Rick Lane
Rick has been fascinated by PC gaming since he was seven years old, when he used to sneak into his dad's home office for covert sessions of Doom. He grew up on a diet of similarly unsuitable games, with favourites including Quake, Thief, Half-Life and Deus Ex. Between 2013 and 2022, Rick was games editor of Custom PC magazine and associated website bit-tech.net. But he's always kept one foot in freelance games journalism, writing for publications like Edge, Eurogamer, the Guardian and, naturally, PC Gamer. While he'll play anything that can be controlled with a keyboard and mouse, he has a particular passion for first-person shooters and immersive sims.
Latest articles by Rick Lane

Less than a week from launch, FBC: Firebreak has broken out its roadmap, with two new updates coming this year adding new levels, enemies and even systems
By Rick Lane published
News Remedy's cooperative shooter releases on Tuesday.

This massive mod for Mount and Blade 2: Bannerlord not only converts it to Sengoku-era Japan, it adds fully simulated naval battles months ahead of the base game
By Rick Lane published
News Shokuho is available to download now.

Two Point Museum's latest update adds memorial exhibits for staff who vanish on expeditions, which you can put on display or sell for cold, hard profit
By Rick Lane published
News The 3.0 update also adds new decorative posters and backpacks for burglars.

Satisfactory's biggest patch since launch makes it friendlier for Steam Deck players: 'It's no exaggeration to say this update includes more than a year's worth of work'
By Rick Lane published
News The 1.1 update also expands conveyor belt modularity, tidies up your pipework, adds a personnel elevator and overhauls photo mode.

The Outer Worlds 2: All the key details on Obsidian’s sci-fi sequel
By Rick Lane last updated
Moon shots Knowledge, such a fickle concept.

Bus Bound aims to be more than your standard public transport sim, it lets you use your sick bussing skills to change the city around you
By Rick Lane published
PCGS 2025 Life coach.

Nidhogg creator's open-world cycling sim Wheel World lets you ride a hotdog around a Moebius-coded Night City, and it pedals onto Steam next month
By Rick Lane published
PCGS 2025 As confirmed during the PC Gaming Show 2025: it's wheelie big.

Craft magical meals to feed fantasy hordes in card-based cooking sim Arcane Eats
By Rick Lane published
PCGS 2025 Monster munch.

DarkSwitch is a fantasy city-builder where you construct a metropolis around a massive tree, but watch out for the fog that drives citizens mad
By Rick Lane published
PCGS 2025 It's great to see the genre branching out.

Generation Exile, a turn-based city builder about managing a generation ship, releases a demo tomorrow—but it already has the best narrative choice of any game this year
By Rick Lane published
PCGS 2025 Generation Exile's demo is available until June 16.

Kaizen: A Factory Story, the Japanese production line sim from the creators of SpaceChem, gets a demo later this month and a full release in July
By Rick Lane published
PCGS 2025 Expect it to be well optimised.

EVE Frontier, CCP's survival MMO about rebuilding civilization among the ruins of a spacefaring empire, is getting a big update and moving into public alpha
By Rick Lane published
PCGS 2025 The Frontier expands on June 11.

Hyper Games is back with another cozy Moomin adventure, and this time Moomintroll is the main character
By Rick Lane published
PCGS 2025 Snuggle up with Moomintroll: Winter's Warmth next year.

Ark: Survival Ascended celebrates 10 years of dino-dodging with a visual upgrade and letting you run around in your birthday suit
By Rick Lane published
News Ascended's paid DLC also gets a new island, featuring the game's first-ever duo miniboss.

Baby Steps, Bennett Foddy's slapstick walking simulator about a slob climbing a mountain, stumbles onto Steam in September
By Rick Lane published
News There's also a new trailer that spends too long talking about toilets.

Rust's recently added rainforest is so dense the developers changed how resources spawn because players couldn't find them: 'The jungle was a bit too good at being a jungle'
By Rick Lane published
News Facepunch's latest update also gives interiors a lighting pass and adds bee bombs for catapults.

Amazon may have cancelled the Wheel of Time show, but the open world RPG ploughs ahead with talent from games like Dark Age of Camelot and Lord of the Rings Online
By Rick Lane published
News The Wheel of Time turns, and adaptations come and go.

Criminally underappreciated survival game Abiotic Factor is leaving early access with an update that adds buildable office cubicles and a spooky library
By Rick Lane published
News The final early access chapter launches this summer.

Forever Skies developer responds to 'significant' disappointment with the survival game's launch: 'It's tough to see that the game didn't meet the expectation of so many players'
By Rick Lane published
News "Good or bad, our intention has never been to walk away".

Fallout 76 now lets you go fishing in its irradiated waters, though I'm more interested in the massive combat overhaul added in its 'Gone Fission' update
By Rick Lane published
News Bigger fish to fry.

Geometric factory sim Shapez 2 just got a massive update that adds 3D construction and better trains, and it's also 30% off until next week
By Rick Lane published
News Shaping up.

I didn't even know what roleplaying was until I experienced this bizarre '90s B-game where you slowly turn into a bug
By Rick Lane published
Insect propellant Bitten by the bug.

'The journey was long': 2 years later than planned, boomer shooter Project Warlock 2 blasts out of early access with a 50% discount and a request to submit your own loading screen tips
By Rick Lane published
News "Perhaps that second step sequel-wise should have been a smaller one."
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