While there's never any shortage of games releasing on Steam any given day, the release calendar for big-budget game productions has felt somewhat thin this year. The repeat delay announcements from games trying to escape the blast radius of GTA 6's gigaton sales detonation seemed to indicate that the back half of the year could continue to feel a little light.

Until this week.

Thanks to the showcase reveals in the last few days, I've gone from wondering if I'll have meaty releases to occupy my time this fall to worrying that it won't be physically feasible for me to hit everything on my wishlist. In its efforts to avoid the GTA 6 gravity well, the games industry has managed to cram all its competing releases into one eight-week window instead.

Here's just a selection of the back-to-back launches we'll be facing from the end of August onwards:

• August 27: Star Wars Zero Company
• September 3: The Blood of Dawnwalker
• September 17: Warhammer 40,000: Dawn of War 4
• September 24: Control Resonant
• September 24: Silent Hill: Townfall
• September 24: Valor Mortis
• September 25: Onimusha: Way of the Sword
• September 30: Dynasty Warriors 3 Remastered
• October 1: Ace Combat 8: Wings of Theve
• October 6: Star Wars: Galactic Racer
• October 13: Planet Zoo 2
• October 15: Castlevania: Belmont's Curse

Again: That's just a selection. And if we widen that scope just a little bit, we pick up yet more launches like August 4's Beast of Reincarnation and October 28's Phantom Blade Zero. I'm glad to have plenty of options—but I'm just one man with one attention span. I can't possibly juggle the prosecution of an interstellar total war, three kinds of supernaturally-empowered action combat, two forms of impossibly dangerous vehicle operation, and zoo management at the same time.

I am, of course, going to try nonetheless. I'm just not sure how we're going to settle on 2026's Game of the Year before June 2027.

If you want to stay abreast of the increasingly-stuffed release calendar, make sure to check in with our very own list of upcoming 2026 games. I suspect you're going to need the help.

It didn't take long, but it happened to me. Less than a week after PC Gamer's Andy Chalk wrote about how these gaming trailer livestreams would start to have their hype trains robbed and wrecked by AI disclosures, I saw it. Crazy Taxi: World Tour, a game I was reasonably excited for, was made with help from generative AI.

"At Sega Corporation, we utilize generative AI as a support tool for developers, aiming to provide better content to our users and enable developers to focus more on creative tasks," the game's Steam page reads. "No AI was used in reference to the performers in the game."

I assume that last bit is referring specifically to voice work. Game Informer's Brian Shea got an expanded statement from Sega which he posted on Bluesky. It includes the extra line, "Assets generated were still subject to review by the development team." It's still a bit vague, but suggests that it was used to create art and not only as a coding assistant.

Fans on social media are not happy. "Using AI slop to make shit for you, more like Lazy Taxi," wrote mat-draws on Bluesky. It's quickly becoming the thing to say. "Lazy Taxi," concurred Bluesky user tehsnakerer. "Lazy Taxi," mused mluckas, also on Bluesky. On Reddit, user RORSCHACH_INC_ commented, "Know what... think I'll just walk home."

It's perhaps especially galling given the faux-counterculture aesthetics Crazy Taxi has always wrapped itself in, blaring pop punk as you try not to crash into the nearest KFC. The AI use, combined with the fact that this is apparently an open world campaign-driven game that takes you across five different cities, suggests that a Crazy Taxi game in 2027 is a very different prospect to the 1999 arcade classic.

The PC Gaming Show 2026 has wrapped up, and it was a corker. Over 60 games, more than 20 world premieres, and some fantastic interviews and behind the scenes sneak peeks. What was your favourite moment? I can't answer that because it would be like picking a favourite child, but you can let us know down in the comments.

If you couldn't keep up with the slew of games or you just want a handy recap of everything we saw in one place, then this is the article for you. Read on to see every single thing in the show in the order it appeared. You can also see every game on our Steam page.

Wielders of the Essence

Wielders of the Essence kicked off the Pre-Show. It's a roguelite with survivors-like gameplay and base-building. You play as frogs, which is pretty cool, not enough games let you do that. It's launching November 5, but there's a demo available to play right now, you can grab it on Steam.

Warhammer 40,000: Darktide - Skitarii Class

The Skitarii skitter into Warhammer 40,000: Darktide June 23. You'll be fighting for the glory of the Machine God Omnissiah in this gory co-op FPS. Remember, the flesh is weak, but the metal is strong. You can wishlist the DLC now on Steam.

Spellsided

Out: deck-builders. In: dice-builders. That's right, in Spellsided, you play as a magical die. Gosh, I love videogames. Customise each one of your six faces so that they each cast a different spell and roll your way through this RPG. There's a demo out now on Steam.

Star Trek: Outposts Unknown

Hack '95

Company of Heroes: Definitive Edition

Red Kiss

Arcane Eats

Next was Arcane Eats, a magical deck-builder where you combine ingredients to sate the hunger of your mythical guests. Featuring celebrity chefs such as Guy Fairy and Gorgon Ramsay, can you get the coveted three Mythril Stars? Download the demo on Steam now to find out.

Serious Sam: Shatterverse

Serious Sam is back, and he's brought a whole lot of himself in Serious Sam: Shatterverse. Play as a variety of Sams from over the years in this co-op shooter, and you can sign up for the playtest on Steam if you want to get in on the action early.

Control Resonant

We went to Finland to bring you a deep dive into Control Resonant. This time, you're out of the Oldest House and in Manhattan. It's been warped by mystical paranatural energy, and it's up to Dylan to figure out what's going on. It's out September 24, and you can pre-order it now on Steam.

Sated

Gone Feral

Abiotic Factor - Entropic Break DLC

There Are No Ghosts at the Grand

Yes there are, that name is a bald-faced lie. Meet police officer Alex Watson in this new musical trailer for There Are No Ghosts at the Grand. Too bad he's going to die in 30 days. There are mysteries to uncover and a town to decorate in this genre-blending adventure. You can play the demo and wishlist it on Steam now.

Starseeker: Astroneer Expeditions

Time for some co-op planetary exploration in Starseeker: Astroneer Expeditions. Hang out in an upgradeable space station and then undertake missions planet-side with your friends. Fight aliens, look for loot, and deform the landscapes around you when the game launches into early access June 11. You can wishlist it on Steam now.

Virtue and a Sledgehammer

Go back to your hometown and bash in the heads of your now-android neighbours. There's both introspection and destruction on offer in this stylish action game. Download the demo on Steam.

Happy Bastards

Happy Bastards is a tactical RPG about, well, a bunch of happy folks. They just love getting into scraps. Build up a band of mercenaries and seek fame and fortune as you take advantage of terrain and kill a load of monsters. There's a combat demo for you to try out right now, download it on Steam.

Another Door

AfterQuest

Next we had a retro pixel RPG, AfterQuest. Make a party of three and venture out into the wilderness to slay foes. It's a roguelite, so defeat only makes you stronger. As you progress you get to choose which loot to take to power up each of your characters' classes. You can wishlist it on Steam now.

SlashZero

Contrary to what the name SlashZero suggests, you actually slash quite a lot. You'll also be shooting and using elemental powers in this timeline hopping action roguelite. Step into the shoes of a Timehacker and try to save the world from nefarious forces. You can wishlist the game and sign up for the playtest on Steam .

Cassette Beasts 2002

Void/Breaker

What's the opposite of turn-based combat? Well that would be Void/Breaker, an FPS where you run on walls, grind on rails, and blast walls to pieces with deadly weaponry. There's a major new update for the early access game that adds new mods, weapons, levels, and enemies, available now on Steam.

2 Fights 2 Tight Spaces

Stronghold 4

Wind Runners

I'm not allowed to be a pilot in real life on account of my colour blindness, but Wind Runners is vibrant enough that even I can get in the cockpit. It's a gorgeous, anime-infused bullet hell where you dart around colossal mechanised war machines. Play the demo on Steam now.

Wardens of Avalon

Planet Zoo 2

Planet Zoo 2 was next up, and the addition of aquariums and aviaries in the management sim absolutely delighted me. Not only do you get to build enclosures for animals, but you can release them into nature preserves. You can pre-order the game on Steam.

Empulse

We never got a Titanfall 3, but we are getting Empulse, a wall running, mech piloting, frenetic shooter that'll delight fans of Titanfall 2. The kinetic movement and high-speed combat harken back to shooters of old, and you don't have to wait long to play it. It's launching in early access June 24, but you can dive into it during Steam Next Fest, June 15. Wishlist it on Steam now.

Arkheron

We flew all the way to the West Coast to get a behind-the-scenes look at Arkheron, an isometric Diablo-like battle royale where you ascend a tower. Proper teamwork is going to be essential if you want to be the last ones standing and make it to the top. You can sign up for the playtest on the game's website.

ReVamp

Rule as Dracula himself and create the most confounding castle layout possible to deter all those who would try to put a stake through your heart. You can sign up for the playtest for this castle-defense roguelite on Discord or by scanning the QR code in the trailer. And you can wishlist it on Steam.

Wardogs

Wardogs is a shooter that blends a persistent economy with 100-player strong firefights. Duke it out with guns and vehicles and earn in-game cash as you play. You can spend it when you die or in a future game, and we're interested to see how it shapes up. You can wishlist it on Steam and sign up for the playtests by scanning the QR code in the trailer.

Shroom and Gloom

We're just over halfway through the announcements here, is that why you're so gloomy? Sorry, couldn't resist. Shroom and Gloom is a deck-building roguelite with not one, but two decks: one is for exploration and the other is for combat. It's got a new demo out now, so you can see how it all works.

Maximum Thunderness

Rivage

We first revealed this game during the 2025 Most Wanted show, and it's back with a new gameplay trailer and a demo you can try out. It's an atmospheric sci-fi puzzle game set on board a space station stuck in a timeloop. Or, in other words, exactly the kind of game I love.

Time Strike

Signet City

Mr Magpie’s Harmless Card Game

Another deckbuilder, Mr. Magpie's Harmless Card Game really isn't all that harmless. You're trapped in an elevator and have to flip over cards that help you and avoid the ones that hinder you. If you don't, a puppet will shoot you. Wild. Wishlist the game on Steam if you ever hope to escape that dastardly lift.

Ascenders: Beyond the Peak

Ascenders: Beyond the Peak is a tactical single-player roguelite in which you have to guide a team of three up deadly mountains. Everyone is tied together by a single rope, limiting movement options, and as you ascend, Lovecraftian horrors await you. Check out its demo on Steam.

Outward 2

Outward 2 combines survival mechanics like hunger, thirst, and crafting, with an open world and action RPG combat. Do you reckon you can survive in its harsh wilderness? Well, prove you can by playing the beta, available now. Right now.

Thief: The Dark Project Remastered

Exo Rally Championship

You know what I thought to myself when I played Exo One? "Man, I wish I could race on these planets." Well, now I can, and you can too. Exo Rally Championship shadowdropped during the show, so head on over to Steam to play "the galaxy’s most dangerous off-road racing event."

Duskers 2.0

El Paso, Elsewhere 2

Beast of Reincarnation

Game Freak continues its themes of nature and decay in this action RPG. We sent a crew to Japan to get some answers about what's in store for us when the game launches August 3. Pre-order it on Steam now.

Terrinoth: Heroes of Descent

Terrinoth: Heroes of Descent marks the first time the board game has made its way over to PC. Battle through dungeons with your friends in a co-op campaign or go solo as you try to aid a world facing relentless darkness. Best of all, this was another shadow drop, so you can go and play it right now.

To Kill a God

To Kill a God turns your map into your skill tree, making the trek into part of your progression. It's an action RPG with a survivors-like aesthetic, and you can try the demo out for yourself.

Pipes.exe

Sunset Summit

Clowntown

Armatus

Paris is burning in this roguelite shooter and only an ancient knight plucked out of his time can save it from the demons running rampant. It's launching this winter, so wishlist it now to remind yourself to get it as a stocking filler.

Dave the Diver In the Jungle DLC

To shake things up, we had a live-action trailer in the show too. This one adds some hilairous context to Dave the Diver's upcoming In the Jungle DLC, which adds a whole new body of water to explore, a new restaurant, and a drum minigame that I'm sure I'll be terrible at. You can wishlist it on Steam.

Carcass Clad

Total War: Warhammer 40,000

Warhammer 40,000 finally gets the Total War treatment in this grand strategy game. It looks like it truly captures the scales of the hostile 40K universe, and will let you play as four iconic factions. Keep an eye on the Creative Assembly and Sega social channels for upcoming beta opportunities. You can also wishlist the game on Steam.

About Fishing

Y'know, a lot of the games in this showcase are telling fibs in their titles. About Fishing is a mystery game set in a small, eerie town, and while you do do some impressive physics-based fishing, there's a lot more going on, too. Download the demo on Steam if you want to cast your line and try it out.

Vampire the Masquerade: Eternal Whispers

Valheim 1.0

Valheim is finally leaving early access and launching its 1.0 version September 9, 2026. It'll also be releasing its Deep North update which adds a frozen biome and new enemies to fight and lands to explore. You can grab the game on Steam now if you don't already have it.

P.O.N

P.O.N is a crime simulator like no other. Rather than going up against cops, guards, or even other criminals, you're in a world full of superheroes. This co-op first-person horror experience isn't one for the faint of heart. Wishlist it on Steam if you reckon you can beat a superhero.

Locator: The Search for Abigail Lidari

Put a narrative into Geoguessr and set it on an alien world and you've got yourself Locator: The Search for Abigail Lidari, a puzzle game that'll put your sleuthing skills to the test. You can wishlist it on Steam now.

Exodus

We aired a highlight reel of all the coolest moments from the Exodus Future Games Show Summer Showcase extended gameplay reveal. Catch a glimpse of the combat, exploration, companions, and effects of time dilation. Since you can't time travel, wishlist Exodus on Steam and wait until it launches.

Remothered: Red Nun's Legacy

This was the penultimate game, so please don't run away, even if the pregnant nuns are really terrifying. Remothered: Red Nun's Legacy is the third instalment in the cult horror series, and it really dials the weirdness up to 11. Search an abandoned villa for clues to unravel the strange past of the Red Nun. Wishlist it on Steam.

Into the Wind

And that's all, folks. I hope you enjoyed this instalment of the PC Gaming Show as much as we enjoyed making it for you. Don't forget to head on over to our Steam page to check out every single game that featured.

There's something deeply satisfying about delivery games—in a sense, most videogames are about getting from point A to point B, but being incentivised to do so in style's always a great table on which to set a cosy adventure. As the case seems to be with Into the Wind, a gorgeous, ghibli-esque looking action adventure/delivery sim with a mind to do just that.

Making its debut in the PC Gaming Show, Into the Wind is the inaugural game of developer Bloom & Bloom Games, and an open-world action adventure. It's being published by Three Friends, a newer publisher that nonetheless has folks from Minecraft, Deep Rock Galactic, and Valheim on its staff.

You play a young lad who has come into the inheritance of his uncle's delivery service after he's gone missing—as the trailer hints—in a mysterious cloud. Cue lots of gorgeously-rendered and charmingly-written NPCs, a deep, textured world, and uh—dog-fighting in the air.

In all seriousness, Into the Wind looks absolutely beautiful, and I'm sure there's a context in which the protagonist's do-or-die battles above his comfy little island wind up being justified. Strange unmanned vehicles coming out said cloud, perhaps? After all, it looks like the motorcycle's sapient, or at least self-driving, which doesn't seem all that in keeping with the charming aesthetic.

Also, it can turn into an aeroplane. I'd neglected to mention that part. There's absolutely some magical mystery laid thick underneath Into the Wind's otherwise cosy exterior.

I'm taken by the delivery segments more than the aerial combat, though—Into the Wind looks to be borrowing a page from the book of games like Death Stranding, though without as much simulation, where hitting a cow causes your hard-earned delivery to go flying.

Into the Wind doesn't have a release date, but you can wishlist it on Steam now.

Check out everything revealed at the PC Gaming Show.

I'm a bit of a baby when it comes to horror. Don't get me wrong, I love scary movies and videogames, but when someone starts moving like a contortionist and I can hear their joints popping, I'm outta there—that just freaks me out too much. Remothered: Red Nun's Legacy's new gameplay trailer lulled me into a false sense of security with a seductive voice over before bringing me crashing back down to earth with its clickity-clackity nuns—it's most definitely a psychological horror.

Red Nun's Legacy is the third game in the cult horror series, and we just got our first proper look at how it'll actually play during the PC Gaming Show. It's a third-person survival horror, so expect to sneak around chest-high furniture and throw household objects at spooky monstrosities bearing down on you.

The trailer focuses mainly on protagonist Susan running, hiding, and occasionally fighting out of a nun's deathgrip. Just like the previous two entries in the trilogy, we're back in Ashmann territory. This time, though, we're on the slopes of Mount Etna, exploring a derelict noble residence that's now home to the Red Nun herself. The dark corridors and old trinkets make for the perfect setting for a horror game that'll have you solving puzzles while hiding from nuns like a misbehaving child at Sunday school.

In one of the sequences, we see Susan running down a hallway as a pregnant nun, clutching her belly, gives chase to the intruder. It adds a sense of body horror to the game that I'm excited to see once it releases later this year. Susan isn't entirely helpless, though. We also see her wielding some sort of club and even stabbing one nun in the neck. I wonder how many Hail Marys she'll have to do to atone for that.

If you want to stay up-to-date on the game, wishlist Remothered: Red Nun's Legacy on Steam.

Check out everything revealed at the PC Gaming Show.

Well alright, alright, alright, highlights from Future Games Show's extended Exodus gameplay video just aired during the PC Gaming Show. What is this, a crossover episode? Okay, I'll stop with the catchphrases—for now.

For those of you not in the know, Exodus is the time-hopping space exploration RPG from Archetype Entertainment. In it, you step into the shoes of the Traveler and fight against an ancient race of Celestials. There's also space-y wace-y, time-y wime-y stuff going on. Every time you embark on a mission, relativity means time passes way faster on your homebase planet than it does for you and your crew up in space. Game director Chris King teases the effect this will have on the game in the trailer.

As an RPG, a lot of choices are in your hands. "Along the way, you'll decide who stands with you, what risks you take, and what you bring back, shaping your path and the future you return to, where time has moved on without you," King explains. We also get another look at Persepolis, the sprawling city that will change as you're gone. Every time I go back to the part of London I grew up in, it feels different, so I hope this will amplify that sensation by quite a magnitude.

Alongside some pretty cinematics, we get a look at Exodus' meaty combat. There's an aerial takedown that would make Ezio weep with joy, a healthy dose of cover-based shooting, and some explosive gadgets, as well as a cloaking device that lets you run right up to an enemy and stab them right between their tentacles—ouch.

If you're a fan of Mass Effect, or sci-fi like The Expanse or Interstellar, Exodus is looking like a treat. Especially for me, because I've been a big fan of Matthew McConaughey since the McConnaisance, and I'm excited to see how his character helps shape the world of the game.

If you want to see the full extended gameplay reveal, head over to the Future Games Show YouTube channel. You can also wishlist Exodus on Steam.

Check out everything revealed at the PC Gaming Show.

Do you remember the first time you went on Google Maps and looked for your house? I was just nine-years-old when it launched in the UK and it felt like the coolest thing ever. Then Street View came a few years later and me and my friends would gather around the computer to walk to school or the shops.

Now, the innocent fun of excitedly looking at a map is back, gamified by the likes of Geoguessr, popularised by streamer Rainbolt. It inspired a ton of videogame variants, so you can guess locations in sprawling worlds like Skyrim, Red Dead Redemption 2, GTA 5, and more. But while those are all fun, they're not exactly full games. Enter Locator: The Search for Abigail Lidari.

Locator is a "Geoguessr-inspired detective game" that sees you looking for a missing archaeologist on an alien planet, so there's no need to go brushing up on your knowledge of where different kinds of trees and grass grow here on Earth. We just got a full minute of the all-new look of the game at the PC Gaming Show—it's had a lick of spit and polish since its January 2025 demo.

The core concept is still the same, though. You're handed a picture snapped from ground level and try to figure out where they were taken. This being a videogame, things get progressively more difficult and engaging. As Christopher Livingston wrote after his time with the demo, "Sometimes you'll need to read journal entries for clues, puzzle over alien hieroglyphs, and even do a tiny bit of (gulp) math." You'll also get to learn more about the planet and Abigail Lidari, the missing archaeologist.

Locator is being developed by Empty Exhibit, which has just brought on Playstack as the publisher. That's the team that helped bring Balatro to the masses, so you know the people there have an eye for cool games.

If Locator sounds like you're kind of game, wishlist it on Steam and sign up for playtest and the newsletter to stay up-to-date with all the latest on Abigail's whereabouts.

Check out everything revealed at the PC Gaming Show.

A new co-op horror game is coming our way, but instead of collecting trash or trinkets P.O.N sees players take on missions from criminal syndicates. The only problem is those pesky crime-fighting superheroes everyone seems to love so much.

P.O.N is a "first-person stealth-action horror game" which decidedly "flips the traditional superhero". Instead of being beacons of hope the superheroes you'll encounter are more like deadly hunting machines, which will stop at nothing to bring you and your buddies to so-called justice.

You'll have to navigate these threats as you make your way around each map, completing the criminal task at hand while retrieving everything specified in the terms handed down to you.

We got a glimpse of what this will look like during today's PC Gaming Show—as is the case with most horror games, the trailer was very dark and included a hell of a lot of screaming. We see four players trudge through abandoned hallways, and it wasn't long before the first person was picked off by what we know to be one of the superheroes in question, although we didn't get a good look at the perp.

It doesn't get much better for the team from here on out. In the chaos and confusion that follows, more players get swept up off their feet and disposed of by this super hunter. Only one's left alive by the end of the trailer, but they're yet to make it out. I guess this is just to depict how difficult this game will be for your average player.

But no matter how scary things get, don't go abandoning your brethren. You've got a better chance at surviving when you stick together: "and remember to not abandon each other because every shadow could hide a 'hero' ready to deliver a brutal brand of justice."

If you think this sounds interesting then you can join the 700,000 other wishlists for P.O.N in the lead up to the game's release, which is now scheduled for sometime during Q2 2027. It's a bit of a wait, so if you're looking for more immediate releases then be sure to check out PC Gamer and the rest of the PC Gaming Show for more upcoming games and recommendations.

Check out everything revealed at the PC Gaming Show.

It's been five years since Valheim launched in early access, and it's held on strong as one of my most-played games on Steam ever since. I wasn't the only one smitten with the viking-themed survival crafting game from Iron Gate either, as the studio says it's sold over 17 million copies to date.

That's a big ol' number for a game still in early access, but that's changing soon. During today's PC Gaming Show, Iron Gate announced that Valheim will launch its version 1.0 update on September 9.

As part of its big jump into 1.0, Valheim is getting a brand new biome, Deep North, and other quality-of-life upgrades. It's exactly what it sounds like, too. The Deep North is a deathly cold, winter wonderland where vikings will trudge through neck-deep snow and slip and slide across frozen lakes. I speak from experience. I played a bit of the 1.0 update as part of a guided tour with developers from Iron Gate, and it's got me excited about Valheim all over again.

Deep North is Valheim's final biome, and it's not just an extension of the snowy Mountain biome already in the game. It's more like the Meadows or Black Forest, so you'll find a lot of Deep North generated in your 1.0 worlds. And like those other biomes, it's meant to be accessible early on, but with a few more environmental hazards and new resources.

I like the approach, especially since it's a real pain to build in the only snowy landscape Valheim has for now. Even though I've explored as far as the Mistlands in my own adventures, I always wind up right back in the Meadows or Black Forest to build. But I don't want your takeaway to be that it's some walk in the park, because it's not.

I died meandering through the snow more than I ever died in the Black Forest—sometimes to the cold, and sometimes to gigantic beasts I was not prepared for. The Deep North seems like it's home to a mix of difficulties, and the further we pushed through the snow, the more I seemed to struggle with each new icy threat.

What I noticed while exploring Valheim's Deep North

A lot was going on in just that brief hour I spent in the Deep North, so allow me to quickly list some of the highlights:

• The group I was with saw a seal scooting through the snow, and none of us were willing to kill it—it's that cute. They're friendly, just like the deer in the Meadows.
• Valheim still isn't adding horses, but you can tame and mount a moose. When I asked where they were, one came bolting out of the woods and mowed us down.
• The snow gets quite deep, but Iron Gate doesn't think it's very fun if they make it slow you down, so it doesn't.
• Yes, there's ice. And yes, it's very slippery.
• Met a giant lanky guy called Barka. It's what a Greydwarf becomes just before it morphs into an elder.
• There were a few loose story elements too, including a new animated intro and ghostly vikings that walked around villages talking (but they ignored me).
• We didn't see it in action, but Iron Gate also mentioned some spirits will "gift you stuff"
• The build menu is getting some much-needed QoL with options to search, favorite, and browse recent crafts.

We also stopped by the Winding Tunnels, one of the new dungeons in Deep North. The name is exactly how it sounds, and had I not been surrounded by people on all sides, I know I would've gotten lost immediately. From what I saw, it's not too different from most Valheim dungeons, just a few more tight turns and spaces than normal.

Another neat idea I was happy to see return was Valheim's living mining nodes. Like the Leviathans you see floating out in the ocean, Deep North has its own creature you'll harvest a hefty supply of raw materials from. They're called Gammeltrolls, and they're way more hostile than Leviathans. We wound up tossing explosives at one to blow its legs off and harvest the delicious ore that dropped, and just when I thought I'd lived through the fight with the giant troll, that damn moose came back and landed the killing blow on me. God, I forgot how much I loved Valheim.

My speedrun through the tundra felt like more than enough to pull me back in, but I only had a small sample of the new biome. The tour ended just as we reached a second door, mysteriously gated off by golden chains. I was told this big gate leads to Deep North's second dungeon, and part of the escalating challenge in the new biome. I don't know what waits for me beyond those doors, but I plan to find out as soon as I can.

Valheim 1.0 launches version 1.0 on September 9, but you can check it out now in early access on Steam.

It's finally here. After more than five years in early access, Valheim has a 1.0 release date: September 9, 2026.

The news was just revealed on the PC Gaming Show, where we also got a look at what that 1.0 update will bring, which you can watch in the video embedded above.

Get your fur coat ready, because the viking-inspired survival game is going into the Deep North. Frozen tunnels, decrepit castles, and oh so much snow await. You'll have to craft a shovel and move it all out of the way if you want to build a base.

This update has been coming for a long time, and developer Iron Gate has been sharing lots of progress reports, but now the release date is finally on the horizon.

It's been a long road for Valheim: It was first revealed during the PC Gaming Show back in 2020 and launched into early access February 2021—it even won PC Gamer's game of the year.

In the years since, Valheim has had a host of updates, from Hearth & Home overhauling the food system shortly after the early access launch, to new biomes in Mistlands and the Ashlands patches.

If you've not given the game a go yet, you can buy Valheim on Steam, or wishlist it to prepare for when the 1.0 version comes September 9.

Check out everything revealed at the PC Gaming Show.

I think everyone has at least one series they absolutely mark out for—which lights up the animal intrigue zones of your brain whenever its name appears. For me, that's Vampire: The Masquerade, the result of uncountable evenings spent poring over second-edition sourcebooks as a teen, internalising all the wild lore and imbibing an entire vocabulary built around cool words like diablerie, inconnu, antediluvian and monomachy.

So when a PC Gaming Show trailer for Vampire the Masquerade: Eternal Whispers appeared, I leaned forward. When it billed itself as a "narrative-driven RPG", my eyes widened, and when that beloved and familiar Disco-Elysium-style vertical dialogue box unfurled down the side of the screen? I started hooting in my seat like a very excited and vampiric ape.

Developed by Flyos, Eternal Whispers reveals precious little info about itself in its trailer, but the vampy vibes are, of course, strong out the gate. Things are dark, bloody, and everyone is some flavour of goth. But here's the kicker: I get the distinct impression you're a member—or at least a victim—of the Sabbat, VtM's faction of outright villainous vamps who don't give a fig for maintaining their humanity and are really big on mass murder, nefarious conspiracies, and building living furniture out of people (well, that one's mostly just the Tzimisce).

I say this because, well, the introductory narration says a whole lotta Sabbat stuff. It sounds like you're a fresh vamp who's the only survivor of a traditional Sabbat mass embrace (what the Sabbat calls it when they vampify a bunch of people with no explanation and bury them alive). What's more, you were buried beneath the Temple of Eternal Whispers, the communal haven of the Montreal Sabbat. So it's all sounding very Sabbat, is what I mean.

As for the gameplay snippets we get, that's very vamp too, filled with oddballs and freaks and skillchecks in dialogue. Interestingly, I don't detect a whiff of combat, which would be in-keeping with the Disco Elysium inheritance and an interesting move for a vamp RPG, especially a Sabbat-focused one. Sign me up either way, but I'll be doubly interested if this is a low-to-no-combat experience.

Anyhow, my hope is you're a full-on Sabbat member. We've gotten a lot of the sect in previous vamp games—they feature heavily in Bloodlines 1 and 2—but you almost never get a chance to see it from the inside. A Vampire: The Masquerade videogame that finally let me pick up the Sword of Caine? Sounds like a great time to me. You can learn more on Steam.

Check out everything revealed at the PC Gaming Show.

Gears of War: E-Day had its big coming out party today at the Xbox Games Showcase, with an extended look at gameplay and confirmation that it will be an "Xbox console exclusive"—still coming to PC, but not PlayStation 5. It was a decidedly nostalgic presentation, particularly for a game positioned as leading the way into the future of Microsoft's console biz: "It's only fitting that as we return to Xbox, we return to Gears," Xbox CEO Asha Sharma said during today's showcase.

And despite what sounded like some early consternation, the new game has been given the official seal of approval from original Gears of War creator Cliff Bleszinski—although he was clearly a little nervous about the whole thing.

Bleszinski's first major success in the games industry came in the form of Jazz Jackrabbit, a long-ago hit for Epic Games, and his work on Unreal Tournament made him one of PC Gamer's "Game Gods" of the year 2000, alongside American McGee, Stevie Case, and Alex Garden. But it was his work as the lead designer of the first three Gears of War games that really cemented his legacy.

Bleszinski left Epic in 2012, and while he's not fully retired—he said so in another post today—he hasn't been up to much on the game front in the years since aside from the ill-fated LawBreakers (which I will once again remind you was quite good). But he's still a man of many opinions, about videogames as much as anything else, and he's not afraid to put 'em out there.

"Those Locust are dying mighty easy, just sayin'," Bleszinski posted on X during the first part of the showcase. After noting that Gearbox boss Randy Pitchford called the first Gears of War "a grinder" when he played it, Bleszinski continued, "Locust should have thick skin and armor and the game feedback loop should evolve to show that—damage on 'em/animation feedback, etc..."

Later on though, as the full-on Gears of War: E-Day Direct kicked into gear, his opinion shifted—not that he was being bluntly negative about it in the first place, but his tone on E-Day clearly lifted as the more detailed showcase got rolling.

"Yes, there's that sweet destruction I was hoping for. The longer glimpse of what the Coalition has been up to is exciting. Super low cover is a nice touch too," Bleszinski posted. He also enthused about the updated look of the Reavers and Seeders, and the increased fatness of the Boomers.

When all was said and done, Bleszinski liked what he saw. "So yeah, E-day looks great, amazing feature set, great tech improvements—and, most importantly—looks like it has heart. On top of all sorts of insane violence and destruction. Now get off my fucking lawn already!"

Gears of War: E-Day is set to launch on October 6, and is up for preordering now on Steam—but not, somewhat ironically, on the Epic Games Store.

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

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

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

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

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

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

Check out everything revealed at the PC Gaming Show.

Here's my shameful confession: I'm a Warhammer 40k dilettante. Oh, sure, I laugh along as friends make their incisive bon mots about Tzeentch, and the Blood Legion, and horrible Horus and his heresy, but deep down I know I'm a carpetbagger. I've only learnt about all these things from wiki-dives. I've never bought a single Dan Abnett book. Never painted a single mini.

My excuse is that Warhammer 40k is so huge—so incomprehensibly vast—that I struggle to know where to jump in (also I think collecting minis costs like a trillion pounds), but friends? I think I've found it. We got a long draught of Total War: Warhammer 40k and some insight from the devs themselves at the PC Gaming Show just now, and I absolutely cannot wait to get grimdark.

This is, of course, the 40k follow-up to Creative War's Total War: Warhammer series (which has been going for around a decade now and which I still almost call Total Warhammer every time). The fantasy-flavoured stylings of the previous games have been swapped for galactic combat between Space Marines, the forces of Chaos, Orks, Orks and, indeed, Orks.

The PCGS trailer was my first time seeing a smidge of the game in action, and it sure looks like it's ticking all the boxes: nightmarish combat at an impossible scale where the deaths-per-second are measured in the seven figures, and the war is waged on every possible front, from ships flattening cities from orbit down to individual Space Marines taking out individual opponents on the field of battle.

I'm pretty eager to get my hands on this one, especially given how good the earlier Total War: Warhammers already were. I may not have to wait long, as Creative Assembly says to keep an eye on the game's social channels for upcoming beta windows. This is it, folks. I can almost feel the money I'm going to blow on minifigs leaving my bank account already.

Check out everything revealed at the PC Gaming Show.

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.

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

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

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

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

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

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

Check out everything revealed at the PC Gaming Show.

Armatus has everything I love in a videogame: brutal melee finishers, lots of guns, a roguelite loop, demons, a man plucked out of his time and placed into ours, a city in ruins. The boundary between our world and another has been ripped open, and now an ancient warrior—that's you—has to get all those nasty hellspawn back where they belong: England wherever it is they came from.

The PC Gaming Show blessed us with a new trailer for the third-person roguelite, developed by Counterplay Games and published by Fictions, where we see the unnamed warrior tearing through the city streets.

Watching our crusader charge through the urban metropolis with their cape swaying in the breeze while also mag-dumping on alien-looking foes gives the whole thing an almost Destiny aesthetic. You also get access to a nasty purple scythe that you can impale enemies with, and a cool set of powers.

The game's Steam page promises you'll "start strong, end Godly," which is quite the offer. As with any roguelite, you'll die a lot and learn as you go, but it seems Armatus wants you to feel pretty buff right from the jump. You'll start with the scythe and a gun, but find celestial powers like holy fire and the ability to slow time along the way.

This is very welcome news. I love roguelites, but the early game of each run can often feel like a slog until your build comes online, so I'm glad to hear we'll be skipping that grind. The attacks shown off during the trailer look phenomenal, though, so I'm equally excited to get stuck in and start exploding things once I'm deep in a run.

Armatus is launching this winter, so you've still got a while to wait until it comes out, I'm afraid. Wishlist it on Steam now.

Check out everything revealed at the PC Gaming Show.

You know the classic clown car gag, where a seemingly infinite number of clowns exit a comically small car? Well, Clowntown is like that but in videogame form. In a world premiere trailer that just debuted at the PC Gaming Show we got a look at a ton of the minigames on offer in this co-op party game.

I've sunk hundreds of hours into Ultimate Chicken Horse and Jackbox—lockdown was rough, okay?—but as fun as they are, they can feel a tad repetitive when you're on hour four in a single session. That shouldn't be a problem here, because there are over 80 minigames to get stuck into.

Made for two to eight players, Clowntown features campaigns that string a bunch of minigames together. One of them is a platforming obstacle course where you can't touch another player or you're sent back to the start, so you'd better be polite and let everyone take their time. There's also a canvas you have to paint together, and as a bad solo artist at the best of times, I can only imagine how terrible I'll be on a group project.

One of the core tenets of the game is to keep us all on our toes, so the minigames evolve and introduce new twists as you go through them, like adding an NPC saboteur spraying paint all over your pretty picture.

If you don't have a lot of time to sit down and get through an entire campaign's worth of games, though, you can hop into various party modes and just play a few minigames instead. If you're feeling chummy, you can play purely co-op, where you'll all be trying to win together. If you're feeling dastardly, there's a competitive mode where teams will be scored separately. And if you want to be downright cruel, there's a mode that only puts you into the PvP minigames so you'll all compete directly.

You can wishlist Clowntown on Steam to make sure you're notified (hopefully with a clown nose honk) when the game comes out.

Check out everything revealed at the PC Gaming Show.

Do you like climbing games? Of course you do, they're all the rage right now, and long may their reign continue. Going free solo is fun and all, but you know what they say: "If you want to go fast go alone. If you want to go far, go together." From developer brothers Joe Fender & Andrew Fender and (aptly named) publisher Future Friends Games comes Sunset Summit, a co-op climbing game that combines the whimsy of Peak and the challenge of Cairn.

You may be thinking this game looks familiar, and you'd be right. Sunset Summit has undergone a rebrand. Rise is dead, long live Sunset Summit. In it, you and up to seven other players have to trek all the way up a big, bad mountain, reaching checkpoints as you go so a fall isn't too devastating. It'll still suck, though, so try not to.

Sunset Summit has all the usual gear you'd use in real life to climb: ropes, climbing axes, pogo sticks… Pogo sticks? And delivery drones? Well, there's that whimsy I was writing about. You'll need it all, as you're not just climbing up sheer rock, but floating platforms, too.

In the trailer just shown at the PC Gaming Show, we see a bunch of buds take on the challenge together. They employ the aforementioned tools as well as some boomer booster pills that make you jump super far. There are also baked beans. I'm not sure what they do, but as a Brit, I appreciate the inclusion.

Just like Peak, there's proximity chat and even walkie talkies so you can stay in touch with your pals as you climb. They're going to come in handy, especially if people jump the queue and go up ahead of others.

If you do prefer to go it alone though, don't worry, because Sunset Summit also supports offline solo play. If you like the look of it, go and play the demo on Steam.

Check out everything revealed at the PC Gaming Show.

It is the year 2026, and for computer touchers that means only one thing: we're going back. We're going back to before AI, before Office 365 and Game Pass upsells during the Windows installation process, before someone spilled glue on your taskbar and locked it rigidly in place. We're going back to the jagged OSes of old.

You can take that either as an imploration to adopt Linux (which it is) or as interest in Pipes.exe (which it also is), the co-op horror climbing game/operating system that just got its world premiere at the PC Gaming Show.

The setup is this: it's the '90s, you're a QA tester at a software firm working on its own OS, and all the world is young and beautiful. Your goal—and the goal of up to three of your friends—is to hunt about for bugs by clambering about a space that looks very much like a certain old Windows screensaver. You can also clamber on your friends. Or on anything. See that pipe? You can climb it.

Once you've gathered up the data you need, you've gotta rush back to the exit. Or get killed by one of the enemies in the OS with you, I suppose. Getting killed is an option too.

The conceit at the heart of the game is that a gaggle of freethinking '90s devs accidentally invented an OS that defies the laws of physics and whose UX is so realistic that dying in QA will kill you stone-dead in real life. So I guess it's also partly a biography of Linus Torvalds. The vibes are very good: like if the Microsoft Excel elevator ad had faded bloodstains on the walls, and I love a game that lets me climb my pals.

So I'll be keeping an eye on this. You can too over on Steam, where the game is set to hit in Q3 of this year.

Check out everything revealed at the PC Gaming Show.

To Kill a God knows just how to pique my interest. A cursed realm trapped in a cycle of life and death. The aesthetic of a polished survivors-like but with action-oriented combat and movement. Cults and tyrannical demigods to carve through. Oh yeah, it's got the juice.

What compels me most is its skill tree that also doubles up as a map and route planner. You see, each stop on your journey through the Death Spiral both powers you up and gets you closer to that titular act of god killing.

Coined the SkillMap, it combines the buildcrafting of a skill tree with the choice of where to actually go. Now, instead of simply levelling up to get the powers you want, you'll need to traverse the world of the Death Spiral and fight your way to your abilities. It makes the trek into a part of your progression in a way I think is really intriguing.

Will you take a shorter route with fewer skills or a longer route with more? A safe route with weak abilities, or a risky one that gets you better build synergy? It's a mechanic that centres choice, the core of a videogame. I also like that it feels less random than upgrades in some rougelites are.

In a new trailer debuted at the PC Gaming Show, we saw a new character in action: Talorim the mage. Rather than the up close and personal sword strikes of the warrior or the ranged attacks of the archer, Talorim uses magic to deal area of effect damage. It's a tactic that makes To Kill a God seem even more like Vampire Survivors, as it becomes beneficial to be surrounded by enemies.

If you want to try them out for yourself, there's a new To Kill a God demo you can download on Steam, right now.

Check out everything revealed at the PC Gaming Show.

Terrinoth: Heroes of Descent, the tactical RPG based on the 2005 board game Descent: Journeys in the Dark, launched just now during the PC Gaming Show. Literally, I mean it's live right now on Steam, you can go and download it while you watch the rest of the show.

For anyone not familiar with the board game, it's a fantasy dungeon crawler where a group of players fight against a dastardly Overlord who controls the enemies and tries to hinder the heroes. Essentially, it's players versus a mean dungeon master.

This new videogame version tells an original story set one year before the events of Descent: Legends of the Dark, a version of the tabletop game released in 2021. But you don't need to worry about not knowing the lore or gameplay systems, Terrinoth is turn-based and made to ease new players into the world. You can even choose between playing the full campaign or opting for a shorter story quest that you can complete in a single session.

In the digital version just shown, it looks like there's a big bad to face off against that takes the place of the once player-led Overlord. You can either go solo or team up with three other players online to kick their arse. There are eight different adventurers for you to choose from, too. Each has their own unique background and combat style, so there's plenty of replayability on offer.

And it wouldn't be a dungeon crawler without dungeons. There are 20 of them to crawl through, each with fully voiced storylines, characters to meet, and unique biomes to explore. That's all paired with turn-based combat that requires you to take note of elevation and sightlines to get the edge in a fight.

Terrinoth: Heroes of Descent is out now, you can download it on Steam.

Check out everything revealed at the PC Gaming Show.

Well, there it is, the Beast of Reincarnation itself. We sent a crew to Japan to give you another glimpse of Game Freak's upcoming action RPG ahead of its August 4 launch, and we learned a whole lot about protagonist Emma and the Blight that's affecting the world.

Game director Kota Furushima explained that the world has been ravaged by the Blight, a malignance stemming from the titular beast of reincarnation that corrupts all living things, from plants to animals and even Emma herself; it transforms them into Malefacts, and our doggo pal Koo is one as well—so, they can't all be bad.

Emma can cross large distances and climb up high by summoning a vine from her arm, all thanks to the Blight. However, she doesn't have any memories or emotions, which is why the humans who are surviving this apocalypse reject and fear her; they treat her like a "corrupted husk," Furushima said. It's unclear if the Blight is responsible for her condition or if she was like that before becoming a Malefact.

Portraying a character with no emotions is a tough task, but, unlike its previous games, Game Freak is opting to use voice actors. Emma is voiced by Yui Ishikawa. Furushima speaks highly of her, but her career history speaks for itself. Well, she speaks for herself since she's a voice actor—you know what I mean. She portrayed 2B in Nier: Automata, and she voices characters in Guilty Gear Strive, Genshin Impact, Honkai: Star Rail, Monster Hunter Rise Starbreak, and much, much more.

Also in the cast is Akio Otsuka, a legendary actor who's been in more movies, games, and TV shows than I can list, but some highlights include the original 1996 Ghost in the Shell and Cowboy Bebop.

Beast of Reincarnation launches August 4. You can pre-order it on Steam now.

Check out everything revealed at the PC Gaming Show.

El Paso, Elsewhere is an acclaimed indie gem—dropping in 2023, PC Gamer contributor Dominic Tarason called it "one of the boldest, freshest games of the year"—it followed the harrowing adventures of one James Savage as he slow-mo shot his way through a reality-warped 46-story subterranean motel filled with vampires, werewolves, and other nasties.

Well, now it's getting a sequel—as announced at the PC Gaming Show, El Paso, Elsewhere 2 will be coming to Steam next year. There's no specific release date, but there is a trailer. Rather than being stuck working over hospitality with his arsenal of weapons, Savage will be travelling along the United States this time in a journey that'll eventually see him pulled into the void itself, all to save the person who betrayed him.

The sequel promises over 20 levels with a bigger remit of scenery than the prior game—libraries, nightclubs, the lairs of eldritch horrors, and perhaps the most horrifying place of all: American suburbia (God help us all, these cities aren't even walkable).

Like the first game, Elsewhere 2 will have an original hip-hop soundtrack, produced again by RJ Lake, alongside fully-voiced cutscenes. It plays very similar to the original Max Payne games—third-person shooting with plenty of slow-mo thanks to Savage's vampiric powers.

"Strange Scaffold nearly closed in the process of making the first El Paso, Elsewhere. It's a game I never thought we'd have a chance to build a sequel for," studio head Xalavier Nelson Jr. tells PCGS.

"We're going to build on the things that worked in the original game, including our existing pieces of art, to create exciting gameplay we never could have even imagined before. I can't wait for folks to see how far James Savage can go."

You can expect high-octane shooting, biblically accurate angels, werewolves, vampires, and plenty of sick backflips along with a hefty dose of interpersonal existential dread. El Paso, Elsewhere 2 will release sometime next year, though you can wishlist the game now.

Check out everything revealed at the PC Gaming Show.

10 years after Misfits Attic released the highly acclaimed real-time tactics roguelite Duskers, we're finally getting a sequel. And this time the developer is promising to expand upon the first game "by adding purpose."

In the first Duskers, players were set the task of piloting drones into derelict and abandoned spaceships in order to find the means to survive and try and figure out how the universe came to be what is essentially a giant graveyard. Our own Christopher Livingston gave it an impressive 86% in PCG's Duskers Review: "When the shit hits the airlock, when your careful plans fall apart and you’re forced to think quickly, when a successful mission becomes a harrowing, scrambling nightmare, Duskers really shines."

Duskers 2.0 has the same premise, but with more "purpose" as mentioned above. It turns out that players had been asking for this, and the answer Misfits Attic came up with was to place survivors hibernating in cryopods inside each run. So now there's an opportunity to not only save all these people you find as you progress, but also create a new home for them by assigning survivors to different colonies and in doing so potentially secure humanity's future.

"Players will scavenge resources, not for them to survive, but for others to thrive," Misfits says. "Sacrificing everything to rescue survivors that will never know them." The developer goes on to compare the role you'll play to Cooper from Interstellar, or Theo Faron from Children of Men.

You'll be able to find out what all that really means for yourself when Duskers 2.0 goes into early access towards the end of 2027, with the full release scheduled for sometime early 2028. But that's quite far into the future, so for now you'll have to settle for the latest trailer shown in today's PC Gaming Show. Hopefully that's enough.

The trailer is a mixture of mock UI and in-game footage, alongside a voiceover which utters remembrances about the necessary and unselfish sacrifice the player must make to save the survivors and humanity itself. It certainly seems like the stakes have been raised for this sequel; with a new emotive twist on the original game's premise. Let's just hope you manage to find and save all these people lost out there in the dark, cold, vacuum of space. You can wishlist it on Steam now.

Check out everything revealed at the PC Gaming Show.

Exo Rally Championship first appeared at the 2023 PC Gaming Show, and now the extraterrestrial racing game is back with big news: It's out on Steam today.

Exo Rally is a "brutally realistic racing simulation," its developers say, with customizable rovers that feature "realistic tire models, drive-trains, suspension and damage," plus thrusters for extra maneuverability in low gravity environments.

I assume by "realistic" they do not mean that they are aware of an actual interplanetary racing league, but you never know. Aliens could be up to anything.

Exo Rally includes a career mode "based on real-world rally, Baja, and Dakar events," and though there's no head-to-head online racing, you can compete for the best track times asynchronously.

The alien landscapes are procedurally generated, but it's possible to share seeds so that your friends can generate the same environments to compete with your times in.

I can't help but be reminded of Mass Effect's rover bits—in a good way! A lot of people hated the Mako, but driving around barren alien landscapes is a great vibe. And this time we can do it while going fast and dodging some brutal looking space weather.

You can see the new trailer above, and Exo Rally Championship is available now on Steam.

Check out everything revealed at the PC Gaming Show.

You know the saying: when God closes a door, he opens a window, then fires a rope arrow through it and steals everyone's antiques. I might not have gotten the Nightdive Deus Ex remaster I've long dreamt of, but we are getting the studio's remaster of Thief, as revealed at the PC Gaming Show.

Allow me to be the first to express this sentiment in an official, editorial capacity: hell yeah. In the big 2026, there's no one I'd trust more to bring back Thief: The Dark Project—a bonafide classic—than Nightdive, which acquitted itself very well last year with a long-awaited remaster of System Shock 2.

We only got some brief glimpses—which I suppose is appropriate—during the game's PCGS reveal trailer, but I like what I see, folks. Much as it did with SS2, Nightdive looks like it's taken pains to preserve Thief's Thief-iness. There are no garishly uprezzed textures, no perversely bump-mapped guard models. It looks like the game I remember playing on a hulking Fujitsu in 1999, subtly tweaked to make sense on modern screens. You can check it out on Steam.

In other words: I approve so far, though I admit to some curiosity as to what work Nightdive has done on Thief's gameplay. The SS2 remaster brought with it some tactful tweaks: controller support, of course, but there were also balance tweaks to sand down some of the game's rougher edges and a repaired multiplayer mode. I'm very curious to see how deep-going the changes it makes to Thief are (with console versions on the way, I suppose controller support is one guarantee).

Part of me wants the studio to make Downwind Thieves' Guild less of a nightmare; most of me wants it to leave the level alone so posterity has to deal with that goddamn labyrinth too.

It'll be a treat to slip into Garret's soft-soled shoes again, anyway. Thief the first is, I'm sorry to tell you, 28 years old, a fact which carries troubling implications about my own age. Nightdive, once you're finished giving The City a spitshine, any chance you could remaster me?

Check out everything revealed at the PC Gaming Show.

We liked the original Outward, released in 2019, quite a lot—our own Christopher Livingston gave it a sterling 89% in his Outward review thanks to its emphasis on making difficult, interesting choices: "Most of all, it makes you approach each and every encounter as if your life depended on it—even though you never die." So we're equally pleased the sequel's almost here.

As revealed in the PC Gaming Show, Outward 2 will be dropping into open beta—well, immediately. While the full game's slated for a July 7 release (and will apparently run on potato settings while doing so), you'll be able to hop into the world of Aurai a little early if you'd like to help developer Nine Dots Studio clean up some bugs.

The central pitch of Outward is thus 2: While you can't die, there'll be no savescumming here. As the Steam page reads, "Constant auto-saving discourages reckless decisions and rewards careful planning. For those who crave even greater stakes, a Hardcore mode is available. In this mode, every defeat carries a 20% chance of ending your adventure permanently by deleting your save file."

Oh. Correction, then—you can die a little on the hardest difficulty.

It's a compelling hook, and one that means every playthrough of Outward 2 will, as our Christopher discovered with the first game, feel completely different. Throughout the course of the game you'll be finding trainers, defeating bosses, and assembling your character from up to three classes, mix-and-match style.

It's not just an RPG, though—like the first game, Outward 2 will have a bunch of survival mechanics underpinning it. Hunger, thirst, crafting, and inventory management. So much inventory management:

"Your bag is essential to your journey through Aurai. Pack it with provisions, potions, weapons, and camping gear … you'll need to manage its weight carefully, as not everything you find will be worth the space." Luckily you can do the time-honoured adventuring tradition of dropping your backpack when you're jumped so you can still move.

Outward 2 looks like it's shaping up to be an expansion on everything that made the first game special—and you can get stuck into the open beta right now.

Check out everything revealed at the PC Gaming Show.

I don't know what was in the air a few years ago, but climbing games are all the rage now. As soon as you reach the summit of one peak, another looms tantalisingly on the horizon. I may be 31, but I have absolutely no desire to go mountain climbing in real life, unlike my peers. But give me a game where the goal is to go up a big rock and I'm all in—eyes closed, head first, can't lose.

At the PC Gaming Show, we just got an explainer of Ascenders: Beyond the Peak from the creative director of developer Ludogram. Build a team and plan a route up a deadly mountain. Sounds simple, right? Well, actually, no it doesn't, and it's only going to get more tricky. Lovecraftian horrors await you, and monsters and the mountain itself will try to stop you reaching the goodies at the top.

You'll have nine different classes to choose from, each with different levels of mobility and abilities to utilise on your ascent. The catch is, you're all connected by a single rope, so if one team member is lagging behind, you may have to cut them loose and send them to their death. Brutal.

You can also use gravity as a weapon, though. Drop rocks or weapons on enemies to bonk them on the noggin and send them hurtling below. If you can position everything right, you might get a two-for-one kill.

Aesthetically, the game reminds me of Into the Breach, just vertical instead of horizontal. You move your team along a grid and can see warnings about environmental hazards such as avalanches and your own explosives' radius.

And, for the aspiring alpinists out there (that's a new word I just learned, it's a mountain climber who does high, difficult ascents), there's a whole base camp feature where you'll plan which mountains to climb, who to take on the expedition, and what gear you'll need. There are also rest stops up the mountains that will help you reset and recover, but not all of the classes get better at the same rate, so you may still end up taking weakened teammates on the climbs and have to make tough calls later on.

If that all sounds like your cup of tea, check out the Ascenders demo on Steam, and don't forget to wishlist the game ahead of its Q3 early access launch.

Check out everything revealed at the PC Gaming Show.

On a long enough timeline, perverse game devs will find a way to turn absolutely everything into a deckbuilder. Now? It's Minesweeper's turn. As we just caught at the PC Gaming Show, Mr Magpie's Harmless Card Game, developed by Giant Light Games and now published by Behaviour, is an actually-not-so-harmless card-based take on everyone's favourite mine-clearing game, in which a horrible felt man repeatedly executes you in a lift.

It looks great, is what I'm saying—askew and off-putting in all the right ways. You're trapped in an elevator with a terrible puppet and your job is to earn enough money to escape or, ah, get shot to death. A metaphor for capitalism, then. Got it.

Your puppet overlord presents you with a table filled with cards. Your job is to turn over the nice ones—the ones that earn you money and add positive modifiers—while avoiding the JERRY cards. JERRY cards kill you. Do not turn over JERRY cards. The goal is to no longer be in the lift: "Mr. Magpie thinks you can't afford his unreasonably expensive elevator. Prove him wrong."

So, yes, Minesweeper, but you can stack the deck. The game's metaprogression layer revolves around doing just that, using money to buy perks and stuff your deck with boons that will strengthen your odds in runs to come. The vibes are very good, by which I mean deeply uncomfortable, and I suspect if you have the sort of mind that found itself ensnared for months by Balatro you have a lengthy date with Mr Magpie's lift coming up.

There's no release date on this one just yet, but you can keep an eye on its progress via—where else?—its Steam page. You can also get some Dead By Daylight rewards themed around the game, if you're one of those goshdarned kids who loves their Dead By Daylight.

Check out everything revealed at the PC Gaming Show.

From the creator of Citizen Sleeper comes something completely different. Gosh, isn't that refreshing? From developer Jump Over the Age, led by Gareth Damian Martin, and publisher Fellow Traveller comes Signet City. It's a dark, moody RPG set in what looks like a mega-fungus infected British city.

We just debuted Signet City's world premiere trailer at the PC Gaming Show, and what a trailer it is. It's hand drawn by Damian Martin themself, and in it we see a person who looks to be a punk rocker who's just had a long night out wake up in a puddle. You know, typical London stuff.

The trailer doesn't give much away, it just oozes style and vibes, and that's my preferred method of marketing—I don't like to know every narrative beat before I play a game or watch a movie. Our nameless punk wanders under railway bridges that I'd swear I've walked under myself, and we get glimpses of a mushroom-infested tower block housing unfortunate residents in a similar state. If the city isn't London itself, it's certainly based on it. I was born and raised in the Big Smoke, and everything in the trailer feels familiar.

Although Signet City looks entirely different to the Citizen Sleeper games, which were set on futuristic space stations and filled with bright colours, Damian Martin's anti-capitalist motif still runs deep here. The game seems to be reflecting the terrible living conditions poor inner-city denizens have to endure. Black mould, cramped flats, water everywhere. Alongside a wall of the tower block is graffiti that reads "this city is a corpse" and "fuck off bailiffs." In space or here on Earth, capitalism screws us all. The musical accompaniment to the trailer, Abandon by Irish post-punk band Sprints, hammers home the message even more.

Who do we play as in Signet City? What will we do? Why is there a fungal wasteland surrounding the city? And what is that smouldering obelisk people keep staring at? I don't know, but if you're as keen to find out as I am, wishlist the game on Steam to keep up-to-date with the latest news.

Check out everything revealed at the PC Gaming Show.

I don't know about you, but playing FPS games makes me feel old. I'm way past my prime, my twitch reflexes are shot, which in turn leads to me getting shot. How I wish I could simply stop time to reposition or line up a headshot. Maybe grab an enemy's missile and redirect it back at them. Even teleport behind them. Then I'd finally have my old edge back.

Hang on a minute. I've just watched the reveal trailer for Time Strike at the PC Gaming Show, and it has all of those things, I'm saved!

The gameplay trailer for Time Strike, developed and published by Mode 7, shows off the game's voxel aesthetic, which also helps bring me back to my younger days, where videogames were more blocky, polygons far less numerous.

It looks like the game takes place in a selection of dense, urban sandboxes, where enemies can come at you from any angle. Why are you fighting them? I don't know. This is a videogame and you've got a gun, so stop asking questions and start shooting—that's how it used to be.

What's fresh about Time Strike is the ability to pause time at will. If you're being shot at, simply stop time, turn around, and shoot your enemy first. You've also got access to a doohickey of some sort that allows you to redirect objects your opponents fire at you, like missiles. You can also use it to lob helmets at their faces or even tear down walls and ceilings on top of them.

There's even a gadget (maybe a contraption, or part of the doohickey) that allows you to teleport a short distance, and you can actually see one of the NPCs look all confused as you warp behind him and then shoot him in the back.

If you want to feel young and powerful again, you can wishlist Time Strike on Steam.

Check out everything revealed at the PC Gaming Show.

One of my (not entirely unreasonable) fears is waking up on a spaceship alone, drifting in a great void that wants to kill you if it's given even the slightest chance. I'm glad I never have to experience that, let alone over and over again on loop.

Such is the fate of one Miranda Vigneau in Rivage, who awakes aboard the A.R.E.S. space station above the promising planetary candidate VESTA—her crew's gone, and the station itself is acting weird, though this being a sci-fi mystery, there'll be plenty of ominous logs strewn around the place to help you piece things together.

Assisting you is something called the "K9 system", which means you can lock in certain puzzle solutions so you don't go mad solving them over and over. Probably a vital bit of systems architecture in a game like this.

You'll still need to loop, though, because the station only has so much power in it—the thing that kills you in Rivage isn't some horrid alien or biological parasite, but space itself. Basically, power's the ticking time bomb that'll bring your present run to an end—though Miranda doesn't get spaced or anything.

Instead, you head on over to a mysterious arcade machine to kick the loop off all over again when the lights go out. In other words, Rivage seems to be angling itself as less of a horror game ala Alien: Isolation or an existential dread/hope simulator like Outer Wilds, and more of a sci-fi mystery with some interpersonal character development via your absentee crew.

Rivage promises to bend your brain with puzzles that hinge on "gravity, magnetism, and the very flow of time"—which, if you like cracking open a good mystery, sounds a treat. It plans to release August 13 this year, though you can play a demo on Steam and take a crack at Miranda's puzzle predicament for yourself.

Check out everything revealed at the PC Gaming Show.

We just got our first look at Maximum Thunderness during today's PC Gaming Show, and this shoot-em-up roguelike looks just as chaotic as it sounds—with giant green goop aliens, tanks, and more explosions than a Michael Bay film.

Maximum Thunderness is a side-scrolling shoot-em-up roguelike that its developer, Berzerk Studios, promises will deliver "the energy and aesthetic of a Saturday morning cartoon—sugary cereal-induced fever dream." Something that, by the looks of this trailer it almost certainly delivers on.

It's been a good couple of decades since I watched Saturday morning cartoons, but I have to say this does kind of remind me of that feeling of sitting down at the weekend and seeing what's on Cartoon Network, Toonami, or Kix—good times.

But this roguelike isn't just a tornado of colours and bullets, it's also a co-op game, so you can enjoy all of this with your friends. You all work together, killing green alien monsters and blowing up every single thing in your path as you make your way across the 2D map.

But it's not just one straight road. The map has multiple branches as players can take different routes across the city and gain different buffs as they go along, such as Super Defender which gives you +4 shield and +1 shield regen, Incendiary Bullet which gives each bullet a +2% chance to create a fireball (that must be where all those explosions are coming from), and Chain Reaction which increases the Lazrifle damage by +4 for the rest of that stage when overheating.

Then with each stage you complete you can get more cash and an upgrade booster pack with different kinds of perks, like the ones above, to choose from. Which will hopefully make your run a little easier.

But as is the case with roguelike, if you die then all that progress and the perks are lost. You'll need to start again from square one with a fresh slate, which means new perks,and maybe some of your old favourites—if you're lucky.

Berzerk Studios has been bringing "creative, polished, and most of all, fun games filled with humour, headbanging tunes and sometimes, gallons of gratuitous violence" for over a decade now. With 30 games published, Maximum Thunderness is its next venture into the bloody foray of action games yet again and it's set to release this autumn, and there's a Steam demo you can try out now.

Check out everything revealed at the PC Gaming Show.

If there was one consistent message from today's Xbox Games Showcase, it's that stuff is back. Crazy Taxi is back, Spyro is back, Persona 4 is back, the first Halo game is back, Gears of War is getting a back-to-basics prequel after its so-so open world reinvention, and even transparent electronics are due for a reprise.

The new ideas on offer also sported a decidedly nostalgic tone, whether we're talking about the familiar zombie-blasting of State of Decay 3 or the Bioshockish, extremely steampunk-coded Clockwork Revolution. Outside of those games, Microsoft's coterie of acquired developers has been constructing a tall tower of sequels, reboots, and revivals: Fable, Minecraft Dungeons 2, Modern Warfare 4's DMZ mode, and so on.

There was even an emphasis on less fuzzy memories—namely, the console wars. Both Gears of War E-Day and Clockwork Revolution proudly punctuated their trailers with the stinger that they're "Xbox console exclusives."

Since they're both still coming to PC, presumably at the same time they release on Xbox, the only purpose of all that seems to be dunking on PlayStation. Similar to Sony's retreat from PC gaming, it's hard to know how many people outside of the hardcore fanbases will really care. As PC Gamer's Morgan Park points out in his article about that, it's a harder sell when games take half a decade to release. And in an era when Halo is on PS5 anyway, is the posturing even convincing?

The games themselves don't mark a new strategy, as they're the fruit of years of work, but Xbox's new CEO herself, Asha Sharma, seems keen to go back in time. She countered the notion that exclusivity is antiquated earlier this week, saying "in order to be a platform, you must have exclusive content and services." Xbox is all caps again, and the new logo is greener than Gak—this may not be an entirely new direction, but it feels like Microsoft is hoping to rope people in with a retro cool more than ever.

It's easy to see why, looking at the company's last few years. Microsoft Copilot's sudden unwelcome ubiquity turned out to be the mistake plenty of users identified it as. Microsoft has been named a pressure target, and Xbox a priority target, of the BDS movement protesting its involvement in Israel's ongoing genocide of Palestinians. That has led to turmoil within the Xbox umbrella and at least one high-profile dismissal at Microsoft. Shareholders are uneasy, employees have led protests, and even Windows 95 startup composer Brian Eno suggested the company was complicit in war crimes.

At the end of 2025, PC Gamer's Wes Fenlon declared it Microsoft's year of shame. Maybe that's why going backwards in time is so attractive for the tech and gaming giant: the first two Xbox consoles brimmed with potential, free from genocidal associations and hallucinating chatbots.

But it's hard to imagine this 'good old days' act will be convincing for long if AI continues to encroach on everything the company puts out and it keeps courting blood-soaked controversy. If Microsoft really wants to go back to the golden years, it will have to start by jettisoning the baggage it's accrued in the intervening decades—in other words, actually moving forward.

I love a deckbuilder, me—something about carefully putting together an engine of collapsing game mechanics to run over whatever roguelike challenge awaits me really scratches an itch. Shroom and Gloom intrigues me, because it's asked: What if we scratched two itches?

An upcoming deckbuilding roguelike by Team Lazerbeam, Shroom and Gloom sees you plunging into the depths of a fungal "under-realm" that cannot be safe to breathe in. But hey, some plucky adventurer's gotta do it, and there's cards down there!

The real intrigue is the fact you're putting together two different decks. One for exploration, and one for combat. It's akin to one of my under-appreciated favourite roguelikes, Griftlands. Griftland's not a game I'd call perfect by any means (it very clearly wears the skin of the open-world RPG it was meant to be) but it asked you to build two decks—one for combat, and one for social encounters.

The way Shroom and Gloom takes that concept and tweaks it from social combat to exploration seems to me a more natural expansion of the genre—transplanting the choices you typically make in, say, Slay the Spire's event rooms and instead making them a part of your hand. Trading in health for bashing down locks, resting up, digging for weapons, and so on.

One thing that also intrigues me is the fact there aren't any block cards—having played the demo (albeit an older version, not the one dropped at the show), Shroom and Gloom is more concerned with stacking max HP and healing items in your deck.

You'll inevitably take damage, the question is whether you're grown beefy enough to shrug it off, and whether you can heal it, usually by generating food cards via certain attacks or by applying the "Seasoned" debuff. It's a refreshing take on the genre—and one that incentivises taking more risks.

The exploration deck's interesting, too, essentially dictating what between-room buffs you have access to. For instance, in the demo I've played, you could grab a training dummy to upgrade your cards or a frog statue to forget them—you can also get powerful passives that encourage you to, say, overeat as much as you can to improve your max HP.

Either way, Shroom and Gloom feels like a novel take on a relatively well-done genre and, as of the PC Gaming show, has a new demo available now. You won't have to wait long to play more, as it's launching into early access later this year.

Check out everything revealed at the PC Gaming Show.

100 players, three teams, constant fighting. That's the premise at the heart of Wardogs. That and the endless flow of cash as you earn and burn currency with each life, as you throw down with every other player to try and be the, er… top dog. Please laugh.

In a new trailer shown at the PC Gaming Show, you can see a lot of Battlefield-esque blasting as we see not one, not two but three helicopters getting smote by a man on the ground with a launcher. It's enough to make you not want to get in a helicopter.

The most intriguing part for me is the promise of a persistent economy where each in-game action that helps your team win earns you cash which you can spend in your next life, or even a later game. How this plays out will be key to how fun the game feels to play—if it brings a small sense of your meta-progression mattering into combat then it'll infuse the moment-to-moment gunplay with a little bit of the terror of extraction shooters, creating a more explosive format.

If they get it wrong, it'll feel like growing up working class, as the millionaire Wardogs players will run amok with better weapons, vehicles and general opportunities than anyone else. I'll probably still enjoy it, as the only valid war is class war. This is your warning Wardogs nepo babies, I'll be coming for you.

In the trailer, Bulkhead Studios says "Wardogs isn't a game made for everyone, instead it's a grounded hardcore shooter that doesn't forget it's a game," but really it looks a lot like the type of open-world team shooters that are beloved by most people. If it feels like something you might want to have a go at, they're running some playtests which you can sign up for via the QR code in the trailer. You can also wishlist it on Steam.

Check out everything revealed at the PC Gaming Show.

It must be stressful to be Dracula. Not only do you have to pay what must be extortionate taxes on your big stonking castle, but you also have to decide where all those confounding metroidvania rooms go to thwart the prospective vampire hunters who want to take a crack at the big D. Well, ReVamp is finally giving voice to that administrative stress.

Developed by Digital Sun (the folks who made Moonlighter and Cataclismo), ReVamp is a castle defence roguelike where you need to craft your own castle from assembled pieces to make it as hard to invade as (in)humanly possible.

You won't just be sitting idly by while your meticulously-placed forces of the damned whack knights upside the helm, though—ReVamp'll also have you leading from the front rather than the throne, dropping boots into your castle to fight in it yourself. As the Steam page puts it, "You are not just the ruler of the castle. You are its final defense."

And, as announced during the PC Gaming show, ReVamp will be entering playtesting soon—you can scan the QR code in the trailer above to sign up yourself via Discord, or click that link.

Honestly, ReVamp looks sick as hell—not only is it looking gorgeous, with animation and artwork that reminds me, appropriately, of the Castlevania Netflix series—it's also from a studio that knows their roguelikes from haunted basement to parapet, but it's also a really fun spin on a handful of genres.

I'm always a fan, conceptually, of games that spin the duties of hero and villain on their head—and a tower defence roguelike where you're also designing the layout of a castle you'll be fighting in is a real novel concept. Also, I just like a good roguelike. Give me a repeatable gameplay loop and one of three upgrade options to choose from, and I'm a happy little camper.

Check out everything revealed at the PC Gaming Show.

Arkheron's an interesting game (I'm about to throw a lot of adjectives at you, don't get scared): an isometric PvPvE battle royale-type action RPG where you and two other mates try to ascend a tower in the afterlife.

Rounds play out as you and your fellow echoes ascend a tower, having showdowns at the end of each floor where you take on another team before moving on. In the interim, you run around fighting monsters, picking up loot, and fine-tuning your build before you go onto the next bout.

But, as shown in the PC Gaming Show's exclusive interview, players had identified a large skill gap between the training mode and the game's core "Ascension" mode—which has led to the introduction of Spires.

The Spires game mode works very similarly to Ascension, except you have three shots to get it right. Basically, it gives you far more opportunities to learn and experiment, rather than simply getting stomped by people who have mastered the high-stakes Ascension mode.

I'm personally actually pretty hyped for Arkheron—I've yet to find a game that's filled the Battlerite-shaped hole in my heart, and I think there's a huge untapped vein of isometric PvP enjoyers who are rabid for something to fill that void.

It's also great to see that developer Bonfire Studios is really making use of the playtests it's been having—more than anything, good attentiveness to player feedback is what makes or breaks these sorts of competitive games, and finding ways to properly onboard players who might be a touch afraid of a steep learning curve is even better.

Heck, it's a trick that Deadlock, my current MOBA of choice, has employed with Street Brawl—get a lower-stakes mode where folks can get their feet wet and become familiar with your cast of heroes before throwing them in the hyper-optimised deep-end.

You can sign up for the Arkheron playtest on the game's website. Arkheron plans to release properly later in 2026.

Check out everything revealed at the PC Gaming Show.

We're going back to where it all started with Resonance: A Plague Tale Legacy, the upcoming prequel to the iconic ratty action series. And thanks to today's Xbox showcase, we now know that its launch is just around the corner.

It's been a year since this prequel was first announced, and now thankfully we don't have to wait too much longer as its release date has been set for August 27, 2026.

The game follows Sophia as she works her way through Minotaur Island—all while shifting between the Middle Ages and ancient Minoan times. Resonance tells an all new story, albeit one that follows Sophia's origins 15 years before meeting Amicia and Hugo.

Resonance will also be trading the usual stealth-focused action of the previous games in this series for a straight-forward approach to combat. This may put some fans off, but not me—I was never a fan of A Plague Tale's sneaky ways, and am always up for some good old-fashioned street brawls.

Plus, Sophia is a hardened fighter, one that is well-versed in agile melee combat. Meaning we can also expect some parries to be coming our way.

If all of that doesn't get you excited, then try and rest easy in the knowledge that there'll still be plenty of puzzles to solve: "Guided by the knowledge safeguarded in your notebook, follow in your crew’s footsteps to explore a richly detailed world, unravel its secrets, and face deadly trials. Use a stolen Minoan sphere to solve ingenious puzzles by manipulating light—a force woven by Daedalus into the island’s very heart."

But with the release date so close, you won't have to wait long to find out whether this prequel is up your alley. At the very least I'm just eager to know more about the Macula's legacy, even if there has been an unfortunate lack of rats in all the trailers so far.

I've been playing first-person shooters for a long time, so if you show me a man wall-running while blasting an enemy, a big smile is going to creep across my face. Empulse's gameplay, shown for the first time at the PC Gaming Show, has me grinning like an idiot, then.

There's a warm, fuzzy nostalgia to Empulse that 1047 Games are no doubt hoping will attract lapsed fans of arena shooter silliness. The trailer, a solid minute of frantic gunplay that ends with a bloke lamping a mech with a sledgehammer, immediately took me back to the glory days of Xbox 360 shooters and left me wanting more.

At heart, I love tactical shooters and saying things like "enemy down" and "we're clear here", but I grew up on weird and wonderful arena shooters like Halo 3, Brink and Timeshift. Empulse's kinetic movement and high-speed combat reminds me of those days, back when I was a teenager with unlimited internet access and basically no responsibilities: the ideal conditions for keeping up with the people who play FPS games online.

That feeling comes rushing back every time the trailer shows someone sliding between a mech's legs or hip-firing an assault rifle while sprinting along a wall. Telling PC Gamer more about the game, 1047 Games promised that movement is at the heart of everything in Empulse. In addition to wallrunning forwards and backwards, you'll also be swinging with grapple hooks and even tossing paint on the ground to change the way the ground works.

Did I mention there are mechs? They spawn on the map armed to the teeth and the different teams can claim them to splatter the enemy team across the scenery. If powerful game-changing stuff spawning on the map doesn't scream classic arena shooter to you, I'd posit that you never played one.

This nostalgia even extends to the soundtrack. Joey Valence & Brae's bustamove might be a brand-new track, but it channels golden-era Beastie Boys so effectively that it put a smile on my face. It might do the same for you.

If you've been convinced, Empulse is releasing on Steam's Early Access platform on June 24, and you can play it for free at Steam Next Fest starting June 15.

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.

You know what I need? You know what would really spruce up the humdrum decor I've currently got in this dusty old flat of mine? A goblet of blood. I don't know why I didn't think of it sooner. You don't see many goblets about these days, even fewer filled with blood, and I think if I could whip one out during my many soirees, why, I'd be the talk of the town.

Which town? Avalon, of course, which we just saw a glimpse of during Wardens of Avalon's world premiere PC Gaming Show trailer. It looks a bit like if Diablo—in among all the monster slaying—also tasked you with restoring the ruins of Tristram. Which it turns out is something I've been waiting for my whole life.

The setup goes thus: betrayal has shaken Avalon to its core, plunging it into chaos and carnage and leaving an order of Twilight Knights—I think that's us—to murder the land back to health. We see some snippets of the game's combat in the trailer, showing bands of knights doing justice to Avalon's enemies in very ARPG style. We've got fireballs, meteors, a whole lotta blood—the works.

But the part that had me lean forward in my chair were the little snippets of what looks like a sort of lite citybuilding mechanic. In the trailer, we see a couple of moments where knights are gathered in front of rundown buildings, only for scaffolding to suddenly manifest and replace the drab old facade with something cleaner, greener, and eminently more livable.

I'm very curious to hear more about what this mechanic entails and the impacts it carries in play. I'm a sucker for any form of restoration and, crucially, for ARPGs that let me blend my way through enormous throngs of enemies. It looks like Wardens of Avalon is offering a touch of both. It's launching sometime in 2027, and you can find out more over on Steam, where you can also sign up for the playtests.

Check out everything revealed at the PC Gaming Show.

Have you ever wished you could be a fighter pilot, tumbling through the skies, pirouetting through the air as you take out enemies on all sides? Honestly, me neither until a few minutes ago when I first saw the Wind Runners trailer. Now I'm humming the Top Gun soundtrack and searching Vinted for second-hand flight suits. Take a look.

Wind Runners looks like a kinetic 2D shooter that channels a little of Vlambeer's classic Luftrausers, but that brings in a vibrant anime-inspired world flecked with roguelike elements. As someone with an attention span measured in nanoseconds, the idea of being able to hop in and immediately get the full experience from a game without waiting around is a tempting one. It should appeal to people used to playing classic shoot-'em-ups as well as the adrenaline junkies.

There’s also something refreshingly old-school about the whole thing. In an era where even action games are asking me to craft—or are designed around silly concepts like ebb and flow—Wind Runners seems laser-focused on movement, momentum, and making things explode as you try to get into the flow state.

The trailer, shown for the first time at the PC Gaming Show 2026, flaunts some pacey action and a cracking soundtrack. It feels like the perfect appetiser. As a result, I'm already desperate to take Wind Runners for a spin myself.

Yes, it turns out another of my many character flaws is impatience, but luckily for me (and you) there's a demo out right now for people who want to strap in and fight the variety of mecha-inspired baddies featured in the trailer. My favourite is the missile-spewing giant spider, and I cannot wait to get shot out of the sky by it repeatedly.

Lucky for me, the game launches into early access September 23, 2026, and there's a demo on Steam out now.

We've just shown off a bunch of new trailers and announcements as part of June's PC Gaming Show. You can see them all for yourself here.

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.

We love a good shadowdrop at the PC Gaming Show, so to be able to drop a sequel to one of my favourites is a real delight. Today we're here to tell you that not only does the ridiculously named 2 Fights 2 Tight Spaces exist, but you can get it in Early Access right now if you so desire.

2021's Fights in Tight Spaces was one of my favourite deck-building games, dropping you and your deck into a series of different action sequences and tasking you with getting through it. Cards allowed you to do things like move around your enemies, or do a cool jumpy flip kick that I don't really understand but meant you were kicking two people in the face at once.

In the world premiere trailer, shown at PC Gaming Show, it looks like there's been a few changes. The biggest addition seems to be co-op multiplayer, allowing you and some buddies to get together and beat up thugs as a group pastime.

There are some extra additions too. Like all of the best action movies you'll now be using your environment offensively, and the trailer has you dunking an unfortunate mook into a deep fat fryer like the most disturbing part of Spooks, if any of you can remember as far back as 2002. Outside of the environmental bits, it also seems like you're going to be taking actual weapons from your opponents too, with cards that will change what they do depending on whether you're armed or not.

Add in the lick of paint that makes environments more detailed, and it feels like a meaningful step forward, with some additions from the half-sequel Knights in Tight Spaces. If you'll excuse me, I'm going to hop into it right now.

Check out everything revealed at the PC Gaming Show.

Marathon has gotten me back into shooters in a way I haven't been since I was a teenager sweating about my kill/death ratio with my mates in Call of Duty lobbies. But as much as I love Bungie's sci-fi masterpiece, it's just not the same when my friends aren't around. Lucky for me, singleplayer sci-fi roguelite Void/Breaker has a new update ready for me to play whenever I get the urge to click on heads.

A trailer revealed at today's PC Gaming Show shows off the update in all its glory. It introduces a new zone to run rampant in, more enemies, an extra boss, new modules to customise your build with, more distorted, fragmented zones, and a sniper rifle, for when you're in the mood to be precise rather than zipping around blasting everything in sight.

It's a solid-lookinng update to a game that's already gotten "Very Positive" reviews on Steam.

There's another update planned for later this year, and the most recent one in April added a ton of new modules and improvements, so if you've got the game already but haven't played in a while, now is the perfect time to dive back in.

Well, maybe not right this very second, after the PC Gaming Show is done would be better. Once we're wrapped, check out Void/Breaker's early access build on Steam.

Check out everything revealed at the PC Gaming Show.

I've always been a little sad that the GBA-era style of RPGs—where you had those cute 2.5D pixel graphics—never caught on. Mostly because I think it looked pretty good, tying together graphical limitations at the time with the advent of better handheld tech. Well, Cassette Beasts has kept that tradition alive and well. First with the original game back in 2023, and now with Cassette Beasts 2002.

Debuting at the PC Gaming Show, Cassette Beasts 2002 is another entry in the monster-collecting game that has a lot of the same hallmarks—a gorgeous artstyle, appealing characters, a bumpin' soundtrack and (most importantly) the ability to smush your beasts together to form entirely new critters.

And, indeed, to actually become them—you're transforming into these things, putting your dukes up, which feels a little more ethical than the legally-distinct but nonetheless relevant Pokémon.

The trailer doesn't give too much away, other than there'll be some kind of dual worlds mechanic going on—but PC Gamer's own Lauren Morton played the first Cassette Beasts back in 2023 and had a lot of positive things to say about it:

"Cassette Beasts is endearingly weird. Not Undertale-level weird—at least not from the several hours I've put in so far—but things are not at all what they seem in New Wirral. I quite quickly encountered its glitchy, horrifying archangels and not long after was off to meet some kind of cult one of my party members had escaped from. Oh, and then there's the vampire landlords."

Given what 2002's trailer hints at, I'm not sure things are getting any less weird in this alternate reality. Everything's looking either rather gothic or run-down and industrial. Either way, if you liked the first game, 2002's looking to be more of the same.

Cassette Beast 2002 is aiming to release early next year, though you can wishlist the game on Steam now.

Check out everything revealed at the PC Gaming Show.

There's just something so cool about using melee weapons in a cyberpunk setting. The katana in Ghostrunner—sublime. The mantis blades in Cyberpunk 2077—inspired. SlashZero, as the name suggests, lets you slice and dice enemies across various timelines. Oh, and you can juggle them in the air with sick combos, too. I haven't seen this much off-the-ground action since my housemate battered me at Super Smash Bros. Ultimate.

In SlashZero, you take on the role of a Timehacker. Their mission is to take down the Lord of the Void, Hieros, who seems to have thrown the whole world into disarray. There are also scattered Authority Keys, Codes, and Blessings all over the place. You'll collect these on your forays into the disparate timelines to upgrade your build on the fly.

The different builds shown off in a new PC Gaming Show trailer look pretty cool. As a fan of Dead Cells, I'm excited to get stuck in and see what synergies I can come up with. The game's 3D anime style lends itself perfectly to the frenetic combat, which sees the characters darting around enemies as they slice, shoot, and summon tornadoes and fiery explosions with elemental powers.

You can freeze enemies in place and go to town on them, racking up huge damage while they're immobile, or you can summon lightning bolts that chain onto multiple foes if you're surrounded. The fire looks like my go-to, though. Burning columns of it rise up from the ground, and hot circles form outward from your Timehacker. I like to control space and get that burn-over-time damage so I'm still getting rid of my opponents even while repositioning.

The trailer shows two of the Timehackers in action—a guy with two swords and a woman with guns that can rapid fire or blast like shotguns—and a third is coming soon. If you want to see more, wishlist SlashZero on Steam and sign up for the playtest here.

Check out everything revealed at the PC Gaming Show.

Brave warriors, it is time to assemble and to die. That's my takeaway from the PC Gaming Show trailer for AfterQuest, which blends up all your nostalgia for the pixelly RPGs of yesteryear with the roguelikes and lites of… today-year. Your party's gonna die and come back a bunch, is what I'm saying.

The trailer gives us a glimpse at a series of battles that are very much in the OG Final Fantasy (and plenty of other RPGs) vein: colourful warriors facing off against ghouls and goblins and monsters in turn-based battles. We get a little look at the roguelite parts too: a tidy loot roulette offering us a choice of three different bits of equipment, each with gameplay-altering effects like stun chance and heal-on-hit.

The look is very nice indeed: a pleasant-to-look-at medley of vivid pixel art and fantasy backgrounds, but it's the info sheet that piques my interest most. You tell me something is a roguelite, I'll assume my party members are all going to absolutely eat it and that I shouldn't get attached. AfterQuest tells me I am wrong: it's very lore-focused, and you're encouraged to get attached to your lil guys and learn their personal stories.

That approach even extends to the game's villains, who apparently all have their own sad reasons for becoming bad guys that you'll have to reckon with as you fight them. Though not while you fight them—the devs at Ember Arcade are quite clear that the game is more or less divided in two: on runs, you'll be fighting, while you learn all the backstory stuff in between.

If that sounds up your street, then you can wishlist it now on Steam, and the full game is coming soon.

Check out everything revealed at the PC Gaming Show.