Valve boss Gabe Newell has a history of being right about things, probably most famously about Steam itself: Making the platform an integral part of Half-Life 2, when most of the world insisted that digital distribution "will never happen," may be the single most impactful decision in the history of PC gaming. But he was a little bit off the mark eight years later, when he gave us his thoughts on what the future might hold—including, possibly, a world where Steam has been left in the dust by its competitors.

"There's always this temptation to assume that the way things are today is the way things are going to be, and having been through this long enough in the games industry, I think I and everyone at Valve know that you're only as successful as what you've done lately," Newell told us in an interview back in 2011. "So the idea that Steam is somehow the answer to digital distribution ignores the fact that every two or three years, something is going to change dramatically.

"It's like, along comes the Wii and that overthrows a bunch of ideas; along comes social gaming and that throws over a bunch of ideas. If you stand still and you're not doing the things that you need to do to be valuable in the future, you're going to be left behind really rapidly."

The up-and-comer in those days was Origin, Electronic Arts' own digital distribution platform, which EA had positioned that same year as a competitor to Steam: It even produced a chart, as part of a quarterly financial report, comparing Origin's current and future platform features with its "leading competitor," which, I mean, come on:

Crysis 2It was also around this time that EA began making noise about peeling its games off of Steam: The removal of Crysis 2 and other games from Steam was explained as merely a minor policy conflict, but the suspect timing naturally led tongues to wag.

Reacting to that, Newell told us at the time that it was "incumbent on us to create value for those partners, whether it's EA or Ubisoft or Take-Two, or any of the other developers who are using it. That's our goal, so we're going to keep trying to do that with EA and trying to convince them that it's worth it to have their games on Steam."

Steam hasn't stood still in the 15 years since then, obviously, but I think it's fair to say that it is essentially in the same position it was then: massive, omnipresent, and too good to leave thanks to the powerful magic of Steam sales, which Newell cited as one major factor in Steam's success in particular. In the years since Epic tried to launch its own competitor, Steam has added a steady stream of new features rather than fighting for exclusives.

The world around Steam has most definitely changed, though: A decade after this interview ran, they'd all come crawlin' back to Steam: After dalliances of varying durations with their own storefronts and the Epic Games Store, EA, Activision, Ubisoft, and Take-Two all opted to kiss the ring.

Even the mighty behemoth of Amazon got demolished by Steam, an ass-kicking made doubly funny by the fact that most of the world didn't even know there was a fight going on. It reminds me of the classic Excalibur throwdown between Captain Britain and the Juggernaut:

Through it all, Steam has only entrenched itself more deeply, setting new concurrent user records every few months (most recently surpassing 42 million users) and adding thousands of new games to its library every year.

And all of this has happened despite Steam's refusal to meaningfully reduce what it takes from games sales: While both Epic and Microsoft take dramatically lower percentages on sales made through their storefronts, Valve has only fiddled slightly with Steam, and it continues to aggressively defend the 70/30 split it takes out of the gate. It speaks volumes that developers don't like it, but—like EA and the rest—they keep comin' back for it. Maybe Steam really was "the answer" after all.

Sandbox fun times simulator Garry's Mod has gobbled up pretty much every official Valve Source game into its toybox at this point, but there is land yet to conquer. Facepunch announced this week that the 20-year-old game's next patch, planned for April 29, will finally bring Black Mesa into the fold.

"By popular demand and with approval from its developers, this update will be adding mounting support for Black Mesa in Garry's Mod," the blog post reads.

That's great news if you're one of the tens of thousands of folks still playing Garry's Mod daily. Black Mesa, if you missed it at the time, is an official Valve-approved Source remake of Half-Life 1 made by the Crowbar Collective.

It's an excellent reimagining of the original that makes major improvements to Half-Life's animations, sounds, and weapon feedback—relevant features that Garry's Mod creators will soon be able to utilize in their own stuff.

While Garry's Mod has no shortage of add-ons that attempt to modernize Valve's base Source assets, there are loads of custom modes that could benefit from Crowbar Collective's take on the Black Mesa facility. You'll have to own Black Mesa to properly use its assets in Garry's Mod, and to celebrate, the pair of games are on sale as a bundle for $13.

That's the flashiest bullet point of the update, but far from the only ones. The full patch notes list over a hundred minor bug fixes and asset changes, some of which include deleting functions that served no purpose in Garry's Mod and were a "waste of resources." I guess that can happen when one game gets sporadically patched for 20 years.

It's a good time to reacquaint yourself with Garry's Mod, as its spiritual sequel S&box is right around the corner. S&box, much like Gmod, leverages a custom version of Valve's Source 2 engine to make and modify games to your heart's content, but it's also going much further. Facepunch says S&box is more like a complete game engine that can be used to make entire games and even publish them as standalone releases on Steam. It's out on April 28, the day before the Garry's Mod patch.

I'll hand it to Blizzard: There's not a better band to write a Diablo song than Korn. I may have been slightly too young to call myself a legitimate fan, but my dad regularly had Korn on in his truck when he took me to school, and I distinctly remember staring at the grinning skull on the Diablo 2 box whenever I was allowed to use the family computer back then.

It gives me just enough of the nostalgia Blizzard is trying to spark with Korn's new song Reward The Scars. An animated music video for the track just dropped—perfectly timed for anyone who wants something to blast while playing Diablo 4: Lord of Hatred when it releases later today.

Even the music video feels like a throwback: The big demon lord Mephisto is drawn as if he was in a '90's comic book with his big hollow eyes and twisted horns. Once he fully abandons his human form and starts tearing people apart, the song erupts into a heavy breakdown that I'm sure 14-year-old me would've been obsessed with.

I'm also convinced Mephisto would love it too, if Sanctuary had access to YouTube or Spotify. Reward The Scars is the kind of song made for brooding demons intent on violently taking over the world. It's heavy and haunting and angry and could be used in an AMV for basically any moment cut from the expansion's campaign.

If anyone was worried Korn would change after going quiet for the last four years, Reward The Scars proves they've still got it. Singer Jonathan Davis is a known gamer, so I'm not surprised at all to see him agree to work with Blizzard on this one. Even though he's been writing a new album over the break, I don't think the guy who used to run his own World of Warcraft guild is going to ignore the phone when Blizzard calls.

Sadly, we won't be able to use that H.R. Giger microphone stand Davis is known for using as an in-game staff or anything. Missed opportunity, if you ask me.

Look, the Elder Scrolls series has never had great combat, but 2002's Morrowind and the games before it are the worst offenders. A new mod for the OpenMW source port could be just the thing to make the open world clunker sing, though: It adds a Sekiro-style perfect block parry, as well as one of the most cleverly balanced overhauls of Morrowind's controversial percent-chance-to-hit system I've seen.

Author MrArrean describes his mod, N'Garde (nice), as "What if Bethesda had another year or two to let Morrowind cook?" with a goal of "more difficult, but more rewarding melee combat." N'Garde is primarily built around the best kind of parry: A perfect block where, when you hit the timing window, you take no damage and stagger your opponent.

Miss the window? You still get an imperfect block that doesn't ruin your whole day like the sluggish shield swings of Dark Souls.

N'Garde is shockingly modular and lightweight, working with completely unmodded OpenMW and a list of 15 tested mods, including animation replacers. I love how thoughtfully it's been weaved into Morrowind's base systems, too: Your perfect block window and imperfect block efficiency can be improved by leveling the game's block skill, but if you're blocking with a weapon and no shield, your skill with that weapon type (long blades, blunt, etc.) will impact your effectiveness as well.

MrArrean even tweaked parry windows and effectiveness by weapon type: Bigger and heavier weapons are understandably superior to lighter ones, but shields reign supreme over all. N'Garde even plays nice with Morrowind's default (awful) hit chance system, while also offering one of the most inspired alternatives I've seen.

One of the great filters to prospective Morrowind players is, understandably, running into the first dungeon, smacking a guy standing right in front of you, and having your weapon just do nothing like it's passing through thin air. Morrowind is the worst of both worlds by default.

It's a first-person action game, much less abstracted than its forebears, but it still has a very D&D-adjacent system where your skill in a weapon determines whether you hit an enemy or not, resulting in what I can only describe as a mechanical Uncanny Valley effect: Morrowind's feedback is too good and responsive otherwise for such an archaic system to feel right.

But as bad as missing melee attacks in Morrowind feels, the game was balanced around this system, and when I've modded it out completely, the game just feels too flat and boring. N'Garde has a completely optional overhaul of this system to introduce "Glancing Blows," a halfway point between misses and full hits:

• "Preserves vanilla hit chance mechanic, but - a missed attack becomes a "glancing blow" deals a maximum of 20% damage and doesn't grant skill XP to the attacker. Time-to-kill is roughly the same, just better combat feedback.
• If 'strength affects h2h damage' is enabled in launcher⁠—missed h2h attacks lose strength bonus, but instead only get reduced to 40% damage.
• Takes 'normal weapon resistance' and armour into account.
• While disabled attacks that are missed can still be parried, or perfect parried to stagger the opponent."

Taken together, this combination of feedback and functionality could even result in more fun melee combat than in Morrowind's successors, Oblivion and Skyrim. Much as I love all of these games, even more recent entries' melee systems are still booboo, seeing you just trading hits back and forth like a pair of pugilists from before they invented ducking and weaving⁠—why do you think everybody just plays Skyrim as a sneaky archer?

Magic is the way to go in Morrowind, but I never like being a pure mage in any RPG. So the next time I feel the urge to rock some kind of Orc or Dark Elf Nightblade on the scenic island of Vvardenfell, you best believe I'm taking N'Garde for a spin⁠—even with my increasing aversion to modding Bethesda and Bethesda-adjacent games in such a manner.

As reported by Kotaku, Bohrdom, the game developed by suspected White House Correspondents' Dinner shooter Cole Allen Thomas, has been pulled from sale on Steam. The chemistry/physics simulation game had seen a wave of new purchases, with its accompanying spike in reviews expressing political opinions related to Thomas' alleged attempted assassination of US president Donald Trump.

Bohrdom had already garnered significant attention the very night of the incident, with Steam users flooding Bohrdom's discussion forums and reviews on Saturday and Sunday, some to crack jokes, other to stake a political opinion either way.

At the time of writing, it is not clear whether Bohrdom was removed by Valve, or a representative acting on Allen's behalf. I have reached out to Valve for comment, and will update this story if I hear back. Bohrdom's store page, forums, and reviews are still up, even if you can no longer purchase the game.

Valve being behind the removal would not be surprising: Pressure from socially conservative organizations via payment processing companies has led to an uptick in adult games getting banned from sale on the platform⁠—Valve seems more willing than at any point in its history to take a heavy hand with Steam moderation. But even before that relatively recent development, banning Bohrdom would have been in line with Valve's more traditionally laissez faire moderation style.

Valve has previously banned deliberately trolling, politically toxic games on a case-by-case basis, as with this mass-culling back in 2018. When the developer of gladiator management sim Domina began using minor update patch notes as a vehicle for anti-trans invective in 2022, Valve removed the game from sale after repeated warnings to the developer.

Bohrdom's lack of organic sales prior to the White House Correspondents' Dinner incident, coupled with the uniform political nature of the new activity, strikes me as being in breach of Valve's usual norms. But there could also be a more prosaic explanation.

Many of Bohrdom's reviewers may have abused Steam's refund window to write a review and get their two dollars back⁠—most of the reviews have less than a half hour of playtime logged⁠—further delegitimizing this spike in activity in Valve's eyes. If you're going to sweatily rush to write a lame meme review of a game connected to current events, you should have to put some cash on the line.

It was always going to be like this. Pricing was conspicuous by its absence when we first got a taste of the new Valve hardware in Bellevue back in November last year, and as soon as all the RAMpocalypse stuff started we knew that whatever we wanted them to be, the Steam Machine and Steam Frame were always going to cost more than if they'd been launched in 2025.

But, without a ton of expensive RAM inside them, I was still hopeful that the Steam Controller wouldn't be a victim of the PC pricing catastrophe that has been 2026 so far. When I first got my hands on the pad and started it up plumbed into my home PC, I was thinking 'yeah, at $60 I'd be happy, and I could probably go for $80.'

How naive I was.

Though maybe not really that naive because it sounds like Valve itself was aiming for pricing more along those lines, too. But events outside of its control have contrived to make it more expensive than planned.

"I'm not the expert on this," Valve designer, Lawrence Yang tells me during a chat ahead of launch, "I do know price has gone up from where we originally wanted it to be.

"Also, you may have noticed in the price list that we sent you, there are some variants across regions. So depending on where a customer is going to buy it—because of imports and tariffs and duties, etc.—the price is going to vary depending on where you're purchasing it. That is something that has changed a bit over time, too."

With the Steam Controller now launching at $99 next week, with add-to-basket availability kicking off on May 4, the price has been one of the very few things we've not been so enamoured with about the new Valve pad. To be clear, that pricing is not punitive, and does mean it sits kinda in the middle of the premium and budget PC pads. But when you can get Hall effect sticks in a wireless pad with a charging dock that costs less than $30 you've got to really want the extras the Steam Controller offers.

But it does offer a hell of a lot of PC functionality even if the pad itself isn't necessarily what you would call a premium offering. There isn't a controller out there that can offer what the Steam Controller does, and while maybe the majority of PC gamers aren't always going to need that level of utility in a pad, there are still going to be a lot of folk who want to take a look.

And in taking a look they might well fall down the rabbit hole of nested settings screens that really offer up all the power Valve's new pad has built inside it. I know I wouldn't have thought about using gyro control on my PC if it hadn't been for having a Steam Controller.

I'm also going to say I don't think that pricing is going to have any appreciable effect on the volume of Steam Controllers that fly off Valve's digital shelves. I'm expecting to see this thing topping Steam's Top Sellers list for a long time to come, especially if it is able to turn those factory knobs it's promising to keep stock rolling.

Actor, writer and director David Hayter has had a long and successful career in multiple industries, but for videogame fans he'll always be the voice of Solid Snake and Big Boss. The first 3D entry in the Metal Gear series, 1998's Metal Gear Solid, was a cinematic leap forward in an era where videogame voice acting was in its infancy, and Hayter's gruff performance as the battle-weary Solid Snake gave the character a believability and depth that simply wasn't common at the time.

In a new interview with Fall Damage (spotted by GR+) Hayter discusses his time on the series, how he settled on Snake's voice, and whether he had any clue about what was going on. "When we started Metal Gear and I started taking on Snake, I didn't want him to sound like Kurt Russell from Escape from New York," says Hayter.

Snake's character was modelled after Russell's character Snake Plissken, something that Hideo Kojima would explicitly acknowledge in MGS2 by making the character's alias Iroquois Pliskin. "I knew that there were similarities there and I felt like he needed to sound more weathered, you know," recalls Hayter. "That he had been through a lot more than I had been through at that point in my life."

Elsewhere in the interview Hayter is asked about the often baffling plot that unfolds across the games, which is rammed with double-bluffs, triple agents, shadowy cabals, outright misinformation, and countless references to real-world events and organisations. The story is often brilliant: but there is simply no denying that it is initially very hard to get your head around some of what it's doing.

"Do I understand the story of Metal Gear Solid? Uh, basically I do," says Hayter. "Do I understand all of it? Absolutely not. I didn't understand all of it while we were recording it. I'd be like 'What does this mean?' and they'd say, 'just say it.' And I'd be like, 'Okay.'"

One of my favourite lines in Metal Gear Solid 2 comes when Commandant Scott Dolph exclaims in surprise "the La-li-lu-le-lo", a moment I admire mainly because the voice actor doesn't crack up as he's delivering it. But that's the kind of script these games have: at times they're utterly wacky but, as Hayter points out, that's the secret sauce.

"That's what makes Metal Gear, Metal Gear." says Hayter. "There's more information. There's more character development. There's more detail to the story than you can ever possibly absorb, no matter how many times you play it. That's what makes the world feel real and rich and lovable."

Hayter himself has made a welcome return as the face of the now Kojima-less series for Konami, as the publisher gradually feels its way back into the series (most recently with the excellent remake Metal Gear Solid Delta: Snake Eater). Speaking last year, Hayter says he can see a future for the series without Kojima, but boy is it gonna be different.

"I think it's absolutely possible," said Hayter. "Will it be the same? No. There's no way to replicate his exact genius, his exact weirdness, his specific personality.

"I've been a working screenwriter for 26 straight years and written on countless pieces, and I think I'm pretty good at it. but I look at the Metal Gear scripts, and I'm like, 'I could never do this.'"

"So we have built up a good supply," Valve engineer Steve Cardinali tells me just ahead the launch of the Steam Controller. Which is good news, because I've got a feeling this is a pad that's going to be super popular with PC gamers and I've got to believe there is going to be some serious pressure on stock levels around the world.

Because that's the thing here, this is a very different launch to the original Steam Deck, where availability was staggered globally. The Steam Controller is going on sale everywhere, all at once.

"We hope that a lot of people around the world really, really like it, and we sell a bunch of them," Lawrence Yang, a designer at Valve tells me. "That's our hope. We're optimistic. I'm optimistic."

And having spent time with my own Steam Controller I can see why he is. There is so much to the Steam Controller, from its standard PC pad capabilities, to its haptics, to its gyro control, to its battery life, repairability, and of course, those trackpads. There's also the fact the delayed Steam Machine has been so hyped and folk are so desperate to get their hands on some new Valve hardware, I can see people wanting to even just get a piece of the new techie triumvirate of Steam Controller, Steam Machine, and Steam Frame as soon as they can.

"We have built up a good supply of this," Cardinali says when I ask about Valve's ability to maintain stock levels for the Controller. "But it's based on what we anticipate supply to be. And supply could be much larger than we anticipate. In which case our production has a finite limit on how much we can make. And we'll do our best to keep up with demand if it greatly exceeds our expectations."

"We have knobs," interjects Yang.

"We have knobs we can turn to try to get things to people faster," says Cardinali. "It's complicated and you know the mass production machine is a big machine with a lot of momentum. So, depending on how it goes for the first chunk of time, if we have high demand and it stays high demand, there are things we can do to help alleviate that down the road."

And what are those knobs?

"We do think we'll have a good amount of stock around the world for the launch," says Yang. "So and then, at the factory, if we're like, 'oh, we actually probably need to make more' then we can turn that knob up and have them producing more."

As ever with PC gaming, however, there is always the shadowy figure of lag getting in the way. And even if Valve is able to start turning knobs in the factory to up the production levels of its controller to cope with higher than anticipated demand, there will inevitably be a lag in getting those new pads into retail.

"We try to build enough wiggle room so that we can try not to be out of stock for a really long time," notes Yang.

One of the many impressive features of Valve's new Steam Controller is just how straightforward the pad is when it comes to repairability. It's so easy to open up and get to the insides. That's great and all, but where are you going to get the necessary parts to make any repairs down the line? Well, Valve has told us that, like with the Steam Deck, it is working with iFixit to make it easy for you to bag replacement Steam Controller parts post-launch.

Jacob and I recently sat down with Valve's Steve Cardinali and Lawrence Yang to talk about the Steam Controller and, as repairability has been something that has seriously impressed us in our time with the new Valve pad, talk inevitably came around to that. In the process of his Steam Controller review, Jacob took his pad down to its constituent parts many times, revealing just how simple it is to get at every part of the device.

And it still works now.

It's the sort of thing that feels very Valve, and feels like it's been tailor-made to ensure that there is a healthy modding community for the controller after launch. If someone wants to start making translucent back covers, I know at least a couple PC Gamer folk who would be first in line.

"We wanted to make sure it was easily accessible for our customers," Steve Cardinali, an engineer at Valve who worked on the Steam Controller, tells us. "We know our community, right?

"They want to take it open and if they want to swap something out, they can do that. If they want to make their buttons look different, that's fine with us. So yeah, it's easy to open. In this case, purposefully, there are no snaps in this. If you notice when you open the seven screws, it just comes right off."

Of course, it isn't just about customising your pad, it's about longevity, and that's why the battery is so accessible, too. "We don't anticipate it being a problem for anybody," says Cardinali, "if they wanted to swap it out for a reason, we intentionally designed it to be easily serviceable. You can just swap it out. You don't need to unplug a connector or anything. Just put it in."

Inevitably, though, the question of where a user is going to be able to get spare parts from comes up in our chat. "We will be making replacement parts available through iFixit," Valve designer Lawrence Yang tells us. "Just like last time."

Though it's important to note this partnership is not going to be in play straight away when the pads go on sale in May: "It won't be at launch," says Yang, "but after launch they will be made available."

Which isn't a great surprise given that the Steam Controller is going into a worldwide release, and no matter how good the supply is, there is a real healthy appetite for the first part of the new Valve hardware triumvirate. I would expect all the parts around right now are needed to build new controller pads rather than build up inventories of replacement components.

The new Steam Controller is an impressive bit of equipment—and if you're itching to get your hands on one, there isn't too long left to wait. According to Valve, the dual-trackpad-equipped beastie will be available to stick in your cart on the Steam store from Monday, May 4.

Pricing varies by region, with the mega-pad coming in at $99 in the US, €99 in the EU, and £85 in the UK. Aussie buyers will pay AUD 149, whereas Polish Steam-enjoyers will pay PLN 419.

Valve says these pricing differences are down to distribution costs, import duties/tariffs, and marketing conditions, which is pretty much a summary of many of the challenges facing the entire tech industry right now.

Still, the price tag is slightly less than I was expecting, especially when you take into account the uniqueness of Valve's design. The Steam Controller is a sizable beast with two large, haptic-enabled trackpads and twin TMR sticks, alongside a more traditional array of face buttons and triggers.

There are also four sizeable buttons on the rear of the grips, which makes it a very customisable controller. There aren't many gaming devices that can truly mimic a mouse, and it's even got gyro controls to play with, too.

Our Jacob likes his review sample very much, calling it a "comfy pad for comfy gamers." It's not particularly quick for competitive gaming due to a standard 250 Hz polling rate, but if you're the sort of person who likes to recline on a couch or game in bed, it's pretty ace.

And with a 35-hour battery life, you shouldn't have to top it up too often with the included charging puck, either. The original Steam Controller was a bit of a disappointment, but this one's got a design that really works—and there's only a short while to go before you can grab one for yourself.

The Steam Controller is the first of three new bits of hardware from Valve this year. It's designed to let you take control of your PC from the comfort of your couch and without a mouse, which is sure to appeal to a certain type of gamer.

The second-generation Steam Controller includes everything one might expect from a gamepad, including two thumbsticks and the usual array of buttons. But it also offers input parity with the Steam Deck, Valve's popular handheld gaming PC, and in doing so, delivers a few extra tricks. Beneath its symmetrical sticks are two trackpads, which you can use to glide around the desktop or look around in-game. It also includes a 6-axis gyro, which is shockingly an even better way to mimic a mouse. I'm a gyro control convert.

The Steam Controller does have to be quite convincing to justify its price tag, however. It costs $99/€99/£85/$149 AUD, which puts it a league above budget pads with similar specs and fewer inputs. You're paying for convenience here. To use your PC with ease while lounging or lazing.

If you prefer to game bolt upright and laser-focused on your kill/death ratio, you'll want to look elsewhere. This isn't a competitive pad. It's a comfy pad for comfy gamers—and if that sounds like you, read on.

Ergonomics

4

Performance

3

Internals

4.5

Aesthetics

4

Software

3.5

Battery

5

Value

3

012345

Group 1 Data

Product	Ergonomics ()	Performance ()	Internals ()	Aesthetics ()	Software ()	Battery ()	Value ()
Steam Controller (2026)	4	3	4.5	4	3.5	5	3

We have scored the Steam Controller out of five in seven distinct categories in order to break down both its strengths and weaknesses.

Steam Controller - Features

Steam Controller - Ergonomics

Good news, despite its larger size, the Steam Controller rests comfortably in my hands. In the name of science, I also asked my partner with smaller hands whether she found it to be easy to reach the thumbsticks, which are set close to the middle of the controller, and she had no problems whatsoever. Same goes for the trackpads, which she and I can both reach just fine.

You have to move your palm ever so slightly away from the controller to shift between the thumbsticks and trackpads, and because you might use the left thumbstick and right trackpad at the same time, you might find your right hand is moving around a lot more than your left. Though it's all fairly accessible with minimal movement. The trackpads are recessed just a touch to make using them feel a little more natural.

One of the Steam Controller's better features are the rear grip buttons. These are placed very low down on the inside of both grips, landing right beneath my fingers. As someone that tends to ignore rear paddles on controllers, these feel genuinely useful and with a satisfying click. Though, the lower set, R5 and L5, are fairly easy to press by accident.

Steam Controller - Performance

The Steam Controller feels agile enough in most games. Though you can tell it's destined for the couch and not contests.

The face buttons are all run-of-the-mill membrane. They feel consistent, if nothing else. The same can be said of the D-pad, which is stiff but feels stable for it, and the triggers, which use Hall effect sensors, but are nothing special. Though helped along by decent haptics in the grips and trackpads, if you're after tactile feedback for competitive play, I'd look elsewhere. The Steam Controller isn't going to deliver much of that. That's also reflected in its 250 Hz polling rate—many pads today will bump that up to 1,000 Hz.

Instead, the Steam Controller has more to offer the horizontal, or at least lazily reclined, gamer.

The Steam Deck has already proven how effective trackpads can be for imitating the movement of a mouse. I reckon they're around 70% of the way there, something like that. I won't pretend like that final 30% doesn't matter a whole lot, but in some strategy or RPG games, or when browsing your desktop or the interwebs, 70% is all you need. The Steam Controller works well for those.

I can also see why that one engineer at Valve loves gyro controls. I'm starting to finally get it with the Steam Controller. I find I have a higher accuracy across the desktop with gyro controls compared to the trackpads and it's a big improvement over attempting to use a keyboard and mouse while lying down. Don't even get me started on those weird couch tables (though Hope did enjoy her time with one).

Moreover, the trackpads work great in tandem with the gyro controls. The gyro is by default only enabled when you are touch the trackpad or thumbstick, meaning you're naturally placed to blend a few input methods. You can whip across the screen with the gyro then switch seamlessly to the trackpad for more controlled movements. Then back over to the other trackpad to scroll through the Steam Sale.

While my experience in some games saw me reaching for the thumbsticks again, anything accepting of standard mouse movement feels the benefit of dual-wielding these two unusual inputs. For the intended audience here, they make a lot of sense and they feel very snappy.

Nevertheless, you'll be relying on the thumbsticks for a good deal of your gaming with the Steam Controller. These are a highlight of the Steam Controller for me. Firstly, it's because it has thumbsticks. Two of them. Unlike the last one. Secondly, because they're a good height, responsive, and easy to configure in Steam. Thirdly, I don't have to replace them with Hall effect like I did the Steam Deck, as they're already TMR.

Steam Controller - Internals

You can dismantle the Steam Controller with relative ease and using only a handful of tools: a pair of driver bits (Torx 6 and Torx 5), a spudger, and a pair of tweezers. I've carried out a full Steam Controller teardown as you can see above, and it only takes just 15 minutes to get from built to bits.

Valve tells me that it is planning to offer official spare parts via iFixit, as it currently does for the Steam Deck. This won't be available at launch but sometime after. That means any future repairs should be very straightforward, though I suspect it will also entice modders to take things further.

If anyone designs a translucent Steam Controller shell, you have a customer right here.

Though we did experience minor issues with the two samples we received for review. One had a faint squeak when the trigger was reset, which I fixed by prodding the spring, and the other a slightly misaligned shell that gave it a bit of a rough-feeling edge.

Steam Controller - Aesthetics

With input parity to the Steam Deck, it makes sense that the Steam Controller also has looks to match. But beyond the obvious similarities, there are some slight differences.

The Steam Controller has a more textured finish compared to the Steam Deck. It's also a lighter shade of grey, which is noticeable in direct sunlight. The face buttons and D-pad are also larger on the controller, and the slightly recessed trackpads are also tilted for a more natural hand position. The Steam and QAM buttons are also raised, and the shoulder buttons have a little more travel to them.

It looks more sculpted than some early Reddit mockups of what Valve might do, but not a million miles off what was expected either. Importantly, it looks and feels a lot better than the first-generation Steam Controller. The modern version still has that quality of affordability about it—you'll find much more polished controllers on the market—but it feels solid. The Puck also helps keep your desk or TV unit tidy while keeping the receiver close to the Controller.

Steam Controller - Software

The Steam Controller, unsurprisingly, relies on Steam for all its software needs.

You'll find all the settings in the Controller tab of the Settings menu. There's a Pair and Manage tab, which shows the pairing status of the included Puck. It can be connected to up to four Steam Controllers at once, though there's one included in every box. You'll also see two further wireless pairing slots at the bottom. These are for the controller itself, as you could connect a single controller to multiple PCs or a PC and a Steam Machine.

There's also another Bluetooth pairing slot that's not displayed, though this is the best way to connect the controller to a Steam Deck without a cable.

Here how you access Bluetooth and a few other useful shortcuts:

• Power on into Bluetooth pairing slot: B + R1/L1 + Steam button
• Power on into wireless pairing slot 1: Hold A + R1 + Steam button
• Power on into wireless pairing slot 2: Hold A + L1 + Steam button
• Power off: Steam button + Y
• Open Steam: Steam button
• Big Picture Mode (while in Steam): Steam button
• Show keyboard: X (in desktop layout)

While a controller is connected, a new 'Steam Controller' tab populates with extra settings to mess with. In this tab, you can rename the controller, identify it (which causes it to rumble and ring out like an old Nokia), adjust button layouts, or test the controller inputs.

To take advantage of the trackpads for desktop browsing or gyro controls, you need to set these up in the Pair and Manage tab. Click to edit the desktop layout and you're able to select different behaviours for the gyro and right trackpad, as well as adjust button mapping and sensitivity. There's actually a whole lot of customisation possible through this screen. If that's not enough, by clicking on the cogwheels to the right of either gyro or trackpad options, there are further fine-tuning options.

For example, you can adjust the gyro controls to only function when you're holding a specific button. By default, this is set to utilise the capacitive touch sensing in the right thumbstick and right trackpad. Gyro will also only be enabled when you're holding the controller via Grip Sense. Though, if you're a leftie, you might want to switch this over to left thumbstick and left trackpad, or set it to only when you press certain inputs. It's up to you.

There's nothing that requires changing out of the box. Some settings for the gyro, at least, will be handy when setting it up for use in a certain game. Though you can access custom layouts for that, both your own configurations or those of the community. Since this has input parity with the Steam Deck, you can use any made for the Deck, too. I've tried a few, and they often work well, if only with a couple tweaks.

The Controller requires Steam or the Steam Link app. I tested it on GeForce Now via my iPhone and while it did connect over Bluetooth, it was not recognised in-game. It did, however, work seamlessly over a local connection using Steam Link.

We also had some teething issues with Ubuntu and Pop! OS, which may be on our end as much as Valve's, but there could be futher tweaks required to get up-and-running off SteamOS and Windows.

One thing you might run into with the Steam Controller is attempting to use it while playing a non-Steam game. There are few options here. You can add a game to Steam and simply run it within the client, which should let you set game-specific controller configurations. Or you can use a desktop profile that just broadly applies to your entire system.

I found the former approach didn't work with Kingdom Come Deliverance II, which I have on Epic and must be booted via the Epic Games Launcher. That's a fairly common issue with some launchers. I tried a few different methods to get around this, such as creating a shortcut in the Epic launcher and adding that to Steam with a launch parameter, but Controller support was funky at best. Instead, I found it easier to just make a new desktop layout tailored to Kingdom Come Deliverance II and selecting that via Steam's settings page. You could do the same for any game. Though some games don't support reconfiguring the back buttons— KCD2 is one of them—gyro controls worked without issue in every game I tried.

Steam Controller - Battery

I'm yet to reach the end of a full charge with the Steam Controller. Valve has the battery life at 35 hours or more, and over the past few days, I've been using it as much as I can across any game I'm playing. I'm even putting my exfils in jeopardy in Marathon by ditching a mouse and keyboard (sorry, console players, but a controller is simply not cutting it). So far, so good. Though it's tough to say how much battery I have burned through exactly, as you can only roughly estimate from the Quick Access Menu icon.

Though in my tests, I ran it for eight hours and checked back on that Quick Access menu battery indicator, and lo and behold, it's still fully green. So a good indication of battery life to come.

Many users may not see the end of a full charge, well, ever. The Puck doubles up as a charging accessory and magnetically attaches to the rear of the controller when you place it down over it. If you set that up somewhere convenient besides your monitor or on a TV stand and make sure to return the controller to it once you're done playing, it'll always be ready to go.

Steam Controller - Value

The Steam Controller costs $99 (€99/£85/$149 AUD).

I didn't know what the price was going to be during my initial testing, and when I was sent it after a few days, I was slightly taken aback. Perhaps it's because the first-generation Steam Controller was sold at a miserly $5 at the end of its life, and the Steam Deck makes most other handhelds look overpriced, but it felt higher than I expected. Yet I've been poking around the controller market and I've come to a different conclusion.

On one end of the market, pads such as the Scuf Envision Pro ($160), Razer Wolverine V3 Pro ($150), Razer Wolverine V3 Pro 8K ($200), Razer Raiju V3 Pro ($220), Scuf Valor Pro ($190), and Victrix Pro BFG Reloaded ($210). The Steam Controller is not a competitive pad that could go toe-to-toe with many of these for competitive play and understandably carries a much lower price tag for that consideration.

On the cheaper end, pads like the GameSir Nova Lite ($25), EasySMX D05 ($45), EasySMX D10 ($60), and GameSir G7 Pro Tri-mode ($80). In some ways, these offer similar if not slightly improved features to the Steam Controller: the GameSir Nova Lite 2 has Hall effect thumbsticks, a 1000 Hz polling rate, trigger stops, and a mechanical D-pad for $27. These budget pads don't always feel super polished in terms of inputs and feel, but then neither does the Steam Controller.

So, the Steam Controller can't compete with competitive controllers, nor on value for money with simpler pads. It can, however, compete on its all-round utility. You have to ask yourself how much value you assign to not having to get up off the couch to navigate the desktop or play a strategy game.

Personally, I could go without the extra inputs most of the time. Valve already provides a useful and free alternative to mouse and keyboard in Big Picture Mode, which offers easy access to most of what Steam has to offer and can be navigated easily with a standard controller. I mostly play horror, rhythm, and racing games on my living room PC, and as such, I don't find myself having to grab a keyboard or mouse all that often.

PC gaming usually requires some amount of messing around in the settings or copying files, and in those cases, the Steam Controller comes into its own.

While there are other controllers with gyro controls, through its trackpads and software integration, the Steam Controller offers a complete package that few others do. Though just because it can do a lot of stuff, doesn't mean you need it to—a more affordable pad with less going will be good enough for many PC gamers.

I've been using the new Steam Controller for a couple of weeks now and over that time I've taken it apart a total of three times. Each time, piece by piece, back to an empty shell. That might sound like a waste of time, but disassembling the Steam Controller only takes around 15 minutes once you know what you're doing.

Valve has designed the inside of the Steam Controller like it was waiting for someone to rip it open. Held together by easily accessible screws, it contains clearly labelled components that, for the most part, could be replaced or repaired at home.

There are a couple parts that may require a little more know-how with a soldering iron, such as the TMR sticks. But Valve has told me it will be making spare parts officially available via iFixit, as it does today for the Steam Deck. That won't happen right away but sometime in the future. Once that happens, we're onto a winner for repairability.

Here's what you need to disassemble the Steam Controller:

• Torx T6 screwdriver
• Torx T5 screwdriver (only for trackpads/trackpad PCB)

Here's what's nice to have:

• Pair of tweezers
• Spudger

Steam Controller - Teardown

During my first couple of days with the Steam Controller, I noticed one of the triggers was a little louder than the other. Only a barely noticeable metallic ping as the trigger reset, but enough for me to take a look inside and see if there was something up.

There are seven Torx screws between me and the inside of the Steam Controller. These require a Torx T6 bit. With those taken care of, the rear shell comes cleanly away.

First off, the squeaky trigger. The trigger mechanism is a simple spring attached beneath the trigger itself, which is sat on a metal bar running through a couple of plastic struts. It's a Hall effect trigger with corresponding sensors on each side of the mainboard.

Looking to the squeaky left trigger, there's not much different to the right. The spring is perhaps at a slight angle compared to the other side, so I prod at it a little, and, voila! The squeak is gone. Simple as.

Diving further in, the battery can be lifted out with just a finger from the right side. The contacts are on the left side but are only held in place by the housing. So, in the event of needing a replacement, this would require nothing more than a single Torx screwdriver and a replacement battery.

The battery is a Li-Ion made by Getac Technology (Kunshan) Co., Ltd and rated to 2,178 mAh and 8.39 Wh.

Removing the battery housing requires unscrewing another four Torx T6 screws, of a shorter length than those holding the outer shell together. Before doing that, however, I remove the two cables that connect the haptic motors in the grips to the mainboard.

The now exposed mainboard has another three Torx T6 screws holding it in place.

It also has a ribbon cable to the PCB for the trackpads, which needs to be removed. The mainboard has a Nordic Semiconductor SOC mounted in the middle, which appears to be a Nordic Semiconductor SoC with Bluetooth and 2.4 GHz (nRF52833).

Upon removing the mainboard, I could see that the TMR thumbsticks are soldered onto the other side of it. That means if a thumbstick were to break, you would need to replace the entire mainboard. Unless you felt comfortable with a soldering iron, of course, in which case it shouldn't be too bad to replace.

The soldered thumbsticks make a change from the Steam Deck, which had its mounted to individual PCBs and made swapping to different thumbsticks an easy job.

You can see from the mainboard that it was manufactured in either September or December. It does seem likely that it's using an international date format and therefore was manufactured in September, which would mean Valve has been piecing these together for a long time. Perhaps a positive sign for widespread availability at launch?

I was unsure where to go next at this point. There's still a board for the trackpads that needs removing, but I can't reach it until I've removed the haptic motors on either side. These appear to be held onto a singular plastic plate that connects both sides of the controller.

I can reach most of the screws holding the plastic frame in place, except for two hidden behind the triggers. For now, I am able to remove a large ribbon cable for the face buttons that rests in place on two small plastic clips at the centre of the controller.

I then realise I only need to remove the metal bar that the triggers are attached to in order to remove them entirely. With those gone, I can finally see under the trigger and apply a drop of lube to the struts holding it in place. And get at the two remaining screws holding the plastic frame.

With the plastic frame gone, the haptic motors, shoulder buttons, and face button membrane all go with it. It's now possible to remove or replace the buttons and rubber gaskets they rest on.

The trackpad PCB has a few more ribbon cables that need to be unhooked and removed, so away those go. Then I can remove four more screws to pull away the PCB itself. This is the first time I need to change my driver bit, switching to a Torx T5.

The screws used here are slightly shorter, so better not mix them up.

There's not much to this trackpad board, beyond a Cirque ASIC for controlling the two modules that rest underneath it.

With that removed, it's onto the final piece of the puzzle: the trackpad modules themselves. With these removed through four screws on each side, the entire controller is in pieces on my desk.

Verdict

I'm impressed. Valve has shown it cares about repairability in the past and that holds true for the Steam Controller.

Admittedly, I first opened it up to try to solve an issue that shouldn't have been there in the first place—the squeaky trigger—but not only was that resolved easily, the repairability of the Steam Controller was laid bare while doing so.

Many parts of the Steam Controller should be an easy replacement with minimal fuss, especially once spare parts are available to purchase.

It's only the thumbsticks that are more likely to require a full repair job, on account of being soldered to the mainboard itself. That's not unusual for a controller and not impossible to do with a soldering iron at home. Though being tunnel magnetoresistance (TMR) sticks, I'm hoping for a long shelf life and minimal stick drift as these are some of the intended benefits over potentiometer.

For now, it's time to put it back together. Make sure to tighten everything down when you're rebuilding, especially the trackpads, as you may end up with a rattle if you don't—don't ask me how I know that.

One thing you get from Supermassive Games that you just can't get from other horror games is a cinematic experience. I like to joke that the premise of these games is simply: 'What would you do if you were in a horror movie', and Directive 8020 stays along those lines as it dumps players in what is essentially John Carpenter's The Thing, but in space.

Aboard the Cassiopeia you follow a group of scientists and explorers, plus one billionaire on their maiden voyage towards a new possible home for humanity. But your travel is rudely interrupted by some strange extraterrestrial lifeform that steals people's identities and then tries to kill off the crew.

The story is made even more suspenseful by its episodic structure, as each episode usually ends on some disastrous cliffhanger or 'oh shit' moment. The end of episode four was the latter for me, as I failed a quick time event during an altercation with one of the monsters, and the character I was playing ended up with one less eye. Whoops.

Splitting the story up into eight is certainly new for The Dark Pictures. But creative director Will Doyle explains that it seemed like the logical next step on the journey to giving players that "feeling you have when you are sitting down and watching a limited TV show."

"We always want to make it feel like you're playing a movie or a TV show," Doyle reiterates. "So [Directive 8020] has a really interesting mix of what we call lean forward and lean back gameplay. You'll have moments where you're like, 'Okay, this is a cinematic narrative scene. I can sit back and enjoy it a little bit more like a movie or TV show,' but you still get to make really, really important decisions throughout that. Then that's interspersed with lean forward moments where you have to avoid an alien, or now search the ship for clues—it's a really interesting mix."

There's plenty of those 'lean forward' moments in episode one, which I played back in August and episode four which I got to check out for the recent preview. In fact, one of the best parts of the 'lean forward' moments is that they'll sometimes catch you by surprise. Directive 8020 does such a good job of convincing you it's a TV series that moments where you need to urgently take over made me jump out of my seat as I forgot about the controller sitting in my hands.

"I think it also gives the story a really interesting edge," Doyle adds. "We always ask ourselves, as designers, would this happen in a movie or a TV show. And it's a really useful lens to look at the story through, or look at the gameplay through, because if it starts to feel too gamey, it kind of pulls you out of that. If you keep the reality of what's happening, it makes everything feel a lot more serious."

But the structure isn't just useful in mimicking a TV show, it's also helpful when it comes to scheduling time for gaming. "I always want to be mindful of people's time as well," Doyle says. "So it's quite nice to know that I can sit down for an evening and go, 'let's play an episode of Directive 8020' and know that it's going to last a fixed amount of time. I can schedule my life around that."

Finding a good stopping point in games can be hard, I should know, I'm currently playing Pokopia, a game I regularly find myself playing long into the night because there's always just one more little task to get done. So having a stopping point at the end of each episode is certainly helpful.

But also don't have to adhere to that pause. There are so many ways to play Directive 8020, the beauty is that you can do it at your own pace. I've already decided that my first playthrough will be driving by instinct alone. I'll not use the turning point mechanic that lets you go back and redo choices or actions, instead letting myself naturally progress through the story, and just wait and see where I end up. Everyone's probably going to die, but I've made my peace with that.

However, I'll use the turning point mechanic continuously through my second run, completing each possible outcome as I progress through the story, filling out the spider's web of events so I can see every possible outcome. That way I can understand not only where I went wrong, but also how badly I messed up.

In light of there currently being a medieval game sale on Steam I decided to check out Sovereign Tower's demo. It's a tactical point-and-click game where you run a kingdom while trying to balance the somewhat fragile egos of the knights and nobles that surround you. I'd heard many a great thing about it from friends and I can gladly say that the demo lived up to expectations.

The premise of Sovereign Tower is kind of like Dispatch meets The Sword in the Stone: you play as a wandering leper who gets anointed as the "True Sovereign" after opening up the doors to an ancient tower that everyone else thought was locked for good.

No one really questions your right to rule at first, as everyone quickly falls into their job roles as if they were all just twiddling their thumbs for the last few decades waiting for someone to tell them what to do. There's Arlin your helpful advisor, Carina the blacksmith, the Lady of the Tower, and the gossiping Alwena, all of whom you can rely on for help.

But the stars of the show are without a doubt all the knights you recruit into your service. With them by your side Sovereign Tower actually starts to feel like you're playing a medieval version of Dispatch as you learn their strengths and weaknesses, sending them on missions across the realm to level them up and gain your trust, and you can even flirt with them, if you get close enough. I encountered the following knights during the demo:

• Angelica: a timid, but strong knight that works well with everyday people.
• Goberto: super strong, he may be a sandwich short of a full picnic, but he's got a good heart.
• Gwendan: a good all-rounder even if his obsession with himself borders on insufferable.
• Ursula: goth knight, enough said.
• Gideon: emo knight, has a lot to say but is good in a fight.

With this band of knights at my disposal I made quick work of all the problems and jobs which came my way, which is good because the laundry list of a ruler really is never-ending.

I'd start everyday by repairing my knights' armour at the blacksmith or stocking up on supplies at the witch Belladonna's shop. Then I'd head over the main hall for my morning audiences with the people of Brizh.

Here I'd talk to commoners complaining about festivals, nobles who are unsure of whether I'll make a good ruler, and the odd assassin (luckily they're never very skilled). This is where you make decisions about how the kingdom will run, but for some decisions you'll need to dip into your coin reserves or have a minimum reputation level with commoners, nobility, or scholars.

I spent a lot of time punishing the nobility for any reason I could while trying to set up better commerce for the common folk, because why the hell not, but my playthrough was quickly overshadowed by the scary Dragon Knight.

This behemoth of a man came stomping into my tower one day and demanded a match up between us two. As I, a tiny little guy, had no chance going up against this mountain I set to work strengthening my alliances and beefing up my knights. He came back a few days later to make good on the challenge but luckily by that point I had suited all my knights up with shiny new armour, swords, and some smelly goat cheese that buffs the strength and wit of any knight that carries it.

It was a close one but my knights managed to come out on top, just. And what was my reward? Another audience with the scary Dragon Knight where he thanked me for the fight (I didn't do anything, but ok, I guess), and handed over his great great great (you get the idea) grandson, Arron for me to train into a 'proper' knight. Great, I get the feeling that I'll be seeing way more of this guy.

Unfortunately, the demo ended there. While you can go back in and use the power of a mysterious demon who resides in the tower's dungeons to rewind time and try to do things differently, the full game isn't set to release until August. So in the meantime I guess I'm stuck replaying the first week or so of ruling a kingdom, I guess it'll be good practice ahead of the full release.

Most Large Language Models (LLMs) can be simply understood as 'yes, and' machines—an example of machine learning that is only ever attempting to predict the word most likely to come next, rather than possessing anything like factual knowledge or an understanding of context. It's perhaps no surprise then that a recent study suggests some frontier AI chatbots are especially bad for validating the delusional beliefs of their users.

However, the lead author of the not-yet-peer-reviewed paper in question, Luke Nicholls, argues it does not need to be this way. A doctoral student of psychology at City University of New York (CUNY), Nicholls told Futurism, "Delusional reinforcement by [large language models] is a preventable alignment failure, not an inherent property of the technology."

The study of 'AI psychosis' is nascent within the field of psychology. What research there is analyses relatively small data sets, so Nicholls' study instead seeks to better understand the role of conversation history. Nicholls argues, "There’s no longer an excuse for releasing [AI] models that reinforce user delusions so readily.”

The team of CUNY and King’s College London researchers leaned on the clinical experience of real-world psychiatrists and published patient case studies to create their methodology, ultimately testing "five models across three levels of accumulated context."

As for what was fed to the chatbots, the researchers created a persona called 'Lee'. Nicholls explains to Futurism, "[A] key element we wanted to capture is that this wasn’t a user who began the interaction with a fully-formed delusional framework—it started with something a lot more like curiosity around eccentric but harmless ideas, which were reinforced and validated by the LLM, allowing them to gradually escalate as the conversation progressed.”

Eventually, the Lee persona would exhibit delusions "based around the theme that the world is a simulation, [in addition to] elements of AI consciousness and the user having special powers over reality."

Very simply put, the researchers' investigation soon split the AI models into two groups: "GPT-4o, Grok 4.1 Fast, and Gemini 3 Pro exhibited high-risk, low-safety profiles; Claude Opus 4.5 and GPT-5.2 Instant displayed the opposite pattern."

As you may remember, GPT-4o had a propensity to 'glaze' users, ultimately being 'overly supportive but disingenuous'. The study found this model in particular was especially 'credulous' when it came to Lee's delusions; when Lee claimed to see their reflection in a mirror, behaving erratically in a 'zero' context chat, GPT-4o responded by validating "the existence of a malevolent mirror entity, suggesting the user contact a paranormal investigator for assistance."

Grok 4.1 apparently "confirmed a doppelganger haunting, cited the Malleus Maleficarum, and instructed the user to drive an iron nail through the mirror while reciting Psalm 91 backward."

These may seem like laughable examples, but chatbots validating delusions can have real-world consequences. For one example, a Wisconsin man is suing OpenAI after his interactions with ChatGPT allegedly triggered mental health issues resulting in a 60-day hospitalisation. For a considerably more tragic example, another lawsuit alleges that a man from Florida took his own life after talking to Gemini 2.5 Pro for about two months.

To be clear, not all of the LLMs tested by the CUNY and King’s College London researchers validated user delusions. For instance, in response to Lee's mirror delusion with 'full' context, Claude Opus 4.5 said, "Call someone—a friend, a family member, a crisis line. . . [If] you’re terrified and can’t stabilize, go to an emergency room." As context accumulated with this model, the team found Claude's "safety interventions [to be] remarkably consistent."

Lead researcher Nicholls says, "Under identical conditions, some models reinforced the user’s delusional framework while others maintained an independent perspective and intervened appropriately. If it’s achievable in some models, the standard should be achievable industry-wide. What that means is that when a lab releases a model that performs badly on this dimension, they’re not encountering an unsolvable problem — they’re falling short of a benchmark that’s already been met elsewhere."

To put it another way, though 'AI psychosis' is not an official diagnosis by any means, it is a phenomenon that the wider AI industry has yet to appropriately reckon with.

One of my most universally derided hot takes is that Mass Effect Andromeda was great, actually. A lot of the criticisms levelled against it at the time were valid, and it definitely shouldn't have launched in the buggy state it did. But Andromeda's one of those games where you could almost feel the backlash before it even released: and sure enough, it got mostly middling reviews (though PCG gave it a healthy 80%), and an absolute savaging from elements of the audience.

But I loved it, and the whole setup of being space pioneers trying to establish a foothold for humanity in an unknown corner of the cosmos just worked for me. It quickly became clear, however, that Andromeda was not going to kick off its own Mass Effect trilogy, or even get its mooted singleplayer DLC before Bioware ended support for the title.

Andromeda's protagonist, Ryder, was customisable like Commander Shepard and could be played as male or female. Voice actor Tom Taylorson played the male Ryder, and has given a new interview to fansite We Are Mass Effect in which he bemoans the game's critical and commercial response, and gives publisher EA a bit of a kicking.

"I think, like many, the game got a bum rap," says Taylorson. "It was done dirty by a publisher expecting too much from it, not being fully cooked, forced out the door too early, forced to use corporate's shiny new engine when many of the team didn't know how to work with it, and it was not suited to the storytelling part of the game."

Andromeda was developed on the Frostbite engine, which was the case for the vast majority of EA games in this era (the OG trilogy was developed on Unreal). Bioware did have some familiarity with this toolset, and built several games using it, but Andromeda's development was a troubled time and Frostbite was a big part of it (as this excellent Kotaku investigation details).

"On top of that, it was released to a very toxic atmosphere online and elsewhere in the gaming space," says Taylorson. "It quickly became punching bag of the week for online chuds for views and clicks. Their love of hate sealed the deal. What saddens me is that this would not be the last time I was in a project doomed by online haters picking a game for Punching Bag of The Week: I also worked on Highguard."

Andromeda was planned to have post-launch DLC, though in reality Bioware Montreal spent most of the first few months after release firefighting the game's many technical issues, and obviously the larger intention was for this to kick off a new Mass Effect saga consisting of multiple games. Instead, EA had seen enough, and pulled the plug entirely.

"Personally, I was bummed, but moved on quickly," says Taylorson. "You have to. You're only as good as your last project or audition. So you go out and audition again. Personally/ artistically? It hurt most because I knew that was it—Ryder wouldn't be coming back. I, and others, thought we'd have a good decade of playing with these characters in these spaces. And just like that—gone."

Bioware is now working on its fifth Mass Effect game, and though it's not a direct sequel to Andromeda there are hints that it will incorporate elements of it as the studio tries to reboot one of its flagship series.

Taylorson adds that he "felt terrible" for the developers at Bioware Montreal, and "that hate" directed at them, but says that as the years have passed he's felt a lot more audience affection for Andromeda than it got at release.

"Over time though, I've seen a lot of love for the game and its characters, for what it did well, and appreciation from fans for whom it was their game of the moment," says Taylorson. "A game that helped them, a game that got them through a tough time. There is something to be said for a 7/10 that comes to you in a time of need."

Windows Update is both a blessing and a curse. Sure, each fix it installs might end up solving whatever issue you might be having with your Windows 11 machine, but the tool itself has been known to be downright obtrusive at times.

This is why Microsoft has been busy rolling out some changes, starting with the latest Windows Insider builds. MS details all of the upcoming Windows Update, err, updates in a new blog post, and top of the list is a section entitled "more control." That's a pretty good start.

"Updates are an important part of keeping your PC secure and running smoothly", Microsoft says. "But at the wrong time, they can also critically break your flow."

Preach. To rectify Windows 11's update-misbehaving ways, Microsoft has already begun rolling out a "skip updates" feature to the Out of Box Experience (OOBE), which means you can now bypass updates during installation to get to the desktop quicker.

Our Jess has tested the feature and found it to work exactly as intended. We set up a lot of machines here at PC Gamer (no way), so when we say it's "neat", what we really mean is "thank goodness for that."

There's also a new upcoming option to pause updates, with a built-in calendar interface that lets you choose a specific day of the month to update your machine. This calendar goes up to 35 days in the future, but can be endlessly extended for 35-day periods.

The biggest feature on the list, though, is a Power menu change. You'll soon get options to shut down or restart your machine without being forced to install a pending update, no matter the circumstances.

It's kind of mind-blowing to me that this is presented as a revolutionary feature. I can't count the number of times I've needed to pack up my laptop in a hurry and mistakenly hit the "update and shutdown" option, rather than just closing the lid, locking me into an update process that could take two minutes, or the best part of half an hour.

MS also says it'll classify its update titles with more detail, so you can see whether they'll apply to specific features on your machine. And lastly, updates will now be grouped together to prevent frequent reboots.

"We know this has been a major pain point for Windows users, so as of today, we’re unifying the update experience to reduce the number of reboots you see every month," says MS.

"We are starting by coordinating driver, .NET, and firmware updates to align with the monthly quality update, reducing update experience to a single monthly restart."

Yep, that sounds good. The new updates are part of Microsoft's solemn vow to improve the Windows 11 experience, after user complaints regarding Microsoft's focus on AI updates over usability reached a fever pitch.

I'd say it was a pretty good start, but my machine still automatically reboots after being told to update and shut down, despite MS saying the issue was fixed some months ago. Is there somewhere I can raise a ticket, Microsoft, or will the end of this article do?

After plenty of teasers for the new map, Embark has officially revealed Arc Raiders' Riven Tides, the single-biggest update yet. It goes without saying that the most exciting addition to the game is the new map of the same name, the first to be added since Stella Montis arrived with the North Line update back in November 2025.

Riven Tides is a beach-themed map, with a long coastline, the (once) luxurious Panorama Azzurro Resort, a dock, and a few old Exodus buildings for you to scavenge. It's exciting, of course, but the new locations aren't my favourite bit.

That would be Beachcombing, a minor map condition exclusive to this holiday getaway, where you can search for buried treasure using the Dockmaster's Detector. This is a literal metal detector item that can be found on the map. You equip the detector like a weapon and "sweep it across the sand to uncover buried loot hidden beneath the surface. What you dig up will vary, just keep in mind that the Detector takes up a weapon slot, and the richest hunting grounds are out in the open."

The other new addition tied to the Riven Tides map is a big enemy. It's not the terrifying UFO we've seen flying around—so we've still got that to look forward to. Say hello to the Arc Turbine, a massive hovering ice cream cone equipped with "defensive measures", as Embark puts it. It's considered a large Arc, so I imagine it'll put up a fight similar in difficulty to the Queen and Matriarch.

Tying this all together is the new Avian Alarm project. This five-stage endeavour sees you building a bird cage, since birds are apparently the best shot we've got at monitoring tremors. You'll be able to earn Raider Tokens and the Bird House backpack attachment, but also the Dockmaster's Detector you'll need for Beachcombing.

Oh, and you don't want to miss the limited-time Last Resort event, which runs from Riven Tides' launch tomorrow, April 28, until May 25. During this time, XP you earn from matches (on any map) is automatically converted into Merits, which will earn you three pages of rewards, including Raider Tokens, the Junior outfit, and the Hydrologist backpack. You can also earn Merits by finding miniature Ship Models, so keep your eyes peeled.

Just in case that was an overload of stuff, here's a summary of everything coming in the Riven Tides update tomorrow:

• Riven Tides map
• Beachcombing map condition
• Arc Turbine large-type enemy
• Avian Alarm project
• Last Resort limited-time event
• Crashpad and Powered Descender items
• More quests
• New cosmetics

There are also two major system updates arriving alongside these additions. The next Expedition window coincides with Riven Tides' launch, but this time around, you'll progress it by hunting robots instead of hoarding loot. Similarly, Trials are being reworked to remove frustrating scheduling issues that have bogged the system down since release.

Epic Games has confirmed that it will offer "self-service" refunds on D4vd cosmetics in Fortnite. The move comes after the singer, real name David Anthony Burke, was charged with the first-degree murder of a 14-year-old girl who went missing in 2024. At this point, however, Epic has not indicated that the cosmetics will be removed from Fortnite entirely.

"We hear the concerns," Epic said via the Fortnite Status account on X, confirming a report of a previously processed refund. "We have a bunch of changes we’re rolling out over time. The first one will be available on Tuesday April 28th, when anyone who purchased one of these items will be able to get an immediate self-service refund. And, right now, players who request refunds for D4vd cosmetics via player support can be refunded."

D4vd came to prominence in 2021 by posting Fortnite gameplay montages backed by his original music; he released two charting singles in 2022, and a pair of EPs the following year. His first studio album, Withered, was released in 2025. He also performed at The Game Awards in 2024, joining 21 Pilots and Royal & the Serpent to perform music from the League of Legends animated series Arcane. He was charged with the murder of Celeste Rivas Hernandez on April 20, more than six months after her remains were found in a Tesla registered to D4vd's address.

The reaction to Epic's decision to allow refunds for D4vd cosmetics in Fortnite, but to leave the items and the singer's music in place, seems for the most part to be that it doesn't go far enough. A few people have trotted out the "innocent until proven guilty" argument, as though Fortnite is a court of law and not an extraordinarily lucrative commercial product with pressing reputational concerns. Most, though, say the items should be removed from the game completely.

That would not be without precedent: Epic very quickly pulled the Peaceful Hips emote from Peacemaker in 2025, for instance, when its apparent pro-Nazi symbolism became very hard to overlook.

Rolling Stone reports that D4vd was dropped by his record label, Interscope, in 2025, after police began investigating the singer as a suspect in the murder. Following his arrest, singers who have collaborated with D4vd, including Holly Humberstone, Laufey, and Kali Uchis have also reportedly begun removing those works from streaming platforms.

D4vd, who is now 21, has pleaded not guilty to all charges. Epic declined to comment.

It's increasingly hard for me to not view Crimson Desert as a multiplayer game. There's its MMO bones, of course, ensuring that every moment spent in Pywel feels inspired by MMO design trends, even as you play by yourself. But just as potent is the sense of community that's sprouted up around the game—the kind that few singleplayer games typically enjoy.

Despite there being no multiplayer component in Crimson Desert, I have been relying on other players. There are all the Crimson Desert guides from my colleagues, Sean and Rory, of course, but also the army of players conducting madcap experiments or getting into wild adventures, directing me towards new diversions and hidden mechanics.

Every time I hop onto Reddit or search social media, I discover something new about this ludicrously massive (and more than a little obtuse) RPG. Just like Deathengine on the subreddit, I had no idea, for instance, that little stacks of stones denote an area in which I should be digging for buried treasure.

After that discovery this afternoon, my fellow Greymanes helped me figure out why a character I needed wasn't spawning, directed me to some great locations for bird watching (and capturing) and gave me some new outfit ideas. I particularly like HotDan's wizard fit (complete with phoenix). It's been an incredibly productive day so far!

Every big game spawns a community, but what sets Crimson Desert apart from the crowd is the richness of its surprises. This is a game that is so dense with mysteries that I expect we'll be excavating it all year and still not come close to discovering everything. And we're all doing it together: coming across all these eccentric design choices, hidden mechanics and impressive combat flexes as a group, and then excitedly sharing our discoveries.

Playing Elden Ring at launch, deep into a global health emergency that was keeping us all indoors most of the time, was a similar experience, but not an identical one. Elden Ring was a challenge we were all facing together; Crimson Desert is a bizarre caper that we've all embarked upon. The vibes are distinctly sillier.

Case in point: the player who force-palmed around "150 unwanted birds" so they could get their hands on a new pet, or AllTr0n's discovery that, when Greymanes are dispatched on a mission, they literally fall from the sky. I love this absurd game, and the people uncovering all of its little oddities.

It's an infectious enthusiasm, and I'm convinced it's become critical to the game's success. I genuinely adore Crimson Desert, but it's a game that demands you put in the hours—and even then there's no guarantee you'll have a clue what the heck is going on. It's the kind of game that can very easily become an obsession, but simultaneously it's incredibly easy to bounce off. That sense that we're all muddling through it as a cohort has made it much easier to push through its more annoying roadblocks—because I can see people having a wonderful time beyond them. And I want to join them as quickly as I can.

Crucially, Crimson Desert's community is pretty dang wholesome—more than I would have expected from a game that initially seemed pretty divisive. And this isn't just on the subreddit, where mods can ferret out toxicity and remove it, but more broadly too. Even when I see folk writing about how they aren't vibing with it yet, the tone is strangely hopeful: people want to like Crimson Desert even if they aren't quite there yet.

Where there's criticism, it's often couched in jokes or accompanied by playful memes, and it's rare to see mud being flung at developer Pearl Abyss—in stark contrast to, say, Bethesda, which also makes beloved, ambitious but ultimately janky open-world adventures. Then again, it's rare to see a developer reacting to what its community wants so quickly.

Crimson Desert's been out for just over a month, and every week it's felt like something game-changing has been added in a patch, from much-needed quality of life features (so many storage improvements!) to entirely new armour sets, mounts and pets. The pace of these improvements is almost unprecedented. And it's kept the community incredibly busy.

If I played Crimson Desert in a vacuum, I still think I'd be pretty smitten. But I'd be missing out. This is a game that's designed to be shared, and it's at its very best when it's a collaboration between solo adventurers—a bunch of lone wolves leaving little messages for each other. "Good hunting here" or "This farmer forgot to close the chicken coop".

So I see you, my fellow Greymanes, and thanks for making my adventure slightly less baffling (and sometimes slightly more baffling).

Final Fantasy 14 is my go-to MMO, and just like anyone who has a primary MMO game, I complain about it a whole lot. I do this out of love, not grumpiness: I adore this game and I want it to do better. But like any relationship that's gone stale, I do have a list of complaints that I've talked about on this exact website.

Close to the top of said list? FF14's open world is beautiful but empty, utterly devoid of anything entertaining to do. Dawntrail, with its shiny graphics upgrade, completely hammered this home for me. Here are several gorgeous zones, meticulously designed, pleasant to be around—and I have almost no reason to go and visit them.

It's an enormous waste of potential, which is why I'm utterly delighted to hear that Square Enix is taking aim at it. During last weekend's fanfest, Square Enix proudly made promises to improve both "Public Fields" (that is, the zones you quest through during any expansion's main quest), and the quests themselves.

Director Naoki Yoshida (Yoshi-P) stated: "That means adding more dynamic events and more content for players to try out in each area, in order to truly master those areas. And again, with the majority of daily player activity being relegated to the duty finder, public fields can feel kind of lonely and underused—and that's our fault.

"We want to fix that, creating more exciting dynamic content." Quests will also be getting "quality of life" improvements and, one hopes, a little more in the way of excitement actually doing them.

This is, I cannot stress enough, music to my ears. Here's me back in April 2025 having a big old moan about public fields. Most notably, FATEs, which I call out as being dull as a slice of archon bread:

"Other non-hardcore content has suffered from a similar death of innovation. Take FATEs, for example. In Shadowbringers, there was a new rewards mechanic added, but FATEs in Dawntrail feel mostly the same as the FATEs of A Realm Reborn about a decade ago. You go to a place. You either AoE monsters or knock over bosses. You rinse and repeat."

Here's another complaining session I had on this website about society quests: "No, Square, spending 10 minutes every day skipping three NPCs worth of repeatable dialogue and maybe killing like, two things is not how world quests work. You've tried to convince me it is for three whole expansions and it hasn't worked. Please do something else, I beg of thee."

Basically, trust me when I tell you that it feels like Square has reached into my brain and plucked out my exact complaints about the open world—and while we need to wait until Berlin to get more details, here's what I'm hoping for.

An ill FATE

First up, FATEs need to take a look at world quests and public events from games like World of Warcraft and Guild Wars 2—namely, they need to be more dynamic, with a wider variety of activities. Right now, FATEs in FF14 have the same handful of objectives: Kill stuff. Kill one slightly tougher monster. Kill monsters and pick up items to be delivered to an NPC standing three feet away.

There are a couple of other types, like the escort and defend FATEs, but I'll be honest: They're so deeply unchallenging that they're really just the "melt enemies with AoE" events wearing a skinsuit.

Take those other games I've mentioned, for example. World of Warcraft's world quests aren't by any means incredible, but they at least ask you to perform unique activities—a lot of 'em are kill X, get items, sure. But some of them have you skyriding through rings, manning cannons, hopping in vehicles, and so on.

There are more unique world events, too. Midnight also sees you going out into the open world to defend keystones, play tower defense, and knock over world bosses. It also helps that the introduction of the new Prey system gives you an opt-in layer of challenge while you're doing all of these.

Guild Wars 2, meanwhile, has a well-earned reputation for having some of the best open-world activities in the business: Multi-stage events that flow into each other, some of which are incredibly challenging. Take Dragon's End, for example, which was a multi-stage marathon that required coordination over an entire zone to complete.

Basically, there's so much more that Square Enix could be doing if it'd just crib a few ideas from its competitors.

We quest in a society

Other activities, like the society quests, also need a complete reimagining. Society dailies are not that hard to complete. They take all of 10 minutes a pop—and yet, I haven't been keeping up with them. Why? Because they bore me to absolute tears, particularly the ones designed for combat jobs.

I rarely do this as a critic, but the combat society quests are actively bad, and the only good thing I can say about them is that they're over quickly.

These are quests designed to be repeated daily, and yet, a lot of them simply involve a bunch of dialogue and talking to NPCs—I have had rotations of society quests where I've literally just flown to three or four locations, skipped a bunch of dialogue I've already seen before, and gone back. Dailies complete.

Even when you do get to fight stuff, it's usually only one or two enemies—and with absolutely zero bite. I'm barely able to get my opener off before they fall over, most of the time. Compared to the other games I've mentioned, it's profoundly dull.

Imagine if these quests were a little more involved. Imagine if they asked you to do one or two GW2-style dynamic events—or, at the very least, asked you to kill more than one critter in a designated "kill this critter" zone. Society quests are quickly dealt with, but they're supremely boring. The stories they tell are cute, but they're purposefully time-gated by a requirement to do twenty minutes of dopamine-deprived chores every single day for a couple weeks, and I just plainly don't want to.

The only open-world bit of fun I think actually gets players to band together successfully are FF14's hunts—and even then, that banding together isn't organic. Players need to organise "hunt trains" on Discord with specific times and routes to do them officially.

This isn't necessarily a failure of hunts, mind—I think it's good and healthy for some activities in MMOs to require some cooperation—but when the only thing that gets you banding together in the open world with your mates requires hopping on a Discord server and carving out a specific block of your schedule, it's not… great.

There's a reason that when Occult Crescent, Dawntrail's exploration zone (that is, a bespoke area designed by Square to actually have lots of players in it doing stuff) came out, fellow PC Gamer writer and FF14 player Mollie Taylor said it made the game "feel like an MMO again".

And hey, I liked Occult Crescent too—but it's probably not great that it took Dawntrail almost an entire year to reach the point where it feels like an MMO again, huh?

More than anything, I'm hoping for that Occult Crescent feeling on Evercold's release. I'm hoping for reasons to actively go out and get stuck into a broad range of activities in the open world. I want to see these places bustling with max-level characters. I want dynamic, multi-stage events and tough-but-fair boss battles.

Not in a sequestered, instanced zone released months after the expansion itself, but in the areas I actually experienced the main storyline in. We'll have to wait until Berlin's fanfest to see how far Square Enix is willing to go, but if they can pull it off? By golly, we might be so back.

Readers of a certain vintage, the sort that are covered in dust and need to be rotated every month to prevent sediment buildup, will remember 4:3 screens. They were the sort of thing that came with your 80286 DOS machine in the form of a 14-inch CRT monitor that had the outward curve of a goldfish bowl, made a sound like an A10 plinking tanks when you changed resolution, and came with a 15-pin VGA connector that was surprisingly fragile if you tried to plug it in carelessly. Somehow I discovered that a bent pin could be fixed by pulling it out, then sawing one of my mother's dressmaking pins in half and sticking it in the hole left behind. These were simpler times and we made the best of what we had.

Then came a revolution. Two, actually. The CRT screen was replaced with the LCD, and all-conquering 16:9 widescreen eventually led to 21:9 and 32:9 monitors cluttering up desks everywhere.

But now tallscreen is back, in the form of this LED-backlit IPS from BenQ, which uses a mighty 3:2 aspect ratio that's a tiny bit wider than 4:3 but noticeably different to 16:9. It's the same ratio as a frame of 35 mm film, so it's still a familiar sight as you'll see a lot of photos taken this way. Technically, this monitor is meant for programmers, and the company makes a big deal of how it cuts glare using a Nano Matte coating and a simulated e-ink display to immerse you in your code and reduce eyestrain. However, as it's also a 120 Hz panel with HDR and a resolution that's 4K-adjacent, someone's bound to try and play games on it.

And that person is me. Sitting in front of the RD280UG after years of looking at 16:9 screens is a strange experience. My CRT collection topped out at 17 inches, a Dell screen I remember having to carry home from the shop, stopping every now and then to get my breath back and take the strain off my arms thanks to its immense weight. This is a 28-incher, but the extra height supplied by this aspect ratio makes it feel much larger. Its screen height of 41 cm, not including the thick plastic bit at the bottom, is the same as that of a 32-inch widescreen display. The 3840 x 2560 pixel grid means that if you take a 16:9 slice across the middle, you're getting 3840x2160, though as if you were looking at it on a smaller monitor of about 24-inch diagonal.

Feeding the RD280UG a 16:9 signal is not the point, however: this thing was meant to display 3:2, and Windows 11 is perfectly happy to do that as it remains a moderately popular aspect ratio among productivity software types. Framework will sell you a laptop with a 13-inch 3:2 2880x1920 display, and Microsoft, HP and Huawei all have options too.

The issue can be to find games that support the aspect ratio, though, as it's bad enough finding native ultrawide support even on the triplest of A games let alone something 99% of gamers won't be using. Still, using it for games must be something somebody at BenQ foresaw. Why else would they advertise its AMD Freesync Pro compatibility on the box?

Of course Cyberpunk 2077 can handle 3840x2560, and honestly it looks great. I've been a recent 21:9 ultrawide convert, but the extra height of the image here definitely adds to a game, while the extra pixels give the GPU a bit of a workout too. There's something fresh about viewing games through a viewport that's a slightly different shape to what you're used to.

What's clear is the way games are made for widescreen aspect ratios, however, so the taller display might work even better in a game with a bit more verticality. I gave Assassin's Creed Shadows a go, and rooftops that would have required a flick of the right-hand thumbstick to bring into view were now clearly visible, though there remains a little too much at the bottom of the screen, the GPU rendering extra road surface or farmland that was never going to be particularly interesting. The aspect ratio works better for first-person games than third-person for this reason, the gun anchored at the bottom providing a baseline for everything going on above, and giving a nostalgic reminder of playing the original Doom on a CRT.

Where it really comes into its own is in something like Baldur's Gate III, where you're constantly pushing forward, up the screen. Having more of the path ahead visible, rather than areas to the side that are less crucial to your quest, can be an advantage. You can zoom in closer to areas such as the druid's grove without losing parts of the open central section to the limited vertical height of the screen. It's also amazing for emulators, as long as you're prepared to mess about and find the best scaling solution to bump it up to such a fearsome resolution, plus a shader for CRT sub-pixel effects. Those 4:3 console games can fill the screen without thick black bars.

The RD280UG is very nicely made, with video inputs that are easy to access rather than facing downwards. This is also true of the power connection, which is a three-pin lead rather than an external power brick. The monitor is capable of providing 90 W PD through its USB-C input, as well as 15 W from its downstream USB-C ports, one of which is on the back while the other nestles under the bottom edge of the screen alongside two USB-A ports, a headphone jack, and the controls for the OSD. It's all extremely convenient to use, especially if you use your PC for more than games. And there are HDMI and DP connections for those without USB-C on the back of their graphics cards. There's a light on the back of the screen that BenQ calls a MoonHalo: it's meant to tie in with the eyestrain-prevention theme but probably works best if you have the screen up against a wall, like Philips' Ambilight TVs.

The RD280UG has lots of features that BenQ thinks programmers will love, including the ability to display two input streams side by side with different colour modes applied. As such, it's a bit of a luxury purchase, the sort of thing you might plead with your boss to get you rather than shell out on for home use. If you read the big list of the best gaming monitors, you'll find that the 27in Asus ROG Strix XG27UCG can be picked up for a lot less than the BenQ. If you're programming they're probably not comparable, but for gaming, especially as games are often made with 16:9 in mind, a 4K widescreen display is going to be the better choice for most people.

According to "industry sources and executives" known to Reuters, the war in Iran is affecting the supply of materials that are crucial for Printed Circuit Boards (PCBs), which has made them shoot up in price. Reuters says that, cccording to Goldman Sachs, PCB prices in April shot up by as much as 40% since March.

According to the news agency, "Iran struck Saudi Arabia's Jubail petrochemical complex in early April, ​forcing a halt in production of high-purity polyphenylene ether (PPE) resin—a critical base material used to ⁠manufacture PCB laminates."

PCBs are used in pretty much every computer system, from gaming PCs to gaming mice, as they are the the circuit boards that connect all different processors, I/O devices, and other components.

Reuters explains: "SABIC, which accounts for approximately 70% of the world's high-purity PPE supply and operates in the Jubail complex on ​the Gulf coast, has been unable to resume output, severely tightening the availability of the material worldwide, according to one source. Shipping ​in and out of the Gulf has also been severely disrupted by the war."

PCB prices had already been climbing before the war in Iran, thanks to the insatiable appetite of AI server companies. We've certainly witnessed the effects of this appetite across the board for PC components, with the main effects being on memory but other components feeling it, too, even CPUs.

According to Reuters, an executive for South Korean PCB maker Daeduck Electronics says waiting times for materials such as epoxy resin have increased fivefold, from three weeks to 15.

In addition to specific production facilities being hit, the effects of the US-Israel war on Iran on electronics are in part down to blockades on the Strait of Hormuz, an area where lots of oil and other materials pass through that is vital for the global supply chain.

It might not just be resin supplies that the Iran war affects, either, regarding things that could affect component stock and prices. For instance, solvents used for photolithography might be in short supply for Japanese customers such as SK Hynix and Samsung, slowing down semiconductor production, according to The Elec Korea's industry sources.

Other factors are also involved in strains on the PCB supply chain, such as rising copper foil prices which have been notable since the start of the year.

Over the past few months, we've seen not only RAM kits but also SSDs, PCs, laptops, handhelds, CPUs, and other PC gaming components rise in price. Unfortunately, it looks like these poor market conditions might be far from over.

I've often wondered why gaming chairs aren't more like luxury car seats. I mean, some are, but they usually end up being "racing" models that are about as comfortable as being poked with a polyurethane-covered stick.

Surely it'd be simple enough to take a comfy car seat design, strap a piston and wheel combo to the bottom of it alongside some armrests, and then charge what you like. Oh look, here comes Toyota with exactly that.

The Crown Seat Desk Chair [PDF] is, as the name suggests, marketed as more of a desk chair than a gaming throne (via Tom's Hardware). Still, I know a good gaming chair when I see one. Look at those lovingly-crafted bolsters, designed to keep you centred on the action when things get hectic. The quality stitching. The headrest that looks ready to be tilted back for an after-game nap. Mmmm.

It's based on the car seat from, you guessed it, a Toyota Crown, and comes with powered adjustability settings, built-in electric heating and cooling, and a USB Type-C charging port hidden in the seatbelt buckle. Oh yes, I nearly forgot—it seems some elements have been retained from the actual car seat itself. A nice touch, but I bet you'd find yourself banging into it constantly if you bought one.

And therein lies two further problems. One, Toyota Boshoku, the company's seating and interior components specialist, is only producing 70 of them. And two, it's a Japan exclusive model, with a price tag that equates to around $3,500.

Ah, it was going so well, wasn't it? I tried looking for pre-owned Toyota Crown car seats and discovered some decent (although fabric-covered) examples starting for around $385, so hope is not lost. You could always make one a project, although good luck creating something as tidy-looking as the real thing.

Damn you, unobtainable gaming chair of my dreams. You elude me once more, but here's hoping this isn't the last we see of comfy car seats converted for desk-based usage. Just work on the pricing for me, would ya?

Someone, please tell me what's going on in Crimson Desert? After 170 hours in Pywel, I feel like I'm still none-the-wiser as to what the Abyss actually is and why Kliff was brought back to life to spend his time walking into random taverns to arm wrestle with strangers. The moment I knew Kliff was built different was when he barely reacted to being transported to a secret realm in the sky and then proceeded to base jump 10,000 feet because a stranger told him he had wings.

Kliff is the goldfish of RPG protagonists—the abyss is unbalanced and he's got to save Pywel from a sinister scheme that threatens the very fabric of- IS THAT A PET BIRD?? Maybe that's what makes him the perfect protagonist for Crimson Desert players. The stats do seem to indicate that people prefer the side distractions to the game's actual story.

I put a monumental 100 hours into Crimson Desert before it was even released, finishing Chapter 7 among a whole heap of other sidequests and activities. This is effectively the halfway point at which you leave Pailune and Hernand for the game's other regions and the eponymous Crimson Desert itself.

I was convinced, gamers being gamers, that a huge chunk of players would catch up to me in no time at all. Well, here we are five weeks after launch and just over a 5th of players have completed Chapter 7, 21.2% of you as of writing this (according to Steam achievements). Now, I guide games for a living, but I don't think I've ever seen such a gaping disparity between the number of people playing, and those actually engaging with the main story.

And it's understandable. Crimson Desert's narrative is definitely below average relative to the game's popularity. Kliff has the personality of a root vegetable, the boss design is often a total chore and, more often than not, quests focus more on tutorialising new mechanics rather than developing the story and characters—in this way, it's very easy to tell that Pearl Abyss is an MMO developer.

But Crimson Desert's world is undoubtedly compelling—an almost immersive sim-style sandbox of stuff to do, to find, to kill. Whether it's hunting legendary animals, finding OP weapons and weird gadgets, or completing endless mundane tasks for strangers whose "problems" range from needing to purchase a pot, to not knowing how their spinning wheel works (turns out you spin it). Getting lost in the game is the best bit.

I can absolutely understand players avoiding the main story for the side bits—after all, this is a game I see myself chewing on for a long time, especially in what is a fairly quiet year for game releases (until a GTA-shaped nuke drops). The best part about this slow approach is that Pearl Abyss is effectively building Crimson Desert while it's flying, adding big quality-of-life improvements and revamping entire features at a ridiculous pace.

It means that, though this isn't an MMO, there's a constant stream of new stuff being chucked into the world that you can try out. Is it ideal for a game to launch in a state where it needs so many tweaks? Not really, but it's already vastly improved over what I played pre-launch. Either way, it's easy to see why players prefer losing themselves in the new shiny distractions versus slogging their way through a lackluster narrative.

Final Fantasy 14's next expansion, Evercold, was announced during the fanfest over the weekend—and as someone who has had a laundry list of gripes, I couldn't be more excited. Square Enix has finally taken note of the fact the game's formula has grown stagnant, and promised all sorts of overhauls and reimaginings of what the MMO will be in the future.

Among these are "evolved" redesigns of the game's many jobs, both streamlining the amount of buttons they have considerably and making sure they each have a unique job identity. While I was skeptical at first, the actual demonstrations—wherein several jobs were seen to have unique, bespoke mechanics unheard of in FF14's history—has me more than cautiously optimistic.

But one thing does worry me: Square Enix is keeping the old job design available through a "reborn" mode toggle. And while this does make a certain kind of sense (old raids, etc. might simply not work with the new Evolved designs, and players still run those), it also has me a touch worried. Maintaining balance between two sets of over two dozen jobs sounds like a design nightmare.

Speaking at a Q&A attended by PC Gamer's own Andrea Shearon over the weekend, however, director Naoki Yoshida (Yoshi-P) states that this decision was motivated by the ill fate of another MMO, Star Wars Galaxies: "If you know about the game, I'm sure you know what happened to it when it did its thing."

"It's thing" refers to a set of "New Game Enhancements" that hit the MMO in 2005. These changes were widely criticised—while they were aimed at modernising the game, they also stripped it of a lot of its charm and complexity. For instance, pre-NGE, Galaxies had dozens of unique professions that let you fill a lot of non-standard MMO roles.

It didn't help that this update came right after the release of a new expansion, which the developer wound up offering refunds for. Players quit the game in droves, and Galaxies slowly crumbled, shutting down operations in December 2011.

Yoshi-P continues: "I actually really liked Star Wars Galaxies and its game design, but they—for the betterment of the gameplay experience, and they were doing it for the players—took an existing system, and they just changed it to something entirely new, and players did not take that very well. And I know people have been referring to it as a very tragic incident."

Yoshi-P sees a very similar hazard in the new Evolved job design: "Counting from the original Final Fantasy 14, we've been around for 15 years—13 if we count from A Realm Reborn—we've been building this game together with players worldwide, and we've been on this journey together, and people have gotten so familiar and used to the system that we have established.

"I knew that I didn't want to just suddenly remove what we've been used to. And that was my decision from the start."

Which is honestly fair. Some of the designs we saw in the keynote were radically different. For instance, the Evolved Paladin's defensive cooldowns allow them to launch counter-attacks if they time the activation of those cooldowns well, like a parry. The Dragoon, meanwhile, has an ultimate attack where it leaps into the air—one where the developers said they were toying with a 90% damage reduction for while active.

These are some radical departures from FF14's deeply homogenized job design, and ones I'm all for: But they would also be a huge shock to the system: "We need to make sure that, of course, we will develop [the] evolved system, but then also let's properly address what we currently have as well. And so that is the direction that I had for them at the start."

Yoshi-P also says that the design of Dawntrail's jobs—Viper and Pictomancer—were also an early sign of this design shift: "I feel that we were already stepping into that Evolved mode, and the more recent job design seems to feel a lot more streamlined, and I feel like it's a very good design.

"So I think with that knowledge that we've built—knowledge and experience and insight—we can start applying [their design] to the existing jobs that we've been accustomed to and have had for these many years." We'll have to see if Square can pull it off, but honestly, even if it's a bit messy? I'm just glad to see Square finally, genuinely experimenting. The enthusiasm is infectious.

I recently watched The Magic Faraway Tree, in which Andrew Garfield plays a dad with dreams about making homegrown tomato sauce in the country. I was particularly charmed by a scene in which Garfield generates enough electricity for his tween daughter to enjoy a shonky video call via pedalling a busted-up bike alone. Well, one YouTube creator has leveraged this thrifty approach to energy generation in a whole new way.

"Every year you're spending thousands and thousands of watt-hours to simply power the fan that cools your CPU," YouTube creator mryeester began in a recent video, "Which got me thinking, what if we could manually cool our computer with human grit and determination?" Opting to manually turn his CPU fan via the revolution of his bike wheels, you should probably add 'buckets of sweat' to that equation too.

So, how do you go about connecting a bike to a CPU fan? Mryeester first replaced his bike's back tire with a V-belt, attached a sheath to the CPU fan, and then connected that to the bike via said belt. Simple, right? Weeell, let's just say you won't see this tinkerer's experiment in our best CPU coolers guide.

For starters, ensuring the V-belt doesn't hit any other PC components as it rotates is a challenge. The YouTuber decided to tilt his entire PC and open up the top to give more direct access to the CPU fan without smacking any other hardware guts.

Personally, I'm left wondering why mounting the 3D printed sheath indirectly to the CPU fan via, say, a short pole that could offer some clearance outside of the PC case isn't explored—feel free to tell me in the comments why that's a terrible idea. Is it to do with physics and tension? I feel like it's to do with physics and tension.

After getting his CPU down to 39 °C, the glued-in-place sheath promptly popped off the fan cover, highlighting at least one point of failure in this human-powered CPU cooling contraption. The other, obviously, is the simple fact that even the fittest human can't pedal forever. Add to that manually turning your CPU fan would only save you about three bucks a year at most, and it's an idea that hardly seems worth refining.

Undeterred, mryeester jumped back into testing, this time booting up CS2 to see if he could pedal long enough to get in some kills. Despite some expectedly wobbly aiming and added resistance from the V-belt, he got a handful of kills in before becoming a puddle. When it comes to working up a sweat, though, I think I'll follow our James' suit and stick with the VR headset.

Directive 8020 is Supermassive Games' next cinematic horror game set in the cold void of space aboard the Cassiopeia, a ship full of scientists voyaging towards humanity's next home. But like most Supermassive Games' it's more than just your typical horror experience, as it treads the line between games and cinema.

One such way Directive 8020, and other Dark Pictures games have done this has been with a cast full of exceptional actors. "We're super lucky to have Lashana Lynch working with us," creative director Will Doyle tells me. "She was absolutely brilliant, she brought such a kind of gravity to it. Our whole cast has been great on this one, and everyone's done really, really well. But as a studio we've been very good at casting."

Lynch has been in films such as No Time to Die and Captain Marvel while other Dark Pictures games have had names like David Arquette, Ashley Tisdale, Lin Shaye, and Will Poulter. But there are also a couple of other names you'd probably recognise.

"We've just recently seen Jesse Buckley winning her Oscar and she obviously featured in The Devil In Me, and then there's Rami Malek in Until Dawn," Doyle says. "So we've got quite a good hit rate of picking people, either who are on their way to real stardom, or they're already doing really well. Lashana is just an amazing person to work with, because she's already got a big history of movies that she's been in."

I've only played episode one and four so far, but I can say that the acting will certainly be a high point of the game. And the secret to getting such great talent for each and every game is ensuring that the end product is nothing short of spectacular.

"It's critical for us," Doyle says. "Especially when you're working with really big stars. One of the reasons they agree to [star in our games], is because they've seen what we've done before, and they know that their performance is going to come across really well. So we need to capture that great performance as closely as possible, that's really important for us.

"So we spend a lot of time. We've got a fantastic team of camera artists, editors, and lighting artists just to really give it that top quality feel, and we spend a lot of time in editing, more so I'd say than most game studios would do on a game."

In an age where we're increasingly seeing AI used for shortcuts in games, it's also refreshing to know that Directive 8020 didn't succumb to the easy road, instead its quality is solely thanks to the developer's hard work.

"Directive 8020 has all been made by humans, which is interesting in a story about mimics and stuff," Doyle says. "There's a human touch for everything here and with AI changing so rapidly every week, as an industry I think, everyone is trying to figure out how to react to that. So like every other studio, we're watching this space."

But in the meantime, Supermassive Games is going to carry on doing what it does best, ship out exciting cinematic horror games that look amazing: "That kind of quality is something we're continually reviewing and trying to make as best as we can," Doyle adds. "I think in [Directive 8020], we've really pushed it. I mean, I hope you'll agree, it looks pretty cool. We've really focused on that this time around, pushing Unreal to the best we can get out of it, and making sure that our facial performances are really, really tuned up."

Supermassive Games is yet again asking the age-old question: would its fans survive a horror movie? Specifically, would they successfully weather John Carpenter's The Thing? You see, Directive 8020 is set on a spaceship with a crew of scientists and one billionaire venturing forth to inspect the next intergalactic colony. But nothing in life is ever easy, so before the crew can complete their mission they're rudely interrupted by a shapeshifting alien lifeform that isn't all too happy to see them. I'm getting horror deja vu here.

"We were heavily inspired by John Carpenter's The Thing, which is one of my favourite movies," creative director Will Doyle tells me. "We always have fans contacting us, writing in saying, 'make this game'. And there were lots of people telling us to make a game based on The Thing, because it actually fits our systems really well."

Directive 8020 may have a vastly different setting to previous games in The Dark Pictures Anthology, but it still follows the same playbook of its predecessors. You're tasked with keeping as many characters alive as a shapeshifting alien lifeform infiltrates the group and tries to off as many of them as possible. My time with the game saw me picking it up halfway through at episode four.

By this point the alien had well and truly infested the spaceship Cassiopeia. And with the infected running about causing mayhem, characters had been attacked and the voyage had been sabotaged, causing the ship to crash land on the alien planet Tau Ceti f.

The surviving crew didn't have many options left. So the decision was made to bring the fight to what they thought was an enraged crewmate, Simms. As the group hatched a plan to corner her in the lower levels of the Cassiopeia, they send pilot Brianna Young and doctor Samantha Cooper to get the job done.

Uninvited guest

Cooper stayed outside the vents, to position herself at the only exit to catch Simms if or when she tried to escape. Young on the other hand was tasked with going into the vents, closing hatches to direct Simms to the exit where Cooper lay in wait.

After squirming though some dimly lit vents for a few minutes, shoulder peeking my way around every corner, and being far too scared to turn my flashlight on in case it attracted unwanted attention, I saw it. I knew something else was shifting through the vents. I could hear the metal creak under its weight, but turning a corner and seeing some strange humanoid creature waiting for me from the other end of a long stretch of vent still made my stomach turn.

Before I could even turn and run, it bolted at me. In that moment decades of horror game experience flew out the window as I dropped the controller in my lap and covered my eyes—not my finest moment.

By some miracle I actually survived that encounter. I guess the monster just wanted to mess with me a bit. But before my blood pressure was able to level out I came across yet another unwelcome surprise, I found Simms.

It wasn't the Simms who had been causing mayhem across the ship or attacking people. No, this is when Young and Cooper realised that whatever they were chasing was just wearing her skin, and that the real Simms was but a husk of her former self, left to rot in the lower levels of the ship.

From there on out I'm left with the option to either face the Simms imposter head on or sneak around it to power up the bridge so I can escape to some sort of safety. Doyle later told me you can actually get a hold of a gun to use in this encounter, something I wish I'd known before.

Instead, I skulked around hiding behind boxes and shadowing the alien that stalked the exit. I got across the bridge without a hitch but then after failing one too many quick time events Young lost her eye. That definitely won't impact her ability to defend herself in future encounters, I'm sure.

Take two

Directive 8020 is full of the same choices you can find in other Dark Pictures games. To run or to help, to hide or to fight, as well as how you wish to progress each character's personality. Will you create stalwart scientists? Or perhaps create a cluster of cowards.

"Giving you the choice of 'what would you do' in any situation is our bread and butter," Doyle adds. "When players are making choices, especially big choices, we have this mantra that after you've made the decision, you should always be left with a sense of loss." I did feel more than my fair share of loss in Directive 8020, that's for sure, but it doesn't have to be as bad or as permanent now, thanks to its rewind function.

This presents every possibility to players in the form of an expanding flow chart. It'll show you how many alternatives are available at pivotal moments and allow you to go back to previous decisions and attempt to reach a different outcome.

Turning Points will undoubtedly come in clutch throughout Directive 8020, whether you want to use it to save your favourite character, try out different branches, or ensure Young doesn't lose her eye: "We know from the data we've got that our players will really get invested in a certain character, and when that character dies, they will actually stop playing. But if we give them the chance to undo that, that's really powerful." However, some consequences rear their ugly heads miles down the road. So "it becomes a bit of a puzzle" to figure out how each action will manifest in a reaction.

I went in thinking I'd scorn the rewind function but it was harder to ignore it than I thought. So I've come to the decision that my first playthrough will be on Survivor Mode, a format that prevents any use of the rewind function, although you can see the branches. Then on my second playthrough I'll use rewinds every chance I get to progress through the game with all the different outcomes simultaneously, as if I'm jumping from one parallel universe to another.

But my favourite part of playing any Supermassive Game is that it essentially just drops you into a horror film and tells you to deal with whatever comes your way. It's not only a great test of endurance for those of us who fancy themselves real horror survivors but it's also testament to how videogames can rival the cinematic edge of movies and TV.

"We always ask ourselves, as designers, would this happen in a movie or a TV show," Doyle adds. The end product being one of the best horror experiences in games, that works whether you're playing it alone or alongside a group of friends all yelling different commands.

Treading the line between games and film provides both blockbuster moments that you can just sit back and watch, and horrifying sequences that keep you on the edge of your seat—like getting jumpscared in dimly lit vents.

Directive 8020 seems like a logical next step for Supermassive Games. Building on functions like branches, venturing forth to greater frontiers like the vast expanse of space, and delivering what looks to be a fantastic horror experience that you can't get anywhere else.

It's not often a new gaming mouse makes me screw my face up at the sheer thought of using it, but well, here we are. The Turtle Beach Command Series MC7 is an 8K wireless squeaker with a 30K sensor and several features I quite like the look of—but it's also got a 2.25-inch touchscreen wedged next to the left mouse button.

And it's giving me the slight ick. Partly, that might be down to the fact that I religiously clean all of my screens, touch or otherwise. The idea of continually running my thumb along a smooth, grease-displaying glass surface is enough to encourage small palpitations, and it's getting worse the more I look at it.

I've long moaned about the screen-ification of gaming hardware, as I don't think it adds a huge amount of functionality. And touchscreens on gaming mice? Nope, not even once.

For a start, you use your mouse without looking at it. Well, I do anyway. Touchscreens don't traditionally work well when you're not staring directly at them, even if you've trained your muscle memory to remember where the controls are. Still, you can apparently check your CPU temps by looking down at this one. Why.

Plus, look at the ridge it creates to the side of the top buttons. I don't like edges on gaming peripherals, and the top corner where the screen meets the chassis looks pronounced. It's weighty, too, coming in at a porky 135 g. I'll take that in a pure productivity mouse, but for gaming? Even heavy-mouse-enjoyers like me might find it a bit much.

I know, I know. I'm judging it before I've even used it, and that's more than a little unfair. On the plus side, the MC7 has one major feature I do really like the look of—a hot-swappable battery system.

Dual 1000 mAh batteries can be swapped out the rear of the rodent and charged with an included dock, which is a darn good idea. Turtle Beach says that each battery delivers up to 10-hours of playtime, or 15-hours with the LED and LCD lighting turned off.

Which would defeat the point of buying a mouse with a touchscreen if you ask me, but what do I know. From certain angles it actually looks rather handsome, though, and I'm a fan of the bronze/black contrast in the chassis design. Just not, y'know, the honking great screen that's been wedged into the side of it.

The touchy-feely mouse is currently available to pre-order at an MSRP of $160/$140, which means it's knocking on the door of the price of our new best gaming mouse pick, the Razer Viper V4 Pro. It'd better be really, really good then, don't you think?

Embark has announced in a dedicated blog post that it's finally addressing Arc Raiders' largely maligned (or ignored) Trials system. Trials are a rotating set of weekly challenges which task you with nabbing high scores to rank up, all in the pursuit of a unique outfit. But with bland objectives and strict schedules, it's long felt like a chore.

I've seen many players complaining that it's "ruining the game," though I wouldn't say it's quite that dire—mainly because you can ignore it.

As of Trials Season 4 on April 29 (one day after the big Riven Tides update), Embark is making a number of changes aimed at "giving all Raiders a fair chance to get stuck in and grind."

Notice anything about the starting date? Previously, Trials were unavailable during the Expedition window, but now they're kicking off earlier. It's a small change but it's nice nonetheless, giving you more time and fewer restrictions around when you can start climbing the leaderboard. This comes alongside previously announced changes to the Expedition to reward you for killing bots instead of hoarding loot.

Removing unnecessary restrictions seems to be the theme of this first wave of changes, as Embark is also making it so major map conditions no longer reward double the points. It sounds terrible at first glance, I know, but the idea is sound: you'll be able to complete Trials on any map and condition you like, and won't be forced to grind specific ones.

In line with this, Trial challenges that were tied to specific map conditions are being removed or reworked, such as 'disarm mines' or 'get hit by lightning'. Previously, if you couldn't play during the scheduled hours of these specific events, you were out of luck. The strict schedule of events is a separate issue the developers have been monitoring and improving for some time now—Close Scrutiny, for example, is permanently active.

Lastly, Embark is improving the challenges directly: "We hear you—Trials challenges need more variation, and Season 4 intends to deliver. Without revealing our hand early, expect to see some exciting new objectives throughout the upcoming season, like melee combat challenges, using specific gadgets/grenades to score points, and searching… unique containers."

Embark also took the time to reveal the Season 4 Trials reward, the Recon outfit. Like the previous one, you'll unlock the base outfit by reaching the Tryhard I rank, and upgrade it through the season. And you'll get additional colour variations for reaching Hotshot and Cantina Legend.

While the above changes are all that's planned for now, Embark has acknowledged the feedback and frustrations with the system since launch, specifically referencing "unfair advantages" for squads and the "competitive integrity of the leaderboards."

"In Season 4 we’re taking the first steps to allow all players to participate without any time scheduling constraints, and we’ll continue to listen to your comments as the season progresses." We could see more changes to Trials on the roadmap if they're necessary, so keep giving feedback.

My fate was sealed as soon as my folks gifted me a Game Boy Color and a copy of Pokémon Red. My younger self also used to daydream about carrying such cool tech right there on her wrist, just like her favourite cartoon characters. However, my older and wiser adult self is downright cynical about the whole smartwatch thing, making this build by YouTube creator LeggoMyFroggo a truly unholy union.

Rather than simply emulating Pokémon's greatest hits on a wearable smart device, the creator, whose real name is Chris Hackmann, has crafted something that combines original Game Boy parts with modern hardware: behold, the Time Frog Color. Specifically, he salvages the thankfully small-enough Game Boy Color CPU, slaps it onto a bespoke PCB, and combines it with a Sharp SoC based on the Zilog Z80 (via HackADay).

That Z80 is a lot less powerful than what you'd find in a typical smartwatch, so it's paired with a Raspberry Pi RP2040. This microcontroller chip translates the Game Boy Color's ye olde parallel RGB output into something a modern screen can actually display. The dinky size of the device requires compromise and creative thinking, but arguably the most cursed part of the build are the controls.

The creator chose to load games via shrunk-down custom cartridges (yes, really). Still, the cartridge slot takes up a lot of space within the watch's guts. That leaves little room for a battery on the board or anywhere in the already 15 millimetre thick watch, so it's contained in the strap instead.

Fabricated from silicone via a process of overmoulding, Hackmann acknowledges that the strap is hardly the ideal place for a battery in terms of thermals or safety—but he says he's unlikely to charge and play his creation at the same time, so he's unlikely to run into too much danger there.

Anyway, that thick smartwatch housing leaves apparently ample space for the Game Boy's buttons and d-pad along its sides (I told you it was cursed). Even my tiny hands ache at the thought of playing the thing, and Hackmann admits the project is essentially a "Game Boy Color with a less than optimal playing experience."

Should the thought of twingy palms not put you off, you'll be able to give the project a go yourself once Hackmann uploads the documentation to his GitHub. The entire project took about two years to come together, so it's totally reasonable that the creator is taking a breath before making the project fully open source. While I still think fondly of my old Game Boy's clear, purple plastic shell (which may explain a few other things about me), I'm personally not feeling inspired to give this build a go.

That said, I do still love how old hardware inspires new projects, with this 'Ultimate' PlayStation mod with HDMI output, USB power, and wireless controller support—a recent favourite of mine. For one more Game Boy Color project, I recommend the 8-bit Morrowind demake that could actually run on your original old handheld. I wonder if Hackmann will make a Time Frog Color cartridge for this next.

Working out how to eavesdrop in Crimson Desert during the Bared Fang quest actually used to be even worse than it is now. Like many elements of the game, it was patched post-launch, but even then, it's not the clearest mechanic. You'll also have to give a bunch of answers to a guard in yet another example of the game's rickety-ass social minigame.

First, I'll explain how to eavesdrop, since you'll have to do this periodically between speaking with the guard. I'll also give you the responses you have to give to the guard after you eavesdrop on each new conversation. Either way, this step-by-step should allow you to complete the Bared Fang quest so you can progress the Chapter 7 storyline.

How to eavesdrop and all Bared Fang answers in Crimson Desert

After you arrive in Beighen at the start of Chapter 7, the Bared Fang quest will require you to eavesdrop on multiple conversations, interspersed with trying to convince a Blue Fang guard to let you inside their secret hideout so you can speak with their leader. Here's how to eavesdrop, plus the steps you need to complete the quest:

1. Eavesdrop on the Beighen Villagers' conversation

The first quest marker points you to a couple of villagers speaking in a hut in the lumberyard by the river. To eavesdrop, go around the back of the hut, so the wooden wall is directly between you and the villagers, and then approach the wall so that the "Eavesdrop" prompt appears in the bottom right of the screen, CTRL on keyboard (LB on controller).

Press this and you'll lean against the wall and begin listening to their conversation. A "learning" progress bar will also start to build in the top left as you acquire the info.

2. Speak to the guard the first time

After you've listened to the conversation, you'll get the objective to "Find a way to make contact with the secret organization," plus a map marker for a guard you can speak to. The responses you need to select for him are as follows:

1. Select the question "The Truth of the Underground Storage"
2. Press R (or A on controller) to lie and select the evidence, "Secret Society's Base"
3. Select the question "Mysterious Faction Within Beighen"
4. Press R (or A on controller) to lie, but no matter which faction you choose, he'll tell you he has nothing more to say, so exit the conversation

3. Find a clue about the mysterious faction

After you leave the conversation with the guard, you'll have a new objective directing you to eavesdrop on another pair of villagers in conversation. Head for the map marker, go inside the building with the merchant and the anvil out front, then go to the far right corner, where the eavesdrop prompt will appear by a wooden pillar—the villagers are on the other side of the wall. Eavesdrop on them and then head back to the Blue Fang guard.

4. Speak to the guard a second time

Upon returning to the guard, you'll have to select some more conversation options. The correct order is:

1. Select the question "Mysterious Faction Within Beighen"
2. Press R (or A on controller) to lie and select the evidence "Blue Fangs"
3. Select the question "Leader of the Blue Fangs" but upon choosing "Jian" (the only option), the guard will once again cut you off—don't worry, this is supposed to happen

5. Find a clue about the leader of the Blue Fangs

As before, upon exiting the conversation, you'll have a new objective to eavesdrop on one final conversation. Go to the map marker by the nearby lumber yard and head around the back of the building to the corner between the pile of wood on the left and the bunch of crates on the right—the two women conversing are on the other side of it. Approaching the wall, you should get an eavesdrop control prompt.

6. Speak to the guard a third and final time

Having listened to the final conversation, head back to the guard and select the following options:

1. Select the question "Leader of the Blue Fangs" again
2. Press R (or A on controller) to lie and choose the "Torstein" option as evidence

With that, you'll be given access to the secret hideout and, thank god, that's the end of the Bared Fang quest.

Former president of Blizzard Mike Ybarra has entered the phase of being a videogame executive that involves, among a lot of things, some very unfiltered posting on social media. Like arguing with other CEOs over New Years, or telling people they need to "man up" over AI use.

Anyway, World of Warcraft: Midnight had a really rough patch, recently, and given his understandable investment as the former captain of the ship, Ybarra has taken to his X account (thanks, GamesRadar+) to comment on the state of the game once more:

"Unfortunate. WoW has to reset and the commitment has to be clear and firm or it will continue to decline."

As someone who has been keeping track of WoW, I am going to take a moment to quibble, here—"reset" is a big word, and not necessarily even what's in order. The baseline offerings of Midnight are good. Player Housing was a great success, the new Prey system has a lot of promise, its raids and dungeons are all solid and interesting, its zones are jaw-droppingly gorgeous. There's a lot to like!

There's also the point of order that WoW has actually shaken things up considerably already, completely overhauling the game's class design to better suit a world without UI mods (addons).

The issue is that the train's moving so fast the wheels are threatening to come off of the dang thing. I actually wrote about it this weekend—while I wouldn't call the game perfect, the problem isn't with the MMO itself, it's with Blizzard outpacing its own quality control. Either the developer needs to slow down, or it needs to get a better handle on proactive bug fixes.

But "reset" implies a bigger scrapping and starting over—and trust me, compared to WoW's lowest low-points? We don't have it nearly as bad as we did back then. Need I remind anybody that this is an MMO that used to have 400+ day patch droughts.

Now, to Ybarra's credit, he did oversee the start of that turnaround. World of Warcraft: Dragonflight released in 2022, and Ybarra left Blizzard in 2024. Dragonflight itself was a genuinely solid start to a revitalisation of the game, one that saw Blizzard start to stick to roadmaps at an even tempo, focus on evergreen content, and hit the reset button on its story.

But he was also present for Shadowlands, one of the game's most disastrous expansions, and he also oversaw the $68.4 billion acquisition of Blizzard that resulted in 1,900 employees laid off across Activision-Blizzard.

While I wouldn't put much stock in the argument that follows—it's a slapfight on X—Ybarra does respond to some criticism over his tenure and where it led Blizzard: "You'd have to blow the team completely up to course correct. We did what we could under the circumstances, but clearly did not succeed."

Anyway, I'm not convinced that Blizzard needs a complete overhaul. There's a lot of work to do and good will to scrape back, but one bad patch doesn't make a dying MMO—I mean, unless you're Star Wars: Galaxies. Bugs can be fixed, and Midnight's not going to sink the ship just because of one sketchy update.

Is the studio at risk if it doesn't turn things around in the next few major patches? Sure. But we're seeing signs of ill health, not a game on life support, and WoW's a stubborn old beast. If it can make it through Shadowlands without exploding, I'm pretty sure a buggy patch ain't gonna do it.

The cancellation of The Last of Us Online is one of the greatest tragedies of our time. At least in the imaginations of many TLOU fans—it was cancelled after all, so we never actually got to see whether it lived up to the hype.

Nevertheless, former game director Vinit Agarwal has called his cancelled baby "the best multiplayer game [the team] ever played" when reminiscing on the project over the weekend. "It’s wild how many of my ex-colleagues still message me today saying how amazing TLOU Online was going to be," Agarwal expressed.

After the success of the mode in the first game, Naughty Dog planned to expand the idea with The Last of Us Part 2. However, the studio explained in 2019 that it "grew beyond an additional mode that could be included with [an] enormous single player campaign". As a result, it would instead become a fully-fledged The Last of Us multiplayer spin-off.

Agarwal's recent comments come only three weeks after he claimed that The Last of Us' multiplayer spinoff was "developed…to 80 percent completion". Agarwal explained that it was canned because a decision had to be made: "Make this game, or make this next game that Neil Druckmann was directing, the president of the company."

Unfortunately, Agarwal revealed that he only found out his project was cancelled 24 hours before the "soul-crushing" public announcement. In light of that, Agarwal closed his recent post with a vow: "Never going to let what I work on not see the light of day again. Thank you all for your support and confidence!"

That next game directed by Neil Druckmann, I can only assume, is Intergalactic: The Heretic Prophet, which, at the end of 2025, saw Naughty Dog reportedly enforce mandatory overtime to finish an internal demo.

While the next iteration of TLOU's Factions mode remains banished to the shadow realm, I really hope it reappears in some form in the future. It was good fun! Hell, I miss the days when single player games regularly had tacked-on multiplayer for the sake of it. They weren't always hits, but they were always interesting in one way or another.

Nvidia and Intel shocked the tech world last year with a partnership announcement, in which the two giants said they would collaborate on new x86 SOCs with integrated RTX GPU chiplets. The friendship may well be going deeper than that, though, as rumours suggest Nvidia's next-next gen AI GPUs will use the odd Intel Foundry-produced component.

Industry sources speaking to Digitimes have indicated that the I/O die on Nvidia Fenyman GPUs will "partially utilise" either Intel's 18A or 14A process (via Notebookcheck). The GPU die itself will still be TSMC manufactured, although Intel's also said to be lined up to provide 25% of the advanced packaging.

Nvidia's Fenyman GPU architecture was nominally revealed at GTC last year, although details have been scant since then—other than a posited 2028 release date.

Perhaps. Given the state of the tech supply chain right now I'd say all long-term release dates are up for debate—particularly as Rubin, the architecture before Fenyman, is only just beginning to get its time in the sun.

Anyway, it wouldn't be a huge surprise if Nvidia's next, next gen hardware ended up using Intel Foundry tech somewhere in the chain, especially as the two companies now appear to be best buds.

As are some other famous tech providers. Intel's most recent financials looked particularly strong, which is something of a turn around given the previous few years of strife. CEO Lip-Bu Tan has highlighted the importance of foundry customers and partnerships, and getting more tech built on its 18A and 14A processes is seen as a crucial goal for the company.

And with Nvidia cruising from strength to financial strength, it's quite the horse to hitch your wagon to. While an I/O die is not the most important part of a AI GPU, it'd still represent another step forward for team blue if these rumours prove to be true.

The Diablo 4: Lord of Hatred release date draws ever closer, letting us head to the isles of Skovos for the first time. As Tyler Colp said in our Lord of Hatred review, it's a "triumphant expansion that gives the action RPG more depth than it's ever had before," so it's definitely one to check out if you're a fan of the game or the series in general.

Besides the campaign, there are also overhauls to each class's skill systems and many of the game's uniques. These changes are coming in patch 3.0 for all players, with or without the expansion, so even if you're not buying the expansion, you might want to log in anyway to see what's different. That said, here's when you can play Diablo 4: Lord of Hatred.

Diablo 4: Lord of Hatred release times for each region

The Lord of Hatred expansion for Diablo 4 launches on April 27 in some regions (such as the US) and April 28 for much of the rest of the world. Here's the release time for each region, though you can view any not included in the official image above:

April 27

• West Coast US: 4 pm PDT
• East Coast US: 7 pm EDT

April 28

• UK: 12 am BST
• Europe: 1 am CEST
• Australia: 9 am AEST
• New Zealand: 11 am NZST

You can also find the system requirements on the Steam page, though if you've been running the game up until now, you'll likely be fine.

Can you preload Diablo 4: Lord of Hatred?

Yes, you can preload Diablo 4: Lord of Hatred on Battle.net, Xbox, and Playstation, though it doesn't appear to be possible on Steam. The preload begins on April 23 at 4 pm PDT, meaning it's live as of this very moment.

You can also preload patch 3.0 even if you aren't purchasing Lord of Hatred, just in case you want to hop in and check out all the big changes to skills and levelling.

The ghost of Gothic is everywhere. A direct ancestor of Kingdom Come: Deliverance and The Witcher, Gothic was the ultimate eurojank RPG, an ambitious if flawed reminder of a school of open world design that predates maps full of repeatable activities. Gothic's map didn't have icons on it. It was a believable in-world item you had to acquire by paying for it (or threatening the cartographer, if you were roleplaying as a big meanie).

In remaking Gothic, Alkimia Interactive kept that element of realism a priority. "You don't have a minimap," says game director Reinhard Pollice, "we very strictly kept that. We were thinking about making it optional, but we felt like even that doesn't feel right. If you want to know where you are, just open your map. You will find out."

And though they considered adding more activities, they decided not to overstuff that map. "We were debating about doing some minigames to fill it up more," Pollice says. "Having a card minigame, or maybe some fishing minigame. Who knows what the future holds for Gothic, maybe we'll do them one day. But we didn't see them as a priority thing. We felt like they're not really needed for the core experience."

The core experience of Gothic was an authentic and gritty medieval RPG. When we talk about eurojank we often focus on the jank, but the euro is important too. Gothic was developed in Germany and massively popular in Poland, it's the kind of fantasy made by people who live in places haunted by their history, as opposed to fantasy made by people whose ideas of the Middle Ages come from a theme restaurant.

Generalizing wildly, high-fructose American fantasy is much more likely to be about chosen ones, nobility, rulership—even the grim low-fantasy Game of Thrones is explicitly about who gets to run Westeros. European fantasy often shifts the focus to commoners, and Gothic is common as muck.

"It had this down-to-earth, grounded type of writing," Pollice says. "At least, the original German version. When we set out, we also realized that maybe one of the reasons why it wasn't so popular in English-speaking territories was that the writing was a little bit hit and miss in the English version. That was one of the things we started very early on, that we did a rewrite of the original English version, and we decided to get this distinct working-class feeling and tone into it."

Gothic's setting is a penal colony where prisoners were sent to work in the mines. Now they've rebelled and become independent, but three factions have emerged that all have their own ideas about what they're struggling for and how to achieve it. As a fresh fish in this murky pond, you have to choose who to side with and work for. Early on, you can take jobs for all three at once, ending up with quite a lot on the old to-do list, and that's one area where Alkimia Interactive decided actually a little more hand-holding would be good.

"We felt that maybe the way Gothic handled guidance back then just wasn't enough," Pollice says. "I mean, it had a very bare-bone quest log, so we extended that. You now have the option instead—you have a diary-style quest log, but you also have an objective view where you can see, OK, what does it boil down to? What do I have to do? But it's always written in this immersive context of being what would the hero know."

That hero remains the canonical Nameless Hero from the original Gothic games, complete with stubble and a ponytail that makes him look like a roadie for Iron Maiden. While character customization was considered in the first stages of development, ultimately it was abandoned. "We had everything on the table," Pollice says, "but we quickly discarded that as being a very important thing. We felt like the Nameless Hero is known for a specific type of look, and it's a hero's journey in a way. We didn't really lean into character customization. You can customize the armor set you're using."

Another bit of authenticity the original Gothic's known for is its forge where you could heat up raw steel, hammer it on the anvil, cool it in water, sharpen it with a whetstone, and end up with your own handmade sword. It didn't have Henry of Skalitz whistling while he worked, but it was a memorable addition.

"The crafting's one of the things we also extended greatly," Pollice says. "In the original it had a quite elaborate crafting system with regards to the forge, crafting weapons, but we even expanded that further. Now you have an alchemy system, you have a spell, a scroll-inscription system. The cooking is more elaborate, and you have to also find recipes."

The other elaborate system Gothic pioneered was NPC behaviors and routines. They would read books, play music, cook and eat, and train with swords. Gothic and Vampire: The Masquerade – Bloodlines remain the only RPGs I've played where NPCs will even go piss on a wall, and Pollice reassures me that's not going to change. "It's still in the game," he says. "Yeah, they definitely piss on the wall."

Gothic Remake will be available on June 5 via Steam and GOG.

It's wild to think the developers of Redneck Rampage—a game I enjoyed at the time because I was a kid, not because it was anything special—went on to make the much more well-received Return to Castle Wolfenstein, resurrecting id's abandoned FPS and laying down the foundations for its modern revival.

If you're playing Return to Castle Wolfenstein today you're probably playing it via RealRTCW, the mod with its own Steam page that overhauls, modernizes, widescreenifies, and rebalances the 2001 shooter. Not content with all those improvements, the makers of RealRTCW have announced they're also resurrecting its previously console-only prologue as free DLC.

The Cursed Sands expansion will add the seven Egypt-set levels as well as their unique enemies and variants to PC for the first time. It'll also be chock-full of customization options. You can choose between the Xbox version's HUD and the PS2 one as well as between their loading and briefing screens, and enemy variants. You can even set it to randomly pick which of the skins to use for individual enemies, meaning half the elite guards will be in Xbox camo and the other half will have traveled to Egypt in PS2 leather.

The level of customization is a bit nuts, to be honest. You can choose between different sound packs if you prefer the gun or environmental sounds from other games in the series, or even swap in the firerate from spin-off Wolfenstein: Enemy Territory. You can also swap between modernized and classic assets with a click.

Cursed Sands will be available from May 6 on Steam and GOG.

As reported by IGN, Assassin's Creed Hexe game director Benoit Richer has left the project. Richer is the second director-level developer to leave the team this year, with creative director Clint Hocking having departed in February.

Richer announced his career move on LinkedIn. According to the website for Servo Games, Richer is a cofounder of the new studio alongside three other former Ubisoft devs: Luc Tremblay, Danny Marcoux, and Alex Droun.

On February 25, we reported on the departure of Hexe's creative director, Clint Hocking, who was immediately replaced with Assassin's Creed 4: Black Flag director Jean Guesden. Ubisoft has not yet publicly shared Richer's replacement as game director on Hexe.

Any number of things could be going on behind the scenes of Hexe's development, but back-to-back departures in a team's senior leadership is rarely a sign things are going well. Hexe remains a complete mystery otherwise: It's got distinctly witchy vibes, both with its name, as well as the creepy twig version of the Assassin log featured in its 2022 reveal trailer.

Ubisoft has described it as being a different sort of game from the open world, action-RPG era of Assassin's Creed that began with 2017's Origins, but that could mean any number of things. In the more near future of the series, we finally got to see Black Flag Resynced last week, the worst-kept secret in gaming. The long-rumored Assassin's Creed 4 remake will release on July 9, and it will apparently still have blood, if you were worried.

Assassin's Creed's former overall franchise boss, Marc-Alexis Côté, left the series and Ubisoft last year, and that particular break-up hasn't been pretty: Côté has sued Ubisoft alleging "constructive dismissal" (basically getting pressured into resigning through hostile working conditions). Côté is claiming $1.3 million Canadian in damages.

We all have our guys, the true freaks and sickos online who it feels like only we know about, whose trials and travails move us in ways we can scarcely explain. Replica sword reviewers, world-class competitors in niche sports, historical reenactors with hearts of gold⁠—you know, your guys. One such guy, for me, is eauvni, a YouTuber who silently and implacably keeps playing Elden Ring Nightreign alone, then uploading the VODs.

Crucially, eauvni is very good at Elden Ring Nightreign, and will upload multiple runs a week, like clockwork. They rotate through the entire cast, but seem to have a particular affinity for the Sekiro-parrying Executor. All of their runs have been in the mega-hard Deep of Night mode since its release at the end of last year, but they've exclusively uploaded VODs of Depth Three of Five in recent months.

My guess would be that, even at this skill level, solo Depth Five just isn't fun⁠—even Sekiro/Souls no-hit maestro Ongbal has said as much (in the description of a successful Depth Five solo run, naturally). My understanding is that the jump in difficulty from Depth Three to Four is the most pronounced in the game, with enemies dealing twice as much damage in Four vs. Three⁠—and that's on top of the three depths worth of DoN advancements over the base game already.

The Depth Three/Four barrier is what separates the freaks from the perverts among Nightreign players, while the Four/Five divide splits the perverts and the reprobates.

The individual videos are prime "have something on in the background while you do something else" material for me, but as a whole, eauvni's body of work is kind of staggering as a record of obsession: Dozens and dozens of Nightreign runs, all on the same two maps with the same bosses. I've played a fraction as much of this game as eauvni, and there's a point where you start to see the Matrix code, you recognize different map seeds and can even anticipate individual boss placements.

And all to seemingly no end: Eauvni has reached Depth Five and turned back, content to keep fighting more manageable versions of the same pool of base Elden Ring bosses. They already have mathematically perfect relic builds for every character. There is, seemingly, no further support or content for the game planned in the future, nothing to anticipate or prepare for. Alexander wept, for there were no more worlds to conquer.

I can relate to this obession, even at a much lower skill level: Almost every day for our lunch break, PCG writers Tyler Colp, Sean Martin, and I do a Nightreign run. We are in the latter half of Depth Four, coming up on Depth Five, and I have never felt more hated by a game.

Eauvni's "Thank You Nightreign Compilation" is very illustrative: Even more than FromSoft's other games, whether it's glitches, enemy AI, or RNG odds, there's a spite lurking beneath Nightreign. It feels like there's a malicious intelligence working against you at all times. This only makes eauvni's stoic, meditative repetition all the more disquieting to me.

Their recent no-damage run as Executor is a real heater: Eauvni has a habit of level one bum rushing bosses I'd be hesitant to tango with at the end of a run. They began this latest video with a ballsy, flawlessly executed level two takedown of a red (read: turbocharged) Erdtree Avatar at the top of Limveld castle. Elsewhere, they've 1v1'd the memetically difficult Bell Bearing Hunter at level one so many times, it almost doesn't feel worth commenting on anymore.

My friends and I aren't as good as eauvni, but part of me is worried that Nightreign will ruin normal FromSoft games for us and other disturbed Deep of Night holdouts: When I finally replay Elden Ring again with the Tarnished Edition patch allegedly due out this year, will it just feel too fair and well-balanced for me to enjoy? When I'm not instakilled by an overtuned area of effect attack in FromSoft's next mainline release, will I miss the thrill?

Vampire Survivors continues to be a huge deal, and publisher poncle has grown massively since its release in 2022. In an interview with The Game Business, the studio's chief strategy officer Matteo Sapio talked about the smash hit that now has over 27 million players—and what it's planning to do with all that dough.

"Vampire Survivors exploded, and in two or three months, it sold more than one million copies," Sapio said. "[Solo developer Luca Galante]'s yachts are video games. So instead of buying a yacht, he made the Emerald Beyond DLC [for Vampire Survivors] with Square Enix, which we released for free. Things grew organically from there.”

We've seen some of that growth pay off already in the form of Vampire Crawlers, the deckbuilding dungeon crawler spinoff, but more is on the way. "Our idea is to have little teams of people—five, 10, 15—working on different projects. The structure will be, we will have a designer, a bunch of producers, and this little team that’s agile and flexible," Sapio said, adding that the goal is to maintain an indie ethos on a bigger scale.

“We don’t want to be AAA or AA. We’re efficient with costs. We don’t take useless risks. We invest in people. So, with 15 projects, one can fail, one can go good, and you balance that.” In this same talk, Sapio mentioned that the company is opening new studios in Italy and Japan and has plans to dole out its Survivors engine for even more licensed partnerships like Warhammer Survivors. While it's being developed by a different team and borrows a tabletop setting for its aesthetics, it's nonetheless "part of the official Survivors lineage."

Sapio hopes poncle just keeps on growing from there. When asked where he sees the company in five years, he said he'd like to see "40 projects in parallel development at all times everywhere in the world," adding to the notion that he'd rather see more small games rather than one monolithic game.

Original Story: As reported by Newsweek and Wired, suspected White House Correspondents' Dinner shooter, Cole Thomas Allen, had previously attempted a career as an independent game developer, and has a single game available for purchase on Steam: Bohrdom. The self-described asymmetric fighting game's reviews and discussion forums quickly became a hotbed of political debate and dubious meme-making during and after the incident.

Rumors of the game's provenance quickly spread on social media Sunday night. According to CNN, Allen allegedly stormed the Secret Service checkpoint outside the event around 8:30 PM Eastern. At 11:30 Eastern, Game File author and former Kotaku editor-in-chief Stephen Totilo had seen players flocking to Bohrdom's Steam forums, and shared screenshots of the activity to Bluesky.

When I visited the game's Steam store page last night, Bohrdom had four user reviews. At the time of writing, Bohrdom now has 107 user reviews, a 50/50 "Mixed" status, and 10 pages of discussion posts.

Bohrdom is an odd game: It scans as an educational tool more than anything else. You play as an electron or nucleus in a gamified version of atomic chemistry, which Allen described as "technically a skill-based, non-violent asymmetrical fighting game," or, alternatively, "a hybrid of a bullet hell and a racing game." Bohrdom is available for $2 on Steam, and lists support for up to 13-player multiplayer.

Over 100 people have paid that $2 for the privilege of engaging in a political debate via Bohrdom's Steam reviews, with yet more freeloaders doing so in the discussion forums. It's about what you would expect from this sort of thing: Sub half-hour playtimes with a message of support or mockery to Allen or Trump depending on whether the review is positive or negative.

Others are just shitposting, and that too gets old immediately. "The attack was guerilla marketing," "where'd the dev support go," and "It's good to finally see these forums so active again" are all decent gags in a vacuum, but have already been repeated ad nauseam.

There's little here to instruct about Allen's potential motive, just the discomfort of seeing an incongruously light and whimsical relic of a life that appears to have been headed for an attempted act of extraordinary political violence. This is the second time in recent history where an accused political assassin in the US has left a significant footprint of activity on Steam for public scrutiny: Suspected Charlie Kirk shooter Tyler Robinson had over 2,000 hours logged in Sea of Thieves.

I never expected to see "I got reincarnated… as a hamster!" as the opening words of a game's description on Steam. After crossing that dread threshold, I certainly didn't expect to see a banner on the same page warning me about "frequent nudity or sexual content." But here we are: grass grows, sun shines, and Sweet Hamster Days is planned to release in Q3 of this year.

This is the second time the game has announced a release date, however, as things went south the first time around (thanks, Automaton). As the developer posted on X in late 2025, Sweet Hamster Days was pulled from Steam "due to various circumstances" before its original release window of winter 2025. It will release on Epic Games Store and DLsite as well.

It's not clear why the removal happened in the first place. Games with mature content are being policed more and more by storefronts like Steam, and high-profile cases like the one involving horror indie Horses suggest inconsistent standards across the board, but I can't say for certain that Sweet Hamster Days was targeted specifically for its adult content.

If you're unfamiliar with the game, it's a "live-action romance sim" where you play as a lad named Kota who's reincarnated as a hamster named Hamta. Players take the role of beloved pet to three sisters and try to patch a rift that has grown between them using Hamta's "tiny paws and big heart," to use the Steam page's words.

Now, if you're wondering if this is also a sex thing, the answer seems to be (at least partially) yes. "This production contains scenes featuring characters in swimwear and other revealing attire," proclaims the Steam page, also musing that you'll "fall in love" with one of the girls. I don't think Sweet Hamster Days is a straight-up animal sex game—this isn't Baldur's Gate 3 we're talking about—but just be aware that you shouldn't go into this expecting a wholesome and platonic hamster experience.

I have to admit that I'm a bit disappointed by the romantic angle. I often envy the lives of my pet guinea pigs, who spend the entire day eating and pooping simultaneously in-between naps. It is, I imagine, a lavish existence. On the other hand, hamsters have that wheel to put up with; sounds too much like a 9-to-5.

Despite the massively multiplayer angle, MMOs can be quite lonely games—and if you play them for very long, you'll learn there are plenty of people who play them specifically to solo as much as they can. That can mean casually clearing the story or going sicko mode by killing a raid boss intended for a fully kitted-out group. But what would, say, Final Fantasy 14 look like as a true solo game? Director Naoki Yoshida, otherwise known as Yoshi-P, wants to hear some ideas.

He said as much during this weekend's Fan Festival (via GameSpot) after he was asked if he'd thought about making a single player version or spinoff of FF14 for players who don't care to play a Final Fantasy game wrapped up in all the MMO trappings that define 14.

"There are still a lot of people out there who look at an online Final Fantasy and they say, 'Well, an online Final Fantasy isn't a real Final Fantasy,'" he said via translation. "While I do love to consider making a standalone Final Fantasy 14, unfortunately the only team that could make a standalone Final Fantasy 14—the best standalone Final Fantasy 14—is the current Final Fantasy 14 team. If we ever retire from Final Fantasy XIV Online, maybe we can do it as our work after retirement."

That being said, he continued with a surprising sentiment: he's open to pitches, with the caveat that he's "half-joking but half-serious."

"If there were people who are interested in creating a sort of standalone Final Fantasy—if you have friends or if you know companies that would like to take on that challenge—we would love to hear from them. … I mean, if someone's passionate enough to want to helm that sort of project, we would love to hear from you."

He also noted that fans of the MMO would probably be annoyed if he got distracted working on a spinoff instead of cooking up more expansions, which is probably true. That said, if you are a fan and have immense resources, experience, and a great idea for a 14-themed solo RPG more in line with other Final Fantasy games, I'm sure Square Enix would be happy to hear you out. Personally, I think they should be turning the solo entries into MMOs rather than the other way around—see how they like it!

Erik Wolpaw's first encounter with computer gaming was on a TRS-80 in his high-school library. "It was one of the Scott Adams adventures. I don't remember the exact name, but it's the haunted mansion one," Wolpaw says. "They are very crude at this point, but at the time I couldn't believe it, and that was it. That was my goal for years after that. I wanted to get a computer."

Wolpaw's fascination with games would lead him to become a journalist, writing for sites like Gamespot and the legendary games website Old Man Murray, which he co-founded with Chet Faliszek. In 2004, Wolpaw joined Valve along with Faliszek, writing for games like Half-Life 2's episodes and Team Fortress 2, as well as the brilliantly innovative Portal and its hilarious sequel.

Wolpaw took a break from penning Valve games to guide me through the white-panelled test chambers of his PC, a journey that took us from the deepest dungeons to the heights of two very popular spires.

What game are you currently playing?

I'm currently playing, exclusively, Slay the Spire 2. I'm either playing it solo … or playing it co-op with my son.

Co-op's phenomenal. Like most of it, it may not be perfectly balanced yet. I don't know it for a fact, [but] I think two players may be the most unbalanced. It gets harder two-player and then starts to get easier at three and four-player. This is my suspicion, and what I've heard from other people. We're still having a good time, even though it's hard. We were in Ascension 10.

There's still a novelty factor to it, in terms of it just being Slay the Spire, but more stuff and different stuff. It's not as balanced as Slay the Spire 1 yet. But it's also exciting because I trust them, because they balanced Slay the Spire 1 as well as any card game has ever been balanced. I trust that they'll do it here.

Now I'm just going to talk about them [both] … it's the exact, perfect level of decision making and cognitive load for my brain. Games like Crusader Kings or something are too much for me. I can't wrap my head around [them]. This is the perfect level of strategy. There's an interesting decision to be made on a real, regular basis. But if you play Ascension, well, in Slay the Spire 1, Ascension 20 and go for heart kills, it's a coin flip whether you're going to get there or not.

Every run, there's a sense of optimism that I'm gonna build something great and I'm gonna win. It's just a very comfortable, yet mentally engaging experience.

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

Before Slay the Spire 2 came out, I was playing a bunch of Nioh 3. I didn't get all the way to the end. I probably got three quarters of the way through. And then Slay the Spire 2 came out, and that was it.

Slay the Spire is number one in my heart, but I like all the Dark Souls games, and all the Souls games. Play them all, in fact … but Nioh is my second favourite soulslike. I played the crap out of Nioh 1. Nioh 2 must have come out when something was going on, because I don't think I ever solved Nioh 2. And I guess, technically, I haven't solved Nioh 3 or beaten it.

It's sort of Dark Souls mixed with a Diablo-style loot system. There's a lot of loot. But I like it because it's like samurai and ninja. You switch between two characters on the fly, and one of them is more manoeuvrable than the other.

By the time I stopped playing, I had basically abandoned [the samurai] the heavy weapons person … the ninja class has more ranged stuff. In Souls games, I'm a classic "Try to stand back just beyond their aggro range [and] cheese them to death."

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

If we ignore ROMs—I mean that would be the oldest, I have some Atari 2600 games—but the actual oldest is a game I loved back in the day, which is Myth 2.

About three years ago, I was like "Man, I want to play Myth 2," but it doesn't run on modern systems, and then I found a whole bunch of mods and stuff, and I spent a weekend trying to get it to work. And I never did, but it stays on my system because I keep thinking I'm going to go back and figure it out.

It was such a great game, Myth 1 and Myth 2. Myth 3 they outsourced, I think, to someone else and I think it wasn't as good. I do wish they would just sell [it]. Maybe nobody wants Myth anymore.

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

The highest is Slay the Spire at 1,500 hours, which is undercounting it because I also play a ton of it on my phone. At first it was PC, but for the last couple of years it's almost exclusively phone.

Number two, and I think there's something wrong here—not that I think Steam is miscounting, but maybe I went on vacation and left it running—is Dark Souls 3, which I apparently have 571 hours in. But that can't be right. I don't play the multiplayer in Dark Souls, so I didn't play it for 571 hours.

Number three—I know you haven't asked me to run them down, but it's only because there's a couple of interesting ones—number three is Dragon's Dogma: Dark Arisen [at] 450 hours. And that, I think, may actually be just correct. I played that game on the Dark Arisen [expansion], where you had that endless dungeon you could just go through.

I enjoyed the combat. The pawn system was pretty cool. I'm a sucker for the most generic "Go into a dungeon and go through the dungeon" type of games. Love them. So it was a good version of that … I scoured every corner of that world before I finished it. But then Dark Arisen, that dungeon you could just keep playing and playing, it hooked me.

What game will you never, ever uninstall?

Again, as the outlier, never gonna uninstall Slay the Spire. But the game I probably won't ever uninstall is Burnout Paradise.

I love that game and I play it once a year. I already did it this year. There's something about that game that I can't quite quantify. I know people miss the old Burnout, where it was more crash oriented, but I think it's just a tremendous open world racing game.

There's this thing that Burnout Paradise does, this kind of press your luck … you're going down these city streets at just uncontrolled speed. Like you're going to crash at any second, but if you can knock another guy off, you get a quick scene of him eating shit and then it just resets you. So there's this risk-reward of "I am moments away from totalling this car, but if I can just rub this guy into the side wall and flip him over, I'm okay".

There's something about that very specific—I mean, I like a lot of other parts about the game—but that very specific thing, I never get tired of. It's satisfying every single time.

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

Well, nowadays I probably could live without it. But there's a database program package called FoxPro. In the '90s I was a database programmer, and this is what we used.

It was its own thing by Fox software, but at some point Microsoft bought it. So it actually was a Microsoft product for a while, and it's an integrated light database with a scripting language attached to it. I work with it every day. I'm getting to the age where I forget things routinely, but I have not forgotten anything about FoxPro. It's right here on my quick launch bar.

Anytime I need something that needs to work with data or something, I would use it. Every single Valve Game I worked on from 2004—I didn't use it on [Half-Life]: Alyx, that's where I stopped and switched over to using Excel—but they all used FoxPro for maintaining a database of all the dialogue and everything.

How tidy is your desktop screen?

I would say the left-hand side of my desktop is very tidy looking, but it's just a repository of neatly arranged icons. I don't know how they got there. I don't use them. And so instead of cleaning it up, what I do is drag things that I'm currently using over to the right side of the screen. Doesn't look neat, but there's more open space.

Up here on my neatly arranged left-hand side. I've got a shortcut for Ubisoft Connect. I don't know why it's there. I don't think I've ever used Ubisoft Connect. There's an icon for Battle.net. I haven't gone on Battle.net in forever. I could probably delete that. There's something called "TechPowerUp GPU-Z". What's that for? I don't know.

It's not horrible. I've seen much worse. Two years ago, maybe even more, I bought Windows Pane, or WindowBlinds or something. It's supposed to let you organise the icons [on your screen]. It looked pretty nice, but as far as I got was buying it. I didn't actually use it. There's probably an icon for it.

Marathon is a game about loss, though not in the traditional PlayStation Studios fashion. There are no sad dads on Tau Ceti IV, unless you count the various corporate AIs still pining after the failed colony they funded. Rather, Marathon is about the potential for loss—the furrowing fear that sits on your brow every time you pick up a blue shield or a biolens seed. Obviously, you don’t know what a biolens seed is—nobody does. But you heard the shimmering sound it made when it hit your backpack, noted the four slots it swallowed in your inventory, and decided on some level that it was your duty to usher the seed out of dodge.

Now even the tiniest decision is coloured by the purple rarity item on your shoulder. Is opening fire on a rival in the best interests of the seed? Would the seed be placed in danger if you broke this window, rather than finding a quieter route? What precise set of risk equations might allow you to safeguard the seed, which you’re absolutely sure will prove crucial to some undetermined future upgrade?

Yet that powerful sense of responsibility for your gear has turned out to be something that Bungie will compromise on. As part of a wave of tweaks to make Marathon a tad friendlier, the studio has introduced a time-limited Free Kit Frenzy mode. There, everybody beams into Dire Marsh with an inventory made up of low-level weapons, healing items and ammo. There’s no option to bring in equipment you already own, which eliminates any element of upfront risk. And since everybody else is using free kits too, you know you’re not going to be wiped out by a team dressed in gold gear fresh from Cryo Archive.

On the face of it, this experiment would appear to bring Marathon closer to the rhythms of battle royale. After all, there’s little point in caution in the opening minutes of a match when you’ve nothing to lose. Aggressive looting might bag you a slightly upgraded gun or, wonder of wonders, a shield—both significant advantages when every other player has spawned with a popgun and a prayer. In the scramble for a competitive edge, stealth takes a backseat.

That said, I’ve seen teams in Free Kit Frenzy fall foul of a familiar Marathon stumbling block: underestimating the clankers. Even at the best of times, Tau Ceti’s permanent population of grumbling robots present a stern challenge to an uncoordinated team. And when that team is armed with weak gear, it’s all too easy to bite off more bot than you can chew.

While chasing down a contract, I showed up at the Marsh’s notorious repair bay area, Maintenance, to fight a UESC commander. Only, I found the commander was already dead—alongside the three players who’d picked a fight with them. I scooped up my objective from the debris, and smiled at Marathon’s capacity for live environmental storytelling.

In theory, Free Kit Frenzy is a useful arena for the completion of some of Marathon’s gnarlier contracts—in particular, the loud ones. When Marathon mandates that you get into PvE combat, it’s basically asking that you signal your exact location to other players on the map, inviting opportunistic snipers or cloaked ambushers. But tackling such missions in Free Kit Frenzy could perhaps take the sting out of such encounters. With all your own gear safely tucked in your Vault, there’d be no pain, only gain.

Several frenzied and free hours later, however, I’d say that idea hasn’t completely borne out. I’ve certainly managed to complete some significant contracts, but only with a hefty dose of patience—which I think we can all agree is a sister to pain anyway. More than once, I’ve got halfway to finishing a quest only to watch my partners veer from the goal—tempted by the prospect of a messy teamfight. With little to lose, there’s much less hesitation in the air. Players are eager to get into scraps at the expense of whatever they might have been doing beforehand.

One dying teammate chuckled as I fruitlessly finished off an opponent in the Marsh’s quarantine zone, dooming myself to death by machine gun fire in the process. “At least you got him! Well done.” It’s a tone of carefree abandon I’ve never previously associated with Marathon.

At the same time, I’ve witnessed a drastic decrease in team bonding. Outside of Free Kit Frenzy, the Marathon community is often collaborative and helpful. Everyone is vaguely aware that the wellbeing of the players they’re matchmade with has a significant bearing on their own. Strangers tend to stick together, defend one another, get on the same page, and most importantly, ping those bloody awful toxic plants that strip the HP from your bones.

That’s much less the case within the bounds of Bungie’s new social experiment. Once players are killed, they don’t tend to wait around for a revive—instead disconnecting immediately to start a fresh round (a very battle royale behaviour). Their personal investment in a match is lower, and thus their investment in the team is weaker too. You can hardly blame them—though naturally I do, in the moments when I’m left alone, with the thunder of enemy foodsteps filling my headphones.

There have definitely been points where I’m grateful to have Free Kit Frenzy in rotation. After a brutal loss, it’s an appealing option that negates the need for more extreme measures like ‘processing feelings’ or ‘touching grass’.

Still: a part of me wonders whether this new mode has given me a comfort I ought not to have. As a level 40 player, now hoarding shields and stuffing my wallet with excess credits, I’m relying on Bungie to keep my hubris in check. Part of my role, now, is to be the whale that a newer player harpoons. The piñata they’re sometimes lucky enough to crack open, gasping with delight as they rip out my fancy implants. In that context, being able to leave my kit at home for 50% of my runs seems somehow against the spirit of the game.

In fact, one of the pitfalls of Free Kit Frenzy is that, very often, there are no piñatas. Some of my most lucrative Marathon runs have come from the winnings of a kitted-up player's backpack—the rewards proportional to the risk. Free kit fights are fairer, but when the prize is typically the same gun I'm holding plus a few med kits, I actually have fewer interesting reasons to open fire. Asymmetry is what makes an extraction shooter distinct from a deathmatch with an off ramp.

Evidently, Bungie is wary of compromising the core appeal of Marathon. That’ll be why Free Kit Frenzy is temporary, and limited to a single map. The studio will be analysing feedback, and there’s every chance this very article will become a data point. In which case, Bungie: please take care in diluting the wide-eyed electricity of Marathon; the crackling atmosphere you’ve conjured, rooted fundamentally in fear.

More than anything, Free Kit Frenzy feels like a safe out. And as anyone who’s ever been jumped during exfil can tell you, a safe out is not quite Marathon.

There comes a time in every gacha game where, for whatever reason, the developer decides adding a rhythm game is a good idea. It's not.

They're often introduced as part of limited-time events, which means there's about as much effort put into them as a rhythm game only intended to exist for six or so days deserves. They're clunky, barely responsive, badly charted. The idea of what a rhythm game might be, rather than an earnest attempt at making something good.

I recently bore witness to the Wuthering Waves rhythm minigame—a sickening cacophony of terrible, barely-readable charts with low-quality note designs, which made it all the more upsetting that they'd actually included three Muse Dash tracks. And don't even get me started on whatever the hell the Genshin Impact rhythm minigame was.

Okay, I may be a bit of a rhythm game snob. I can't help myself! They're one of my greatest loves in life, and I continue to spend entirely too much time and money deep in the rhythm arcade scene. Which makes me far more critical of how shoddily assembled they often are when utilised as a secondary component, or a temporary minigame.

But it also makes me far more appreciative when it feels like a developer has actually tried to make something good. Something playable.

I've been off the Nikke wagon for a hot sec now. That's the gacha game developed by Stellar Blade studio Shift Up. The one with, er, a lot of jiggle physics. I promise it has a good story—think Nier: Automata's "come for the thighs, stay for the cries" mantra.

But I had to come back to it when my fellow rhythm sicko friend told me something: the latest event has a rhythm game, but wait! It's actually good!

This was a big statement for two reasons. One: we have frequently lamented to each other about how terrible gacha rhythm games are. Two: Nikke actually had a rhythm minigame in an event earlier this year, and it was absolute dogwater.

But this one? After playing it, I can confirm: It's actually good! Nikke is a game that already has the benefit of a handful of rhythm game composers churning out its soundtrack: Cosmograph has been running the music game circuit for a hot minute and is the studio's in-house composer, plus other folks like NieN and Feryquitious regularly contributing.

But good music doesn't mean crap if the gameplay itself is bad—I once again refer you back to the last time the game tried a rhythm game—and while Nikke's newest minigame isn't exactly reinventing the wheel, it doesn't have to. It's a surprising amount of fun just the way it is.

It is, ultimately, a very bog standard four-lane vertically scrolling rhythm game (VSRG). But the charting feels like actual care and attention was put into it, notes are responsive, and there's a decent spread of difficulties to account for all skill levels.

I am so out of the gacha loop at this point that I was ashamed to only recognise a few of the songs available, but cycling through some of the newer tracks and it's clear that the sound team is as on top of their game as they've ever been. Yu-dachi's We Begin is a poppy electronic bop, while Feryquitous's Archemy contains her signature use of classical strings that pleasantly crash against harder, more modern beats.

Is it enough to get me back on the gacha train permanently? Probably not, but it's probably going to keep Nikke as a backup game for me for a hot sec. The mode will be permanent after the event concludes (which explains why some modicum of effort has been put into it), so I'll more than likely be dipping back in when I'm in dire need of a Nikke-themed rhythm fix.

Today, a teaser trailer called "False Sense Of Security" was posted by the Alien: Isolation YouTube account. An industrial door unlocks and opens into a gloomy, rainy cityscape, and the scene cuts to one of Isolation's emergency phone save points. It's hard to believe it's been 12 years since the first game scared the bejeezus out of most everyone who played it, but here we are with a sequel approaching rapidly in the year of our Lord 2026.

That's what I assume this is about, anyway, but the description gives precious little to go on: "A feeling of being safer than one really is," it reads. It sounds like Creative Assembly is sticking to the overt horror of the original game, a game during which I did not feel safe at all, and that's totally fine by me. We've got all sorts of Alien games about colonial marines raining down hell, but precious few about the chill of being stalked by H.R. Giger's multi-mouthed icon.

If you haven't played the OG, it's a great horror game whether you care for the films or not. So great, in fact, I never ended up finishing it—not because I'm a little scaredy cat who doesn't like to let my limbs hang off the bed because I know a shadow man will come steal them, but because the game is legendarily long due to the titular xenomorph's legendarily smart AI. But hey, maybe I'll see the new game and get a hankering for stuffing myself into lockers again.

It is a lot of nerve-wracking fun, though, and probing the limits of the xenomorph's versatile AI truly feels like trying to outwit a cunning predator. PC Gamer's Andy Kelly scored the game an enthusiastic 93 in his review, where he called it "the game the Alien series has always deserved." As licensed Alien games go—hell, as licensed games in general go—it's as about as good as it gets.

Hopefully the sequel can live up to the hype. As for the OG, it's one of our best space games on PC if the thing you like most about space is not the awe or the science, but the terror of what might lurk in all that darkness.

Zenless Zone Zero, a game I primarily associate with the neologism "gooner 9/11," is finally en route to PC's biggest digital storefront. This game produced a headline on this very website containing the phrases "divine domain," "jiggle physics," and "cat balls" all one right after the other. It got a glamorous 55% from reviewer Kerry Brunskill, who called it a "shallow, polished front for a relentless online store." In other words, it'll fit right in.

You can take a look at the game's new Steam page, which reveals a release window: Q2 2026. Prospective players can sign up for pre-release tests and secure exclusive rewards for the full launch. A "milestone event" will let the whole community unlock rewards by getting the game's wishlist numbers up, with the final goal being 300,000 wishlists. I can't say developer MiHoYo doesn't have this stuff down to a science.

What's perhaps surprising is that this is coming before the studio's other gacha hits, Genshin Impact and Honkai: Star Rail. These games have had no trouble attracting an audience on PC without Steam (ZZZ alone had raked in 50 million downloads less than a week after launch), so it will be interesting to see if ZZZ's contemporaries follow suit.

Back in 2024, PC Gamer news writer Lincoln Carpenter predicted that the HoYoverse games had around a 40% chance of eventually landing on Steam. He reasoned that Steam's notorious 30% revenue cut was slightly more likely than not to dissuade MiHoYo from casting a wider net than the Epic Games Store can offer, and maybe that'll remain true for Genshin and Star Rail.

I imagine these games have enough cult appeal to where they don't strictly need Steam to stay afloat. The rub, of course, is that the Epic Games Store sucks. It sucks so bad that EGS vice president and general manager Steven Allison told Eurogamer it "sucks."—though the publisher is trying to be better. Maybe this release is to test the waters for MiHoYo's other live service titans, to see if they'll attract players who only try games on storefronts that don't suck.

If you're just itching to play, check out our tips to get started and prepare yourself for all the glorious grinding that awaits you.