Of all the other professions I never quite saw myself as a hairdresser, I'm simply not creative enough and my small talk leaves a lot to be desired. But I was still willing to give it a go (within the safe confines of a game) because Beastfolk Barber just looked too cute to pass up on.

The premise is simple: you play as Freddie, the owner of a small hair salon in Starfish City, where beastfolk now outnumber humans. So to keep up with the changing clientele Freddie rebrands her shop for beastfolk and snags herself a magical mirror in hopes to beat out the competition who have more money and employees at their disposal.

Any time a client sits down ready to get their haircut you can use the mirror to show them up to three hairstyles they might like. This way they can get a feel for a hairdo before any hair is chopped off. But the catch is that they won't always tell you out right which one they prefer.

It's up to you to keep track of the options you present them with and their reactions to them and come to a decision of which one is best for them all on your own. You are a professional hairdresser after all.

Luckily, it's not too hard to suss people out, I managed to please every customer who walked through my doors, except for the owl. But he was really grumpy to begin with, and looking back on our interaction I think he may have been a really shady criminal. You see Beastfolk Barber has more going on than just cutting people's hair with little minigames, there's actually more to these beastfolk than just looks.

Everyone who sits in your chair has something going on in their personal life and they really want to talk to you about it. Whether it be chasing the guy of their dreams, getting ready for a tough family reunion, or trying to push legislation through the senate to try and adjust age limits for various beastfolk.

It was the two headed dragon, Luca and Varo, who brought this issue to my attention. Apparently every beastfolk has to go by human rules and regulations. For example, bees don't live long enough to access their government pension (which is 65 in this world; we should all be so lucky) and mice have to wait over half their lifespan for a chance to vote. But Luca and Varo are trying to change this, and apparently needed the help of a good haircut to get their confidence up to do so.

On top of all the civil unrest and shady business Freddie also has to deal with a demonic presence called Edi who's also in need of a haircut. But being a demon, their request is not exactly straight forward. First off, they won't pay in cash, instead opting to grant you one re-do, magically erasing or changing whatever thing you wish for. Secondly, in order to get a chance to cut your hair you need to prove your skill by acquiring 10 regulars.

Sadly, the demo ended before I could make any real headway with the task, but I think I did a good enough job for at least three clients to return to my salon. I guess the proof will be in the pudding once the full game releases in the future, hopefully we won't have to wait too long.

Who knew that all I needed to be interested in maths was the command of a five-thousand-tonne artillery battery? If only my secondary school teacher had known. Turns out that the ticking clock of exam pressure is a hell of a lot less motivating than the boom of artillery shells growing ever closer, as enemy gunners zero in on your position, trying to blast your colossal cannon to kingdom come before you blast them.

But Iron Nest is a similar test of mental endurance. You hustle and bustle around your one-man gun emplacement, triangulating degrees and distances, praying that your next shell won't sail clear over the target, leaving you scratching your head as to which vital calculation you somehow messed up. It's an addictive challenge, bolstered by an array of wonderfully tactile gadgets and gizmos.

Sure, it's an artillery simulator of sorts, but it's more like one of the best versions of Battleship you'll ever play. It's about employing what you know and learn through each shot, to track down enemy positions and destroy them, often before they destroy you. And it's hard to overstate how satisfying it is when you land a shell squarely on-target, especially when it's the payoff for 10 minutes spent messing about with machines and the map table.

So who are you shooting? Iron Nest is set in an alternate-history version of 1920s Spain in which the Kingdom of Castille somehow got their mitts on a gigantic, city-levelling artillery piece, and is using it to maintain their grip on power. That's your job: shoot what they tell you, or don't. As the lone denizen of the Iron Nest—save for one presumably very deaf cat—your job is operating the battery by yourself.

You have to read the teleprinter and note vital info on your clipboard. Use the map table and its elaborate array of markers, coloured pencils, and measuring devices to triangulate enemy positions. You're inputting distance into a machine to calculate barrel elevation—which prints off a cute little firing solution ticket—and wheeling the gun on its axis to the correct bearing. And when all is prepared, you're flipping switches as if arming a nuke, and pulling the handle to take your shot.

There's just so much gravity to Iron Nest, in fiddling with its tactile machines and gadgets, but also in the methodical step-by-step that plays out before each firing. Despite its initial learning curve, before long the pre-shot preparation becomes a bit of a ritual, a process you refine through repetition and gain mastery with. It's strangely relaxing for a game about obliterating enemies with explosive ordinance.

And as you gain mastery, Iron Nest unfurls even more. You unlock a requisition station that lets you satisfyingly stamp cards to buy recon plane flyovers and different shell types, but it adds a new challenge element as you try to spend the bare minimum possible, relying on your smarts to bridge the gap.

You unlock a second barrel, letting you hit two targets in quick succession. That is, if you're able to juggle the calculations and tweaks you have to make between each firing without your brain melting. And thanks to its procedurally-generated objectives, with enemy positions changing even when you replay a mission, plus medals for performance, Iron Nest has a lot of replayability.

The only thing Iron Nest is lacking is co-op. It would be ridiculously fun to run around the gun with a friend, but the game is already a pretty incredible achievement considering it was built by one guy. It'd also be a great candidate for a Battleship-style head-to-head mode, where two Iron Nests try to triangulate and destroy each other, but multiplayer is listed on Iron Nest's roadmap, so maybe we can look forward to that.

While I'm still very excited for next year's PVKK: Planetenverteidigungskanonenkommandant (*gasps for breath*) which sees you commanding an orbital defense cannon, Iron Nest is the best artillery game I've tried. Its playground of tactile tools and machines makes it appealing to simulation fans of all stripes, while its smart yet addictive gun-prep formula feels almost endlessly repeatable, as you strive for that elusive yet satisfying sense of mastery.

They called me mad. They called me a fool. They said it would never work—my plan to build a business empire on the back of a single department store that sold three products and a silica mine. 'You'll bankrupt us!' yelled red-faced advisors. They saw no wisdom in my schemes at all.

And, frankly, they were correct. Fair play to those guys. We are very bankrupt now.

In 1995, PC Gamer—a monthly journal about computer videogames—issued a challenge to me directly. In the back-most pages of its 22nd issue, it tucked away an ad for a then-new game called Capitalism. "Good enough to make a convert out of Karl Marx himself," declared an included testimonial from, yes, PC Gamer.

I was too busy being two years old to issue a response at the time, but I'm here now. As one of surely very few people who have reviewed The Communist Manifesto for a major gaming publication, I want to know: can it convert me? And more than that, can it offer a way forward? Can I find, in Capitalism's thicket of spreadsheets and input/output graphs, a solution to our current economic and social malaise? I accept your challenge, PC Gamer from 31 years ago.

Business 101

Capitalism—the game—does not work how you expect it to. For one thing, it is not on Earth. It happens on a procedurally generated pseudo-region of an Earth-like planet that you can spin up with every new game. Want to build the free market on a vast archipelago? By all means. A single, contiguous mega-landmass? Absolutely. The only guarantee is that, wherever you end, it will look nothing like anywhere that exists on our actual planet. Also, cities like Lisbon and Chicago will end up a short walk from each other, much like they are in real life.

I admit it, my first forays into the world of business were jazz capitalism. I was hitting buttons and trying things out without much regard for structure or logic. I built a department store in central Jakarta (next to Tehran) and filled it literally, exclusively with laundry detergent.

This was not just an idle whim. Capitalism is big on the supply chain, strangely, which means all the goods you sell have to come from somewhere. The wares I flogged in my department store were sourced from Jakarta's nearest seaport, and the things Jakarta's nearest seaport had to offer were: cookies, leather shoes, and detergent.

Were the people of Jakarta buying my suds? Absolutely the hell not. They could not have been less interested, even as the industrious worker-bees in the department store's purchasing unit accumulated more and more boxes of the stuff, gradually entombing my sales team like soapy pharaohs. Supply outstripped demand by a gazillion to one. I was making negative $80,000 a year.

I asked myself what Warren Buffett would do and decided the answer was probably 'keep digging'. I added the cookies and leather shoes to my department store's roster of goods, turning it into one of those malls—you know the ones—that occupies an entire city block and sells three unrelated products. If this didn't work, the game was broken.

There was, happily, more demand for shoes and cookies than laundry detergent, which is to say I was selling literally any of the former at all. Nevertheless, my expansion into the footwear and baked goods sectors had taken its toll. In spite of the new products' relative success, I was now making negative $300,000 a year. I added an advertising unit to my department store and partnered with a TV station.

This either helped or, more likely, coincided with an entirely unrelated change in my fortunes, because my annual profit suddenly skyrocketed to an incredible negative $3,000 a year. I went mad. I built an R&D Centre, a silica mine, and a new department store—this one selling CPUs, silica (a lot of silica about) and raw tobacco. Had I maybe started trying to sell directly to consumers raw materials I was meant to use in my own factories? Perhaps! Was I nevertheless now making an utterly inexplicable $400,000 a year? Yes!

I could only ride the high for so long. Eventually, my objectively boneheaded business decisions ricocheted back on me. The people of Bombay (where my second store was) were not interested in bulk-purchasing silica or computer chips, the fools, and even adding another advertising department didn't help. Though I did partner that advertising department with a newspaper rather than a TV station, and we all know traditional media is dead.

It wasn't long before the game told me I was out of cash in a Nickelodeon font.

Visions of the past

Here is the serious part of the article: Capitalism is genuinely rather fascinating. It is the crystallised end of history—that moment of triumphalism that marked the end of the Cold War and the seemingly final victory of liberal capitalism over all its foes. Its pregenerated scenarios, which you can play if you don't want to generate a random world for yourself, have names like The Fall Of The Berlin Wall and The Emerging Dragon (yes, it's about China).

It presents a vision of the world where consciously-held ideology is dead. In its place, ranks of men with big phones and suits chasing ever-greater numbers on ever-bigger spreadsheets—the "dog-eat-dog" world of capitalism. Was it good? No. Was it bad? No.

Capitalism, the game, does not sing the praises of capitalism the concept, nor does it criticise it. In this way, it reflects its era: good and bad were outdated—relics of a past where people deluded themselves by believing in things rather than chasing stuff that is concrete and consumable. Humanity had outgrown the distractions of faith and ideology. Now it could focus on reality, and the accumulation of CPUs and silica.

And air conditioners.

The aircon king of Guangzhou

My attempts to grow fat from detergent sales had run aground, but I did learn some things in that first run. Mostly, what I learnt—right there at the end—was 'hey, there's a button here to change the price of the things I sell'.

So I tried again, and a little bit slower this time. In Guangzhou (near Adelaide), I erected a department store, sourcing a thick gush of shampoo from the nearby port and selling it to anyone with hair. Crucially, this time I paid attention to things like 'product quality' and 'price'. The shampoo I was sourcing was a fair bit better than what Guangzhou already had access to, and by fidgeting with the price-per-bottle I could establish a neat equilibrium between supply and demand. Before long, I was making a stable $500,000 in annual profit.

What else did the port have to offer? Air conditioners and jumpers ('sweaters,' to our American readers). Guangzhou was hot; I suspected aircon demand would be high. I funnelled them into my department store.

It turned out I could charge essentially whatever the hell I wanted and get away with it. Demand was too strong to deter. I was charging people double what I was paying for them and raking it in. Before long, I got the jumpers on the shelves too, which inscrutably sold like hot cakes at the same time as the aircon units did—though, in credit to Capitalism's simulation, I am fairly sure the aircons sold better in summer, and vice versa for jumpers.

I was making $5,000,000 a year. I built factories, invented the video camera, purchased my competitors' jeans and sold them at a mark-up. I even started mining silica again, just for old times' sake. Pretty quickly, I hit $12 million a year. Which is kind of where I left it, since it rapidly became apparent I was simply too good at Capitalism for anything funny to happen ever again.

I'll say this, though: I like Capitalism (the game) a lot. The depth of its simulation is impressive, and not even 'for a game from 1995'. It just is. Here is a toy free market that consistently surprised me with the things it took into account and the things it asked me to take into account, from climate and environment to the nitty-gritty of the supply chain to the precise number and arrangement of business units in each of my outlets. It's a good time, if you are also the kind of person who gets excited by a nice spreadsheet.

Total conversion

Am I converted? Well, apparently I could be making $12 million a year in shampoo sales, which is only slightly less than I make writing about videogames, so maybe. I'm certainly into the game itself, which is probably the most I can reasonably ask of an entertainment product from three decades ago.

Does Capitalism, with its sepia snapshot of a period of post-Cold War triumphalism, represent a way forward for our current period of deep societal stagnation? Well, not quite. Capitalism captures not so much actual things that happened so much as it captures a vibe that existed in a select few places during a vanishingly small period of time.

You couldn't return to it if you wanted to—it was a product of a historical juncture, and no amount of nostalgia for an era when things felt better (whether they actually were is perhaps debatable) will change that.

Unless, of course, you start selling air conditioners.

Immersive sims like Dishonored and Deus Ex are typically solo experiences, but there have been a few attempts to bring multiplayer into the mix over the years. System Shock 2 featured an infamously wonky cooperative mode that was overhauled in last year's Nightdive remaster, while Arkane's Deathloop successfully folded an invasion mechanic into its mix of roguelike running and emergent sneaking.

Now, you can also play Arkane's excellent System Shock successor Prey with a bunch of pals, albeit via unofficial means. The functionally named Prey Coop enables up to 16 players to explore the Talos 1 space station together. Prey Coop is the creation of modder null234, who says that the mod "syncs global campaign progression, story choices, enemy AI, inventory, doors, hazards and world physics across all connected clients."

Although Prey Coop is still in Alpha, null234 says the whole campaign is playable from start to finish on "both new and existing saves". Nonetheless, there are still plenty of kinks to be worked out, such as "visual rough edges, animation quirks, and potential bugs."

Frankly, 16 players running around Talos 1 sound like the worst thing ever, but playing Prey as a 2-player cooperative game should work fairly well. Prey is by far the most methodical and cerebral of Arkane's immersive sims, one that encourages ingenious use of gadgets and powers to get the drop on the Typhon menace. Working together with a partner to set up traps, fight enemies, and bypass obstacles seems like a viable way to play, especially if you compensate for the extra player by amping up the difficulty.

As far as I'm concerned though, you can play Prey with as many friends as you like, so long as you play it. Arkane's dark sci-fi adventure has gone up in my estimations every time I've played it, to the point where I believe it might just be the best thing Arkane has produced to date.

Sure, Dishonored 2 has the more galaxy-brained levels and flashier powers. But I think Prey's slower-burn has the greater satisfaction, especially over repeated playthroughs. It has the superior story, by some margin and the way Talos 1 unfolds as you explore is marvellous. I also find that treating the Typhon as puzzles to be solved rather than enemies to be fought also elevates the experience. There's tons of fun to be had in manipulating those inky aliens from the shadows using all the weird gizmos Prey furnishes you with.

Anyway, I'll step off the soapbox now. If you want to try Prey Coop for yourself, you can download it via Nexus Mods. Alongside the mod itself, you'll need to install Chairloader, forward the appropriate ports, and ensure all players have a legitimate copy of the game and the same DLL build of the mod. Full instructions are available here.

Randy Smith Evergreen knows his immersive sims. As a designer on Thief: The Dark Project, he was there in the early days of the genre, and his credits include System Shock 2 and Dark Messiah: Might and Magic, as well as Thief 2 and Thief: Deadly Shadows. And he's pretty sure the genre is a bad fit for the AAA arms race.

"Myself and other folks who have worked extensively on immersive sims have a belief that the immersive sims that are being created today and are slated for the future are, by and large, thinking of themselves as [existing] in an arms race to be bigger and better," he tells us.

And this has been happening for a while. Just think about how Deus Ex: Mankind Divided pushed things in terms of fidelity. Or how big and expensive Arkane's modern offerings have been. They aren't competing with other immersive sims, they're competing with blockbuster shooters and vast open-world games from the biggest studios out there.

"Like, you just have to put more money into them, make a bigger and bigger immersive sim. It's got to be AAA, and it's got to sit right alongside Ghost of Tsushima and GTA 6, and it's got to be a game that's big enough to capture the public's attention. But I think that might be a misread for the audience size of immersive sims."

It certainly hasn't worked out for Arkane. Dishonored 2 and Prey are landmark immersive sims, but they were backed by a big publisher, Bethesda, who has since been swallowed up by Microsoft. Both games were considered commercial disappointments because Bethesda's expectations were not realistic for what has always been a niche genre.

Arkane Austin was shut down by Microsoft in 2024, following the poor reception to co-op vampire shooter Redfall. Arkane Lyon, meanwhile, is still hanging on, but only because of French labour laws. Microsoft reportedly wants rid of it. If a studio of this pedigree, with this amount of talent and experience, can't fit the square peg into the round hole, what chance does anyone else have?

Smith Evergreen believes the solution is to not participate in the arms race, unless you make something aimed at the mass market rather than the comparatively tiny immersive sim audience. He uses the Arkham games as an example.

"I think that the company that does this most closely is [Rocksteady with] the Batman Arkham games. Those superhero games have a lot of variability and a lot of player expression in them now, right? But they are still button-mashing combat fighter games with a huge IP."

If you want to make a proper immersive sim, though, it shouldn't be AAA.

"There's quite a few of us who think the way to do it is to be III or AA," he says. "So you're talking about a $3-10 million budget, a passionate team led by some of us folks who have experience with immersive sims or newcomers who just played a lot of immersive sims and really get it, making something that's a little bit smaller, more passionate, and can be made more quickly."

As he notes, the original Thief had a $3 million budget—but that was back in the '90s and would be $6 million in today's bucks. Still, there are ways to make immersive sims on the cheap, using existing engines, for instance, or evoking the simpler but still very potent aesthetic and fidelity of the immersive sim OGs.

"So it's not clear to me that the $3 million dollar Thief or Deus Ex-style immersive sim that you want to make in the year 2026 is going to sell disproportionately different amounts of copies than the $250 million one that comes out of a big studio. So I think that's an example of where the market is going, or [where] I think it should go at least."

I think the sales disparity is probably larger. Arkane's Deathloop had shifted five million copies by 2023, while indie immersive sims—Heat Signature and Gloomwood, for example—rarely reach 500k. But they don't need to!

Heat Signature was considered a success, and designer (and former PC Gamer editor) Tom Francis went on to make the also-well-received Tactical Breach Wizards. With lower costs and without a big publisher's inflated expectations, immersive sims can reach profitability a lot faster, allowing the studio to survive.

Given how vibrant the indie side of the genre is, and how close to death the other side is looking, I think Randy Smith Evergreen might be onto something here.

Among the heavy hitters and viral sensations that make up Steam's most-wishlisted games, Over the Hill exudes "little engine that could" energy. It's a chill, vibey offroad driving game that puts you in an old school 4x4 and sets you off among some low-poly hills to get lost. You've got a grappling hook and the option to drive in a co-op pack with a few friends, which may be the key ingredient that's seen Over the Hill build up such a strong pre-release following.

It's accrued more than a million wishlists in the couple years since it was announced, and all those folks are about to be very happy. Over the Hill is out in just a couple months, developer Funselektor announced today.

October 14th, to be exact, is when the co-op driving game is venturing out on Steam. Console releases won't arrive until next year.

PC Gamer's Andy Chalk played a bit of the game earlier this year and came away very pleased with how it captured "the broader experience of being 'out there,' going slow, taking your time, and thinking about how you're going to get where you want rather than just hammering on it. You can hammer on it if you want, and it'll carry you for a while, and also likely put you over onto your roof when you're not expecting it."

Where racing games offer the thrill of speed, Over the Hill "lands closer to real love of the wheel: Funselektor understands it in a way that an awful lot of studios miss," Andy wrote.

You'll be able to see what so entranced him soon. Funselektor says the launch will include "several areas in the Canada and Alergia regions" with "more content and surprises than what we had in the demo. If you want to play it sooner, you'll have to get yourself over to Gamescom later this month.

North Dakota may not be the most dazzling US state, but it is one of them, and so it's set to be absorbed into American Truck Simulator's expansive recreation of life on the road. The game's next DLC will take players through the state's "sweeping prairies, fertile farmland, winding rivers, and endless skies."

I don't know that its skies are any more endless than, say, South Dakota's, but it's still a looker in the trailer (the advertising kind, not the big rig kind) that went up today. Predictably, it shows a bunch of semi trucks hauling supplies past herds of buffalo, small towns, and giant statues of fish. It brings the game up to a whopping 61 DLCs on Steam—though notably, a number of those are free and others are minor additions that come cheaper than the addition of a full-on state.

North Dakota will join the likes of Texas, New Mexico, Idaho, and so on when it launches, though no release date has been named yet. Folks on social media are getting their yuks in: "Easiest update ever," said Reddit user Fun_Assignment_269. "Do you even need to design any assets to replicate North Dakota?" A reply from logicalguest chimed in, "Lol! Empty field, CTRL-C, CTRL-V. DONE!"

Okay, maybe the new locale isn't that exciting. But this isn't some key-jangling, action-packed, high-octane thrill ride we're talking about, this is a game where you drive the speed limit and deliver goods while saying "10-4, good buddy" and blasting Jerry Reed so loud you get a noise citation. Perhaps the placid sights of one of America's most boring states is merely a blank canvas for the determined trucking roleplayer, the kind of player who sees a giant fiberglass catfish statue and says, 'Yes, this is what America is all about.'

Or maybe it's just boring anyway. I mean, this is North Dakota we're talking about.

I am lucky enough to live close to some of the best plant shops I've ever had the pleasure to stumble into. I love taking my sweet time strolling around each one, looking at all the plants, succulents, seeds, and pots—all of which I could never dream of fitting into my small apartment. The best part of all of them is just how jumbled they all are, brimming with all sorts of strange plants for customers to discover. So, with that in mind you'd think I'd also create a maze-oasis of foliage right? Wrong.

The plant shop I created in Leafy Corner, the management sim game which just released, is regimented and ordered. Pots are colour coded and plants are separated into strict categories. You see, the whimsy will be better accessible if everything is ordered clearly.

I only actually noticed just how precise my layout was after seeing some examples of what other players made. These actually remind me of my local shops, with huge plants branching out over the store, little pots tucked away in dark corners, and fairy lights and all sorts of wall hangings adorning any shred of free space. I'd like to make something resembling that, but unfortunately my brain seems to crave order more than cosiness.

Thankfully there's no right or wrong way to go about creating your shop in Leafy Corner. My store may not look quite as fanciful, but that didn't stop customers from arriving in droves and picking up plants faster than I could restock them. I ended up earning over 500 coins in just my first session—not a bad day's work if you ask me.

I then used this cash to buy more shelves to create more order for the new plants I got in stock such as orchids, cacti, and peperomia rosso, of course. The more customers you successfully serve the better your store rating gets. This means you'll have more money to buy decorations and ship in new kinds of plants.

There's also a bit of customer interaction involved—no don't run away, these guys are nice and fairly normal. Every now and then someone will walk into your shop and know they want to buy a plant, they just won't know which one (we've all been there). This is where you come in, to help them decide.

Usually they'll have some sort of criteria such as something hardy, small, or geometric—I told you there were some oddballs. If you manage to find them the correct plant they'll buy it straight away, if not then they'll leave your store an unhappy customer, so it's worth taking a look at your plant journal if you're unsure of the demands.

Leafy Corner really is a calm and cosy sim which you can enjoy at your own pace, as organised or chaotic as you want. There's loads of customisation and plants to unlock, but if you're still unsure whether it'll be for you then you can check out its short demo.

As a former delivery guy, I have a fondness in my heart for videogame trucking. It lets me reclaim the simple satisfaction of moving things where they need to go without needing to endure all the things that make people glad they aren't a delivery guy. There's just one problem: Videogame truckin' isn't weird enough.

My six years of delivery work regularly involved surreal events, uncanny individuals, inexplicable decisions, and plenty of other inscrutable encounters. Videogame trucking, however, tends to be extremely scrutable—until this week, when developer Code Wakers launched an open playtest for Prospice: Anomalous Logistics, an upcoming driving and delivery sim that's properly unfathomable.

In Prospice, you play as an employee of an organization that would be right at home alongside the SCP Foundation, the Federal Bureau of Control, and any number of groups poking around the Backrooms. Its mission is researching an island that is, in the Steam description's words, "cursed by the corpses of ever rotting gods" and "a place where the world itself unravels."

Unfortunately, the open wilderness isn't the best environment for researching the remains of a massive, mouldering entity—which is where you come in. As a logistics driver, you'll undertake delivery tasks to support and supply the expedition, all while managing fuel, navigating unpaved terrain, and ensuring whatever still-twitching godflesh might be weighing down your flatbed gets to its destination unspoiled. Ideally while surviving, which—in my experience—isn't guaranteed.

When I started the playtest, I was just yards away from a massive, partially unearthed corpse, its hand already removed and waiting in my truck for transport—cargo that was, I'll admit, somewhat eerier than anything I've delivered in person. But still, despite how much that severed hell-hand continually quivered throughout the drive, I completed my inaugural delivery with only some passing clumsiness as I juggled gears to get my truck over and through some swamp mud and rocky inclines.

When my next run went just as smoothly, it was almost enough to convince me that this Anomalous Logistics business might not be all that bad. Sure, the island's ambient energies mean my PDA's map can't always triangulate my position with full precision, and I did have to stop and wonder whether the hovering, bleeding orb I found in the woods would do anything untowards once I strapped it down for transport. But my first day of work was going great!

Until ten minutes later, when a huge, twitching monstrosity crawled out of the trees, and "dissolved" my "dreambody" in "the labyrinth of collective death," according to the text that briefly appeared on-screen following my immediate and grisly undoing. Which, I can confirm, is an accurate description of the actual deliveryman experience.

Prospice: Anomalous Logistics doesn't have a release date yet, but Code Wakers says its playtest on Steam "will remain open for approximately one week."

I've taken the train from Bath to London hundreds of times in my life, usually to visit game developers in the capital. And while I enjoy that part of the job, the journey itself is a dispiriting chore. Rail travel in the United Kingdom is a chaos of delays, overcrowding and overpriced sandwiches. Yet when I saw Great Western Express on Steam—an expansion for Train Sim World that recreates part of that route—I felt compelled to play it.

Videogames are a powerful form of escapism for me, but what if I played one to achieve the complete opposite of that?

Train Sim World is primarily a game about driving trains, but it's unique in that it also lets you be a passenger. Bath isn't in the game yet, so I start my journey at Reading, and I'm immediately struck by how well they've recreated the station. I've spent many hours here over the years waiting for delayed connections, and the layout is perfect—although the lack of a pasty shop is jarring. The pasty is a station staple, and I will forever associate the smell of hot pastry with waiting for trains.

On Rails

I get on the train and it's a strange experience seeing something so mundane, so tediously everyday, replicated in 3D. I walk through the buffet cart and can almost smell the reheated bacon rolls. I go through a vestibule and think of all the times I've sat there on my suitcase because the seats were all reserved. It's a bit too clean, though. It needs a layer of grime to capture the experience, and perhaps some men drinking tins of Carlsberg and shouting.

I find an empty seat, which knocks some serious points off for realism, and the train pulls out of Reading. Next stop, London Paddington. I watch the city give way to the countryside through the rain-spattered window, and I do what I always do when I'm on a train: I listen to a podcast and eat a Twirl.

And, honestly, it's just like the real thing, which I guess is the point of any simulator.

The grey, misty gloom streaking past me is authentically British, although it's far too quiet. No one is talking loudly and no children are screeching. I think about how much more atmospheric it would be if you heard the train manager piping up over the intercom. But these minor criticisms aside, it's the closest any game has ever come to replicating being a passenger on a train in the UK. So well done for that.

Knowing that there's no manager on duty, I relocate to first class. But it feels wrong. I don't belong here. I should be in standard with the "real" people. But before I head back down the train pulls into Paddington, which is as accurate as Reading. This isn't an experience I'll be hurrying back to, but it was an interesting one.

I'm fascinated by games that recreate real life, especially if they capture the rubbishness of the UK. And I'm glad sims like Train Sim World exist to fulfil this very specific desire.

In theory, I get the appeal of an NPC powered by AI. What if Lydia from Skyrim could talk endlessly about topics other than your shared inventory and could offer more than the handful of phrases she shouts at enemy bandits? I like the idea of characters whose interactions don't end just because their scripts do. It's an intriguing concept.

The reality is that, at least for now, the AI solutions I've seen just don't work all that well. AI-powered NPCs can talk and talk and talk, that's for damn sure. But they're not saying anything worth listening to.

A while back I took a modded, ChatGPT-powered companion with me to see if the AI that can supposedly pass college entrance exams could solve the easiest puzzle in Skyrim. Spoiler: it absolutely couldn't, and the AI character I spent all that time with wasn't a convincing conversationalist, either.

More recently I've been playing Seed, an MMO colony sim from Klang Games that just arrived in early access after about a decade of development. In Seed you create a seedling, a Sims-like avatar, who shares the world with other players' seedlings, and they can converse with you and each other using Seed's AI.

My first AI interaction was actually a good one. During character creation I noticed seedlings had very long legs and short torsos, making it look like my avatar was wearing extremely high-waisted jeans. I decided to ask him about it, and this is a game where you can absolutely ask whatever the heck you want. It's even kind of cute because when I type a question, he'll take a little phone out and text me back.

"Hi!! I'm so happy to finally be talking to you!" my seedling said.

"Hey why are you so high-waisted" I typed.

"Everyone's wearing high-waisted right now! It's like, totally the trend… Is it… not looking good?"

I mean, that's a great response. I couldn't ask a character in Skyrim or The Sims or any other game I can think of a question about the length of their legs or the equator of their jeans. It's genuinely fun that you can do that in Seed.

But it mostly went downhill from there, and after a few hours it became hard not to see this first amusing interaction as just dumb luck that Seed's AI stumbled on an entertaining response. The rest of my conversations with both my doppelganger, and between my seedling and other player-made seedlings, didn't go well at all.

Here's a conversation (seedlings use text bubbles, not spoken words) between my seedling and the seedling of another player. Note that neither I nor the other player are typing these messages, it's all Seed's AI. The other player wasn't even online: seedlings are persistent in the world even when the player isn't around.

"So, how old are you actually? Just curious!" my seedling asked another player's seedling.

"I am eighteen!! It feels like such a heavy, beautiful number," said the other seedling.

"Eighteen is such a classic age! Totally iconic," my seedling agreed.

"And what about you?" the seedling said. "How many years have you lived?"

"I am eighteen too!" my seedling gushed. "We are literally the same age, how cool is that?"

A few things immediately make me aware that this is AI, especially the practice of filling up space with completely unnecessary words. "I'm eighteen!" would have been an adequate response: you don't need to then give the age of eighteen a bunch of nonsensical attributes, such as that it's a "heavy, beautiful number" because, y'know, that doesn't make any damn sense.

"How many years have you lived?" is also another indication of an AI that's trying way too hard. You don't have to rephrase simple questions to sound alive! I'm alive, and I don't do that. "How old are you?" still does the trick.

Here's another typical conversation, in which I choose an AI-generated topic that is related to another seedling not having facial hair:

My seedling: "Wait, look at that person over there! Their skin looks so smooth and perfect!!" (A weird thing to say.)

Other seedling: "Smooth? No way. They look completely washed out to me." (A weird response.) "Actually, look at how clean that person's face is! No hair at all!" (Yeah, that's what my guy said originally.)

My seedling: "Haha, my bad! I guess I was just seeing what I wanted to see?" (What?) "Wait, I don't know… I actually think that look is super trendy right now!! Like the minimal vibe is totally in everywhere."

As conversations go, the topic (no facial hair) is odd, the observations don't sound natural, and the responses barely make sense. The player's seedling and mine have added some points to our relationship meter, but it came at the cost of a pointless conversation.

I'll say this much: the Seedlings do at least have detectable personality types that come from players' choices during character creation, and those come through in how the AI talks. Some speak very curtly, indicating they're not really interested in a conversation at all, others gush with enthusiasm about just about everything, some like to throw shade while others find it unappealing to gossip. The AI does make it easy to get a quick read on what type of character you're talking to, which is good!

But the conversations themselves aren't compelling and the immersion grows weaker the longer they go on. As you've seen, "heavy" and "beautiful" and "iconic" and "vibes" are words that come up constantly in Seed: not only is my seedling's age "heavy" and "beautiful" but so is my seedling's name and the color of someone's shoes (brown) in two other conversations. Everything, everywhere, is a vibe of some sort, even when it's clearly not. I find this sort of thing as unconvincing as any other AI chatbot I've ever spoken with. It's just filler, something that may briefly appear genuine but doesn't hold up to even a bit of scrutiny.

I do see some real benefits of AI here in Seed. I like that I can ask the tutorial robot questions about aspects of the game, like how to perform certain tasks or locate specific resources, and I'll usually (not always) get a helpful answer in plain English. But it can be vague and unhelpful at times, too, such as when it misunderstands the question or delivers unrelated information. Seed's AI doesn't appear to make up or hallucinate stuff the way most chatbots do, but while it's faster than consulting a wiki or asking another player for help, it's not always better.

Plus, Seed's tutorial bot will sometimes mispronounce a common word or stress the wrong syllable, and for me that's immediately immersion-breaking because these are the things I've learned to instinctively check for when trying to determine if something is AI or a real person, like in a narrated YouTube video. It's an uncanny valley thing, an instant reminder that you're seeing or hearing something fake.

Like I said, there are some good examples of the AI in Seed working as intended, and it may improve over time. But I'm still left wondering if these types of AI interactions are needed or even wanted in games. Are two avatars mindlessly blathering about how beautiful and heavy a number is really an improvement over The Sims, where two avatars can produce a word bubble containing a picture of a guitar, and we all immediately understand that they're talking about music? It's shallow, sure, but not as shallow as a full conversation that contains no actual meaning.

Even though I'm not loving this aspect of Seed, I can imagine the possibilities of talking to characters in a life sim or MMO or RPG and them never running out of things to say. But at the moment, I'll still take limited but compelling dialogue, or even simple word bubbles with emojis, over unconvincing AI wordslop.

The best games like Stardew Valley

Fields of Mistria

Why: The level of heart and detail in the character dialogue is unmatched.
Fields of Mistria review (89%): "Fields of Mistria is the first farm sim in a lot of years that's made me want to spend time in town visiting with its cast even after I've gotten rich off shipping berries to the capitol."

Now that it's finally hit 1.0 launch, Fields of Mistria has become my absolute favorite in the post-Stardew farm sim scene. It solves so many of my little farm simming gripes with little quality-of-life touches and just feels like it was made with a deep love of the genre.

Mistria commits so hard to the '90s anime and Game Boy Advance aesthetic with pastel colors and a bunch of loveable cuties wearing capes and shoulder pads. I can't stress enough that it's got so much substance underneath that anime trope crust, though. Yes March is a textbook tsundere and Juniper is a witch who says "OH HO HO" with that arrogant hand pose when she laughs, but it leaves room for characters who defy stereotypes too. Mistria has so much detailed, character-building dialogue that I truly love getting to know its characters and their quirks.

Roots of Pacha

Why: It's the best exactly-like-Stardew thing out there.
Roots of Pacha review (88%): "It delights in genre staples while tuning the formula just enough to create something engaging and fresh."

Roots of Pacha is by far the closest thing to just playing more Stardew Valley, only set in the stone age. It's got a very similar pixel art style, character types, and soundtrack, but unlike so many things chasing Stardew's coattails, Pacha doesn't suffer for the comparison. It's just downright solidly good with lots of little extras like a fun musical minigame to tame animals and a tech tree for unlocking farm inventions that your community members come up with. This is the one that I managed to get my group of friends to play together for several weeks despite never doing co-op Stardew together.

Coral Island

Why: It's one of the biggest farm sims around.

Coral Island has 30 dateable characters. That's wild, when the standard in this genre is more like a dozen. Plus there's all the other characters on Coral Island who are equally personable and unique. After a year of early access and several post-launch updates with massive feature lists, Coral Island become one of the biggest farm sims around. It's now got multiplayer, a (toggleable) jealousy system if you're neglecting your spouse for other datable characters, and even more big updates on the way. I came to this one later than most, but honestly I'm glad I'm seeing it after it's been jam-packed with goodies.

Moonstone Island

Why: Creature-catching will always be catnip to me.

Moonstone Island leans closer to a crafting sim than a life sim, so some of the community and social elements like dating are shallower than other Stardew-like games. I cannot deny that adding creature-catching to a genre I already like is pretty much always a winner, though. Moonstone brings my favorite bits of base-building and procedural generated world exploring into a cute farming and crafting experience the way that almost no other post-Stardew life sims do. It flips the usual farm sim priorities on its head by making my creatures the focus instead of my rows of crops.

Kynseed

Why: The world feels so enticingly creepy and interesting.
Kynseed review (89%): "A hearty stew made from elements of Fable, Stardew Valley and Crusader Kings."

Kynseed is an odd one, in general and also, admittedly, as a pick for this list. It's built on creepy fairytales with an almost overwhelmingly dense pixel art style. Having roots in the older Fable games means that its characters are more like simulated little pawns in your world and don't really have that Stardew-style depth of character. It has gotten more Stardew-like with all of its years of updates though, adding in more house customization and other personal bits. Playing through family generations means you can sink a lot of hours into this one. I'm always fascinated by the crusty old RPG feeling of exploring its world and chasing down quest hints between coming home to farm. I just think it's very niche and neat and I'll never shut up about how its super tactile cooking minigame is amazing.

Staff Picks

I may be the tender of this list, but I'm just one of many farm sim lovers at PC Gamer, so here are the latest favorites from my fellows.

Readers' choice

Upcoming games like Stardew Valley

Steam's Train Fest has begun, meaning there are deals and discounts on lots of locomotive games, even a few brand new ones like Denshattack, which just came out this month.

But when it comes to train sales there's really only one train game to talk about: Train Simulator Classic, a sim notable for having a whole heck of a lot of DLC: a whopping 790 pieces of it. And almost all of them are on sale this week.

The base game itself has a hefty discount of 80% off, making it a steal at only $6 during Train Fest. And just about all of that tasty DLC is also on sale for anywhere between 20-80% off as well.

I won't lie, it was trickier than I expected to figure out what the total discount on all that DLC adds up to. Perhaps for obvious reasons, Steam won't let me add all 790 pieces of DLC to my cart at once, but it also won't just display all of the pieces of DLC in a nice tallyable column, truncating the list to a mere 200 entries. Even the ever-useful Augmented Steam extension won't let me fill my cart with every piece of DLC in one fell swoop. Come on, storefronts, let me accidentally purchase thousands of dollars of software!

But after a lot of clicking and scrolling and digging and copy-pasting raw data into a spreadsheet, and then doing a whole bunch of organizing and sorting and calculating, I think I've worked it all out.

Typically, in order to buy every piece of DLC for Train Simulator Classic at full price, you'd have to spend about $15,621.11. With today's Train Fest Sale where most of it is heavily discounted, it'll only run you about $6,933.80. That's about 55% off! Not bad if you have thousands of dollars to blow on train DLC—or, far more likely, if you've been looking for one or two bits of DLC and were waiting for a sale.

If you're looking for some train games that won't cost as much as a used car, there's quite a few to choose from, even newer games. As with Denshattack, train survival game EverRail also came out this month and is 10% off, and Fogpiercer, a strategy game also released this July, is 25% off.

No deals on Monster Train 1 or 2, however. Feels like a missed opportunity. Here's the Train Fest trailer with more sales to choo-choo-choose from:

The country I lead is in uproar. My approval ratings have to be measured on entirely new axes to capture popular upset. The streets throng with rebels and malcontents. The only reason I have not been assassinated is that the sheer number of people who want to murder me cannot fit through the door at the same time.

The election takes place tomorrow. The situation is excellent.

The United Kingdom is in a parlous state (I'm talking about real life now). The current Labour prime minister—who I will not name because that's simply not information any of us will ever need again—has resigned and a new one, former Manchester mayor Andy Burnham, is imminent. Based largely on vibes and the fact Burnham has a northern accent, the British elite is girding itself for hyper-Bolshevism. How will the nation fare under our imminent war communist regime?

I can answer that. Using cutting edge models (a copy of political sim Democracy 4), I have exhaustively plotted out the trajectory of a radical premiership in an exacting replica of the UK in 2026. Friends, I've cracked it. My advanced technologies have revealed exactly what course Britain's prime minister should take. Join me as I walk you through it.

What is to be done?

Of course, to accurately foresee the possible political trajectories of the UK, my simulation needs to reflect the country as it is. The British Isles are a peculiar beast, and capturing them in simulation means I need to be able to make a variety of fine-tuned adjustments.

Fortunately, Democracy 4:

1. Lets you simply choose the UK as a country to run from a list of options.
2. Lets you tweak it a little bit before you hit the road.

Per YouGov polling, the British public considers itself +15% liberal-leaning and +3% socialist-leaning, which I duly reflected in Democracy's settings. The national debt—a made-up number the Treasury invents to give the chancellor something to talk about in meetings—is around £3 trillion. Into the simulator it goes.

But it wasn't quite enough. This might be my home country numerically, but the spirit wasn't there—I had detail without soul. The sine qua non of British politics was missing. Some subtle, herbal ingredient was absent.

It came to me. I named all three main parties The Fascists and gave them different-coloured rosettes.

Nationalised sausages

My UK simulacrum—simUKlacrum—was mostly perfect. The skies were grey, the people dour, the spending high, the income low, the bourgeois revolution frustratingly incomplete. The only thing that seemed off was that my party—the Burnham crew—inexplicably had 10 million members and climbing. If I woke up tomorrow and heard that 10 million people had joined any UK political party I would immediately flee the country.

Apart from that? All verisimilitudinous: a true-to-life canvas on which to etch the social revolution. I decided my first move would be to try to bring that debt down—bringing expenditure below spending by waging a merciless Red Terror on the City of London and military-industrial complex.

We started as we meant to go on: boldly. Democracy 4 tasks you with balancing ministers' loyalty and their capability when selecting your cabinet. You might have troops who would go to war for you, but who would be useless at implementing your policies, or vice versa. Both are important.

I completely disregarded this and filled every post with the most obedient stooges I had to hand. Then we got to work.

The UK nuclear arsenal? Abolished. The military? Reduced to five of England's reddest dads. Corporation tax went up, capital gains had their pockets turned out; the nation's wealthy were a tube of delicious tomato paste and I was the chef de partie.

Shark-infested waters

International capital was not happy with this turn of events. The UK credit rating tumbled down a cliff face and smashed its head into every rock along the way: AAA became AA became BB became CCC became C—the ruling class was mashing the keyboard to register its displeasure, as meanwhile rivals took advantage of our newly hamstrung defences.

Argentina planted a flag on the Falklands, Russian ships drifted alarmingly close to the coast. At one point pirates manifested. I had implemented socialism in one country with such forceful enthusiasm I had somehow returned us to the Age of Sail.

None of this particularly bothered me. Let credit agencies toss entire cans of alphabetti spaghetti at me, let Argentina call them Las Malvinas. If Russia wants to paddle menacingly in our waters I'll just add it to the yearly tourism stats. Pirates are fun!

What did bother me was that the British public wasn't too psyched about how things were going either. I had come into office with unenviable approval polling and my moves to reshape the national finances along more egalitarian lines had only made things worse. Though, hilariously, I never polled as badly as the actual, real-life Labour Party, things were nonetheless on a downward trend. Even more galling: expenditure still outpaced income to the tune of £15 billion or so.

I consulted my advisers—a YouTube clip of Limmy saying don't back down, double down—and decided the answer was to become even more radically communist than I had been previously.

The five-turn plan

We needed new policies, not just tweaks to the old one. I began by implementing city farms: new kolkhozes to feed a hungry people as their fortress weathers capitalist assault.

I went further. We banned cryptocurrency, subsidised healthy food, handed out university grants to anyone who showed interest in buying a book, and taxed employers who used AI. Inflation spiralled and expenditure climbed, but my polling stabilised. Britain did not love me, but its hatred stopped growing.

Then two things happened which turned things around. First, I legislated the right to die. Britain loved this. They went absolutely nuts for it, as though they had been waiting around for someone to tell them they could die for decades. My polling shot through the roof. By which I mean it entered the general vicinity of 43% or so.

Shortly after, the whole credit rating and inflation scenario got so bad that parliament declared a state of emergency. Paradoxically, this meant I—the guy who had very much caused all this—now had way more power and political capital than I did before. I went hogwild with it. I created a state postal service and dragged its slider all the way to the right: maximum postal service. State airlines got the same treatment, as did the NHS, which now had sufficient annual income to cure death.

I also embarked on a bold policy of 'giving everyone free money,' which was popular. All of this was well-timed: the election was now imminent.

All power to the soviets

Here we come full circle, right back to where I started this piece. Britain was a nation cut in two. Socialists, trade unionists, and the poor (all of which are actual, modelled voter groups in Democracy 4) loved me. Meanwhile, in the blue corner, religious conservatives and capitalists had become so outraged at my leadership they had begun to create armed paramilitaries with names like "The Angels of Heavenly Justice."

The question was: who could better mobilise at the ballot box? Also, could I make it to the election without some modern-day Fanny Kaplan taking my head off with a light machine gun?

I hit the campaign trail with the aim of infuriating my enemies even further. There would be no rapprochement, no outreach, no olive branch to my foes. I had no interest in winning over floating voters or in persuading anyone who was not firmly in the tank already. Every speech I gave had the goal of inciting my followers to a spittle-flecked fever pitch. Meanwhile, I focused my campaign on slandering my opponents.

Somehow, it worked. 70% of my base turned out to put an X next to my name, while my nearest competitors barely managed 46%. The result was that, on a nationwide turnout of 72%, I came away with 30 million votes (or 44.7% overall), completely blowing my reactionary foes out of the water.

Britain's credit was in the tank, Russia was on the verge of seizing Kent, and buying a loaf of bread required one of those duffel bags full of cash they have in Heat, but the people were with me. I had been re-elected. The red dawn brings a bright new day.

Feel the burn

What can we take from this? In real life, Britain will soon get its new prime minister, and the compromises have already begun. Many of the faces and ideas that surrounded the outgoing, now-despised PM are already reappearing.

Clearly, this is doomed. As my rigorous testing has proved, what 21st century Britain needs is a sweeping cavalcade of courageous policies. We need collective farms, punitive taxes, the immediate execution of anyone with a business studies qualification. Bold, radical action—this is what science says this green and pleasant land requires.

That is, if you want to win the next election. I guess if not then, hey, just keep doing whatever.

Mr Burnham, I'm just a phone call away.

Mail delivery is a thankless job. No one notices all the hard effort that goes into sorting through mountains of boxes, parcels, and letters to get deliveries ready on time. Oh, but I drop a couple of dozen boxes in the sea and suddenly I'm bad at my job? Everyone's a critic.

But someone's gotta do it, and that's the fate which befalls you and your friends if you decide to play the new cozy management sim Cat Mail Co. Residents of Cat Island will turn up to your post office with mail to collect or send and it's your job to ensure everything gets to where it needs to go on time, and doesn't end up lost among a pile of old packages.

Cats will turn up to collect their mail, they'll describe said package, some in great detail and some in what feels more like a riddle than a description. Parcels will have first names and the initial of a last name on them alongside stamps that signify if they're heavy, fragile, or frozen, as well as some other visual signifiers like ribbons, stickers, or what I have deduced are scratch marks from alligators—I try not to ask too many questions.

Because I'm very much Type A, I created a thorough sorting system in which I separated boxes by weight, type, and crocodile scratches, making it pretty easy to locate mail and race through customer orders each day. But that's not to say I didn't have any trouble.

I did find myself rejecting customer requests a couple of times—when they gave me absolutely nothing to work with. One cat asked for a box, no name, no weight, no visual signifier, just a box. If I'd actually been on the other side of that counter I would've probably thrown a box at them. But I wasn't, and after giving them almost every box I had in stock only for them to reject each one, I gave up and told them to shove off. My customer service isn't great either, I suppose. But it's also not dreadful, because after the first couple of hours I managed to complete orders for 100 cats, an achievement I'm quite proud of.

But it's not all about handing off parcels. You also collect them from customers and sort them so they're ready to be handed off to the cheery Captain, who arrives at your post office by boat each morning and evening and then sets sail to deliver them to the surrounding towns.

So far I've unlocked Sunny Shores, Port Windy, and Crescent Bay. The Captain's delivery schedule will change each day, however, meaning certain areas may be missed out on, depending on which route he's taking. So you'll have to manage your stock quite closely, otherwise you can have packages sticking around the office too long, and before long you'll be flooded with piles of boxes strewn across the floor.

The Captain will also have a random amount of space on his boat, meaning you have to stack boxes like a jenga tower, with the heavy cargo on the bottom and the fragile stuff on the top. But there are other variations, like lovers boxes that have to be shipped together, or frozen items that need to be kept in the cool room until the very last second, making for a different kind of puzzle for you to tackle each dawn and dusk.

I've only been playing Cat Mail Co. for a few hours now, but there's clearly so much more to experience, with locked rooms, broken gadgets, and new places all being out of reach right now. And if you get tired of playing on your own and want to throw a live grenade into the mix, you can invite friends to play with you—warning, this will severely decrease the cosy and significantly increase the stress, but it's still a ton of fun and means you're essentially getting two games for the price of one.

Everything I know about crime scene investigations I learned from the TV series CSI: Miami, a show where sexy people get murdered and different sexy people—plus David Caruso—solve the crime by doing lab work.

My memory of the show is that Caruso always kicks off the episode by saying the first part of a sentence, then puts on his sunglasses and finishes the sentence with a devastating zinger related to the sexy murder victim. But that's sort of not true. His zingers in this 8-minute montage of Horation Caine one-liners are pretty darn underwhelming. Sometimes he just states the obvious, like when a body that had been thrown off a building was determined to have been killed elsewhere:

"Priority number one…" *sunglasses* "...is for us to find the murder scene."

Yep. That's… that's the thing everyone already knows you need to do. Wasn't a cool thing to say, and didn't need to be said at all.

Hoping to fill his shoes this week, I'm trying out a new career in Forensics: Crime Scene Detective, and unfortunately it seems I'm about as good at solving crimes as David Caruso is at delivering memorable zingers.

My first case is to collect evidence from a drug dealer's apartment. Not drugs, unfortunately, but electronic devices that include communications to his clients, perhaps text messages that read "hey if you would you like to buy some illegal drugs hmu 💉💊🌿🤪"

At the apartment I get to label, photograph, and collect evidence, which is rad. I've seen them do it on TV a million times: placing little yellow plastic numbered markers next to things like bullet holes and blood stains and then taking photos. In the alleged drug dealer's apartment there are just a couple smartphones and a password written on a post-it note, so I label 'em, snap 'em, and take them back to the lab.

That's where the problems begin. I use the password to access one of the phones, but the other is damaged so I have to open it up and "desolder" it: heat up the memory card so the glue melts and it can be removed—but without heating it up so much it's destroyed. I gingerly heat the card and try to remove it. Nope. I try again. Nope.

Ultimately, it goes the way things go anytime I toast a bagel:

• It's untoasted
• It's untoasted
• It's untoasted
• It's burnt beyond all recognition.

My first act of lab work and I nuke the evidence. And not only did I destroy this device, it turns out I also missed a third electronic device somewhere back at the apartment. I guess this drug dealer… *sunglasses* …is going to continue dealing drugs.

Embarrassingly, I flub my next two cases, too. Finding fingerprints is kinda fun: I shine a purple light around a room until I spot one—and it's always just one, because people only touch a surface in their home with a single finger then never touch it again. After labeling and snapping a pic, I sprinkle dust on the print and lift it with tape, which I bungle on the first two attempts by using almost no powder and then by using way too much. That makes it tricky, or some might say, impossible, to match prints back in the lab.

My second case: Unresolved! I'm glad this game doesn't simulate getting yelled at by the chief of police.

My third time out I'm hopeful because there's blood, and I'm good at collecting that: you just stick a Q-tip into it. But again, I wind up torpedoing the lab work. I use some sort of machine to extract DNA and then compare results on a readout to see if it matches. I know it must match: this is a crime-solving game, so I figure most of the cases will result in a "solved" scenario instead of a "nope, this one stumped us" ending, but no amount of fiddling with the knobs helps me ID a perp.

Why am I dealing with squiggly lines, anyway? Aren't we living in the grim future of no privacy and information harvesting? Surely I should just be able to feed both DNA samples into a computer and it gives me two pictures, and if the guy looks the same in both pictures, he's guilty. Why doesn't science work like that?

Finally, I get a case involving a gun. I'm an American and a former gun store owner, so this should be a slam dunk. No one was killed, this is just sort of a "please don't fire a gun in your apartment" type of case. The bullet is lodged in a wall, so I do that fun thing where you put a stick in the hole and it points where the gun was fired from, and then something more fun: shining a laser along the path of the bullet, and then spraying some kind of mist so the laser can be clearly seen and photographed. Awesome.

And for the first time, I don't bungle the evidence back in the lab. I take the gun, fire it into a water tank, and collect the bullet for comparison, which is done basically the same way as in The Great Mouse Detective: line 'em up and twist 'em to see if the scratches match. Finally, I score 100% on a case—and it only took four tries. What's that famous saying? Let justice be done though three hardened criminals go free so you can imprison one guy who shot his own living room wall.

It's about time I reveal the shocking twist in this story: those four cases were just the tutorial. That's how bad at this I am: I even fail at being given step-by-step instructions on how to do basic tasks. It's with real trepidation that I take my first real case, praying it involves someone else shooting a gun because I nailed that. C'mon, violent gun murder!

I open the folder and it's a coin burglary. Shit. Someone has been stealing antique coins. Filled with dread and disappointment, I go to the perp's apartment.

It's not so bad: at first. I dust for several fingerprints and do a decent job at lifting them. I find a whole crapload of evidence to label and photograph, including an actual pile of coins—which the game oddly does not consider relevant to this case.

But while I know I'm pretty good at working the crime scene, I'm just utter shit in the lab. And here's another twist—in my first real case I was also terrible at the scene! I missed several additional fingerprints, a second electronic device, and at least one password. Labwise, I failed to even complete the fingerprint analysis. My score for this case was a mere 16/100.

I hope someone can solve the case of my brief investigative career, because it's dead.

Performance Evaluation

I think moths are great. Their hardiness, fuzzy little bodies, and the fact that I relate to their obsession with bright lights; I too find them fascinating. Unfortunately, other than the Scalloped Oak and the Puss Moth, I've not been able to see many of the 2,500 species of moths recorded to be in the British Isles, which is why I've now turned to Mothkeep's demo to take the edge off my lack of moth finding.

Mothkeep is all about finding and documenting native species of moths, in woodlands, rolling green fields, overgrown pastures, and even inside homes—you know, moth places. The full game is releasing in just a few days and it's not expected to be very long, clocking in at just a couple of hours. But that doesn't detract from the peaceful and cozy practice of listening to calming music while searching around for some cool moths.

I spent most of my time sat in an overgrown mossy woodland waiting for the Four-Dotted Footman and the Garden Tiger moth to turn up. I waited so long for the latter that I actually had to go to the shop and spend some of the coins I'd collected from spotting moths on a bunch of leaf litter, which I could pile up in the woodland to attract the attention of the Garden Tiger moth. Luckily that one coin paid off and I soon added the Tiger to my list.

But it's not just about appreciating moths while in their Imago stage (when they get their colours and wings), you need to find instances of moths during every stage of their life: eggs, larva, and pupa as well. You can use their preferred native plants to attract these stages also.

It's a pretty basic game, but sometimes those are the best. It's nice to have something where the stakes and stress are low, it certainly balances out all the horror and competitive FPS games I play.

Mothkeep is whimsical, chill, and the perfect game to play if you want to wind down or just see some cool critters in the woods. It's also just a great way to find out a little bit more about the 160,000 species of moth we share the planet with.

Thief: The Dark Project is a brilliant game for many reasons, among which is that it has one of the best mapping communities of any game. While the Doom and Quake mapping scenes are larger and more prolific, Thief's mappers consistently punch so far above their weight they should probably get into boxing sims rather than stealth games. They regularly deliver maps, missions and entire campaigns that are orders of magnitude more ambitious than what exists in the base game.

Hence, any remaster of Thief worth its salt would ensure the fan mission scene is well supported, and that's exactly what Nightdive plans to do with Thief: The Dark Project Remastered. Speaking on Nightdive's Deep Dive podcast, producer Daniel Grayshon delved into the significance of community creations for the remaster:

"There's been a very dedicated community that has created all sorts of wonderful additions to the game, and a lot of that has not gone unnoticed, " Grayshon explained. "Compatibility with those is extremely important, and that's what we're working on very heavily to ensure that when you buy a copy of the game on PC, you'll be able to very easily and very quickly get set up with whatever fan mission you would like to play."

Given the number of fan missions that are out there, this is pretty ambitious, and Grayshon does say that, while they want to support as many FMs as they can, Nightdive's resources are not unlimited. "We're doing our best to make sure that we have a good compatibility across the board with everything that we can test given the time that we have. There's a lot of content out there, but we're doing our best."

There is one specific fan campaign that you'll definitely be able to play out of the gate, and that's The Black Parade. Released in 2023, The Black Parade is a 10-mission campaign with its own story, overseen by Arkane Lyon level designer Romain Barrilliot. A majestic ode to Thief, each of its levels is preposterously ambitious, richly detailed, and often bloody terrifying, and I'd count it among Deathloop and the System Shock remake as one of the best immersive sim experiences from this decade.

Nightdive is very much aware of The Black Parade's reputation. "Obviously the big one in the room is The Black Parade," Grayshon says. "It won ModDB's number one mod of the year, I think, that year. And just by looking at people's reactions to our announcement, I noticed that they will talk about 'Oh, I can't wait to see how The Black Parade runs in this.'

"I knew this would be a thing that people would be wanting right from the very beginning, and the reactions to the announcement have proved that I wasn't wrong there in that. So we're working as quickly and as thoroughly as we can to make sure that compatibility is there for the things that people want to play."

I can personally attest to the fact that fan-mission compatibility is a big draw for Thief fans, and I can't wait to give The Black Parade a whirl in the overhauled game. Indeed, it's an oddly good time to be a Thief fan right now. Alongside the Remaster, Eidos Montreal just announced a graphic novel set between Thief 1 and 2, along with a bunch of other nifty merch like a new soundtrack. Now all we need is a new game from someone who understands the series. I don't hold out much hope for this, but stranger things have happened.

In one of the rarest phrases ever uttered, it's a pretty good time to be a Thief fan right now. Earlier this month, Thief: The Dark Project Remastered was announced at The PC Gaming Show, with the remaster maestros at Nightdive Studios lending their skills to Looking Glass' revolutionary stealth game. Last month also brought a new stealth game from many of Thief's original creators, with Thick as Thieves proving a surprisingly fun sneaking romp—even if it feels significantly cut down from its original PvPvE premise.

Now, it's been announced that Thief is getting an officially licensed graphic novel. Thief: Pulse of Promise is a project created by Bit Bot Media in collaboration with Eidos-Montreal, developers of the not great, not terrible 2014 Thief reboot.

If you're concerned this means the story is set in the rebooted Thief universe, that doesn't seem to be the case. Pulse of Promise is apparently set between the events of Thief: The Dark Project and Thief 2: The Metal Age, so logic follows that it stars the original Garrett rather than his 2014 doppelganger. The cover art for the graphic novel also heavily channels the vibe of the first two games.

Pulse of Promise is being crowdfunded via BackerKit, and it isn't the only thing being funded by the collaboration with Eidos. The campaign will also include a statue, replicas, clothing, a plush, and an original soundtrack by Celldweller, which will feature a new performance by Stephen Russell. I just had the terrifying image of Garrett rapping, but fortunately that doesn't seem to be Celldweller's vibe.

I'm not convinced by all this other stuff, frankly. But I can certainly see a Thief graphic novel working. Garrett's laconic voiceover is essentially a series of comic captions running in real-time, so the transition to that format should be relatively smooth.

There's no word on when Pulse of Promise will release, but given the campaign hasn't started yet, I'll hazard a guess that it will arrive sometime after the Thief remaster. Which would be appropriate, considering the story is set after the events of The Dark Project.

As for what's coming in the remaster, well, the answer is everything you'd expect from Nightdive. Upgraded visuals, support for 4k and 120 FPS, a vault of behind-the-scenes stuff. For me, though, the most exciting features are a level-select mode, which means I can jump right into The Sword whenever I want, plus support for custom campaigns, letting players access Thief's incredible array of fan missions such as the superb campaign The Black Parade.

Partway through Nightdive's video about remastering Thief: The Dark Project, producer Daniel Grayshon casually mentions that in the original you pressed 4 to bring up the water arrows and I realized I still remember a bunch of the keybinds for Thief's arsenal of items. The trusty blackjack was 2, rope arrows were 8, the get-out-of-jail-free flash bomb on F6, and so on.

"As with a lot of Nightdive games in the past we're not looking to change the core experience of the game," Grayshon says, something studio head Stephen Kick reiterates at another point when he explains they take all the comments on the trailer insisting they haven't changed anything as a compliment. If it looks the way you remember it looking, Nightdive considers that a success.

But Thief's controls were definitely in need of improvement. "The first thing that I wanted to do for the game was introduce a weapon wheel," Grayshon says. In the original I cycled through my collection of tools by pressing tab on the occasions when I couldn't remember the shortcut for gas mines or whatever, and a wheel would definitely help there.

"I think that will make a great deal of difference when it comes to playing the game," Grayhson says, "and getting through those tricky situations where you're being approached by someone and you've gotta lockpick through a door really quickly, but you don't have to cycle through your pockets to find your square-toothed lockpick or your triangle-toothed lockpick. You quickly open the weapon wheel, you throw the mouse to the left to get the square lockpick or you throw it to the right to get the triangle lockpick."

Kick jokingly plays the contrarian, miming a desperate search for the right equipment while asking, "Did you think for a moment that that was part of the original design, that as a thief you'd have this bag of just stuff?"

"If you want to do that you can totally do that if you want," Grayshon replies. "Not taking anything away. If you fancy the convenience it's there for you, but we're not forcing you to use it."

Which is exactly what you want to hear. I'm glad the option will be there when I can't remember which key brings up the moss arrows and don't want to accidentally equip a brightly burning fire arrow and give away my position, but I'll still be pressing 4 to whip out the water arrows because apparently that's permanent muscle memory now and I'll still be able to recall it long after I've forgotten the names of all my loved ones.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

A friend of mine who worked in a bookstore used to complain about customers who couldn't remember what they wanted. They'd say unhelpful things like, "I think it had a red cover?" At first the thought of gamifying that only with music instead of books seemed off-putting to me, as someone who goes shopping with overly detailed lists and would sooner bury myself in the ground than ask for help.

I'm glad I gave Wax Heads a chance though, because it's more than just a puzzle game where you figure out which record with a saxophone on the cover somebody wants.

Like Strange Horticulture with punk instead of plants, it's about an extremely specific kind of shop: the record store that promotes local bands and zines. Repeater Records is a struggling hub for a town's music scene—but maybe putting on a gig can save it? You know the type of place, from movies if not reality. In terms of tone it's halfway between Empire Records and High Fidelity. With Scott Pilgrim's art style thrown in that puts it right up my alley.

All the lovable weirdos who work there have their own story, and so do the regulars. To figure out what customers want you have to explore the mazey store, keep up with a daily music press and an Instagram-like called Phonogram, and even pay close attention to what people wear for clues about their preferences. Some customers are just forgetful, while others want you to recommend something new they'll like based on their taste.

I think they could do with checking out these things called reviews, but getting to know Repeater Records and the music it stocks is genuinely fun. The invented album blurbs are well-observed—the saga of a metal band rumored to have killed their original lead singer rang true as exactly the kind of subculture mythology people discuss over the vinyl.

You can even queue up songs on the jukebox, each one a perfect recreation of a niche subgenre. I wish several these bands were real so I could listen to more of their work.

Wax Heads is available on Steam and has a demo you can play now.

I was never able to get a feel for Funselektor's top-down driving game Art of Rally, or its predecessor Absolute Drift: I like rally in real life, but sliding cars around corners at screaming speeds from a weird perspective and with no tactile feedback just didn't work for me. I had higher hopes for the slower pace of the studio's upcoming Over the Hill, and after trying the demo that dropped today with the start of the Steam Next Fest, I am very happy to say that yeah, this is the one.

Over the Hill is a very stylized take on off-roading: You're not going to find high-fidelity mud here, or detailed first-person views from behind the wheel. It's really more about the broader experience of being 'out there,' going slow, taking your time, and thinking about how you're going to get where you want rather than just hammering on it. You can hammer on it if you want, and it'll carry you for a while, and also likely put you over onto your roof when you're not expecting it.

The game world itself is very much like that too: Not realistic, but evocative in a way that I think makes it more powerful—a bit like Firewatch in that regard, and in visual style too, at least for this demo. This playable portion is set in a beefy chunk of Canadian wilderness, and while Funselektor emphasized that it's still "a work in progress," there's a lot to see and do.

Trails of different types lead to points of interest where you'll find customization items and in-game currency, there are cabins that serve as save points, "challenge trails" wait to test your patience and precision, and scenic lookouts provide an opportunity to just kick back and enjoy the view, and play with the game's photo mode if that's your thing.

You can (and surely will) also leave the trailers completely and just go bombing around wherever you want, within the limits of your vehicle's capabilities, which—as an entry-level machine—are pretty limited indeed. But that's also how you find the interesting stuff: The map will guide you to nearby POIs, but it can be a lot more fun to just get out there and see what comes up.

It's probably wise to play it a little safe until you've got some of those cabins unlocked, though. The first time I fired up Over the Hill I found and immediately embarked on a challenge trail that led me across some rocks to a gorgeous waterfall, and I was this close to completing it when I misread the trail, ended up in the water, and drowned my engine. The only checkpoint I had at that stage was the one at the very beginning, so—right back to the start I went.

See that very narrow rock trail in front of the falls? Good luck.

But even those long slogs can be almost hypnotic. During another session I came across a vehicle stranded in a bog, and spent more than 30 minutes trying to pull it out. I came so close, so many times, and I kept telling myself one more shot from this angle and I'm done, and then I kept trying—until, well, I got a little rammy, ended up in the nearby lake, drowned my engine, and whoops. Now we're both stuck.

(I later found a trail that led me to the stuck vehicle from the other side of the bog, and pulled it out with relative ease. Live and learn.)

It wasn't all misfortune and failure. A drive up to a distant fire tower left me hung up on a boulder: After a few minutes of gunning the engine and reefing the wheel I was ready to reset, but decided it was time to finally take a dig through Over the Hill's toolbox. Turned out there was a portable winching point in there, similar to a piton but big enough to yoink a car around. I was able to pull off the boulder, and after a few more stressful moments but no full-on catastrophes, I made it to the top. (And then forgot to take a picture. Isn't that always the way?)

This one, well, I did not get out of. But I also have to admit that trying to drive out to the end of a very narrow, rickety dock was probably not my best idea.

Over the Hill has a day-night cycle that works really well. The game world becomes a very different kind of beautiful over long distances, but this isn't one of those pretend-nights in videogames where the skybox is dark but you can still see: You're gonna need your headlights if you want to keep driving.

One thing I realized after playing Over the Hill for a good while is that I'd put my truck into low gear range—slow, but better for climbing rocks and powering through muck—and then just left it there. Yes, it was taking me longer than necessary to traverse the game's safer areas, but I hadn't noticed because slow and meditative is what Over the Hill is all about. Even after I clocked that I was basically crawling when I could've been cruising, I left it alone—apart from being a more relaxing way to travel, running in low gear had the added practical benefit of keeping me from high-speed bouncing my dumb self into roadside trees and rocks.

Along with singleplayer exploration, Over the Hill supports multiplayer for up to four drivers at once. I took it for a very brief spin, mostly just so I could say that I did, and it's very easy to set up and connect with other players. As for the actual exploration, I didn't do extensive testing but it looks more or less identical to singleplayer, except you've got other people around—handy if you need to be hauled out of some self-inflicted trouble.

How the full game holds up is an open question, but the demo sets a great tone. (Speaking of which, Over the Hill's music is excellent too: Not as deep a soundtrack as that other great fantasy driving sim, Pacific Drive, but a soothing, gentle backdrop to the demo's quiet isolation.) A lot of driving games, like the upcoming Clutch, like to churn excitement about "the connection between car and driver, and the raw thrill of speed," but for my money Over the Hill lands closer to real love of the wheel: Funselektor understands it in a way that an awful lot of studios miss.

The Over the Hill demo is live now and will remain up until the end of the Steam Next Fest on June 22. A release date hasn't been announced but it's expected to be out later this year.

I've played a few theme park sims in my day, which means I've accidentally—and occasionally on purpose—killed some of my guests. Maybe it was a faulty roller coaster, or maybe it was a roller coaster I'd deliberately removed a few lengths of track from just to see what would happen. Sorry (or not sorry) valued park guests!

But revealed today at the Future Games Show is the first theme park sim I've seen where the whole point is to kill your guests. At least there's a darn good reason for it: you're a cannibal. A hungry one.

In My Cannibal Family, you got whacked by the mob and stuffed into a drum of toxic goo, emerging as a mutated monster with an appetite for living human flesh. It happens.

Naturally you go into the theme park business, building a maze of attractions to lure in guests and kill them, either with deadly traps or your own two hands. Then, its dinner time.

"Build a twisted theme park beside a remote highway and use it to lure visitors to a gruesome death—harvesting their bodies to feed your growing family of loveable mutants," says the developer. "Gather resources and construct attractions during the day—then when night arrives, use traps and stealth attacks to eliminate guests within a deadly sandbox of your own creation!"

Your hungry family isn't just there to chow down on your victims: you can assign them jobs in the park like gathering resources or taking part in the attractions. And you'll even be able to use your park to get revenge on the mobsters who murked you.

You don't need to work alone, either: My Cannibal Family can be played in co-op, so you can team up with friends to get killing and cooking. The deadly theme park sim comes out in 2027.

A lot of co-op games are cozy or funny. That's not so much the case with Carcass Clad, a new co-op tank game from Wrong Organ, developer of Mouthwashing.

We just saw the world premiere of Carcass Clad at the PC Gaming Show, and it looks absolutely feral. Your character is mere inches from hot, dangerous machinery, and you've got to operate your section of the tank and communicate with your crew to stand any chance of defeating your enemies. If you've ever watched Fury, that's the vibe.

For a lot of games, that would be enough, but this is from the people who brought us Mouthwashing, so the sicko meter is cranked up to 11. This isn't a standard WW2 co-op simulator. You have to battle your way through a war-torn city ravaged by a cultish military that uh… armours their vehicles with animals—some still living. Oh, and the cult has also resurrected some long-dead political figure and transformed them into a bird-man that hunts you throughout your run. Good luck!

There are three roles: commander, driver, and gunner. As commander, you'll be charged with spotting enemies, planning your route through the city, collecting items outside the tank, and deploying defensive measures like smoke screens.

The gunner is responsible for, you guessed it, manning the gun. Aiming, firing, reloading, that's all you. You'll also scan for threats, but your commander will have to properly identify them.

Finally, there's the driver. They'll be in charge of moving the tank through the city and positioning it during fights. Additionally, they can manage each system's power, giving one a boost at the expense of another when the time calls for it.

Almost all of the gameplay is mouse-based, so you'll have to crank levels, turn wheels, and load shells manually. It plays like a roguelike, with each run broken down into levels separated by safe rooms where you can buy supplies like ammo and fuel and upgrade your tank.

If you're a fan of Mouthwashing or just want a new co-op experience to test the limits of your friendships, wishlist Carcass Clad on Steam.

Check out everything revealed at the PC Gaming Show.

When you really stop and think about it, the whole world is one big zoo, right? We're all just animals in our enclosures, going about our daily lives, hoping for some enrichment and waiting for our next meal. So, it was only natural we'd get Planet Zoo 2, a successor to Frontier Development's 2019 management sim. We were due some more enrichment, after all.

A new gameplay trailer for the sequel just debuted at the PC Gaming Show, showing off all manner of adorable critters and the tools you'll be able to use to give them a happy life. The biggest addition is all the fishes—and yes, that is grammatically correct; fishes is the plural for multiple species of fish. There are also aviaries that can house flying birds. We're nurturing land, sea, and air in this game.

You can build both saltwater and freshwater aquariums to house turtles, pufferfish, and those weird massive fish that look like they're sideways all the time—ocean sunfish they're called, and they freak me out. We see some happy divers going in to clean up the tanks and keep the fish in good health, and the guests all look delighted watching the marine animals swimming about.

The aviaries also look spectacular. You can build tall, wide, netted areas for your white-tailed sea eagles and other flying birds. You can give them jangly toys to play with and eventually even release them into wild nature reserves. It's a lovely feature that highlights some of the great conservation work zoos do, rather than purely focusing the game on the entertainment value of the animals.

Planet Zoo 2 makes caring for the animals as clear and easy as possible, showing bars that fill up as you meet the needs of the wildlife. Each species has different needs, so making enclosures that can keep them all happy is where the challenge comes in. And making everything look pretty rather than purely functional, I've always been bad at that myself.

Planet Zoo 2 launches October 13, 2026, and you can head over to Steam to pre-order it now. I can't wait to go and rescue some beavers—my partner loves the way they pause and listen to the trees they're felling to make sure they have time to scurry away.

Check out everything revealed at the PC Gaming Show.

Stronghold 4 was revealed to the world at the PC Gaming Show today, which despite the title is actually the 10th game in the long-running series of games where you design medieval castles, build them up, and then smash 'em down—the castles that belong to your sworn enemies, anyway.

The first thing you'll notice, because it's the first thing in the trailer, is the presence of Samantha Béart and Ben Starr, known for star-making roles in Baldur's Gate 3 and Clair Obscur: Expedition 33, among numerous others. (Yes, I know, Ben Starr is also big in FF16, don't @ me.) They're unexpectedly enthusiastic about the new Stronghold—perhaps because they're not just here to reveal the new game, they're actually in it too.

Stronghold 4 looks very much like a Stronghold game, but developer Firefly Studios says it's the "most ambitious" entry in the series yet, developed in Unreal Engine 5. Castle design and construction is closely interconnected with economic systems and supply chains to deliver a deep "castle simulator," bolstered by weather effects, day-night cycles, and changing terrain.

As with its predecessor, Stronghold 4 will feature a full narrative campaign laced with the series' well-known humor to go along with the deep sim stuff, with returning fan-favorite characters and all-new cinematics. For players who prefer to stick to the building and smashing part of things, the game will support multiplayer action for up to eight players and co-op skirmish missions.

The Stronghold series could use a strong new entry: It's 25 years old now (the first game released in 2001) and it hasn't been what you'd call a consistent winner across that quarter century. In his 2021 review of Stronghold: Warlords, for instance, reviewer Robert Zak asked, "Can the latest entry in the struggling series rebuild its strong foundations?" And the answer was, simply, no: The game was fine and castle sieges remained excellent, but too much of the rest of it felt "too thin" to properly support the experience

The 2023 Definitive Edition remake of the original Stronghold, by comparison, has been very well received, holding a "very positive" rating across nearly 9,500 user reviews on Steam, and if Firefly is able to build on that success with this new mainline entry, it could be a surprise hit. Stronghold 4 is expected to launch later in 2026, and a demo is coming to Steam on June 23.

Check out everything revealed at the PC Gaming Show.

I've not had any first hand experience at running a cult. But I have enough faith in my people skills and resource management to believe I'd do a pretty decent job, and I'm willing to put my theory to the test in Wolf Haus Games' upcoming doomsday cult simulator game Join Us—what you didn't think I'd be daft enough to actually start a cult, did you?

We just got a fresh look at Join Us during today's Xbox Showcase, but let me run you through all the details.

It's a run through of the basics any cult leader would need to know. Being an open world survival game you can head out into neighbouring towns to recruit people or just piss them off. As well as expand your territory, stockpile military-grade weapons, sacrifice followers, and farm tomatoes (that last one is key to any decent cult).

You can also specialise your belief system—UFOs, cannibalism, and intermittent fasting are all on the table for core belief systems. I already know which one I'll be picking, but I'll leave that up to your imagination.

You can also team up with your friends to run the joint with four player co-op. Although, I'm not sure how the leadership structure would pan out with that. It may be best to decide on one ruler beforehand so you don't get into any petty scuffles.

The only catch is that we have to wait a little longer to put all our expertise to the test: Join Us will be releasing March 2027. Just remember folks, don't try this at home, it's best to wait for the game's release.

Well well well, look who's come to say goodbye. No use, buster. You won't have ol' Josh Wolens to kick around anymore. I'm off. Gone. Scarpered. My future is a long stretch of road near Białystok and all who ride upon it. I'm a car mechanic now. Also, a drunk. Somehow these things compliment each other.

I've been playing some Cheap Car Repair, is what I'm saying, and I've scraped off just enough rust to realise that this business is my true calling. Set in an anonymous Polish village in the mid-to-late '90s, it's a game of cutting corners, pocketing air filters, blasting Slavic pop and consuming vodka by the litre. I believe it may be a documentary.

It's a comedic game—your whole gig is doing car repair on the cheap, as sloppily as you can without driving your customers to actual violence—but it's also meditative in that Powerwash Simulator kind of way. Repairing cars is, well, zen. It's calming to methodically strip a car of rust before reapplying the paint, or to remove and repair a tyre. It almost feels a shame that the game is so keen on you doing a bad job—some part of me wants to remove every millimetre of rust rather than just painting over it.

But I will admit it is kind of funny when you get one over on your schmuck clients. The game's tutorial centres around a local street thug who wants you to scrape the rust off his clanker and repaint it. Well, fine, except I got a little enthusiastic in the removal process—the car was all bare metal by the time I was done.

Which would have been fine, but I only had the one can of green paint. The car was only halfway dressed by the time that spray can hissed dry, and while Cheap Car encourages sloppiness, you can't quite get away with returning a half-painted car to someone.

What you can get away with is: patriotism for the proud nation of Brazil. I had no more green paint, but I did have yellow, and so I decked out the car in the colours of the Brazilian flag. Brazil is a lot like Poland. They're twinned. Don't look that up.

My punter was pleased with his paintjob and the game complimented me on a job well done as I sipped one of the 52,000 bottles of beer and vodka that litter Cheap Car Repair's garage. It was, genuinely, quite amusing to get the message that my client didn't suspect a thing.

My only issue with the game, from what I've played, is that it sometimes leans a little too wacky. The central conceit of the whole thing is enough of a laugh without also making some pretty hackneyed blonde jokes or giving me a burp/fart button. But that's a minor quibble, and it couldn't have been further from my mind as I sent my friend off in the Ordem e Progresso-mobile.

Cheap Car Repair hit Steam last week. It's got a demo you can check out now.

Last week, Star Citizen surpassed $1 billion in player funding, an eye-popping milestone that inevitably raised all the same questions about Cloud Imperium Games' wildly ambitious space MMO. Is it a scam? (no). Is it playable (yes). When will it be finished? (no idea). What's the situation with its single-player component, Squadron 42?

The last we heard, Squadron 42 was on course to release sometime this year, but the breadth of the release window, combined with the fact that Squadron 42 has been delayed numerous times already, made it difficult to take this too seriously. However, it might just be that Squadron 42 is nearly finished after all. In a recent interview Star Citizen's creator Chris Roberts said the single-player game is "in the closing stages" of development.

Speaking to Variety during Star Citizen's recent DefenseCon event, Roberts shared some fresh details about Squadron 42's current status. This started with him reiterating the pitch of the game, which takes the technology created for Star Citizen and uses it to build an "authored" single-player campaign.

"My pitch is, basically, you're the star of this huge blockbuster event movie, and it seamlessly goes between the storytelling and the cinematic moments to you being in control and [in] first person," Roberts explained. "It feels pretty epic. I'm actually very excited for when people—because we're right at the end now, we're in the closing stages and it's coming together really well."

Roberts added that "the heat is being turned up for Squadron", in reference to the game's marketing, implying that we'll start seeing promotional material for it soon. He added that this was a "difficult thing to deal with" because of how closely he says CIG communicates with the community. "As we get imminently closer to launch—and I say that in game development language—it's very hard to keep it under wraps."

It certainly sounds like we'll be hearing more about Squadron 42 soon, though it might not necessarily be news we'll want to hear. Following Roberts' statements to Variety, rumours began to circulate that what CIG will be announcing will be another delay rather than a release date.

These rumours derive mainly from YouTuber and Star Citizen specialist TheAstroPub. In his most recent video, TheAstroPub says that he has spoken to several (anonymous) Star Citizen developers, who have been providing him with intermittent progress updates over the last few years.

TheAstroPub says that, according to sources he spoke to at the start of 2026, Squadron 42 had entered "some sort of beta" in February or March this year. More recently, The AstroPub apparently reached out to his sources again, whereupon cited concerns about how Squadron 42 will perform on release.

When TheAstroPub asked whether these performance issues could be fixed by a theoretical October release date, the response was surprising. "They all went 'no, it's not October, it's 2027.' They said a specific date in 2027. I am not going to repeat that date in case it gets them into trouble."

On top of this, TheAstroPub suggested that Squadron 42 will make an appearance at this year's Summer Games Fest. The evidence he cites for this is tenuous—a message that appeared on a Spanish streamer's Twitch channel from someone with the same online handle as Star Citizen's Senior Game Designer. When translated from Spanish, this message says: "I'll just say that I'm not missing Summer Games Fest this year just in case".

That said, I do find the theory plausible. Squadron 42 is the kind of game that Geoff Keighley would want to showcase at SGF, and the fact Roberts is openly talking about ramping up the marketing lends further credence to the idea. As for whether such a showcase would announce a release date or a delay, my money is on both, a specific launch date in 2027 as proposed in TheAstroPub's video.

After 13 years of development, over half a decade of post-release support, and one of the most incredible expansions ever made, Wube Software is preparing to call time on the development of Factorio.

In its latest Friday Facts blog, the Czech developer revealed that the coming 2.1 patch will be the game's final significant update, with the studio switching to minor quality of life patches thereafter.

"We envision 2.1 as our last major update of Factorio, and we will shift the focus onto long term support. So things like bug fixes, platform support/compatibility, modding features, etc," the studio wrote. "Other than that, we feel we've reached a good place to conclude the active gameplay development."

I am honestly a little surprised. Like Dwarf Fortress or RimWorld, Factorio is one of those games that seems like it could just carry on development forever. To be clear, though, 'surprised' does not mean 'disappointed'. The original game was already a preposterously vast, life-consumingly complex game, assembling one of my favourite PC gaming experiences when I reviewed it back in 2020.

Then, four years later, came Factorio: Space Age, an expansion that exploded the game's scope in even more ludicrous fashion. Not only did it involve building a space factory on top of your existing factory, but you also then took that space factory to four other planets that offered totally different factory-building challenges.

Alongside the many, many mods that have been built for Factorio, there's enough game here to keep you playing for the rest of your natural life. So while I am a little surprised to see Wube close the book on Factorio, I don't begrudge it at all.

As for what 2.1 itself will bring, Wube hasn't revealed specifics yet. But the studio is open about the fact that it won't bring any major new features like planets, enemies, and so forth. Instead, it will introduce some quality-of-life improvements, several "small" new features, the usual round of polish and bugfixes, plus a few tweaks to modding support.

It's also worth noting that, while development of Factorio is ending, Wube Software is kicking around ideas for something new. Again, Wube is candid about the prototypical nature of these ideas, stating that "there will not be anything to share for a long time". But the studio has recruited three new staff members to replace three departing employees, while its focus will gradually shift from supporting Factorio to spending time on "other game prototypes/experiments."

"While we are quite pleased with your thieving prowess and how much you are enjoying the game," say Thick as Thieves developers OtherSide Entertainment, "we also know that there is continued room for improvement and we intend to keep serving that up."

Following a first patch that added an FOV slider, an option to disable motion blur, and a few other valuable settings tweaks, a second update has been promised "sometime in the middle of next week." And while it does include stuff I'm all in favor of, like the ability to rebind your keys—essential in a stealth game, rebinding the keys is the first thing everyone does in Thief: The Dark Project—there's a gaping hole where some variation on "timers to be made adjustable or optional" should be.

Thick as Thieves is a classic vent-crawler you can play solo or in co-op, infiltrating buildings to get loot and get out. Each mission has an overall time limit, usually 45 or 30 minutes, but that's not the real problem. As soon as you tick off any of the objectives on your list of goals for a given map—even if it's just stealing one of a three-item set, or a secondary objective like "collect X amount of loot" easily triggered by accidentally picking up one too many valuables—an eight-minute countdown begins.

If the countdown ends before you find the magic exit door that randomly spawns at the moment the countdown begins, you fail the mission. And if you don't complete the other two steps of that three-step job first, you'll have to do the whole thing again on your next trip. It's infuriating to learn the hard way that, no matter how efficiently you play before that moment, you might be screwed over by a particularly rough exit location after all the hard work you put in. And since Thick as Thieves began life as a multiplayer game, of course there's no mid-mission saving.

Thick as Thieves is making the mission timer visible, at least. Previously, while the eight-minute countdown showed up at the top of the screen, the longer one was invisible until it was nearly over. Now, it'll be there whenever you press tab to open the map.

Which is a good change. It's just not the change that'll bring me back, and it has me worried that the annoying eight-minute timer—and the way items have to be stolen again if they were part of an incomplete three-item objective you can only grab during those eight minutes—is something the developers consider essential to the design, rather than something we should be able to adjust like the FOV.

One of the best parts of living in the UK is all the history which is right on our doorstep. Unfortunately, one of the worst parts about living in the UK is that sometimes you need to actually live in said history, and anyone who's lived in an old building will know just how bad it can be for mould.

Needless to say, Stachybotrys Chartarum, otherwise known as black mould, has become my lifelong enemy. So I've decided that my free time that isn't spent battling it in my bathroom is best spent battling it in a cosy cleaning sim, because I'm nothing if not consistent.

This is where Moldwasher comes in. It's a cosy top-down pixel art cleaning sim in which you play as a little Salmon Nigiri, who is tasked with cleaning up their kitchen. This involves you washing bubbling mould off of fridge shelves, cleaning up a clogged sink, and even fighting a germ-spreading fly.

I'm not kidding. I turned up to one level thinking all I had to do was wash off some mould from the sides of a fridge, pretty normal stuff for Moldwasher. But as I went on I noticed more mould was appearing. Now this isn't abnormal, since if you don't wash the grime off fast enough, it will gradually spread around the level, but it seemed faster this time.

That's when I noticed the fly buzzing around. At first I had thought nothing of it. It just seemed to be an annoying obstacle which I'd spray with water whenever it got too close to me. But I was wrong, The fly was actually spreading dirt around the level as I was cleaning it, I'd even been unknowingly following it around for a couple of minutes while wondering where on Earth it was all coming from.

Once I realised that embarrassing detail I managed to corner the fly into a tight spot at the edge of the map and finish up my cleaning. I found out later that you can actually kill the fly in order to stop it from spreading any more mould, but that seems a bit harsh if you ask me.

Moldwasher nails that oddly satisfying feeling you get from methodically spraying off substances from walls and floors, leaving a sparkling shine behind. It's cute, simple, and manages to help satiate my need for eradicating all the mould from my apartment.

It's also extra calming thanks to all the low-fi tracks you can uncover under the grime as you're making your way through a level. There's also stickers and trinkets to be found under all the dirt, and the money you make from each level can go to a toy machine where you can purchase more of them to decorate your base with. You even have a chance of scoring a rare rainbow plushie—although I haven't been so lucky yet, but here's hoping.

Thanks to a dysfunctional relationship with my own bones and muscles, I accepted from a very young age that I wasn't ever going to be much of a golfer. Golf games, however, I've believed myself to be pretty good at, having achieved mastery over the subtle arts of pressing A when the meters make you golf good.

That, as I learned today, was hubris. Whatever faith I had in my own simulated golf skillset has been systematically dismantled by the demo for Normal Golf Game, a deceptively golf-like torture apparatus developed by Fruit Ninja creator Luke Muscat—presumably for the purpose of inflicting widespread psychic harm.

The demo makes an immediately pleasant impression as its main menu logo becomes unfixed and starts bouncing around the screen like the canonical DVD screensaver. It maintained that charm as I started a new save, at which point I was treated to my character's pair of first-person, FMV-animated hands that shimmy with a golferly self-importance as I strutted about in search of my first tee.

The vibes quickly shifted, however, when I was abruptly accosted by text narration dispensed through a CCTV camera by Luke Muscat himself, who informed me that I am $100,000 in debt after signing a legally binding contract and must earn my way out of bankruptcy by completing golf-related feats and bounties. Which would be fine, except the golfing is a harrowing Foddy-esque trial of personal fortitude.

To golf, I press Tab, which pulls the camera back to give me a full-body, third-person view of my FMV golf-self as additional UI panels accumulate on-screen. One represents my character's body, letting me swing my club by clicking and dragging my hands, determining the swing's power and contact angle with the ball based on my speed and movement. It's imprecise, but it's manageable after some trial and error.

Simple enough, I—a fool—thought after growing comfortable enough to complete some promising swings. That arrogance was short-lived, because Muscat then introduced another UI pane, presenting a top-down view of my club through which I can control the placement and angle of the clubface.

That doesn't sound too bad in the abstract, but that's because I haven't mentioned that—thanks to my character's fleshy, organic fluidity—my club is constantly swaying. I can't simply set my ideal angle and fire away; I have to actively compensate for the club's perpetual motion with keyboard presses, all while trying to click and drag my hands with the appropriate speed and motion for a square, solid impact with the ball and not the dirt beneath it.

I did a lot of hitting the dirt beneath it.

Meanwhile, Muscat's golf demands are escalating in difficulty and absurdity. Not long after achieving rudimentary competence in completing a straightforward swing, he demanded I start executing hooks, fades, and draws—not to sink any holes in one, but to remove planks from boarded up NO PARKING signs, topple a giant bowling pin obscured by forcefields, or strike a massive gong the size of an Olympic swimming pool.

Successfully striking the massive gong took me 11 unbroken minutes of consecutive golf swings.

It's as compelling as it is maddening. Triumphing over the antagonistic control scheme has all the satisfaction of a record-setting QWOP sprint. And while it can feel brutal, it's not without some clever affordances to help you adjust—or attempt to adjust—your strategy for a tricky shot.

For example, Normal Golf Game traces the path of your golfball, as any self-respecting golf game should. Here, there's an added benefit: At any time, you can press Tab again to resume first-person view while maintaining the traced path from your last swing. Because you aren't anchored to a tee while following Muscat's golf instructions, it's a nice way to evaluate whether you're swinging from the most advantageous angle, or if you'd be better off repositioning.

While I wouldn't say I had gotten good at juggling Normal Golf Game's input demands by the end of the demo, I could feel myself getting tantalizingly better. Surely the full game can only get so hard, right?

Normal Golf Game doesn't have a launch date for its full release yet, but you can wishlist it on Steam now.

Like many others that have come before it, One Move Away derives its satisfaction from handing a bunch of stuff to players and asking them to neatly solve it. And in the same way that Unpacking uses this as a storytelling medium, One Move Away utilises each of its scenarios to tell the story of our nameless protagonist.

It all starts back in 1973, when the tutorial takes place. At that time you're just playing as a baby, who's passing the time by carefully and methodically stacking blocks and neatly sorting them into containers, you know, regular baby things.

It's here that you're taught the restrictions of the game, how precise you have to be with rotating or stacking items, and that a lot can be accomplished by a strong nudge here and there.

The rest of the game follows the protagonist through other major life movements like leaving their family and moving out of their first apartment. All of which sees you having to cram all your world possessions into small moving trailers and trucks.

There's certainly a lot of satisfaction to be had when it comes to neatly packing everything away and stepping back at the end to admire the diligent and precise work, but moving is also stressful, something that One Move Away manages to also capture.

I thought my plan for packing the moving truck was solid. I'd fetched everything down from the apartment and laid it all out on the pavement and road beforehand (there's no oncoming traffic, I checked), so I could see everything I had to work with. Then I went about stacking all the large items of furniture like the sofa, fridge, and washing machine first to get them out of the way. The only problem was that it didn't leave a lot of space for manoeuvring.

There was so much more I needed to pack away, small boxes, lamps, and other nicknacks, but there wasn't any space for me to get into the truck to place them anywhere. So what did I do? Well, what any self-respecting mover would do. I threw the boxes as far into the truck as possible and used the poke function to cram them into any space available. It ain't much but it's honest work.

Ok, so maybe things didn't go exactly as planned, and maybe I should have implemented more patience to get the full cosy experience. But I solved the problem, in my own way, and had fun doing it. Plus, I don't have to unpack any of it, so frankly the dubious nature of which everything is stacked isn't my problem—although, I'd certainly recommend a hardhat to anyone giving it a go.

It finally happened. Star Citizen has officially surpassed $1 billion in player funding. Well, I say 'finally', it actually crashed through the barrier a lot faster than I expected. I've kept a close eye on the funding tracker for Cloud Imperium Games' hugely ambitious space MMO as it approached the big one-billy milestone, and with around $10 million to go last time I checked, I anticipated it hitting the target sometime in the next few weeks.

I suppose I was technically correct. But I didn't take into account the fact that Star Citizen is playable for free until Wednesday, as part of its annual DefenseCon event where you can test out all its spaceships at zero cost. That means a lot more people will have been checking it. Some of those will undoubtedly have been seduced by all its big shiny spacecraft, which would explain the sudden spike in funding over the last few days.

This makes Star Citizen one of only two games known to have plus $1 billion budgets, the other being Monopoly Go—though most of that budget was spent on marketing. There are a few games rumoured to have +$1 billion budgets, however, like Call of Duty: Black Ops 6 and Grand Theft Auto 6. I wouldn't be surprised if Fortnite was up there too, given what it must have spent on all those brand crossovers.

If you're curious how exactly Star Citizen raised so much money, its latest spaceship helps explain the story. Just before it hit the $1 billion mark, Cloud Imperium Game started sending out invites for select players to purchase the Anvil Odin, which the developer says "closes out the final remaining stretch goals established at the very beginning of the project's journey."

What is the Anvil Odin? Well, it's a 762 metre-long Battlecruiser armed with 20 vertical launch missiles, 15 manned turrets, 8 remote turrets, 42 point-defence turrets, and one massive laser beam. It also has its own hangar for docking smaller ships, as well as a canteen, its own hospital and an in-built tram system.

All of this can be yours for the not-so-low price of $5,000. Only, it can't, because the Anvil Odin isn't in the game yet. According to the ship's description page on Star Citizens' website, the ship is "being offered for the first time as a limited vehicle concept pledge". Apparently, this means "the vehicle is in development, but is not yet ready to play in Star Citizen" arriving in a "later patch".

It's also worth stressing that you can't just lay down five thousand smackeroos and get the Anvil Odin in return. To qualify for buying the ship, prospective purchasers must first be accepted into the Odin Founders Club, which involves writing an application to explain why you should be allowed in. Anyone who is accepted and pays their pledge will receive a "loaner vehicle"—the Aegis Idris-P, until the Anvil Odin leaves the shipyard.

Paying huge sums of money on a promise does kinda encapsulate the Star Citizen story up to this point, and is a large part of why the game has repeatedly been accused of being a scam. But while it's taken a long time and used some interesting funding practices to get there, Star Citizen is very much playable these days and has been for years,

The big question, of course, is 'when will Star Citizen be finished'? Its single-player component, Squadron 42, is theoretically due to launch in 2026, though Cloud Imperium Games cast doubt on this release window late last year. Star Citizen itself has a vaguely suggested endpoint of 2028. But there's no real reason for Cloud Imperium to put a finish date on it so long as players keep throwing money at it, and even if they do settle on a 1.0 date, I expect it will become one of those forever games that just keeps getting added to.

While there's a lot of speculation about when, if ever, Star Citizen will actually be finished, Cloud Imperium Games' massively ambitious space sim has been in a steadily-growing playable alpha for a long time. And if you want to check out how far along the game is without investing hundreds of dollars in virtual spaceships, the game is free to play until Wednesday.

This is all part of Star Citizen's annual DefenseCon event, a very normal virtual military convention which allows both new and existing players to try out the biggest ships in Star Citizen's fleet. For regular Joes like myself, this means we can cut about in ships that would normally be available to only the most dedicated players, while also checking out what Star Citizen's galaxy has in store.

To play Star Citizen for free, you just need to create an account and download the launcher. The DefenseCon event is being held in-game at the Bevic Convention Center in the city Area18. New players will receive a loaner Aurora Mark 2 ship so they can fly to the event. Alternatively, you can just spawn at Area18, then take a shuttle (Star Citizen is the kind of game that has virtual public transport) to the Bevic Convention Center. Apparently there are 100 ships available to fly, with each loanable for a total of 48 hours.

The free week comes hot off the heels of a major update to Star Citizen that implemented an extensive game wipe. This was done primarily to address players abusing various exploits within Star Citizen's economy, but it also means that, if you're new to the game, you'll be rolling into a relatively fresh-feeling universe. The update also introduced a bunch of extra mission types to Star Citizen, including a new type of refuelling mission that you might be able to try, and a high-level Tactical Strike Group mission that you probably won't get access to in the time allotted.

Star Citizen is free to play from now until May 27. Chris Roberts' sci-fi magnum opus is rapidly closing in on raising $1 billion in crowdfunding. Indeed, judging by its current trajectory, it's only a matter of weeks until it crosses the threshold. While the full game is unlikely to be finished before 2028 at the earliest, its single-player component, Squadron 42, is still theoretically due to launch sometime this year.

I love a good game about skulking through the shadows, but it isn't an activity I get to do much in virtual worlds anymore. Even within the already sparse genre of stealth games, most modern sneak 'em ups are based around lines of sight rather than levels of light.

I always figured this was because such an approach is simpler for players to parse—especially given most games that feature stealth are not exclusively stealth games. But according to Clint Hocking, director of the second-best stealth game ever made—Splinter Cell: Chaos Theory—it might have something to do with the nature of virtual shadows themselves.

Speaking to FRVR, Hocking explained that the shift from baked lighting and dynamic lights with hard edges, to softer shadows and ray-tracing lighting models, may have had an impact on players' ability to assess their own stealthiness.

"I actually think one of the difficulties with modern stealth games is the sophistication in the rendering has made lighting so much more realistic," Hocking told FRVR. While this sophistication results in a more authentic-looking scene, it makes the play space for a stealth game "so much harder to read" than in the days of Chaos Theory and the Thief series.

"When you think about those old school stealth games because of their baked lighting, the lighting is very clean and readable and very understandable for the player," Hocking elaborates. "But once you get into this diffuse and ambient occlusion and all of the stuff that comes with it, it gets very hard to tell what's light, what's shadow, what's dark, what's safe, what's dangerous and all of that stuff."

I can certainly see why this added nuance would make a light-based stealth game more challenging to make. But it's also fair to say that nobody has really tried. As I mentioned, stealth generally forms part of a broader experience rather than the fundamental core of games these days, and those stealth mechanics tend to be very simple so players can shift in and out of stealth easily.

Because of this, Hocking reckons that making a fully-fledged stealth game with modern graphics techniques would involve some challenges. "I think there would be some learning if we wanted to really use these modern lighting techniques to have a really pure stealth experience," he added. "And people who go ahead and make that game, I think, need to do some really deep thinking."

While I'd certainly be interested to see a modern stealth game that went all in on shadow tech (and brought back noisy floors, while we're at it), the smattering of stealth games we've seen recently have been more interested in other forms of experimentation. Thief VR: Legacy of Shadow—the first game in the series in over a decade—sought to bring the venerable larceny simulator into true 3D with fair to middling results. And only this week saw the launch of Thick as Thieves, which has some promise as a cooperative stealth game despite launching in a stripped down package.

My first few hours in Thick as Thieves were a good time. It's a first-person stealth game with lean buttons and maps that look like they were hand-drawn by someone named "Fingers" who sold them to you from out of his overcoat. The setting mixes technology and magic, reinforced by guards with Scottish accents muttering about whether a given light is electric or fey. The map of Elway Manor's basement has a whole area that's just labeled with a question mark.

I clambered onto rooftops and through vents in the traditional style, being impressed that guards noticed when I snuffed out candles or left doors open. The first impression it gave was very much of an old school stealth game with a handful of new ideas—like ghost guards who glide through walls and into the sky on their patrol paths so you're never quite sure if you're safe. Helpfully, they still cough like living guards to let you know they're nearby.

Ignoring the friends list in your thieves den (used for starting co-op games) made Thick as Thieves almost feel like the new Thief game I wanted it to be. Hell, the electrogram you get contracts through is even set to 0451, the door code to get into Looking Glass Studios that became an easter egg in basically every immersive sim.

At first, I wasn't fussed that there are only two maps. The police station and Elway Manor are both multi-level buildings with multiple entrance points, and the second time I returned to them with new objectives I found different areas and approached problems from different angles. I upgraded to get a pickpocket fairy that can grab keys and flip switches at a distance, and an insult fairy that distracts guards. Like returning to Sapienza in Hitman, I enjoyed a growing sense of mastery over the space.

The worm in my gut turned thanks to the time limits. You've usually got 45 minutes (sometimes 30) before the magic door you need to find to escape appears, and then you've got eight minutes to get to wherever it's randomly popped up this time and get out before you fail the mission.

The intent is clear. Thick as Thieves wants to be a pacey stealth game rather than a methodical one—no manual saves here—and if I had infinite time I'd rinse these maps on my first visit and be less forgiving about the campaign just being a string of reasons to return to the same two buildings. The time limit also makes sense in co-op, where your buddy will want to know if he's got time to squeeze in one more level before putting the kids to bed.

But that eight-minute timer also begins when you complete any objective. If you've got a mission to steal three specific items in a level, the countdown begins when you pick up any of them. The first time that happened I didn't even know where the other two things I needed were, and only found one before booking it. When I returned to get the last, my objectives told me I needed to find all three again. Which I did, feeling a lot less inspired to creatively find alternate solutions this time—only to have the random magic escape door appear somewhere I couldn't reach.

I'm not sure if it was a bug or if there was an area I hadn't found behind a secret door, but that hand-drawn map I found delightfully vague at first was pointing me to an area on the far side of an exterior wall three storeys up, which I had no way of getting to. And when my time ran out, the thought of a third trip in a row back to Elway Manor really didn't appeal.

At some point in development, Thick as Thieves pivoted from being a PvPvE game to a singleplayer/co-op one, and I can only assume that change is how we ended up with an immersive sim that doesn't let you rebind keys and only has two maps. Otherside is calling it the first chapter of the game, but I wish they'd called it early access, because that's what it feels like.

On the other hand, it is only $5, and if the timer waited until you completed every step of your contract I'd probably be playing it still. At that price I might even have picked up a copy for a friend to drag them through a co-op session, though in its current state I'm not sure they'd thank me.

Cairn is a climbing game about reaching the top of a ridiculous mountain. While some routes to the apex are more obvious than others, you have a fair bit of freedom to decide how to get up there. I took the path of least resistance, but maybe you're braver, or more masochistic, and decided to take routes not even the goats would dare tread.

If the latter is you, you're probably disappointed there aren't many opportunities to brag about your achievement. Sure, you can share a screenshot of your route—the in-game map shows step-by-step your exact path through Mount Kami—but sometimes sharing your achievements with people on the internet isn't satisfying. They are, after all, people on the internet, far less human than flesh world citizens, and much more likely to randomly insult you.

That's OK though, because in collaboration with Mighty Merch, Cairn developer The Game Bakers has devised a whole new way of bragging about your journey: now you can print it on a shirt.

Like so:

If you open Cairn and go to the Extra section you'll see a new option to create a t-shirt. You'll need to have completed an ascent for this option to be available: if you think you can print a shirt bragging about how you made it halfway up Mount Kami, perhaps as a joke, then sorry.

Cairn was a big success upon release in February. I reviewed it, describing it as a "brilliant climbing adventure that siphons the rage out of navigation puzzlers like Death Stranding and Baby Steps". As of March it had sold 500,000 copies—pretty good for a niche climbing sim—and come summer it'll get its first free DLC in the form of On the Trail.

Star Citizen has a problem. No, not the fact that it's been in development for well over a decade, or that it still has no hard release date on the horizon despite raising almost $1 billion in development funds. The problem is that the markets in Cloud Imperium Games' space sim alpha are riddled with questionably obtained goods.

Unscrupulous players are using various exploits to duplicate valuable items en-masse, enabling them to make money and buy expensive ships quickly while flooding the market with duped goods. Not only is this viewed as unsportsmanlike by many players, but it's also throwing the game's economy out of whack.

The situation has been threatening to boil over for a while, but it finally came to a head in the runup to the release of Star Citizen's latest update. With the release of patch 4.8, Cloud Imperium Games had committed to a partial wipe of the servers, resetting players' bank balances, in-game resources, and vehicles purchased with in-game currency (i.e, earned by playing the game). Crucially, however, it left out ships that had been acquired through trading with Wikelo, which led to widespread complaints that players who spent money earned from duped items on Wikelo would be exempt from the wipe.

Cloud Imperium Games responded to this on Tuesday, saying that it had been "closely following the conversation surrounding 4.8's upcoming wipe." In response, the studio has now enacted a "full reset" of Star Citizen's universe, wiping everything except player blueprints and items and vehicles players have bought with real-world money.

CIG also said that the patch would include "additional safeguards aimed at reducing exploits and duplication issues", though it didn't specify what those safeguards are, and the patch notes don't seem to mention any features specifically targeting exploits either. Players, meanwhile, are still reporting that duping is occurring, though CIG didn't say the patch would stop the exploits entirely, stating that there are "more improvements to come."

As for what else Alpha 4.8 brings. It chiefly introduces a new, endgame "Tactical Strike Group" mission designed for "large, organised player squads", which involves assaulting a fortified asteroid both from space and on foot. It also introduces flight suits that have an effect on your tolerance for G-Forces, improves the game's refuelling missions, adds a couple of new infantry weapons, and much more.

It's a substantial update, though the game's 1.0 still seems a long way off completion, potentially as far off as 2028. Its single-player component, Squadron 42, is still scheduled to launch this year, though CIG also cast doubt on this prospect in September last year.

When I first walked into the mime's house in Rhell: Warped Worlds & Troubled Souls, I hadn't intended to destroy it. In fact, the prospect of encountering a mime in a house hadn't factored into my thoughts at all.

I don't generally go around expecting to find mimes in places, and I've never once entertained the concept of mimes being on the property ladder. I'd always assumed they lived in those invisible boxes they never seem to be able to escape.

Nonetheless, walk into the mime's house I did, and almost immediately picked up a spell for magnetism that was just lying around.

I suppose mimes don't have much use for magnetism, given they are inherently repulsive. But it does beg the question why this silent entertainer had an elaborate magnet-themed puzzle set up in his abode.

Anyway, I solved the puzzle and was about to leave, as I feel similarly about being close to mimes as I do electric fences or saltwater crocodiles. But then I spied a barrel lodged in a gap in a wall, which seemed to have open space behind it. Naturally, I suspected a secret, and assumed some cunning deployment of magnets would yank the barrel from the aperture.

Unfortunately, through some fumble of my spellbook that I still don't fully understand, I ended up casting magnetism on myself. At which point, half of the items in the mime's house were all dragged out of place and began clattering toward me.

Books, cushions, sideboards, all were trapped in a swirling vortex around me.

As my borked spell proceeded to wreck the joint, I did briefly ponder why this surprise magnetic field affected so much more than metal. But I didn't have long to consider the notion, because the mime was being dragged towards me by the laws of attraction—at which point I panicked and ran out of the house.

This is just one of around a dozen anecdotes I could summon to explain the brilliance of Rhell. In fact, this hybrid of Zelda-ish RPG and immersive sim might just be the best game about being a mage I've ever played. Not only because of the astoundingly reactive toolset it provides, but also because of how often your dabbling in the occult comes back to bite you on the arse.

Rhell kicks off with a simple, intriguing premise: everybody in the fantasy kingdom you reside in is disappearing, and you've decided to figure out why.

You are Rhell, by the way, a curmudgeonly apprentice mage who abandoned their studies eight years prior, instead pursuing an illustrious career of getting locked up in a castle dungeon for some reason. But a spark of fortune enables you to escape, and you resolve to return to your wizardly ways and solve the mystery of the missing citizenry.

Structurally, Rhell is similar to the Zelda games of yore, with you exploring colourful fairytale landscapes from a top-down perspective. The world is basically a gigantic puzzle box that you need to solve, scattered with eccentric characters who will help you along your way.

In place of Zelda's key items, however, Rhell furnishes you with a far more elaborate toolset.

The game features 40 spells (known-in game as runes) you can paste into your personalised grimoire, ranging from simple push runes to pyromancy and turning things into slime. What's more, you can combine up to five spells at any one time to enhance their existing effects or create completely new incantations.

For example, you could combine a push spell (which shoves objects forward horizontally) with a lift spell (which raises it in the air vertically) to make the object essentially jump in a forward direction. Adding more push spells will increase the horizontal force of the spell, while adding more lift will increase the height.

Rhell couples this system with a highly systemic world that follows rules that are logical and intuitive. Fire burns wood. Ice freezes water. Combining fire with ice creates water. If you apply slime to an object, it will become bouncy. If you apply ice to slime, it will become hard and heavy.

This toolset affords a truly dizzying array of ways to solve puzzles.

Say you want to jump from one platform to a higher platform. You could push together stacks of books or boxes to create a makeshift staircase. You could apply slime to an object and bounce up to the higher ledge. But you could also conjure a scarecrow-like dummy—which will fire any spell you create alongside it at regular intervals—and program it to fire a push/lift spell which you can then stand in front of.

It's a properly galaxy-brained bit of a design, and you can tell that it's brilliant because of how much fun it is when things go wrong.

In one early puzzle, I had to hold down two buttons that were positioned directly opposite each other on the floor and ceiling. "No problem!" I thought. "I'll just cover this box in slime and then use a lift spell to make it bounce between the two buttons."

But I had to push the box into place before I could lift it, and stupidly, I covered the box in slime before I did this. So when I pushed the box, it immediately rebounded off the opposite wall and hit me square in the face.

It helps that Rhell leans into such mistakes.

There are lots of slapstick-enhancing animations if Rhell getting dazed or squashed or burned or frozen when struck with her own spells, as if Wile-E-Coyote stopped ordering stuff from ACME and took up sorcery. But the actual cost of failure is relatively low. Falling to your death simply causes you to respawn at a nearby point, while any puzzle-room you cock up can be instantly reset in the menu.

As such, when you succeed in a puzzle, you get rewarded. When you fail, you get a punchline. Rhell also effectively communicates what it would feel like to wield powers that no person should probably wield. Simple mistakes can lead to colossal screw-ups, as my hostile rearrangement of the mime's house demonstrates.

There are a couple of nits I could pick at with Rhell. The writing's a little rough around the edges, and I think would benefit from dialling down Rhell's world-weariness ever-so-slightly. Also, constantly reprogramming spells is a little fiddly, though Rhell does its best to help you with this through gems that you can find specific spell combinations to. I also don't begrudge that finickiness too much, as it led to so many of the stupid mistakes that had me howling with laughter.

While it looks nothing like Deus Ex or Dishonored, Rhell absolutely embodies the spirit of those games. In fact, it's arguably a truer example of "Zelda, but an immersive sim" than the likes of Breath of the Wild or Tears of the Kingdom. If you’re a fan of either strand of its inspirations, you owe it to yourself to give it a try.

Outbound makes it obvious from the beginning that signal towers are your main resource for unlocking additional recipes and blueprints, but what's not clear is how the game decides which set of new craftables to put in front of you. Sometimes it seems like it's all left up to RNG, while other encounters may lead you to believe they're all ordained by specific triggers.

It gets especially frustrating when you're worried about how to unlock new tools in Outbound, since those items are often what stands between you and the next biome or new resource. After a bit of testing, I'm here to say there's not a nice and tidy answer to the mystery, either. Some signal tower downloads are locked behind RNG, while others seem to rely on specific triggers, but I've got a few tips for helping you collect more.

How to unlock new tools and recipes in Outbound

Just like Outbound teaches you from the beginning, a vast majority of new tools and other downloadable blueprints will come from signal towers. The map you start in will always open with the same few tower downloads, but as you explore more, you'll be asked to choose one recipe from two or three options, and that's where the indecision anxiety creeps in.

So let's start with this first tip: If you're worried about permanently sacrificing those cute new shelves in favor of a much-needed axe upgrade, don't be. Outbound eventually cycles all of the downloads you forgo the first time back into another pool of offerings, though it's true you have some sway on when or what new crafting recipe is offered next.

Tips for downloading new recipes at Outbound's signal towers

• I recommend prioritizing new tool downloads and upgrades when they're available, with the Axe and Pickaxe taking priority over the Sickle.
• Many of your recipes will come from reactivating signal towers you've already visited.
• Skipped recipes eventually cycle back into available downloads at other towers (or the same tower after it's reactivated).
• You can track what tools and other blueprints you've unlocked by opening your journal and tabbing through the various collection categories.
• The biggest determining factor for what recipes the next signal tower offers seems to be the map, and your journal will highlight what biome you've discovered new downloads in (or where to search for missing entries).
• Bringing a friend along for some Outbound co-op doesn't hurt your chance at new recipes, either. It doesn't matter who interacts with the signal tower; the new recipe unlocks for anyone playing on that save file.
• Reaching new milestones can trigger new downloads to become available at signal towers. I noticed things like lighting several campfires or visiting a new point of interest would make a tower elsewhere ping with new offerings.
• Recipe downloads are not always tied to specific tower locations, either. For instance, I was always offered the same three tool downloads (Axe I, Pickaxe I, and Scythe I) at the second signal tower I interacted with, even when I started a new game and visited a different tower.
• Some signal towers also seem to reactivate simply by 'playing' the game, even if that means just leaving it running. I left Outbound open in the background while I was busy with another window, and noticed a tower reactivate while my character stood still.
• And while most new recipes will come from signal towers, keep in mind there are a handful of collectible blueprints you'll find inside points of interest, or by spending your bottle caps at vending machines.

I don't fault you for wanting to science out how to unlock new tools and other craftables in Outbound, but even after doing all of that testing, I still think you're better off ignoring too many 'rules' and just playing. It's irritating advice when you want a straight answer, I get it, but I promise the downloads will keep funneling in as you drive.

Have you also spent far too many hours daydreaming about leaving everything behind, buying a camper, and driving through the country to get away from it all? Lord knows I have, and something tells me I'm not the only one. With the release of Outbound—a laid-back, crafting exploration sandbox—all you listless adventurers can too.

I've been eyeing a handful of exploration and mobile base building games that capture that sort of same spirit, like Solarpunk and Sand, but Outbound was the only one on my list that's not caught up in the fantasy element of it all. It's a down-to-earth experience just about you, your van, and maybe a dog, in a long-distance drive focused on sightseeing and building.

Outbound features

What kind of crafting game is Outbound?

Outbound is an exploration sandbox with some light crafting elements where base building is the main draw. You'll forage for materials out in the wild through traditional avenues like mining ore and chopping wood, but those mechanics are pretty simple and don't require you to take multiple swings. It's all one button.

Signal towers for unlocking new crafting recipes are scattered throughout the world along with other points of interest. If you want the next cute shelving upgrade or crafting stations to process new materials, you'll have to hop in your van and keep driving. It's a fairly relaxed loop, and while there are hunger and health stats, I never felt pressure from maintaining them.

I played Outbound for 15+ hours, and here's what stood out…

My favorite feature in Outbound is the building system, coupled with finding the perfect spot to camp out for the night with my cozy setup. I didn't always land in the most picture-perfect area thanks to a lack of fuel and van upgrades, but when I did, I took a little more joy in decorating my space. Doing the best I can with a mobile base and trying to find the balance between form and function was a fun juggling act, even if I was mostly disappointed with the crafting.

Outbound lacks a crafting system with real depth, and my disinterest was a malaise that slowly spread to the rest of the game. Most items don't even require you to interact with the workbench, and you'll just place a new station directly from the build menu. There's also a crafting minigame you've seen a dozen times before—time a button press correctly a certain number of times—and there's no real incentive to try your best at it since Outbound doesn't have any quality modifiers or chance of breaking a craft. I just spammed left click until it worked out.

Is Outbound worth it?

Will you like Outbound?

🛠️ If you like other crafting games: I've played a ton of crafting games, and Outbound just isn't worth it if you love grinding for materials and exploring to find them. Your slow movement speed and stamina makes hunting for resources a sluggish chore, and the crafting minigame is bare bones. The system feels like it's there to begrudgingly drive exploration, not complement it. Outbound tightly controls your pace with blueprint unlocks and objectives so it never felt like I could explore freely the way I would in other crafting games.

🏚️ If you're in it for the base building: The mobile base building is where all of the fun is at, but keep in mind it'll take you a while to collect the blueprints and materials to build much. I was close to the 10-hour mark before I really felt like it clicked, though I did enjoy decking my van out with cute plants, new structures, and Outbound's assortment of crafting stations. It's still a fun mix of managing function and form, it just takes a while for you to get there, and I'm not sure there's enough depth in base building to keep me playing much longer.

👥 If you're in it for the multiplayer: In my experience, there just wasn't enough to do for two people in Outbound, let alone four. Your friends won't get their own van, and progress isn't character-specific like it is in Valheim. Anyone who isn't driving will be doing a lot of sitting, maybe looking at the map sometimes and making a suggestion, but that's about it.

Your Outbound van starts out slow and cramped, but you can make some serious improvements to your ride with upgrades. You probably have most of the necessary resources stashed in your van's storage already, too.

These upgrades aren't just about horsepower, either. You'll be able to keep your van on the road longer with a souped up battery, and you can also maximize your coziness with new decorations and an expanded building area. You just need to find one little terminal before you can get started.

How to unlock the Vehicle Research Station

Before you can upgrade your camper van, you need to build a Vehicle Research Station. It's a small little device that you can place in your van to unlock new recipes for the workbench in your trunk.

You can get the Vehicle Research Station blueprint at a terminal attached to a Signal Tower. For my playthrough, it was at the locked terminal in The Community Tree POI in the northwestern part of the starting region—just across the broken bridge north of the Fire Lookout.

Outbound dishes out blueprints randomly, though, and things can change depending on the order of blueprints you've chosen so far. You may end up finding the Vehicle Research Station in a completely different part of the map. Still, it's a good idea to check out the POIs marked with a question mark on your map since they tend to have the biggest upgrades.

Once you've unlocked the blueprint, plop the Vehicle Research Station down on an empty countertop in your van. You can then start upgrading your ride as long as you've got enough materials. The game will pull resources from your van's storage as well, so there's no need to keep all that junk in your inventory.

All Outbound van upgrades

These upgrades are meant to last an entire playthrough, so don't freak out if you can't find all the necessary materials in the first region or two. The first map only has the materials to unlock the first van upgrades, for example, and you won't be able to make your ride any faster or unlock extra furniture recipes until you continue your road trip.

These are all the van upgrades you can unlock in Outbound.

Your cozy camper road trip in Outbound is quickly interrupted by a raised drawbridge, and the other bridges crossing the river are also destroyed. If you want to keep this show on the road, you'll need to figure out a way to fix the broken bridges so you can lower that drawbridge.

While you can't just swim over to the other side of the river to lower the bridge, the solution is still really simple. It'll just take a few minutes of exploring to gather the necessary materials, then you can hit the road. Here's how to fix the bridges in Outbound.

How to repair the broken bridges

1. Find one of the broken bridges along the river
2. Collect 20 Everwood from the surrounding area
3. Unlock the Sawmill blueprint and build one in your van
4. Turn 20 Everwood logs into 10 Everwood Planks
5. Take your planks and turn them in at the broken bridge

There are broken bridges on each side of the drawbridge—just drive up the road north or south to find them—and those will get you and your van across the river. They need to be repaired before you can cross, and each bridge requires 10 Everwood Planks to fix.

Everwood Planks are crafted at a Sawmill, another little crafting station for your van. Other bridges in the area will require even more wood, so keeping your Sawmill stockpiled with Everwood is a good idea in the early hours of the game.

If you don't already have the Sawmill blueprint unlocked, check the nearby paths for Signal Towers with new recipes to download. Stop at each campsite along the road to clean up Litter in exchange for Download Coupons, too.

Use your new Sawmill to turn 20 Everwood into 10 Everwood Planks (and ignore how that conversation ratio doesn't make sense). If you need logs, you can pick up a bunch in the wooded areas by the river. If you have the Axe unlocked, there are also dead Everwood trees on the ground that you can chop for five Everwood logs each.

Once you have enough Everwood Planks, take them to either bridge and fix it up. The prompt to repair the bridge will appear once you get close enough to it. Make sure the wood is in your inventory as well; they won't count if they're in your van's storage.

How to lower the drawbridge in Outbound

Once you've repaired at least one of the bridges, you can cross the river and start looking for a way to activate the drawbridge. It doesn't matter which bridge you choose; either one will put you on the path to the bridge controls.

After driving to the other side of the river, make a sharp turn and start driving toward the drawbridge. Once you arrive, you'll see a small control center to the right of the bridge.

Head inside and flip the switch to lower the drawbridge. There's also a Bottle Cap on the counter inside. Pocket it for now and test your luck at a Cap 'n Snap machine later.

The bridge will remain lowered after you flip the switch, so you only have to worry about this once. Don't forget to go back and fix the other bridge once you have enough wood too. Having multiple paths across the river will make navigating the first map a lot easier.

The other side of the river has several new resources to discover, including a new type of wood and a tough ore that blocks the tunnel to the next map. You'll need to craft better tools and upgrade your van before you can harvest any of the cool stuff, so keep an eye out for Signal Towers and other prominent POIs with new blueprints to unlock.

I can't imagine driving a camper van alone through the woods by myself, so fortunately I don't have to in Outbound. The mobile base building adventure has enough room in the car for up to four players, but co-op in Outbound isn't available quite from the moment you start the game.

You'll have to complete the tutorial, sort lobby codes, and start the journey with the right expectations since progression isn't locked to your character. I've been camping out under the stars for a while now and I've got a breakdown on how co-op works in Outbound ready to map the way forward for you and your crew.

How to unlock co-op in Outbound

You'll need to complete the tutorial to unlock co-op in Outbound, but it only takes a few minutes so you don't need to spend an hour prepping to play with friends. Multiplayer is available as soon as you open the gate to leave the first camping spot, so here's what that looks like in a few easy steps:

1. Drive along the path until you reach the camping area
2. Pull over and open the back of your van to set up camp
3. Loot the supplies from the nearby chest and light the campfire
4. Use the terminal nearby to download blueprints for Basic Tools
5. Pick up the scrap metal nearby and access your van's workbench
6. Craft Wrench I, then use it to open the barrier blocking your way

With the gate open, Outbound should give you a small pop-up announcing that it's time to invite a friend. From there, you can access your multiplayer code from the in-game menu and give it to a friend.

How to invite friends to co-op

Whichever player would like to host the co-op session can invite friends to Outbound by:

1. Hit the Tab key, then select the multiplayer icon on the far right
2. Copy and share your multiplayer code with up to three friends
3. Your friends will use that code from the Join Friend option in the main menu

How co-op progression works

If you're familiar with the sandboxy, multiplayer crafting games, then you know shared progression can work a lot of different ways. Outbound attaches progress to a save file, not to your character like in Valheim, for instance. So, here are a few things to keep in mind about how co-op progression works in the camping adventure:

• You create a new character when joining a friend's save game
• Any downloads, upgrades, etc. you unlock while someone else is hosting are tied to that save and won't carry over to your other characters or vans
• The host owns the save, so you won't be able to play from the same progression point if they aren't online
• Tool and recipe unlocks are shared within the save, so if one person unlocks a new tool or decorative pack, everyone can craft those items

I've never been much of an artist, but when I first saw Drawquarium I thought to myself 'how hard can drawing a fish really be?' I now know that answer to that question and, as it turns out, it's pretty darn difficult.

Drawquarium is simple: you draw different fish and plants to fill your aquarium with in order to make it as attractive as possible to potential customers. The demo, which is currently available, only has a handful of base designs for both fish and plants, but that's not a massive issue for someone as creative as I am.

You see, you can design each fish however you see fit. I started off populating my aquarium Any Fin Goes (I'm quite proud of that by the way), by spending way too much time trying to create a pretty ombre design. Bear in mind I don't have a drawing tablet so this was all done with a mouse and keyboard. Despite putting a considerable amount of time and effort into it, the final product looked like something your toddler would ask you to pin on the fridge, but I was still proud of my simple creation.

I had a better time designing my plants—of which there were many—and my shark turned out alright, although its eyes ended up looking a bit wonky. I'll also admit that the effort levels for each fish design dwindled with each new creation. But once there are loads of fish all swimming around together their designs look a little better, especially if you look at them from a distance and squint.

After creating the fish for your aquarium you then need to look after them. This is a pretty simple task, you just need to make a nice tank and feed them when they're hungry. The more you look after your fish the better they'll look, as they slowly develop a holographic shine and can even turn gold in the right circumstances (not that any of mine have become this beautiful).

Drawquarium will have more than just a demo soon, even if there's no release date announced yet. Once this is live you'll be able to do even more with your aquariums with more decor, themes, and custom backgrounds. And as I've already established, while creativity certainly helps in this sandbox, it's certainly not necessary to have a peaceful and mindful break.

PVKK, or Planetenverteidigungskanonenkommandant if you're particular, is a game we've been eagerly awaiting: It was named one of our most anticipated games during last year's PC Gaming Show: Most Wanted rundown, largely by virtue of how badly we want to fiddle with the many deliciously tactile switches, levers, knobs, cranks, and buttons it offers for the operation of its titular planetary defense cannon.

Unfortunately, we've now got a longer wait before we can play the Papers Please-like supercannoneer sim for ourselves. In a Steam news post, game director René Habermann announced that PVKK has been delayed until 2027 "to make sure PVKK is in the best shape possible at launch."

"I know this sucks and I understand your disappointment. As we've been working behind the scenes, it's become clear that we can push things way further than we originally thought, and with a bit more time, make something really special," Habermann said. "For every problem we've encountered and solved (and there have been many!), we've had 10 new ideas for ways to improve things for our commanders. We're super happy with the planned content in the game now, and are working hard to bring everything to life."

Executing on all those ideas, it seems, has meant bringing on a few additional hands. According to Habermann, Bippinbits—the studio behind PVKK—has expanded alongside the game's scope. In 2025, its staff more than doubled in size from four full-time developers to 11.

"As it stands, releasing on our original timeline would mean compromising on making PVKK the best game it can be, and that is not something we want," Habermann said. "This means that PVKK will now be launching in 2027."

In a 2024 interview with PC Gamer, Habermann said PVKK is more than just listening to the satisfying clunks and clicks of the apocalyptic artillery's control surfaces. It'll also give players plenty of time between executing the firing orders they receive from their superiors to sip their daily tea rations, peruse teleradio propaganda, and consider more generally the ethical implications of shooting a giant cannon for what its store listing openly calls "an autocratic regime."

"What I do enjoy a lot is to put the player in certain situations, and let them have their own thoughts with it," Habermann said. "That's something funny that also happened already with Dome Keeper: Some people picked up that you land on this planet, you shoot all the native creatures, you exploit the planet, and then you then you go away again. Yeah, like, 'Am I the bad guy?' … That's something I really enjoy."

While a delay isn't the kind of news we hope for, perhaps the extra pondering time isn't a bad thing. After all, we wouldn't want to rush to any conclusions about a moral dilemma as complex as "is it bad to shoot a big gun for bad people." Best to approach these sorts of ethical quandaries with a level head.

While we won't see it this year, you can still wishlist PVKK now on Steam.

Subnautica 2 will launch into early access on May 14, a new trailer confirms. If you're surprised I don't blame you: the sequel has been subject to endless controversy, with studio Unknown Worlds and publisher Krafton at loggerheads about when and how it should be released.

It's a long story at this stage, but the short of it: Subnautica 2 was initially meant to release in the second half of 2025. But in July Krafton gutted Unknown Worlds' leadership, including CEO Ted Gill, and then delayed the early access release into 2026 amid many and varied public accusations.

The most relevant of those accusations, to us at least, is that Krafton didn't think the game was ready for early access; it wanted more content. The publisher also claimed that had Subnautica 2 released in 2025 as planned, it would have caused "irreversible harm to the entire franchise". That claim was later mysteriously dropped.

Those are the key points—it's a tangled 'n' murky affair—but Gill was eventually reinstated as CEO in March at the command of a court, and a May release was set. But even that theoretically positive development was fraught with tension: Unknown Worlds wasn't happy with the Krafton-made release date announcement.

None of which instills much confidence in the early access aquatic survival sim that'll hit Steam on May 14. It'll be interesting to see whether Krafton was on to something when it hoped to delay the launch. Or perhaps Unknown Worlds will be vindicated? We'll find out in a matter of weeks.

There's a lot resting on it: Subnautica 2 is currently the most wishlisted game on Steam.