In 1984, an upstart retail company called Costco had just opened its first handful of voluminous warehouse stores on the west coast of the United States when it decided to try an experiment. It installed a hot dog cart in front of its San Diego store and started selling Hebrew Nationals with a drink for $1.50. People, it turned out, liked the hot dogs. The cart became Cafe 150, named for the combo price.

The company sold 245 million of them last year. When the CEO of the company in the 2010s complained to founder Jim Sinegal "we can't sell this hot dog for a buck fifty. We are losing our rear ends," Sinegal, likely then in his 70s, famously shot back: "If you raise the effing hot dog, I will kill you. Figure it out." A Costco hot dog and a 20 oz soda still costs $1.50.

In 1992, just a year-and-a-half after releasing a cutesy 2D platformer called Commander Keen, a tiny squad of game developers barely out of their teens started a studio called id Software and pioneered the first-person shooter. Then they followed it with Doom, maybe the most important computer game of all time. It was installed on more PCs than Windows. That tiny squad hired more people and then made Quake, maybe the most important 3D computer game of all time.

Decades later, a new generation of people at id dedicated to that legacy defied expectations to make another shooter so good it could proudly stand beside the ones that defined videogames. Then they made an even better one.

On Monday, Microsoft, which owns Xbox, which owns Bethesda, which owns id, laid off 136 developers from the Texas studio, which 12-year art veteran Derek Best described as "nuking a team into the dirt." Neither id Software or Doom were mentioned in CEO Asha Sharma's "Resetting Xbox" announcement. But the studio's new game, released one day after much of the talent behind it were laid off, currently occupies the top banner on Xbox.com.

What does it say about a company when it doesn't understand—or at any real level seem to care about—something it has become the steward of?

Doom, as a series of videogames, has generated hundreds of millions of dollars. But Doom is not just the money it's generated. It's the literally countless mods, maps, and entire games built on its bones; incredible ones are still coming out right now. Doom is the countless people making games today who cut their teeth mapping or had their neural pathways permanently altered the first time they picked up the Super Shotgun. The original game's labyrinthine levels and pulsing music and gory kills were revelatory enough, yet it's literally impossible to overstate its impact on the history of videogames from that moment forward. John Carmack programmed in the network code that enabled multiplayer in one month, in November 1993, and the game came out 10 days later. John Romero called the multiplayer deathmatch, and we're still calling it that today.

id Tech, the studio's ever-evolving engine, is not just a modern marvel that runs like a greased-up bat hurtling out of hell at a time when its competition is leaning on AI upscalers to crack 30 frames per second. It is the origin of yet more careers, thanks to its history of open source releases; one of the best indie games of 2025 uses it. It is a creation that any executive with any amount of vision would see as both a point of pride and an invaluable asset. You bought your way to the inner chamber, the very beating heart, of videogame software. Is that not a thing to revere?

Ahhh, but how much money does id Tech make? How much is it really worth? Xbox, its leadership says, is "not healthy," and as a result hard choices have to be made. That's just sensible business, not a short-sighted attempt to maximize shareholder value this quarter by kneecapping an incredible asset.

How else could this have gone? Last year Costco took home $275 billion in revenue (just $6 billion shy of Microsoft), and its former CEO—the one whose life was threatened over the sanctity of the hot dog—bluntly said "we have never been a company that puts the shareholders on top." A few months ago his successor housed a hot dog in a viral Instagram video before declaring: "The hot dog price will not change as long as I'm around."

He also said, through a mouthful of meat, that it's a good hot dog. And it is a good hot dog! But that's not why people love it.

People love the Costco hot dog because it's a symbol for the whole operation: that you're paying the membership dues because the deals are worth it. That they're going to give you a good value for every goddamn cent you give them. It stopped mattering years ago if the hot dogs themselves made money or not.

Costco's founder Jim Sinegal, who declared the buck fifty frank more valuable than a human life? The hot dog cart wasn't even his thing back in 1984. The idea started at a competing warehouse chain, Price Club, which merged with Costco in the '90s. But Sinegal knew what he had and expanded Cafe 150 into the food court, now one of Costco's biggest draws. That's how you treat a legacy.

The people at id Software—or the people who were at id Software as of four days ago—knew how to treat a legacy. They got it so deeply that it was evident from the very first moments of Doom 2016, as PC Gamer's James Davenport wrote in the very first paragraph of his review 10 years ago:

This thing here? It's important.

How does the company that's for decades been synonymous with the PC—much as we now wish it weren't—end up with its hands on the game studio that's synonymous with the PC, and not see it as a priceless asset?

"Xbox has many of the most beloved franchises in entertainment history," Xbox CEO Asha Sharma wrote on Monday. id wasn't mentioned. What does it say about the people in charge that they paid to get their hands on that kind of legacy, and then gave it less respect than a $1.50 hot dog?

We don't give a score of 90% or more to just any old thing—we're real hardware sickos with standards to match. And, as real hardware sickos, many a shiny bobbin has received a thorough humbling at our hands. Yes, we love RGB lighting as much as the next person, but it'll take far more than a sparkly light show to impress us.

All of that said, a whopping 34 bits of kit earned a review score of either 90% or higher—that's 4 more than last year. But what was simply the best?

It's interesting to note that only one bit of hardware among the highest-rated six costs less than $100. Spoiler alert, it's the Arctic Freezer 36, going for a seriously impressive price tag that rests comfortably under $50. Still though, it's hard to ignore just how expensive PC gaming continues to be.

With the memory pricing apocalypse upon us, not to mention how it's set to carry on into 2026 and beyond, a bit of kit's value proposition is never far from our minds. That said, the WD Black SN8100 2 TB NVMe SSD is still sitting pretty among our top six hardware review scores.

There's a healthy mix of kit in our top six, but once again, no graphics cards feature among the heaviest hitters—if you've seen how much more than MSRP some GPUs have been going for throughout 2025, that probably comes as no surprise. However, the same cannot be said for the opposite end of the scoring spectrum.

Carrying on Nick's grinch-esque tradition from 2023, I'm also going to include six dishonorable mentions that were absolutely hardware misses. Almost nothing enjoyed the infamy of a score less than 40% this year, which I think generally speaks to the quality of kit that tends to pique the hardware team's interest. Still, that doesn't mean I'm going to go easy on 2025's four hardware flops. Anyway, before all of that, let's take a look at the six highest review scores we gave in 2025.

The top 6 best products of 2025

The highest rated PC gaming gear of 2025

So, that was the six highest-rated hardware this year—what about the rest? For anyone that loves a good statistic, I can reveal that about 12% of the 289 hardware reviews we published in 2025 earned a score of 90% or more. By a strange twist of fate, 11 of those hardware hits earned a review score of exactly 92% this year. Though that's not quite high enough to feature at the tippy-top of this list, that's still worth shouting about. You've already perused the very best—now get ready for hardware that's still better than the rest.

The six lowest scoring products of 2025

While many misfires aiming for the moon still land among the stars, you can bet there's a subset that ends up in much less sparkly company. At long last, it's time to take a gander at the four lowest rated bits of hardware we reviewed this year. Now, none of these flops scored lower than 40%—but there are still plenty of better options for the money.

The monsters in Akalabeth: World of Doom—the precursor to the Ultima series, sometimes called "Ultima 0" by fans and series creator Richard Garriott himself—look ridiculous. The thief is just a floating cloak, the mimic is a featureless cube, and the final monster (straight-up called a Balrog) looks a bit like Firebrand if he was crushed under a cartoon steamroller. To be fair, it was 1979 and Garriott was a teenager; the Apple 2 could only draw a pittance of lines on screen at a time, so he designed wireframe silhouettes for each enemy using coordinates on graph paper.

Akalabeth's world was a meager, primitive trick of the light. But in the days of text-based multi-user dungeons and Zork it was a crumb of revelatory proof that the emergent worlds players imagined in freeform sessions of Dungeons & Dragons—which was only five years old at this point—could be cast in a virtual mould, simulated with math, and explored through the phosphor glow of a CRT monitor.

YouTube documentarian Majuular, or Luke, was not at ground zero for this CRPG revolution. He grew up with the RPGs that live in Ultima's long shadow and had been making videos sifting through their complexities since age 14, informed by the zany YouTube stylings of the Angry Video Game Nerd and Classic Game Room. But while he was researching the origins of his most beloved game genre and reading the 450-page tome Dungeons and Desktops: The History of Computer Role-Playing Games, he was singularly struck by Akalabeth's futurism.

"Something broke through in my head and I realized how incredible it was that somebody thought this up, made it, and put it out, and not solely Akalabeth," he recalled, measuring out each word with the enthusiasm and clarity of a habitual storyteller. "It was like the root of a tree that grew out and became this incredibly nuanced world of RPGs that I already had grown up with. I had always taken that seedling for granted."

Galvanized by Barton's book, Luke was inspired not only to play through the series which he had only dabbled in previously for himself, but to use his newest, relatively young YouTube channel to relay the wild story of its creation in his own way. Charting the sparse corridors of the World of Doom to the endless eccentricities of creator Garriott (represented in each game as the preposterously named Lord British, ruler of Britannia) has been a two year undertaking, but more than 500,000 people are showing up for each new video.

Britannia makes the waves

Eleven videos deep as of late 2025, the Majuular Ultima Retrospective embodies the fastidious, affectionate critique that is gaming YouTube at its best. Many are multi-hour features that trace Ultima's burgeoning influence on both western and Japanese roleplaying games, discuss the human stories and context around its creation, and actually involve the dirty work of playing the games while analyzing Ultima's lore on its own terms.

While you might associate gaming-centric video essays with long-winded synopses or provocative hot takes, Luke's Ultima series is the fruit of exhaustive research compiled from decades of interview material, elusive photographs, and details cataloged by communities like the Ultima Dragons virtual fan club (without whom Luke says he'd be "totally lost").

That research might seem tiring given the pace at which Luke has pumped out these videos while also making detours to the likes of William Shatner's TekWar—he's covered 1979's Akalabeth through 1993's Ultima 7 Part Two in just two years—but immersing himself in each game's history is precisely what keeps him going.

A single question remains his creative north star: "What would it have been like to dream this up at the time?"

"There's something really intriguing about knowing there's just a group of young guys with very little experience in the real world who are actually able to create something that is a real contender, something that can threaten these huge videogame companies that have infinitely more employees and resources. It turns out that just a good idea and infinite drive and lots of Diet Pepsi is pretty good fuel for redefining entire genres or even creating them, in the case of CRPGs or id with the FPS," he said.

"You almost wish you were there. You wish you could hang out with these guys and spend the afternoon eating leftover pizza in [early id Software's] lake house … there's something romantic about that kind of scrappy, amateur, just-doing-it-for-the-love-of-it and hoping something comes out of it, then not only does something come out of it, but something that is still very obviously prevalent to this day. You cannot ignore the influence of these people and the things that they've created."

Exodus

Luke has over 200,000 subscribers on YouTube and a healthy following on Patreon these days, but he's been making videos for as long as he's had the means. His earliest works were "angry reviews," ripoffs of AVGN. He didn’t pull in many viewers then, but his was a wildfire enthusiasm for games: crude, self-sustaining, and uncontainable.

"It turns out that taking somebody's shtick and doing the same thing but worse usually doesn't bear fruit on YouTube," he says, but those attempts taught him how to write a script and cut together gameplay clips.

Before Majuular, Luke worked for the better part of a decade as a pizza delivery driver, a retail worker, and eventually in manual labor to make rent as he moved with his girlfriend "from basement to basement" as a college dropout. He noticed YouTube video essays become a huge part of the online conversation as channels like Joseph Anderson, MandaloreGaming, and Matthewmatosis rose to prominence, but it all seemed like watching the back of a train he'd missed slowly become a pinhole on the horizon.

"What a great idea, to talk about videogames in this way," he remembered thinking. "Well, it's too late. Somebody else has already cracked the code; back to the lumber yard with me."

It was in a rare clump of obligation-free months between a second college exit and a planned return to hauling construction material that he decided "to go all-in" on a few highfalutin dreams. One of those dreams was still YouTube, and so he pumped out lengthy retrospectives on the likes of Chrono Cross, The Legend of Dragoon, and eventually, Ultima, on a new channel he named after a Devin Townsend song. Little by little Patreon members trickled in.

Now with 2,700 people paying to see more, Luke and his girlfriend have saved up enough money to afford "a home, and sunlight for our cats." It's the first time they've had a kitchen and windows in years.

"It's totally changed my life," he said. "It's given us a degree of security and it's just cool to have a group of people who are interested in what you have to say and it's something I don't think I'll ever get used to. Seeing people say 'I'm so excited for this video' … it's almost overwhelming."

His work ethic has hardly changed since his days at the lumber yard. "Very much a creature of habit," Luke says—he puts in his hours like clockwork each day, whether they're spent researching, playing and note-taking, or trawling obscure archives for an era-appropriate picture of Warren Spector. It's natural to spend a dozen hours or more a day working on the next video, split between script writing (which he “rarely” looks forward to, dreading the piercing gaze of a blank Word document) and the "more workmanlike," if tedious, editing process.

The routine is fueled by the sense that he owes whatever he can spare to his audience, and a sense in the back of his mind that YouTube, what with its fickle algorithm, is precarious. He made it this far by showing up, so he's mimicking a 20th century videogame designer to barrel forward with as much drive and Diet Pepsi as it takes.

You can see the effects in the resulting work—his Ultima series alone has only grown more detailed and elaborate with each new video.

Take The Tyranny of Virtue, Luke's retrospective on Ultima 5. By this point, the games have grown into a sprawling story about good and evil, acknowledging the player character directly as the Avatar; Ultima 4 had a remarkably robust morality system that rewarded virtuous in-character behavior, and Ultima 5 flips that on its head, using the previous game's virtues as the basis for a tyrannical villain's absolutist dogma.

It may have been easy to write these narratives off as cool for the time but pedestrian now, but Luke was up to the task of combing through the thematic implications thoroughly: he honors the game as a work of fantasy fiction in its own right, comparing its findings about the meaning of virtue to inspirations like Lord of the Rings and praising its willingness to interrogate its own messaging and encourage players to do the same.

Luke concedes that the narrative itself is a bit pedestrian in a post-Baldur's Gate 3 world, but the way the story leveraged the medium was wildly forward-thinking for its time. Those moments where the player's actions are brought into the story and roleplay is rewarded are, to Luke, some of "the most clever implementations in an RPG that I've ever seen to this day."

"The idea at the time of, like, 'you beat the game by acting virtuously,' would have been so abstract and such a hard sell for a lot of people," he said. "The narrative really reaches beyond the computer screen and becomes meta in a way that I would describe, as much as the word gets thrown around very flippantly these days, as genius."

His life somehow now revolves around talking about games in this way.

"Even on those 14-hour editing days, I'm glad that, at least for now, I don't have to get out into the car at -40 degrees Celsius to go lift drywall all day. That's a pretty positive change I would say," he laughed. "I know it won't last forever, so I'm always trying to make hay while the sun shines, and a big part of that is trying to improve my craft."

Through the ages

Onto new worlds of adventure

The Ultima retrospective is nearing its end. Luke plans to get through the main series ending with Ultima 9 and, beyond that, at least cover Ultima Online, which even taken alone was hugely influential in the world of MMORPGs. After that, there are a few "lesser games" to chew through: assorted cash grabs, phone games, and a glitchy mess PC Gamer's Rick Lane gave a 25. But while Luke's channel has always covered a variety of roleplaying games and accounted for a contingent of his audience with no interest in the games, ending a retrospective odyssey longer than a Ken Burns documentary will prove bittersweet.

"Ultima is not for everybody, but it's for me, because when I pull the brakes on it and when I give myself a chance to kind of recalibrate, by the time I'm diving into the next game, I can't wait to get back to the research component and see how things are changing in Britannia," he said.

"I've thought about Ultima pretty much every day for the last—I don't even remember when I started this series—two-and-a-half years ago at this point? It's been a huge part of my life, so I'm probably always going to bring it up. It's always going to be part of the identity of the channel, it's always going to be something that interests me, even just talking about it. What it did: how it changed the world of RPGs."

Though storing your precious files in the cloud is an ever tempting option, I would still rather rely on my own physical storage media. The great thing about an external SSD is that it's pretty difficult for someone else to access without you knowing about it—unless, of course, you have a bad habit of losing pricey personal hardware. My messy ways aside, Cyber Monday has seen some cracking deals, offering external SSDs for much less.

• We're curating all the Cyber Monday PC gaming deals right here

A case in point is the Samsung T9 Portable SSD 1 TB, currently going for only $95 at Amazon. If you've spent a lot of time perusing our Cyber Monday SSD deals hub, you'll note that it's currently cheaper than the older Samsung T7 Shield, as well as another one of our 1 TB favourites, the Crucial X9 Pro.

I point out these two other drives not just because of the similar capacity and price point, but because the Samsung T7 Shield drive is our current pick for the best budget durable drive, while the Crucial X9 Pro is our budget favourite for the best external SSDs for gaming. But it's not just the grounds of cents per gigabyte that the Samsung T9 Portable SSD is showing up both of these SSDs.

For one thing, the Samsung T9 Portable SSD outpaces both of those aforementioned external SSDs by boasting read and write speeds of up to 2,000 MB/s. Though Jacob notes in his Samsung T9 4 TB external SSD review that USB 3.2 Gen 2x2 external SSDs often see their performance capped by their choice of USB protocol, the T9 surprises by just how consistently it is able to maintain its peak speed.

Jacob digs deeper in his review, writing, "The drive's top speed is maintained by pseudo-SLC cache—a section of the NAND flash acting as speedier memory to make transfers a breeze. This maintains a speed of around 1,800 MB/s. Once this pSLC runs out, the native NAND flash speed for the T9 kicks in. [...] Where the other USB 3.2 Gen 2x2 drives I tested drop down to sub-500 MB/s—and often much lower—speeds once the pSLC cache has run out, the T9 maintains a steady 900-ish MB/s the whole way through."

So, if you're playing musical chairs with some big game files, the T9 shouldn't keep you waiting around. As Jacob puts it, "if you're thinking of regularly transferring more than 250 GB at a time—perhaps moving across multiple game installs or system backups—then a T9 makes perfect sense. It'll keep things moving smoothly at about 1 GB/s for as long as you need."

However, there are some drawbacks to this speedy drive. Though its rubberised, textured shell does mean the Samsung T9 Portable SSD can endure a drop from 9.8 ft, it's not actually that hardy a drive. Completely lacking an Ingress Protection (IP) score, there's no guarantee your files will be protected from dust or moisture on this drive, severely limiting just how portable this SSD can actually be.

Look after it, though, and it'll serve you well for many years.

👉Click here for all of Amazon's external SSD deals👈

I really wanted to like the wireless version of the Scuf Valor Pro, but its significant price increase over its wired counterpart kept me at arm's length. Setting aside the fact that, yes, that is the optimal operating distance for most PC controllers, I was left feeling like you'd be better off saving your pennies for something else.

The wired version of the Scuf Valor Pro may well be that 'something else'. It's our top pick for the best wired PC controller for many good reasons, not least of all its very reasonable price point. Cyber Monday sales only sweeten the deal, dropping the price to only $93 from Amazon.

• We're curating all the best Cyber Monday PC gaming deals over here

So, why swerve wireless functionality for the best wired PC controller instead? Well, for one thing, you never have to worry about a dwindling battery life or charging your device again. For another, you can't get much lower latency than a wired controller connection, either. But more specifically, with the Scuf Valor Pro, you're also getting Xbox-style asymmetric Hall effect thumbsticks and a controller body that feels robustly built besides.

At 260 g, there's a definite heft to the Scuf Valor Pro. However, alongside this PC controller's ergonomic design, it feels well-balanced and comfortable through long play sessions. I especially like the mega-textured palm grips on the underside of the gamepad, ensuring it won't slip from my sweaty grip during a nerve-wracking round of Arc Raiders.

Don't ask me how I know this, but the Scuf Valor Pro can certainly take a tumble. Granted, it's a bit scary when the magnetic faceplate pops off, but there's really no need to worry. Plus, the faceplates are easy to remove and replace, opening up a world of customisation options too.

Besides interchangeable (and very much sold separately) faceplates, you can also swap out the thumbsticks. The headliner here is the long, long thumbstick, which apparently allows you to make even more precise movements with the Hall effect thumbsticks.

Jacob explains it best in his Scuf Valor Pro review, writing, "The idea here is that the longer the stick is, the further away the archimedean point and the more distance your thumb has to travel to make the same amount of in-game movement. This should make it easier to be more accurate—a bit like low sensitivity gaming with a mouse and mousepad."

It wasn't a winner for me, but Jacob found himself digging it. He said, "It could all be placebo, but the headshots did feel easier to line up. It's a little less comfortable to use than a regular stick because your thumb has to move more and stay a little more raised than usual, and I imagine it might not be suitable for very long sessions, but I found that slight cost to be worth the benefit to my aim."

👉Click here for Amazon's gamepad deals👈

It's not every day the best of the best can be enjoyed at a cut price—but then again, not every day is Cyber Monday. Neither is today, to be fair, but the deals are rolling through from Black Friday so it counts. For the moment, I'll set aside my grumblings about how it just feels like the week-long sales events go on forever, and instead tell you about a cracking deal on the best PC controller.

GameSir has the unusual honour of making multiple appearances at the top of our best PC controllers guide. While I personally still rate the GameSir Nova Lite as a great budget controller for everyday use, I'm actually here to talk about the tippy top of the pyramid; the GameSir G7 Pro isn't just our pick for the best PC controller overall, it's also now only $60 from Best Buy.

• We're curating all the best Cyber Monday PC gaming deals over here

Amazingly, at that discounted price, you're getting asymmetric TMR sticks, and so can effectively banish the spectre of stick drift from your mind. TMR is even more precise and possesses smaller dead zones than Hall effect, the other magnetic tech, also capable of warding off stick drift.

This gamepad still enjoys Hall effect in its trigger buttons, alongside some lovely clicky microswitches on its face buttons. As Shaun notes in his GameSir G7 Pro Tri-Mode review, that tactility may not be to everyone's tastes, but it was definitely something he appreciated. He argues, "The clickiness seems to annoy some people, but as a regular player of precision-oriented platformers, it's one of the things I loved about the Turtle Beach Stealth Ultra, for example."

So, drawbacks—what are they? Well, for one thing, the GameSir G7 Pro doesn't have the beefiest battery life, offering about ten hours (though, interesting to note, Shaun writes he "charged it once during a fortnight of using it").

You'll also need to wade into the GameSir's Nexus software to switch the G7 Pro from the default 500 Hz mode it comes in fresh out of the box, to its twice-as-responsive 1000 Hz mode. Furthermore, you'll also need to noodle around in Nexus if you want to use this controller's gyroscope functionality.

Yes, this bad boy boasts gyro-functionality, which is definitely not the most common sight on a TMR or Hall effect pad. You can only use it in PC games and not on Xbox, mind. However, if your one true gaming love is PC, then that's hardly even a minus point against it. Anyway, the bottom line is you're getting a handful of solid features for maybe a big fistful of dollars—that's worth the commitment.

👉Click here for all of Amazon's PC controller deals👈

The life cycle of a game isn't easy to predict. Some start strong and burn out quickly, others endure for years before slowly fading. Some crash and burn on day one while others are kept alive by players, modders, and community creators long after they might have otherwise slipped away.

A few games, however, have lived on for decades, kept alive not just by passionate fans but by developers who have never thrown in the towel or dusted off their hands and said "done." These games have, against all odds, managed to withstand the test of time. They're still being worked on after 20, 30, even 40(!) years. When we first wrote a version of this list in 2018, all of the games we included had been updated that year. Amazingly, seven years later they're all still alive, even if updates are a bit fewer and farther between.

But almost every entry on this updated list has either been updated in 2025, or in the last couple years, with its development history making us pretty sure they'll still see another patch in the second half of this decade. We've focused on games from the '80s and '90s with interesting and slightly lesser-known histories—it's not a complete list (shout out to Everquest, Dark Age of Camelot, and plenty of other famous games from the late '90s that are still thriving).

Here are the oldest PC games that are still being maintained today.

Klondike

Released: 1984 | Latest update: January 2024

"Developed on a borrowed Lisa using Lisa Pascal, Klondike was one of the first games available for the original Macintosh," writes creator Michael Casteel on his website's history page. It feels silly to debate the semantics of Mac vs. PC in the face of Klondike's place in gaming history with 40 years of support from a sole developer.

The classic take on solitaire has evolved and been rewritten many times over its life. Casteel added color in 1988, animations of the cards moving in 1989, a new random number generator in 1994, additional solitaire games in 1998, high resolution face cards in 2004, replaying of your old games in 2009, resuming games in 2011, handing off in-progress games from iPhones and iPads in 2015, and Apple Silicon support in 2020.

It feels only proper that a game that dates back at least a century would have such a dedicated steward.

NetHack

Released: July 1987 | Latest update: February 16, 2023

Trace NetHack allll the way back, and it's actually an evolution of Hack, circa 1984, itself a derivation of 1980's Rogue. In 1987, a developer named Mike Stephenson wrote his own expanded version of Hack and released it under a new name: NetHack. This major update to the nascent roguelike added a bunch of new classes like Samurai, Valkyrie, and Priest, very basic IBM graphics support, the Excalibur, and much more. You can read old USENET discussions and actually see the origins of NetHack as they played out online in 1987, which is pretty incredible.

More incredible is that the latest update to this game was released in 2023, and there's no sign it will be the last one. NetHack sometimes goes years between updates (the volunteer developers were silent from 2003 until 2015), but it still retains an active playerbase and seems destined to live forever.

Because NetHack is a game built so heavily around random generation, it doesn't really need updates to remain interesting and playable. There's no RPG-esque dialogue to get tired of and no need for new quests, like the MUDs on this list.

Still, it's fun to look at what's been added in recent years. Here are my favorite patch notes from 2018's 3.6.1 update:

• Blinded hero or monster who eats a nurse corpse will have blindness cured
• Allow taming monkeys and apes with bananas
• If you have lycanthropy, eating the class of creature you turn into is considered cannibalism
• Vlad the Impaler has been made significantly stronger

3.6.1 was the game's biggest update of the past decade, but 3.6.2 and 3.6.3, released in 2019, also had some good stuff in them:

• Vault guards now carry cursed tin whistles, so that the "shrill whistling sound" an escaping player hears has a source
• Eating spinach while having sustain ability no longer makes you feel like Popeye
• Player can no longer leash unsolid monsters and monsters with no extremities
• Flying monsters are no longer generated on the Plane of Water, where they would instantly drown

The best place to play NetHack today is on the server nethack.alt.org, which maintains leaderboards, lets you spectate other active players, and encounter the "bones" of other failed adventurers in your own dungeons. They usually have some pretty good loot—just watch out for the monster that killed them, which will be lurking on the same floor, too.

Gemstone IV

Released: 1988 | Latest update: September 29, 2025

GemStone IV sounds like a sequel, but it's really just the latest iteration of a MUD (Multi-User Dungeon) that's been running since 1988, making it, as far as we can tell, the oldest living MMORPG. And it's seemingly still going strong, with frequent updates adding new stories and places to adventure. Most games this old are community-developed, community-hosted passion projects, but GemStone IV is a remarkable exception, with a dev team still backing it up. While you can sign up for a free trial, GemStone IV has a $15 per month subscription fee and a microtransaction store to boot. You can also pay for a "premium" subscription, which costs $25 on top of the standard fee, and nets you some extra stuff.

PC Gamer's Joshua Wolens spoke to the lead developer of Gemstone IV in August 2025, who has about 40 people working with him to maintain the MUD and keep adding to it. "We want to be able to survive another 35 years," he said.

If you've been a Gemstone IV subscriber since the early days, congratulations: your character is older than the vast majority of the world's videogames. That's pretty cool.

Kingdom of Drakkar

Released: 1989 | Latest update: March 6, 2024

Like most of the oldest living games, Kingdom of Drakkar started life in text. What's less common is that it eventually transformed into a graphical RPG, taking the form it lives in today. Drakkar actually grew out of an even earlier game, the 1984 MUD Realm, but has existed under the Drakkar name since 1989. It absolutely looks like a precursor to Ultima Online, and was playable over Compuserve in the late '80s/early '90s when Ultima was still a single-player RPG series.

Drakkar's creator Brad Lineberger claims they coined the term "massively multiplayer" at MPG-Net, an early '90s web platform that hosted Drakkar and other online RPGs. The game's rights changed hands several times before Lineberger bought it back in the early 2000s. Remarkably, he still works on the game to this day, potentially making Kingdom of Drakkar the oldest living game still run by its original creator. You can download and play it for free.

Genesis

Released: 1989 | Latest update: March October 27, 2025

Genesis is a MUD and fantasy role-playing text adventure. Stretching way back to 1989, before the internet was widely used (or even widely known), Genesis was created by a small team at a university in Sweden. Over the years the in-game world of Genesis grew (like the internet itself) from a single landmass to a massive ocean dotted with continents and smaller islands, including some that let you explore locations from other fantasy worlds like Middle-earth and Forgotten Realms. There are more than 60 different guilds to join, and those guilds have occasionally fought major wars with one another. By the time World of Warcraft arrived to introduce the MMORPG to a massive audience, Genesis had already been around for fifteen years.

I jumped into Genesis when we first made this list in 2018, and ran into several other players in just the tutorial zone. There are members on the forums who've registered in the last few years. Though it's far from a bustling community, it's clearly still attracting new players here and there. And it's still actively updated. In October 2025 the designers made tweaks to magic resistance mechanics and then held a Halloween event.

It's a snap to get started if you want to try it yourself: visit the site, click Play Now, and create a character and password. There's nothing to download: it runs in your browser and there's a Chrome extension, too.

UnReal World

Released: 1992 | Latest update: June 27, 2025

UnReal World is a roguelike RPG set in a procedurally generated world based on Finland in the late Iron Age. Players engage in open-ended wilderness survival, crafting, fishing, trapping, hunting, cooking, trading, and can even build their own cabin in the woods: features fairly common in survival games today but completely unheard of 30 years ago. Originally UnReal World was based in high fantasy, with elves and orcs, but over time it's become more grounded in history, though there are still mystical elements to it.

UnReal World been steadily updated since its release in 1992: version 1.0 was written in Turbo Pascal before being rewritten in C, it made the move from DOS to Windows, it slowly became a fully graphical game, and it even made its way to Steam in 2016. You can read a comprehensive history of UnReal World, year by year, on its official site.

Since we originally covered UnReal World in 2018 it's gotten a remarkable number of updates, probably more substantial than any others on this list. Here are just some of the additions since 2018:

• actively hunting wandering NPCs, utilizing their kills
• new companion commands: butcher, roast, make logs and boards
• birch-bark as harvestable material and craftable birch-bark items: shoes, ropes, caps, baskets
• improved fire mechanics and its graphical representation
• gradual heating up and cooling down of fireplaces and sauna stoves
• sauna improvements; make a vasta broom, build a stove, more moody experience
• milking reindeers
• textilecraft skill; extract fibres and produce yarn
• the moon and moonlight effects
• snow crust and snow penalties for all the animals
• fishing improvements; craftable hooks, usage of baits
• water temperature affecting to spoilage rate of the fish caught in nets
• hafting spears, axes and shovels - and their separate heads and hafts
• bowyer skill
• tree species property for big trunks and some assorted timber products
• portion based cooking

You can buy it on Steam or download it here to play (and if you enjoy the free version, consider donating to the developer).

Meridian 59

Released: October 7, 1996 | Latest update: September 2, 2025

"Perhaps the first online game with a 3D engine" according to co-creator Andrew Kirmse, Meridian 59 predates the more famous Ultima Online by more than a year (its first beta form went online in December 1995). The prototypical fantasy RPG has the feeling of a proof of concept for the games that would follow, but that just goes to show how much of a trailblazer it was.

Meridian 59 has changed hands more than any other game on this list: in 1996 it was acquired and published by 3DO, then shut down, then re-released by Near Death Studios in 2002, then returned to the original developers, made open source and released as freeware in 2012. In 2018, the Kirmse brothers launched it on Steam, where it has 10 players online as I type this.

Since it's open source, a number of volunteer developers are still contributing to it, with a major patch seemingly dropping about once a year.

Furcadia

Released: December 16, 1996 | Last updated: October 2025

Like the more famous Second Life, Furcadia is a longrunning social MMO built around user-generated content, with tools allowing players to create their own art, scripts and whole worlds (aka Dreams) for others to experience. Ever wanted to visit Furabian Nights?

If you count the game's original form as a graphical MUD, Dragonspires, it actually launched in 1994, but it's been soldiering on as Furcadia since '96. In 2016, a few years after a successful Kickstarter to revitalize the game, it was relaunched as Furcadia: The Second Dreaming, which still sees updates and active community events today.

Just look at this adorable freakin' hamster added in recent months. Furcadia is playable in your browser on its official site.

Ultima Online

Released: 1997 | Latest update: October 27, 2025

Ultima Online has a storied history, beginning with perhaps the greatest moment in PC gaming ever (and a Guinness World Record to boot): the assassination of producer Richard Garriott's avatar, the nigh-invulnerable Lord British, during a beta stress test in 1997. The fantasy MMO with a player-driven economy and a heavy focus on PvP drew in more than 100,000 players by 1998 (another Guinness World Record), and over 20 years later it's still being updated with new content and expansions. There's still a small but active community playing on a daily basis.

UO's grand ambitions and complex systems allowed for a lot of exploits and griefing by players, particular when it came to murder and theft, though its expansions added zones where players can't kill one another and did a lot to discourage griefing. There's still great nostalgia for those early, brutal days of back-stabbing and skullduggery, the likes of which have never quite been matched.

Ultima Online celebrated 28 years of operation in September 2025, promising a face-off with the "Dragon Matriarch" near the end of the year with an "all-new dragon mount" the exciting reward for taking her down. And the developers have plans for 2026:

• Player vs. Player Combat — evolving combat to be more dynamic and engaging.
• Housing — improvements and updates to make your Britannian homes even more special.
• New Legacy Season 2 — a bold new chapter in the evolution of Ultima Online.

Lord British may have been killable in that one glorious moment, but Ultima Online seemingly isn't.

Utopia

Released: 1998 | Latest update: November 9, 2025

Utopia is a text-based fantasy strategy game where the multiplayer matches, known as Ages, take place over a period of 10-12 real-time weeks. Players manage a province in a kingdom, build it up with farms and guilds, train a military, and vote for a monarch from among the players in their neighbor provinces. Kingdoms war with other kingdoms, and at the end of the Age the largest kingdom wins, the match ends, and the game resets.

Each new Age brings about some changes and updates. Age 113, which kicked off in early November 2025, was dubbed the "Age of Merry Mayhems: where wars meet with large amounts of ale, and no one’s entirely sober. Between flying avians, heavily bearded dwarves mistaken for Santa, and over-eager generals yelling 'just one more massacre before dinner!,' Utopia plunges into the most wonderful time of the year." Each age brings with it loads of balance changes as well as tweaks to core mechanics.

Despite its age, Utopia's development seems quite vibrant: it even has an Android version and an active community wiki. Game updates aren't the only things that have changed Utopia over the years: its ownership has changed as well. A two-man team called Muga Gaming LLC acquired it in 2017 from Jolt Online Gaming, which had bought Utopia from its creator, Mehul Patel, in 2008. While he's no longer involved with the game, Patel did an interview about Utopia as recently as 2024.

Utopia runs in your browser, and you can enlist right here.

Age of Empires 2

Released: September 27, 1999 | Last updated: October 14, 2025

One of the greatest strategy games of all time just barely squeaks onto the list before the '90s come to an end. While the vast majority of this list is dedicated to MMOs that are decades past their heyday, Age of Empires 2 has seen a remarkable second life since the release of its Definitive Edition remaster in 2019.

For six years, it's not only remained popular on Steam, but seen a constant stream of new expansions: Eight in six years, and 13 over the course of its whole life.

In October 2025 Age of Empires 2 got an expansion focsued on Alexander the Great, with a new campaign and three civilizations: the Macedonians, Tracians, and Puru. This RTS may outlive history itself at this point. If you somehow don't already own Age 2, grab it on Steam next time there's a sale.

When I was a young warthog, trying and failing to touch type with my wee hoofs at the family computer, I had a choice of two audio output devices—some relatively decent speakers or a headset that wouldn't look out of place in a call centre. As a teen growing up during the advent of both YouTube and MySpace, I opted for the headset that would make an audiophile weep every time. It was simply all I had. Thankfully, we've come a long way since then.

These days, those serious about sound and gaming are spoilt for choice. If you're not into RGB lighting, the best audiophile headphones for gaming won't demand that you compromise. For example, my new reigning champion of the best closed-back headphones category, the Beyerdynamic DT 1770 Pro MKII, presents a clean black silhouette alongside brilliant sound that picks out all of the little details of a game's soundscape with startling clarity and accuracy.

The Pro MKII is great for gaming and great for music listening—though without a microphone arm, it is less well suited to party chat. Mind you, for those who simply have no desire to venture into the realm of voice chat with strangers (which is fair, to be honest), that might actually sound appealing.

For those who'd rather not add a whole other sound input device to their setup, there are plenty of audiophile headphones that come with a microphone arm. For example, the Audeze Maxwell ranks as our top pick for the best wireless headphones, so you're not tethered to your desk like you are with the aforementioned Beyerdynamic headset. But on top of that, the Audeze Maxwell boasts a detachable mic that records your voice clearly to boot.

Now, I don't know about you but my poorly co-ordinated trotters tend to mean I drop and lose things a lot. Hence why I don't mind a non-detachable microphone arm quite as much as the next tusked piggy (or in the Beyerdynamic DT 1770 Pro MKII's case, no microphone at all).

Thankfully, our pick for the best audiophile headphones overall is the Beyerdynamic MMX 330 Pro, which comes with a non-detachable mic that even I can't lose. For those doing a double take, yes, Beyerdynamic heavily dominates this category not only for their stunning audio quality but also, with their great big, plushly velour ear cups, they often offer a wonderfully immersive listening experience. The closed-back design of the Beyerdynamic DT 1770 Pro MKII is especially good at keeping ambient distraction out while you game.

Gosh, if my younger ungulate self had donned even one of these audiophile headphones, I've no doubt it would've blown her tiny mind. But there's much more than just the above offering a crisp earful. Do join me down by the watering hole, and soak up every tiny ripple that the world of audiophile headphones for gaming has to offer below.

The quick list

Best headphones for gaming

Everyone loves a bargain, especially during Amazon Prime Day. But even amid a sea of price cuts and discounts, some folks only want The Best. If you are just such a discerning individual, you're in the right place, friend.

Below, I've summarised all of the hardware that we consider to be the 'best overall' in their respective category. Keeping with the big deal day spirit, I've also hunted around for the best price available for each bit of kit. Sure, some online storefronts know exactly what they have and are still charging full price—but that doesn't mean there aren't any steals among this list of hardware goodies.

👉Shop all the Prime Day deals on Amazon👈

If you're looking for something a little more specific than simply The Best, or are wondering about our favourite budget picks to date, all is revealed in our very own techie tier list. But to badly paraphrase the immortal words of Tina Turner, what follows below is better than all the rest.

1. Best gaming chair: Secretlab Titan Evo

"The original chair has been in constant use in our office since we first reviewed it in 2021—gosh, has it really been that long? Since then, it's been rolled around, bumped into, and carelessly caressed by many staff members, yet it's still in excellent condition. That Neo Hybrid Leatherette is really holding up great."

2. Best gaming laptop: Razer Blade 16

"The new Razer Blade 16 is the best gaming laptop I've ever used, and I've been messing around with them professionally for the best part of 20 years now. But it's not about the fact I've been using an RTX 5090-powered version, and that it's simply the fastest, most powerful machine I've had the pleasure of toasting my lap. Because it's not. The real kicker, the real reason why this is the best gaming laptop is because the experience of actually using the device itself is a genuine pleasure—whether that's gaming, productivity, or just general laptopery."

3. Best gaming monitor: MSI MPG 321URX QD-OLED

"This is a staggeringly good display that undercuts its rivals significantly, and as a result, it's the best gaming monitor you can buy right now. It can be a little difficult to get hold of as a result, but if you manage to snag one of these, you're getting all the main benefits of OLED tech for less."

4. Best gaming headset: HyperX Cloud Alpha

"What's special about the Cloud Alpha gaming headset is how it sounds. That should be a given, right? Yet it's easy to get distracted by extraneous features that don't altogether matter much when looking for a gaming headset. The Cloud Alpha, however, is a simple beast. It delivers fantastic audio that's difficult to match for the same money."

5. Best gaming PC: HP Omen 35L

"Gaming PCs can be expensive, but with the HP machine, you're receiving all of what you want for a price that's competitive with the cheaper options on the market, from a trusted manufacturer. That makes it the gaming PC to beat right now, if you ask me."

6. Best gaming desk: Secretlab Magnus Pro XL

"The Magnus Pro XL can lift a gigantic 120 kg / 265 lbs in gross weight (including the weight of the desk itself) up to a height of 125 cm / 49 inches. That's plenty of range to stand up for work during the day and lounge back to game during the night. That also makes the Magnus Pro XL the best standing desk for our money. Why buy something that's purely a standing desk when you can have both options in one?"

7. Best microphone for gaming: Shure MV6 USB Gaming Microphone

"The Shure MV6 is the mic to go for if you want something desktop-based, easy to use, and with excellent sound [...] it's also very reasonably priced. That makes it the best gaming microphone you can place on your desk and one that'll likely keep on trucking for many, many years to come."

8. Best webcams: Elgato Facecam MK.2

"The Facecam MK.2 offers uncompressed 1080p video capture. This makes for an artefact-free video stream. It's not 4K-capable but that works just fine for anyone looking to use this camera for streaming, rather than recording, be that on Twitch, Google Meet, or Zoom."

9. Best graphics card: AMD Radeon RX 9070

"The RX 9070 offers close to the performance of AMD's most powerful RDNA 4 GPU, still packs in 16 GB of GDDR6 video memory, can be easily overclocked without demanding much more cooling or power, and handily outperforms Nvidia's similarly priced, lower-spec RTX 5070."

10. Best mini PC: Minisforum AtomMan G7 PT

"Being more than capable of proper 1080p gaming performance and practically anything else you might want your PC to do, the Minisforum AtomMan G7 PT is the best mini PC around. Housed in a compact chassis and mounted in its vertical stand, the AtomMan G7 PT is larger than your average mini pc, but still diminutive in terms of desktop footprint. Chances are, if you're in the market for a mini pc for gaming, then space is a factor—and this wee beasty takes up very little."

11. Best handheld gaming PC: Lenovo Legion Go S SteamOS

"The best handheld gaming PC is the Lenovo Legion Go S SteamOS. That SteamOS part is key, because Valve's operating system is no small part of what makes this device so spectacular. That, and its incredibly comfortable design and premium aesthetic."

12. Best gaming keyboard: Asus ROG Strix Scope II 96 Wireless

"It's been a long time since I've been blown away by a gaming keyboard—so many seemed carbon copies of what Corsair did 10 years ago—but the Scope II 96 is mighty impressive. It focuses on nailing the actual mechanics of a mechanical gaming keyboard. Importantly, it's also great for gaming and doesn't cost anywhere near as much as its smaller, more premium sibling, the ROG Azoth."

13. Best PC controller: Xbox Wireless Controller

"The best overall controller for the PC is the Xbox Wireless Controller. It's exceptionally high quality for the money, comfortable, colourful, and frequently discounted. What more could you need in a pad?"

14. Best CPU for gaming: AMD Ryzen 7 9800X3D

"The Ryzen 7 9800X3D [...] has improved gaming power consumption and better gaming performance. In the likes of Baldur's Gate 3 and Homeworld 3, games that are heavily CPU-limited, the 9800X3D sweeps Arrow Lake aside and even makes the standard Zen 5 chips look average in comparison."

15. Best DDR5 RAM for gaming: G.Skill Trident Z5 RGB 32 GB DDR5-7200

"The G.Skill Trident Z5 DDR5-7200 is the best overall DDR5 kit for gaming that you can buy, thanks to ultra-high speeds and super-low latencies. You'd expect memory at this level to cost a bundle, [...] but it's not that bad. It's a downright bargain compared to the cost of premium DDR5 a few years ago, where prices of $500/£500 or higher were commonplace."

16. Best SSD for gaming: WD Black SN7100

"While sequential read/write is great too (we clocked it at 7,116 MB/s), Random 4K performance blew us away. Our Zak, who tested the drive, says it "absolutely demolished every drive I've tested on the [Random 4K] read front, scoring an insane 101 MB/s." RND4k is what translates to gaming performance, and this drive performs well there, too."

17. Best PC fans: Noctua NF-A12x25 G2 PWM

"On a technical level, Noctua has done the near-impossible here with an extremely small gap between the fan blades and the housing. It's just 0.5 mm, or in layman's terms, as thin as a milkman's dinner. This tiny gap is partially responsible for this fan's absurdly impressive performance, even at low RPM, and Noctua's massive headache trying to build the darn thing. I've been told multiple times over the past few years that the materials used on this fan needed to be changed or the fan redesigned to prevent 'critical deformation'."

You’ve been feeling it too, haven’t you? You try to scroll up on a gaming news article and the ads crowd out the text so thoroughly you have to reload. You want to find a short guide for collectibles in a new RPG, but beneath Google's flat-out wrong AI summary there's only a parade of videos well over the 10-minute mark. Pressures to survive in the attention economy have turned countless websites into labyrinths of engagement and monetization tactics. This spectre of quality decay—this "enshittification," as it was dubbed by journalist Cory Doctorow—goes beyond news outlets, social media sites, and blogs, extending to streaming TV, digital storefronts, and just about any service that exists in proximity to capital.

Perhaps that's why Stephen "Blue" Heaslip's site Blue's News is such a stable time capsule of the quaint, uncynical frontier the early internet is remembered as. Created to platform Heaslip's hobby writing in the '90s, the site was never about money. It was about something timeless, human, and more primordial: Quake hype.

"I was very into Doom, " Heaslip says, with a sort of timeworn fondness that betrays he is very much still into Doom. "I emulated some of what I'd seen people doing to follow Doom and Quake was about to come, so I created a Quake website. I was interested in experimenting with html … I did it on an impulse."

That impulse came and went in 1996, but nearly 30 years later, Blue's News persists as a general PC gaming and tech outlet with minimal changes since its inception. Its very layout brings to mind a yellowing Packard Bell CRT, and that's after the "modern" redesign. You'll not find so much as a hot take on the site, as it's an endless stream of concise, neutral news roundups and aggregated headlines. Today, Blue's social media tagline tracks its response to the shifting media world at its flanks: "No AI slop, no sponsored posts. Sorry, not sorry."

It's pure function and no filler; as the storm of enshittification rages, Blue's News is squarely in the eye of the storm. Heaslip isn't sure whether that makes him a one-man journalism outlet or just "one of the luckiest guys in the world," as his site notes. Regardless, it remains an unsullied flag planted in a landscape increasingly dominated by fewer and fewer parent companies. And for Heaslip, that's the point.

"Sometimes I question, you know, what am I doing here? There are all these much bigger corporate websites that dwarf my reach and all that. But it's sort of nice to feel like you're helping stem the tide or digging in against enshittification. The world's going to enshittify around me, I'm not gonna stop it, but I can try and revel in something that used to be better."

Blue streak

Refusing to jump in with sensationalist headlines or touchy op-eds is a steelier commitment than it might sound. It's cynical to think of journalism through the lens of attention-getting and controversy, but sites live and die by how much they are read—and what's neutral to one set of eyes is indistinct to another, easily passed over for more tantalizing reads.

Heaslip isn't blind to this pressure, he said, and recalled that it was what first pushed the site to outgrow its Quake blog origins.

"Somebody posted a list of different Quake websites and how many visits their links to them were generating. Suddenly this was like a scorecard; and wow, not that many people are coming to my website. Like, why would that be?"

That was the first time he thought of his site as something to foster and develop; the move to general news coverage was only made so that active readers who returned to the site could reliably find that something had changed in their absence. Heaslip founded one of the most resilient names in games writing in search of "something interesting."

With an up-and-running site and no prior experience writing news, he had a train in motion with tracks he'd have to place on the fly. You can still identify the site's indie edge in all its streamlined glory, but in the early days, it took some figuring out.

"I had to learn as I went along what being a journalist was—or what being a fake journalist was, whatever I was—and I learned a couple of lessons really early on. I was coming out of Usenet, I was kind of like a glorified forum poster. At one point Microsoft did something and I abbreviated their name as M$. Which is a funny 'forum dude' thing to do, but somebody came back at me and said, 'listen, you need to be more objective.' It was kind of like a slap in the face, and I was like okay, I get it: people have an expectation of fairness."

Those growing pains helped Heaslip identify a set of standards that guide the site's voice to this day. While formal education might have helped him steer clear of some pitfalls, his homegrown path kept him away from the strings of a big institution. Without them, he was able to implement a standard of his own design, accountable only to an audience which supports him directly through donations (these days via both PayPal and Patreon).

That freedom might have taken the site down a darker path; if you've been on any unmoderated forum for long, you know what I mean. Take, for instance, a site like gossip-column-turned-conservative-propaganda-pusher Drudge Report. It's a Bizarro World inversion of everything that makes Blue's News so placid, sharing its spartan web design, focus on headline aggregation, and no-nonsense ethos, but with a hard conservative slant.

Heaslip says that some moderation has been necessary to keep Blue's News so genial, but for most situations, classic internet wisdom never expires. Don't feed the trolls, for one.

"The internet is filled with hot takes. If anything, maybe I can be refreshingly free of hot takes," he says. "I don't disallow myself editorial comments, but I feel like I want to be like the Greek chorus. I want to say the thing that everybody is thinking. It became my mission to be more fair and more objective."

He's careful not to "make any claims to be Edward R. Murrow," but Heaslip thinks this approach helps keep things civil, adding that it's easy for online forums to devolve into "echo chambers." His stripped-back commentary has helped Blue's News retain a degree of trust few surviving news outlets enjoy today.

"I understand why people don't want to trust everything they read … it sort of feels like we're living in a post-truth world where you can formulate your own take on something and create your own reality. I think that's happening in a lot of areas, and it happens in gaming journalism. What's supposed to be your take on that, as the audience? It's gotta be disturbing. It shakes your ability to trust anybody who says anything."

His concerns aren't lost on me. I care about my work and think the media commenting on the games industry can be impactful—if we were all perfectly satisfied with the state of things, we probably wouldn't be journalists. But Heaslip has had his heels dug in against the tide of spicy takes for nearly three straight decades. That steadfastness, even in something as simple as sending out the headlines day after day, is emboldening.

Old but gold

In 1996, Heaslip's favorite game was Doom (you can find his custom maps on Doomworld). He'd just gotten engaged to his fiancee, known online by the handle MrsBlue. He posted dozens of PC gaming news stories daily.

In 2025, Heaslip posts dozens of PC gaming news stories daily. Last year was in fact his site's busiest for posts yet, clocking in at 12,313 stories. He's celebrating 29 years with MrsBlue. Doom is still a favorite, though he gives due props to Portal and Half-Life 2. And yes, you can still find his custom maps on Doomworld.

With over a billion site views since its inception and hundreds of thousands of news stories under its belt (94% of which have been written by Blue himself), Blue's News' legacy is more than simplicity or longevity. It's unparalleled consistency.

Despite a single-digit staff now comprised mostly of emeritus titles and bolstered by contributors, the site has only gone 22 days without at least one post since July of 1996. Twenty two days out of 10,530, as of this writing. That's a 99.8% hit rate. When Heaslip broke his arm in a car accident in 2021, he continued to pump out articles using his free hand and voice recognition software.

Even when a representative from MTV approached him back in the '90s about buying out the site, his immediate priorities didn't budge. "It wasn't like it was going to make me rich, and it wasn't like it was going to make me happy … any question like that led me to say, 'once that happens, when can I start a new website?'"

Left and right gaming news sites are dying, coming back, getting acquired, and trading around staff like a hellish game of musical chairs. Through the dot com bubble, through Gamergate, and through US government officials decrying the medium as garbage, Blue's News has kept a steady pace.

Blue's News doesn't live in showstopping release coverage, explosive view counts, or burning criticism of big-name games. Nothing so boom and bust. It lives in every small moment captured and sent out to a remarkably loyal niche. As much as Mr. Blue gives to the site on a daily basis, it's what he gets back with every upload that keeps him going.

"At certain points, I can't say why I continued. The world evolved and a lot of external money came into a lot of websites. It was just very difficult for me to continue to compete for everybody's eyeballs with the rise of other websites," he says.

"What had once been a bigger deal started to diminish a bit, but I really started to learn that I was getting something out of it myself besides financial success. The act of [writing], the relationship with the readers, staying in the flow of the news, it all suits me very well. In the end, I get a lot out of doing it."

Maybe the enshittification of the internet was inevitable. He thinks anyone who's been around since the early days knows a lot of the gruesome hallmarks of today's internet were already in place, just not on the scale we see today. Maybe, then, whatever the web seemed to lose over the years—an air of "sincerity," as Heaslip put it—is still around too, easily stumbled upon out of the blue if you just go looking.

"In these trying economic times, it is tempting to visit the website LinkedIn.com in search of employment in the videogame business," we wrote on PC Gamer in July 2025. "On that dread portal one can find an endless parade of hucksters and hustlers promising they're guarding the secret to success: a guaranteed six-figure career is just one $299.99 seminar away!

"Here on the trusty ship PC Gamer we make no such outlandish promises, instead offering more practical advice: How to get laid off from whatever games industry job you already have."

In light of Microsoft's announcement that it will lay off another 3,200 Xbox employees, it's come to our attention that as many as tens—perhaps even hundreds—of game developers around the world somehow remain gainfully employed worldwide. Embarrassing! Surely at this point they must still have jobs against their best efforts, because it's never been easier to successfully get shitcanned by someone who makes an "awooga" noise when the profit line goes up at a steeper angle.

Initially we provided 20 foolproof techniques so that anyone could find the path to joblessness that was right for them. We earnestly believed that any developer with a little tenacity and a bit of hard work could use these tips to join the vaunted ranks of the approximately 8,000 developers laid off in 2026, and the roughly 43,000 since 2022 who have accomplished the lifelong dream of being considered too costly to employ in an industry that generates more than $100 billion every year.

Spurred by Microsoft and the other major developers who have recently cut their workforces to the bone and then straight through it, we've revised our list with some avant-garde techniques that have emerged in the past 12 months.

Behold, then, our newly revised guide: 25 foolproof ways to get laid off in the videogame industry.

PC Gamer's definitive (but by no means exhaustive) list of ways to lose your job in the videogame industry—guaranteed!

🚨🚨Hot new tips for 2026!! 🚨🚨

1. Make one of the most acclaimed and successful multiplayer videogames of all time while your bosses somehow squander $3.6 billion
2. Have your boss's misunderstood masterpiece derailed by saboteurs. Saboteurs!!
3. Ensure that after a once-in-a-lifetime hit, your company quadruples down and puts all its eggs in the endless growth metaverse basket
4. Make an earnest attempt to stand up for yourself and your colleagues, which your employers will spin as "gross misconduct"
5. Work for Microsoft

Tried-and-true techniques

1. Work at a company whose "platform, hardware, and game roadmap have never looked stronger"
2. Make a game that does so well that it's called a "break out hit" by the company that hired you to make it
3. Work for a publisher that decides your game is dead less than three months after your boss insists "the game is absolutely not dying"
4. Follow up a critically acclaimed game about skateboarding with a critically acclaimed game about rollerblading before your publisher decides it needs to "rationalize its pipeline"
5. Make a game that doesn't do well, probably because of decisions made by your boss, boss's boss, and/or boss's boss's boss
6. Help make a game as successful as Marvel Rivals, but as part of a team that does not fit into new plans for "optimized development efficiency"
7. Work at a studio that gets acquired for over $60 billion dollars, none of which ends up in your pocket
8. Endure executive pressure that forces your studio into making a game it isn't well-suited to (it is then shut down)
9. Work at a studio that can't get funding despite being founded by an industry veteran
10. Work at a company that needs to become more flexible/agile/versatile under these trying economic conditions. (Meanwhile, your CEO might've spent $2 million on vintage cars)
11. Have a boss who wears a really bad hat on stage
12. Go on strike because your bosses want you to train your AI replacement
13. Fail to meet unrealistic sales expectations after your game has been de-prioritized and your studio mismanaged
14. Get hoovered up by a company whose spending spree turns out to be reliant on Saudi Arabia forking out $2,000,000,000 (and then it doesn't do that)
15. Believe a tech company that it's serious about funding games for its new platform that no one wants. (It will change its mind before you have enough time to finish a game)
16. Have a boss who declares that a leak of "non-public information" about your in-development game was so dire, the whole studio's gotta go
17. Uh oh, your CEO is high on AI! Should've seen that coming
18. Write the best character in a long-running and much beloved RPG series
19. Just, uh, write a character at all
20. Have the hubris to try to make a videogame. What were you thinking?

Read More

• One third of US games industry workers were laid off in the last 2 years, 2026 GDC survey says
• The grim industry summer continues as EA lays off staff ahead of $55 billion sale to Saudi Arabia, likely to soothe the sting of its $20 billion debt
• 'Generational talent just gone': Developers react in shock at the brutal scale of Bungie layoffs, which has reportedly seen the Destiny 2 team almost completely wiped out
• Ubisoft closes another 2 studios, lays off hundreds more employees
• Epic devs discuss the shock of mass layoffs: 'We only had a slight hint that the company revenue wasn't doing well'
• Microsoft's year of shame
• Bluepoint Games, Sony's famed remaster studio, is being closed as the fallout from PlayStation's disastrous pivot to live service continues
• Rockstar accused of 'the most ruthless act of union busting in the history of the UK games industry' after firing dozens of employees who were allegedly attempting to form a union
• The impact of 16,000 games industry layoffs, in one chart
  After 2024, it feels like the games industry is poised for a vibe shift—or maybe a reckoning

Well, that was a blast. Several of our illustrious hardware team were on the ground at CES 2025 in Las Vegas this year, and now the jet lag has abated and the dust has settled it's time to round up all of the winners of our Best of CES 2025 awards for your perusal.

CES is always fertile ground for gaming laptop releases, and this year we weren't disappointed. But 2025 was something of a special show, as we also got to see the wraps taken off Nvidia's next-generation 50-series graphics cards—and they were a sight for sore eyes after months (nay, years) of speculation and rumour.

AI was still everywhere, as you might expect, but we carved our way through the crowds to find the implementations worth talking about. We also saw some impressive-looking CPUs from AMD (and a brief glimpse of the RX 9070 and RX 9070 XT, however fleeting), alongside some interesting gaming chair concepts, the odd clever case design, and even some handhelds worth talking about.

A pretty successful show in general then, and a good opportunity for us to get hands on with the very latest tech. We've narrowed down our awards to nine categories, and each recipient of our coveted trophy is well deserved. Roll on 2025 then, as it seems there's plenty of exciting hardware coming our way.

Best gaming laptop of CES 2025

1. Best gaming laptop of CES 2025

Razer Blade 16 (2025)
CES has long been a showcase for the latest laptop releases, and this year was no exception. But out of every gaming laptop we cast our eyes upon, it was the Razer Blade 16 2025 that really stood out. Not only is it a slimmer-looking, edgier-feeling machine, but it keeps the fantastic OLED panel from last years model while updating the hardware inside to include AMD's Strix Point chips in the CPU socket (all the way up to the Ryzen AI 9 HX 370) and RTX 50-series mobile GPUs. Razer also says it will be "aggressively priced", although what that translates to in practice remains to be seen. Still, it's a truly desirable object to hold in your hands, and one we can't wait to test out when it releases in Q1 of this year.

Best gaming chair of CES 2025

2. Best gaming chair of CES 2025

Razer Project Arielle
We've seen gaming chairs with fans integrated into them before, but Razer came sweeping in this year with a mesh chair design that makes the whole concept feel seamless. Not only can Project Arielle deliver a steady stream of cool air down your back in a way that feels soothing, not irritating, but it can even provide a subtle yet comforting blast of heat for those chilly winter mornings. Personally I was expecting it to be a bit gimmicky, but having tested it myself it was a delightful effect. It remains a concept for now, but I reckon it won't be long before we see something like this available for sale.

Best graphics card of CES 2025

3. Best graphics card of CES 2025

Nvidia RTX 5090 Founders Edition
CES 2025 featured a rare event this year—a fully fledged Nvidia graphics card launch, unveiling the RTX 50-series GPUs to the world. While a smorgasbord of cards were unveiled (including the rather promising-looking RTX 5070 touting RTX 4090 levels of performance for a mere $549), we'd be remiss if we didn't give this award to the new top-end card for this generation, the RTX 5090. Not only does it feature an astonishing 21,760 CUDA cores, 32 GB of GDDR7 memory and 680 5th gen Tensor cores, but it somehow manages to be remarkably slim and svelte looking to boot. Perhaps the best looking Founders Edition card of all time? You be the judge, but we were suitably impressed.

Best processor of CES 2025

4. Best processor of CES 2024

AMD Ryzen 9 9955HX3D
Stand back everyone, it's a monster. AMD's new high-end laptop chip is essentially a Ryzen 9950X3D with a 54 W TDP, which means it should be about as beefy as mobile CPUs come. 16-cores, 32-threads, 144 MB of L3 cache and a 5.4 GHz boost clock makes for a tantalising chip on paper, although thermals remain a question for now. It looks like a staggering amount of silicon for a mobile device on paper, and it'll likely feature in some of the 18-inch models we saw at this year's event—alongside some chonky cooling solutions, we expect. Still, it's a remarkably highly-specced mobile chip, and looks like a bit of a victory lap for AMD and it's gaming-friendly 3D V-Cache technology, especially now so many laptop manufacturers are starting to choose its mobile silicon over Intel.

Best new tech for gaming at CES 2025

5. Best new tech for gaming at CES 2025

AMD Ryzen AI Max
Ah, Strix Halo. We've been covering the rumours surrounding these mobile chips for such a long time, it feels slightly surreal finally seeing them in the flesh. And specs wise, they don't disappoint. At the top of the range sits the Ryzen AI Max+ 395, a 16-core 32-thread 5.1 GHz beastie with 80 MB total cache. It's the iGPUs on these chips that truly get us hot and bothered, though, as the top chip gets 40 CUs, with 32 CUs each on chips further down the range. Could this mean thin, light, dedicated GPU-less devices that possess the mettle to deliver excellent gaming performance? The Asus ROG Flow Z13 looks like a candidate, although as usual we'll need to benchmark one for ourselves before giving a final verdict. Still, exciting, isn't it?

Best handheld of CES 2025

6. Best handheld

Lenovo Legion Go S
Handheld gaming PCs are starting to refine down to a formula, and the Lenovo Legion Go S, on initial appearances, doesn't have a huge amount that makes it stand out. But it's got the right elements in all the right proportions, marrying an eight inch 1200p display with a choice of Z1 Extreme and Z2 Go APUs in a form factor that feels both familiar and comfortable. Plus, it's the first handheld other than the Steam Deck to use SteamOS—a development that's been a long time coming. There's something confidently refined about this one, although we'll have to put it through the ringer ourselves to see if it holds up to close scrutiny.

Most innovative use of AI at CES 2024

7. Most innovative use of AI at CES 2025

Nvidia DLSS 4 Multi Frame Generation
Walking the show floor and taking in the generative AI barbecues (you think I'm kidding) and the AI-touting cat toilets, you'd be forgiven for thinking all the AI implementations at this year's event were nothing but hype. Leave it to Nvidia though, as DLSS 4 looks truly impressive—not least because it now uses transformer-based AI models that reduce ghosting, improve temporal stability, and provide higher detail for all RTX card users. For the 50-series alone, though, you get Multi Frame Generation, which Nvidia says can multiply frame rates by up to 8x over traditional brute-force rendering. "Fake frame" doubters may protest, but we saw DLSS 4 in action for ourselves—and all those improvements stack up to look staggeringly good in person.

Consumer-first award

8. Consumer-first award

Asus ROG Strix Scar 18
In a world where gaming laptop manufacturers are increasingly soldering hardware to the motherboard to keep things slim, it was truly refreshing to see what Asus was doing with the latest version of the Asus ROG Strix Scar 18. Slide a latch on the back panel, and you'll reveal two diagonally-mounted latch-held SSD drives, just begging to be swapped out and upgraded on a whim with nary a tool in sight. The SO-DIMMs are tool-free to access too, meaning this big hunk of gaming laptop should be remarkably easy to upgrade. Chalk one up for a consumer win—and we can only hope more manufacturers follow suit in future.

Best gaming PC

9. Best gaming PC

Alienware Area-51
It wasn't just the Asus ROG Strix Scar 18 that impressed us when it came to upgradeability. Alienware makes some desirable (if pricey) gaming PCs, but its tendency to use proprietary parts has traditionally been a sticking point. No longer with the new Alienware Area-51, as it now uses standard ATX motherboards and power supplies. Not only that, but it's festooned the insides with a smattering of QR codes, linking out to tutorial videos on exactly how to remove and upgrade the components. A genuinely good idea, and one that shows—with the Area-51 models at least—that Alienware has been taking some of that upgradability critique on board.

The best thing about a wildcard is you never know what to expect next. They may at first brush appear to be nothing special, only to reveal hidden depths. They'll keep you guessing: Will they draw a card and conjure a figure from mythology—then hit you with an instant kill attack in the fighting game spin-off?

Okay, so clearly I've been playing way too much Persona 4 Golden because it turns out 'wildcard' can mean different things (or so my colleagues tell me). Here, it means we've seen a whole lot of impressive hardware throughout 2024, with the weird and wonderful not always neatly fitting into any one of our headliner categories. Still, outside of the usual suspects such as best graphics card or best gaming monitor for instance, there's a heck of a lot that still ought to get its flowers.

Hence, the wildcard represents our 'best of the rest.' From specialised peripherals, to robust performers that put the 'hard' in 'hardware,' there's quite a mix below. Not only are the nominees as eclectic as you'd hope, but they all scored highly in our reviews too; unlike last year, all three of our 2024 nominees secured a review score of 90 or higher, so you know they're each worth at least another look.

Alright, my colleagues are emphatically gesturing towards the 'get on with it' sign. So, without further ado, here are our three nominees:

Best of the rest 2024: the nominees

And those are PC Gamer's wild card nominations, representing hardware's best of the rest from 2024. Though all three be deserving of the crown, only one can snatch it up. We'll announce the winner (presumably after a flailing, Fall Guys-esque smackdown) on New Year's Eve.

If you want to go back to the original Dragon Age today, you'll need some help. Origins was made in the Eclipse engine, which had some long-standing bugs that never got patched and given there are "maybe 20 people left at BioWare" who understand how it works, aren't likely to ever be officially fixed. Unofficially, they've already been solved and all it takes is a dive into the PC Gaming wiki and Nexus Mods to sort them out.

Without these patches, running Dragon Age: Origins is likely to make your PC overheat, performance will degrade the longer you play without a reset, and you'll probably see flickering red squares appear underneath dead bodies. These issues are fixed, or at least mitigated, by two mods. The first is the 4GB Patch, which makes Origins large-address aware. By default it'll only use 2GB of your RAM, but as the name suggests the 4GB Patch doubles that. It's an easy install in either the EA App or GOG versions of the game, but if you're playing on Steam you'll need to follow a different installation guide.

Next up is the Performance and Memory Leak Fix. Take the d3d9.dll and dxvk.conf files out of the archive and put them in the "bin_ship" directory of your Dragon Age: Origins install. With that done, you'll have the game in a much more playable state—one that won't melt your laptop—and you'll be ready to install some mods for fun instead of just to make the game run properly.

How to install Dragon Age: Origins mods

Almost every mod for Dragon Age: Origins comes in one of two formats. Some you can paste into the "BioWare\Dragon Age\packages\core\override" subdirectory of your documents folder, and will work automatically the next time you launch the game. Others will be dazip files, which take a bit more effort to get working.

To install dazip mods, find daupdater.exe in the "bin_ship" directory of your Dragon Age install. It'll probably be in "Program Files\EA Games\Dragon Age". When you run daupdater.exe it'll open a window you can drag and drop your dazip mods into. Then highlight them and click on "Install selected".

Next time you launch Dragon Age: Origins, go into the DLC section of the menu. Your dazip mods will appear here next to whatever official DLC you have. Make sure they've got a green tick in the box next to them, and they'll be activated. With all that out of the way, here are the best Dragon Age: Origins mods.

Dain's Fixes

Does it bother you that ugly animations for buffs like the angry red tears flowing down threatening warriors or the glowing fire of burning weapons remain on even in cutscenes? Or that rogues drop out of stealth the moment they steal things? Or that you have to loot everyone manually after every fight? Or how slowly you have to jog around outside of combat?

All these annoyances and many more are fixed by Dain's Fixes, a modular set of tweaks that incorporates quality-of-life improvements as well as fixes for bugs you may never have noticed, like the fact that Mighty Blow doesn't actually halve the speed of anyone it hits like the description says it should. Each of Dain's Fixes comes in a separate folder, making them easy to pick and choose between.

Qwinn's Ultimate DAO Fixpack

If Dragon Age: Origins released today instead of in 2009 there would be a legion of YouTubers telling us about how its "cut content" proves it's actually unfinished and borderline unplayable. While obviously that's not true, there is a lot of dialogue and a fair few codex entries, items, and alternate quest options restored by Qwinn's Fixpack—including 18 interparty banters you'd otherwise never hear. It also fixes a bunch of bugged items and scripting.

FtG UI Mod—More Readable Fonts and UI

"Follow the Gourd" is a modder who has done the vital work of boosting the size of Origins' UI so you won't be squinting at your screen to read the text on a modern-sized monitor. Subtitles, codex entries, tooltips, and the inventory can all be resized to your liking, and the subtitles moved to the bottom of the screen if that's where you prefer them.

Extra Dog Slot

The mabari warhound is a Grey Warden's best friend, with their snappy jaws, pointy ears, and muscled chest. They're fantastic, happy partners, and essential tanks for mages and ranged fighters. Still, it's easy to let your canine companion get left behind in favor of more useful companions who can carry inventory, equip items, and, you know, talk.

With the Extra Dog Slot mod, your dog joins you as a permanent fifth party member. Adding a bloodthirsty mabari warhound isn’t the most balance-friendly addition to the Dragon Age combat system, but have you seen those big, sad eyes? You can't leave him behind. Who's a good hound?

Once you've recruited five companions, install Extra Dog Slot. Then on the party select screen, highlight four of the non-dog party members. When you return to the game, your faithful hound will still be by your side.

Character Respecialization

A dark raven appears on a fencepost. A sour elixir full of evil portent is strapped to its leg. Drink it, and… respec your skills and attribute points at any time! Well, that was unexpected.

As strategies shift in Dragon Age, it's great to be able to rebuild a team to better support each other. The Character Respecialization mod pulls this off in a (mostly) lore-friendly way, and can be used at any time. After installation, find the dark-but-slightly-stupid-looking raven perched in most of Ferelden's major cities.

Equal Love

Equal Love erases gender restrictions on companion interactions, so you can flirt, kiss, and get freaky with any companion you'd like to, regardless of your player-character gender. Best of all, the new genderless rules carry over into the storyline's conclusions, so now male player-characters can [spoiler] with [spoiler], provided he chooses the [spoiler] ending.

Madd Gift Guide

Interpersonal politics, as we all know, begin and end with the giving of gifts. In vanilla Dragon Age though, finding a special "gift" item only leads to a bunch of hassle as you try to figure out who is supposed to receive it. With the Madd Gift Guide, the item descriptions of gifts suggest which of your companions would enjoy them, saving a lot of trial and error. For anyone trying to win the Most Popular Grey Warden contest, this is a simple but essential mod.

You can get a gift guide for the Awakening expansion too.

Forced Deathblows

Every once in a while, a melee fighter will kill an opponent with a combo of brutal finishing moves straight out of Game of Thrones. These are supposed to be a rare treat, but if you’re the kind of person who rejects the idea cookies are a sometimes food, Forced Deathblows can dial up the carnage. A variable setting makes the special kill animations happen slightly more regularly, most of the time, or for every single melee kill. The highest setting is recommended for the folks who played Sniper Elite with the X-ray gore animations turned all the way up, as it leads to the same amount of repetitive, gratuitous spleen-smashing.

No Helmet Hack

From Mass Effect 2 on, BioWare's games featured a simple checkbox that made helmets invisible so you could see your characters' beloved faces at all times, even when they were strapped into a thousand pounds of high-tech armor. Back in the Bad Old Days, helmets would only go away in dialogue scenes. The rest of the time, you'd have to see them running around in a daft wizard hat or leather bonce protector. Enter No Helmet Hack, a simple little mod that gives each character a weightless, valueless book to read. Using it toggles their helmet visibility on or off. Beautiful, simple, and efficient.

Ser Gilmore Companion NPC – Fully Voiced

The Human Nobles among you may remember Ser Gilmore as your well-intentioned, but only briefly relevant, childhood friend. Originally thought to be the next Grey Warden recruit, Ser Gilmore instead sacrifices his life to give you and your mother time to escape your burning castle.

Thanks to the retconning of this mod, however, Ser Gilmore is back. Even better, he's ready to join your quest and features full voice acting. The voice acting isn't half bad, and it's remarkable how well he fits in with the other companions. After installing this mod, you can recruit your miraculously alive childhood chum near the Lothering chantry.

Baldur's Gate 2 Redux

For a taste of something a little different—and a break from Dragon Age entirely—the Baldur's Gate 2 Redux mod is a thing of beauty. The first dungeon, Irenicus's Dungeon, has been entirely recreated by a team of modders, including the original audio and famously snappy dialog. Though this project was supposed to eventually recreate all of Baldur's Gate 2, unfortunately it went on hiatus in 2014 when the project lead got a job at Beamdog. Still, this bite of BG2 is good for about an hour of nostalgic dungeon-diving.

Alley of Murders

Alley of Murders is an add-on campaign that introduces a serial killer in the grungier areas of Denerim. The local constabulary aren’t having any luck solving the case, so it's up to the Grey Wardens to step in. This mod is fully voice-acted (to varying degrees of success) and should take about half an hour to wrap up.

The Shattered War

Alley of Murders was the first fully voice acted Dragon Age: Origins mod, and an impressive proof of concept. The Shattered War is the real deal, a standalone expansion of near-professional quality with more than 3,600 lines of recorded dialogue. Set after the events of the game, it casts you as a member of a military expedition sent to investigate a darkspawn threat in the Frostback Mountains, and should give you around 10 hours of bonus adventuring.

Shortcut Through the Deep Roads

By your second or third playthrough, you'll probably be pretty sick of Deep Roads dungeoneering. This mod lets you skip straight to the Brood Mother, though you'll have to be careful not to get turned around after defeating her, because if you wander into the Dead Trenches you'll get teleported back to the Brood Mother Fight. On a similar tip there's Skip the Fade, though some users on Nexus Mods report issues with it and it does conflict with mods like Ser Gilmore.

When I think about all the games I played this year, there's a very obvious throughline that I didn't quite put together until recently. Action RPGs, those monster bonking simulators with sparkling loot, represented the majority of my gaming diet. OK—most of it was Diablo 4, but I dabbled in almost all of the action RPGs that came out this year and not a single one was a miss.

Part of the action RPG genre's strength is, admittedly, its broad definition. Loot lovers have Diablo 4, soulslike sickos have Elden Ring: Shadow of the Erdtree, roguelike ruffians have Hades 2, and then there's Dragon's Dogma 2 for anyone who wants their action RPGs to be delightfully weird. Black Myth: Wukong and Final Fantasy 16 veer heavily into the action side of things, and we just got a new Dragon Age that is a better action RPG than I think anyone expected. And don't forget Path of Exile 2, which didn't quite make the cut, but is still on track to come out in early access this year.

My favorite part about action RPGs are the stories you hear about players coming up with ridiculous challenge runs or builds that the developers surely didn't really intend. That's the charm of a genre that hands you a buffet of combat systems and lets you gorge on whatever you're hungry for. Let's dig into each game, what ridiculous things players did in them, and what makes them stand out.

The bizarre action RPG: Dragon's Dogma 2

Most impressive player feat: Beat the game naked in under 2 hours.

Play it to simulate a D&D party made up of player-created NPCs who can kill you at any moment.

Fast travel in Dragon's Dogma 2 is a pain in the ass. To travel between towns, you need to catch an oxcart before it departs and then pray you don't get attacked by a griffon along the way. Teleporting around the world is possible, but you need to have visited your destination once before and have a specific item on you. Dragon's Dogma 2 is an inconvenient action RPG where any quest could turn into a fantasy epic.

And then there are the pawns, NPC buddies who you recruit throughout your journey. Without them, Dragon's Dogma 2, like your main character, would lose its heart. "It feels like I'm in a proper RPG adventuring group, and each journey is made better by their company and funny little eccentricities," Fraser wrote in his Dragon's Dogma 2 review. He gave it a score of 89% for its originality and ambition.

I can still picture my party of pawns and all the surprises we encountered on the way to finish some mundane task. I owe them my life for how many beasts they kept off of me while I shot arrows from relative safety, and for being good sports whenever I hurled them toward items I didn't feel like jumping across a gap to get.

The slick action RPG: Hades 2

Most impressive player feat: Beat every boss without taking a single point of damage.

Play it for the jetpack that was just added.

The first Hades is up there with some of my favorite games of all time. Supergiant knows how to make unbelievably satisfying action RPGs that slowly unfold their complexity over time. Hades 2 isn't finished yet, but already has some new toys that might make me kick Hades 1 down a few ranks.

Simple things, like Melinoë's quick dash that leaves a trail of stars behind her to indicate how long you have until you can do it again, are the kind of little touches that give Hades 2's combat a sturdy foundation. If the basic act of moving around weren't so satisfying, Hades 2's entire arsenal of creative weapons and powers wouldn't work.

Every run you can stack boons together to turn your grenade launcher into an explosive shotgun or your sprint into Poseidon's tidal wave. Supergiant makes it almost impossible to stumble into a build that doesn't work, activating the right neurons that keep me coming back to do it all over again and again.

The relentless action RPG: Elden Ring: Shadow of the Erdtree

Most impressive player feat: Beat it with 1 HP, 1 FP, and 1 Stamina over 55 hours and 1,900 deaths.

Play it for its dual-wielded blades that let you slide behind enemies like a ninja.

Apologies to the other action RPGs on this list, but Elden Ring: Shadow of the Erdtree is easily the best one I've played this year. FromSoftware's enormous expansion delivers a beautiful new landmass, terrifying new monsters, and weaponry that stretches what I thought was possible in this flavor of action RPG.

As I said in my Shadow of the Erdtree review, it "rivals Dark Souls with a corkscrew world design layered with wondrous and horrific secrets to discover." And like Dark Souls, normal enemies—not just bosses—can tear you apart. One of my issues with Elden Ring is how uneven its difficulty scaling becomes in the last third. The expansion dodges this problem by having its own leveling system that almost makes you feel like you're level 1 again.

The challenge goes hand in hand with where FromSoft chose to set the expansion: In a land that echoes the base game with remixed enemy types and bosses built to exploit all the habits you used to rely on. Shadow of the Erdtree can see right through you and I was happy to be threatened by the smallest enemies in a world that is practically screaming at you to leave.

The bold action RPG: Black Myth: Wukong

Most impressive player feat: Beat the entire game without dodging.

Play it for its marvelous 10-minute intro.

This is the only action RPG on the list where you get to duel a tiger with a katana. I guess you also play as a monkey man with a polearm, so maybe that isn't surprising.

The creativity in Black Myth: Wukong's powers impressed me the most. The idea of turning into a giant frog to slap enemies with your tongue sounds like a joke but in Wukong it isn't, and it somehow doesn't feel out of place. You transform into a lot of different creatures in this game, and each one shifts the pace of the combat in satisfying ways. I spent so much time as a wolf man slicing enemies apart with a fiery blade that going back to the monkey man felt like a punishment.

Wukong is also just a great entry point for anyone who doesn't play a lot of soulslikes or action RPGs. It certainly gets difficult by the end, but most of it is fairly lax as long as you can handle fast-paced combat like you find in Devil May Cry.

The cerebral action RPG: Diablo 4: Vessel of Hatred

Most impressive player feat: Discovered powerful bugs that let the new class hit for billions of damage.

Play it to summon a giant poison-spitting centipede as its speedy new class.

Vessel of Hatred reboots Diablo 4 into an even stronger action RPG than I ever thought it could become; an expansion that revitalizes the endless loot chase with a variety of new dungeon types and items to discover.

Clicking demons and picking up loot remains almost unnervingly pleasing, and now there are even more ways to do it. You can speed through the Undercity for runes to steal skills from other classes, battle waves of enemies in Infernal Hordes with 'boons and banes' that randomize each run, and challenge yourself in The Pit, a 150-tier dungeon for benchmarking your build.

There's an entire buffet of activities to sample as you scoop up loot to make whatever build you can dream of. I made a spiritborn who electrified the entire screen using one button and a rogue who turns into a spinning top flinging knives in every direction. Blizzard's stellar visual effects and tactile combat design elevate Diablo 4 above the other loot-heavy action RPGs. It's one of the most expressive, satisfying games on this list and only promises to expand as each new season releases.

The unexpected action RPG: Dragon Age: The Veilguard

Most impressive player feat: OK, this one is too new, but I'm sure someone will beat it blindfolded or something by next week.

Play it for its snappy combat and gorgeous setting.

Where Dragon Age: The Veilguard misses with its early game character writing, it really hits with its completely revised action RPG battles. I liked the earlier games in the series, but I wasn't there for combat. In Veilguard, I've found myself poking through the skill tree, eager to see what kind of abilities and bonuses I can unlock. And after only a handful of hours, it's starting to click.

I'm playing a spellblade mage, a caster who likes to stab, and for the first time in a Dragon Age game, I don't want to drop the difficulty down to forgettably easy and skip straight to the cutscenes. BioWare nails the fun of rhythmically flinging magic at enemies and teleporting in to strike them with a devastating finisher. I'm essentially a magical rogue empowered by allies who can slow down time or buff my damage output.

Lauren says the dialogue finds its footing deeper into the game in her Dragon Age: The Veilguard review. And that's absolutely fine with me because I'm currently having way more fun than I expected fighting off darkspawn in its gorgeous high fantasy ruins and forests. Part of me wants to try the other classes too, but as this list makes clear, I probably won't have time for that.

Black Myth: Wukong is "a stunning action game clearly inspired by the Dark Souls series," we said in our 87% review. It's also a new link in a very long, rich, and constantly evolving chain of mostly untranslated Chinese-language RPGs that have too often passed English speaking gamers by. The current star of this often overlooked segment of gaming may be a graphics card-stressing adventure that focuses almost entirely on the action, but Chinese RPGs have been steadily working towards this sort of breakout success for decades. It just took a whole lot of slow, often turn-based steps to get there.

Although it wasn't the very first, Taiwanese-developed Sword and Fairy, released on DOS-based hardware similar to the PCs English speaking RPG fans were using to play Stonekeep and Ravenloft: Stone Prophet on at the time, had a huge impact on everything that followed. The story charted a magically-infused romance from humble hometown to its tragic end, well-received not only in its original game form but also in the multiple luscious and lengthy TV adaptations made afterwards.

As timeless as the story is, the RPG that surrounded it followed a traditional town/dungeon formula familiar to gamers the world over, with action portrayed using isometric 2D pixel art. The battles in Sword and Fairy were strictly turn-based: Heroes on one side of the screen, enemies on the other, and all attacks handled using a simple menu system. But that was perfectly fine in 1995.

Sword and Fairy was more than a hit: it was a historically significant masterpiece, a fantastic game that every Chinese and Taiwanese RPG developer at the time wanted to create their own spin on. Sword and Fairy's sequels, spinoffs, and sister series Xuan Yuan Sword even ended up struggling to outdo. 

Old battles are given a new real-time twist 

Time marched on regardless, and soon mainland Chinese RPGs were also trying to bring a little action and excitement to the traditionally stat-heavy genre. 2001's Jian Xia Qingyuan Waizhuan: Yue Ying Chuanshuo merged an almost Baldur's Gate-like presentation with real-time skirmishes. Here fights play out naturally within the environment and how often and how fast I swung my sword depended entirely on how often and how fast I clicked my mouse button. Turns and formations simply weren't a thing, although an achy index finger was. Did this early attempt to "go action" work? Oh heck no, not even close. Clicking on tiny highly mobile VGA-sized sprites over and over again wasn't practical, let alone fun. It was an interesting experiment, though, even if it's also one I hope I never encounter again.

Thankfully the Fantasia Sango series, starting in 2003, offered a more successful mix of RPG and action. These games are set in a gloriously colourful take on Three Kingdoms-era China, mythical versions of famous people and fantastical takes on real-world locations used as a backdrop for heroes to battle and romance their way through. Taiwanese developer UserJoy Technology Co. came up with something a bit different from all the lightsaber action found in another RPG released that year—KoTOR—but it still had the same desire to bring something new and more directly interactive to the genre.

As in Sword and Fairy the heroes are lined up on one side of the screen while the enemies politely keep to the other, but there's a new and unstoppable layer of action running underneath it all, a truly fresh twist on traditional RPGing. A Final Fantasy-like ATB gauge governed when friends and foes alike could perform an action, but the game then expanded on the concept of active combat in ways Square's headline games never would.

Both sides arranged their combatants on a generously sized grid, the positions controlling which attacks could hit their mark (a 1x3 square swipe would leave the back half of a 2x2 formation unharmed, for example).

Formations could also be changed mid-battle, altering buffs and character positions in the process. Here a character was more than a bundle of numbers with some equipment attached. They were a physical presence on the battlefield.

And that meant when they attacked mattered just as much as who they attacked. Well-timed blows of any sort could combo with other characters' offensive skills, increasing the damage they caused. This battle system worked so well the series started with it and then kept it forever, the idea going from innovative action to comfortingly familiar as the years passed by. 

Embracing QTEs and a more active future

By 2010 singleplayer Chinese RPGs were somewhat stagnating in the face of the unstoppable threat/promise of endless money in mobile gaming and F2Ps MMOs. Shanghai developer Aurogon's Gu Jian Qi Tan made a great effort to drag them back into the limelight with polished, voice-acted cutscenes packed with animated characters. Its locations weren't just rendered in lavishly detailed 3D, but were truly awe-inspiring. Pink petals fell from blossoming trees near gorgeous lakes, cheeky monkeys hid in autumnal forests, and monsters loomed over the party in battle.

This beautiful bow was wrapped around a game eager to move with the times, and that meant introducing action wherever it could. QTEs allowed hero Tusu to perform dramatic leaps and gravity-defying runs, as if he was the athletic star of a wuxia movie. Battles tried to mix traditional turns with flexible timings, a bar across the top denoting when someone's attack was coming up, and whether that heal you needed would come before or after a powerful enemy had unleashed their next move. 

Gu Jian 2 would take this idea further, introducing free movement and using MMO-style skill cooldowns in battle. 2018's Gu Jian 3, which is one of the rare few Chinese RPGs officially available in English, reduced the party size down to one and transformed the game into a real-time action adventure. This series was a turning point for RPGs made in China, and another step away from their orderly past. After Gu Jian, any Chinese RPG hoping to turn heads and make headlines had to be as close to cutting-edge-gorgeous as possible, and ideally had to be heavily action oriented too. The trend abroad wasn't too different: The Witcher 3 bowled everyone over in 2015, while Final Fantasy 15, released in 2016, also pushed heavily in the action direction.

Even as action RPGs were clearly taking over in China, exactly how that action materialised was still somewhat open to interpretation. In 2016, Genshin Impact developer MiHoYo's first breakout game, Honkai Impact 3rd, presaged the arrival of mega-budget gacha RPGs. But not everything was headed that way.

2017's Faith of Danschant took a different path to modernising this ancient genre. In screenshots it has all the hallmarks of a modern AAA game: Feixing is a flexible hero who can generally rely on on-screen waypoints to guide him to his next event, and only needs to be given a nudge and maybe a quick button press to perform some sort of fluidly animated context-sensitive environmental traversal. NPC chatter automatically sparks up whenever he passes by, because who actually has the time to stop and talk these days, right?

This free and loose interactivity tied to sumptuous presentation was a firm foot forward, but in combat Danschant always kept one toe dipped in the past. Battles use a mix of broadly Fantasia Sango-like chaining coupled with tactical cooldown timing, and then combine it with a dynamic positioning system. One moment three people are lined up to face a powerful monster, as quintessentially RPG as ever, but the next the entire team's dashing off to the side so they can completely avoid what would have been a screen-filling attack. The battle then seamlessly continues on from this new position, reinforcing the game's modern 3D environments.

A little less RP, lots more G

Faith of Danschant was something of a curious outlier, and many games fully embraced real-time action and saved almost all of their RPGing for cutscenes. 2020's Xuan Yuan Sword 7 opted for seamless sword swinging set in various gorgeous 3D locations, coupled with a streamlined story that prioritised getting from one spectacular event to the next over anything else. Time-padding fetch quests were a thing of the past, and although the maps always looked expansive they kept players walking a relatively narrow path, with nothing more than the odd treasure chest hiding away down the occasional short and easily backtracked diversion. This same year, Baldur's Gate 3 entered early access and Cyberpunk 2077 had its somewhat wobbly launch—both embracing a freeform open world structure that Chinese RPGs didn't seem interested in following.

Xuan Yuan Sword 7's latest stablemate from publisher Softstar, 2021's Sword and Fairy 7, tilts the balance even further towards action over numbers.

There are sneaky stealth segments and seamless battles that rely on me perfectly timing dash-dodges in response to telegraphed incoming blows, or running off to take cover before a particularly devastating attack goes off. It's a thrilling spectacle, and one where my stats and equipment very much take a back seat. How I handle my heroes from one moment to the next and how I react to the damage headed my way are always the deciding factors in battle, much like in Black Myth: Wukong's soulslike skirmishes.

Where will mainstream Chinese RPGs go next? Who knows. But it's safe to say that whatever direction they take it'll be a spectacular, experimental, and constantly evolving ride that's different from everything that came before it—which funnily enough, would make it the same as everything that came before it too.

When members of artist collective turned game developer Studio ZA/UM thanked Marx and Engels in their 2019 Game Awards acceptance speech for the RPG triumph Disco Elysium, I felt like I was looking at the future, the ecstatic debut of my new favorite developer, but that isn't how things panned out. Disco Elysium has been #1 on our yearly Top 100 games list four years in a row, but for much of that time, ZA/UM has been engulfed in an existential crisis.

Since 2019, A Disco Elysium sequel, a sci-fi RPG in a new setting, and a full-size Elysium spin-off game have been canceled or "paused," while a heated personal and legal dispute between founding members hangs over ZA/UM's every move. That last canceled game, described as "a spin-off about one of the most beloved characters in Disco Elysium" and spearheaded by one of the first game's principle writers, wowed other teams at the studio in an internal demo at the end of last year. It could have been on our SSDs as early as 2025. 

This project was cancelled in February, much to the shock of most ZA/UM employees, and nearly the entire team⁠—including that Disco Elysium writer, Argo Tuulik⁠— was laid off. I spoke with 12 current and former employees, including Tuulik and fellow X7 lead writer Dora Klindžić, to find out what went wrong. Studio ZA/UM itself did not respond to a request for comment in time for publication.

The fall

In late 2021, three of Disco Elysium's most senior developers, including the setting's original creator, Robert Kurvitz, lead artist Aleksander Rostov, and Final Cut lead writer Helen Hindpere, left the company on acrimonious terms. The ousted artists have alleged financial malfeasance on the part of company management, with much of their ire focused on Tõnis Haavel, a producer on Disco Elysium who had previously been convicted of investor fraud in the developers' native Estonia in 2014. ZA/UM studio management, meanwhile, insists that the three were fired for refusing to return to work and creating a hostile environment.

After the departure of Kurvitz and friends was revealed in 2022, fan sentiment largely aligned with the ousted creatives, with a backlash against ZA/UM escalating into harassment and threats against developers still at the studio. That situation cooled down somewhat with the release of People Make Games' 150 minute-long documentary on ZA/UM, which featured interviews with senior developers still at the studio who had worked on Disco Elysium.

Disco Elysium writer Argo Tuulik, a longtime friend of setting creator Kurvitz, gave a raw appraisal of the studio and the ousted writer's respective missteps, asking fans to let those still at the studio prove themselves with their work.

Tuulik and his team didn't get that chance: They were laid off from ZA/UM in February alongside nearly a quarter of the studio's staff, predominantly developers on Tuulik's now-canceled project, X7, which would have been a spin-off "standalone expansion" to Disco Elysium featuring some returning characters and an advancement of that game's distinctive conversation and "psychological RPG" systems. 

Tuulik and fellow X7 lead writer Dora Klindžić lay the blame for X7's end squarely with management, particularly Tõnis Haavel, while 10 other current and former ZA/UM developers spoke with me under anonymity. They described a confused, rudderless studio that expanded too quickly in the pandemic, struggled to adapt to remote work, and has canceled three projects as the afterglow of its triumphant debut faded in the intervening five years.

"Most hardcore Disco since Disco"

In the absence of a full sequel to Disco Elysium, X7 was going to be a spin-off⁠—smaller than Disco, but still full-scale⁠—headed up by Tuulik, someone who has been part of the Elysium creative project from the start and who wrote some of Disco Elysium's standout characters like the foul-mouthed urchin Cuno and the Hardy Boys, a vigilante militia whose frat boy veneer conceals a strange nobility.

"It was a spin-off about one of the most beloved characters in Disco Elysium," explained one developer who worked on the project. "I feel like it was the best possible shot at a Disco-like game without [Kurvitz], Rostov, and other people that made the original Disco Elysium."

Klindžić said, "It was something no one else but Argo could have done, and it would have been 110% authentic, most hardcore Disco since Disco." She added that X7 "would have advanced the story, the emotional threads, and gameplay elements all at once to truly evolve the genre of psychological RPG as Disco Elysium started it.

"For a while it seemed like miracles were possible, and with them, redemption."

The internal response to a company-wide showcase of the game at the end of 2023 seems to have been uniformly positive, with developers on other teams at ZA/UM telling me they were impressed with the demo. "Everyone was looking forward to its development," one of them said. "Its internal announcement lifted a lot of spirits after a rough time of bad press around the studio."

They also thought it was "exactly the sort of game [ZA/UM] needs to put out," and that it could "reassure fans that ZA/UM is not a husk, that the IP is in safe hands and that the studio is full of talented people with a genuine love for the world of Revachol."

My sources disagree on when X7 could have been ready for release, with some saying a 2024 launch wasn't out of the question, while others argued 2025 was more realistic. Klindžić, for her part, thought that with less interference from management, "it could have perhaps been a three-year development cycle start to finish." Project X7 began development in 2022.

One thing everyone I spoke to agreed on was that X7 was the closest major project ZA/UM had to release at the time of its cancellation, and that ZA/UM's main project in active development, codenamed C4, is still a long way out. The smaller-scale project M0 seems much closer to completion, but the mobile and tablet-oriented Elysium spin off, while well-received internally, doesn't seem to be the full Disco Elysium successor promised by projects Y12, C4, or X7.

X7 was promising: positively received internally and poised to be a long-awaited second outing from ZA/UM after a five or six-year wait since Disco Elysium. Multiple current and former employees also attest to ZA/UM president Ed Tomaszewski having assured staff in a December 2023 all-hands meeting that the studio was on strong financial footing, and that they did not have to fear the layoff crisis sweeping the industry. Two months later, X7 was cancelled and nearly a quarter of ZA/UM was laid off, primarily impacting the former X7 team.

Interference

Following the departure of Kurvitz, Rostov, and Hindpere, there seems to have been an understandable crisis at the studio. "Executive leadership and management did not provide any information about what was happening," said one developer who witnessed the transition. "It was very uncomfortable for everyone there." 

Work on a full Disco Elysium sequel codenamed Y12 was eventually halted⁠. My sources described flagging morale and a lack of direction after Kurvitz, Rostov, and Hindperre's departure leading to a decision to regroup on new projects.

Multiple sources describe the cancellation of Y12 as having caused friction between Tuulik, Klindžić, and management, with one stating that Y12 was cancelled without input from the senior writers, and that it looked like they were being "pushed out."

"In February 2022, I left my job as an academic physicist and space mission scientist in order to work on Y12, the sequel to a masterpiece, Disco Elysium," Klindžić said of this time. "Upon my arrival, I was told all the leads were gone and replaced, but this was framed as a good thing, a healthy thing. Four months later the project was shelved overnight. I began raising concerns, as I felt I had just abandoned my entire life and career only to end up in a studio where the people I had come to work with were fired, and the project I was meant to work on shelved with no reason given."

Tuulik and Klindžić were subsequently offered their own project, but under highly irregular constraints. 

"In August 2022, after production on the sequel was stopped, management approached Argo and I to come up with a pitch for a standalone expansion under the Disco Elysium label," said Klindžić. "We were given only around a week to come up with a fully-fledged game pitch, and we worked around the clock to come up with a new story, new characters, new gameplay mechanics, and a new creative direction, including an initial vision for design, art, and audio. We presented the pitch to management, it was a resounding success. It was greenlit and codenamed X7, and its initial production schedule was set for one year."

Tuulik, Klindžić, and everyone I spoke to who worked on X7 attest to it not having been allowed a pre-production period, the industry standard planning phase of developing a game. Making a game without pre-production is analogous to writing an essay without an outline, or building a house without blueprints. 

"We were set up to fail from the start and it was impossible to catch up," said Klindžić. "Whenever we raised concerns about this and expressed we needed more writers if the deadlines were to be met, we were accused of not wanting to do our jobs."

"Pretty much from the moment the writing team's pitch was approved in August of 2022, the other teams started production," Tuulik said. "We didn't even really know what the story or the characters were gonna be, when art teams were already making first character and environment concepts. I'm sure you can see how this is a big problem, when you're making a narrative-led game. 

"Essentially, the writing team had to work double-time from day one to supply other disciplines with work, whilst trying to write the first dialogues and sketch out the rest of the game at the same time. The writing team consisted of myself and Dora at the time."

A "be careful what you wish for" moment came for X7 with the cancellation of P1, a sci-fi RPG in development under Disco Elysium producer Kaur Kender, who after leaving the company sued ZA/UM with allegations similar to those from Kurvitz, Rostov, and Hindpere before dropping his lawsuit at the end of 2022. While the P1 writers added more hands to the project, X7's breakneck pace and lack of planning in pre-production led to Tuulik and Klindžić struggling to bring the new writers up to speed while still building the narrative of the game.

One thing that may have fundamentally doomed X7 was an issue of hierarchy: even though Klindžić and Tuulik pitched the project and effectively led development at the beginning, neither was formally designated X7's project lead. "I don't know if Dora and Argo ever felt in control," observed one ZA/UM employee. "You can't back people into corners and expect them to behave."

"I didn't ask for a title, because titles used to be meaningless back then," said Tuulik, noting that previously for ZA/UM, "writers who started projects had also been effectively leading them. 

"That's how it had been, and was at the time on other projects. That's how it was on X7 in the first four months, the most productive months."

"The work we were required to do throughout 2022 and 2023 was analogous to the work of other directors in the studio, but we were not given a title upgrade nor a wage adjustment to match," Klindžić said. "It resulted in a situation where I performed labor well outside my original role for the studio for over a year without being properly compensated or recognized for it."

That lack of specified roles seems to have quickly become a problem. Tuulik, Klindžić, and other members of X7 say there was fruitful collaboration between departments and good progress in the early months of development, despite the extreme workload taken on by the two-person writing team, and everyone I spoke to, both on the X7 team and outside, praised Tuulik and Klindžić as thoughtful, professional collaborators.

Klindžić and Tuulik described having been increasingly sidelined by management and unable to directly communicate with the X7 team⁠—ZA/UM had become fully remote, with most communication occurring through a company Slack⁠—while management introduced a new project coordinator/creative director the two had to go through instead of directly communicating with their colleagues. The two characterized much of this interference as coming from Tõnis Haavel, the Disco Elysium producer at the center of the company's dispute with Kurvitz, Rostov, and Hindpere. Indeed, according to Tuulik, toward the end of the project Haavel was officially the project's coordinator/director and "interim narrative lead."

"Nobody says that things are going to change," recalled one member of the X7 team, "But suddenly you have no more meetings with writers for some reason and you're not allowed to send them your work for feedback." Another ZA/UM employee who was not part of the X7 team told me that "in internal docs there was a lot of shifting around who was responsible for leading the project."

Klindžić characterizes this as a form of retaliation for Tuulik's statements in the People Make Games documentary: while the developer made a case for those still working at ZA/UM, he also criticized some of the studio management's decisions and expressed some admiration and understanding for Kurvitz. "I felt that a strong resentment developed towards Argo for growing too big for his shoes, so to speak," Klindžić said. "I got the sense that there was resentment for the fact Argo was getting so much support from fans, while [ZA/UM CEO Ilmar Kompus], Tõnis, and the company weren't.

"They put Argo through a humiliation campaign. They made him apologize to people for what he said in the interview. They undermined his confidence and tried to make him doubt himself. They told him he was incompetent, unqualified, and unfit to lead his own project, demoted him and made him invisible inside the studio."

A one-game studio?

X7's direction as laid out by management seems to have been incredibly fluid, with shifting targets including a 2022 Game Awards teaser to announce the game that was ultimately scrapped. Despite producing the well-received internal demo at the end of 2023, the X7 team has been laid off and the project cancelled.

Employees still at the company expressed confusion and frustration over the decision, especially considering president Tomaszewski's remarks regarding layoffs in 2023. One common sentiment among those I talked to was that it was just hard to tell if there was a problem on another project or even in a different department on the same project, such is the extent to which ZA/UM's employees are isolated from each other in its remote work environment.

ZA/UM expanded from 30 to 100 employees following the release of Disco Elysium, the sort of expansion that can drastically change the character of a company, and one that demands a commensurate increase in output to keep up with the costs. Five years later, the studio has canceled its major project that was closest to launch. It's unclear how much runway the studio has for an intensive, multi-year development cycle like the one demanded by project C4 without substantial new revenue coming in, while the legal battle with Kurvitz, Rostov, and Hindpere continues to haunt its every move.

And we'll never get to play X7, a follow-up to Disco Elysium masterminded by one of its principle writers, produced by a team that hit a major milestone and impressed its peers despite what they describe as a scrambled and untenable working environment. The livelihood of that team has been completely upended, and some developers' immigration statuses have been imperiled by their layoffs.

The developers I spoke to share the same sense of disappointment I do, that the idea of ZA/UM as a different kind of game developer, one driven by artistry and capable of pushing the medium forward with more games like Disco Elysium, was never meant to be. "For a supposedly 'leftist' company, this is a real mask-off moment," one current employee told me. Another mused that "We're not the first studio to go through that, it just feels worse when it's ZA/UM."

There's a quote from Disco Elysium itself that springs to mind here, one about capital taking off its mask of humanity to kill everything you love, but it feels a little on the nose.

"The entire X7 team loved the Elysium world⁠," Klindžić told me in our last interview. "As fan artists, musicians, iconic voices⁠, we only wanted to keep it going, rather than leave it to wither in some dark decrepit cellar of corporate intellectual property."

When Brian 'Chip' McLaughlin dons his Boy Scout uniform and pulls on his Vault Boy head, pandemonium ensues. At Fasnacht this year—a real-world Swiss-American costume celebration also held in Fallout 76—he almost missed the parade after an hour taking photos with Fallout fans. And the Vegas strip was even crazier.

"The Fallout fans are waving and talking and taking pictures," he says. "We're in front of the Bellagio, and up comes this guy dressed as Goofy, and he stands right next to me. And I'm like, 'Oh my god, I'm about to get shanked by Goofy. This is their turf, and I didn't realise it.'"

More worrying still are the pensioners, who have stared at McLaughlin with scorn at more than one tourist site. To their eyes he looks like a Hitler Youth with a Trump head. But the occasional misunderstanding is worth it. "I love it," McLaughlin says. "Because I love the fans of the game, and they're everywhere you go."

McLaughlin's YouTube channel The Chip Monk Show, in which he visits locations from the Fallout games looking like a living bobblehead, grew from an unlikely source: professional disappointment.

From the age of 11, back when he made films with a Super 8mm camera, McLaughlin had wanted to break into Hollywood. As he reached adulthood he made some headway as a writer, scripting sitcoms. "A friend was a producer on Saved by the Bell," he says. "She hooked me up with an agent who had just left Disney. I wrote a lot of spec work and non-produced stuff." At the time, though, reality TV was peaking in the United States and laid waste to the landscape of scripted comedy and drama. "That's typical of my life," McLaughlin says. "When I get to the point where I'm really going strong and I've got everything in place, some unknown force just devastates it."

Nevertheless, he persisted, using his new contacts and experience to set up an independent production company and shift towards bigger and bigger projects. "I did do two TV pilots which didn't get picked up, but that's OK," he says. "It moved me into position to do my final project, which is a big Pony Express feature film. I had wanted to do it since I was a kid."

After six years of script development, McLaughlin had started putting together a seed budget for his reboot of the Charlton Heston-starring Western. "Right when everything was ready to go, all the contracts were signed and we were ready to start the financing phase, Covid hit," he says. "It just came to a grinding halt. That was devastating."

With the pandemic unfolding in earnest, McLaughlin and his wife began a playthrough of Fallout 76 with a friend. One night, he turned off his HUD to see what the game looked like when stripped of its heath bar, ammo count and various quest trackers. "Oh my god," McLaughlin realised: "Your character is a camera."

From there, he did something only a frustrated scriptwriter would think to do: plug in an external hard drive and start recording footage for a sitcom. That decision triggered what he says is "the most free and creative time I've ever had in my life."

West Virginia, mountain machinima

McLaughlin invented The Chip Monk Show, a dark comedy starring a plucky Pioneer Scout with an oversized Vault Boy head fused permanently to his body. After years of butting up against funding problems, the writer had finally found a place where the cameras, costumes and locations all came for free. Inadvertently he'd discovered the magic of machinima. "We can tell stories," he says. "We can have fun. There's no pressure, there's no stress, there's no financial impact."

Now deep into its third season, The Chip Monk Show retains the lo-fi voice acting and homemade editing style it began with—though by this point its characters have cracked wise against the backdrops of The Elder Scrolls Online and Red Dead Redemption 2 as well as Fallout. It remains McLaughlin's great passion, despite the fact that, by his own admission, it's a hard sell.

"Gamers are like, 'Well, I don't like it, because it's not lore, it's not what happens in the game," he says. "For some reason, people can't seem to separate machinima from the gaming experience, which is weird to me." Much more popular is The Chip Monk Show's spinoff, a travel series in which McLaughlin takes on the role of his star and tours the states that have featured in Fallout games.

Road Chippin', as the travel show is named, is a charmingly earnest watch. McLaughlin wears his enormous bobblehead throughout—a styrofoam pumpkin that has been shaved down, painted, and topped with a great big ice-cream scoop of yellow felt hair. To answer the most common question he gets: No, he's not completely blinded by his headwear. In fact, he looks out through a white mesh in Chip Monk's mouth. "When I'm walking down stairs, it's a little scary," McLaughlin says. "But I can see OK, and it's comfortable to wear for the most part."

Despite the goofy costume, McLaughlin isn't out to prank or poke fun at anyone. His comedy is good-natured and self-deprecating, and only really a delivery method for the local discoveries he's excited to share with viewers. Road Chippin' has the genial, low-key vibe of a Sunday afternoon docuseries on terrestrial television, stuffed with historical breakdowns and interviews with regional experts. 

The highlights of the show, however, are invariably the moments when McLaughlin spotlights just how faithful the Fallout games are to their real-life inspiration. That's especially true of the hub locations in Fallout 76. "To go to the Whitespring Hotel, or the Greenbrier, it's overwhelming to the senses," he says. "You go in there, and down to the vases, the colour schemes, the layout, the dimensions, it's represented in-game. Everywhere I went in West Virginia, I just kept encountering that over and over at every location. I really wanted to celebrate the work that the designers do—to me they're unsung heroes."

In lesser hands, an episode on West Virginia's Allegheny Asylum—better known as Fort Defiance to Brotherhood of Steel members—might lean into ghost stories and cruel clichés about incurable mental illness. Instead, McLaughlin presents the findings of his research with real sensitivity. "I had no idea how controversial this place was," he admits. "And it's like, 'Oh my god, do I just scrap the episode, or do I try and make this work? How can I take such serious subject matter and throw Chip Monk into this?'"

McLaughlin wrestles often with this tonal balance—which in many ways is the same tonal tightrope the Fallout series walks itself. In Road Chippin', as in the games and the Amazon show, the levity and absurdity of the naive vault dweller at the centre is crucial. It's the comedy that lets you sit with the horror of nuclear war, as well as the uncomfortable real-world history that Fallout feeds off. If the function of post-apocalyptic art is to let us process the possibility of our extinction, then the ironically smiling face of Vault Boy is what makes that process palatable. Fun, even.

"That is exactly why I made the character and wear the mask," McLaughlin says. "My favourite element of Fallout is the Vault Boy, duck-and-cover layer. It blows your mind that during the '50s and '60s in American history, that is what they marketed this into. It's horrifying, but it's hysterical at the same time. That is Vault Boy in a nutshell."

McLaughlin's own riff on Vault Boy, Chip Monk, was from the beginning a radical optimist—just like Lucy in the Fallout show. "He thinks he can rebuild the world the way it was," McLaughlin says. "By the end of the show, he comes to the realisation that the best he can do is be an example of what is good in people. Fallout itself really embodies that—there's hope. It may not be realistic, but you'll die living that, and that's a better way to be in my opinion."

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For our third and final roundtable from the 2024 Game Developers Conference, we put together a special panel—a quartet of developers who have all been making games since at least the year 1990, and are still active today. Joining us for this conversation: 

• Charles Cecil - Broken Sword, Beneath a Steel Sky
• Khris Brown - Voice director & editor for LucasArts, Double Fine, Ubisoft
• Jordan Mechner - Karateka, Prince of Persia, The Last Express
• Warren Spector - Ultima Underworld, System Shock, Deus Ex

Over the course of an hour our guests talk about how they got into games (and how unlikely their paths would be to replicate today), the challenges of making games with the technology of the '80s and '90s, run-ins with celebrity voice actors like Mark Hamill, and a passion for history. That fascination was key to the stories Jordan Mechner and Charles Cecil told in their beloved adventure games The Last Express and Broken Sword: The Shadow of the Templars (and also led to a particularly memorable encounter for Cecil with Hollywood director Ron Howard).

All four developers have seen the games they've worked on be remade, remastered or followed up by sequels over the years, and they discuss the feeling of leaving behind a legacy.

"System Shock getting remade recently, people still care about a game I worked on 30 years ago—that's cool," says Warren Spector. "Making things that last—when you get to my age, I'm 68 and proud of it, the word legacy comes to mind probably more than it should. I want to leave something behind that's bigger than me. Deus Ex in particular is that for me… later on, when Eidos was acquired by Square Enix and a new series of games set in that universe came out, people would ask me 'how do you feel about that? Does it bother you that someone else is making them?' No! I participated in something that has a life of its own, that has some cultural impact. It's like my baby grew up. Who's upset about a baby growing up? That was pretty special."

The conversation also covers the early days of voice acting in games, with LucasArts veteran Khris Brown talking about how difficult it was for actors at the time to understand the nonlinear storytelling of games compared to film (while working on Double Fine's Brutal Legend, she also taught Ozzy Osbourne how to use his new smartphone). 

You can find the PC Gamer Chat Log podcast on a whole bunch of podcast platforms:

1. Apple Podcasts
2. Spotify
3. YouTube Music
4. Pocket Casts
5. Podcast Addict
6. Castbox
7. Amazon Music
8. iHeartRadio

And more!

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For this week's special roundtable episode of the PC Gamer Chat Log, recorded at the 2024 Game Developers Conference, we gathered a party of adventurers and ventured forth into our second annual deep dive into making RPGs. Here's who you'll hear talking about wizards, lovable and hateable companions, and, yeah, a little game called Baldur's Gate 3: 

• Swen Vincke, founder and director at Larian (Baldur's Gate 3)
• Carrie Patel, game director and senior narrative designer at Obsidian (Avowed)
• Sarah Gruemmer, acting lead quest designer at CD Projekt Red (Cyberpunk 2077: Phantom Liberty)
• Adrienne Bazir, founder and sole developer at insertdisc5 (In Stars and Time)
• Ted Peterson, co-founder Once Lost Games and former writer and designer at Bethesda (The Elder Scrolls 1-4)

Across an hour and 20 minutes, our RPG discussion includes a dissection of Baldur's Gate 3's approach to romance, as well as the immense challenges of designing intro quests for lengthy RPGs and finding the balance between linear and nonlinear. 

On the romance front, Larian's Swen Vincke talked through their approach to making a mature-rated game and taking that responsibility seriously: "We try to be as true to life as we could," he said. "Internally in the studio there were some people who felt uncomfortable, and we said, it's a mature game, right? We're going to treat it like what you would see on TV. A series I refer to often was American Gods, which I thought was really well done [in how] it treated mature themes and fantasy settings. You can do really crazy stuff and still relate to it. It was always tastefully done. I mean, the famous bear scene—it was really a squirrel that was not looking. The rest was the theater of your mind. You filled that in, we didn't do that!"

Later, Ted Peterson, who served as a primary writer and designer on the original two Elder Scrolls games, talked about how the first game, Arena, was a linear story inside a large open game world—and how trying to make the sequel more ambitious posed some problems.

"[The Elder Scrolls: Arena] was not even meant to be a roleplaying game," he said. "Because it was turned into a roleplaying game it became super linear. The original idea was that you'd go around to a bunch of fighting arenas, build your characters up, and eventually go to the Imperial arena and fight the evil wizard at the end. But as the arena combat didn't work out, we changed it into a roleplaying game where you had to fight through these arenas in a distinct order… so linear was our easy choice."

Peterson remembered that when Arena came out, the reaction was positive—except for players who said "the story kind of sucked."

"I overcompensated by making Arena super nonlinear, and nobody understands the story to this day." 

Thanks to the revival of The Elder Scrolls 2 in fan remaster Daggerfall Unity, Peterson said he's actually been working on a series of books to "explain the background of this story that I wrote 25 years ago and try to patch it all together." 

If you haven't heard of indie RPG In Stars and Time, you're in for a treat: solo writer/developer Adrienne Bazir dives into the unique way the game deploys a time loop mechanic to consider the meta storytelling layers that come from a player and character reliving the final moments of a quest over and over again. And make sure you stick through to the end—I promise you won't want to miss Carrie Patel's story about a moment from The Outer Worlds that didn't make it into the final game for reasons that become more and more clear as the tale unfolds.

And if you're hungry for more after this conversation is over, you're in luck: our 2023 RPG roundtable is also a great listen with a whole different crew of experienced designers.

You can find the PC Gamer Chat Log podcast on a whole bunch of podcast platforms:

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And more!

You can also check out PC Gamer Chat Log on YouTube: 

Don't forget to check us out over on the PC Gamer forums, too! We'll be checking in every week to see what you lovely lot have to say about each week's episode, and joining in the discussion ourselves. 

I have a high tolerance for fetch quests. If Genshin Impact wants me to exterminate the same group of hilichurls over and over to search for a vengeance-obsessed NPC's lost sword, then I'll do it—I've got time to kill. But when an RPG jams that kind of drudgery front and center into the main storyline or sends me down a long, tedious questline with the reward pushed to the very end, even I start to think: is this really the best they could come up with?

Fetch quests, which have earned a reputation as the lowest form of RPG sidequest, typically involve finding items and bringing them back to a recipient. The particularly bad ones make you run from area to area between lines of filler dialogue, compounding a boring objective with a limp justification for doing it.

"At their heart, almost every quest is 'go get a thing' or 'go kill a person,'" Avowed game director Carrie Patel said in a recent interview with PC Gamer. "When quests fall flat, it's just because there's not enough interest in what you're doing." 

Last year in One Piece Odyssey I did entirely too many errands for NPCs in the desert town of Alabasta, each of them telling me that I ought to ask the other guy for a key I needed to progress in the story. Honkai: Star Rail, a game I publicly love, also dragged me through fetch quests for its Belobog museum event. It was a chore despite some handsome rewards; I'd trade that bounty for quests that asked more of me than fast traveling somewhere, walking for 30 seconds and pressing one button. It's possible for a fetch quest to come across as an honest attempt to tell a real story, but too often they fall short, if they're trying at all. Patel says that "even if it's a fetch quest at heart," a quest should have "some moment where your expectations change, or something surprises you or things get more complicated.

"If it really is 'go pick up this thing and then bring it back,' you're just missing something."

But those kinds of quests do still exist in games. After so many years of players rolling their eyes at the fetchiest of fetch quests, are they still haunting our RPGs just so games can advertise longer playtimes? Developers say the truth is more nuanced.

So why are there still so many fetch quests?

Most quests are mechanically built from the same basic pieces, yet only some of them get labeled fetch quests. All quests need a quest giver and an objective, which should—big ask here—ideally entertain the player and fit into the overarching story. It's up to writers and designers to build on these points to create a quest worth our time, layering in sub-objectives, scattering lore throughout, or amusing us with a lively NPC. Finding which solution hits the sweet spot is the hard part. 

Adam Dolin, a writer and narrative designer who previously worked for God of War's Santa Monica Studio, points to execution as the problem in many fetch quests rather than the premise. "When there isn't much complexity beyond that initial structure, or there's TOO much of it, or the narrative wrapper feels arbitrary… that's when the quest is at risk of being labeled 'just another fetch quest,'" he says. 

"The reason fetch quests are so common is because finding that perfect balance is difficult and time-consuming. It requires MASSIVE amounts of collaboration between many different departments, and lots and lots of playtesting, iteration, and then more playtesting."

External factors can turn a potentially intriguing quest into a flat one. Many times game writers and narrative designers have an idea of how to improve a quest and just don't have the means to do it. Guild Wars 2 game designer Emily Morrow points to the boogymen so often outside of designers' direct control: time and budget. 

"Sometimes that big, engaging quest you're designing turns out to be too expensive, or it will take too long to implement and test, or there isn't enough broader team support to give it the consideration it deserves," she says. "I find that originality usually isn't an issue when coming up with quests: ideas are cheap, and it's easy to brainstorm lots of new and unique concepts.

"Unfortunately, real-world considerations often get in the way of that."

Fetch quests can be... good, actually?

Jeff Howard, senior lecturer in the Games Academy at Falmouth University, studies how different game design elements can strengthen a story—or fail it. To him, fetch quests are "underrated" for their untapped narrative potential and the entertainment they can offer players when they have a more complex purpose behind them. 

Howard points to The Elder Scrolls and Planescape: Torment as examples of games that do fetch quests right. He highlights the Daedric quests in Oblivion in particular, which task the player with collecting artifacts for demonic gods. "These items include the Sanguine Rose and the Masque of Clavicus Vile, which are both embedded in the eldritch mythologies of their associated daedric lords. Similarly, Planescape Torment involves the search for abstract ideas, such as songs and memories, which can operate as keys to open interdimensional portals."

Not every quest is supposed to be a narrative marvel, anyway—compared to the protagonist's ultimate goal of saving the world, it might feel inappropriate for a sidequest to suddenly take the spotlight when all it rewards you is a couple of extra bucks. 

"Not every quest in a game, particularly a large game like an open world adventure game or MMO, needs to be wholly original or a showstopper," Emily Morrow says. "Having a good mix of simple and complex quests gives players a variety of activities to participate in regardless of their skill level or experiences."

She also points out how fetch quests can even be necessary for the overall health of the game. "Fetch quests are a way to acquaint new players with a game's mechanics and give existing players a moment to breathe in between big beats. They can help make a world feel more vibrant and active, and they can be adjusted to fit just about any story setting."

Done well these quests don't just feel like chores, even when they're straightforward.

"Aloy hunting raccoons for a specific bone or pelt has a purely functional reward: better equipment," says Dolin, using his time working on Horizon Zero Dawn to highlight how smaller fetch quests can be effective. "The emotion you feel as a player when completing that quest is different from, say, one with cinematics and dialog and interesting NPCs. But the feeling of finally finding that last damn raccoon bone and getting a bigger ammo bag is still a positive feeling! Adding quest givers and cinematics and tons of dialog to this simple 'fetch quest' is overkill."

Avoiding "just another fetch quest"

So then, how do devs keep the "good" fetch quests that don't set off busywork klaxons in players' heads?

"I try to ask myself: what purpose does this particular type of quest serve here? Is it meant to be a big moment, or is it OK that it's more of a side activity or a way for players to grind?" says Morrow. "The answers to these questions play a big part in what a quest will ultimately be." In short, players just need a good reason to want to finish a quest. 

"If I'm working on a fetch quest or something that has the potential to feel tedious, I try to insert something else that makes it interesting or unique. It could be a funny character, a familiar item or setting used in a new way, or engaging dialog." 

"A bad fetch quest is one that feels pointless or a waste of time," says Dolin. "If you're going to ask your player to spend their time to go fetch something, ask yourself, "Why would players do this?" If there isn't an answer besides "experience points and/or gold," then there's no emotional investment."

His advice for junior devs: "Give your quest giver some personality, imbue the item you're fetching with a personal story, and lean on your themes for inspiration."

Weaving worldbuilding or character development into a quest can turn something that's a fetch quest by definition into a meaningful story. Dolin looks back on The Anatomy of Hope from God of War, when designers gave him a simple description that he needed to write into a quest: "While exploring the Lake of Nine, Kratos and Atreus encounter a spirit who asks you to collect his lover's bones so she can finally rest in peace. Once you return all the bones, they turn into a powerful Revenant you have to fight."

"I'd been conditioned by Matt Sophos (narrative director) and Rich Gaubert (lead writer) to always answer the question, 'why would Kratos agree to do this?' The strongest answer was usually 'to teach Atreus a lesson.' I thought having the spirit promise a reunion with the recently-deceased Faye was strong motivation for Atreus, but Kratos knows from experience that this is bogus. So the lesson became: 'Let the kid burn his hand on the stove.' It also gave me the rare opportunity to let Kratos and Atreus talk openly about their grief after collecting a bone and boating to the next location."

That bit of the game received the care needed to nurture something that is a fetch quest at its core into a meaningful moment. There was also a personal experience at its center, creating for Dolin the same kind of emotional investment he hopes to invoke in players. He wrote the quest not long after his father died in 2016, and was processing his grief while Kratos and Atreus were processing theirs. 

"Authenticity resonates with audiences. Don't be afraid to mine your own personal experiences for inspiration," he says.

War… war never changes. And neither does the enduring appeal of Fallout: New Vegas, the jankiest little post-apocalyptic RPG that could. With the second season of the TV show setting its sights on the fate of post-nuclear Nevada, it's probably the best time to try out this classic FPS/RPG hybrid if you haven't already, and maybe give the Mojave wasteland another visit if you've been away for a while.

Despite working with the wonky engine of Fallout 3 and saddled with a tight deadline, Obsidian delivered something truly special with New Vegas. A smart, reactive sandbox where your path and choices with its feuding factions led to some genuinely satisfying outcomes, and the sense of you really authoring your own adventure—a feat that even Fallout 4 struggled to live up to. While it caught some flak at launch for its shoddy state, DLC and patches brought New Vegas up to acceptable standards.

But we're not here for 'acceptable' today. You want the best, so here's a guide to getting the most out of this classic RPG, with the aid of more than a few community-made mods and improvements.

Which Fallout: New Vegas version to buy

What's the best version of Fallout: New Vegas? 

There are a few places you can pick up Fallout: New Vegas, but you’ll want the Ultimate Edition from either Steam, GOG or Epic if you plan on modding the game, which you will absolutely want to do. Also if you’re unfortunate enough to have the German version, you’ll need to follow some extra steps—see the Viva New Vegas guide below.

The full version of the game is normally $20, but New Vegas goes on sale multiple times per year, so savvy shoppers can often snag it for under $5. The Ultimate Edition includes four lengthy expansions that most bugfix packs require. The rest of this guide will assume you own this version of the game. 

You’ll probably want to skip on the Game Pass or Microsoft Store versions, because they don’t play nicely with the Script Extender used by many mods.

First steps to setting up Fallout: New Vegas

Before you do anything else

New Vegas is technically playable straight from the jump, but if you want to play the game at its best, you’ll want to go through a few steps before anything else: 

1. Install the game, and then run it at least once. This will create the directories on your PC to hold your saves and INI files. If your PC's guts are from any time in the past decade, you’ll be fine cranking every graphics setting up to maximum too.

2. Make an account on Nexus Mods. You won’t be able to download the key mods and fan-made patches until you do this. Don’t worry about Nexus's premium subscription thing—it’s fully optional and only worth it if you’re very impatient.

The PC Gaming Wiki—a perennial tech-advice hub—has tips for how you can force higher frame rates, fix field-of-view for ultrawide resolutions and ambient occlusion. But aside from the Ambient Occlusion fix, you should hold off on doing anything, because we’re diving into the deep end with a lot of heavy changes.

Essential mods for Fallout: New Vegas

Essential mods for the newest New Vegas possible (The Easy Way)

Hurrah for automation! Since the last time this guide was updated, the fantastic community mod pack Viva New Vegas has returned to Wabbajack, a time-saving app that downloads mods for you, sets up the correct load orders and handles all the finicky bits n' bobs. Just follow the Wabbajack setup guide on the Viva New Vegas site and it'll handle most of the heavy lifting for you.

If you've decided to go the Wabbajack route, you can skip the rest of this segment. But if you're the kind of person who needs to vet every single mod or handle the installation all manually, there's also a step-by-step guide to follow here. Whichever route you choose, there’s varying levels of modded-ness you can pick from, with the default setup guide just focusing entirely on patches, fixes and some quality-of-life fixes.

While you should follow the above guide to install them (most of which you’ll be slotting into place using Mod Organizer 2), the key mods of the most basic install include:

• Yukichigai Unofficial Patch - Thousands of little errors ironed out
• Unofficial Patch NVSE Plus - Uses script extenders to fix even more issues
• Improved AI - Cleans up a lot of pathfinding issues that kneecapped combat
• Iron Sights Aligned - Makes your bullets go where they should when aiming

But there’s plenty more, including a separate guide on optimizing and tuning the game for your hardware. The more you add from the initial setup list, the smoother and more stable the game will become. You’re restoring the game’s foundation here, rather than building a wobbly Jenga tower of add-ons.

For those wanting to start on that tower and build up a richer, meatier New Vegas experience, the VNV Extended section of the Viva New Vegas guide is where you want to go. Split up into UI, Gameplay, Content, Visuals and Finishing Touches, you’re free to pick and choose what modules you use.

I personally recommend Agua Fria, from the Overhauls section, a further-refined version of the ‘JSawyer’ mod, which rebalanced the game to fit the personal preferences of New Vegas’ own development lead, Joshua Sawyer, making the game a bit tougher and less loot-centric, but also buffing a bunch of lesser-used items to make more playstyles viable.

I've returned to New Vegas every couple years for the past decade, and this has given me the most solid, polished and coherent version of the game I’ve played yet. It runs flawlessly on my new 3440x1440, 120hz ultrawide monitor.

More New Vegas mods

Extra mods for a wilder Wasteland

New Vegas wasn’t an especially handsome production even when it first launched. Partly because sacrifices had to be made to get the game running on the PS3 and Xbox 360, consoles with tight RAM limitations, and partly because Obsidian is a studio that always seems to be working with a shoestring budget.

One big budget shortfall of the game is the voice acting. While decent, there’s far too few actors to voice all the cast, and a lot of characters end up sounding almost identical. Fix that with:

Brave New World (previously featured on PC Gamer): Re-voices thousands of lines of dialogue with a much larger cast. They left the best performances intact, but a lot of minor NPCs are given a fresh lease of life. The voice-only version of BNW can be paired with New Vegas Redesigned 2 Revised to give almost all NPCs a makeover, too.

There’s also a handful of expansion-scale mods for New Vegas, not ideal if this is your first time playing, but interesting additions:

Fallout: New California: Gives your character a years-long origin story, starting out as a lowly vault dweller before getting caught up in a full-scale military conflict, eventually dovetailing back into the beginning of New Vegas. Our own Andy Kelly had nothing but praise for it, despite a few rough edges.

Fallout - The Frontier: A more guarded recommendation for this mod. It stands as the most ambitious mod for New Vegas, bigger than any of the official DLCs, and it’s a very different beast from the main game. Its three largely-linear storylines take a more ‘cinematic’ approach that leads to some interesting but awkward vehicular sections and a questionable assault on a space station. Balance is also geared towards a high-powered combat character. Flawed, but if you want more New Vegas, this is a huge chunk of it.

Autumn Leaves: Less ambitious, but a better fit for the original game. A single large narrative-heavy quest with multiple solutions and a ton of new voiced dialogue across a cast of quirky robots that you’ll find in a long-abandoned new facility. A full playthrough will take most players around 4-6 hours, making it roughly comparable to New Vegas’ own DLC, albeit a bit more self-contained.

It’s also worth noting that there are other New Vegas mod packs for Wabbajack, most of them centered around the massive Tale Of Two Wastelands mod, which combines the campaigns of Fallout 3 and New Vegas into a single game. You’ll need both FO3 and New Vegas installed for it to function, but if you really want to go large and work on that atomic tan, these will make the process of welding the two games together a relatively painless process. 

Time to start playing New Vegas

Wasteland survival tips & tricks

Unlike Fallout 3 and 4, New Vegas is a little more old school in its structure. The moment you’re out of the character creation sequence, you are largely free to go wherever you like and do as you please. Of course, this being a harsh post-apocalyptic warzone, a lot of options will lead to near-certain death. Save early, save often and don’t be afraid to experiment. There’s no one right way to play, and New Vegas is famously replayable, supporting dozens of approaches.

During Viva New Vegas character creation, you’ll be given the option to enable Wild Wasteland mode independent of any other option, and without overriding another of your starting traits. Don't disable it unless the idea of silly easter eggs and alien encounters upsets you.

⭐In the early game, use Goodsprings as a safe haven—explore, scavenge what you can then fast-travel back for some rest. Take some time to fully explore the town and talk to all the NPCs. There’s one in the saloon that’ll offer to teach you some survival skills, including the basics of marksmanship and crafting. Well worth doing for both the XP and free ammo.

⭐There are a few early threats to be especially aware of. Cazadors (monsters that look like giant house flies with bright orange wings) are extremely fast, aggressive and powerful and will destroy most lower-level characters. If you see them, run, and keep a note of where they were.

⭐Deathclaws (giant humanoid lizards with coincidentally huge, deadly claws) are another critter that tend to be placed as a wall to dissuade lower-level characters from continuing. With enough explosives and maybe some armor-piercing ammo, you can brute force your way through, but it’s easier to run past them than Cazadors.

⭐Ammo types are important, especially early on when you’re largely using scavenged gear. The default hotkey to switch between ammo types is (rather unintuitively) '2' and it’s well worth experimenting with what you’ve got. Use cheap bullets and bulk energy cells when fighting low-level critters like molerats or coyotes, and switch to the premium gun-food when you need to serve up a feast.

⭐Invest in at least a little bit of Repair skill, and make sure you pick up weapons identical to whatever you’re using. The janky, low-quality gear that raiders drop can easily be stripped for parts to improve the quality of your usual gear. Look for the prompt to repair in your inventory menu.

⭐Even with the JSawyer mod (or its descendants) making things a little more intense, Hardcore mode isn’t quite as scary as it sounds, and some players find having to keep a cursory eye on hunger, thirst and other negative effects adds to the experience. Nobody will judge you for just playing on Normal though.

⭐Keep an eye open for escalating hostilities. New Vegas does level scaling in a fun way, with the war between the NCR and Caesar's Legions stepping up as you become more powerful. Keep an ear open for NPCs talking about new enemy types entering the fray, especially around military bases. 

New Vegas is built to be replayed. There are a vast number of dialogue branches, endings, several major factions that you can throw your lot in with, go to war against or ignore entirely, and the game remembers a surprising amount. Even if your actions don’t immediately return to haunt you, the ending monologues will probably acknowledge any acts of heroism (or crimes against humanity) you performed along the way.

Don't miss these New Vegas quests

Sights to see and folks to visit in New Vegas

Once you’ve got a few levels under your belt, you’ll want to make some friends. Firstly because New Vegas’ companions are excellently written with their own morally complex questlines, but also because they’ll soak up an impressive amount of lead for you in combat. You’re allowed one human and one non-human buddy with you at any given time, so here’s one of each to get you started: 

⭐The easiest companion to get is the floating drone Ed-E, found in the town of Primm just slightly south of Goodsprings. You’ll need to fix him up but it’s not a hard quest.

⭐As for a steadfast human pal, if you’ve got positive Karma (she only hangs out with heroes), Cass is a hard-drinking, hard-brawling sort down on her luck. You can find her at the NCR Mojave Outpost far to the west and a little south of Nipton. Talking with her will start a quest chain that’ll need you to talk her into selling her caravan, requiring either good Barter or Speech skills to clear, but she’ll eventually find her way into your party. 

As for the rest of the friends to look for, they’re spread pretty thin and far, but it’s well worth meeting them all. Each brings something useful to the party, and each has a personal quest-line to follow that fills in more of their backstory. Here’s a list of them all on the Fallout Wiki, but I’d personally just recommend exploring.

⭐Once you’re feeling confident, it’s time to head north to the Vegas strip proper. It’s a hub of iniquity, inequality and intrigue, as well as some other words beginning with ‘in’. It’s also where you’ll find most of the big plot hooks of the game. Investigate what’s up with that casino chip that you nearly got killed over, and make sure you grill the local NCR forces on what they’re doing in the region.

⭐While you’re in Vegas, it’s highly recommended you do some investigating (see, another in-word) into the three families running the strip. Not to spoil too much, but the White Glove Society are attached to one of New Vegas’ most reactive and freeform quests, with many possible branches and endings depending on what kind of character you’re playing.

⭐ If you want to see the main story of New Vegas to its end, you’re going to have to pick your poison. There’s three factions fighting for power here. Mr House (in his big casino penthouse) is trying to carve out a capitalist hotspot here, and you can follow his story in the questline The House Always Wins.

⭐ The democratic NCR are trying to establish American business as usual, and will try to recruit you pretty actively once you’ve made a name for yourself, so just swing by the NCR embassy on the strip to sign up. Lastly, Caesar's Legion are a bunch of ancient Roman larpers, slavers and raiders, perfect for evil characters or people who follow too many ‘trad history’ Twitter accounts with marble statue avatars. Begin the misadventure with Render Unto Caesar at Caesar’s camp Northeast of Hoover Dam.

⭐ The DLC campaigns are also extremely worthwhile. Arguably the best expansions the Fallout series has ever seen, and ranging from survival horror in Dead Money to screwball super-science comedy in Old World Blues. They build on your personal story, filling out The Courier’s history, and are best played in release order (Dead Money, Honest Hearts, Old World Blues and then Lonesome Road), ideally once you’re above level 20. Start your personal side-story when you pick up a radio signal leading you to the Sierra Madre casino, via an abandoned Brotherhood Of Steel bunker far off in the east.

That should be enough to start you on your wasteland wandering. Exploring and finding stuff for yourself is half the joy of the game. So off you go, Courier—you’ve got deliveries to make. Try to stay away from any glowing barrels and keep some big iron on your hip.

The Vaults were built to protect human life from atomic bombs, providing safe underground shelter for years until the surface world was once again safe to be inhabited. At least that's what the Vault-Tec Corporation told everyone. As Fallout 2 revealed, in truth most of the Vaults were built to perform sinister, cruel, and occasionally quite funny experiments on the unsuspecting inhabitants.

There are a lot of Vaults in the Fallout games, and even more have been revealed in Prime TV's Fallout TV series. For the record I haven't included every Vault in Fallout history on the list below since some are only mentioned in passing in the games and some have been deemed non-canon by Bethesda.

Considering the amount of evil and suffering involved in Vault-Tec's Vaults, it's hard to say what makes one Vault "better" than another. I mostly based these rankings on how interesting they are to visit, how memorable they are to explore, and how interesting the lore surrounding them is. Here are the Fallout Vaults, ranked from worst to best, and be aware that there are major Fallout TV show and game spoilers below.

Vault 88 (Fallout 4: Vault-Tec Workshop)

Vault 88 was never completed, but that's where you come in. Part of Fallout 4's Vault-Tec Workshop DLC, it's ostensibly a chance for you to become an overseer and perform your own experiments. 

Unfortunately, it winds up being essentially just another Fallout 4 settlement, albeit one with Vault-themed building options and a lot of room to build. The experiments, however, are a bit on the tame side and don't leave much of an impression. Some of them let you be a bit mean to your dwellers, but not truly evil. Instead, you make them power generators by riding stationary bikes or serve them tainted cola. Tainted cola. It's not exactly the Overseer experience I've always dreamed of.

Vault 111 (Fallout 4)

Cryogenics doesn't sound like a bad idea for surviving an atomic war, but only if you actually inform the Vault residents about it first. Naturally, Vault-Tec didn't, instead saying the pods were for decontamination. Surprise! You're an ice cube.

Due to a short-sighted lack of supplies, the non-frozen staff eventually staged a mutiny. Over 200 years later, one frozen resident (you) woke up long enough to witness their spouse being murdered and infant son abducted. Another chunk of time passed, and the resident found themselves the sole survivor of the cryogenic experiment. After it provides a kick-off to Fallout 4's main quest, there's not much reason to hang around the somewhat dull Vault 111: not when there's the settlement of Sanctuary Hills just outside.

Vault 95 (Fallout 4)

Vault-Tec set up Vault 95 as a rehab center for drug addicts, and did an admirable job carefully and thoughtfully treating its residents' addictions. Nice! Then five years later it popped open a secret hatch filled with a bunch of drugs just to see what would happen. Not nice!

Many of the addicts relapsed, others fought and killed one another (at least the Vault-Tec jerk who opened the drug hatch was killed too), and it eventually became a Gunner hideout. Apart from clearing out Gunners, you can also use Vault 95 to cure your companion Cait of her Psycho addiction. Nice!

Vault 3 (Fallout: New Vegas)

Vault 3 was a control Vault, scheduled to open just 20 years after the bombs fell. The residents weren't eager to expose themselves to the dangers of the outside world, however, and quite sensibly kept it locked longer than was planned. They even managed to stay indoors without everyone killing each other. Weird!

There wasn't a sinister experiment (as far as we know) taking place within the Vault, which therefore makes it one of the more successful yet least interesting Vaults in the series. After a malfunction in the water system, the people of Vault 3 finally opened its door and were promptly slaughtered by a collection of drug-addled raiders called Fiends. When you visit you'll get to exact revenge by wiping out the Fiends and freeing some of their prisoners.

Vault 34 (Fallout: New Vegas)

Vault 34 was low on living quarters which eventually became an issue due to massive over-population. Also, Vault-Tec filled it with a ridiculous amount of weapons—and an armory door that couldn't be locked. Do you see where this one is going? Riots broke out during attempt to plunder the armory, leading to damage to the Vault computers, a radiation leak, and a whole lot of inhabitants being turned into ghouls. Whoops!

In addition to learning the story of the Vault, there's plenty of weapons and ammo still left, making it a worthwhile visit.

Vault 19 (Fallout: New Vegas)

Red vs Blue: a war as old as time. Vault 19 was separated into red and blue sections accessible only to those with the correct colored keycards, most likely as an experiment to see how the different colored teams might interact with (read: turn on) each other.

Unfortunately, a sulfur leak from caverns below Vault 19 made the inhabitants abandon it before they could completely devolve into the violence and murder that seems to be the desired outcome of many Vault-Tec experiments. The Vault was partially occupied later by Powder Gangers. Make nice with them and they're perfectly friendly, or you can blow the whole place up with C-4. As with so much of Fallout: New Vegas, it's entirely your choice.

Vault 92 (Fallout 3)

Vault-Tec invited the world's most talented musicians to Vault 92, hoping to not just preserve the human race but also its musical culture and history. Ha ha, no. They really invited them to use them as unwitting test subjects for white noise experiments in an attempt to create a legion of obedient super soldiers.

Hold on to your eyebrows, because they're about to shoot up in surprise—it all went horribly, horribly wrong. The white noise eventually drove the test subjects into fits of extreme rage, which isn't a terrible side-effect if you're building super soldiers. Not so useful is the fact that they couldn't be controlled. There was eventually a mass slaughter in the Vault, compounded by the collapse of a portion of the Vault walls which allowed a swarm of mirelurks to enter. Mirelurks are gross and their clicking and clawing isn't music to anyone's ears.

Vault 4 (Fallout TV series)

Some fine intentions went horribly awry in this Vault from the Fallout TV show, which began with a group of scientists sealing themselves in before the bombs even dropped to study the effects of radiation on human DNA. But it wasn't long until they overstepped their ethical bounds and tried to create human-salamander hybrids using unwilling test subjects. They wound up with a rampaging Gulper in their Vault and the immoral scientists were overthrown.

Now Vault 4 isn't a bad place to live. They attempt to ease the pain of former test subjects and treat mutated humans like anyone else. They're so nice that even if you break their rules, their most extreme punishment is to ask you to leave the Vault. They'll even give you a couple of weeks of supplies so you don't leave empty handed.

Vault 75 (Fallout 4)

Vault-Tec may have topped themselves for sheer evil with Vault 75. Supposedly built as a safe place for schoolchildren, the kids who took refuge there were separated from their parents on entering, and the parents were quickly executed an incinerated. Children were tortured and tested to determine which had the 'best' genes, and at age 18 those genes were 'harvested' for the next generation in a revolting attempt to create a master race, if you will. Those not up to snuff were snuffed out like their parents. 

At some point the subjects of the tests learned what was happening and rebelled, killing the scientists and escaping. Wherever those kids wound up, it's gotta be a better place than Vault 75. Now it's inhabited by Gunners, though the Brotherhood or Institute may show up, and while you're too late to help the long-departed children of Vault 75, you get the satisfaction of making sure the 'research' conducted here never falls into the wrong hands.

Vault 22 (Fallout: New Vegas)

Seemingly a decent place with an admirable goal, Vault 22 was staffed with scientists who undertook agricultural studies and subsisted on the plant life grown inside. Unfortunately, as sometimes happens with videogame scientists, they made an oopsie and the fungus meant to control pests wound up becoming pests. The spores of the fungus infected the human population, turning them into horrible plant monsters. 

It's a deadly and harrowing battle through the Vault as you fight these lightning-fast creatures along with giant venus flytraps and mantises. At least you get to blow the entire lab up at the end to make sure they don't escape to the surface.

Vault 31, 32, 33 (Fallout TV series)

I can't really separate these three Vaults because they're all part of the same terrible system. While things seem peaceful and idyllic in Vault 32 and 33 at the start of the Fallout series, the ugliness of the society eventually becomes apparent. The plan is to repopulate the surface world with the best dwellers possible, so there are arranged marriages and no unsanctioned interbreeding between residents of 32 and 33 to keep the stock pure (not to mention quite a bit of incest between cousins while waiting to be assigned a partner).

As it turns out it's all the master plan of Vault-Tec corporate suit Bud Askins, who cryogenically preserved a bunch of his junior executives and unfreezes one each time the other two Vaults needs a new overseer. (Bud himself is a brain in a jar mounted on a little robot.) Fearing competition from Vaults owned by other companies, Askins hoped to raise a perfect society to recolonize the surface world, nuking any settlement that could threaten Vault-Tec's monopoly on civilization.

Vault 15 (Fallout, Fallout 2)

One of the few Vaults you can visit in two different games, Vault 15 was an experiment to see how a population composed of a variety of cultures and backgrounds would get along when crammed into a confined space together for decades. In short: they didn't, and when the door opened 50 years later, the dwellers split into several warring factions of raiders, plus one group that eventually form the NCR. 

Though Vault 15 has been stripped and pillaged, it's still being fought over by a few different factions. At the very least you can bring a little peace to the contested Vault by dealing with the raiders who have been kidnapping people living at the entrance, and broker a deal between the locals and the NCR.

Vault 81 (Fallout 4)

Entering this Vault is an absolute shock because it's filled with… normal, well-adjusted people living their lives. Vault 81 was intended to find the cures for all known diseases by secretly experimenting on its inhabitants—by infecting them with those diseases. However, in a surprising twist, the Overseer of Vault 81 wasn't actually an evil prick and prevented most of the medical scientists from ever entering the Vault. She then sealed off the rest of the scientists from the population permanently. 

The scientists were pretty good sports about it, honestly, and carried on studying diseases for the rest of their lives, though not on unwilling human subjects. Best of all they created Curie, a very nice robot with a French accent who can accompany you on your travels.

Vault 118 (Fallout 4: Far Harbor)

Up for a murder mystery? Built under a hotel,  Vault 118 was never completed and its experiment (to house Hollywood hotshots in the lap of luxury and working class stiffs in cramped quarters) was never realized. There's still plenty of drama. A robobrain has been murdered, and when you arrive you get to play detective, question the suspects, and make an accusation. It's fun, and there's some great loot to be acquired, too.

This Vault and quest is a contentious one in the Fallout community, though—it bears a lot in common with a mod called Autumn Leaves for Fallout: New Vegas, which also contains a robot-themed murder mystery and a few other details that feel suspiciously similar. The modder didn't seem too bothered either way, but would like at least to be credited. As for Bethesda, it's denied copying the mod altogether.

Vault 114 (Fallout 4)

Leave it to Vault-Tec to drop the ball on their one good idea. Vault 114 was advertised to rich politicians and the wealthy elite, who would arrive to find themselves crammed into tiny apartments with shared bathrooms and at the mercy of a deranged, pantsless, Abraxo-eating Overseer named Soup Can Harry.

Unfortunately, the Vault was never completed and it appears no one ever moved in. On the plus side, this is the Vault where you first meet Fallout 4's best companion, robotic gumshoe Nick Valentine, and face off against gangster Skinny Malone. Plus, you get to listen to Soup Can Harry being interviewed on holotape—a definite bonus.

Vault 106 (Fallout 3)

This is pretty a unimaginative experiment by Vault-Tec standards: 10 days after the door was sealed, psychoactive drugs were pumped into the air supply. Everyone went crazy and killed just about everyone else. So, uh, yeah. Crazy drugs make people crazy. Good work, everyone!

It's also a creepy and disturbing place to visit. While exploring you'll inhale some of the drugs still in the air and trip balls, your vision flipping between a pristine and populated Vault and a rusting and ruined one. You'll imagine your father, Butch, and other residents of Vault 111 are present as well. While they're attacking you, you're also being attacked by the real and really deranged residents of Vault 106. It's a jarring and memorable experience.

Vault 12 (Fallout)

Radiation: how does it work? Vault-Tec decided to find out by herding a thousand people into Vault 12 and then making sure the door wouldn't close when the bombs fell. Sorry-not-sorry, citizens!

The results of the experiment: it turns out radiation is pretty bad for humans. Who knew? The citizens were transformed into disfigured ghouls and glowing ones, who still live there when you arrive. The true revelation of Vault 12, however, is that not all ghouls are simply monsters. Ghouls can be good people, and despite their tragic circumstances they carry on with their lives—a tradition that has carried through the rest of the Fallout series. Many of the ghouls from Vault 12 went to the surface and eventually founded a ghoul-town on the ruins of Bakersfield called Necropolis.

Vault 11 (Fallout: New Vegas)

The social experiment in Vault 11 was a damn grim one. Residents were told that every year they would have to sacrifice one resident or they would all die. You even get to visit the sacrifice chamber, where a filmstrip is shown to the unlucky lamb stressing how important their sacrifice was for the greater good—after which the walls slide open and a score of robots and turrets open fire. The actual sad truth of Vault 11 was that if the citizens chose to stand together and refuse the annual sacrifice, nothing bad would have happened to them.

But these are human beings we're talking about, so naturally they went with the sacrifice option, which led to bouts of infighting, plotting, back-stabbing, and murder. In the end, only five inhabitants were left to discover that all the killing had been done for nothing. They then considered the only 'logical' option: killing themselves. They didn't, though, because one of the five shot the other four dead. What a great group of people, huh? Of all the Vaults, this one sounds like a pretty accurate depiction of human nature.

Vault 8 (Fallout 2)

Vault 8 contained nearly 1,000 inhabitants and was intended to remain locked for 10 years, after which its residents would attempt to rebuild society on the surface. What went wrong? Well, nothing, really. In fact, Vault 8 was a smashing success, which shows just what can be accomplished when you don't perform a bunch of horrifying secret experiments on people trapped underground.

Vault 8 eventually formed the foundation for Vault City, a sprawling community that was also highly successful. The Vault itself remained mostly in good shape, housing an excellent medical center, plus a host of quests and characters.

Vault 101 (Fallout 3)

It's hard not to have fond memories of Vault 101. In Fallout 3, it's where you're born and grow up in a series of scenes that constitute the tutorial. There were so many good times: shooting your first radroach with a BB gun, watching a robot cut a cake with a buzzsaw on your birthday, passing your Generalized Occupational Aptitude Test, bludgeoning that asshole Butch to death with a baseball bat... and, oh yeah, realizing your shitty dad lied to you for years and then abandoned you to almost certain death. So many memories!

The ghastly truth of Vault 101 was that it was supposed to remain closed forever. It didn't, making it another of Vault-Tec's expensive failures. But the experience of beginning the game here, from the very moment of your birth to your eventual violent and dramatic escape, makes it one of the most memorable Vaults in the series.

Vault 13 (Fallout, Fallout 2)

Depending which source you trust, Vault 13 was either a control group, or a study of prolonged isolation, intended to remain closed for 200 years. When an element of its water purification system failed, Vault 13's Overseer began sending explorers out to locate a replacement. Which is where you come in, as the protagonist of the original Fallout.

When the Vault Dweller not only found a water chip but solved the super mutant problem that threatened Vault 13's safety, the Overseer hailed him as hero—then exiled him, worried that other Vault dwellers would hear his stories and leave to join the outside world. The Vault was to be protected even if it meant banishing its savior. The theme of hiding the truth from those who inhabit the Vaults, denying them free will under the guise of protecting them, carried on through the rest of the Fallout series. It began here, in Vault 13.

Vault 112 (Fallout 3)

A great way to pass the time in a nuclear shelter would be in cryostasis, with your mind plugged into a virtual simulation that creates an idyllic utopia you can happily inhabit forever. This is Vault-Tec though, so under the tree-lined streets and white picket fences of Tranquility Lane lies a torturous and unending Hell. The Overseer, Stanislaus Braun, is a sadistic madman who uses the simulation to stalk and virtually murder the Vault's inhabitants. Then he wipes their memories and murders them again. Repeat roughly forever.

You get to take part in the trippy simulation while being directed by Braun to torture the other residents both psychologically and physically, from making a little kid cry to straight-up stabbing everyone to death while dressed as an adolescent slasher.

Vault 21 (Fallout: New Vegas)

What happens in a tin can underneath Vegas stays in a tin can underneath Vegas, except in the case of Vault 21. Vault-Tec, in its infinite wisdom, decided to fill a Vault with compulsive gamblers. Surprisingly, the gamblers-only society seems to have done fairly well, all things considered, with games of chance being used to settle differences. Eventually, Robert House set his sights on a takeover of Vault 21 and did a bit of remodeling.

Vault 21 was turned into a casino and hotel, which is a far better fate than most Vaults experience. The door was even appropriated into a sign for the hotel, and it's refreshing to visit a Vault with actual life in it instead of just another rotting tin can of death. You can even acquire a personal and permanent hotel room there.

Vault 108 (Fallout 3)

When Fallout fans discuss the various Vaults, it's never without a mention of Gary. Looking over the series, I'd really hoped to find a Vault that was better than Gary's, just to shake things up a little. But I'm with everyone else on this. Gary. Gary? Gary! 

Vault 108's experiment was about how people function in a crisis with a lack of leadership and an overabundance of weapons. The Vault was assigned an Overseer who would die of terminal cancer within months, outfitted with a heavily stocked armory, and given a malfunctioning power supply. What would happen in the vacuum of leadership when the lights went out and guns were everywhere?

We don't really know, honestly, because a cloning chamber was included in Vault 108. That doesn't really fit in with the leadership experiment in any way that I can tell, but it does bring us to Gary. (It brings us to several Garys, actually.) Gary was a resident of 108 who was cloned multiple times, with each resulting Gary only able to speak the word "Gary" and each Gary more violent than the last Gary—at least to any non-Garys. Gary was cloned over 50 times, which was a few too many, as ultimately the only survivors of the Vault are a handful of variously numbered Garys—and they are not at all happy to meet you.

It's certainly one of the more memorable locations. Encountering Gary after angry Gary is a surreal experience. Vault 108 isn't the only place Gary appears, either. Interestingly, Gary 23 somehow escaped and was found by the Brotherhood in the Operation: Anchorage expansion. They cut off his arm to remove his Pip-Boy after growing frustrated by his inability to say anything but his own name. Another Vault in Fallout 4 has a number of alphabet blocks that spell out Gary—perhaps an escaped Gary had children? Could be there are more Garys out there, waiting to be discovered in future Fallouts? I hope so.

"You bunch of mad, relentless, beautiful people really went and did it," gushed Yoru-hime. "No more asterisks, no more legal or moral ambiguities hanging over our heads. Let it be shouted far and wide: City of Heroes lives again."

On the day that the fan-run Homecoming server officially became the future of the resurrected City of Heroes, one player professed to have something in their eye. Another was so excited they felt dizzy. Some reminisced about the moment City of Heroes was first shut down over a decade ago, posting videos and testimonies. "I was at the sunset in front of Atlas Park City Hall with my torch! I actually cried at that point," wrote mnbeave. "Now, time to arrest some baddies!"

The celebration on the Homecoming forums this January was a long-awaited catharsis—an outpouring of relief and a bonfire of painful memories many had been too wary to let go of. City of Heroes was a remarkable MMO: a decade and a half before The Avengers came to Fortnite, it was the first game to deliver on the fantasy of the superhero team-up. More than that, it was a landmark in online self-expression—boasting a powerful character creator in which you shaped a unique look and costume for your alter ego, right down to the mask that hid your real-world identity.

In today’s gaming world of purchasable skins and social media personas we take that sort of individualism for granted. But for many this MMO was "one of the only places they felt comfortable being themselves," says the team behind community revival City of Heroes: Homecoming. "A lot of us grew up with it, and losing it in 2012 was quite literally us losing a part of our childhoods."

The shutdown of City of Heroes was met with in-game protests and petitions, but neither could halt the bulldozers. So the community went underground, like the outlawed supes of The Incredibles. In one notorious instance, a fully-functioning City of Heroes server was kept running in private for six years—its players sworn to secrecy, until a YouTuber leaked its existence to the dismayed fans who had been left out. The colourful spy thriller twist: the server was named SCORE, or Secret Cabal Of Reverse Engineers.

Such lengths are extreme, but understandable. Revival efforts for MMOs have forever been plagued by cease and desist orders, and where community servers do operate in public their players typically live in fear of a sudden publisher slapdown—a second loss to compound the trauma of that initial closure.

City of Heroes: Homecoming, a fan initiative formed in the aftermath of SCORE’s reveal, was different from the start. Its team was aware of rare precedents like Project 1999, the EverQuest private server which in 2015 was officially sanctioned by the game’s publisher. Instead of running dark, the Homecoming team dared to be hopeful. 

"We were in contact with [City of Heroes publisher] NCSoft from day one in pursuit of having a friendly, stable, and long-term version of the game for everyone to enjoy," the Homecoming team says. "We believed that working with NCSoft was the only way to make this possible." The team had some connections with the right people at the publisher, but they were still very nervous. "Even though we believed this was the best course of action for keeping the game alive, we knew it was far from a sure thing."

NCSoft, too, had its reservations. "We were initially skeptical about their proposal," a spokesperson told PC Gamer. "To our knowledge, a AAA publisher/developer like NC West had never undertaken a non-commercial license of a sunset game. Ostensibly, such an undertaking would be too resource-intensive and risky to justify without benefiting a meaningful number of a game’s fans." 

Yet NCSoft wasn’t blind to the unusual fervour of City of Heroes veterans in the wake of the game’s shutdown. "This support created unique conditions in which evaluating Homecoming’s proposal about working together as a serious venture was not dismissed."

Heroic efforts

It helped that the Homecoming team consciously held itself to high professional standards. It was transparent and diligent, taking its technical and security infrastructure seriously and running a player support and moderation team. In short, the Homecoming team was designed from the outset to be easy to work with. "Our aim was to run the game in a way that would instill confidence in our ability to keep things going long-term," the Homecoming team says. "All of this definitely helped lay the groundwork for the license agreement."

NCSoft appreciated the Homecoming leadership’s familiarity with City of Heroes’ lore and game operation; its dedicated staff, sophistication, and vision of where to take the server next. "From there we needed to subject Homecoming to meaningful guardrails in its operation of City of Heroes," NCSoft says. "And take steps to confirm that, as a practical matter, Homecoming was likely to abide by all guardrails we imposed." 

Many back-and-forth conversations, "tire-kicking sessions" and contract drafts followed. Whatever guardrails the Homecoming team agreed to, they’re not telling—perhaps as a result of that professionalism that has gotten them this far. In the end, NCSoft was convinced. "Only once we believed they would be capable stewards of the City of Heroes IP did we begin exploring a license agreement," the publisher says. 

That agreement will now "keep Homecoming’s independent server running as a sanctioned, legitimate City of Heroes option for the game’s loyal fanbase." The deal was announced in January of this year, to much rejoicing. "Having our plan, nearly five years in the making, bear fruit was cause for immense celebration for us and the entire community," the Homecoming team says.

It’s an extraordinary arrangement that provides a positive example for other MMO owners to follow—a way to lift up the lost communities that once adored their games and have drifted ever since. Homecoming’s server costs continue to be funded by donations, which open up each month and tend to meet their targets in a matter of hours.

"Before the license happened, we’d been running Homecoming independently for nearly five years—with oversight, of course," the Homecoming team says. "There was no real benefit for anyone in changing that. Approval, support, and guidance is what we needed, and that’s what we’ve got, and are very thankful for." Full-on integration into NCSoft’s operations would, the Homecoming team suggests, probably have been counterproductive for all involved.

City of tomorrow

Today the Homecoming team is a volunteer operation made up of nearly 50 people. A leadership group, or City Council, makes decisions about policy and direction with input from various parts of the project. "We believe that this range of experience and expertise at the top helps us make informed decisions as a group," the Homecoming team says.

One group of volunteers tackles player support and moderation across the project’s official Discord and forums. And another team, still recruiting and growing, handles development—loosely divided into traditional disciplines like programming, writing and art. "With a relatively small team of talented people, there’s naturally a lot of overlap and cross-discipline work going on," the Homecoming team says. "But overall everyone works great together and there’s a lot of cohesion." There are plans for new additions to the game, though they won’t be announced until they’re almost ready: "There’s no telling quite how long something might take, or if it’ll even be finished at all, due to the volunteer nature of the team."

Meanwhile, NCSoft keeps a watchful eye over Homecoming to make sure its services, updates, and overall play experience "align with our desire to support the City of Heroes community with an enjoyable online gaming experience." But the trust established in those initial conversations remains, and the partnership has been harmonious.

"We’ve had a really positive working relationship with NCSoft so far and don’t expect that to change going forward," the Homecoming team says. "It’s not unlike a traditional developer-publisher relationship—just without the pressures of, y’know, hitting deadlines or needing to make any money. Which is quite a liberating set of circumstances, all things considered."

Through it all the Homecoming team has stuck to the mission statement it laid out in May 2019—one which held true to City of Heroes’ values of freedom and self-expression. "Our prime directive is to keep the servers online and available to everyone," wrote the volunteers at the time. "The key is in the name: we want this to feel like the home we all lost, and we want everybody to feel welcome."

This week, a clip allegedly depicting Helldivers 2 game master Joel entering a player's match, spawning an unreleased vehicle, and then leaving so he can "get back to work" garnered over a million views on Twitter. While many believed the video was yet another tactic by Arrowhead to sneak new features into the game, all signs pointed to the "[AH] Joel" in the clip being an imposter who had access to unreleased stratagems.

I wanted to know for sure what was going on, so I tracked down a few Steam users who'd recently used the same username and committed a PC gaming faux pas: sending friend requests to complete strangers. Surprisingly, a few of them friended me back, and one of them had an interesting story to tell.

"I was personally the Joel in the clip," the imposter, who goes by Steve, told me. Steve and at least one other friend have been donning the Joel disguise for a while now, visiting random players' lobbies and dropping unreleased toys onto the battlefield. They're not just showing off, he tells me, but promoting their boosting business.

"We were trying to think of some ideas to try to organically promote some of our boosting stuff we do without jumping in a lobby and dumping samples to ruin it for people who do enjoy progressing through a game," Steve said.

The part of the viral clip that didn't make the cut, he said, was his friend coming clean to the unsuspecting player about not being the real Joel before advertising their services.

"We weren't expecting it to be clipped and definitely wouldn't have expected the popularity of it even if it had been."

Powering their cheats is a trainer that Steve tells me their outfit developed especially for Helldivers 2. He says their trainer is different from the cheats anyone can download from Nexus Mods because it "actually parses the game files to look for new stuff each time it's activated so we'll see as stuff is patched in."

Ride along

I wanted to make sure Steve wasn't all talk, so I took him up on his offer for a ride along. I joined the group of two for what seemed like a standard Automaton mission at first, but the irregularities began at the loadout screen. While I equipped my favorite support weapons and airstrike stratagems, Steve equipped a bunch of stuff that doesn't exist: two vehicles (an APC and buggy that've been well-documented by now) and a few other weapons I didn't recognize.

Things got weirder once our hellpods hit the dirt. Steve and his friend started skating around the sandy dunes at Mach speed and flying through the air. They also wielded machine pistols that never ran out of ammo and fired 100x faster than they usually do. Immediately, the pair started calling down secret goodies. One of those secrets was the Quasar Cannon, a support weapon that, at the time, none of us knew would be released legitimately a few days later.

I won't spoil everything I saw, because who knows how much of it will actually come out, but suffice to say there is a lot of work-in-progress stuff hidden in Helldivers 2's files (much of it you can find online elsewhere), and I'm excited to see these ideas pan out once they're ready for primetime. I do think players will be surprised by how tough the vehicles are to drive. As suggested by the leaked videos out there, you do indeed have to manually shift up and down. That means pressing backwards doesn't do anything—to go in reverse, you have to shift to "R" and then press forward.

It was almost frightening how much control Steve had over the session. Not only was he unkillable, but he could bend the rules of the mission to his will, like calling down an extraction beacon wherever we were standing. Our ride along came to an abrupt end when my game crashed while driving a buggy, a bug I'd previously been warned about.

It was an awkward end to my first vehicular excursion in Helldivers, and the experience made me wonder: What's the appeal of cheating your way through a PvE game?

Why boost?

Boosting, or hiring players to "boost" you through a progression system through skill or cheats, has recently taken root in Helldivers 2. I've always associated the practice with PvP games like Rainbow Six Siege, where it's possible to hire cheaters to illicitly boost your ranking, but it's prominent in PvE games too, especially ones with lots of grinding. Through the use of cheats that grant them unlimited ammo, extra health, max damage, and super speed, Steve and his cohorts group up with customers and run level 9 difficulty missions, gobbling up as many samples as Helldivers will allow in a single go. When all goes well, one mission takes less than two minutes.

It struck me as odd that some people are willing to pay a premium, as well as risk a potential ban, simply to skip the grind. You can reach level 20, which unlocks most stratagems, within 20-30 hours of normal play. That's not a wild number, at least not by videogame standards. It takes a lot longer to gather the samples needed for the best ship upgrades, like the ones that lower stratagem cooldowns or add an extra barrage to missile strikes, but these are entirely optional.

It's not about farming Super Credits, Helldivers 2's premium currency, either. Arrowhead is relatively generous about giving out free Super Credits on missions, but the number of credits Steve can gather in an hour, I'm told, doesn't make up for the price of hiring him. For his customers, the decision to boost comes down to time.

"Most people who want boosting are people that just don't get a lot of play time and are really just wanting to play the game socially with friends," he said. "We've had a cool mix of people come through, this game has an amazing community."

In that context, boosting makes a little more sense. I've made the time to play Helldivers 2 a lot over the last few months, so unlocking the latest and greatest gear hasn't been a problem. When mechs released, I had already reached the required level 25 and pocketed 20,000 Reqs. My friends who have tighter windows to play still haven't gotten there. I wonder if they'd ever consider boosting over the finish line for the price of lunch.

Boosting in a PvE game may be a mostly victimless crime, but it's against Helldivers 2's terms of service nonetheless. Steve doesn't seem too concerned about getting banned, but he does keep his main Steam account on a separate machine just in case. "I personally have almost 130 hours legitimately played and I absolutely love the game," he said.

Seeing Helldivers 2 through the lens of an all-powerful god was enlightening, but also pretty dull. We had all these new toys to play with, but no stakes to make any of it matter.

My Joel impostor encounter was a well-timed reminder that half the fun of Helldivers 2 is the result of hard work by Arrowhead in building a meta narrative around the need for powerful weapons and escalating action. The new Quasar Cannon isn't just a random weapon drop, it's the answer to the growing Automaton threat. Termicide defense wasn't just a fun new mission type, it was a story beat that eventually led to the birth of Shriekers. Mechs didn't just show up one day—we fought for them ourselves.

That's the sort of magic you can't replicate with cheat software.

Hearthstone turned 10 this week, which on a personal note means I've been playing, watching and writing about the same game for a decade. From the halcyon days of peak RNG being Sylvanas stealing your opponent's Ragnaros, through the absolute degeneracy of Demon Hunter on day one, to the Colossals and Titans of the modern game, it's been a great ride. I was chatting to a colleague who also covered the game back in its golden era, remembering how great it was when there seemed to be a new tournament on Twitch every other week and the esports scene was doing legitimately huge viewership. 

For years the game fizzed with a constant influx of Mensa-smart young players who generated new memes as fast as they did game-breaking decks. As with all games that last this long, that imperial phase couldn't last forever, and none of us knew quite how good we'd had it until we were on the downslope. But even now I get excited before a new expansion—the nostalgia-heavy Whizbang's Workshop is out next week—eager to see what madness the current designers have cooked up. 

To celebrate the game's big anniversary, I decided to catch up with many of the OG stars who still share a love of the game, to see what their favourite memories are (and hear a few nightmares too).

Kripparrian 

Favourite moment: The biggest moment I've had in Hearthstone was the first big button press. I was regularly playing Arena and earning golden cards and many packs filled with extra copies, but rarely ever crafted the golden cards I was missing, or got rid of the copies. The copies were best kept as extras, because if Blizzard ever nerfed a card, they would offer a full refund for disenchanting it, and playing the (very) long game of grinding out a full golden collection meant that patience was key. 

The big button press was over three years in the making, but it came at a point that I realized I couldn't keep up with the release schedule of card sets. [Kripp was eligible for 660,620 Arcane Dust at the time he nuked all the extras—Ed.] I later learned from the dev team that they weren't sure what would happen when I pressed the button, as nobody had disenchanted so many cards with one click before.

Coolest card design of all time: Coldlight Oracle is my favorite overall. An amazingly versatile card that later spawned the fatigue Druid archetype, which became my favorite deck of all time.

Card you wish had been nerfed sooner: My most frustrating experience with a card in Hearthstone has to be with Firelands Portal. While existing as a fairly mundane removal option for constructed play, it plagued the Arena game mode because, as at that time, card frequency in the draft was determined by a card's rarity. With Firelands Portal being a common, and competing against some of the strongest cards in the game mode, Mage decks would regularly have fistfuls of them and dominate all other classes. This was tough to swallow, because Firelands Portal was released as part of an adventure, not a card pack-based set, so the rarity of each card had no relevance outside Arena, where it was massively problematic.

Best Meta: While I mostly played Arena, I would check out constructed Hearthstone each cycle to see what Blizzard had come up with, and get some experience playing the new sets and their decks. While I often only played for a few days, Whispers of the Old Gods kept my interest for almost the entirety of the set's cycle. Building decks around each Old God was a blast as it could be done differently with each class, and you could even combine decks with several Old Gods in one!

Worst Meta: While it was fun to see the first real class addition with Demon Hunter, it quickly got out of hand. I would regularly play against Demon Hunter opponents exclusively for long periods at a time. [The first set of Demon Hunter cards were so ridiculous they had to be nerfed within 24 hours—Ed]

Kibler 

Favourite Hearthstone moment: Casting the World Championship Finals in 2015—or this nonsense [embedded above]. 

Coolest card design of all time: Elise the Trailblazer. I loved getting an Un'Goro pack from Shadow Visions and then trying to win with whatever nonsense was in it.

Card you wish had been nerfed sooner: Warsong Commander. Patron being dominant for as long as it was led to entire sets feeling like they didn't matter. [Sottle actually wrote a defence of the card for PC Gamer back in 2015, but as a huge Patron player, it may have been a little biased—Ed.]

Best Meta: Journey to Un'Goro (minus Quest Rogue)

Worst Meta: United in Stormwind. It felt like every deck was either a super linear quest combo or hyper fast aggro.

Savjz 

Favourite Hearthstone moment: Winning SeatStory Cup II. That whole event was very special to me. [The SeatStory series was an early Hearthstone tournament held at a studio in Germany, where all the players would hang out, and was known for its chaotic but fun vibe.]

Coolest card design of all time: The OG Reno, because it encouraged the 'highlander' playstyle for the first time.

Card you wish had been nerfed sooner: The original Undertaker. It took Blizzard six months, even though it was ultra OP. The game was picking up pace at an incredible speed at the time, so I assume they didn't want to touch anything. It was painful. 

Best Meta: Honestly, if I thought about it for a long time I would probably give a different answer, but Prince Renathal was a breath of fresh air when it came out in its original form. It slowed the game significantly, making it a bit closer to the type of grindy, back and forth gameplay that I enjoy, but has been absent at times due to the single-turn power spikes that I don't enjoy as much. 

Worst Meta: I don't have a specific answer, but whenever there is an OTK that happens from hand early, that's the worst. OK, I do have an example: Mozaki, Master Duelleist which existed at a time when there was no counterplay in the form of any disruption.

Sean 'Day9' Plott 

My favorite Hearthstone moment:  The Best Worst Game. [For those not familiar with Sean's oeuvre, this is a a 30-minute Priest Mirror with some iconic belly laughs and quotes like: "Oh my god, I'm going to vomit blood."—Ed.]

Coolest card design of all time: Echo of Medivh! I built some awesome giant decks with that card! Or Astral Communion, for the clown show.

My favorite meta: Journey to Un'Goro. It was so insanely fun with Discover, Quests, and Adapt. Every game felt very rich and decision heavy.

My least favorite meta: Undertaker Deathrattle Hunter. Unless you had an instant answer, it spiraled out of control SO HARD my god.

Card I wish had been nerfed sooner: Symbolically, Mind Control from 8 to 10 mana at Hearthstone's launch. It foreshadowed the next five years of my Hearthstone experience where it felt like Blizzard was so slow and so conservative about balancing and changing overpowered and/or problem cards.

Dan 'Frodan' Chou 

Favourite Hearthstone moment: Hosting the winning moment on the BlizzCon stage when Li 'Liooon' Xiaomeng made esports history [as the first woman to win the Hearthstone Grandmasters Global Finals—Ed].

Coolest card design of all time: Yogg-Saron, Hope's End.

Card you wish had been nerfed sooner: Yogg-Saron, Hope's End.

Best Meta: Yogg-Saron, Hope's End.

Worst Meta: Yogg-Saron, Hope's End.

Simon 'Sottle' Welch 

Favourite Hearthstone Moment: Liooon wins Worlds and her subsequent speech. A lot of people that know my history might expect me to single out Hunterace vs Viper as my favourite moment [which remains the most incredible World Championship final in the game's history—Ed], but the following year is just that little bit more special to me for a number of reasons. Firstly, due to various travel issues and other logistical nightmares, the casting lineup was heavily impacted, meaning I had to be front and centre for the majority of a World's broadcast, which was an incredible privilege. Far more importantly than that though, the history-defining moment of Liooon's victory and her words on stage brought tears to my eyes. 

[Liooon's speech below is embedded below—Ed.]

If you ask me what story I'll be telling my grandkids for the 34th time while they look on in disbelief that I'm still talking about Hearthstone, it's this one.

Coolest Card Design of all Time: Zephrys the Great. I think as hands-on time with this card passed, more and more people started to focus on the fact that the card wasn't a living breathing sentient empath that knew intuitively what your gameplan and innermost desires were. Instead, I think it's worth celebrating what an ambitious project this card was from a design perspective, and how it (mostly) achieved what it was supposed to do.

Card I wish had been nerfed sooner: None! Leave the strong stuff alone. Let chaos reign. Adapt or die.

Best Meta: Even though The Grand Tournament was a very hit and miss set in terms of overall impact, the meta it landed in was awesome. Patron Warrior, Control Warrior, Handlock variants, Tempo Mages, and then everyone playing Secret Paladin that you just rolled over by being a good Patron player. Those were the good times. Honourable mention to the Cubelock/Hadronox Druid meta.

Worst Meta: Master's Tour Seoul. Specialist format. 5-Mana Luna's Pocket Galaxy. The perfect storm. When you're a person like me, who is focused on the competitive side of things, metas like this with individual cards that spike winrate by 10%+ when drawn on curve or held in mulligan are just the absolute pits. The problem was amplified by the Specialist format, which really highlighted the dominance of the deck, and all the mirror match finals. A good time was had by few.

Neil 'Lorinda' Bond 

Favourite Hearthstone moment: Liooon winning worlds, but I'm aware Sottle has also chosen that, so I'll pick Feno winning HCT Orange County. It was the culmination of Hunterace's dominant year, but Feno had performed incredibly consistently without a win and was a hugely popular player. Although I wasn't there for that event, I'd been at many many featuring him that year and although it wasn't the most important win ever in the scheme of things, it was the loudest I'd ever screamed at a match. I'm pretty sure I tweeted something out with joyous expletives when he won.

Coolest card design of all time: Zephrys the Great.

Card you wish had been nerfed sooner: Prince Renethal or Edwin Van Cleef.

Best Meta: The one-day Demon Hunter meta!

Worst Meta: The one with Cubelock and Hadronox.

RDU

Favourite Hearthstone moment: My favorite moment, outside of winning a tournament, would be when I got #1 legend and then decided to queue some games with Whizbang decks for fun. [Whizbang is designed to help new players, and gives you one of 18 random decks each time you play it—Ed.]

I was so happy when I heard that not only is he coming back, but he's also the central theme of the next expansion.

Coolest card design of all time: I think the coolest cards ever made were the Death Knight heroes, so I rank Shadowreaper Anduin as the most badass ever. It completely changed the dynamic of how the Priest class is supposed to be played.

Card you wish had been nerfed sooner: The Rogue Quest and some other game-dominating Quests that made gameplay repetitive.

Best Meta: The Patron Warrior meta was by far my favorite, even though it was super dominated by one deck, because it was very skillful and interesting to play in both the mirror match and against other decks.

Worst Meta: There were a few metas that I didn't like but nothing compares with Goblins vs Gnomes. It came out right after Naxx, which was one of the best releases, and it felt horrible to play with so much randomness that couldn't be controlled in a skillful way.

Trump

The Mayor of Value Town skipped the other questions but sent a truly old school clip featuring one of our favourite crusteaceans. Trump wrote: "It's fitting that the video's just about 10 years old." 

Fighting to stay alive is hard-coded into our DNA, so it's pretty easy to see why we love survival games. The best survival games on PC push players to their limits, presenting them with tough problems and challenging them to find creative solutions.

You need to take a lot more into account than your standard health bar in survival games. Things like hunger, thirst, and extreme temperatures will need to be considered, alongside disease and threats from any hostile enemies.

Paired with exploration, foraging, and crafting tools and gear, a lot of the best survival games will put your every instinct to the test.

But in such a popular genre, it can be hard to know where to start, especially if you're jumping into the world of survival games for the first time.

Below you'll find our favorite examples of simulated survival on PC, whether it's among the stars, deep underground, or in other dangerous environments packed with monsters, mutants, zombies, dinosaurs, or the deadliest enemy of all: other players. Here are the best survival games on PC.

Abiotic Factor

In a sentence: Half-Life, but it's a survival game about the nerdy scientists left behind in Black Mesa.
Status: In early access
Link: Steam

You may be a scientist in a Black Mesa-like facility as its overrun but monsters, but this time you're no Gordon Freeman. You're one of the eggheads left behind. It's a different kind of survival game because you're in a sprawling lab instead of stranded in the woods: harvest snacks from vending machines, fashion armor out of sofa cushions, and cannibalize broken computers for electronics. Abiotic Factor is bursting with fun twists on the survival formula, like a clever crafting system where you use your nerdy brain to come up with an "idea" for a new item, and a minigame you play while sleeping that buffs your rested status.

Further reading: I fell in love with Abiotic Factor the minute I strapped a couch cushion to my chest and called it armor

Project Zomboid

In a sentence: The deepest and most complex zombie survival game, period.
Status: Released Nov 8, 2013
Link: Steam

If you're looking deep and complex survival systems in a massive sandbox sim, there's only one game that truly fits the bill. There's a big learning curve in this zombie survival game but once you've got a handle on how the various systems work you'll find an unending and engrossing challenge in the harsh post-apocalyptic world. Loot buildings, craft gear, farm and fish, fight zombies (or better yet, avoid them) and struggle with everything from injuries to disease to boredom to how much noise you make while moving around. This is a brilliant zombie survival simulation like nothing else out there.

Escape from Duckov

In a sentence: A singleplayer extraction shooter where you're a duck
Status: Released October 16, 2025
Link: Steam

Escape from Duckov may be cute—you're a chunky duck fighting adorable birds—but it's no joke. The top-down shooter quickly sunk its claws (or flippers) into me with a compelling survivalcraft loop and tense combat. I know an extraction shooter is an odd pick for a survival list, but your duck has to eat and drink and there's lots of tinkering around your base that gives Duckov a real survival feel. I wouldn't have thought a singleplayer extraction shooter would work, but this one sure does.

Further reading: Escape From Duckov might look like a parody, but it's a full-fledged, full-featured singleplayer bottling of extraction shooter juice

Grounded 2

In a sentence: You're tiny and trying to survive in a park.
Status: In Early Access since July 29, 2025
Link: Offical site

It's still in early access, but the sequel to Obsidian's Grounded is already outshining the admittedly excellent original. Once again, you're a kid who's been shrunk down to ant-size and have to survive in the wild. This time your survival crafting playground is a town park, and along with new insects like butterflies and scorpions to contend with (and in some cases, befriend), you've got new tools to help you out and a more robust combat system to master. The game still has a long way to go, but it's one heck of a promising start.

Further reading: Grounded 2, even in early access, is one of the best survival games I've ever played

Palworld

In a sentence: Kinda like Ark: Survival Evolved, but with Pokémon-like critters instead of dinosaurs
Status: In early access since January 18, 2024
Link: Steam

We knew this Pokémon-with-guns game would draw a crowd, but we didn't expect it to become the mega-hit of 2024. The mixture of survival and collectible creatures drew millions of players overnight, and you know what? It's fun. Build a base, add to your creature collection by battling monsters, make them work for you... cook and eat them... there's lots of stuff you can do, not all of it savory.

Further reading: Palworld is the Pokémon this sinful world deserves

Sons of the Forest

In a sentence: Plane crash survivor angers cannibal tribe. Again!
Status: Released February 23, 2024
Link: Steam Store

After picking through the wreckage of the plane crash that stranded you here, you'll quickly discover you're not alone. You share a mysterious island with a tribe of terrifying cannibals, and while you struggle to stay fed and hydrated, build structures from simple tents to log homes, and construct traps to snare animals, you'll have to defend against the hungry and determined locals. Best of all, you've got an AI-controlled pal, Kelvin, to help you out.

Further reading: Sons of the Forest review is the funniest game on the internet

Valheim

In a sentence: Exploration and base-building in the Viking afterlife.
Status: Released in Early Access on February 2, 2021
Link: Official site

It didn't take long for Early Access co-op Viking survival game to draw a crowd, and it's easy to see why. A massive procedurally generated world, fearsome boss fights, and excellent base-building systems mesh wonderfully with survival elements like cooking and crafting. Solo play is great, but it really shines in co-op, and players can busy themselves with base construction or set out on perilous journeys across the sea to find dangerous new continents.

Further reading: Valheim is making me love survival games again

Subnautica and Subnautica 2

In a sentence: Survival, crafting, and building—underwater.
Status: Released January 23, 2018 / May 14, 2026
Link: Official site

Explore an alien, underwater world while piloting your hand-crafted submarine through mysterious submerged landscapes. From beautiful coral reefs to deep-sea caves and trenches, you'll gather resources and sustenance, build habitats and a fleet of subs, and craft new tech to help you survive the depths. The original is one of the genre's best, and the sequel is off to a great start in early access.

Further reading: After all that drama, Subnautica 2 is good

Frostpunk

In a sentence: Survival, city-building, and crisis management in a frozen world.
Status: Released April 24, 2018
Link: Official site

Frostpunk is a blend of city-building, society simulation, and survival in a grim and frozen world. With a handful of cold, hungry, unhappy people, you'll need to construct a working city inside a snow-filled crater heated only by a massive coal furnace. Gather resources, hunt for food, and manage your citizens by giving them hope for the future. It's a harsh and beautiful survival game that confronts you with difficult choices at every turn.

Further reading: Frostpunk review: an incredibly stylish and addictive survival management game.

Pacific Drive

In a sentence: Your car is your only companion in this driving survival game
Status: Released Feb 21, 2024
Link: Steam

A novel survival game where nearly all the survival systems are contained within a station wagon from the 1980s. Drive through a world filled with horrible anomalies, gather resources and use them to soup up your car with sci-fi gadgets, and drive even further the next time. It's different than just about any other survival game out there, though it's pretty darn punishing, too.

Further reading: Pacific Drive review

RimWorld

In a sentence: Sci-fi colony management simulation inspired by Dwarf Fortress
Status: Released October 17, 2018
Link: Steam

It's been five years of Early Access, but RimWorld has finally reached version 1.0. In this management and survival sim you oversee a colony of randomly generated people stranded on a procedural alien planet. Expand the base, keep your colonists healthy and sane, and deal with disasters thrown your way by RimWorld's AI director, which can include anything from disease outbreaks to alien attacks to weather events. The toughest challenge may be just making your colonists simply get along with each other: each one has a distinct personality, desires, and moods.

Further reading: Making a clan of cannibals with RimWorld's scenario editor

Raft

In a sentence: Survive on a raft while building it into a floating fortress
Status: In Early Access
Link: Steam

It sounds almost idyllic, floating through the world serenely on a raft, building and expanding upon it as you fish flotsam from the ocean with a grappling hook. There are sharks, though. Hungry ones, and if they can't eat you they'll settle for eating your floating home. You'll need to somehow find food and fresh water while keeping your raft afloat and growing. Luckily, you can play co-op with a pal and double your chances for survival.

Further reading: How Raft conquered the seas of Steam

The Long Dark

In a sentence: Atmospheric survival in a Canadian post-apocalypse.
Status: Released August 1, 2017
Link: Official site

With a focus on atmosphere and environmental survival, The Long Dark stands out in an increasingly crowded genre. You play as a bush pilot stranded in the frozen wilderness after a mysterious global calamity. There are no zombies, no mutants, and no other players: it's just you fighting against the elements, the wildlife, and your own human fragility.

Further reading: Survival gets serious in The Long Dark

Don't Starve

In a sentence: Survive a cartoon wilderness filled with beasts and monsters.
Status: Released April 13, 2013
Link: Offical Site

With charming artwork yet punishing gameplay, Don't Starve is an addictive challenge and one of the best survival experiences out there (and in a rare turn of events, one of the few games here to graduate from Early Access). The crafting is complex and satisfying as you attempt to survive busy days and deadly nights. Fight (and eat) animals, practice both science and magic, and keep an eye on your mental health so you don't go insane. The standalone expansion Don't Starve Together even lets you play with pals.

Further reading: Don't Starve: Shipwrecked is a breath of fresh... Nope, that's a hurricane.

DayZ

In a sentence: Online zombie survival in the Eastern European countryside.
Status: Released December 13, 2018
Link: Steam Store

Yes, it was a long road out of Early Access, DayZ's technically still isn't done. But the survival elements of DayZ are strong, with complex nutrition, hydration, and health systems that go beyond merely eating, drinking, and bandaging wounds. Scavenge a sprawling and decaying persistent open world, engage in tense interactions with other players, customize weapons and craft gear, and try not to die: if you do, you start again with nothing.

Further reading: DayZ Diaries: the one where Ben force-feeds Andy a rotten banana

Rust

In a sentence: Naked men running around hitting each other with rocks.
Status: Released February 8, 2018
Link: Official site

Join or battle other players—or attempt to go it alone—starting with primitive tools and weapons and advancing to firearms and massive bases. You'll have to contend with wild animals, hunger, and thirst, but this is a very PVP-intensive survival experience and your main threat will come from the dozens of other players on the servers. Rust left Early Access in Early 2018, but continues to add new features.

Further reading: Trick-or-treating in Rust went about as well as you might expect

Minecraft

In a sentence: Build things, destroy things, fight monsters.
Status: Released October 7, 2011
Link: Official site

You may have heard of it. There are many different ways to play Minecraft: alone, in creative mode, with friends and strangers, as an explorer, or with custom game modes on specialty servers. As a survival game, it's still excellent, with well-implemented hunger and thirst systems and incredibly robust crafting and building. Dive into its blocky and beautiful world and you may never want to leave.

Further reading: The 40 best Minecraft custom maps

Terraria

In a sentence: Side-scrolling Minecraft.
Status: Released May 16, 2011
Link: Offical site

A wonderful, expansive, addictive, and not to mention inexpensive survival crafting sandbox. Explore randomly generated worlds, gather resources, and enjoy a simple yet satisfying crafting system. Tunnel through vast caverns, battle monsters, befriend NPCs, build yourself a palace, and play alone or with friends in co-op. Terraria has been around for years, but it's stood the test of time.

Further reading: Terraria review

This War of Mine

In a sentence: Struggle to survive in a war-torn city.
Status: Released November 14, 2014
Link: Offical site

Depicting war not from the perspective of an elite soldier but from that of a group of civilians simply trying to stay alive amidst the chaos, This War of Mine is a different and more desperate kind of survival game. You'll face tough choices as you manage your survivors' health, both physical and mental. Scrounging for food and supplies during the night is tense and harrowing, and no matter what you find it never seems to be enough. It's not just a survival game but a harsh and unblinking look at the reality of war.

Further reading: This War of Mine review

Unturned

In a sentence: A free-to-play multiplayer survival sandbox.
Status: Released July 7, 2017
Link: Steam store

It costs you nothing to play Unturned, but this isn't some slapped together free-to-play title. Its creator (a teenager) has released scores of updates to the zombie-based survival sandbox since 2014, which makes it easy to see why it's been downloaded by millions of players since its initial release. Despite Unturned's blocky visuals it contains deep and satisfying crafting, skill, and survival systems, plus there's a massive and exuberant community surrounding it.

Further reading: How a survival game made by a 16-year-old racked up 24 million downloads

The scale of the past year of videogame layoffs is a hard thing to wrap your head around. We're confronted with more big numbers almost every week: the latest "regrettable" cuts made by this or that gaming company in the name of staying "agile and competitive." The announcements blur together and the numbers become talking points, but within each statistic are scores of intimate miniature apocalypses: someone's livelihood, maybe their dream job or first break in this competitive industry, dashed against the wall.

The causes of this recent industry contraction include studio consolidation, tightened margins after an early Covid-era boom, and good old fashioned corporate greed. Today, we're just focusing on the personal impact: a snapshot of the industry crisis from January 2023 through January '24 with testimonies from some of the people who lost their jobs.

Each individual dot on the graphic above represents one person laid off at some point in the last 13 months. In addition to PC Gamer's own reporting, Gamesindustry.biz, Wrapped.games, and the public Games Industry Layoffs tracker hosted on Obsidian Publishing were essential resources in compiling the big picture. 

Our own estimated total for 2023's layoffs was 11,250 people (the Obsidian tracker posits at least 10,500), while in 2024 we had already reached nearly 6,000 layoffs (5,900 on the public list) by the end of January. More layoffs have been reported in the early days of February, including an unknown number at Visual Concepts Austin, which Take-Two acquired in 2021.

As many observers have pointed out, the industry is already halfway to 2023's total layoffs just one month into 2024. 2023 was higher than 2022's estimated 8,500 total layoffs, and the wider tech downturn that these games layoffs spun off from was already underway by the end of that year.

One question we keep coming back to at PCG is how aberrant these layoffs are in games history, with the possibility that a combination of social media attention and increased scrutiny of industry labor practices has brought an issue that's always been this bad more to the forefront. While we don't have a statistical answer to that question, I was struck by former HakJak sound designer and industry veteran Michelle Hebert's testimony on the matter. Despite this being the fourth time she's been laid off in 15 years, Hebert has found the recent situation far grimmer than in the past.

"Before there were plenty of places to land and studios would respond to swoop up talent," she said. "This time, they're not there because everyone is drowning it feels." 

On the other end of the spectrum, this is the first time former Blizzard senior environment artist Molly Warner has been laid off in her 10 years in the industry, but she understandably says that "one is enough."

With thousands of developers now looking for work, new roles are difficult to come by. But there are also resources dedicated to help game developers find new jobs. On LinkedIn, Amir Satvat organizes volunteer mentorship and CV reviews in addition to constantly updating lists of laid off developers and job opportunities. Cristina Amaya runs a Slack server for job-seeking devs. There's also a UK games industry Slack group to turn to.

Below we've included a number of responses from developers who were willing to share their stories with PC Gamer. All of them have been affected by layoffs in the last 12 months. They represent just 0.05% of the total impact.

Faces of the 2023-2024 games industry layoffs

When I first discovered Monster Sniper Season 3, the self-declared "worst videogame of all time",  I was immediately hooked on following its strange development. Once it actually became playable, I got a bit obsessed. Creator Carsen Rapp's TikToks about the game's ongoing progress are both brilliantly silly and also a little horrifying; he often looks baffled by his own work as he crams more and more diabolical ideas into his Frankenstein's monster of a platformer. 

Recent additions include a horrific poison swamp maze, one of the most stressful underwater levels I've ever seen, and confusing captchas you have to solve to respawn when you inevitably die. That's on top of features like a rocket launcher that takes 30 seconds to reload, a cute dog that explodes into giant ants if you pet it, and a mechanic where you have to regularly type compliments into the game to prevent the protagonist losing the will to continue.

Rapp doesn't make games for a living—he's an enthusiastic amateur—but through this bizarre project he seems to have discovered a whole new way to get into the industry. "It's been a hobby thing since I was like 12," he says. "I got into web development instead of game development and I've kind of regretted that ever since, so this is me correcting that.

"I've tried and failed to make, over my lifetime, 50 games. Everyone who makes games has done the same thing. So I thought, okay, I'm just going to do the most fun part of making videogames, which is implementing cool new features, and not do any of the boring things, like polish the game,  make it make sense, make it work correctly… no, it's just a bad game, and that's fine,  because that's the most fun thing for me to make right now. Just keep, every two days, adding something new."

And, importantly, show that new thing to an ever-growing TikTok audience. The unique social media platform surfaces videos in users' feeds based on what it thinks they'll enjoy, not just who they follow, allowing creators to flourish quickly without an existing audience. "Where else can you upload a video and people will just see it? Nowhere!" says Rapp, who initially gained a thousand followers with just one video. 

Now that the game is available to the public, it's getting thousands of plays too—and even a budding speedrun community. It taps into the same vein as the ever popular "masocore" genre, exemplified by games like I Wanna Be the Guy and Getting Over It with Bennett Foddy which take rely on players' stubbornness more than their need to be entertained.

"It's not a game anyone would play normally right?" says Rapp. "No one's going to sit down and play it just for fun. It's going to be something you play for content, or because you like really hard games, or you want to speedrun it. It's all the weird, fringe parts of playing a game, that's how you're going to approach this."

But it's only in watching others finally go hands-on with his creation that Rapp has come to appreciate quite how vicious the game really is. The irony of the project is that its greatest victim is Rapp himself—he's the one who has to actually play it over and over to test it, regularly wasting hours and thousands of attempts trying to beat his latest additions. All that practice, however, has given him plenty of chance to get used to its worst foibles.

"I had totally forgotten how bad the control scheme is," says Rapp. "I kind of realised a couple of days ago—I don't think more than two people have gotten past the first part of the second level, because of just how strange it is to even do a normal jump in this game."

When I add that one of the worst parts for me is the audio—the way the dreadful, out of tune flute soundtrack restarts every time you die profoundly adds to the pain—Rapp seems surprised anyone's even still listening to it. 

"I've been watching TikToks and the music's playing in the background. I'm like, 'people aren't muting their browser when they play the game?!' I haven't heard it in a month!"

And yet, enough people are happy to subject themselves to this digital torture to leave Rapp excited for the game's future. "My loftiest goal, the biggest one I have, would be for someone to speedrun it at Awesome Games Done Quick. That would be the best thing that's ever happened. Beyond that, I'm just seeing what happens."

There's something wonderful about seeing someone whose game design dreams have always gone unfulfilled suddenly finding their own unique joy and success in a project. Monster Sniper Season 3 is deliberately awful, but it's also a testament to Rapp's creativity and sense of humour. Energised by his sudden audience, he's already got stranger concepts brewing. ("I had this idea for a game where you can only play it once in each state. So if you lose you have to go to Missouri and play again…")

So I finish by asking: what advice would Rapp give to other aspiring and amateur developers hoping to find their own unique place in the hobby too? 

"Just make anything and put it out. And make TikToks about it!" he says. "Whatever you make, it is a piece of art, and it is interesting because it came from a human. So just make something, make some content about it. 

"That's actually my number one piece of advice—I've seen so many people, peers of mine too in the game development Discords, they make a game, they put it out, no one plays it, and they're like 'Aw, dang it!'. No, that's just the first part; the second part is getting people to play the game. Make some content, talk about it for a long time, don't just give up. That's my advice."

That's advice Rapp lives by—follow him on TikTok and you'll be treated to multiple hilarious and/or distressing updates a week. For the braver among you, you can try the latest build for yourself on his itch.io page. Just… maybe mute the music. 

The year is 1982. The internet won't exist for several months yet, and the Web won't go World Wide for another decade. But if you send a formatted floppy disk to a man named Andrew Fluegelman, he'll pop a copy of his communications program PC-Talk on it and send it back free of charge. If you like it, you can make further copies for your friends. In the event you really like it, you can send Fluegelman $25. "If you order the program and are disappointed," wrote PC Mag in its August-October 1982 issue, "you've lost nothing but a stamped, self-addressed envelope."

Fluegelman characterised this model as "an experiment in economics more than altruism", and sure enough, it soon started making people rich. Free distribution gave software developers such enormous reach long before internet downloads that even voluntary payments from a fraction of their users resulted in huge profits. They settled on a name: shareware.

Apogee founder Scott Miller grew up in a household with a former NASA engineer for a dad and an IBM PC packed with shareware. "My father had even sent a couple of guys some money," he says. "So it was on my mind." By the mid-80s, the younger Miller was coding videogames in his spare time at college and making them available much the way Fluegelman had.

"I had written some text adventure games in the style of Infocom, released those into shareware and asked people to send me money," he says. "And it just was not working out at all. I wasn't making anything worth talking about."

What Miller was missing was an enticement—a way to lure players into payment, without giving away a whole product. In 1987 he put out a trilogy of fantasy roguelikes named Kroz: The first, a 25-level game, was released for free, but the second and third parts cost $15 each. "That was the magic trick that worked," he says. "No one else was doing that. I immediately wrote another three Kroz games and did the same thing with those." 

By the end of the decade, Miller was making $100,000 a year through cheques showing up in his mailbox. He quit his day job and began reaching out to other game authors through pre-internet services like BBSes and CompuServe. One was Todd Replogle, an "amazing, amazing talent" who dreamed up Duke Nukem with Miller and worked as a programmer on the series from its origin as a platformer through to its final, 3D form.

Another was John Romero. At the time, Romero and the team that would become id Software were pumping out a new game every month for Softdisk, a company that promised subscribers 12 original games over the course of a year for a total of $89.95.

John Carmack had blown Miller away with his demo of a smooth-scrolling platformer on the PC—a feat akin to distilling Super Mario in his garage (id literally did that, too). But the nascent id Software wasn't convinced of the merits of shareware. "If you want us to make a game for you," they told Miller, "you gotta pay us $2,000 to do it." Miller practically punched the air, knowing he would have gladly paid 10 times that amount to publish id's first game. 

Keen dreams

In December of 1990, Miller uploaded Commander Keen's first episode to bulletin board systems that served as file sharing hosts. For $30, players could order the two follow-up episodes on floppy disks in Ziploc bags. And they did. In droves. By the end of the month, Miller had sent Romero and co. $10,000 in royalties.

The next cheque, in January, was for $25,000. "It just grew from there," Miller says. "At that point, they were completely sold on the whole idea of shareware."

Yet shareware wasn't solely a pact between the publisher, developer and consumer. It required the cooperation of the postal service, which was completely fascinated by this new mail phenomenon—taken to a new level by the launch of Wolfenstein 3D. "They actually sent an empty truck to our office, just to load up all the packages and everything we were sending out," Miller says. "We got really close to them, and also developed a really good relationship with our local printer for all the labels and everything. Early on, Apogee developed more as an order-taking company." 

Only in the months after Wolfenstein 3D, as id Software's star continued to rise, did Apogee move into internal development. While the company was still working with several shareware creators, Miller knew that Romero and Carmack would want to break off on their own, and so asked former id Software designer Tom Hall to lead work on Rise of the Triad, a new Apogee FPS that would keep the company's mail order staff and infrastructure busy.

"It actually started off as a Wolfenstein sequel," Miller says. "Wolfenstein 3D: Rise of the Triad. That's why it has the whole military angle. But about 10 months into development we got a call from John Romero, who said, 'You know, we really don't want another Wolfenstein game coming out. We'll let you continue to use the engine, but you can't call it Wolfenstein anymore.'

"Their worry was that it was going to be released too close to their coming game, Doom, and they didn't want the competition."

Doom ended up sweeping away any and all competition. Shareware players bought 1,154,541 copies, placing it among the best-selling games of the '90s. In the process, Doom brought shareware to the attention of an enormous audience, and inextricably associated the model with the budding FPS genre. By then shooters were becoming too large and complicated to be developed as trilogies like Kroz and Commander Keen, so the convention was to release a generous set of taster levels for free. If players wanted more, they could mail in for the rest. 

Shadow war

Shareware's sales structure couldn't help but have an impact on the shape of a game itself, tempting developers to stick the finest levels upfront to make the best possible impression. At Apogee, though, development tended not to pan out that way. "We gave a lot of thought to maybe developing the middle episode first," Miller says. "And once we become experts in making our own game, then we can do the first episode, make sure we get it right. But it never worked out, we always made the first episode first. For a lot of our games, the later episodes were the better ones because of that."

Of course, many players never saw those later, more refined episodes. For Rocksteady web developer Jason Burt-D'Arcy, who was a young teen living in the small Southampton suburb of Netley Abbey in 1994, access to free games was a revelation. Wolfenstein, Doom, Heretic, Duke Nukem 3D, Shadow Warrior, Rise of the Triad, Descent, Quake—he played them all. Up until they asked for a cheque, that is.

"You got some levels, a bunch of weapons and a cool boss to kill at the end," he says. "Because these games, Doom in particular, were so good you would just go again. It had scaling difficulty and loads of hidden things so there was still plenty to do. I never felt like I wanted more because I'd been given so much already."

At the time Miller reckoned that Apogee's games were in some cases reaching tens of millions of people: "My estimate was that about one or two in every 100 people that would download a game would end up sending us money for it," he says. "Nowadays, ordering on Steam is just pressing a button. Back then you had to pick up the phone and have your credit card ready or write a cheque. There was a lot more friction."

There were additional barriers for international players, too. Apogee established a worldwide network of partner distribution companies and published lists of local dealers that could be accessed via the menus of its games. Yet even so, some customers were put off by US-centric advertising in an age when the oceans between continents felt wider. "I remember taking one look at the purchase information and it was 0800 numbers and dollar signs," Burt-D'Arcy says. "I wouldn't have known where to start."

Those borders came down with the internet, and by the late '90s shareware had made enormous successes of not just Apogee but other lasting companies like Epic Games. It had shaken the traditional industry to its core. "I remember hearing a story that there was a board meeting at Electronic Arts," Miller says. “And one of the top people slammed Wolfenstein 3D on the table and said, ‘How are these guys beating us? How can some little company out of nowhere be making better games than us?’”

By 1996, Quake’s shareware edition was the sixth-best-selling game of the year in the US. 

But in the end, the internet brought down shareware too. Over time it became possible, and then trivial, to download full games online, making mail order the preserve of lavish collector's editions.

Sharewhere?

While the idea of episodic gaming still appeals to developers, it's often proven to be a poor fit for the volatile and unpredictable nature of game production. Valve abandoned Half-Life 2's expansion episodes after two entries stretched across multiple years. And although Hitman's World of Assassination trilogy is now a huge commercial success, that wasn't true while its first levels were releasing one-by-one—most players prefer to wait for a whole, finished product before investing. 

The original Telltale Games remains the biggest name in episodic gaming—yet financial insecurity and the crunch associated with an aggressive release schedule saw the company unravel in sad, spectacular fashion back in 2018.

So where does the spirit of shareware live in PC gaming today? Not with free-to-play, according to Miller. "There's always some sort of grinding element that you can somewhat bypass if you pay, which I'm just not a fan of at all," he says. "We never had anything like that. There were no throttle [points] in the shareware releases of our games."

Miller's more keen on demos, which have seen a reemergence in recent years thanks to both the rising cost of full-price games and high-profile events like Steam Next Fest. "They're super important for game developers to be doing nowadays," he says. "Even more than early access. Because what you're trying to do with a demo is just get your game out there, allow people to download it for free, and once again get hooked to the point that they wishlist it." 

Crucially, demos are a way to spread word-of-mouth without exposing an unfinished game to Steam user reviews. "It's a way to have the public help you playtest, get great feedback from them and modify your game as necessary," Miller says. "At most you want to give away about 25-to-30% as your demo, which is what we did back in the shareware days." It's a model the modern-day Apogee will be following for all its upcoming releases.

As an adult, Burt-D'Arcy works as a web developer, and sees something like a shareware spirit in his field. "The sheer amount of code that is written and given away for free is completely mind blowing," he says. "So much of the systems that run our daily lives is [built] on code that people wrote because they love making things."

Yet in games? "I don't think there is anything really like it anymore," he says. "Shareware was about faith. Faith in your own ability to make something good, and faith in people to respect and respond to that." It wasn't altruism, as Fluegelman pointed out in the beginning. But it was rooted in something pure—an optimistic belief that generosity would be rewarded in kind.

For PC Gamer's own 30th anniversary, we're journeying through three decades of PC gaming history, and we've finally arrived in the modern age of PC gaming. From the mid-2000s to now, we've seen some huge shifts in the landscape of the hobby, and some new classic titles ready to stand the test of time for many more decades to come. Let's kick off with just such a one, an RPG near and dear to the hearts of the PCG team...

📜 Part 1: 1993-2003 

📜 Part 2: 2004-2013

The Witcher 3: Wild Hunt (May 2015)

Open worlds on PC reached their zenith with CD Projekt's dark fantasy. The scale of this RPG was extraordinary, but what truly defined The Witcher 3 was the texture of its world. Its landscapes weren't just beautiful, they were wild and unkempt and hostile. Its story wasn't just dramatic, it was tender, nuanced, heartwarming and heartbreaking. The quality wasn't limited to the main plot, but virtually every side quest too. It may be a game about a mutant slaying monsters, but The Witcher 3 is one of the most human games ever produced by a big-budget studio.

Steam hardware (November 2015)

Valve first crossed the line from software developer to hardware designer with three devices: the Steam Link, Steam Controller, and Steam Machines. It was Valve's first stab at building a console-like experience around PC gaming, without actually making a console. Unsurprisingly, this half-measured approach didn't catch on, and Steam Machines had all but vanished from Steam by 2018. That said, the Steam Link was a genuinely neat piece of hardware, and Valve's hardware aspirations would see much greater success in the years to come.

PUBG: Battlegrounds (December 2017)

Perhaps the most recent game to cause a paradigm shift in how mainstream titles are designed, PlayerUnknown's Battlegrounds emerged from the inhumane chaos of DayZ, Bohemia Interactive's multiplayer zombie survival mod for ArmA 2. In DayZ's world, survival was the only goal, and in achieving this you could be as cruel and treacherous to other players as you liked.

PUBG basically took this idea and formalised it into a round-based scenario. The same large, post-military world, the same large number of players. But now players had to compete with one another in a gradually shrinking playspace until only one of them was left. And lo! The battle royale genre was born.

PUBG's impact was as enormous as it was rapid. In the battle royale formula, Epic saw an opportunity to turn around the ailing fortunes of its Minecraft-inspired survival game Fortnite, creating one of today's biggest blockbusters. Respawn applied its unrivalled FPS talents to the formula, producing arguably the best battle royale game in Apex Legends. Even Activision stood up and took notice, building the hugely successful, if variably good, Call of Duty: Warzone.

The success of battle royale lies in its balance of scale and accessibility. These games have the footprint of an MMO or a shared-world shooter, but don't demand the same commitment. They have events and seasonal changes, but don't require that you follow along with every step. Perhaps that's why battle royale has thrived in recent year, while so many looter-shooters and MMOs have struggled.

Geforce RTX 2080 (September 2018)

PC gaming has long been at the cutting-edge of graphics technology, but the rate at which visual fidelity increases has been flattening over the last decade. Back in the '90s, just four years took you from the 2.5D hellscape of Doom to the fully 3D, hardwareaccelerated sci-fi nightmare of Quake 2. Then it all went quiet.

Which is why the advent of ray tracing in 2018 felt like such a big deal. Here was a technology that seemed a genuine leap forward: true, pathtraced real-time lighting that accurately simulates how light bounces off surfaces to create shadows, reflections, and refractions. Games had become very good at faking these things, but here was a technology that did it for real.

In practice, the ray-tracing revolution has been more of a spirited argument. The improvements ray tracing brings can often be hard to discern. Moreover, the performance cost for often slight improvements was enormous, and on early RTX cards like the 2080 were often not worth the enhancements they provided.

Modern ray-tracing also raises other questions, such as whether or not an all-purpose lighting solution is always beneficial for how games look. Yes, putting real-time lighting into games like Quake 2 and Minecraft is a cool trick, but it also fundamentally compromises the aesthetic of those games. The recently released Counter-Strike 2 uses old-fashioned baked lighting, and not only does it look fantastic, it looks fantastic in the way a Source engine game should. As is always the case, good technology is nothing without good implementation. That said, when it is used correctly, like in Cyberpunk 2077, ray tracing can be absolutely mindblowing.

Disco Elysium (October 2019)

Role-playing games inherently involve experimenting with alternate personalities. But few are as fundamentally about personal identity as Disco Elysium. The detective RPG from Slovakian developer ZA/UM plunges so deeply into your sense of self that your inner thoughts have inner thoughts. Playing as an alcoholic cop who goes on a bender so extreme it wipes his entire memory, you must solve the murder of a man found hanging in a tree while also solving the mystery of who the heck you are.

Many RPGs have your character start out as a blank slate, but in Disco Elysium you are a shattered slate, your mind a million shards. Every character skill relates to a fragment of your disassembled self, and each of those has its own voice. Your logic skill, for example, will help you solve conundrums. Your electro-chemistry skill, by comparison, will go hog-wild whenever you spy drugs or alcohol, begging you to indulge. It's up to you which parts of your mind you listen to, and what kind of detective forms from that.

Disco Elysium combines this with a literary approach to narrative design that is both hilarious and achingly astute in its perception of its own dilapidated world. It's an expressly political affair. The game's central murder takes place in a city district living in the shadow of a failed communist revolution, the bones slowly being picked clean by corrupt unions and external capitalist interests. These politics play into your character too, with the game letting you affect various political stances and explore their ideologies, contradictions, and consequences.

It's a truly singular experience, although that description has gained more literal significance lately. The game's legacy has been marred by a split within ZA/UM between its creative director and the company's own directors and investors. That story is a messy one, but it ends with the sad truth that we're unlikely to see a sequel.

That makes Disco Elysium all the more unique, a reminder that good RPG design is about the paths you give a player to follow, not the amount of real-estate available to explore. If more recent events are anything to go by, it's an idea that might be catching on again.

The Covid-19 pandemic (January 2020)

Covid-19 affected virtually every individual and organisation on the planet, and the games industry was no different. But the effect of the virus and the ensuing lockdowns to help protect people from it was unusual in the case of games. Covid-19 caused serious disruption to game development schedules as studios adjusted to working from home. But it also caused a massive spike in sales of games and hardware, due to the millions of additional people passing time during lockdown by playing games.

The consequences of all this are still playing out today. The delays Covid caused meant fewer games being launched in the following two years, while 2023 has seen a bumper release calendar as all those delayed games finally reached completion. On the other hand, the massive spike in gaming revenue has also flattened, resulting in widespread layoffs as companies looking to exploit short term gains during the pandemic now seek to downsize their operations to maximise their profit. It's a sharp reminder that, while business has always partly driven gaming as an artform, for some, it is exclusively a money making machine.

One positive that emerged from the pandemic, however, is an increased awareness of the risk of exploitation on the part of game developers. The post-pandemic years have seen numerous unions created at developers like Blizzard and Raven Software, with the aim of protecting workers' rights. One of the less expected effects of the pandemic was to change how people view their relationship with work, and the game industry is still wrestling with what that means for the future.

Valheim (February 2021)

Any game that brings together the building and survival systems of Minecraft with the exploration and combat of Dark Souls always had a reasonable shot at being popular, but nobody expected Iron Gate's procedural Viking simulator to become the phenomenon that it has. As well as being the perfect capstone to the design ideas that drove the 2010s, Valheim's popularity derives from being such an excellent hangout space. Its atmospheric Viking world is highly rewarding to explore with other players, and while the game bills itself as a hardcore survival experience, for the most part the only pressure is that which you choose to take on.

Steam Deck (March 2022)

Valve's answer to the Nintendo Switch is a miniature marvel of engineering, a compact yet deceptively powerful handheld that combines the portability of a handheld with the flexibility of a PC.

The success of the Steam Deck was undoubtedly assisted by launching at an opportune moment. High-end games were scarce in 2022, making it an ideal time to reunite with old favourites and catch up with the hottest indie games. The Steam Deck also happened to release alongside the perfect gaming companion, Poncle's simple yet enormously compulsive Vampire Survivors. This year's calendar of wall-to-wall blockbusters has been less well suited to the Steam Deck, but it's still a fantastic bit of hardware, and a tinkerer's delight.

Baldur's Gate 3 (August 2023)

Receiving a whopping score of 97 from PC Gamer, Baldur's Gate 3 epitomises how the PC's most traditional genres can still surprise after 30 years. This magnificent CRPG blends world-class writing, acting, and storytelling with challenging turn-based combat that brilliantly adapts D&D's toolset. Not only is the game's central narrative preposterously flexible, the world is also highly responsive to your actions.

A stone cold all-timer, it's hard to know yet what impact Baldur's Gate 3 will have. But you can guarantee it's under the microscope of every major game developer.

Cyberpunk 2077 2.0 (September 2023)

CD Projekt has long held a reputation for improving its games post-release, but Cyberpunk seemed like an insurmountable task. Alongside a list of bugs and performance issues were more fundamental problems, like underwhelming progression and a gorgeous, but lifeless, city.

Yet CD Projekt was true to its rep, and while it took three years and a countless number of eddies, the studio really did fix Cyberpunk. It's now as entertaining mechanically as it is narratively, while the world feels more alive thanks to better crowds and a proper police system. The Phantom Liberty expansion provides further enhancements, alongside a new story that's a superb complement to the original.

As PC Gamer's 30th anniversary celebrations continue, we're taking a trip back through three decades of PC gaming. In part 1, we looked at the early days of 1993-2003; now, we step firmly into the mid-2000s, and discover a game that changed everything and launched the defining PC gaming platform...

📜 Part 1: 1993-2003

📜 Part 3: 2014-2023

Half-Life 2 (November 2004)

In history there are two games industries: the one that lived before Half-Life 2, and the one that woke up after it. Half-Life 2 was the sum of all the FPS' aspirations. A realistic, contiguous 3D environment that saw players travelling through a vast and elaborate cityscape. A revolutionary physics engine that turned every object in the game world into a potential weapon. An endlessly inventive adventure in which every chapter brought new twists. A story told by characters who moved, talked, and acted like real people.

Even at a time when shooters and first-person games were constantly breaking new ground, nobody had seen anything like Half-Life 2. It was so good that Valve, with all its collective brainpower, still hasn't figured out how to make a sequel to it.

The influence of Half-Life 2 stretches as wide as it does deep. Without Half-Life 2 there'd be no Garry's Mod, no Dear Esther, no Portal, and all the games those titles inspired. But by far Half-Life 2's most significant impact was to make Steam a going concern. PC gamers may have hated taking their medicine before they could play the best game on the planet, but the additional install base Half-Life 2 provided was the first major step in transforming Steam into the behemoth it is today, and by proxy, shunting the entire medium into a digital future. Not since Doom had there been a PC game that so fundamentally changed everything, and another wouldn't come along until Minecraft.

World of Warcraft (November 2004)

World of Warcraft is a bizarre videogame phenomenon, in that it both started and ended the MMO craze of the noughties. Every publisher wanted a piece of World of Warcraft's action, but hardly any would come close to Blizzard's success. World of Warcraft opened the gates to the MMO party, then kicked the arse of anyone who tried to touch the cake.

What's especially remarkable about this is, before World of Warcraft launched, all eyes were on Everquest 2. At that time, SOE's Everquest was the best MMO going, and the sequel looked set to provide a substantial upgrade, with improved visuals and less punishing progression.

Admittedly, Everquest 2 did all those things. World of Warcraft merely did them better. Blizzard took the lessons it learned from games like Diablo and StarCraft and used them to refine everything that made MMOs fussy and obscure. Its death penalty system was both lenient and imaginative, while its auction houses made trading items with other players a breeze. Alongside this was slicker storytelling and quest design, and state-of-the art PvP that divided players into two warring factions. You could even fly across the map on mounts like gryphons.

In the end, World of Warcraft just buried Everquest 2. And it would do the same for virtually every MMO that followed in its wake. While a few titles like Guild Wars and Lord of the Rings Online were innovative or illustrious enough to cobble together a reasonable following, so many more died quietly within a few years of launch. Only Final Fantasy 14 has proved anything like competitive, and that's after the game was competely redesigned.

All the while, World of Warcraft kept on succeeding, with each expansion building upon the game's foundation, or in the case of addons like Cataclysm or Shadowlands, overhauling it entirely. Indeed, the game has changed so much that Blizzard released the original version again as WoW Classic, for players who wanted to go back to its first iteration. World of Warcraft: so good they launched it twice.

Oblivion's horse armour (April 2006)

In 2006 Bethesda was the most exciting game studio around. Its new RPG Oblivion had blown players away with its vast, beautiful, and endlessly surprising fantasy world. But Bethesda's popularity soon took a dent when it launched Oblivion's first slice of additional content. This differed in two ways from previous expansions Bethesda had made, like Tribunal and Bloodmoon for its earlier title Morrowind. First, it was delivered entirely digitally. Second, it wasn't a new island to explore or adventure to tackle. No, it was a bit of armour for your horse.

The stink this caused was unbelievable. While players weren't against paying for additional game content, the idea of shelling out money specifically for one in-game item was ludicrous. One commenter on the website 1UP around the time of release wrote, "I am going to pay a 'premium' for a nifty hat?" unwittingly predicting Valve's entire business plan for the 2010s.

Looking back now, what's most remarkable is how mundane this all seems. Today, virtually every game has optional payable content, whether it's in the form of expansions, DLC, microtransactions, battle passes, season passes, or loot boxes. It's taken as read that most games, especially bigger titles, will be orbited by a ring of fragmentary extras. A paid item being entirely cosmetic is considered a good thing, as it means players aren't missing out on a potentially meaningful feature.

What changed? Well, partly this was normalised through sheer inundation, not just of payable DLC, but of games in general. As the volume and size of available games increased, the debate over smaller pieces of payable content seemed to matter less. When you've got three 80-hour open-world games on the go, plus 100 hours in a free-to-play shooter, the option to buy an extra suit in one of those games doesn't seem so offensive.

That said, paid extras can still be contentious. Loot boxes remain controversial due to the gambling element that plays into them. Star Wars: Battlefront (2017) was savaged for its cynical loot box implementation, a criticism that stained the game's reputation long after it was resolved. Which goes to show, you're only one shortsighted business decision away from becoming the next bit of horse armour.

Dwarf Fortress (August 2006)

Never has a game been so simultaneously behind and ahead of the times as Dwarf Fortress. Released in 2006, Dwarf Fortress was a preposterously complex management sim at a time when management sims were out of vogue. It was a game fronted by impenetrable ASCII graphics, at a time when the industry was moving toward increased visual fidelity and streamlined interfaces.

By all rights, Dwarf Fortress should had vanished into internet obscurity. At the same time, it's quite hard to ignore a game that generates an entire history of civilisation before you start to play. Notionally about building and managing a home for a colony of dwarves, Dwarf Fortress is really an impossibly complex story engine designed to factor in every possible eventuality. It's not just a game where your dwarves fight procedurally generated monsters in a procedurally generated land, but one where they have procedurally generated personalities and can write procedurally generated poetry.

Dwarf Fortress would go on to inspire other colony sims like Prison Architect and RimWorld. These games didn't have quite the same depth as DF, but were significantly easier to grapple with. All that changed late last year, however, when Bay12 released a new version of Dwarf Fortress sporting *gasp* hand-drawn graphics and *swoon* a user interface that supported a mouse. This made Dwarf Fortress significantly more accessible, and made Bay12's designers millionaires. All it took was 20 years building the most complex game ever made.

The Orange Box (October 2007)

Valve is a company that likes to solve problems, and in 2007 the problem was that none of its current projects—Team Fortress 2, Half-Life 2: Episode Two, and a weird experiment called Portal—really felt like a full game. But Valve realised each project filled in the gaps where the others fell short. So was born the greatest videogame anthology in history.

Before launch, the headline act was Episode Two. Although Episode One hadn't been quite up to the same standard as Half-Life 2, Episode Two promised terrifying new enemies, advanced vehicular mechanics, and some big story twists.

Ultimately though, Episode Two proved the least exciting part of the box. Team Fortress 2 brought a radical new aesthetic to Valve's Quake-mod-inspired shooter, one perfectly suited for the cartoonish chaos of a multiplayer FPS. But the most astonishing of the trio was Portal, which brought a genuinely revolutionary game mechanic to the table, packaged in a brilliantly brain-teasing puzzler overseen by one of gaming's greatest comic creations.

The legacy of The Orange Box isn't entirely without blemishes. Valve's handling of Team Fortress 2 has been questionable, and Half-Life 2 never did get a proper ending. Nonetheless, The Orange Box represents Valve at the height of its creative powers, and I'd give my little finger to see the company do something this bold again.

Plants vs Zombies (May 2009)

Like Peggle before it, Plants vs Zombies was instrumental in the normalising of 'casual' games on PC. Valve's inclusion of a demo version of Peggle in The Orange Box had countless PC gamers paying attention to what PopCap would do next.

Plants vs Zombies showed that games you'd normally find free on Newgrounds.com could compete with shooters and RPGs as premium mainstream titles. Then PopCap was acquired by EA, and Plants vs Zombies disappeared into mobile-land. But the original's significance as a PC landmark remains. It's also the second best game after Portal to finish on a song.

Recettear: An Item Shop's Tale (September 2010)

You might not be familiar with Recettear, in which you play a young girl in a magical shop who explores randomised dungeons. But it's notable for being the first Japanese game to release on Steam.

Prior to this, the PC was rarely a focus for Japanese publishers. You'd occasionally see a port of a Capcom or Sega game, but that was it. Yet Steam revealed the PC market was too big to ignore. Recettear was the first crack in the dam, leading to everything from Dark Souls to Yakuza, Persona to Nier Automata arriving on the platform. You can even play Shenmue on PC now. What an age we live in.

Minecraft (November 2011)

While Minecraft officially released in late 2011, it had already been a sensation for over a year. Its highly public alpha development is one of many reasons why Mojang's cubic omni-game was revolutionary, and there's a direct line from it to today's Early Access.

It also changed the types of games being made. Minecraft's groundbreaking survival mechanics paved the way for titles like DayZ, Subnautica, and Fortnite, while its block-based building system directly influenced the likes of Factorio and Satisfactory. It's wild just how much of today's gaming landscape was shaped by Minecraft.

The Elder Scrolls V: Skyrim (November 2011)

Bethesda's finest hour. Skyrim combined the refinements of Oblivion with a less cod fantasy landscape inspired by Norse myth. The rugged mountains and misty valleys brought back some of the weirdness Bethesda had left behind in Morrowind. Also, it had dragons.

The result was a perfectly balanced RPG brew. Skyrim had just enough sharpness in its combat and intuitiveness in its systems to give it mass-market appeal, but it also had sufficient flexibility and, let's face it, inherent wonkiness to make it an internet sensation in the golden age of social media. Buckets on heads! Oaths to carry burdens! A certain projectile in a leg joint! It was the same weirdness that had been in Oblivion, but unlike in 2006, it was a lot easier to share.

Which is not to say everyone loves Skyrim purely because of the memes. So much of Skyrim's memetic potential derives from its openness, its willingness to let you bend and even break it. Nowhere is this more apparent than in Skyrim's unrivalled mod scene. From new inventories to enhanced survival systems, novel quests to entire unexplored areas. Forget waiting for The Elder Scrolls VI, you could probably assemble a sequel yourself just out of Skyrim mods.

Since Skyrim, Bethesda's games have lost some of that openness. Fallout 4 leaned far more heavily on its shooter credentials, while Starfield lacks a contiguous play-space capable of generating oddball moments. They're still decent adventures, but the sooner Bethesda gets back to The Elder Scrolls, the better.

XCOM: Enemy Unknown (October 2012)

Firaxis' reboot of Julian Gollop's 1994 game (known variously as X-COM: UFO Defense and UFO: Enemy Unknown) is another one of those great pivot moments of PC Gaming. Before XCOM, turn-based tactics was practically a forgotten genre. But Firaxis brought it screaming back, blending cinematic flair with ruthless tactical challenge to create a gripping, dynamic sci-fi drama. XCOM's tactical scenarios could deliver the kinds of shocking twists you'd normally experience in a TV show like Game of Thrones, only the characters being mercilessly slaughtered were ones you'd created, in situations you'd got them into.

XCOM also fit right into the 2010s' renewed appetite for uncompromising experiences, a more cerebral companion to the high-wire athleticism of Dark Souls. Its alien menace wasn't afraid to just beat you, but to humiliate you too, and even the best outcomes came with losses. As such, completing a mission in XCOM always felt like a huge achievement. And winning a campaign? Well, pat yourself right on the back.

In the wake of XCOM, turn-based tactics went from forgotten genre to arguably the dominant strategy mode for the next decade, inspiring everything from Gears Tactics to Invisible, Inc. Turn-based tactics even began infiltrating other genres. Role-playing games like Wasteland 2 and Baldur's Gate 3 owe as much to XCOM as they do the CRPGs of the '90s. Going forward, the 2010s would see a string of highly successful reboots, including Tomb Raider, Wolfenstein: The New Order and Doom, but none of them were as transformative as Firaxis' tactical masterpiece. Hurry up Commander, we need you back.

Steam Early Access starts (March 2013)

Although Minecraft first seeded the idea of paying for an incomplete game, it was Valve that formalised the concept. In March 2013, 12 games launched as part of Steam's Early Access programme, letting developers sell unfinished titles, using player funds and feedback to complete the project. The list included ArmA 3, Kerbal Space Program, and Prison Architect.

The idea of paying for unfinished games risked further fragmentation of games as a product, a process that had already begun with DLC and microtransactions. There was a fear developers might abuse the system to escape scrutiny, responding to criticism of flawed or poor design with "it's not finished", or simply taking the money and running.

And Steam Early Access has been misused on occasion. But, on the whole, has been a huge net positive for PC gaming. Of the 13 games that originally launched in Steam Early Access, three eventually ceased development, but ten saw full launches, and at least one, Kerbal Space Program, is among the greatest PC games ever made. That's not to mention all the brilliant games to emerge from Early Access since, like Slay the Spire, Vampire Survivors, and of course Baldur's Gate 3.

Rather than representing a threat to how games are made, Early Access acknowledges the highly iterative and collective nature of game development. Whether a game is finished or not comes down to one thing, the developer's choice, and Steam Early Access simply helped expand their options.

Oculus Rift DK1 (March 2013)

You could play a crude VR version of Half-Life 2 on the Oculus Developer's Kit 1. It was grainy, it was disorienting, and it made some feel sick. But the Combine soldiers were actually human-sized, the vertical drops made stomachs lurch, and the headcrabs leaping at your face were terrifying.

In 2013, it felt like virtual reality would take over the world. Physical and economic limitations have prevented a VR revolution, but the tech is nonetheless a well-established part of PC gaming today. If nothing else, VR brought us a whole new Half-Life game, Half-Life: Alyx, every bit as brilliant as the first two.

Head to part 3 for 2014 onwards.

If you haven't heard, PC Gamer turns 30 this month. But it wouldn't be right to celebrate our own anniversary without celebrating 30 years of PC gaming itself too. There's too much history to truly cover it all, so we've decided to focus in on some of the most pivotal moments—the games and software that defined each era, the hardware that let us run it, and the events and moments that made us look at them in new ways. Let's kick it off with the first decade, 1993-2003, and the game that started it all for so many of us...

📜 Part 2: 2004-2013

📜 Part 3: 2014-2023

Doom (December 1993)

Strictly speaking, PC gaming didn’t start with Doom. Spiritually though, it absolutely did. Doom embodies so much of what would define PC gaming across the next three decades. Its cutting-edge tech established the PC’s reputation as a premium gaming platform. Its immersive, satisfying gunplay made first-person shooters the PC’s mascot genre. Its emphasis on violence and horror expanded the medium’s reputation beyond a pastime for children. It even took the first steps toward online multiplayer.

Doom’s influence on PC gaming cannot be overstated. Yet what’s most remarkable about id Software’s landmark shooter is its sheer sticking power. Far from being a fondly remembered relic, Doom is one of the most widely playable games in existence, having been ported not just to every gaming platform, but every piece of technology with a screen. Its engine, made open source in a truly visionary move by John Carmack, birthed the PC’s unique, endlessly creative modding scene. Doom mods are still making waves today. There are even whole new games being made in Doom’s engine, like ambitious shooter Selaco, due out next year. 

While Doom’s cultural omnipresence is remarkable, it can make it easy to lose sight of the game at the centre of it all, which remains a fantastic experience today. Although visually primitive by modern standards, mechanically it retains its delicate balance of weight, flow, and reactivity. Its weapon roster is still the blueprint for most single-player shooters, while its shotgun remains the baseline for all videogame firearms, and its 3D mazes still have much to teach about level design. 

Moreover, for all the games that have imitated it, Doom’s distinctive atmosphere and pacing have proved oddly hard to replicate. Even its own follow-ups fell to either side of the original’s distinctive blend of action and horror. Thirty years on, there is still something elusive at the heart of Doom, which more than anything else is what defines it as a masterwork.

E3 begins (June 1995)

To understand the significance of E3’s arrival, you need to know how games were treated before E3, at other technology trade shows like CES. “In 1991, they put us in a tent,” said Sega America’s then CEO Tom Kalinske, “You had to walk past all the porn vendors to find us. That particular year it was pouring rain, and the rain leaked right over our new Genesis system. I was just furious with the way CES treated the videogame industry, and I felt we were a more important industry than they were giving us credit for.”

The first E3 was born as a response to this kind of treatment, a trade show designed to promote gaming’s growing commercial and cultural significance, rather than obscure it. Held from May 11-13 at the Los Angeles Convention Centre, the first E3 saw exhibitions by the likes of Sega, Nintendo, Sony, Activision, EA, Capcom, Microsoft, and LucasArts. Showcased PC games included Descent, Discworld, Wing Commander 3, and Syndicate Wars.

Although technically a trade show meant for industry professionals, E3’s cultural significance gradually broadened, gaining global public attention after the turn of the millennium. Simple game and console showcases morphed into extravagant stage presentations by big publishers. E3 could even affect how games were made, with huge amounts of developer resources being funnelled into making an E3 demo that would wow people. Having the public’s eyes on E3 was something its organisers were dubious about, and between 2008 and 2010 the show was closed to all but handful of professionals, with attendance dropping by 90 percent. 

While it's been largely dominated by console manufacturers, E3 has witnessed some explosive PC gaming moments, like the positively futuristic demo of Doom 3 in 2002, and the hugely anticipated showing of Half-Life 2 the following year. In 2015, the PC Gaming Show was launched in association with PC Gamer, bringing attention to all the fantastic PC games that don’t have a massive publisher behind them.

In 2020, E3 was cancelled for the first time due to the Covid pandemic, and with the exception of an online event the following year, the show hasn’t returned since. While there have been events in its place like Summer Games Fest, nothing has yet managed to replicate E3’s collective celebration of videogames. We can only hope that it returns someday.

Quake (June 1996)

While there are many shooters like Doom, there’s nothing quite like Quake. With its peculiar mix of gothic fantasy and industrial horror, id Software’s 1996 shooter remains a singular entity in the annals of the FPS. Even its own developer has never revisited the series’ original design, choosing instead to go down a more sci-fi route for the sequel.

Perhaps that’s because Quake was born from id Software’s tensions as much as its talent. With a lengthy (for the time) development cycle, Quake’s creation was plagued by multiple redesigns and personality conflicts, culminating in John Romero’s departure from the company. It’s one of the earliest insights into the mounting pressures upon blockbuster game developers, which would only increase as ambitions, budgets, and development cycles ballooned.

Nonetheless, Quake is still a landmark entry in the gaming canon. Its true 3D graphics engine represented a huge advance over Doom. It was also the first id game to feature mouselook, bringing added responsiveness and verticality to its gunplay. Special mention should be given to Trent Reznor’s buzzing, ominous soundtrack, which remains one of the most distinctive musical scores of any game.

Of course, Quake’s most significant contribution to the PC gaming landscapes was its multiplayer. John Carmack’s revolutionary netcode made Quake playable across dial-up internet connections, paving the way for everything from Counter-Strike to Call of Duty. Its fast-paced, competitive deathmatch also saw the earliest pro gamers rise to prominence, like Dennis 'Thresh' Fong and Stevie 'KillCreek' Case, laying the groundwork for today’s global esports scene

Ultima Online (September 1997)

Ultima Online was to MMOs what Doom was to first-person shooters. It may not be the original massively multiplayer game, but it was the first to demonstrate they could have global appeal. While Ultima takes place in a typical fantasy world, it’s closer in spirit—mechanically speaking—to EVE Online than World of Warcraft, a player-driven sandbox with a dynamic economy and persistent housing for its players. The game was also the scene of gaming’s most famous instance of griefing, when Origin co-founder Richard Garriot’s "Lord British" avatar was assassinated during a beta test. The more things change…

Fallout (October 1997)

When Fallout arrived in late 1997, the CRPG was dead. PC gaming was all about action and attitude in the '90s, and Fallout’s success came from channelling some of that attitude back into the RPG. Its satirical post-apocalypse and snappy branching narrative let players be a badass, a hardass, a dumbass, and every kind of ass in between. Fallout’s isometric perspective and adaptive quest design made it the template for the modern CRPG, and its legacy is still visible in games like Baldur’s Gate 3.

Voodoo2 (March 1998)

The Voodoo Graphics card from 3dfx introduced hardware acceleration in 1997, but it was the Voodoo2 that really showed what GPUs could do. Not only did it boost resolutions from 640x480 to 800x600, but you could pair two of them together to crank that up to 1024x768. The Voodoo2 also supported dual texturing per pixel, which made games like Quake 2 and Unreal look phenomenal. The Voodoo2 represented the most dramatic advancement in computer graphics since the advent of 3D, and catalysed the advancement of computer graphics across the next decade. Sadly, 3dfx wouldn’t survive to see it.

StarCraft (March 1998)

Today StarCraft is best known for two things: its national following in South Korea, and the resulting esports scene. But there’s a reason why StarCraft could capture the hearts of a nation: it’s the RTS honed to perfection. Blizzard took the fundamentals already refined in its WarCraft series, and transposed them into a vibrant sci-fi universe centred around three asymmetric factions. Mastering their particularities is what kept players coming back for the next decade, and what ultimately made StarCraft one of the keystones of the nascent esports scene. Even after the colossal success of StarCraft II, the original remains reasonably popular in its spiritual homeland

Thief: The Dark Project (December 1998)

Looking Glass’ gothic fantasy was a dedicated sneaking simulation. Its lighting system let players disappear into the shadows, while its advanced audio propagation meant every step you took had to be carefully considered. It also features some of the best 3D level design around. Missions like Assassins and The Sword have become key reference points in the level design handbook. Thief’s framework would filter through to pretty much any game where the screen goes slightly darker when you crouch. Yet while countless games include stealth in their toolset, Thief remains the best dedicated stealth adventure in existence

Age of Empires 2: The Age of Kings (September 1999)

Twenty years after its release, Age of Empires 2 is still getting expansions. That’s a testament to how universally beloved the historical RTS is. Age of Kings brought the series from the slightly stuffy classical era into the more popular Middle Ages, adding new features like advanced AI, improved isometric visuals, and the ability to build big-ass castles. In more recent years, Age of Kings has received not one but two overhauls. The HD edition launched in 2013, while a Definitive Edition released in 2019, introducing new playable factions and new campaigns. Few games have stood the test of time this well.

GameMaker releases (November 1999)

In the 1990s, there were two ways into game development. Either you learned to code, or you learned how to mod. Then, in 1999, a Dutch scientist named Mark Overmars released a simple graphics tool called Animo. The tool gathered some attention, and Overmars began adding new features like a particle system and networking. He also changed its name to GameMaker, which in time would become emblematic of the democratisation of game development. Since 2007, GameMaker has been developed by Dundee-based company YoYo Games, and has been used to make games like Hotline Miami, Gunpoint, and Undertale.

Deus Ex (June 2000)

Deus Ex represents the culmination of PC gaming’s innovations throughout the 1990s. Here was a game that gave you the shooting of Doom, the sneaking of Thief, the ability to talk your way around a problem à la Fallout, all in one astonishing package.

It was a long-awaited triumph for the immersive sim, an offshoot of the RPG that emphasised systems-driven worlds designed to facilitate player agency. Immersive sims had been pioneered by Looking Glass Studios throughout the 1990s in games like Ultima Underworld and System Shock. Yet while beloved by those in the know, their commercial success had been negligible.

Deus Ex boasted greater ambition and flexibility than those games, but it also took place in a more relatable world. A near-future cyberpunk dystopia where every conspiracy theory you can imagine was true, Deus Ex’s world was governed by shadowy organisations, fought over by rogue AIs, and ravaged by a pandemic. In an age of online misinformation, its perspective on conspiracy theories can seem a little quaint, but it’s also startlingly relevant in places. It has nuanced discussions about how power structures work, how government can slide into dictatorship, the problems of unregulated technology, the surveillance state, and so much more.

Sadly, Deus Ex’s success didn’t lead to a new golden age of immersive sims. Yet it was influential enough to keep the flame alight, leading to several excellent follow-ups (and Invisible War) while also influencing games like Dishonored and Cyberpunk 2077. But the original remains the genre’s best mix of intricate systems and insightful storytelling.

Windows XP (August 2001)

Microsoft’s Windows OS was transformative for PC gaming, offering a level of stability, compatibility, and accessibility that simply didn’t exist in the era of DOS. Gone were the days of typing text commands to install and boot games, getting it wrong several times, then throwing your keyboard out the window.

Although Windows 95 represents the key turning point from command lines to icons, Windows XP is Microsoft’s crowning achievement in OS design. Its UI replaced the unsightly grey boxes of old with a sleek, colourful, and above all intuitive design. It overhauled the Start menu introduced in Windows 95, adding the two-column layout. It also introduced a bunch of new features like taskbar window grouping and fast user switching.

But what made XP such a triumph was its reliability. At a time when every PC game came with the risk that it might Just Not Work, XP proved remarkably compatible. Even games that were years old by that point, like Quake and Half-Life, would generally run without complaint.

XP was the first truly modern PC OS, and its quality is evident in its longevity. Microsoft continued official support for XP until 2012. By comparison, Windows 95’s support ended just six years after its launch. XP’s reliability helped power Microsoft through the embarrassment that was Vista. Even when the much-improved Windows 7 released, many users stuck with XP until the death.

Battlefield 1942 (September 2002)

The turn of the millennium saw PC gaming ask itself two big questions. The first was “What if you could play multiplayer shooters in teams?” while the second was “What would it be like to fight in the Second World War?”.

Battlefield 1942 answered both these questions simultaneously. In doing so, it spawned one of gaming’s biggest franchises. Battlefield took the renewed interest in WWII spawned by Saving Private Ryan (and in the PC gaming sphere, Medal of Honor: Allied Assault) combined it with the PC’s rapidly advancing multiplayer capabilities that facilitated games like Unreal Tournament, Counter-Strike, and Team Fortress, and then massively blew out the scale.

Not only did it support whopping 64-player battles, but those players could traverse vast, open-ended maps in vehicles like tanks and planes. The result was an unprecedented virtual cauldron for brewing player-driven action. A match of Battlefield was a thousand tales written and told simultaneously by amorphous groups of players. That time you took out a Stuka with an AA gun, or when you coordinated an armoured assault on a control point with your mates, or when you held off the German advance at El Alamein. 

Battlefield has been a staple of PC gaming ever since, and while the quality of the individual games may vary, its core appeal has never diminished. Its influence is also undeniable: games like PUBG and Apex Legends owe an enormous debt to Battlefield’s open-ended multiplayer design, while even Call of Duty has taken a lesson or two from DICE in recent years.

EVE Online (May 2003)

Many games promise freedom, but EVE is one of the few that truly commits to it. Launched as a space MMO with a player-driven economy and an emphasis on PvP combat, what has come to define it are the shenanigans of its player-operated corporations. EVE Online’s virtual history is riddled with ambitious heists, daring assassinations, elaborate spy-games, and enormous space battles. There have even been times when its players have taken the fight directly to the developers. It’s a game built not just for the community, but around it, with developers CCP responding to players’ actions and treating them as part of the design.

Valve releases Steam (September 2003)

Valve's distribution service was never intended to be the gaming bazaar that it is today. It was made to solve a simple problem: how to patch Valve's multiplayer games in the most efficient manner possible.

The earliest version of Steam had no store, no community features, and certainly no trading cards. It was also roundly hated at a time when most homes still lacked internet connections, and was seen as a draconian anti-piracy measure, a threat to the freedom of PC gaming.

Eventually, Steam would completely change how PC games are purchased, owned, played, and even made. All largely because of a certain game that arrived the following year: Half-Life 2.

Call of Duty (October 2003)

Today Call of Duty is known for its world-conquering multiplayer. But in 2003 it was the cinematic campaign everyone was excited about. Hot off the heels of Medal of Honor: Allied Assault and its recreation of Saving Private Ryan’s Omaha Beach landing, designers Jason West and Vince Zampella created a new studio. Call of Duty cast Allied Assault’s filmic eye across three campaigns, fighting through the hedgerows of Normandy as the Americans, assaulting the bridges of Holland as the Brits, and enduring the carnage of Stalingrad as the Soviets. It was a thunderous airstrike of a game, and for better or worse, the FPS hasn’t been the same since.

Head to part 2 for 2004 onwards.

The imminent launch of Baldur's Gate 3 has filled my head with thoughts of elves and dragons and enchanted swords, all of which I've realised I'm utterly exhausted by. My tolerance for fantasy inspired by European folklore and Tolkien has entirely run out, leaving me wishing game developers would delve into weirder places to look for a new muse. 

Baldur's Gate is, of course, beholden to an existing universe, one of the most familiar ones, so these mainstays are inevitable. But the world of Toril, where the Forgotten Realms are situated, is one of the least exciting locations in D&D, especially when compared to the wonderful mess of the planes or the void between worlds that plays host to Spelljammer campaigns. Gimme some of that cosmic fantasy.

That said, Larian deserves credit for still embracing the odder side of D&D. The focus on mind flayers and body horror, the introduction of characters like The Dark Urge and, of course, having sex with a druid using the Wild Shape spell ensure that Baldur's Gate 3 stands out. The studio is clearly having a lot of fun within this otherwise conventional setting and trying to push it in unusual directions. But we are still inundated with the overly familiar, where even the most celebrated of fantasy games feel obstinately conservative, ticking off a dizzying array of ancient tropes.

Traditional fantasy isn't inherently shit. I'm always going to be fond of dwarves, and not just because they're frequently presented as Scottish. It's just that so many games, films and books end up retelling the same stories—ones as old as Lord of the Rings, which itself owes a huge debt to folklore. Their impact has been dramatically lessened by oversaturation and an overzealous fixation on racial traits: elves are haughty, dwarves are taciturn and greedy, orcs are bad and dumb. This makes even new tales seem staid and predictable. 

It's one of the reasons I still cling to Morrowind, a land where people live inside carapaces in a volcanic desert, where wizards fall from the sky, and where public transport is dominated by large, adorable bugs. And it's proof that you don't need to toss out every single familiar element just to make a place feel alien. You've still got your prophecies, lots of lots of elves, schools of magic—but it never stops being delightfully weird. Mind you, getting rid of some of those things would still be welcome.

Unfortunately, Bethesda ended up going in the opposite direction. When it followed up Morrowind with Oblivion (a big European forest) and Skyrim (Scandinavia) I didn't suddenly kick the series to the curb, but my enthusiasm for exploring these locations never reached the heights of my journey through their predecessor. I'd seen the light, and generic fantasy ceased to float my boat. 

For those looking for a mix of classic fantasy and lots of novelties, Shadowrun has a lot to offer. This tabletop setting, which has inspired a variety of videogames, including the excellent Shadowrun: Dragonfall and Shadowrun: Hong Kong, splices urban fantasy with elves and orcs. Big corporations run the show, but they exist in a world where magic is very real and where they might be hacked by a cybernetically enhanced dwarf. This combination of cyberpunk and traditional fantasy results in a unique concoction with plenty of surprises bubbling to the surface.

Even more than sci-fi, fantasy allows creators to eschew the rules of reality, where anything can make sense if you give it enough context. But it often feels like developers want to make fantasy settings even more familiar, encapsulated by the trend of tackling issues affecting the real world, like how the plight of Dragon Age's elves mirrors real-world bigotry and colonialism.

Now, fantasy has always had something to say about real issues—like Lord of the Rings' critique of industrialisation—and that shouldn't stop. This kind of grounding can help us more easily make sense of these fictional places. But when it's combined with so many other tropes, it leaves me desperate for some escapism.

Failbetter's Fallen London setting, which spawned Sunless Sea and Sunless Skies, is perhaps my favourite example of a world that strikes the perfect balance between the familiar and the alien. It has all the trappings of Victorian London, but a Victorian London that was dragged beneath the ground by bats, which sits next door to Hell, where devils were once bees. It is, at all times, unhinged and surprising, now boasting multiple games full of indescribable horrors and oddities. And its brand of horror is novel, too, looking beyond the usual sources of inspiration.

At a time when Lovecraft is a touchstone for so many videogames, Failbetter instead looks to writers like China Mieville, whose weird tales are even more bizarre and unsettling, but without the pervasive racism. I was rereading Mieville's Perdido Street Station recently and there's still nothing like it. Instead of elves casting spells, you've got scarab-headed women making art out of fruit and saliva, murderous betentacled moths who can get you high from their excrement and a dog possessed by a sentient hand. With every chapter there's something new to wrap your head around, but rarely does it ever get too baffling.

That, I suspect, is a fear developers have when crafting a setting: "If we go too weird, will players just get confused?" For the likes of BioWare and Bethesda in particular, they're interested in something with a broad appeal. When you enter a world heavily inspired by old fantasy tropes, you immediately understand it. Instead of spending ages swotting up on esoteric lore, you can just start stabbing stuff with your enchanted sword. But I'm convinced developers can have their cake and eat it too.

Just look at the success of Elden Ring, a game where the narrative is anything but explicit and you make friends with a heroic jar full of blood/wine/whatever that is. Now it is baffling, but that didn't stop a vast number of people from becoming absolutely obsessed with it. There's not just space for the weird, there's a hunger for it.

It's not just more oddities that I desperately want, though. It's new experiences. At the very least, it's about time for more fantasy games to leave Europe behind. The well of European folklore has well and truly run dry. That's why I'm excited about The Wagadu Chronicles, an afrofantasy MMO inspired by African mythology. And it's intriguing beyond the setting, promising a world where players are fully in control, even playing the role of NPCs with emergent quests.

The Wagadu Chronicles is not alone in shining a light on the folklore of other places, but this task is mostly left to smaller, independent studios who don't have the budget to spend on huge marketing campaigns and probably won't ever get introduced on stage by the likes of Geoff Keighley. It's not enough that they're getting made; they also need more attention, more influence and the kind of success that will inspire risk-averse, larger studios to follow suit. 

In the meantime, I guess I'll just fire up Morrowind again. 

My earliest PC gaming memories are haunted by a shipwrecked sailor, stuck on a desert island. For the longest time I couldn’t remember who this specter of my gaming past was. His bedraggled appearance and amusing antics—building sand castles and feuding with a seagull that wanted to sit on his hat—didn’t belong to the first level of the original Duke Nukem (which I never got past), or any other childhood  favorites. Not Chopper Commando, not Lighthouse: the Dark Being, and not Quest for Glory. 

This mystery sailor remained shipwrecked in my brain, and after years of ignoring him, I finally dedicated myself to unraveling the mystery on a slow afternoon: His name was Johnny Castaway, and he wasn’t actually from a game at all, but instead a screensaver released in 1992 by Sierra On-Line.

Screensavers are nearly forgotten today. Older gamers may fondly remember flying toasters and tangled masses of colorful pipes, but modern displays have no need to prevent burn-in like now-obsolete plasma and CRT monitors. But Johnny Castaway didn’t share much in common with the typical '90s screensaver. 

When it was released in 1992, Johnny Castaway marketed itself as "the world’s first storytelling screensaver" and the description was apt. Stuck on a tiny desert island with a single coconut tree, Johnny was a bearded man in battered shorts and a sea captain's hat. Every time the screensaver would start, you would get a glimpse into Johnny’s ongoing predicament, watching as he climbed his tree for coconuts, tried to start a fire, and failed at fighting off a seagull.

Other screensavers had done something vaguely similar to what Johnny Castaway did, like the ‘Mystery’ module from the After Dark screensaver collection which showed various ‘spooky’ scenes at a haunted house. But no other screensaver came close to the narrative and presentation of Johnny Castaway, which blends smaller randomized scenes with larger story segments and a day/night cycle based on the system clock. Johnny’s stories were amusing and low stakes—falling in love with a mermaid, trying to build a raft, or sleeping through potential rescues—but they made me want to come back.

While I had no control over what Johnny would do, the way the storytelling was slowly fed to me morphed Johnny Castaway into a game in my young mind. I "played" it by finding ways to sneak in to catch what Johnny was up to on my dad’s state of the art Windows 3.1 laptop. I never knew how many scenes there were or what I'd missed, and that uncertainty sparked my imagination 

Johnny Castaway narrowly predated a whole swath of innovation in digital companions. Virtual (or desktop) pets grew to have proper gameplay and encompass a lot more than a lonely shipwrecked guy, with the Petz games releasing in 1995, followed by Tamagotchi becoming a massive fad in 1996 and 1997. The web-based Neopets followed. Quasi-spyware Bonzi Buddy, Clippy the Microsoft Office assistant, and The Sims franchise all have roots in the world of virtual pets. Most of them were far more complex than Sierra's, so why was the simpler Johnny Castaway stuck in my head?

Recommended daily shipwrecks

After finding my white whale, I discovered that Johnny Castaway was still surprisingly popular. I wanted to install this computing relic again to revisit it, but I figured a 16-bit screensaver released in 1992 had about as much chance of running on my modern 64-bit installation of Windows 10 as poor Johnny did of escaping his island. But fans have figured out a workaround, and Johnny Castaway has a preconfigured install that launches it inside DOSBox and lets you select it as a screensaver, even on 64-bit Windows. They rescued Johnny and then dumped him right back on the same island, but stranded in a more modern sea.

Below: Some other virtual pets from the '90s

Johnny Castaway’s producer Jeff Tunnell was asked about the screensaver's longevity in 2022 and posted the Q&A on his website, wherein even he seemed surprised. "I never expected Johnny Castaway to become the underground cult hit that it became," he wrote. "Of course, you always want a product to be successful, and JC was. The only surprise was how long it lasted."

In many ways, Johnny Castaway is a running gag with only one note. He tries to do something—whether fishing or escaping the island—and fails at it. But Johnny Castaway understands the secret to success of a running gag is not in the gag itself, but in the things that support it. 

Gilligan’s Island revolved around the difficulties in being stranded on a tiny island. For three seasons, the cast would try and fail to escape, and the humor was in the increasingly silly ways that their plans would fail and the absurd nature of their existence, right down to the coconut radios. The fact that Johnny never escaped was a core feature of his story, just like Gilligan and crew. 

My glimpses into Johnny’s world were always stolen: A few minutes while my dad played dominoes with his friends or while he went to get the mail. Once I showed it to some friends, and we gathered around the laptop screen, basking in the glow of the 16 standard Windows colors while a weird little digital man angrily stomped on his sand castle.

Johnny Castaway stuck with me because my mind was forced into creativity: I imagined a whole game, a whole world, around my shipwrecked pal. I must not be the only one, because the pioneering desktop companion is still alive, in that 64-bit port of the original screensaver, a disassembled version you can run in your browser, and even his very own Team Fortress 2 spray. Technology may have moved on, but Johnny's always right where he should be: on his island, trying to woo a mermaid onto shore for dinner.

The first edition of tabletop wargame Warhammer 40,000 nailed the setting's tone right away. The 1987 book described humanity's future in bleak terms, summing up what it's like to be a citizen of the Imperium with the words, "To be a man in such times is to be one amongst untold billions. It is to live in the cruelest and most bloody regime imaginable."

The back cover blurb was no less pessimistic. "There is no time for Peace," it declared. "No respite, No forgiveness. There is only WAR."

Though frequently balanced by a tongue-in-cheek sense of the absurd, the various adaptations of Warhammer 40,000 that followed delighted in its grimness. In the board game Space Hulk, doomed space marines are beamed onto derelict craft in oversized power armor and then hunted by aliens through corridors they can barely turn around in. In the Eisenhorn novels, an Imperial Inquisitor who is so scarred by torture he loses the ability to smile makes compromise after compromise until he's indistinguishable from those he used to hunt. In the miniatures game Necromunda, the underclass at the bottom of the hive city live on food made from the recycled dead. You can practically hear the creators striving to outdo each other.

At their best, videogames have taken the same glee in depicting this baroque world, its cursed inhabitants, and their awful fates. At other times they seem more like the COOL ROBOT meme with power armor on. There are a lot of them; they can't all be winners.

The Criteria

Number of entries: 53. New and moved entries in the latest update are marked with a 💀.

What's included: Every Warhammer 40,000 game on PC, including those in the Horus Heresy setting, which rewinds the clock 10,000 years to depict the downfall of the Imperium and how it got so messed up.

What's not included: Games that were canceled before full release like the MOBA Dark Nexus Arena, which was briefly available in early access. Standalone expansions like Dawn of War: Dark Crusade and Inquisitor – Prophecy are considered as part of the original game, like regular expansions. Games in the Old World and Age of Sigmar settings are in a separate ranking of every Warhammer Fantasy game.

And now: Every Warhammer 40,000 game, ranked from worst to best.

53. Carnage Champions (2016) 

Roadhouse Games

Carnage Champions was a sidescrolling autorunner, Canabalt with a thunder hammer and a heavy metal soundtrack. At some point the server was taken offline and now this game—this entirely singleplayer game, I should note—no longer runs whether you got the free-to-play mobile version or paid actual money for the now-delisted Steam version. This, obviously, sucks.

52. Kill Team (2014) 

Nomad Games/Sega

No relation to the tabletop game called Kill Team that lets you play 40K on a budget, this is a twin-stick shooter made with repackaged assets courtesy of Relic's far superior games Dawn of War 2 and Space Marine. The co-op is local only, which is a shame, and checkpoints before boss introductions instead of after them are always annoying, but what really sinks it is the camera consistently swinging into the worst positions. You'll be staring at some pipes and a gantry while 15 orks shout the same recycled "Waaagh!" and murder you somewhere in the blackness that's taken over the rest of your screen.

51. Talisman: The Horus Heresy (2016) 

Nomad Games
Steam

Games Workshop released the first version of Talisman: The Magical Quest Game in 1983. It was a race-to-the-center board game, half of which you spent finding a talisman to let you access the middle of the board, and the other half not letting someone else steal it from you. Even if the other players didn't drag you down, the luck of the cards and dice would. It was fantasy Snakes & Ladders with PvP.

This videogame reskins it with The Horus Heresy, a prequel setting 10,000 years in 40K's past that's been the basis for a huge amount of novels, some of which are actually quite good. It's an even more desperate and serious version of Warhammer 40,000, completely at odds with a chaotic beer-and-pretzels game about chucking dice and laughing at your latest misfortune. In the original board game players got turned into toads on the regular. In Talisman: The Horus Heresy someone might find a card that gives them +1 to the Resource stat and consider it an exciting turn.

50. Space Hulk: Vengeance of the Blood Angels (1996)

Krisalis/Electronic Arts

This was the second attempt at adapting the board game Space Hulk, and the worst. It's a first-person shooter where you control a squad, except the first six missions of the campaign don't actually let you. Once you're finally allowed to take command, you lead them by pausing to drop commands on the map, which is less innovative than its 1993 predecessor—which had a realtime/turn-based combo—and less satisfying than having full control over them would be.

The big problem with Vengeance of the Blood Angels is that it came out when 3D graphics and CD audio were new and experimental and rarely any good. Everything's stuttery and enemies awkwardly pop into rendered CG when they're close enough for a melee animation. The marines are chatty, but their dialogue is stitched together from samples. The way they bark "SAPHON / search this area for / AN ARCHIVED RECORD" and "I haven't found / AN ARCHIVED RECORD" at each other will make you long for their death, especially when BETH-OR! shouts his name with the same cadence every time he's selected. It's entirely charmless, and not worth setting up the virtual machine you'll need to get it running today.

49. Space Wolf (2017) 

HeroCraft PC

40K + XCOM is such an obvious idea the Steam Workshop is full of mods for XCOM 2 that combine the two. Games that attempt the same have been a mixed bag. Space Wolf looks the part, even zooming in on dramatic attacks just like XCOM does, but it doesn't play the part nearly as well.

The levels are tiny, which makes weapon ranges weird—a boltgun is only able to shoot four squares, and I've done vomits with longer reach than that—and when new enemies spawn they're immediately next to you. Plus, every character has a deck of cards and the only way to attack is to play one of the weapon cards you've randomly drawn. Some of them can be briefly equipped, but most of the time each marine can only shoot a plasma gun when he's drawn the card for it. Then he'll just forget it exists until you draw another plasma gun card. Depending on the luck of the draw, in the meantime he might suddenly have three different heavy weapons, somehow pulling them out of nowhere like the Imperium has started issuing bags of holding as standard.

💀48. Tacticus (2025)

Snowprint Studios
Website

Tacticus is a free-to-play mobile game with a PC port I suspect most of its players don't even know exists. It runs in a strip in the middle of your screen, but at least it tells you to click on things instead of tapping, so I'll give it that.

Tacticus is turn-based squad tactics with characters from across 40K's factions. The campaign starts you off with a squad of Ultramarines, but quickly throws in a Sister of Battle for variety as it pits you against necrons. If you thought the vertical nature of the screen would limit the amount of flanking you'd be right, but its miniature levels suit the snacky nature of mobile play where you can squeeze a few of them into a train trip.

It's also a hero-collecting gacha game. Requisition orders give you a chance at unlocking new heroes, and you'll need a full squad from a specific faction to play as them. The odds are against that—unless you sink countless hours and/or dollars in. To call it a manipulative gacha game would be redundant. They're all manipulative, and if Tacticus's lack of pity mechanics make it seem like a tighter wallet squeeze than its competitors, that doesn't make the others good.

The PC client has some issues, too. Occasionally it becomes unresponsive, and it froze shortly after I unlocked the battle pass and the first time I tried to use 10 requisition orders at once. It also lacks the option to watch ads to gain more energy—whether you think that's a positive or negative is up to you.

47. Storm of Vengeance (2014) 

Eutechnyx

Storm of Vengeance is a lane defense game, sort of like Plants vs. Zombies only instead of spending sunshine to grow plants you're spending redemption points to make Dark Angels pop out of their drop pods. Actually, what it's more like is Ninja Cats vs Samurai Dogs, an earlier game from Eutechnyx. Storm of Vengeance is that, only with a progression tree so you can unlock frag grenades, a multiplayer mode, and 3D models of orks and space marines where the ninja cats and samurai dogs used to be.

46. Battle Sister (2020–2022)

Pixel Toys
Steam (2022) | Oculus Quest (2020) | Oculus Rift (2021)

The first VR-exclusive 40K game is a disappointment. Impressive as it is to have that sense of presence, whether you're poking around a starship or looking up at a space marine, Battle Sister remains a rudimentary corridor shooter. Plus, the physical controls for everything from throwing grenades to holstering weapons are unreliable, and when that gets you killed in one of the levels with a savepoint on the wrong side of a tutorial or an elevator ride? That's unforgivable.

45. Dawn of War 3 (2017) 

Relic/Sega
Steam

If you like the kind of RTS where you manufacture a huge amount of troops then drag them together in a glorious blob, the first Dawn of War is for you. If you prefer a handful of units and heroes with their own special abilities to carefully manage, that is Dawn of War 2's whole deal. Dawn of War 3 tries to split the difference, and it's an awkward compromise. Elites all have different things they can do and some of your units have an ability or two, but there are long stretches where it feels like you should be using those abilities yet there's nothing for you to do.

In the story campaign you alternate between marines, orks, and eldar one mission at a time, never playing any one group for long enough to get comfortable with them. Almost every level feels like a reintroduction of abilities and tech it expects you to have forgotten, as if the tutorial never ends. While the first two games are divisive and there are plenty of passionate defenders of each, Dawn of War 3 didn't end up appealing to anyone.

44. Fire Warrior (2003) 

Kuju/Chilled Mouse
Steam | GOG

There are surprisingly few 40K games where you get to be the t'au, the mech-loving weebs of the setting. Fire Warrior isn't about mechs, however. It's a corridor shooter ported over from the PlayStation 2, a fine console that didn't have a single decent FPS to its name. (Red Faction fans, you're kidding yourselves.)

You'll have to turn auto-aim on to fix the busted mouse controls in Fire Warrior, but nothing will fix the boring guns or unreactive enemies. Two things elevate it, however. One is that the first time you have to fight a space marine he seems borderline unstoppable in a way that feels right, and the second is that Tom Baker recorded some glorious narration for the intro.

43. Eisenhorn: Xenos (2016)

Pixel Hero Games

The Eisenhorn novels are some of the better 40K books, hard-boiled Raymond Chandler detective stories about an inquisitor who finds himself questioning his principles while he hunts heretics and slowly comes to grips with the Inquisition's own corruption. This adaptation of the first book did one thing right by casting Mark Strong as Eisenhorn. He's perfect, but the voice direction is weak overall and every cutscene is full of characters at wildly different levels of intensity.

Between the story bits is a mish-mash of third-person combat, collectible hunts, hacking minigames, that thing where you spin clues around to examine them—a bundle of features lifted from other games and artlessly glued together to fill the gaps. It feels like the kind of budget movie tie-in game that used to be commonplace, only this time it's a book tie-in.

42. The Horus Heresy: Betrayal at Calth (2020) 

Steel Wool Studios
Steam

There are plenty of turn-based 40K games about squads of space marines jogging from hex to hex, but what makes Betrayal at Calth different is its viewpoint. You command from the perspective of a servo-skull, a camera that swoops around the battlefield and lets you appreciate the architecture of the Horus Heresy era up close. You can even play in VR.

It's a cool idea. Unfortunately, you can tell where the money ran out. A limited number of unit barks repeat (often coming from a different direction to the unit that is actually acting), some weapons have animations while others don't, and the mission objectives occasionally leave out details you need to know. It started in early access and clearly didn't earn enough money to stay there until it was done. It's out now with a version number on it, but it doesn't feel finished.

41. Warhammer Combat Cards (2021) 

Well Played Games/The Phoenix Lighthouse
Steam | Microsoft Store

In 1998 Games Workshop released collectible cards with photos of Warhammer miniatures accompanied by stats so you could play a rudimentary Top Trumps kind of game with them. It went through several iterations, and the 2017 version became a free-to-play videogame with painted 40K miniatures on the cards.

Don't expect Magic: The Gathering. You build a deck of one warlord and a bundle of bodyguards, keeping three of them in play at any time, replacing bodyguards as they die. Each turn you choose whether to make a ranged, melee, or psychic attack and the relevant numbers get added up and damage exchanged. Tactical choice comes via buffs to whichever attacks you don't choose that turn, and deciding when to play your warlord (a powerful card whose death means you lose).

Oddly, the only PvP is within your clan and mostly you play against AI that uses other players' decks. Not that Warhammer Combat Cards tells you this, or much of anything else. Good luck trying to join a clan even after you've leveled-up the appropriate amount, thanks to a designed-for-mobile interface.

40. Inquisitor – Martyr (2018) 

NeocoreGames
Steam

Inquisitor – Martyr is being pulled in multiple directions at once. It's a game about being an Inquisitor, investigating the mysteries of the Caligari Sector, chief among them a ghost ship called the Martyr. It's also an action RPG, which means if it goes for more than five minutes without a fight something's wrong, and among the most important qualities your heretic-hunting space detective genius possesses are their bonus to crit damage and the quality of their loot.

The action RPG part is OK, Diablo with guns, but it doesn't mesh with the rest. Why would an Inquisitor spend so much time crafting new gear? Why do I need to collect all these different-colored shards? Every game wants me to collect shards of something and I'm just so tired.

39. Adeptus Titanicus: Dominus (2021) 

Membraine Studios

Scale is important in a setting where billions die and nobody blinks. Mechs can't just be mechs in 40K. They're titans, god-machines up to 100-feet tall that stomp through fancy gothic megacathedrals without slowing down.

Adeptus Titanicus: Dominus pits maniples of titans belonging to the Imperium and Chaos against each other in turn-based combat. You order a titan to move and a hologram appears at its end position; you choose who it's going to target and color-coded projections show which weapons will be in range. You commit and the titan spends 10 seconds stomping to its endpoint, firing continuously the entire time—just spaffing out barrages of missiles and lasers while walking through buildings.

You get a lot of odd-looking turns where most of the shooting is aimed at impenetrable rocks that happen to be between titans, which isn't helped by the AI's tendency to shoot when it has no chance of hitting, or the cinematic camera's tendency to clip inside mountains. Another oddity: you don't plot out moves but simply pick where to finish. Sometimes you'll select a position within the movement radius and the hologram will instead appear on the opposite side of where you started because apparently you need to go the long way round and don't have enough movement after all.

That's all a bit of a downer. So is the way some missions give you a fresh maniple, but partway through the campaign suddenly half the missions have to be completed with the titans that survived the previous one, a fact Dominus doesn't bother to tell you.

38. Chaos Gate (1998) 

Random Games/SSI
Steam | GOG

A squad tactics game reminiscent of Jagged Alliance or X-COM, but with less of a strategy layer. If the specific flavor of original X-COM is more to your liking than modern, hyphen-less XCOM, Chaos Gate may be your thing, but it does lack enemy variety. You're up against the forces of Chaos, which means Chaos Cultists, Traitor Marines, and half-a-dozen varieties of daemon. Meanwhile you're in charge of the Ultramarines, and while you can rename your troops and assign a limited number of heavy weapons per squad, after a while every battle feels the same. They drag on too, thanks to the Traitor Marines who litter most maps being able to survive multiple krak grenades and heavy bolter rounds.

37. Sanctus Reach (2017) 

Straylight Entertainment/Slitherine
Steam | GOG

The classic hex-and-counter wargame Panzer General has inspired a lot of 40K games, and Sanctus Reach, which pits Space Wolves against orks, is certainly one of them. It's not bad, but it is basic. The objectives are often just capturing or defending victory points and only after three levels of those will you get something different like an escort mission, the story's a paragraph of text between maps, there's no strategy layer, and everything on the presentation side, from unit types to animation to level furniture, feels like the absolute minimum, where 40K should be all about maximalism. Other games do this identical thing better.

36. Space Hulk: Deathwing (2016)

Streum On Studio/Focus Home Interactive
Steam | GOG | Microsoft Store

A multiplayer co-op FPS, Deathwing is Left 4 Dead with genestealers. Although it launched in a terribly buggy and unoptimized state, an enhanced edition rerelease fixed some of its worst problems. Now it's a competent claustrophobic multiplayer game where you can dress up your terminators real fancy. As a singleplayer experience it's let down by daft AI, and even with friends you'll have to overlook whiffy melee weapons and shooting that feels more like you're turning on a hose than opening up with a mark-two storm bolter.

35. Space Crusade (1992)

Gremlin Interactive

Milton Bradley's follow-up to HeroQuest was a version of Warhammer 40,000 for ages 10 to adult, and Gremlin Interactive were once again responsible for the videogame. Like Gremlin's HeroQuest, it's a pretty direct replication—although for some reason the genestealers have been replaced by different aliens called "soulsuckers."

It's quite slow-paced and you have to choose between music or cheerfully rinky-dink sound effects because it can't do both at once, and of course it's lacking the board game's slick miniatures and card art. Nostalgia's a powerful thing though, and I adore these goofy pixel space marines.

34. Warpforge (2024)

Everguild
Steam

Now that Magic: The Gathering is doing crossovers, including one with Warhammer 40,000, it feels more redundant than ever for every media property to have its own Magic imitator. Warpforge is actually 40K's second following Horus Heresy: Legions, and comes from the same developer. The differences between the two are typically slight. In Warpforge each unit has a separate rating for ranged and melee attacks, there are some new keywords, and some of the effects work slightly differently. The campaigns are also different. Where Horus Heresy: Legions has narratives with rewarding snippets of story, what Warpforge calls campaigns are just a separate battle pass track for each faction.

33. Space Hulk (2013)

Full Control
Steam

This was our first look into the particularly grim darkness of a near future where there are only PC ports of 40K games made for tablets. Space Hulk comes with all the limitations you'd expect from a game designed to run on an iPad Mini. This fine if unambitious version of the board game plays the same limited animations over and over, whether it's sprays of blood that appear sort of around genestealers as they're shot, or three red lines appearing in mid-air to mark a terminator falling to their claws. The way genestealers suddenly transform into a pair of bleeding leg-stumps when hit by an assault cannon is unintentionally hilarious.

Thanks to some patched-in improvements, like the ability to speed up terminators so your turns don't take forever, this take on Space Hulk ended up OK if all you want is a version of the board game with a singleplayer mode where you're the space marines.

32. Gladius – Relics of War (2018) 

Proxy Studios/Slitherine
Steam | GOG | Epic

Take Civilization 5 (or maybe Warlock: The Exiled, or Age of Wonders), then remove the diplomacy so it's all about war. Add some inspiration from RTS base-building, with separate barracks for infantry and vehicles around your city, then add heroes who level up and gain some quite Warcraft 3-esque abilities on top of that. Gladius is an intriguing Frankenstein of a strategy game.

While it had some problems in its early days, like a saminess to each campaign thanks to the early turns being spent clearing the area around your city of endless bug monsters and dogs (even with the "wildlife" setting lowered), patches and DLC have improved things. Gladius has a lot more variety now, though there are still some annoyances like the way in hotseat games only the last player gets to see the AI's moves.

31. Space Hulk Ascension (2014) 

Full Control
Steam

After the negative response to the PC version of their previous Space Hulk game, Full Control retooled it into Ascension, giving it a welcome visual upgrade and customizable marines. More divisively it plays less like a board game, with reduced randomness, an upgrade system based on experience points, and tweaks to the way weapons work. Storm bolters gain heat when fired and jam when it maxes out, and instead of just filling an entire room or corridor with fire, the flamer has multiple modes of spray. And to make it look less like a board game there's fog of war, rendering the map dark beyond a tiny zone of vision. Some of the changes are fussy and don't add much, but it's a slight improvement overall.

30. Dakka Squadron (2021)

Phosphor Game Studios
Steam | GOG

Not many 40K games focus on playing the aliens, but Dakka Squadron really embraces the idea of letting you be an ork. It's committed to the bit. This is arcade aerial combat if Star Fox was violently Cockney and everything was soundtracked by wailing deedly-deedly guitar and shouts of "Dakka dakka dakka!"

It's maybe a bit too orky. Multiplayer is orks versus orks, and so is most of the singleplayer, though eventually you get to shoot down some Adeptus Mechanicus craft that look like flying boxes full of lasers, a few of the necrons' tin death croissants, and so on. Mostly though it's endless orks in World War II fighter jets with nose-mounted spikes laughing as they krump each other.

Missions drag on, with wave after wave of enemies and the same combat barks as you shoot them down, but fortunately a three-lives system was patched in so you don't have to re-do an entire mission because you got krumped at the end. I did have to turn down the guitars, though.

29. Shootas, Blood & Teef (2022)

Rogueside
Steam | GOG | Epic

On the subject of orky games for orks, here's a sidescrolling action-platformer that's kind of like a high-speed, green Commander Keen, or maybe Metal Slug with squigs. These toothy fungal creatures are relatives of the orks, but also have a symbiotic relationship where they serve as pets, mounts, and tools for their green cousins. In Shootas, Blood & Teef the grenades you throw are squigs with dynamite strapped to their head like a barrister's wig, the mines are squigs bred to eat explosives until they're so full they can't walk, the health packs are edible squigs wearing surgical head mirrors, and your entire motivation for going to war is the fact someone stole the fuzzy squig you were wearing as a wig.

As you'd expect from all that nonsense, Shootas, Blood & Teef understands what orks are about. That means a hard-rock soundtrack and characters who use the word "WAAAAGH" like it's punctuation. It doesn't outstay its welcome, with a campaign that pits you against orks, the Imperium, and genestealers yet can be finished in under four hours. To extend things there's a co-op mode for four players and a cosmetics shop full of silly hats you can buy with its currency of "teef", but the brevity feels pretty apt. It's best as a goofy one-off, not a game you need to turn into a lifestyle.

Though it was a bit crashy at launch, a couple of patches have made Shootas, Blood & Teef more stable.

28. The Horus Heresy: Legions (2019) 

Everguild Ltd.
Steam

We're in the Horus Heresy era again, only this time via a free-to-play collectible card game. Though Legions plays a lot like them it's not as flashy as big names in the genre like Magic: The Gathering Arena, with the card art quality being all over the place. But if you've got the time or money it's a solid enough example of the form, and if you've read the books and the phrase "the Fall of Isstvan III" makes you feel like a 19th century French campaigner hearing the word "Waterloo," then there's a stirring singleplayer campaign that will let you experience that in card game form.

27. Freeblade (2017) 

Pixel Toys
Microsoft Store

I went into this with low expectations. A free-to-play adaptation of a mobile game, complete with loot boxes and multiple currencies and all that jazz? Freeblade scores points for letting you play an Imperial Knight, however, a mech that's bigger than a house, and letting you color and customize your walker like you're choosing paints and decals for a miniature. It's a simple rail shooter, basically a version of Time Crisis where you're the size of Godzilla, and better than I thought it would be.

26. Aeronautica Imperialis: Flight Command (2020) 

Binary Planets/Green Man Gaming Publishing
Steam

Flight Command is an aerial-combat simulator where you program your planes with maneuvers and then watch 10 seconds of dogfighting play out in real-time. It's somewhere between Sid Meier's Ace Combat and the simultaneous turns of Frozen Synapse. Those 10 seconds contain a bewildering amount of stuff, as one plane powerdives to avoid an attack from behind, another explodes, and one of your pilots pulls off a high-G turn then blacks out. Switching to theater mode, which lets you see all this at once rather than following each pilot in turn, makes it easier. That said, I could do with a simple way to scrub the timeline back and forth.

Planes can switch loadouts if you remove the default missiles, and pilots might gain skills if they shoot down enough enemies, but one fighter is much like another. When your ace pilots in Aeronautica Imperialis: Flight Command kick the bucket, shot down by ork fighters in rustbucket planes made out of scrap in a cave, a commander slides onto the between-mission screen. "Your pilot numbers are depleted," she says, "You may call on reserves." There's no judgment in this because every randomly generated pilot is entirely disposable. Even top guns are replaceable in 40K.

25. Legacy of Dorn: Herald of Oblivion (2015) 

Tin Man Games
Steam

Games Workshop published several pick-a-path gamebooks under the Path to Victory label, and this one was turned into a visual novel. If you ever read the kind of Fighting Fantasy/Lone Wolf/choose-your-own-adventure books that declared, "YOU can be the hero," that's what this is, only YOU are a lone space marine cut off from your squad on a space hulk, striving to find your battle-brothers.

Legacy of Dorn really gets across the oddness of a ship made out of the fused remains of multiple wrecks, and as you explore each section feels distinct, whether fungal and orkoid or sanctified by the Sisters of Battle. The turn-based combat is nothing to write home about, but the difficulty options include the ability to skip the boring fights and cheat as if you're leaving your fingers in the pages, as is only right.

It's worth noting the mouse cursor vanishes if you play on higher resolutions.

24. Regicide (2015) 

Hammerfall

Chess, but make it 40K. That's Regicide, which you can play in classic mode using the boring rules of real Chess, or in Regicide mode, which adds an initiative phase after every turn where pawns shoot boltguns and queens launch psychic lightning. While taking a piece the usual way is an instakill, complete with gorey duels reminiscent of Battle Chess, attacks in the initiative phase chip away at the hit points of your target. At first it feels like regular Chess, but focus fire and combine the right abilities and you'll soon remove a bishop from across the board. It feels like cheating in the best way, like you have outsmarted the centuries-old game of Chess itself.

There's a story mode, but some of its puzzle matches can grind to annoying stalemate halts. Stick to skirmish play and Regicide does a better job with its ridiculous concept than you might think.

23. Eternal Crusade (2017) 

Behaviour Interactive Inc.

Initially billed as a Planetside-esque MMO with a persistent world for players to fight over, Eternal Crusade was scaled down in development. What eventually released was a lobby shooter that took the multiplayer combat from Relic's Space Marine and added vehicles, eldar and orks, as well as a co-operative PvE mode where four players take on tyranids.

Players who'd bought in early were disappointed at the reduction, but here's the thing: Relic's Space Marine was great, and so was its multiplayer. Building on that with missions where you might be defending a fortress while other players tried to smash through its gate in Predator tanks, or hovering over victory points as an eldar swooping hawk made for some thrilling battles. Hardly anybody gave it a chance though, and even after being rereleased for free it was still almost empty. Finally, the servers were shut down. Here's hoping its handful of fans figure out a way to revive it, because Eternal Crusade is better than its reputation.

22. Deathwatch – Enhanced Edition (2015) 

Rodeo Games
Steam

The Deathwatch are elite alien-busting marines who draw their recruits from other chapters, and this turn-based tactics game gives you command of a squad of them. You can have a Space Wolf and a Blood Angel and an Ultramarine, all hunting tyranids side by side.

Deathwatch was another game originally made for tablets, which you can tell by the way your new wargear and marines arrived in random packs with lootbox sparkle, even though they're earned through play rather than microtransactions. This Enhanced Edition for PC remastered the original graphics and gave it a mouse-and-keyboard UI, though it could have done with tooltips for the many buff icons each marine ended up with. For a budget version of a Firaxis-style XCOM with space marines, it's decent.

21. Necromunda: Underhive Wars (2020) 

Rogue Factor/Focus Home Interactive
Steam | Microsoft Store

Hive cities cram billions of people into illustrations of the class system someone drew winged skulls on. At the bottom of the hive, gangs who work for mid-level Houses fight over scavenger rights and who has the coolest mohawk.

Underhive Wars is another turn-based tactics game that isn't content to copy XCOM and instead has to go and mess with success. Every map's covered in ziplines and elevators, and gangers have enough movement to whip up and down them. Seen in over-the-shoulder third-person, the AI's moves are often baffling. Gangers run past enemies they could attack, deploy buffs for opaque reasons, pick up mission objectives then end their turn exposed, sometimes just jogging on the spot for a bit.

And yet, if you ditch the story campaign after the intro missions and get stuck into the procedurally generated Operations mode, there's a fun game here. Though each gang has access to the same classes, gear, and only slightly different skills, over the course of an endless war of territorial pissing they come to feel like your own. Customization makes your leather-fetish wrestlers or leopard-print amazons look rad as hell, and successive injuries, bionic implants, and limb replacements turn them into individuals with stories.

💀20. Speed Freeks (2025)

Caged Element Inc./Wired Productions
Steam

Multiplayer demolition derbies are fun because being in a truck justifies having a longer time-to-kill than being a squishy meatsack, and because of the pure joy of being launched directly into the sky like it's Dukes of Hazzard and shooting people as you fly through the air. Speed Freeks combines both those things, and also you get to be orks. It's like Twisted Metal if it wasn't aimed at juggaloes. Also there's a dash that shoots you in the direction the camera's pointing and adds high-skill traversal options.

Speed Freeks has two modes, both team-based. One's a capture-point race where you earn so many points for blowing people up, why, it's almost as if they're encouraging you to launch rockets or fire your zappa gun instead of concentrating on the noble art of motorsport. The other mode gives each team a slow, stompy mech and randomly spawns bombs around the map you can pick up and deliver to the enemy mech by driving into it at top speed. The subsequent explosion does no damage to you, though it does launch you into the air (which, see above, is fun). They're both good modes, though I prefer the latter and suspect there aren't enough players to support more options.

The usual multiplayer caveat applies: it's better with friends than on a public server with one dude who demolishes everyone because he's been no-lifing it since it was in early access. You can make a solo game and play against bots with adjustable difficulty though, which is both an excellent way to learn the basics and a blast on its own. You even earn scrap while playing solo, the currency that lets you progress through the "Waaagh Pass" and score orky cosmetics.

19. Rogue Trader (2023)

Owlcat
Steam | GOG | Epic

It's not uncommon for big RPGs to have an identity crisis. When games cater for any kind of character their players might cook up, they can end up feeling like they have something for everyone but nothing at their center, no unifying idea you can point at and say, "This is what it's about." Rogue Trader is one of the strongest examples of this phenomenon I've ever seen.

On a systems level, the messiness works in its favor. It's simultaneously a management sim about being an imperialist colony master, a text adventure about exploring haunted space like a version of Star Trek where every episode is "the weird one", and a ludicrously overcomplicated tactics game where every unit has dozens of miniscule buffs and debuffs to stack. Against the odds, it pulls off two-thirds of what it's trying to do mechanically.

Narratively, not so much. On this level, Rogue Trader tries to be a mystery about the betrayal of your boss, a morality play about The Inquisition, and a gladiator movie for people who are into leather. None of these elements gets satisfyingly resolved. The mystery is tied up in a throwaway conversation in chapter three then forgotten, and the final chapter feels like it comes out of nowhere, building as it does on side-content foreshadowing you may not have even seen. Though there are plenty of individual parts to enjoy—especially the deep dives into 40K lore—the whole struggles to cohere.

18. The Horus Heresy: Battle of Tallarn (2017)

HexWar Games

HexWar Games has its own take on the Panzer General series called Tank Battle, with multiple iterations like Tank Battle: 1944 and Tank Battle: 1945. Battle of Tallarn reskins the WWII game to be about the largest tank confrontation of the Horus Heresy era. It's essentially Tank Battle: 30,000.

Battle of Tallarn is a particularly rock-paper-scissors wargame, with tanks, infantry, fliers, walkers and titans as counters to each other in specific situations, and terrain that's either damaging, hard-stopping, crossable only by fliers, or cover but only for infantry. Like all the Horus Heresy games and books it demands a dedication to the fictional history of Warhammer 40,000 as passionate as any WWII nut to get the most out of it, but if that's you then you're probably already familiar with Battle of Tallarn and are humming the bombastic technogoth theme tune right now.

17. Armageddon (2014) 

Flashback Games/The Lordz Games Studio/Slitherine
Steam | GOG

Another take on the Panzer General turn-based hexgrid wargame, Armageddon is set on a hive world so polluted it's all fire wastes, lava canyons, and acid rivers, which the armies of the Imperium have to defend from hordes of orks. Each scenario is a puzzle where you'll have to decide whether to split your battlegroups or unite them in a single wedge, lock down the bridges or move into the bombed-out buildings, scout ahead with walkers or fliers, and so on.

There's DLC for various other conflicts that have played out on the well-named planet Armageddon, but skip the expandalone called Da Orks, which lets you experience the other side of the conflict. Instead of handing you control of a horde it makes you play a balanced force that feels like a green reskin of the humies.

16. Battlefleet Gothic: Armada (2016) 

Tindalos Interactive/Focus Home Interactive
Steam | GOG | Microsoft Store

The Imperial spacecraft of Warhammer 40,000 are one of its most distinctive elements. Each one looks like someone painted Westminster Abbey black, put a prow on the end, and hooked it off into deep space. Battlefleet Gothic: Armada is an RTS where these stately, miles-long ships swing about on a 2D plane that emulates both a tabletop and the ocean. They do battle like it's the age of sail, complete with broadsides and boarding actions, though troops insert via torpedo rather than swinging over on a rope with knives between their teeth.

The other thing about Battlefleet Gothic: Armada that feels like the age of sail is the time scale. Even with the speed set to its fastest, getting into position at the start of an engagement takes a fair old while. And then by the time the fleets make contact, there's so much micromanagement it can feel overwhelming even slowed down. It's deliberately paced this way, tempting you into mistakes and collisions that will cost you a capital ship with the population of a city inside it.

15. Boltgun (2023)

Auroch Digital/Focus Entertainment
Steam

Though at first glance it looks like a lost 40K Doom WAD, Boltgun is actually a blend of Doom (1993) and Doom (2016). The sprites, health pickups, and color-coded-keycard hunts are 1990s throwbacks, but those ingredients are mixed in a cocktail that's not as old fashioned as, say, an Old Fashioned.

The purge sections, where waves of cultists and plague toads with too much health teleport into an arena while you run ammo loops, are a modern touch, as are the chainsword dash and grenades being bound to their own keys. So are the thankfully rare first-person platforming challenges where sliding walls threaten to push you to your death, and the more annoying lack of a map.

My first hours with Boltgun were a blast. You feel like you've got a stompy heft despite being able to zip about like a greyhound on skates (I recommend toggling autorun in the settings), and the way it represents Chaos as both psychedelic oil-slick intrusions from an alien paradigm beyond understanding and gross little Nurglings who wiggle their butts at you is perfect.

There's a deep understanding of Warhammer's appeal in details like the armor score being labeled "contempt", the way each Pink Horror splits into two Blue Horrors when killed, the inquisitor being voiced by Rachel Atkins (who voiced Cassia in Space Marine's audio logs), and the protagonist, Malum Caedo, voiced by Ultramarines fanboy Rahul Kohli (you can press T to hear him taunt at any time). Even the menu music is a deep cut: it's D-Rok's album Oblivion, released on Games Workshop's short-lived heavy metal label in 1991.

In 2025, Auroch released a free standalone reinterpretation of Boltgun as a typing game subtitled Words of Vengeance. It's Malum Caedo Teaches Typing, with phrases like PURGE THE UNCLEAN and NULN OIL SPILLAGE that need to be hammered out as daemons approach. Sure, it's just an ad for Boltgun 2, but it's also 10 minutes of pure joy for anyone who wants a 40K-themed Typing of the Dead.

14. Space Marine 2 (2024)

Saber Interactive/Focus Entertainment
Steam | Epic

The first Space Marine was a great singleplayer action game with a surprisingly decent tacked-on competitive multiplayer mode. It's an odd decision then to make the sequel first and foremost a co-op shooter, with the option to play solo feeling like the thing that's been tacked-on. From the moment the prologue ends you're saddled with two AI partners and your objectives are straight out of the co-op playbook. Prevent enemies from damaging structures while being attacked; hold down a button to activate a machine while being attacked; defend a square patch of ground while being attacked.

As an evocation of the setting Space Marine 2 is impressive. Grotesque cherubs flit around voidship interiors, rubric marines' armor clatters apart to reveal it was full of dust, and the climactic scene where you get to recreate the cover art of the wargame's first edition is a real fuck yeah moment. It's just a shame that if you try to play it by yourself it feels like the game's sneering at you the whole time for engaging with it in johnny got-no-friends mode. You don't even get to take down the tyranid hive tyrant threatening the Imperium personally unless you do the relevant operations mode co-op side mission, because the intended experience isn't the story—it's leveling up your wargear in endless co-op missions while unlocking shinier cosmetics for your shoulderpads.

13. Chaos Gate: Daemonhunters (2022)

Complex Games/Frontier Foundry
Steam | Epic

If the original Chaos Gate was 1994's X-COM with space marines, then Chaos Gate: Daemonhunters is 2016's XCOM 2 with space marines. It's not not shy about it either. As the days tick by on the map, one of your advisors (a tech-priest) builds things, and the other (an inquisitor) researches stuff. Three missions pop up and you choose the one with a reward you like (usually more servitors, who go missing like the tech-priest eats them or something), then your ship flies over to it. There's overwatch, half-cover and full-cover, enemies who activate in clusters, and a guy who shows up once a month to tell you how much you suck.

Where it differs is that your troops are Grey Knights, elite psychic powerhouses with better gear than God. They have powers that enhance attacks, boost armor, give each other extra action points, and let them teleport. Plus, they never miss. Daemonhunters ditches hit percentages, though it doesn't embrace determinism completely. It just hides the dice in other areas, like randomized crits, chances to trigger conditions, and requisition rewards. I played all the way to the last mission without seeing a paladin-class Grey Knight but wow did I get offered a lot of apothecaries.

Like Gears Tactics, Daemonhunters wants you to play boldly. Overwatch is garbage, even the weakest cult trooper can survive multiple storm bolter rounds, and I only bothered with incinerators after lucking out in the requisition lottery and finding an amazing one. Since the warp surge meter ticks up every turn, eventually setting off random debuffs and hazards, you want to be inserting blades into bad people fast. Stun an enemy and you can execute them, which gives your whole squad a bonus action point. Chain those together and you're laughing.

The run-teleport-stab speediness seems at odds with how long the levels get. That's one place where it resembles the original Chaos Gate—the mission types get samey and drag on a bit. Daemonhunters is no XCOM 2, but it's not bad either.

12. Necromunda: Hired Gun (2021)

Streum On Studio/Focus Home Interactive
Steam | GOG | Epic

A singleplayer FPS that's part looter-shooter, meaning you'll find a bolter and five minutes later swap it for a lasrifle because it's a higher rarity tier. Hired Gun is also a movement-shooter, with wall-running, dashing, sliding, a grapnel, and augmetics that let you double-jump, slow down time, and more. Even your dog has an upgrade tree. Each fight's a high-speed zip around a huge environment.

That said, the animations frequently look garbage and there's a nonsense story that expects you to have read all the Kal Jerico comics (I have), and cared about them (I didn't). Side missions, which increase your rep with factions including genestealers and Chaos cults, are separated by difficulty grade—but some are always hard and others, where you can ignore the endlessly spawning enemies to zipline around completing objectives, are always easy.

And yet, it's really fun? The combat's hectic, and you end up with so many abilities it's like Borderlands only you're every class at once. Each level is a perfect evocation of the setting, whether corpse-grinding factory or maglev megatrain, with dead-ass servitors controlling doors, cargo ships, and even the bounty board. One of the villains looks like Marie Antoinette gone Mad Max. If you like 40K enough to read this list, you'll probably like Hired Gun.

11. Rites of War (1999) 

DreamForge/SSI
Steam | GOG

There are other Panzer General-alikes with 40K trappings, but Rites of War one was straight-up made in the Panzer General 2 engine. It's got the tactical depth you want thanks to a collection of pixel units who all work slightly differently, with every turn a stream-of-consciousness where you're thinking things like, "If I attack this guy the heavy weapons will be able to support, but the jetbikes are in cover so they can make a pop-up attack, but then there's a unit who can attack and fall back in the same turn..."

The campaign lets you play as the eldar, colorful but stone-faced murder elves with psychic powers and a weapon that unspools a long monofilament wire inside your poor enemy's body to reduce their organs to soup. They can summon an incarnation of their war god inside a shell of superheated iron, and they charge into battle wearing harlequin pants. It's a crime more 40K games aren't about them instead of the same four chapters of space marines every time.

10. Battlesector (2021)

Black Lab Games/Slitherine
Steam | GOG | Epic

When I wrote about Sanctus Reach, I said other games do what it does better. That was before Battlesector came out, but it's a perfect example of what I meant. It's the same kind of mid-sized turn-based tactics game where you control squads and vehicles rather than a handful of individuals or massive armies, but what Battlesector gets right is that it gives troops personality.

That's thanks to a momentum system that rewards you for playing to type, with bloodthirsty Blood Angels scoring points for killing enemies close enough to see the whites of their eyes, the swarming tyranids for staying within range of a hive leader, and the sadomasochistic Sisters of Battle for taking damage as well as dealing it.

DLC has added necron and ork factions and expanded the Sisters of Battle from a handful of allies to a fully playable army of their own, while a free update patched in a horde mode against daemons. It would be even better with some kind of veterancy system for squads rather than just HQ units, but Battlesector really is a cut above.

9. Space Hulk (1993) 

Electronic Arts

The first of many attempts to turn the Space Hulk board game into a videogame remains one of the best. An innovative freeze-time mechanic lets you transition into turn-based mode where you can move your five space marine terminators around like you're playing on a tabletop—but gives you a timer. When it runs out, you have to play in real-time, bouncing between their first-person perspectives and the map to keep your squad alive while genestealers boil out of the walls. Manage that for long enough and you earn more freeze-time. The relief of switching back is intense.

The other thing it gets right is the atmosphere. Spinning wall fans chunk away, unknowable alien sounds echo down the corridors, and somewhere in the distance there's always a scream. When marines die their screen goes to static, fuzzing out one by one. Plenty of videogames have been inspired by Aliens, but few of them do the panicky "game over, man, game over" moment as well as this. It's brutally difficult, but that's because it's not really a strategy game—it's horror.

(You'll need DOSBox to play Space Hulk today and it doesn't like version 0.74 for some reason, so download DOSBox-0.73 instead.)

8. Battlefleet Gothic: Armada 2 (2019) 

Tindalos Interactive/Focus Home Interactive
Steam | GOG | Microsoft Store

In the 40K universe faster-than-light travel is made possible by briefly hopping over to a universe next door called Warpspace where distances are contracted and time gets squiggly. The downside to Warpspace is that it's inhabited by the Ruinous Powers of Chaos, gods who represent and are fueled by the dark urges of mortals. Chaos wants to spill out of the Warp into realspace, and when they do you get places like the Eye of Terror, a hellish overlap at the edge of the galaxy. Near its edge is the Imperial world Cadia, a bastion that stood firm against multiple excursions led by the forces of Chaos—until the 13th Black Crusade, when Abaddon the Despoiler crashed a gigantic alien starfortress into it.

This happens several minutes into Battlefleet Gothic: Armada 2 while you're playing the prologue. It's a hell of a spectacle. This sequel improves various small things about the spacefleet RTS game, adds campaigns from the perspective of the insectile tyranids and Egyptian robot necrons, and leaves its core of 2D sailing ship combat intact. The one big thing it changes is that sense of spectacle, understanding what we want to see is entire worlds falling and a galaxy in flames.

7. Dawn of War 2 (2009) 

Relic Entertainment/THQ/Sega
Steam

Where the first Dawn of War is about masses of tanks and a screen full of lasers, Dawn of War 2 gives you just four badasses, maybe eight replaceable squadmates, and a bunch of special abilities. It's not about researching at your base until you've put together an unstoppable force—most missions begin with you falling out of the sky, sometimes squashing a few enemies, and then it's on. A typical battle involves parking the heavy weapons and sniper in cover, charging in with your commander, then telling the assault squad to jump-pack over the top. After that it's a matter of setting off abilities as they come off cool-down.

The boss fights can be chores, but maps where you're on the defensive, outnumbered by hordes of tyranids or whatever, are excellent—both in singleplayer and the Last Stand, a three-player mode with waves of enemies and unlockable wargear. In a fair and just universe the Last Stand was more popular than Defense of the Ancients and inspired a whole genre and MOBAs don't suck.

💀6. Darktide (2022)

Fatshark
Steam | Windows Store

The Vermintide games have top-tier first-person melee, something a lot of games don't do well. Darktide takes that and adds top-tier shooting, with ripper guns that rip and tear, bolters that kick like an Olympic mule, and, in the Kantrael MGXII Infantry Lasgun, a lasrifle that that will put paid to all those jokes about them being glorified flashlights.

That combat is showcased in a game so 40K it shits grox. The hive city of Tertium manages to be both cramped and too big to comprehend, the ogryns are loveable lummoxes, the music's an ominous chugalug, and even the drink bottles have purity seals like they've been inspected for freshness by the Adeptus Sanitatus.

The Battle for Tertium update added a narrative path through Darktide's missions, with added voiceovers to put them in context and post-mission cutscenes. It's not quite the full story campaign experience of Vermintide, but it's nice.

The Top 5

5. Final Liberation: Epic 40,000 (1997) 

Holistic Design/SSI
Steam | GOG

"Epic" is right. Final Liberation is a strategy game that gets the scale of conflict in the 41st millennium spot on, with a mixed force of Imperial Guard and Ultramarines having to not only pool their forces, but then unearth an entire lost legion of titans to repel an ork invasion on a planetary scale. The orks are faster and brutishly hard to put down in hand-to-hand, but you have artillery on your side and, as the Tyrant of Badab said, "Big guns never tire."

Every turn is a cautious advance, trying to keep the speed freeks away from your bombards while you flatten buildings with thudd guns just in case orks are about to pop out of them, and doing everything you can to stay the hell away from the gut buster mega-cannon obscenely jutting out of the gargant's undercarriage.

The peak of 40K games in the 1990s, Final Liberation has two extremely 1990s things about it. The first is its heavy metal soundtrack, and the second its FMV cutscenes. Both are cheesy in exactly the right way, clearly being taken seriously by people unconcerned with the ridiculousness of what they're doing.

4. Space Hulk Tactics (2018) 

Cyanide Studio | Focus Home Interactive
Steam | Microsoft Store

Criminally underrated because it came out after a string of middling games with the words Space Hulk in their names, Tactics is the best of them. It's an adaptation of the board game that understands what makes it fun—the asymmetry of five clunky walking tanks pitted against limitless numbers of speedy melee monsters—and also understands that it's even more fun if you can play either. Tactics has an entire genestealer campaign, and finally getting to be the aliens is a blast. It doesn't skimp on the marine side either, and the AI plays genestealers like a tabletop player would, lurking around corners until enough gribblies have gathered to charge an overwatching marine en masse, knowing his bolter's going to jam eventually.

Where Space Hulk Tactics makes additions to the board game's rules, like cards that give single-use bonuses, and a maze-like map of the hulk to explore, they're well-balanced and complement the base. In fact, they feel like they could be from one of Games Workshop's own expansions to the original. While you can control from first-person for that 1993 Space Hulk experience, played in isometric view this is finally the XCOM-but-with-space-marines everyone wanted.

3. Space Marine (2011) 

Relic/THQ/Sega
Steam

During the dark heyday of the third-person cover shooter, Space Marine was a revelation. Why would an armored superhuman need to crouch behind a waist-high wall? Space Marine isn't having a bar of that. You regain health by killing bad guys up close, charging forward with your chainsword or slamming down out of the sky thanks to the best jetpack ever. Each fight reminds you this is what you're genetically engineered to do, and early on there's a quiet moment where you enter an Imperial Guard base and wounded soldiers several feet shorter than you look up in awe. It nails the fantasy of being a space marine.

Specifically, of being Captain Titus of the Ultramarines (voiced by Mark Strong, a man born 39 millennia too early). The Ultramarines are the chapter of choice for 40K videogames because they stick to the book. They aren't like the Space Wolves with their fangs and Viking schtick, or the Blood Angels and their periodic descent into the Black Rage. You don't have to explain anything extra to an audience who don't know the setting with the Ultramarines. Because they're boring.

Space Marine lets them be boring so Titus has something to rebel against. His brothers follow tactics from ancient tomes. Titus jumps out of a spaceship to fight orks across the deck of a flying pirate ship—and that's the tutorial.

(In 2025, a remaster called the Master Crafted edition was released. While its slightly improved graphics do make the marines' curved shoulderpads less jagged, otherwise it's a step backward. The new weapon-changing UI covers the centre of the screen and hangs around just long enough to be annoying, and in a few hours of play I experienced a black-screen bug and a crash to desktop. Also, the multiplayer's dead. Stick to the existing Anniversary Edition.)

2. Mechanicus (2018) 

Bulwark Studios/Kasedo Games
Steam | GOG | Epic

What Space Marine did for the third-person shooter, Mechanicus does for turn-based squad tactics. Your band of Adeptus Mechanicus tech-priests don't need cover. They've got disposable cannon fodder instead, servitors and skitarii soldiers to soak up the necron lasers. Those predictable enemies will only attack the closest target, and that closest target should be a replaceable cyberzombie rather than one of your leveled-up tech-priests.

The psychologically abnormal scientists of the AdMech see everything as a learning opportunity, and while their subordinates are dying they're off examining the architecture and sending servo-skulls to inspect alien glyphs, all of which gives you cognition points. These can be spent on extra movement or activating special abilities, and when you defeat a necron you get more of them, with a bonus for reaching the corpse within a turn to stand over them creepily watching the light in their artificial eyes go out. For science.

(They're so creepy that Mechanicus's essential expansion, Heretek, makes a villain faction out of their twisted mirror images.)

Spend those cognition points right and you snowball, ending each turn in the right spot to earn more. Your robed worshippers of the Machine God zip around the necron tomb they're investigating with a force axe in one hand and a data tablet in the other, six spare Doctor Octopus cyberlimbs whipping around just for fun. The AdMech normally show up as support in other games, but here they're the stars and everything from the way the mechanics accentuate their oddity, to the droning music, to the mechanical garble that serves as their voices fits them perfectly.

1. Dawn of War (2004) 

Relic Entertainment/THQ
Steam | GOG

Because Dawn of War 2 ditched the base-building, its predecessor has become a standard bearer for fans of build orders who miss that particular flavor of RTS. The thing is, what made Dawn of War's base-building great was how downplayed it was compared to the RTS games that came before it. It's not about carefully managing walls and cranking out more gatherers than the other players so your economy can triumph. There's no gold, no spice, no vespene bloody gas. The main way to gather resources in Dawn of War is to kill for them.

Nodes are spread across the map and you might grab a couple peacefully in those early moments where everyone is scouting and constructing their first power plant, but sooner than you think it's going to kick off. Dawn of War is the RTS accelerated. Instead of marching individual soldiers out of the barracks one at a time and click-dragging them into control groups they come in ready-made squads, and if you want a squad to be bigger you can teleport more troops in while it's in the field. Same for reinforcements. Instead of constantly flicking back to the barracks to replace losses, you just fire up the teleporter and off they go. This squad needs a missile launcher because they saw an armored vehicle over the next hill? Teleporter goes brrr.

Dawn of War is fast enough that you'll soon hit the unit cap and be leading a massive force that includes vehicles and robotic dreadnoughts who pick up individual enemies to fling around. Zoomed-out it's a glorious mess of lasers and explosions, and zoomed-in you'll see sync kills where someone gets pinned to the ground with a spear or has their head lopped off by a daemon. There is Only War and honestly it rules.

The base game's story builds to something unexpected, while the Winter Assault expansion is very much for fans of the Imperial Guard, but where it's really at is the Dark Crusade expansion's campaign mode, which has eight factions fighting over persistent maps where you return to one of your territories under siege and find all the defenses you built last time waiting. If that's not enough, the Soulstorm expansion has received the most love from modders, who have taken away the unit cap and upped the scale even more. It's 40K in its final form, eating worlds and firing missiles from a tank shaped like a church organ.

Warhammer 40,000: What to read next

Playing all of those Warhammer 40K games could keep you busy for 40,000 hours. But if you want to read more about some of our favorites and the 40K universe, here are some more stories.

• The best Warhammer 40,000 novels
• Major events in the Warhammer 40,000 timeline
• Why Necromunda is a big deal
• Dawn of War's modders have turned it into the ultimate 40K game
• Great moments: Going on the defensive in Dawn of War 2
• Great moments: Conquering Kronus in Dawn of War—Dark Crusade
• What's your dream Warhammer 40k game?

The best sex games on PC have a lot of prejudices to overcome. Since Steam began selling uncensored adult games in 2018, there have been so many low-effort puzzle games with recycled art that it's tempting to toggle the Adult Only filter just to make them go away. If you do make the effort to separate the decent stuff from the slush, whether on Steam, itch.io, Nutaku, or wherever games for discerning adults are found, you have to wade through the kind of games that love boobs but hate women, and are packed with the bigotry and stereotyping that flourish on the seedier side of the internet.

But there have always been terrible sex games. My first experience of that came via Sex Games on the Commodore 64. That's literally what it was called: Sex Games. Published by Landisoft in 1985, it was about waggling a joystick back and forth while two bright pink cartoon people went at it like joyless jackhammers. It wasn't a great introduction to the idea sex was a worthwhile subject for videogames.

We've come a long way since then—quiet, you—but there are still plenty of games about sex that are just as bad in their own way. Those that aren't deserve to be celebrated, because sex is as worthy a theme for games to explore as anything else. Sex can be playful and funny and exciting, and those are all things videogames excel at.

Today, Patreon provides funding for a lot of independent developers making ambitious adult games. It encourages a state of perpetual development, influenced by subscriber suggestions. While they may be labeled "in development", they can be just as complete as many other games are at launch, if not more so.

It's worth noting that these are all "sex games" rather than "games that happen to have sex in them", if that distinction makes sense. The Witcher 3 is an RPG dozens of hours long that has some sex scenes in it, but it's not about sex in the same way as NSFWare or Summertime Saga.

The best free sex games

Erostasis

Release date: 2022 | Developer: Domino Club | itch.io

In the far future apparently the best way to run a spaceship is with meat-tech—cyborg systems for everything from weapons to ventilation. It may be efficient in some ways, but there's one way it's not. All those cyborgs have needs, and it's your job to fulfil them. Turns out the ventilation system has a breathplay kink, and the waste disposal's into some weird stuff involving slime. In this short visual novel that's basically interactive Nine Inch Nails album art, you'll find out just how many fetishes a living spaceship can have.

Read more: The best space games on PC

Love Sucks: Night One

Release date: 2021 | Developer: Art Witch Studios | itch.io, Steam

Love Sucks is Buffy if it was about hooking up with vampires and demons instead of slaying them. Actually, that already describes a lot of episodes of Buffy. Still, if you swapped Sunnydale for Crescent Valley, the Hellmouth for leylines, and made it a visual novel, you'd essentially have Love Sucks.

You play the local Xander equivalent—although a future update, which the creators plan to work on after finishing the sequel, will add a Girl Mode so you can play as a woman. Pursued by two lady monsters, all you have to do is live through the night. The story piles on supernatural twists and character comedy setpieces without going overboard—it's anime, but not too anime, if you know what I mean.

Read more: The best visual novels on PC

Sex Advice Succubus

Release date: 2023 | Developer: NomnomNami | itch.io

As wholesome a game about horizontal jogging as you're likely to find, Sex Advice Succubus suggests that demons who feed on sexual energy would actually make natural sex counselors. Succubi and incubi want everyone to be having more and better sex, and one way to facilitate that without having to drain anyone's life is by getting jobs as gurus of groping.

NomnomNami's game presents a single session in which you, a succubus with a frankly ideal work-from-home situation, choose how to advise a ghost who is about to meet her internet girlfriend IRL for the first time. You navigate this by choosing options you think will boost your nervous client’s comfort level, and hope for the best. Sex Advice Succubus is short and sweet, and feels like an ideal format to be expanded in a larger game some day.

Read more: Sex in games has finally become personal

Crush Crush / Blush Blush

Release date: 2016 / 2019 | Developer: Sad Panda | Steam, Nutaku / Steam, Nutaku

Honestly, who could have predicted Farmville-parody Cow Clicker would lead to a future in which there's an entire storefront dominated by incremental games where you click on cartoon boobs? They say idle hands are the devil's playthings, and it seems like idle games belong to the devil too.

Crush Crush and Blush Blush are a cut above the rest. They do contain the standard activity of clicking on anime ladies to make them like you more (or anime men, in Blush Blush), as well as the usual time-management math that buffs your stats and their affection meters. But while these are games about manipulating numbers so you can see more of a hottie, the characters are fun and so is their dialogue. A lost time traveler asks who the current God Emperor is, while a man cursed to be a pegasus decides he's actually better off this way. And of course there's Bearverly, who is a bear.

Read more: There's a sea of hentai junk games on Steam, and then there's Crush Crush

Radiator 2

Release date: 2016 | Developer: Robert Yang | itch.io, Steam

A collection of Robert Yang's minigames, Radiator 2 includes Stick Shift (which is about a dude driving a car he's way into), Succulent (which is about a dude eating a corndog he's way into), and Hurt Me Plenty (which is about spanking). While the third one straight-up simulates a sexual act, the first two are extended, unsubtle double entendres, and both are hilarious. They're interactive music videos in which your mouse-waggling builds the visuals toward an over-the-top crescendo.

Yang's games delight in taking 3D characters who look like they belong in a shooter—his early work included Half-Life 2 mods—then stretching and exaggerating them for effect. They're like sexed-up versions of an0nymoose's Source Filmmaker videos.

There's a bonus in that vein in Radiator 2, an extra game you unlock by clicking the condom on the menu screen. It gives you a sniper rifle that shoots prophylactics and sets you up across the street from a building full of men who need protection. A bizarre parody of modern military shooters follows. Sex can be funny, and Radiator 2 understands that like few other games do.

Read more: This public bathroom sim swaps wangs for guns to make a point about censorship

NSFWare

Release date: 2018 | Developer: Pierrec | itch.io

The WarioWare games are grab bags of Nintendo microgames a few seconds long. You're thrown into them at random, frantically trying to figure out the controls so you can land a hang-glider or saw through a tree or shave a mustache. It's like being trapped in a frantic Japanese game show. NSFWare is that, but with fucking.

Each microgame is a pixel-art trace of a scene from a porno, and you have mere seconds to figure out how to mash the arrow keys to, for example, spank someone in a pillory or successfully jerk off two guys in a fair and even-handed manner. The brightly colored pixel sex is absurd, the hectic microgames are unfair, and the combination makes for a perfect spectator sport. It's Sex Games on the Commodore 64 only fun, and it lets you do what Nintendon't.

Read more: Enjoy some of PC gaming's most satisfying gifs

You Must Be 18 or Older to Enter

Release date: 2017 | Developer: Seemingly Pointless | itch.io, Steam

Your parents are out, and the dial-up internet is waiting. A screechy modem is the gateway that connects you to AOL and all the slow-loading bitmaps of naked people you could want. You Must Be 18 or Older to Enter reimagines what it was like to be young in the 1990s when the internet was new, confusing, and kind of frightening. Then it casts you as a kid for whom sex is also new, confusing, and kind of frightening.

The pornography is all impressionistic ASCII art, the kind of porn I imagine characters looking at on those retro computers in Fallout. You explore it via increasingly debased categories while under time pressure, because every noise you hear could be your parents in the driveway.

You Must Be 18 or Older to Enter is a singular recreation of a specific moment in time, one that's not so far away from us and yet, with its domains like "fourecks.com" and quaint virus unblocker pop-ups, fascinatingly distant.

Read more: RIP, AIM: Remembering how we used to talk on the internet

Triad

Release date: 2018 | Developer: anna anthropy, Leon Arnott | itch.io

After the threesome an awkward conversation happens. How do three people share a bed when they're just trying to get to sleep? Triad is a puzzle game about arranging people with different sleeping habits on a single mattress, making sure the one who likes to roll around won't slip right onto the floor, and that nobody's face is next to the one who snores.

Then, once you've arranged everybody’s body to your liking, you press the button to send them to sleep and chaos breaks out. This one flips over with their feet on that one's head, the other ends up on the floor no matter how much room you gave them, and finally the cat jumps on someone to make the disorder complete.

Read more: Hypersexed Hypertext: Porpentine and the Twine text game revolution

Trials in Tainted Space

Release date: 2015 | Developer: Fenoxo | Website

Trials in Tainted Space (a name surely chosen for its acronym) gives you a spaceship and worlds to explore, but before it does that it puts you through a rigorous character creation process that includes detailing your genitalia in some quite specific ways. No matter what you choose, you end up playing the version of Captain Kirk who exists more in memes than actual Star Trek—the one who spends all his time banging green alien girls.

It's a text-heavy game, with small character illustrations in the corner of the screen. (In a nice touch, you can choose from several different artist's interpretations for many of the characters.) There's combat, grid maps of planetary locations to explore, and a storyline about racing a rival heir, but mostly there's a lot of sex with a variety of weird aliens. Like, really weird. Everything is somebody's fetish and there's stuff in Trials in Tainted Space will make you say, "Wow, somebody out there wants to fuck that?" The answer is always, "Yes, somebody out there wants to fuck that."

The same creators are also responsible for Corruption of Champions and its sequel, which are the same thing but in a fantasy setting. The Dragon Age to its Mass Effect, if you will.

Read more: Sexuality and gender in science fiction games

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Dating of the Future

Release Date: 2025 | Developer: GeoWaffle | Steam

After the robots rise up and overthrow us, they create their own society. In that society, everyone has a role to play. Robots specialized for romantic pursuits, for instance, run the porn industry. It just makes sense.

You might think a game where you play a robot videographer who makes robot porn would be an excuse to get right to the rude stuff. You would be wrong, because take a step down any of the paths in this visual novel and you'll end up in a surprisingly involved exploration of its future society.

Say you decide you're interested in solving a mystery to win over the robot who wears the classic trenchcoat-and-hat combo (it works for Nick Valentine), and in no time at all you'll be knee deep in bee lore trying to figure out how the M-Apiarists on their way to Gust Moon keep going missing. Dating of the Future is a sharp and funny slice of sci-fi that puts plenty of games without sexbots in them to shame with its worldbuilding craft.

Captain Firehawk and the Laser Love Situation

Release Date: 2024 | Developer: Portland Caviar | Steam

A clothes-em-off shoot-em-up, every level of Captain Firehawk and the Laser Love Situation ends in a boss fight where a spaceship menaces you while you try to blast the clothes off a giantess. If you defeat the spaceship boss before you strip the big writhing lady in the background, she eats your ship and then shits it out. No, I don't know why either.

Captain Firehawk combines a '90s arcade game (specifically, Sentimental Shooting) with '90s anime, and is every bit as nonsensical as both. The protagonist is Spike Spiegel if he was a loser pizza-delivery guy, and he gets roped into joining the Space Armada and fighting giant space women under pretenses as flimsy as their clothing.

Don't expect upgrade trees or level ups, this is a pure arcade shmup only with a visual novel's worth of bugfuck anime silliness between every stage.

Read more: How Steam brought shmups out of arcades and into a new PC renaissance

A heavily modded Skyrim

Release Date: 2011 | Developer: Bethesda | Steam, Nexus Mods, Lover's Lab

If you've played Arena and Daggerfall you know the earliest Elder Scrolls games had a fair bit of nudity in them. So in a sense mods like Highly Improved Male Body Overhaul (HIMBO), Caliente's Beautiful Bodies Enhancer, and Schlongs of Skyrim are just bringing Skyrim back to its roots. And so too is Maelstrom, an adult quest mod that's mostly a gigantic dungeon that just happens to have some naked monster ladies in it.

The adult Skyrim modding community is vast and mature enough to contain parodies of itself too, like The Erotic Adventures of Misty Skye and Cambria – Unarmed Brawler, versions of the ever-popular "scantily clad lady companion mod" that are written with the tone of a Carry On movie.

Read more: Inside the Skyrim sex modding community where almost no taboo is off limits

Love Sucks: Night Two

Release Date: 2024 | Developer: Art Witch Studios | itch.io, Steam

The Sucks saga continues in this second-date sequel, which challenges you to survive a double date at a carnival. Night Two really plays up the idea that your supernatural ladyfriends, a vampire and a succubus, are struggling to control their desire to kill and consume just as you, an entirely too normal college student, struggle to rein in your brainkilling horniness.

There's a lot of comedy in that contrast, but Night Two also finds fun in those archetypal "win a huge fluffy toy from a carny" scenes. It's less linear than Night One, letting you explore the Witching Woods Carnival at length and find the layer of spookiness behind its superficially normal facade—the bright lights of the midway only accentuate the darkness beyond it. (Darkness in which someone is probably getting it on.)

Read more: Love Sucks: Night Two is a horny game where the real fantasy isn't sex, it's enjoying a carnival without almost immediately getting tired and wanting to go home

Monster Girl Quest!

Release Date: 2011 | Developer: Torotoro Resistance

The "horny on main" era has got to the point where even a mainstream RPG podcast like Worlds Beyond Number will casually descend into a discussion of monsterfucking mid-episode. We've got a couple of things to blame for this phenomenon. One is the fact D&D's creators filled its monster manual with sexy lady monsters like succubi, nymphs, and lamias. The other is Monster Girl Encyclopedia and the videogame inspired by it: Monster Girl Quest!

A visual novel RPG parody, Monster Girl Quest! is set in a world where every single monster seems to have been contributed by a particularly horny game designer, though the goddess Ilias forbids men from having relations with them. When a hero devoted to Ilias sets off to defeat the Monster Lord, he's repeatedly confronted by monsters who don't seem that bad, and places where monsters and humans could get along if only they tried.

Read more: The best anime games on PC

Mirror

Release date: 2018 | Developer: Kagami Works | Steam, itch.io

Tile-matching games and porn have been weirdly linked since the arcade release of Puzznic, Taito's 1989 post-Tetris puzzler where you slowly uncovered topless pixelated ladies, but Mirror owes more to Puzzle Quest's innovation of combining Bejeweled with Final Fantasy: Tactics. Lining up three or more symbols is how you power up spells and attacks and potions while engaged in duels with its sexy anime ladies, and, yes, there is a toggle to enable "clothing torns".

The matches aren't always fights, however. Each visual novel storyline introduces a new character, whether rival thief or Queen of pseudo-Egypt, and the matches are conflicts that separate chapters of her story. They might be mental duels between a demon and the nun he's trying to corrupt or playful arguments between a dragon knight and his mount who has been given human form. Some are better-written than others, with the best well aware of their own ludicrousness.

Completing the lot unlocks a challenge mode that's properly tough. It's not the kind of match-3 game where a time limit forces you to play frantically—instead there's a turn limit as well as a countdown showing how many moves before your opponent uses an ability that might chip away at your health, turn gems into beetles, or otherwise mess with the field. It's genuinely one of the better match-3 puzzlers since Bejeweled 3, but if it's the boobs you're here for you'll want the R18 patch (there's a patch for the DLC too).

Read more: Steam now has an endless supply of hentai puzzle games

Memoirs of a Battle Brothel

Release date: 2022 | Developer: A Memory of Eternity | Steam, itch.io

Equal parts Sin City and Shadowrun, Memoirs of a Battle Brothel is an RPG set in a cyberpunk-fantasy city called MoonFall that has lore so deep krakens could be swimming in it. As a facilitator for a branch of the MoonFall Courtesan's Guild, part of your job is managing and upgrading a brothel, but the majority of your job is negotiating with the city's many factions and occasional outbreaks of cosmic horror.

The Courtesan's Guild is a well-regarded diplomatic institution, the one organization that has dealings with every level of society from street gangs to corporations, as well as occult cults and crime syndicates. With your party of well-trained fuckwarriors, you navigate a dangerous political situation where earning the trust of any faction without losing another's is like walking an oiled tightrope.

Read more: I'm glad I looked past the name because Memoirs of a Battle Brothel is exactly what I want in an RPG

Ladykiller in a Bind 

Release date: 2017 | Developer: Love Conquers All Games | Steam

While a lot of saucy visual novels cast their protagonists as arrogant jerks or desperate losers, Ladykiller in a Bind puts you in the role of a suave lesbian womanizer who is confident and cool. Even if inhabiting that character isn't your fantasy, it's a fun space to explore and one that no other game does.

Though there's a complex plot involving a popularity competition worth five million dollars and the reason you’re disguised as a man, what Ladykiller in a Bind is actually about is being stuck on a cruise for a week with a ship full of horny young people. Horny, kinky young people.

While you can spend the days pursuing votes in the popularity competition while dodging suspicion to maintain your cover, you'll also be pursuing sex. No matter what happens during each day, when the sun goes down you choose one of two characters to share a room with—one dominant and the other submissive. Ladykiller in a Bind is an introduction to BDSM, and a great one. If you thought "subspace" was where Optimus Prime keeps his trailer you're gonna learn some stuff.

Read more: Ladykiller in a Bind review

Coming Out on Top 

Release date: 2014 | Developer: Obscurasoft | Website, Steam

Coming Out on Top takes the kind of subplots the gay sidekick gets in a sitcom, then expands them until they become the A-plots. That guy at the bar last night seemed so nice, then you go to college the next morning and your new lecturer is that same guy. DRAMATIC MUSICAL STING. The plots are full of twists, but usually resolved in fairly wholesome ways. There's no problem that can't be solved by three roommates talking about it while throwing around one-liners.

When I was on a date with a pop star who wanted to stay incognito because his fans didn't know he was gay, we went to a country & western bar then did karaoke. It was one of the most romantic things I've seen in any dating sim. Then afterwards we went back to his hotel room and it got real explicit.

I called Coming Out on Top "fairly wholesome" but it does feature actual raunch. It also gets dark and weird sometimes. I don't want to spoil it for you, but the stuff with the goldfish really goes some places.

One Night Stand

Release date: 2016 | Developer: Kinmoku | itch.io, Steam

One Night Stand is a visual novel that shares Ladykiller in a Bind's interest in negotiating what comes after sex. It's the morning after and you're working through the awkwardness of what happens between you and the woman you've woken up beside, walking an interpersonal minefield while hungover and basically at your worst.

Read more: This 'xxxhibition' complete with dildo joysticks was the highlight of PAX Australia

Hardcoded

Release date: 2024 | Developer: Ghosthug Games | Steam, Patreon, itch.io (demo)

You're a semi-organic robot on the run in a cyberpunk dystopia who happens to fall in with a friendly group investigating a mystery that might be the fault of an evil corporation's experiments. Where does the sex come in? Well, the mystery being investigated is that everyone in the city has become inexplicably horny.

Each day you choose whether to pursue the main plot or one of your new friends, who are of course romanceable. You can also just wander around the city, busting up surveillance droids for valuable scrap, talking to people, and, yeah, getting down.

Hardcoded is so well-written, and has such a great pixel-art adventure game look that I'd recommend it even if it wasn't about sexbots who've just had their boobs upgraded and would quite like a chance to test them out.

Read more: The best cyberpunk games

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Summertime Saga

Release date: 2015 | Developer: Kompas Productions | Patreon, itch.io

Summertime Saga takes the traditional dating sim and rethemes it as an American teen movie: Fast Times at Tokimeki High. As a young man in his final year of high school, you decide how to budget your time between study so you don't flunk any of your classes, hobbies that raise your stats, part-time jobs that fund your social life, and, of course, dating. You’ll have to take someone to prom, after all.

It wouldn't be a teen movie without complications, and Summertime Saga has plenty of those, from the local battle rappers and bullies to mobsters and hitmen chasing down your late father's debt.

Read more: The most popular adult game on Patreon is being made by someone who'd never played one before

Monstrous Liberation

Release date: 2025 | Developer: BP Games | Steam, itch.io

The Usurper has lived up to his name by usurping control of a fantasy city full of diverse monsterfolk and enslaving them with magical compulsions called Threads. The Usurper also has a thing for irony I guess, which is how you end up with an angry minotaur compelled to work as an apothecary in a shop full of fragile bottles—a literal bull in a china shop. Or a slime who dries out easily forced to work in a hot bakery. Or a succubus given a job in a brothel—but as a kitchenmaid who mostly peels potatoes.

Thanks to magical shears that can cut these Threads, you're the hero to save the day. Also, you're a horny vtuber from the real world who got isekai-portaled into fantasyland and is a little too eager to live out this particular weeb fantasy. Monstrous Liberation is a visual novel about helping a repressed kingdom through sexual revolution, blessed with writing that's self-aware enough to skip past and eventually subvert the clichés.

I shouldn't be surprised, because Monstrous Liberation is written by the editor of the Adult Analysis Anthology, a uniquely thoughtful series about applying a critical lens to games designed to make you want to jork it.

Read more: Let's talk about politics in games

In June 2020, less than two weeks after the murder of George Floyd, the lead designer of indie fighting game Skullgirls made an "I can't breathe" joke while commentating an official tournament. Mike Zaimont's words hung in the air for an uncomfortable 13 seconds of silence from the other two commentators before he spoke again. Zaimont apologized on Twitter later the same day, but that joke ignited a chain reaction that would, within three months, lead to the collapse of the studio just as it was starting a new multi-year project.

On June 29, as employees at Lab Zero were still grappling with how to publicly and privately deal with the stream incident, two fighting game community cosplayers accused Zaimont of making uncomfortable sexual comments. By late August, several of Lab Zero's developers had quit the company, citing years of similarly inappropriate behavior internally.

"Almost every employee had a story where Mike abused his position of power," wrote senior animator Jonathan Kim in a tweet on August 24. Kim accused Zaimont of "frequently mentioning his genitals, forcing unwanted physical contact, making sexual comments about himself or about employee's bodies, insulting coworkers privately or openly in front of other coworkers, or using very personal details to threaten or demean coworkers when they didn't go along with what he wanted." By the end of the month, after more high profile departures, Zaimont—who had previously acquired sole ownership of the company after buying out the former CEO's shares—laid off all of Lab Zero's remaining staff.

Since then Zaimont has had little public presence online, but he hasn't left game development. For approximately the last two years, Zaimont has been a programmer on Diesel Legacy: The Brazen Age, a new 2v2 indie fighter from publisher Modus Games announced on Sunday. It's an exciting project: indie fighting games are rare, and rarer still are ones that try to do something notably different in the genre. In addition to its striking hand-drawn art, Diesel Legacy is marrying classic Street Fighter-style combos with a bit of the chaos of Super Smash Bros, with three 2D "lanes" for four players to fight in simultaneously.

I played an in-development build of Diesel Legacy, and even unfinished it ran impressively smoothly online—borderline miraculous when you consider that many 1v1 fighting games from bigger developers are only now adopting rollback netcode, the ideal networking style for low latency combat. Diesel Legacy seems to gracefully handle the addition of two more characters with its own rollback implementation, and I had fun immediately picking up some basic combos with the kinds of command inputs I'm familiar with from Street Fighter. I found it a bit awkward knowing which direction to be facing at a given time when pinched between two enemies, but the three "lanes" open up options for sidestepping and deeper movement options than 2D fighters typically have. Zaimont's expertise on Skullgirls, and in particular his experience with rollback netcode, led to his role on Diesel Legacy.

Before debuting Diesel Legacy, CEO of Modus (and also its parent company Maximum Entertainment) Christina Seelye spoke with me about hiring Zaimont to work on the game, despite the accusations of inappropriate behavior against him. "I am one of the few women that are CEOs and making games in this entire industry. In the couple years since I made that decision [to hire Mike], I'm one of two women CEOs that are running publicly listed companies in the whole industry, in the world. I did not take this decision lightly," Seelye said.

"That said, when I was talking to Mike and went through the process of figuring out where he was at—if you want to have an inclusive environment in the world, and you want to have diverse viewpoints, all of the things we want for DEI, you have to have a path for people to learn and improve. You have to create a way for them to show the world that they've changed and decided to do better. And I really got that from Mike. I got that he was committed to it and that he didn't want everything that went down to be the end of his story. He wanted the opportunity to have the redemptive arc that's in so many stories that we all love."

Multiple former Lab Zero developers I spoke with, however, expressed skepticism that Zaimont has changed—and also expressed frustration that he had been unwilling to do so in 2020.

"We did everything we could to help him come through this cleanly and improve himself as a person, and he refused every single thing we did to try to improve the situation," said one former coworker. "He refused it all, and only hardened and only became worse to everyone involved who was trying to help him. He hurt everybody at Lab Zero, and there was no reason for it. Things could've been a lot better if he'd just tried to be a good person.

"I know that sounds insane, but if he'd just tried to work with us and improve, we were all there for it."

Ground zero

In recent weeks I've spoken with four former Lab Zero developers, who all asked to be quoted anonymously when speaking about Zaimont. They independently corroborated the major events that led up to their departure from the studio, including:  

• Employees discussing Zaimont's behavior and realizing that he had a history of making sexual, cruel, or otherwise inappropriate comments in their private interactions
• More than one conversation with Zaimont after the George Floyd joke where he was given the chance to commit to addressing behavioral issues, which he did not do, before he was asked to leave the company
• Zaimont failing to follow through on a plan to turn Lab Zero into an employee-owned company with all employees receiving equity, which he had "held over [them] like a carrot"

Lab Zero's implosion still looms over two people in particular: former creative director Mariel Cartwright and former CEO Francesca Esquenazi, both of whom were also on Lab Zero's board of directors. In April 2021, the pair sued the company—now solely owned by Zaimont—over wrongful termination and retaliation. Zaimont then counter-sued, claiming a lengthy list of infractions including "breach of implied covenant of good faith and fair dealing," "misappropriation of trade secrets" and "intentional interference with contractual relations." Both suits remain unresolved.

Three of the people I spoke with had strong words about the contents of Mike's cross-complaint: "deranged" and "full of ad hominem attacks" said one. Another characterized it as full of "super off-the-rails stuff and philosophical screeds."

Where two of the former coworkers I interviewed described team conversations with Zaimont where they offered to help him change his behavior after the George Floyd joke, Zaimont's lawsuit characterizes those conversations very differently. "During the second meeting that included me, Mariel and Francesca encouraged all employees to bash me in front of each other and thereby fostered hatred and negativity toward me. Mariel and Francesca repeatedly admonished me to be quiet and yelled at me. I started to cry during the meeting and was forced to explain my Autism Spectrum Disorder to the entire company," Zaimont states in the suit.

Two of the former employees were particularly bothered by the way Mike invoked Autism Spectrum Disorder in his lawsuit. 

"He uses his autism as a defense of his behavior, which I think is particularly insidious—I personally know plenty of people on the spectrum who don't behave like creeps, and it's insulting that he would throw an entire community under the bus to make himself look helpless and unaware of his actions," one told me.

Both lawsuits paint a picture of a messy dissolution and hurt feelings for all parties, but many of the conversations Zaimont cites seem to be attempts to justify his behavior as appropriate rather than deny it.

Cartwright and Esquenazi allege in the lawsuit that "Zaimont engaged in a pervasive campaign of sexual harassment through generalized sexual and harassing comments" including "frequent unwanted touching" and "unprompted, unwelcome, and inappropriate comments about Ms. Cartwright and Ms. Esquenazi’s bodies, dress, and sexuality."

In his cross-complaint, Zaimont claims that Cartwright "routinely facilitated written and oral conversations with me relating to sex, sexual orientation, urination, menstruation, porn, plastic surgery, body image, etc… Based on these conversations, Mariel gave me the impression that no topic was off limits, but rather that these topics were welcomed and ordinary in the course of our friendship."

In the first example he cites of one such sexual conversation, Cartwright is complaining over Slack about her past experiences being "hit on, leered at, touched and grabbed."

"If ANY of that kinda shit happens when I'm around you tell me," Zaimont responded.

"He has never stopped pursuing Mariel and Francesca in court. This basically makes it clear he has never repented for anything he's ever done," one former employee said. "I think I, and most of the team, would be willing and understanding that people are allowed second chances and allowed to move forward with their lives, but only when they understand what's happened and are willing to put in the work. He has in fact worked in the opposite direction this whole time." 

Diesel Legacy

Outside the complaints of harassment, the former Lab Zero developers characterized Zaimont as difficult to work with—unwilling to compromise on design, bad at managing his time, and prone to retaliate against coworkers who made decisions he disagreed with, though he was obviously a skilled programmer. A couple of Zaimont's former coworkers invoked the "genius" stereotype of a skilled developer whose problems with teamwork end up making things worse for everyone else around them.

"I looked up to him as a game developer, and admired his dedication to his work, which I now look back on as a pretty toxic crunch mentality," one said of the fraught development of Lab Zero's last game, Indivisible. That aligned with another developer's description of Zaimont crunching overnight and then being upset with another employee for working the nine-to-five schedule they were paid for.

In speaking about Zaimont's work on Diesel Legacy, Christina Seelye said that in her opinion, Zaimont had learned that being in a leadership role where he had to design, make big decisions and guide a team "was not his skill set." He's focused on the online rollback netcode, and has no direct reports on the team. Seelye also used the word genius to describe his work on the netcode and called it an "amazing technical feat," but said that she'd been clear during the hiring process that she "was not willing to trade bad behavior for genius." 

"This is not a scenario where he's difficult to work with and making people on the team mad, and we're saying 'oh it's okay because he's so amazing at what he does.' No assholes. Just a straight, no assholes policy," she said. "So I don't believe, today, that I am trading genius for bad behavior. I think that what we're doing is, people have strengths and weaknesses, and they have the ability to do really good work and they have the ability to not do great work if they're in a bad situation."

Diesel Legacy art director Giancarlo Montalbano also praised Zaimont when I reached out to him privately. "We couldn’t have done what we've done on Diesel Legacy if there wasn’t a great working relationship, in my opinion," he said over email. "This team has been creatively firing on all cylinders from day one, and that has to do with conduct as much as it does proficiency. This kind of game is notoriously complex in its execution, requiring an almost perfect handshake between design and art/animation production. ANY poor relationships or conduct on the team would be detrimental to what we are trying to do here. Mike consistently outpaces almost everyone on the team in his general levity and attentiveness to people’s creative needs. The entire team has successfully created strong, productive, and professional working relationships, in my observance. I will tell you that, in my career, this is some of the best team synergy I've ever experienced."

One of the former Lab Zero developers I spoke with told me that they warned Modus Games that hiring Zaimont would be a red flag to other indie developers. Two others expressed that they hoped he had changed, and did think he had a right to make a living doing what he does best. "If he treats the other team members better than how he treated us, good on him, good on them," said one.

The fourth former coworker strongly disagreed.

"When I heard that Modus were going to work with him, I was like: that is disgusting. They are disgusting. It's disgusting they'd work with him because they clearly don't care about female game developers—the public record was there of his continued harassment of two ex-coworkers."

Seelye knew that in announcing Diesel Legacy, the studio would be under scrutiny for Zaimont's involvement, and went back and forth on how to address it. Ultimately, she said, they decided to "lead with the truth and hope that works."

"I'm not sure it's appropriate to say who has changed and who hasn't changed," said Seelye. "I can only talk about my experience with him, and the team's experience with him. There's a team of 30 people who have all been working together for the past couple years, and those guys have worked very effectively together. We have not seen any of the behavior that caused a lot of the problems that he had previously in his career. Has he changed? Has he not changed? I don't know. And I don't know if you can say that about somebody else.

"But what I can say is the behavior that everyone is experiencing with him is fundamentally different, phenomenally different, than what was happening. By his own admission—he would say he's completely changed how he deals with issues, how he deals with pressure, his team member interaction. By his own admission, and by me seeing it."

Zaimont has remained out of the public spotlight since 2020, and the lawsuit over the fate of Lab Zero continues to crawl through the legal system, with a hearing scheduled for August. The outcome may eventually provide some closure for the the three people directly involved, but it can't answer the question of how the games industry deals with preventing abuse, and reckoning with who gets forgiveness.

We're digging into the PC Gamer magazine archives to publish pieces from years gone by. This article was originally published in PC Gamer issue 146, March 2005.

It's too late to run. Running from The Cradle is like running from the air around you. People bandy the word "immersive" around when discussing videogames, but miss the subtext of what they're really talking about. To be immersed is to be surrounded and submerged, thrust into a new context. If The Cradle is about anything, it's immersion. Your head pushed beneath murky waters until you choke and drown.

The Cradle is the penultimate level in Thief: Deadly Shadows. It's what's known in television parlance as a "format breaker"—something that subverts many of the set expectations of the show to stir the critical palette into new life. While The Cradle is based on Thief's shadow-stalking mandate, and a clear extrapolation from the first Thief's seminal Return to the Haunted Cathedral, it has amplified its source material to become something quite different. It's probably the scariest level ever made, an experiment in non-linear storytelling methods that pays off handsomely and a towering achievement for games.

Like anyone who plays The Cradle, I was anxious before I even arrived. Perhaps more than most; in a passing email, Thief's project lead, Randy Smith, had mentioned a "haunted house" level which was a deliberate extrapolation from the theories he laid out in a Fear feature in Gamer's prehistory. I was expecting something special, so waited until the witching hour and played the game on a wall projector in front of a group of unnerved peers. Even in Garrett's introductory speech, he doesn't sound his usual cocksure self. For the first time, he sounds anxious. The level starts and... there it is.

The Shalebridge Cradle. An ornate gothic façade on a dilapidated mansion. The starting view is angled so that you're looking up and it's looming over you like a furious parent about to discipline a child. In this first moment, The Cradle's themes are set—the relationship between those with power and those without, authority and the oppressed.

The level's genius is that it never explicitly states its purpose. The truth is only approached tangentially, in the non-linear method of storytelling entirely unique to games. That is, through immersion. The level doesn't tell you a story. It gives you clues, and you tell the story to yourself. It's this process of realisation that provides some of the most disturbing moments in The Cradle. You're told from the start that it used to be a madhouse. You're told that before that it was an orphanage. It's only when you're inside, reading a child's scribbled note, that you realise The Cradle served both purposes at the same time.

It's a horrific idea. A few years ago, one of my friends was sectioned, believing he was either the Anti-Christ, the Son of God or Muad'Dib from the Dune books. The cliché's true: you have to laugh, or else you cry. But when I visited him, in halls that stunk of disinfectant, full of people who only looked at you through drugged eyes, laughter was impossible. Madness is the most frightening thing in the world, and an asylum its church. The idea of the criminally insane intermixed with the stray children of a city is a horrendous concept, pure melodrama. If it was just told to you, you might have rejected it as simply that. But since the idea was hinted, and you made the dreadful leap of logic yourself, you accept.

Now, I've played The Cradle a half-dozen times preparing this feature, and while the initial trip is still the one that squats in the back of my mind glaring, it's never a comfortable place to be. Some of its torture-blades dull when the surprise is spent and you know what's happening, others remain permanently whetted. They're the incisions which attack your guts through mood and timbre: that is, what the place sounds like and what it looks like. That sound and images can disturb has long been known: the Roman Catholic Church expressly forbade the creation of church music featuring chords including a diminished fifth ("The Devil's interval") due to its profound effect upon the psyche.

Sound-man Eric Brosius? He'd have been burned as a witch. His Thief and System Shock 2 credits make as fine a resumé for horror as anyone in the business, but The Cradle is absolute career-best work. Mostly a drunken miasma of sound is smeared across your speakers, making you uneasy until an unexpected noise splits asunder. Distant sounds rise up, suggesting the scuttling of unknown things moving elsewhere, up to no good. Moments of plot-revelation are provided a chilling counterpoint by an apposite ghostly sound effect—find the ashes of a baby, still in a crib, and expect to be haunted by its cry from beyond the grave. The flickering of lights wouldn't be the same without the tiny crackle. And, most memorably, as you inch up towards the attic, the sounds of room-shaking violence that either petrify you or send you running back the way you came.

On the visual side, things are just as deliberately wrong. After all—there are visual tricks as disturbing as the Devil's Interval to apply. Take the Cradle's inhabitants—the puppets, whose movements are carefully judged to appear unnatural. They don't move like people. They move as if their insides are about to split or their bones have been broken and set at off-angles. The art here is to not be wrong (as in not correct) but Wrong (as in so close to being normal... but not quite). No matter how long you stay, there's always another detail to shake you when you're getting too comfy, like realising the lights in the building pulse, as if they were slowly breathing, or... Well, when mapping a section for this feature, I physically screamed when one of the inmates pulled himself from the ground unexpectedly and lurched to attack.

And these touches unnerve on every journey into The Cradle. The first time you walk down the steps into its basement, when you know nothing, it's devastating. The masterstroke is that the first half of the level is empty. Nothing's there, so you spend almost the first half of the visit inching around darkened corridors, trying to work out what went wrong while jumping at shadows. You hate the darkness, as you know it could be concealing anything. And then, once you've reactivated the generators, complete with the sort of rattling mechanical scream that you just know will have alerted anything with something vaguely analogous to ears within a square mile, the electric lights twitch back into life and you'd do anything to have a good darkened alcove to crouch in again. Masterful psychology: make you hate one thing, then take it away in a way which makes you wish for its speedy return.

It's this manner of mind game that forms the foundation on which the whole Cradle is built. Insecurity is reinstated by changing the rules just as you've grown familiar with them. As you explore the Outer Cradle, it is only your own fear that twists the knife. By the time you realise you're being manipulated, you've entered the Inner Cradle. Here the corkscrewing of your guts has been externalised in the form of the inmates' impossibly convulsing bodies. When you grasp that particular problem, the Cradle twists again and transports you from its current ruined state into its memories of earlier times, to be chased through a pallid, fish-eye world by the black silhouettes of long-dead staff—literally faceless authority figures.

Ah. The Cradle's memories. It's by this point you've realised that Shalebridge isn't made of bricks and mortar, but something more. The years of brutality and institutionalised torture sublimed into some shapeless intelligence that wants nothing better than to keep you here forever. While you simply view the place as a building at first, by the time you leave it's clearly an adversary—its personality expressed in the world you've fearfully sneaked your way through. It never speaks directly to you. There's none of the obvious taunting of an entity like SHODAN in System Shock 2, but when your every action is thwarted it's painfully obvious that something wants to keep you, in the way a stomach keeps a snack.

There are moments where you think, against all logic, it could actually do that. The Cradle is the longest level in the game. Before the close, I had an eye-of-the-storm moment when I wondered if there was in fact any way out of this place, or whether the real end of Thief 3 is to be batted around like a mouse in the diseased paws of some malevolent feline, forever.

But, yes, eventually you do escape. Except that isn’t really true. Yes, the level ends. You do escape The Cradle. But, because you've been there, it lives on in your mind in dirty little fragments of memory... and so it escapes in you.

The Cradle's in me. If you've played it, it's in you. Even if you haven't, by reading this, a shadow of my dread is cast on your mind. So we're all carrying it with us, like a dark little secret or black twitching egg, waiting to hatch and let its brood stretch your skin to breaking point and fall twitching into the light.

It's too late to run. But don't let that stop you. Run.

Abandon all hope

While most films specifically feed you the story on a drip, the best games put you in a context which you explore. The Cradle is full of clues—in its sounds, in text, in graphics, in the action of its inhabitants—which you piece together inside your head then perform an act of closure upon to fill-in the gaps. You aren't told the story; a world exists, and you transform it into a coherent image through the power of your mind. In other words, exactly the way you gather diverse information from the real world. Any game can do this. Many have. The Cradle does it particularly well, so makes a fine example for us to examine more closely.

On the following annotated maps are marked the more significant clues you find when playing The Cradle, along with some notes on their possible significance. After that is an attempt to transform them into a linear narrative. If you've played The Cradle, take it as a guide to the place. If you haven't... essentially this is a videogame murder mystery, transformed to paper. We show the clues and provide what we think is a likely and entertaining solution.

Previously: before entering the Cradle you know little about the place. You come because Hammerite Inspector Drept saw the Gray Lady here when he was a child, as she killed his friend Lauryl. It's your only possible link to catching up with this mysterious figure and uncovering what horrors she plans for the City.

The Outer Cradle

A) Note: "It was better before. Too many rules to remember. Don't go here. Don't touch that. Don't talk to the patients. The Doctors are just as scary as the patients. Miss Arthur says orphans shouldn't complain." The moment you realise Shalebridge was an orphanage and asylum simultaneously.

B) Lauryl's portrait: The second you touch this, you become aware of Lauryl's ghost and able to communicate with her. Once you free Lauryl, she disappears from the frame—The Cradle no longer has any hold on her. Relevant question: who painted it?

C) Lauryl's ghost: Still haunts the location of her murder in the attic, blood stains still visible. Despite its ovoid shape, this bubble of light casts a human shadow. It's a fantastic effect due to its impossibility being more tangible than it would be in another medium, such as film. Look closely and you can see the soft outline of Lauryl's face on its surface. She acts as the voice-in-your-head plot guide for most of the game. Point of interest for fans of System Shock 2—the same voice actress, Thief writer Terri Brosius, also played SHODAN, who fulfilled a similar, if more aggressive role.

D) Lauryl's blood: In a vial. Still warm. Yuk.

E) Case study: Examines one C Pins, the patient in room 7. Claims he's decorated his cell like "The Murder Scene". Discusses his obsession with birds. Foreshadowing of in-mate viciousness and disturbing obsessions.

F) Case study: This one's of F Topper, in room 6, who was found carrying an urn filled with ashes which she claims is her child. She treats it exactly like a baby. Recommended experimental Hanscomb's therapy. Foreshadowing of the brutality of the regime. Listen to the sound effect of a baby crying after you read this, for a first example of sound used to reinforce the impact of your discovery.

G) The staircase: Rattling noise as you head up the stairs, provides one of the biggest scares. Something's going on up there. Best guess: the ghostly echoes of the murder.

H) The pauper's ward: Low security ward. Note its location—it's not behind the heavy security gates. A note describes someone collecting gold teeth from the morgue for profit, perhaps implying workers here too.

I) Note: "I didn't want to have my picture painted, but I was too scared to say no. I guess I did it right because he said I sat good and still." A note, probably written by Lauryl, since hers is the only unmutilated portrait in the building.

J) The lobby: Apart from looking beautiful, noteworthy for a book that gives a feel for the institution's policy on lobotomy: "more can be learned from a surgery performed incorrectly, so we'll keep the training to a minimum." Nice. Also claims that this may solve the problem of an "uprising" at The Cradle.

K) Treasurer's office: Useful to a thief for the money it contains, but plot relevant due to the notes on Dr Hanscomb's experimental heat therapy to dry the "excessive humours" which are, he believes, a cause of madness. "The heat must be of the dry variety" he urges, and "hot elements must be laid directly onto the skin."

L) The staff tower: Lauryl warns you that no one is allowed to go up there. In the "real" time period, it's destroyed and in rubble, making exploration impossible. When you first venture into the past, it exists again. When explored again after using the Cage to transport yourself into the past—that is, to a later period than the first—the entire place is emitting ghostly smoke, as if on fire.

M) The chair: Only present when visiting the latter of the two time periods, it faces the Staff Tower, casting a dramatic shadow. Suggests that someone was watching it during this period.

N) The doors: Heavy metal doors, only capable of being operated from the outside. Implies that the dangerous stuff is beyond this point.

O) The cage: Where they kept new prisoners entering The Cradle. Lauryl urges you not to go in, for fear of The Cradle noticing you. Eventually you're forced into doing so, in order to enter the past for your escape—which brings you to an entirely different period to previous trips. Interestingly, you can also use the cage before you've been told you can.

P) The generator: All lights are off and access to the Inner Cradle barred until you replace its fuse. This implies that the doors to the Inner Cradle have been shut for a considerable length of time, and you're possibly its first visitor.

The Inner Cradle

A) The lounge: Contains a particularly blackened fireplace. Interesting, that.

B) The hall of records: The centre of the Inner Cradle, most important for its listing of the patients, their treatments and their privileges. Especially relevant is the patient in room 9, who was allowed to light the fire in the lounge if she continued to behave. For this purpose, she was allowed to keep her tinderbox.

C) The observatory: Here you'll find an inmate, presumably the one from Cell 5. The room is full of portraits, each defaced with a bloody smear over the face. Jewels are positioned where their eyes should be. The inmate, until disturbed, perpetually moves between them, making sure each is positioned correctly. This implies perfectionism was a main trait.

D) The nursery tower: In the present day, burnt down and inaccessible. Once you travel into the past, you can locate Lauryl's diary in the main ward. Information also comes to light on the Gray Lady: the report on Lauryl's death which claims that one of the patients must have killed the girl, because this Gray Lady idea is clearly ludicrous. "The staff blamed him for what happened to me," Lauryl reveals after you've read it. "They were wrong." Who is "him"? There's also a note to the effect that rules to keep patients and orphans separate must be followed.

E) Ghostly staff: The Cradle only animates the staff when you are in the past, and even then, only as spectral memories in silhouette. Since The Cradle is quite capable of animating the actual corpses of the patients, you have to ask where the bodies of the staff went to prevent it from doing this to them. That this is how The Cradle "remembers" people also tells you something about its perspective on the world.

F) Treatment room A: Home of the asylum's electric shock and wet-heat treatment room. "I saw a man all wrapped up in wet bandages," Lauryl informs you as you enter, "I think he wanted me to help him, but I was too afraid." Tells us that orphans and patients mixed to some degree. Also note a wax mask resting on the electric chair: someone discarded it here.

G) Treatment room B: The lobotomy theatre, containing Dr Ranker's specially made silver tools. Includes a note congratulating Ranker on his report on the "botched" lobotomy, speculating that "in the future they'll call the procedure the Ranker Lobotomy and use it on the most difficult cases."

H) The white hall: Nine cells, in a circular formation around a central meal hall. Each is decorated according to the style of its occupant, only the most notable of which are referenced here. This whole section is heavily locked down, with heavy steel gates preventing access to the area outside. Lockpicking is required to get anywhere. People other than Garrett would need keys.

I) Seclusion chamber: Home of King No One—a play on words of "Number 1" or "No. One", his patient number. Comprises an elevator, ascending to an isolated cell. You hear the King's manic laugh on the way up. Only at the top do you realise it's because there's no button for sending the elevator back down.

J) Cell 5: A telescope is positioned, watching a portrait with the face cut out. Clear links to what you find in the observatory. The cell has a false back wall where, once dismantled, you find Lauryl's blood-stained dress. If it's the Gray Lady who killed Lauryl, this patient must have come into possession of it shortly afterwards.

K) Cell 6: Foreshadowed in the Outer Cradle, belonging to F Topper. Tiny baby clothes hanging above a crib. As you inch closer, it becomes obvious that it's an urn not a child that rests there.

L) Cell 7: Home of C Pins, the Birdman of Shalebridge, foreshadowed in the Outer Cradle. Contains what is presumably his re-animated form, standing, perpetually admiring his array of birds, nailed into the brickwork. A row of skulls rest on the desk.

M) Cell 9: A relatively bare cell. It takes a second to realise that it's because the entire place is burnt out, especially towards the far side. A tinderbox lies nearby. Someone clearly likes lighting fires.

N) The inmates: Physical puppets of The Cradle's will, in the "real" material plane. While they can be taken down with a physical blow, they will only get up again. The only way to permanently disable them is through flashbombs and holy water. Notice the unearthly, jerky movement cribbed from Jacob's Ladder.

The Shalebridge Cradle: Folklore

The City is used to strangeness. The bizarre is the mortar that holds it together. Its people are a hardy sort. In a world where the dead won't stay buried, they have to be. It hardly counts as superstition when you know what's out there, in the dark, waiting for a chance to make you join it. Still, even in the City, no-one loiters too long in the shadow of one particular building, which hangs off the east side of the Old Quarter like some facial canker. Shalebridge Cradle. "If there's a way to cram more misery into one building's history," Master Thief Garrett once said, "I can’t think of it."

The Cradle doesn't have history. It has a scream, stretched out through time. 

It's said Shalebridge used to be that sad institute for lost children: an orphanage. It's also said that it was that sad institution for lost adults: an asylum. What most don't realise is that, during its latter days, it was both at once. While safer inmates were kept in the pauper's ward towards the front of the building, the murderously insane—of which, at The Cradle's demise, there were nine—were kept in the White Hall ward, towards the rear, with heavy metal, lock-down doors between them and civilisation. Near them, the orphans, high in the Nursery tower. At the building's heart, looking over all, was the Staff Tower, the stronghold of the lawmakers. Children and the insane, under the lock and key of nurses and doctors. Authority and oppression, bound together. 

The tale of Shalebridge rests on two children—a boy and a girl. The boy, Drept, ran away, grew up, found redemption in the order of the Hammer and became known as a fanatical hunter of shadows. The girl, Lauryl, didn't get the chance to grow up at all. 

The head doctors—Dr Sandbridge, Dr Ranker, and Dr Hanscomb—had strict rules which Matron Miss Arthur was to follow. Obvious rules: such as homicidal patients and the children weren’t to mix. But rules in a madhouse tend to err, so it came to pass that Lauryl found herself sitting while having her portrait painted by the patient in Room 5, known as The Watcher. He was brought to Shalebridge after slaughtering his previous sitters because "they moved". He then smeared his victim's blood over each portrait's face, in frustration at the lack of life in the final work. Lauryl was a good girl. Lauryl didn't move at all. So, Lauryl lived and The Watcher made the one perfect picture of his life. 

No one is that lucky twice. 

The Gray Lady of myth and nightmare came to Shalebridge to find a body to use for her devilish purposes. Someone discarded already. Someone no-one would miss. That is, an orphan. If Lauryl and Drept weren't playing in the attic that day, maybe the Gray Lady would have chosen a different victim. Would The Cradle's cry have been stifled early? Perhaps, perhaps not. We can only speculate as to the reasons why The Watcher was close enough to the murder scene to take Lauryl's bloody, tattered dress as a keepsake before anyone else arrived. Perhaps the murder he would eventually carry the blame for would have occurred anyway? The Cradle's birth is rife with such sick irony. 

Despite Drept's testimony that some hag-like creature butchered his little friend, the material evidence pointed at the man locked in cell 5. Extreme measures were called for: lobotomy. Or rather, all too common measures. The staff of Shalebridge—when not experimenting with their weirder theories such as applying red hot bars to bare skin or testing the outer limits of electrocution—turned to Dr Ranker's custom silver knives that could transmute a pest into a vegetable. The "result" could be stored cheaply with the other trash in the pauper's ward rather than the expensive White Hall. News spread that whatever made The Watcher himself would be sliced away in Treatment Room 2. 

These words eventually reached the man who hid his shattered features behind a wax mask, Patient Number 1—or "King No One" as he was known among the inmates thanks to the script on his door. The fact that he was contained in the isolation chamber, at the top of an elevator shaft in the White Hall, wasn't enough to separate him from the other patients. His poisonous whispers leaked out, fanning the flames of dissatisfaction. The Watcher was a popular madman. His fraternity owed him an attempt to stop this. After all, they could be next. Dissent sparked into a fiery riot. Before anything could be done, the keys were with the patients. They were all free. The gates were sealed, but most of the children and the staff were inside, trapped and barricaded in their towers. At least the lucky ones were—those on the ground floor proved wet and scarlet sport for the rampaging White Hall inmates. 

The midwife to The Cradle's true birth was the patient in cell nine, The Moth. A pyromaniac, she was allowed to keep her tinderbox as part of her therapy. Now free, she had all the fuel she could wish for. She lit the matches which reduced Shalebridge to the skeleton of a building it is now. First, in her room. Then, under the cover of the riot and urged on by King No One, the fires at the base of the Staff tower. 

While the King discarded his wax mask, finally revealing his molten face, and led the dismemberment of the remaining staff, The Moth pulled up her chair at the foot of the staircase and stared into the inferno as men and women were reduced to soot and screams. 

Flames swept up. The Nursery tower joined its sister in misery. The voices of boys and girls merged in an unholy choir, a shriek to empty skies. The smoke arose to the heavens, blacking them out, forming a cloud of the remains of authority. Anything elevated was destroyed. All that remained was the base material. 

The tortured voices were The Cradle's birthing cry. The rising smoke was its first breath. Born of torture, oppression, authority, murder and a history of weeping, the place was alive. 

It pressed down upon the remaining inmates, who ruled the remains of the asylum under King No One's malevolence. His Kingdom couldn't last, in earthly terms. The doors were shut. There was no way out. The inmates sickened, withered and died. 

It wasn't the end. 

The inmates rose from death, becoming puppets of The Cradle's will and twitching in meaningless echoes of their past existence. The bodies animated in a closed, spasming loop for 50 years, waiting for someone else to enter, to catch The Cradle's attention, and so join its eternal, macabre dance. 

They say its doors will open before you. They'll seal behind you. And as long as you're alive, it'll never let you leave. 

Even in the City, no-one loiters too long in the shadow of one particular building, which hangs off the east side of the Old Quarter like some facial canker. Shalebridge Cradle. "If there's a way to cram more misery into one building's history," Master Thief Garrett once said, "I can't think of it."

Interview: Return to the Cradle

The Cradle designer Jordan Thomas speaks candidly about the making of fear.

PCG Where did the conceit of The Cradle come from? 

The Thief games are—in the abstract—largely about exploring unfamiliar, hostile spaces. It seemed an elegant sort of conceit to take that concept literally, and simply feed Garrett (the ultimate trespasser) to a vast building which harbours a sort of monstrous sentience, along with a perverse appetite. We knew that our "haunted house" (the internal title) would be one of the latter entries in the story arc, and that it would pit the player against the undead, in some form. 

I had a series of design discussions with Randy Smith (project director on Deadly Shadows) about our intent for the space during its infancy. We quickly concluded that our core objective was to devise the single most terrifying first-person game experience ever constructed. I'll leave it up to the fan base to decide whether or not we achieved it. Fear is inherently subjective, after all. At the very least, no one can claim that we were devoid of ambition! 

PCG So what do you actually count as terror? 

In terms of the aforementioned terror, we weren't bent on eliciting constant panic, per se. Our point-of-origin was the word "dread". I like to define it as that quintessential "threshold" sensation which whispers rather than shouts, warning you that you're seven steps from the unspeakable. 

With that emotional shape in mind, I began to draft the design equivalent of the level's "blueprints". Suffice it to say, I took the process seriously. It's probably obvious by now that the subtle manipulation of a player's darker emotions (most notably, fear) is an abiding interest of mine. Which is a fancy way of saying that I'm on a mad little crusade to improve the quality and range of games in the horror genre. 

PCG Where do you think horror in games goes wrong? 

We've got a deficit there, and it's far from exclusive to gaming; horror in general tends to ooze along the path of least resistance. Think back—in your entire life, how many movies have drawn you in deeply enough to make your guts go cold in genuine fright? They probably number less than 10, if you're reasonably hardy. With games, I suspect you could count them on one hand. 

Fear is regarded as one of the easiest emotions to stimulate with any audio-visual medium. It is trivial to frighten a reasonably receptive audience. You need only shout, "boo!" at the optimal moment, and your victims will find themselves clinging to the ceiling, quivering and hissing expletives. 

Our reptile brains instantly respond, ready to brandish the adrenals at the drop of a hat. But will the memories last? Typically, no. They are warning signs, written in a very basic language. As the mind rights itself, these messages fade away, leaving it largely unblemished.

I want my scares to leave scars. 

PCG Well, there's the pull-out quote. So how do you think of The Cradle?

Unsurprisingly then, I regarded The Cradle as a kind of meta-project in addition to a game level. It was to be a multi-layered experiment in interactive horror, using players as hapless test subjects. I suppose that's not entirely without irony, given the kind of "science" fictionally practised within its walls. 

The intent was to frighten, disturb, thrill, or startle as wide an audience as possible within the parameters I'd been given. And, if possible, to leave a few of those "scars". The jaded user would, hopefully, appreciate the grim narrative and physical tension. The highly imaginative or impressionable players would find themselves inching along through a simulated nightmare, trying not to breathe. 

And, of course, I hoped to execute all of this without sacrificing the key intrinsic strengths of Thief gameplay. Stealth is inherently conducive to a feeling of vulnerability, but typically not quite this pronounced. The Cradle was, all in all, a holistic effort in game horror and stealth level design, intended to communicate the feeling of dread in several complementary languages. 

PCG What do you mean when you talk about holistic level design? 

The term "holistic level design" isn't a buzzphrase so much as a well-established creative philosophy that is often put into practice across various industries, but is rarely put into words. In plain terms, it refers to the evaluation of any self-contained game segment as an integrated whole. The total package, as it were. It often manifests as a series of questions, some of which look like these:

• Are all the mission's systemic elements gracefully woven into each other?
• Does the space feel believably occupied by living, imperfect beings?
• How well does it fit into the experiential topography of the entire game?
• Does the end result offer the player a seamless, unforgettable experience?

I attempted to effectively answer dozens of queries along these lines with The Cradle. In hindsight, I can see plenty of room for improvement, but that’s exactly how a developer expands the list. 

PCG So—what rewards do a more holistic approach give the developer? 

The expected reward for this (rather fastidious) series of trials can be summed up by one word: "resonance". All of The Cradle's actors, from the malfunctioning lights to the shambling undead themselves are tied into a central choreographer object. It's a kind of invisible "puppet master" that tells them how to behave in the real world, and in the world beyond (which is comprised of the asylum's fragmented dreams of its former days). 

And, although The Cradle has its share of entirely linear scripted sequences meant to induce the right mood, it is the purely circumstantial moments that took the most planning. Each object family has a special relationship to the rest, which can manifest during gameplay when they happen to collide with each other. I can't predict exactly what kind of horrific moments will be generated by that ecosystem, which is ideal. 

PCG I'm going to say the word "emergence" now. Thank you. 

Life, which we broadly emulate—and typically, embellish upon—in games, is the result of an unfathomable number of systems interacting with each other in a kind of eternal dance. That's pretty easy to understand, subconsciously or otherwise.

Humans are accustomed to the transparent feeling of "rightness" that results from being swaddled in such a dazzling, orchestral synthesis at all times. The mental recordings we make of all this data carry some inherent resonance, simply because of their unfiltered perfection. Simulations (like videogames) do not nearly make the grade yet, and we regard them with inevitable scepticism. They simply cannot directly compete for territory with memories of the real world. 

That said, by focusing on a specific type of target experience, and leaning heavily on the human instinct to fill the gaps, we are able to cheat a bit... We invite players to convince themselves that a sequence is "real enough" or "tight enough" to be drawn into, by carefully integrating all the level and game components. Gamers have a discerning eye, but they want to become immersed. 

PCG All fiction's reliant on a leap of faith in that way, really. 

The more appropriate the systems that are already at work in a given level, and the more elegantly they appear to "plug into" each other, the easier it is for a human to become a willing participant in the suspension of their own disbelief. Or, for that matter, in the suppression of their aesthetic scepticism. This provides a kind of indirect springboard into that notion of "rightness". 

Because, in that tiny microcosm of supported behaviour choices (say, stalking through an abandoned building and trying not to die), the network of simulated possibilities is dense enough that you cease poking holes in the world-fabric, and begin actively filling them yourself! Your imagination becomes inextricably intertwined with the content you're consuming, and you become a partial architect of your own reactions.

The game is then far more likely to resonate with you, carving out a permanent niche among your long-term memories. And that, of course, is the honour for which we developers strive. 

PCG How much reference work did you make when preparing The Cradle?

The Cradle is the synthetic offspring of dozens of actual, existing Victorian hospitals and reputedly haunted buildings. All the misery, malpractice and dementia that have been ascribed to those places are seen here through a proportionally exaggerated lens. 

I read reams of patient and staff interviews, scoured countless articles on historical mental-health treatment practises, compiled a huge reference archive of photographs taken by urban explorers who regularly break into abandoned asylums, and even visited a few locations myself. 

PCG Any particular incidents stuck in your memory from your research? 

One story involved a patient who managed to escape into the storage wings of the asylum, and because of her eroded state-of-mind, she became lost and succumbed to starvation. The place was such a teeming "snake pit" that she wasn’t missed, and the stain from her body seeped permanently into the wood. 

Another involved a man who was committed as a toddler. Decades later, when asked to sign his own name, he drew a rough silhouette of the hospital. The place was so omnipresent and dominant a force in his life that it eclipsed his identity. The Cradle was built out of that sort of cheery material. 

PCG And, finally, what fictional influences shaped The Cradle? 

Among the films that helped inspire it were Jacob's Ladder, Session 9, and The Devil's Backbone. Books included From Hell, House of Leaves, and The Shining. 

My game influences are innumerable, but two most prominent were the Silent Hill series and the System Shock series, to which The Cradle owes a great deal.

In a job like this, you spend a lot of time looking through different online gaming communities, hunting for news, stories, and the atmosphere around a game. From Reddit to Facebook to Discord, from multiplayer shooters to competitive card games to roguelikes, there's only one constant: everyone's always complaining.

Okay, not quite everyone, but negativity predominates far more than it should. For every one cheerful post about how much fun someone's having with a game, there'll be ten complaining about buffs and nerfs, whipping up conspiracy theories about the developers, chiding other players for their behaviour, or claiming the game was better at some unspecified point in the past. Almost every game community across the internet is like this. With one notable exception.

For years now, in my stormy feed of Call of Duty players screaming about the latest gun and Hearthstone players declaring the meta dead for good this time, there's been this one consistent bright spot—a bunch of dwarf miners cheerfully shouting "Rock and stone!". Through thick and thin, the community around co-op shooter Deep Rock Galactic has been a haven of positivity. Sure, they have their problems with updates and balance changes sometimes, but on the whole they spend their time sharing memes, offering advice to "Greenbeards" (newcomers), telling funny stories of their experiences in the game, and posting screenshots of vaguely phallic ore formations. 

The question is: why? What makes Deep Rock Galactic fans so cheerful? Is it a magic that can be replicated?

Working together

The most obvious answer is, it's a co-op game—working together in harmony is the goal of the whole experience, and that has certainly helped foster a friendly community. "It doesn't hurt, the fact that the players never have a reason to antagonise each other," says Mikhail Akopyan, lead game designer at Deep Rock Galactic developer Ghost Ship Games. "The game never, at any point, says somebody is better than someone else."

For those unfamiliar, Deep Rock Galactic is a game about space dwarves extracting ore and resources from a planet infested with alien bugs. Surviving a mission means keeping swarms of enemies at bay, but also manipulating the environment and finding novel solutions to obstacles. Characters can dig through the earth, create platforms, set up ziplines, and more to create paths to their goals, and because environments are procedurally generated, there's no established solution to any problem, forcing creative thinking. Those abilities are spread between the different classes, so it's only by working together that you can succeed—naturally fostering a sense of teamwork and cooperation. 

But, of course, there has to be more than just that—five minutes on the Darktide subreddit will quickly disabuse anyone of the notion that the co-op genre inherently creates friendly communities, and we've all had the experience of getting yelled at in a game like this for getting something wrong or not following agreed-upon strategies. 

Rock and stone! 

I suspect the other key part of Deep Rock Galactic's friendliness formula is the dwarves themselves. Not because they're nice, positive characters—they aren't, really. They're grumps who spend most of their time complaining about their work or hurling insults at each other or their robotic assistants. But they're relatable—they may be in space, fighting alien bugs, but at the end of the day they're blue collar workers with a job to do. 

"These are not super soldiers or galactic badasses," says Akopyan. "They're tough but… they're tough the way a miner might be tough, or an oil rig worker." Taking the setting and characters out of the militarised realm most videogame heroes operate in has a fundamental impact on the atmosphere of the game, emphasising a kind of camaraderie in the face of a tough job. This is a game where before a mission, you can buy the team a round of beers to gain buffs. The stakes feel important, yet mundane—it's not life or death (well, mostly), and it's more important that the job get done than that it get done with exacting strategy.

That's embodied most perfectly in Deep Rock Galactic's rallying cry: "Rock and stone!". This all-purpose salute has a dedicated key in the game—when pressed, your dwarf raises their pick in the air and enthusiastically yells the phrase. What does it mean? On the face of it, not a lot, but context gives it function. When you're all huddled around the oil rig's starter button, "Rock and stone!" means "Are we ready to start?", and called back in response it means "Yes, let's go!". When you're scouting ahead of the group, it can mean "Come over here, I've found something"; when using an ammo pod, it can mean "I'm restocked and ready to push on". 

But most importantly, it's a celebration—a way to cheer a victory, congratulate someone on a job well done, or express glee at a fortuitous discovery. In that form, it quickly spread beyond the game—in all of Deep Rock Galactic's online communities, it's used as a fun response to almost anything, and in other game's communities, it's a way for Deep Rock Galactic fans to find each other and share an in-joke. 

The salute arose early in the game's development, a very deliberate design choice. "Okay, this is a co-op game, and you're not necessarily going to be talking on the mic," says Akopyan. "But it's very important to be able to acknowledge somebody, the way you might in real life with a nod or just some body language, which you can't do in the game, right? It was made to be a rallying cry, for the players but also it makes sense in the game world that the dwarfs would say something like this to support each other in this weird universe they've got stuck in." You can actually read about the complete origin of the phrase in a great blog post by the team. 

On the frontlines

A positive community can't be built and maintained purely through a game's design, however. Over Deep Rock Galactic's five years of life so far, Ghost Ship Games has taken an active hand in its many online groups—starting from when they were just a small gang of players in the first alpha, all the way to the increasingly growing fanbase of today. Log in to the official Discord, or the Facebook page, or the Steam forums, and you'll find members of the team participating in the conversation—and the studio also moderates its own subreddit.

"I have seen people complain about it," says community manager Jacob Herold. "They say developers shouldn't run their own subreddit, that they'll censor stuff. But I think we are very lax on the moderation there. People can be unhappy with things, as long as they're civil. But one of the advantages of running it ourselves is I can go there, give feedback to a post or just show my face, and pin my post to the top of the replies. It makes me visible, and it makes people feel that we're there." 

Community managers are usually on the frontlines of what can feel like a war with fans. Their job is often to take the brunt of a fanbase's toxicity and abuse. But for Herold, that visibility leads to a far more positive relationship—one that can be seen very literally through Reddit upvotes. "I was one of the top 1% contributors on Reddit based on karma in 2022," says Herold—the reaction is typically so positive that other members of the team ask to get to post things too, so they can share in the love. You won't find many other games where developers are volunteering for the frontlines. 

Fierce feedback

Things aren't 100% rosy, by Herold's own admission—as the community has grown, inevitably "more toxicity is appearing", he says, "but I'm not seeing any levels like in other games." There's criticism, of course—Deep Rock Galactic is not a perfect game, and like any live service game some updates are received better than others—but that feedback is more often than not respectful, and even at its most extreme it seems to be more reflective of passion for the game than pure negativity. 

"I got sent a document that was 32 pages long, of literally explaining what's wrong with the various weapons and proposed solutions to them," says Akopyan. "That was some fierce feedback right there! We get plenty of 'Hey this is not working, this is not okay'. But I think it's also a relationship that we have developed with our player base, that there is a place for them to give this feedback."

As I talk with the two, the genuine affection they have for their players shines through. It's clear that, large as the fanbase has grown, they're thought of by the studio as a community, not just numbers. And that feeling seems to be allowed to lead the way at Ghost Ship Games.

"From my experience working here… I haven't experienced any pressure from above," says Herold. "I know people in the same position [at other developers] that have to deliver numbers, campaigns, reach certain goals. The entire time here it's just been, like, we're doing what we want, what we think will feel good... If you support the community, if you're open and accepting of feedback, the growth will come." 

It's not a situation the studio takes for granted. Far from being smug about the game's success, both Herold and Akopyan are keen to stress how fortunate the position they're in is. "It's very easy to talk about and have space for this stuff right now, because things are going really well," says Akopyan. "But it's important to keep in mind that when we launched, it was like 'If we can sell 250,000 copies then we're okay. That's where we're coming from." In the end it sold 500,000, and has since climbed to 5.5 million. 

"So, of course, things have been going well, and that makes it easy to not set targets, and not claw onto [the numbers]. But games development is hard. We have this luxury of saying, 'Let's just keep trying to make this the best game we can make it,' and that seems to be working. But I think that is a luxury not every developer has. It's not a luxury I've had before." 

In other words, there's no easy or obvious path to a positive community. To my mind, that makes it all the more important for both developers and players to cherish them where they find them. 

In their own words 

I'd be remiss if I didn't finish by letting the Deep Rock Galactic community speak for itself. I headed to the subreddit and asked them directly: Why are you all so positive?

Many were keen to give credit to Ghost Ship Games. "I think a major part is played by the devs being so active in the community," says HissyHazza. "They play their own game and understand a lot of what the playerbase wants. That doesn't mean they give the playerbase everything they ask for, if anything they maintain a very clear vision for where they want their game to go, but it does mean the community feels like part of the game's growth." 

Some had more niche theories: "I think people who enjoy dwarves and identify with them are a certain breed who work well together and get along,"  says NecroCowboy. Someone should run a study on this. 

But most of them just wanted to share how much they enjoy playing with their fellow dwarves, and the friendliness they experience from each other every time they log in. "For the most part it doesn't matter if you're account level 1 or 1000, there is something for you to do and people will join you," says That_CDN_guy. "In the 300+ hours I've played, I can count on one hand how many negative experiences I've had with the community. Really, who wants to be a jerk in a game where you're a space dwarf that gets to drink beer, dig holes, and shoot bugs?"

Cozy gaming has never been so popular. Each showcase and announcement offers a plethora of wholesome, heartwarming games that stray from the traditionally competitive nature of video games which means they are never in short supply. However, this does give us more titles to wade through outside of the big hitters like Stardew Valley and Animal Crossing.

Although the term "cozy game" doesn't have just one set definition, the consensus is that the experience offers everything from soft visuals to gameplay that doesn't demand too much. Because of this, lots of cozy game recommendations echo the Stardew Valley farming formula, but there are hundreds of games that fall into the cozy game category that stray from yard work and raising livestock. But, if you do want something that replicates the farming experience, we've got a list of the best games like Stardew Valley too.

If you're looking for a new bunch to shake up the old favorites, we've pulled together a list of equal parts cute and chill games that won't have you tilling the soil until the sun comes up. If you want something driven by narrative, simple puzzles that put your mind at ease, or pastel-colored rhythm games, we've got something that is bound to suit you.

Tiny Bookshop

Release Date: 2025 | Developer: neoludic games | Steam

Tiny Bookshop sets you the challenge of abandoning your normal life to open a tiny mobile bookshop by the sea. You'll manage your stock and cater your shelves to your customers' needs, while advising what novels they should lose themselves in next. You even get to decorate your little trailer for added aesthetic points, which is definitely a plus. Tiny Bookshop is an incredibly sweet and simple game to sink hours into, which lets you live the life a lot of us cozy gamers dream of.

Tiny Glade

Release Date: 2024 | Developer: Pounce Light | Steam

Sit back and doodle castles, cottages, and landscapes until your heart is content in Tiny Glade. There's no pressure to unlock tools or skills, and no need to prepare for combat. Instead, you're just encouraged to let your creativity run wild with whatever you fancy building. Whether you're creating something entirely new or trying to recreate a scene from your favorite Studio Ghibli movie, Tiny Glade makes it incredibly easy for you to slip hours into without realizing it.

Hello Kitty Island Adventure

Release Date: 2025 | Developer: Sunblink Entertainment | Steam

Scratch the itch of having Animal Crossing on PC, but replace all of its well known characters with Hello Kitty and her friends. You'll explore all sorts of environments with a variety of quirky characters as you make your way across Friendship Island. Quests, timed challenges, and seasonal events are ready to keep you entertained too. Who doesn't love a Sanrio bestie?

Once Upon a Katamari

Release Date: 2025 | Developer: RENGAME

Because what could be more relaxing than frantic, bite-sized levels that set you one simple challenge: rolling up as much as you possibly can? Once Upon a Katamari is the first mainline Katamari game in 14 years, and it certainly lives up to the expectations. It's silly, fun, and incredibly moreish. It might not be your traditional pastel colored cozy game, it's got a sense of familiarity everyone is sure to love.

Jusant

Release Date: 2023 | Developer: Don't Nod | Steam

Jusant is all about climbing to the top of a world that was once underwater with your tiny magical companion. It's hyper-focused on the rock-climbing system that Don't Nod developed but it's not nearly as intense as that makes it sound. This is akin to a puzzle platformer where you're always trying to figure out how to access the next area by combining the maneuvers you've been taught: belay climbing, swinging, using magical plants or wind to your advantage, and more. This is one that just feels so physical as you grip the left and right triggers on your controller (which Don't Nod recommends, as do I) to move your left and right hands steadily up to each new handhold.

Chants of Sennaar

Release Date: 2023 | Developer: Rundisc | Steam

Chants of Sennaar is an adventure game about learning languages and it was my personal favorite game of 2023. Each area of the tower you're ascending is occupied by a different group of people with their own language. By talking to people around you, examining murals and shop signs, and all the other clues hidden in the environment, you begin to piece together the meanings of each word. Taking notes in your sketchbook is a great record of how your thought process changes as you puzzle each language out while you uncover the truth about the tower and how all these people stopped communicating.

Mineko's Night Market

Release Date: 2023 | Developer: Meowza Games | Steam

If you want a new way to explore Japanese culture cutely, then Mineko's Night Market will appeal. This narrative-driven social sim will ask you to craft various enchanting items to sell at the night market and befriend a cadre of cats to help you on the journey. You'll also have to complete various quests and challenges which help add a little more structure to the game but maintain the relaxing atmosphere.

Summerhouse 

Release Date: 2024 | Developer: Friedemann | Steam

Summerhouse is the epitome of channeling creativity through cozy gaming. It's a small-scale building game that asks you to create a neighbourhood of beautiful homes in various settings, but with no rules or restrictions, so you are free to let your imagination run wild. We all know that the best part of games like The Sims is building the house, and fortunately this game is just all about free building.

Journey

Release Date: 2012 (2020 on PC) | Developer: Thatgamecompany | Steam

Journey is an old classic that predates the cozy game trend but it holds up incredibly well after getting ported to PC. It's a wordless adventure from a desert up to the top of a mountain accompanied by an incredible soundtrack that was the first from a videogame to ever be nominated for a Grammy Award. Journey will make you experience the full spectrum of emotions with a silent protagonist as you sand surf through ruins, fly with magic carpet whales, and eventually brave the snowy peaks.

Toem

Release Date: 2021 | Developer: Something We Made | Steam

For a game all in black and white, Toem has so much personality. This is an adventure game where you solve puzzles and riddles by using your camera to photograph things around you. The stamp book challenges are really nice classic adventure game stuff that force you to pay attention to all the world's surroundings. It's also a pretty short game which you can complete in three or four hours.

Donut County

Release Date: 2018 | Developer: Ben Esposito | Steam

Donut County is colorful, funny, and just a joy to play. It's like Katamari Damacy in reverse: Instead of rolling increasingly large objects into a ball, you swallow increasingly large objects into a mysterious hole in the ground that grows ever bigger as it devours the town. Each level has its little part of the story as Mira and her raccoon pal BK try to control the hole.

Melatonin 

Release Date: 2022 | Developer: Half Asleep | Steam

Rhythm games don't really have a reputation for being chill, but Melatonin is definitely low key and cozy. With its muted colors and lo-fi beats, Melatonin is nearly as relaxing as its name implies. Instead of throwing bars of beats at you, you'll play along via visual cues that help you complete the beat in each of its levels.

A Short Hike 

Release Date: 2019 | Developer: adamgryu | Steam

For those that want a cozy game that won't consume 100+ hours, this super cute adventure can be completed in around four hours. Explore an island mountain park while helping out the folks around you and uncovering small secrets on your journey to the peak. The park is lovely enough from the ground, but your main character can fly down too, so don't forget to hunt for hidden areas and unseen new friends.

Lil Gator Game 

Release Date: 2022 | Developer: MegaWobble | Steam

If you want a game that scratches an almost nostalgic itch, Lil Gator Game is worth picking up. Inspired by The Legend of Zelda, you will quite literally create your own adventure through arts, crafts, and an overactive imagination alongside your animal friends hiding around the map. But even though it wears its Nintendo inspirations on its sleeve, the dry humour and adorable characters that accompany the adventure as you try to get your sibling to play with you make this an incredibly easy game to lose yourself in.

Dorfromantik

Release Date: 2022 | Developer: Toukana Interactive | Steam

Strategy games don't normally strike me as cozy, but Dorfomantik really lets you take the pressure off. I lost an entire weekend to this hex-based tile game the first time I tried it. In its standard mode, you'll use a deck of hex tiles to match up stretches of fields, cities, waterways, and railroads to complete quests and grow your deck until you run out of tiles. For even less stress, creative mode lets you just build a lovely stretch of tiles any way you like from a neverending deck.

Beacon Pines