Got myself a Pip-Boy! Sorry, for legal reasons, it's actually a "Rad-Lad." I recently bought my first ever smartwatch (a Garmin Vivoactive) and now my evenings are spent being completely inactive as I sit on the couch downloading cool watch faces and trying them out. This is a really impressive one called the Rad-Lad by MarekSoso that turns your watch into a Pip-Boy, complete with different tabs for time and date, body metrics, weather, and even a world map. You can even complete quests! It's pretty rad. All that's missing is VATS.

La Rochefoucauld once wrote, "What grace is to the body, good sense is to the mind." He wrote this some time before the release of Grand Theft Auto 5, and was likely referring to Mirror's Edge instead.

Regardless, it holds true today. And you know what? Whatever their qualities, the gentlemen of GTA 5 simply don't have much grace to them. They are lumpy, ambling figures, and move like young children unused to their bulk. I have rectified this using Back Flip Mod—a mod for back flip. "Simple backflip for Single Player," it says, with an alarmingly cavalier attitude to capitalisation and style-guide coherence.

But it's true. Now, with a tap of page down (enormous shoutout to the author for choosing page down, by the way: one of few keys left on my keyboard not already colonised by another mod) the lads of Los Santos will, whimsically, backflip in place. Then they'll get very pleased with themselves for pulling it off.

"There's a chance the backflip fails and your character ragdolls," notes the mod's author, which is delicious. Of course, in my testing so far, failures happen not mid-backflip but more at the conception of the backflip idea.

That is to say, you hit the backflip button and—if the dice roll deems it to be a failure—your character collapses immediately, without even moving. In fairness, many of my own ideas and impulses fail in precisely the same way.

What's great about the PS2 back catalogue is that it's too vast to have an encyclopedic knowledge of everything in there. The defining 20 or so games on the platform—God of War, Gran Turismo 3, Final Fantasy 10 and so forth—are very well known, and maybe Millennial players can recall a weirdo game or two like Mr Mosquito or Global Defence Force. One look at the games in the Japan-only Simple 2000 series, however, shows you just how deep the library goes. When's Demolition Girl getting a HD remaster, eh?

Still, we're in an era where it's not hard to rediscover the key games of that generation, partly because many platform highlights have found their way to Steam in various forms. Intriguingly, we've also reached a point where developers who grew up with this generation are designing great new games inspired by the classics.

Below you'll find six modern games that are inspired by what's known as the 'sixth generation' of consoles, plus six ports of Dreamcast/PS2/GameCube/Xbox-era favourites. I've kept the latter to games that didn't get a PC release at the time (so GTA: San Andreas would be ineligible, for example). All of the games in both lists are discounted in the Steam Autumn Sale.

PS2-inspired

Promise Mascot Agency

Promise Mascot Agency (40% off at $15/£13) is an open world game built around a novel management simulation layer. You send Japanese mascots off to various events while exploring an island that may or may not be cursed. It's actually one of the better open world games of recent years because every sidequest offers something meaningful, like additional mascots to manage or upgrades for your truck (culminating in flight capabilities, as pictured). It's also deeply PS2-pilled in its overall presentation, with its creators citing everything from Disaster Report to Persona 4 as its influences. "6 and 7 out of 10 PS2 games are what I live for," director Oli Clarke Smith told RPG Site. It shows in the marvellously unique finished product.

Hi-Fi Rush

Hi-Fi Rush (55% off at £12.14/$13.49) is at the intersection of several great PS2-era phenomena: innovative rhythm action games, cel-shaded visuals and Devil May Cry-style 3D hack-and-slash combat. Tango Gameworks weaves in many other influences besides, including the way director Edgar Wright matches music to visuals in films like Shaun of the Dead and Baby Driver. It's not exactly at DMC or Bayonetta's level when it comes to hardcore combat credentials, but it's presented in an appealing and often breathtaking anime wrapping, and playing to the beat sets it apart. It captures the flavour of the PS2 era without being exactly like any single game.

Denshattack!

A leading candidate for my top 10 games of 2026, Denshattack! (25% off at $15/£12) draws inspiration from Tony Hawk's Pro Skater, but perhaps more crucially, blue skies Dreamcast classics like Crazy Taxi and Jet Set Radio. It's a speedrunning game of stunt jumping, grinding and rapidly boosting your train through regions of a corporate-owned version of Japan. Except the vision of it just keeps expanding, until you're eventually using said train to battle enormous robots and smash massive baseballs at bosses. Again, it's not exactly like any one of its inspirations—this is a special game because the developers draw something original from those sources.

Sifu

Capcom's God Hand is one of my favourite PS2 games. It was a true cult classic, riffing on Fist of the North Star with ludicrous cutscenes, but having one of the best third-person combat systems ever (and getting an infamous IGN 3/10 review for its trouble). There aren't many games that have been able to capture the physicality of its hand-to-hand brawls or customisable combos, but developer Sloclap has specifically called the game out as an influence on 2022's wonderfully brutal Sifu (75% off $10/£8). It's tonally a far more serious proposition, but its enthralling and beautifully animated fistfights did reawaken my God Hand muscle memory.

Kunitsu-Gami: Path of the Goddess

Outside of its well-known franchises, Capcom made a lot of random stuff for the PS2, like Chaos Legion, Auto Modellista, Gregory Horror Show and Clock Tower 3 (if you know what all of those games are, we are the same person). Kunitsu-Gami (25% off at £30/£25) feels like a lost stablemate to those: you recruit villagers to help you defend against hordes of demons that come at night, which are dead set on attacking the maiden you're charged with protecting. You also have a suite of hack-and-slash abilities to use, so it's an inventive hybrid of action and strategy. While there's no way it would've looked this handsome as a PS2 game, it's exactly the sort of thing you'd have expected from the publisher behind Killer7 and P.N.03. We gave it 86%.

Clair Obscur: Expedition 33

"Oh, these guys really like Final Fantasy 10," I thought when I first played Expedition 33 (20% off at $40/£34). To be fair, you feel it more in the world-building and story than the actual bones of its turn-based combat, which feel more like they're drawn from Lost Odyssey on Xbox 360 and Sekiro. The world-ending threat is so similar in Clair Obscur and FF10: the Paintress erases adults of a certain age on an endless cycle, and Final Fantasy 10's giant destructive whale Sin always comes back even if it's destroyed. The melancholy denizens trying to get on with life in a doomed but beautiful world is something crucial that the games have in common, too.

And now, some actual PS2 games

Metal Gear Solid 3: Snake Eater

A few years ago, you couldn't even play MGS3 on PC without an emulator—and now you have two decent ways to play it. The original version comes in the Metal Gear Solid: Master Collection Vol. 1 (50% off at $30/£25). Delta, the remake, is also 30% off. Take your pick, but I personally think the PS2 aesthetic holds up. MGS3 was the less hyped of the two PS2 Metal Gears, mostly because Sons of Liberty was used as an early tech showcase for the platform. But Snake Eater is a more complete game with superior boss battles and the best story in the series.

Final Fantasy 10/10-2 HD Remaster

RPG purists may argue Final Fantasy 12 is a better game—it certainly has stronger localisation and voice acting, and aims for mature storytelling over anime nonsense. It's the easy-to-parse combat and progression systems that keep me coming back to Final Fantasy 10 (60% off at $12/£8), not to mention how distinctive the world of Spira is. The soundtrack is loaded with bops, and might be the part of the game that's endured the most for me. If you like PS2-era Japanese RPGs, you're actually spoiled for choice on Steam: Phantom Brave, Tales of Symphonia, Grandia 2, Kingdom Hearts (if you don't mind stretching the definition) and more are also on sale.

Rez Infinite

I always think of Rez as a Dreamcast-first game, but it was actually released simultaneously in Japan on both PS2 and Sega's final console. Still, it feels Sega to its core. This Panzer Dragoon-style rhythm shooter where you're fighting evil viruses in a computer network has a beautiful Y2K aesthetic, and Rez Infinite (70% off at $8/£6) brought it to modern platforms with a well-received expansion to the original game. It's not a long experience, so the price here is spot-on.

Shin Megami Tensei 3 Nocturne HD Remaster

It goes without saying that Persona 3 Reload and Persona 4 Golden are easy recommendations from the Atlus RPG stable, since both games started their lives on PS2. Persona 4 Revival seems like it'll keep to the same standard, too. The publisher's other games were always a bit weirder and more impenetrable, though, like Nocturne (70% off at $15/£13), an atmospheric and hardcore monster battling game from the mainline Shin Megami Tensei series. Known as Lucifer's Call in the UK, it was my first exposure to Atlus. I never finished it and lost my save when my launch model PS3 died, but 20 years after I first played Nocturne, the specific dour feeling of its post-apocalyptic Tokyo still sticks in my memory. An acquired taste, but the people who love this game really love it.

Onimusha 2: Samurai's Destiny

"I wonder what PC Gamer gave one of my favourite games of all time," I asked myself this morning. Turns out the answer was 65%. Oof! I love Onimusha 2: Samurai's Destiny (50% off at $15/£12.49), because it offers a branching path at numerous points in the story based on how friendly you are with the four different warrior companions in the game. Samurai's Destiny is at the midpoint between old school Resident Evil's fixed camera survival horror and Devil May Cry's hack-and-slash combat (except more methodical and less acrobatic). A great Steam Deck game, as you might expect.

It's a small thing, but being able to save and quit when I'm playing against the AI is a definite improvement in Warhammer: Blood Bowl. Though matches didn't take a huge amount of time in Blood Bowl 3, there were still nights where I'd find myself with 40 minutes before I should really go to bed thinking I can squeeze another game in, and then realizing too late I absolutely cannot.

A bigger change in Warhammer: Blood Bowl, though one that also makes it easier to squeeze in another match, is Rumble Mode. Based on the tabletop format called Sevens, it's a shrunk-down seven-a-side version of Blood Bowl played on a smaller pitch, inspired by 40K in 40 Minutes and Rugby Sevens. Each half has six turns instead of eight and rerolls cost twice as much, making failure much more common—and since a failed action results in a turnover in Blood Bowl, that speeds up play as well.

Rumble Mode isn't exactly the same as Sevens, though I'm playing the beta so details are subject to change. It doesn't have the Desperate Measures inducements, for instance, and you don't have to make one of your linemen a veteran (who is slower, but can reroll a few specific actions). But it still plays faster, and shakes up the tactics in interesting ways.

There's no line of scrimmage for a start. Instead of having to put three players on the frontline where they'll be biffing or being biffed from the outset, there's a no man's land between both teams. That means fragile teams aren't potentially down three players on turn one, which would be even more disastrous with only seven on the pitch.

The smaller pitch makes slow players less of a liability, and the expensiveness of rerolls means skills that let you reroll, like Dodge, get even better. My beloved Halfling team finally has a place to thrive, especially since their Halfling Master Chef can steal precious rerolls from opponents.

You can learn to play Rumble Mode easily since the first chapter of the campaign, carried over from Blood Bowl 3, now defaults to it. The three beginner games you play as default Ussingen Rookies have become seven-a-side, which makes the second match against Chaos Chosen a bit more challenging—getting the assists you need on those Strength 4 Chosen felt trickier to me.

From there you can opt to play the rest of the campaign in either Rumble Mode or as traditional matches, and Rumble Mode is also available in Eternal League, competitions, friendlies, and basically everywhere. It'll be interesting to see how popular it ends up being.

I don't know if I'm hallucinating, but the AI seems better at handling the reduced scope of these smaller matches. Improving the infamously dopey AI is an aim of Warhammer: Blood Bowl, and while I've only had a few days with this beta it does seem a little better. It still throws the occasional ill-advised block—the skink who took on a mummy must have been feeling real lucky that day—but at least it picks the best block die when it has a choice. I even saw it attempt a pass instead of defaulting to a cage around the ball carrier no matter which team it's playing.

I'll need more time with the playtest version to compare, but my first impression is that the AI is slightly less bad, even if it sometimes attempts a risky play before doing something safe like standing up a prone player. Which, admittedly, I'm guilty of in the heat of the moment too.

As well as Rumble Mode, Warhammer: Blood Bowl incorporates the tabletop game's third season rules update. I'm a big fan of the way it punishes stalling, with bored audience members throwing rocks at players who could score but elect not to, and rewards you with a bonus 10 grand at the end of a match if you don't stall.

The new Secure the Ball action lets you pick up the ball on a 2+ if you sacrifice the rest of that player's activation to do it, while the passing rules have been updated to get rid of Wildly Inaccurate results as well as deflections, both changes that encourage actually playing the ball instead of just lining up two teams and hitting each other until the bell rings.

The way Most Valuable Players are selected is different too—instead of a completely random player on your team earning bonus Star Player Points, only the six players you nominate (four in Rumble Mode) can potentially earn MVP. It means you're not punished for having spares on your bench by having them soak up Star Player Points you'd rather see go to someone more useful.

It's still the same Blood Bowl, but with some interesting tweaks. Changes that affect the balance or play out over the course of a tournament, like the Hatred trait players can gain after being injured, will take more time to judge, but I'm positive about the rules update so far.

Other positives in Warhammer: Blood Bowl are a landing page with tiles that can be personalized so you can leap right into whichever mode or ongoing competition you've put a pin in, and a player advancement screen that highlights which three skills other players tend to buy in this situation, with percentages for each. Is everyone else picking Guard for their mummies? Yeah, pretty much. It'll save me alt-tabbing out to see what the internet recommends when I'm playing a new team.

The beta doesn't include either of the new teams coming to Warhammer: Blood Bowl, so I haven't had a chance to try the Tomb Kings or Bretonnians. It also doesn't have the shop or season pass, so how that'll be implemented—and if there are changes to how teams are monetized—remains to be seen.

Warhammer: Blood Bowl's playtest will be available to the public from October 7 on Steam. The full release is scheduled to be out by the end of the year.

I somehow missed that Dark Souls turned 15 two weeks ago. Honestly, what do you even say about it that hasn't been said already? I guess that's why I'm relegating this to a quick post on the PC Gamer Hyperfeed™ rather than a 3-hour YouTube video called something like "The Haunting Ambiguity of Dark Souls 1." The game is undeniably hauntingly ambiguous, though, no word of a lie.

I bounced off Demon's Souls when I first tried it (many such cases), and it took watching a ton of video guides for me to crack this sucker at the beginning of 2014. I was playing the world historically bad Games for Windows Live port on my giant hot laptop in college. I have many fond memories of dragging that thing and its power brick to dorm common spaces or my friends' rooms to feel like I was being social while I ignored everyone and kept dying to Manus over and over.

FromSoft's devs have only grown in power and artistry since, but each new game is so unique in atmosphere and mechanical experimentation that it remains worthwhile to revisit the studio's earlier works. I've played DS1 so many times, though, that I might need to wait another 15 years to forget enough so it can floor me again.

It feels like the last few years have seen a huge upsurge in videogame concerts, at least over here on British soil anyway. Undertale, The Legend of Zelda, Stardew Valley, The Witcher 3, Sonic, Metaphor: ReFantazio, Final Fantasy. The list goes on and on!

It's been a heartwarming sight—despite my saltiness at half of them happening in London, a city that is both too far away for a casual evening and also far too London for me to willingly set foot in it more than twice a year—but I still yearn to see more of my favourite songs in a live setting.

So it got me thinking, what would my ultimate videogame concert actually look like? Well, I'd probably be chucking in a whole lot of Square Enix nonsense a la Distant Worlds—give me Final Fantasy 10, FF12, FF14, and a little bit of FF13 on the side—but I would also kill to hear some Kingdom Hearts stuff with a live orchestra.

Then I'd probably take a pivot away from JRPGs entirely to hear some songs from my childhood. I continue to be utterly obsessed with the soundtrack from Rare's Kameo: Elements of Power 20 years after I first played it, and it's the kind of music that absolutely deserves the full orchestral treatment. And to wrap it all up? Chuck in a DJ set full of remixes from some classic Tekken games. Is that a major tonal shift? Yes, but it's my dream videogame concert, not yours. Get your own!

No, seriously, what would your dream concert look like? Is there a concert that already exists which you're desperately yearning to come to a city near you, or would you concoct some messed-up megamix even more cursed than my own? Leave a comment and be sure to let me know.

Tonda Ros was first drawn to PC gaming at seven years old, after playing the action-adventure classic, Beast. "It's kind of like an open, nonlinear Sokoban that's action-based and not puzzle-based," says Ros, the creator of 2025's Blue Prince. "I think it was the next year where we had a 386 PC in the house, and that's when the floodgates opened … when I played Tank Wars and the original SimCity and Star Control."

Establishing a career as a cinematographer and visual artist, in 2016, Ros began working on Blue Prince. Inspired by games like Myst, board games like Jewels in the Attic and puzzle books like Maze: Solve the World's Most Challenging Puzzle, Blue Prince was painstakingly created across the best part of a decade. When it released last year, it quickly established itself as a modern puzzling classic.

After taking a break following Blue Prince's launch, Ros is currently working on tech support for the puzzler, while also experimenting with new projects. "I think the next game will have to be a smaller game, logistically," he says. But he stepped out of his game development lab to show me around the ever-shifting parlour of his Steam library.

What game are you currently playing?

I'm currently playing Cairn, by The Game Bakers, which is just a gorgeous rock-climbing simulator/adventure game with some survival elements. What's remarkable about the game is how much it feels like rock climbing, and how simple and intuitive the controls are.

I didn't even have to do a tutorial to understand, because that's just how simple and intuitive the controls are—where you control each limb in sequential order. It's just one of the most well-executed control schemes that I've ever seen. And it's not a control scheme that I had seen before.

I think what's really interesting to me is how similar the controls are, conceptually, to last year's Baby Steps, because these are both games where you're controlling individual limbs [and] climb up a mountainous terrain. But one is incredibly intuitive and smooth and frictionless—in the way the controls are executed at least. And then of course Baby Steps goes to the opposite side of the metric.

I love both games, and I think it's cool to see such similar design work conceptually, but with just slight tweaks in the game feel, they're completely different and unique experiences.

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

That would be Big Walk, which is funny because that's also a game about climbing and walking. But yes, I just finished—two weeks ago—Big Walk with my group of friends, and that was an amazing experience.

I have been waiting for that game since it was announced at The Game Awards many years ago, and it's fascinating, because it's the first social proximity chat game I've ever played. I had been waiting for Big Walk for so long that every time other ones came up, I was like, "Yeah, I'd like to play this, but I'm waiting for Big Walk."

It's fascinating because they started development before this whole social chat scene kicked in. It reminds me a lot of Blue Prince, because I started Blue Prince's development before there were any deckbuilders. So you kind of get a sense that this is something that was created in parallel to those design trends, and you see the different decisions that they made, in the same way that I don't think Blue Prince really feels like a deck builder, though you could probably tell we share similar tabletop designs.

I played it with [seven] people. We had been prepped to play this for years … we played it on Thursdays and Sundays, Thursday was a shorter session and then Sunday was a little bit longer. And it was fun because seven people really allowed us to get lost in groups, where two people would be in a conversation and get distracted and fall away, and we wouldn't see them again for four hours. And that was exciting to me.

I don't want to spoil Big Walk for anyone that plays, but the ending just blew me away. I will say that it literally shook me. I think for a lot of times, I'm playing as a game designer, and you can't help but have a little design hat on where you're like "Oh, I would have done this differently" or "I think I could see ways that they could have improved this."

And when I played the last act of Big Walk, I was in awe, because there is no way I could have come to a fraction as good of an ending to that game, as the way they did. So hats off to House House, well deserved success.

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

I had thought it would be this, and I'm happy to report it's Myst, 1993. I have Cyan's entire catalogue installed. Myst will always be on my PC. It might not always be the oldest, but Myst is not one that's going anywhere.

There were many, many years where I just liked hanging out in that world, just to listen to the atmosphere while I was working. Hearing the wind and the oceans lap at the shore of Myst island. It has a serene quality. And it has a very deep familiarity because of how many years of my life were spent in that game as a kid, and especially [because] it was my first exposure to an immersive graphical world.

The very first time I played Myst was at a friend's house, and I was going to check out their Super Nintendo because they had just gotten [one] around the same time, and then he was like "Do you want to play something else?" And he took me to his father's office, who had a PC on his desk, and he booted it up, and I was just absolutely stunlocked … and I remember the day I got back, I told my parents—I didn't ask for a Super Nintendo—I told them "We need to get a computer with a CD-ROM."

I'm glad that my game and Big Walk and these games are finding success … because unlike a lot of other genres that are oversaturated, the first-person puzzle game is really not oversaturated. It's crazy, because you have Outer Wilds and Obra Dinn and all these games finding success and [being] universally beloved, and the community is ravenous for new experiences … I hope it encourages more people to explore these areas.

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

I'm only looking at Steam here, so thankfully I get to discount Battle.net, and I'm going to disqualify my own game. So the winner would be Mossmouth's magnificent UFO 50, clocking in at 691 hours. But I'm pretty sure a few hundred of those hours are because of Pilot Quest, which likely won't surprise anyone familiar with the game.

If you aren't familiar … UFO 50 is a collection of 50 games—so it's kind of a cheat in terms of the hours—that all belong to a fictional 1980s console called the LX. And if my hours of play are any indication, these are not 50 mini games. They're 50 games, full games that have a lot of depth, and they're as sizeable as any of the games from the '80s.

There are games across every genre. I remember when I first heard of it, I was like, "OK, that's a cool concept, [but] I don't really play a lot of retro nostalgia-driven games." But when I first saw a clip, the design work I was seeing was like, "Oh, they're doing some cool stuff." I think I saw a clip of one of the games called Mortol. It's like a puzzle platformer where, instead of lives, you have a spaceship full of little men, and each one sacrifices his life to progress everyone else. I just thought the design work was insane, and I spent an entire year playing the game, and I decided to give every title its due.

I think it's easily my favourite game of the last 20 years. I have golden in every cartridge, and I've cherry'd most cartridges. I speedrun a few of them, and one of the titles is Planet Zoldath, so hours can clock up when you're speedrunning.

My favourite is a game called Mini and Max, and it's a game about a little girl trapped in a closet, and the entire game takes place in this walk-in closet. But she learns through the help of her dog—who can talk to her, of course—that she can shrink herself down, or at least use her imagination to pretend she's shrinking herself down, and so the game takes place at a minuscule scale within the closet …. Without spoiling too much about this game, I have a massive, 100-page notebook for the game where I was just mapping out things to a micro scale.

My official recommendation, as someone who had an amazing experience … is boot it up and just start chronologically. Act like you're a kid who only gets one game a week, and just play that game until you want to give up on it, but maybe try to play it a little longer than your instincts.

What game will you never, ever uninstall?

I think it would have to be something that would be inconvenient to reinstall … there's a few borderline abandonware games that I remember having to jump through hoops to actually play again. One at the top of my mind is a game called Lighthouse: The Dark Being. I think it's by Sierra, and it's a first-person, point-and-click, post-Myst exploration game.

It's not the most amazing game in the genre. There were a lot of post-Myst point-and-click adventure games of various quality levels. But I was one I was fond of as a kid, and it's one that was technically difficult to play, at least when I tried to play it.

The work of Michael Brough, actually, his game Cinco Paus is not on Steam, and that's one of my all-time game experiences. I think you can download it from itch. These are games I used the executable files on, as opposed to using Steam. I'll say Cinco Paus too. I won't uninstall Cinco Paus.

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

Adobe Photoshop. It's the software I know the best, and the one I'm technically the most fluent in, having used it daily since 1999.

It's the one piece of software I've used across all my creative pursuits in my career. It's my canvas when I paint. I use it for motion graphics, for compositing work. It's the foundation of all my web design for all the websites I've made throughout the years. For game design, obviously, all the graphics in Blue Prince, and even for niche stuff like DVD menus, which was actually my first job when I moved to Hollywood.

I'm not into a lot of the changes over the last few years. Obviously, all the AI integration. I just want to stick on, essentially, because I developed all those skills. I'm really comfortable in the 2019 model, right before they moved to the subscription.

How tidy is your desktop screen?

For my workstation, it's a bit of a mess. I basically never see my desktop as my monitors are eternally occupied with various game dev software that I never shut down. Unity and Photoshop pretty much have 100% uptime. I don't shut my computer down when I go to sleep, so when I get back up, I resume exactly where I left off, just get right back into it. So that's always dominating my screen real-estate, so I don't have too much incentive to keep it clean.

However, on my dedicated Steam machine, which is a mini PC that I use to game on the couch, that desktop is kept really clean, because I don't want anything on that PC that's not software that I need to run games. On that desktop, it's just a shortcut to Steam, an executable file of Cinco Paus, and one Chrome shortcut to a random Kyle Bosman video playing his Happy Monday song, which I play every Monday for my pet bunny.

I have no idea why, but that bunny gets so excited when he hears the piano at the start of that song, and it's the only music he's ever responded to.

Can we see your pet bunny?

Silent Hill: Townfall is a suffocating experience, especially if you're like me and love tormenting yourself with stealth, limiting the use of any kind of weapon. I spent almost all of my first playthrough forgoing any pipe or plank, or even pistol in favour of my trusty CRTV and top-notch strategy. But my pacifist run stopped dead in its tracks when I got my hands on the shotgun.

Silent Hill: Townfall spoilers ahead

Every horror game fan will know the liberating power of getting your hands on a shotgun in a game where you've done nothing but cower and run from danger—finally, you get to be the danger. Turns out the horrors are trapped inside this game with you, not the other way around.

I may have embodied this a bit too much when I got my hands on the shotgun in Richard's section of Townfall. Tasked with making it to the top of a 10 story office building, you need to solve puzzles and clear the way all while fending off a new kind of Silent Hill monster: the widow.

These are bloodied creatures with shrouds of flesh covering their faces. They'll hide behind doors, under desks, or just anywhere that's a bit shadowy. They'll jump out at you, stab you with a knife, and then run off to yet another hiding place. It didn't really bother me at first, their attacks don't deal a massive amount of damage, so I just kind of decided to live and let live, for a short while at least.

Before I knew it I couldn't take a step without one of these widows hurling themselves out of the shadows and attacking me. The final straw was when they interrupted my loot hunting—a precious pastime that I hold very dear—so I decided to make use of the shotgun and the very large stock of ammo I'd built up.

Eventually I'd cleared out every floor. I actually went out of my way to ensure I could walk freely around the office building without being pestered. But then I looked closer at the piles of dead bodies lying at my feet. Uh oh, I have succumbed to my inner rage and have perpetrated the same cycle of anger and death that got us stuck in this situation in the first place, becoming the true monster of Silent Hill again. Whoopsie.

On further inspection these widows had the photos of their deceased loved ones stapled to their bodies. Precious people that my character had indirectly, but essentially killed due to his own greed and hubris. No wonder they're angry.

On reflection I did also notice that some of the monsters were perhaps hiding from me. And hunting them down with a shotgun probably wasn't the most empathetic thing to do to people who were simply enraged by the loss of a loved one. Dammit—this is why I keep getting the bad ending.

Apart from the fact that this section made me question all the morals I thought I had, it was one of my favourites because of how well Screen Burn was able to craft and convey who Richard was in such a short amount of time. Yes, he's clearly evil, like pantomime levels of evil. But I didn't really mind that because by the end of this section I was genuinely convinced that he thought he was doing the right thing for the good of the town as well as himself.

Complex characters like this who aren't built to be liked but appropriately examined do so well in Silent Hill because of the nature of the curse. Richard has enough turmoil, inner strife, rage, and regret to power like three different Silent Hills simultaneously. While I would've loved to see more about how his twisted mind would've warped St Amelia, this section is enough for me. Though, I don't think I'll be able to look at a shotgun in a horror game the same way again.

Steam's global top sellers are my Top of the Pops

• A new entry for an older game, Cyberpunk 2077 is number 5 thanks to a 70% discount.
• Who let the dogs out? Wardogs continues its slow slide, dropping to number 4.
• Former number 1 EA Sports FC 27 slips as well, dropping back to number 3.
• Counter-Strike 2 is number 2 and will stay there until morale improves.
• Steam's new number 1, soaring over 30 places, is AION 2: a Korean MMO with the same art style they've all had since Lineage.

The past is a foreign country, and they do things differently there. At least, this is how I explain PC Gamer of yore's selection of Metal Gear Solid 5 for Game of the Year 2015. Meaning no offence to MGS5—a game I spent several hundred hours obtaining every achievement in, just to have an excuse to play more—speaking personally? Nothing's knocking The Witcher 3 off the pedestal of 2015's greatest triumph.

And now CDPR has gone over the whole thing with a fine brush, tweaking and enhancing it to second-quarter-of-the-21st-century fidelity. You might say, 'Didn't that happen several years ago?' Poor reader, that was merely a "next-gen update." Now is the time of The Witcher 3: Wild Hunt – Remastered.

There is already discourse, to no one's great surprise. Are the graphical enhancements good? Are they bad? Do they wrench The Witcher 3's beating aesthetic heart from its chest and stomp it into the dirt? I'm not exaggerating; people really are talking like this. Ignore them. It looks excellent. In the course of play I've found myself stopping regularly just to survey a sunset skybox, or the way tender motes of light slip through Geralt's beard. Actually, I've not been doing that second one. Don't put in the article that I'm doing the second one.

There is a way in which certain game worlds become home. They become actual spaces, fixed in your mind like places from your past. That's The Witcher 3 to me: its battlefields; its main city; and clean, icy Skellige, which arrives towards the game's end like a therapy session after it has spent tens of hours oppressing you with the first two regions. Going back feels like, well, going back—walking streets that were yours as someone younger, looking at nondescript corners and patches of pavement and remembering the specific, personal myths and legends that played out there in now-dead ages.

And it looks excellent, of course. Better than it did before, which means just as good as you remember it. So not only is The Witcher 3 Remastered like going home, it's like going home and finding someone has, in your absence, been in and aired the place out, run a duster around, and reupholstered the furniture. There are some lovely little additions too—minor new features and mechanics to smooth your way through the world.

You can, for instance, now see all your myriad quest objectives on the world map, and you can flip between focused quests (and objectives) right there with a squeeze of a gamepad trigger. The HUD is less cluttered, and a new loot feed tells you what stuff you've picked up or been given, which is rather nice for the myriad quests that end with someone telling you 'Here, take this,' without ever telling you what 'this' is.

There have been changes to the game's combat, too. Some fiddling to sand down some of the old jank. This may be very noticeable to some people, but I confess it's not to me. If, 11 years ago, you fired up The Witcher 3 and bounced off in revulsion at how its swordplay and sign-slinging felt, I don't think you're going to experience a sudden conversion here. That's no bad thing. I'd be upset if The Witcher 3 no longer felt like The Witcher 3, but I do wonder if CDPR was perhaps overegging the pudding with its stated goal of making the game feel, mechanically, like it released in 2026.

The Witcher 3 Remastered is a lovely little present and, with a brand-new expansion called Songs of the Past currently pencilled in to arrive some time in 2027, an excellent excuse, especially now both of the other expansions are free.

Obviously, I need to generate a new, 100%-complete save to take into the new DLC. And hey, I obviously need to see every inch of the game's newly remastered world.

What an autumn treat: a series of warm, placid nights await me, curled up on a sofa and making my way through Geralt's Big Adventure again. It's like 2015 never really went away.

The Cursed Apple, wherein Valve’s latest MOBA Deadlock takes place, is ‘an urban fantasy setting’ in the same way that Limp Bizkit is ‘an American rock band.’ Sure, the label is accurate, but Deadlock is unmistakably, crucially, and specifically New York the same way Fred Durst is sort of like the living avatar of Jacksonville, Florida.

The latest batch of new heroes just unveiled as part of the City Never Sleeps embraces this aspect of the game and takes it to new heights. Almost all the new characters are the sights and sounds of New York City: old man playing chess in the park? That’s Solomon, a chessboard-wielding wizard. A grandma on a park bench, feeding pigeons? That’s Baba, a cheeky twist on Slavic folklore. What about those giant, slimy rats always gnawing on floor pizza? Enter the literal Rat King, who makes all of da rules.

Just look at this fan concept for a Chinese immigrant and construction worker reimagined as Sun Wukong (who natural law mandates must appear as a playable character in every MOBA). Deadlock’s online community is always abuzz with ruminations about what comes next the same way you can find with games like Heroes of the Storm or Smash Bros., but their enthusiasm isn’t for games they’ve already played or stories that have already been told. It’s for the winding alleyways and wild card denizens of the real-life NYC, pulled through a prism of macabre magic.

Maybe that sounds like a gimmick, but the game is never content to leave these characters without dimension. Vyper isn’t just a slithering sewer lizard with a firearm, she’s a chronic flirt and a dismal career criminal. Seven may be a cackling pulp serial villain, but mark his tender memories of friendly wight Kelvin and his affinity for the naive, almost childlike goo monster Viscous.

It's refreshing because a lot of MOBA heroes are basically action figures: emphatic, unsubtle, function-first designs where narrative is a secondary priority at best. It’s obvious why this is if you know the genre’s history—MOBA progenitor DotA's designs all came from Warcraft, and its successors haven't been able to fully get away from that. Sure, Dota 2’s Disruptor has a unique backstory, and he’s an oglodi rather than an orc, but no amount of reverse-engineering will erase the truth from my memory: he is Thrall, but red.

League isn't too far off from that, taking generic character concepts with rough DotA counterparts and retooling them for a standalone game—one with a narrative that wouldn’t be figured out for years. Heroes of the Storm's Smash Bros. grab bag of Blizzard favorites has its own charm, but it certainly isn't cohesive. Smite draws from a different well, but real-world mythology is even more archetypal and constrained by prior assumptions than Blizzard's fantasy cast.

That’s not to say you can’t tell a good story with ‘Thrall, but red.' Dota 2 actually has a lot of fun storytelling if you look for it. But Deadlock breaks new ground for MOBA-pilled lore fiends simply because it's not so beholden to its forebears.

Deadlock is the rare MOBA with both an original story to tell and the blank canvas necessary to tell it best. Valve has seized this opportunity with apparent relish, and you can see the results of that in the oodles of fan art pouring out for each of the newest six characters, only one of whom is even out at this point. Every time the community gets its hands on unique names for over 100 of the Rat King's unique rat citizens or Valve patches in "over 10,000 non-ping voice lines" in a single pre-release update, playtest enthusiasm renews all over again (it just hit a new all-time concurrent player count peak yesterday, according to SteamDB).

Deadlock's specific emphasis on New Yorkian archetypes also begs the question, what’s next? I need a ghostly muckraker journalist. A witch with a hot dog cart. A greedy, monstrous landlord who charges his enemies soul rent! I’m giddy for what’s to come the same way I am with a crossover fighting game, but there’s not that latent stench of knowing it all doubles as advertising for other products. For every bit it’s a pulpy fantasy world, Deadlock is a celebration of the real one outside. And where other MOBAs are sketching in familiar margins, it still feels fresh two years into its "private" playtest.

WoW: Forever's had me nostalgic for a bygone era of MMOs that seems to be enjoying a touch of a resurgence—the idea of a lived-in immersive world, versus the daily task theme park of modern MMO design. Not that I have anything against the latter, mind. Theme parks are neat and roller coasters are fun.

But I have, true to the point, been grouping up with strangers more often in a slower-burn world, partially for convenience, but also partially because the slower pace has me less hungry for rampant progress and time saving. I've gotta hike for six minutes to get to this quest anyway, why wouldn't I stop and help someone in trouble?

When I get all sappy and soft-hearted like this, I also think of The Remarkable Life of Ibelin, a documentary about a WoW player Mats Steen, who sadly died in 2014 of Duchenne muscular dystrophy—a man whose closest online friends travelled from across the world to attend his funeral.

Steen had a massive impact that I wouldn't presume to match, but in my 16 years playing MMOs (and roleplaying in them, like some kind of nerd), I've also met a lot of people who have changed my life. My first girlfriend, for instance—but I've also made a lot of friends who've become part of my social makeup, as much as any of my "real" pals.

I won't name them for privacy's sake, but one of these people—though I've only heard their voice for the better half of a decade we've known each other, for reasons I cannot share—has been a constant force of good in my life, and I hers. We've pulled each other out of some real mental swamps in the time we've known each other, and I've even met her sister in the real world through sheer accident.

Hopping from City of Heroes: Homecoming to Final Fantasy 14, we've told countless stories together in both MMOs. We know plenty about each other—she knows I write for this very website—but it's all been in the tiny, cosy window of Discord. It would not be going too far to call this person one of my best friends, and while I have a more regular balance of "real world" mates and digital friendships, the latter ones have never stopped being vital.

Ultimately, the friendships are what make these games—beyond any trick of design, art asset, raid, or loot system—special. As such, I'm carving out this week's Terminally Online to ask you all about the folks you've met in MMOs who've changed your life for the better: Please share in the comments below!

After putting together a list of some of the big, well-known games currently on sale in the Steam Autumn Sale, I asked the PC Gamer team for some deeper cuts—games they're real sickos for, but that haven't gotten enough love. Here's what they brought to the table.

The ones where you have to read

Underappreciated shooters

Chillout corner

For the tacticians

There is a place, deep beneath the earth, where the narrative wranglers behind our favourite games come together. Writers who helped deliver the perfect ending for Destiny in The Final Shape, or make sense of Stellaris' irresistible mix of strategy and story. Who spun up the Tim Curry sass of Baldur's Gate 3 companion Astarion, and scribbled the funny ambient dialogue that shows up in Borderlands 4 compilation videos.

They all tangle in Fallen London, the marvellous and sprawling text-based RPG from the makers of Sunless Sea. And there, they do their bravest, smartest, most depraved and moving work.

You play Fallen London in your browser, but it helps to abandon your expectations about how slight, forgettable or exploitative browser games can be. Failbetter's RPG is a near-bottomless brunch of comic and cosmic horror—an interlaced network of choice-driven, literary stories that have been woven together over a decade and a half. It is a regularly updated and living world, riddled with intriguing mysteries and set against the backdrop of a sunken Victorian capital city.

Most Fallen London players are in pursuit of some overarching main quest that swallows up their resources as a gadabout-slash-magnate. These adventures, put together in episodic installments by Failbetter, take you far across the unterzee and eventually up to the cavern roof where the false-stars shift and glitter. They take months and years to see through; Fallen London is a game you might prod at in spare moments on your phone, but gradually becomes a slow-burn and deeply rewarding parallel existence.

In between these major plotlines, however, come Exceptional Stories. Reserved for subscribers, these are bite-sized, entry-level quests that show up every month, as regular as a ratwork watch. They're not typically written in-house, but rather handed off to freelance contributors, and this fact is crucial. It's the reason that Exceptional Stories feel like unpredictable entries in an anthology series. They're self-contained, often introducing new characters whose fates are decided by the story's end. And they reflect the tastes and personalities of their writers in unique ways.

Take Baudelaire Welch, for instance: the architect of Baldur's Gate 3's Dark Urge path, which makes your protagonist responsible for a string of murders they don't remember. Their contribution to Fallen London has been The Goblin Poet—a potently sinister story in which you follow a cult of BDSM bohemians through the mirror to the Reddest Keep, where they toil to capture the beauty of the Red-Handed Queen, using their own lifeblood as paint.

The Keep itself is viscerally horrible, its very floors made up of taxidermied beasts tied together in a carpet of rodent death. But it's the attitudes of the infatuated artists that lend the story its lasting unease. Their hapless adoration of the queen is conditional; the moment she reveals the slightest imperfection, they turn on her in misogynistic rage.

"The vision I presented to you—that is who I am," argues the queen. "Who is not a different person when they turn to bed for the night? When they are in their own company? It is no different than wearing a fine suit! All of you will age and wither: why must I be confined to one skin alone?" Yet the artists reject this argument; their impossible ideals of womanhood ultimately unravel the queen, and free them from a trap of their own making. It's hard to imagine such an uncomfortable conclusion to a mainstream RPG quest.

Then there's Tired of London, another missing person case among this year's Exceptional Stories from Paradox designer Giada Zavarise, which takes the player somewhere utterly different. Channelling the opening hours of Failbetter's most famous roguelike, Sunless Sea, it carries you north on a steamer to the Tomb-Colonies—where an ingénue seeks to escape the stifling obligations of nobility among the crumbling near-dead.

It climaxes with the kind of grand spectacle a text-driven game can offer without breaking the budget: a last cruise of the mummified living, designed to end in a split hull and a rush of water. "The captain removes the ship's wheel," Zavarise writes, "and throws it overboard." The ship lists and lurches into the black zee as the band plays.

Where Tired of London ends with a half-drowning, Nessa Cannon's tale begins with one—your own. In Old, New, Drowned & Blue, the Borderlands 4 writer offers a lethal love story, rooted in the deep-zee court of the Fathomking, who appreciates a good yarn as much as any Fallen London subscriber. Dishonored and Destiny scribbler Hazel Monforton, meanwhile, introduces a romanceable rodent with three heads in The Prince of All Rats—the kind of figure you couldn't imagine kicking about The Tower with Ikora Rey and company.

It's cool to see AAA writers let loose in a universe that can accommodate their wildest ideas, and empowered to tell a whole tale from start to finish. In this context, their individual voices come through more clearly—rather than becoming muffled in the mix of a much larger product.

But Fallen London's Exceptional Stories are a home for more esoteric indies, too, and have introduced me to some new favourites. My ears now prick up whenever I hear about the latest story drop from Heather Flowers, a devious designer who likes to muck about with probabilities—both in Fallen London's dice rolls and in her own projects, such as the heads-or-tails mindfuck of Unfair Flips.

You might remember the name Jim Rossignol from the byline of PC Gamer's classic Half-Life 2 review—or from the credits of Sir, You Are Being Hunted, the British riff on Stalker that lampooned the country's fondness for fox hunting and class warfare. His dark whimsy has proved a strong fit for Fallen London; in recent months, he's contributed stories about a painting that refuses to live in its frame, a malevolent building that follows you around the city, and a new aesthetic movement that treats illness as art. "Oh, let me look at you, my poor darling. Yes, it's just as I thought! You have the Lily-Tongue Sweats. Fascinating. Beautiful!"

There's also Anna Anthropy—a legend in the field of text-based interactive fiction, who wrote September's The Poetry of God. A clearly personal work, it concerns a disabled academic who handles dangerous sigils with the same matter-of-fact fearlessness as she does her wheelchair. Yet it's also something of a Cold War thriller, full of delicious turns of phrase. Grief and yearning are briefly revealed in the eyes of a revolutionary, "like darting things in a hidden pool".

At one point, you learn that a book-burning censor has been surveilling the academic, but keeping his distance. Here Anthropy writes as if peering down her glasses at the man with disdain: "Perhaps he fears that the small woman in the chair that he has been watching might turn and look back at him." It's the story of a powerful person, underestimated.

Before the year is out, Fallen London will serve up another handful of distinct short stories from all corners of the gaming medium. And there's a bank of them going back a decade at least, beginning with the nascent tales of Nighthawks writer Richard Cobbett. It only remains for the wider world to discover them. These stories are Exceptional in both senses of the word: deeply unusual, and bloody good. It simply doesn't get bloodier than the Reddest Keep.

What comes to mind when I say 'big brand competitive gaming mouse'? If you're anything like me, that particular Rorschach test will make you spit out the word 'expensive.' That response isn't wrong, either: just look at the big releases we've had this year.

There was the Logitech G Pro X2 Superstrike: $180. The Razer Viper V4 Pro: $160. The SteelSeries Rival Pro and Sensei Pro: each $180. And there's an X3 Superstrike now, too, which is $200. These are some very expensive mice.

In previous years, I would have taken a dimmer view of this. Especially given the impressively competitive rodents you can pick up from niche Chinese brands these days. The $89 Mchose K7 V2 Ultra+, for example, is a Razer Viper V3/V4 Pro clone that performs very well and is plenty comfy.

And to be honest, even if fancy big brand mice are top-tier build quality, it's still a heck of a lot of money to ask for. The Rival Pro, Sensei Pro, and Viper V4 Pro specifically are truly fantastic on the build quality front, with the latter being practically flawless and cheaper than the rest, but they're all still very expensive.

So why isn't my view quite as dim as it could be? Because all of these releases have pushed the competitive gaming mouse scene forward in a way that probably only big brands can—both in terms of being able to absorb risk and also get new tech into as many hands as possible with big marketing campaigns.

In the case of Logitech, we have probably the most radical tech of all three: haptic-inductive (analogue) clicks. Then there's Razer, which has changed the way the sensor reports its data to save battery. And SteelSeries offers a few new things: primarily ultra-wideband (UWB) wireless connectivity and some changes to how it does polling (there are hot-swappable batteries, too, but those aren't completely new).

Logitech's analogue clicks

Logitech's Haptic Inductive Trigger System (HITS) combines, well, haptics and induction, of course. The result is the ability to change how much you need to press down your mouse button before it actuates and registers a click, with the haptics there to ensure you get the feeling of a click wherever you set it to.

Logitech was the first to market with this tech. In fact, the company's head of engineering told me, "We knew we had a golden nugget in our hands... so we took all the shortcuts we could." Which probably goes some way towards explaining why an improved X3 Superstrike was released just seven months later—a fact that must surely sting some early X2 Superstrike buyers.

Since Logitech launched the X2 earlier in the year, we've seen that Keyhcron has been cooking up the "next gen mouse switch" which lets you choose between optical and magnetic within one switch, though its click feeling is static, meaning you won't be adjusting it to perfectly align with the actuation like with the Superstrike. We've also seen niche brand Finalmouse show off its TMR analogue clicks.

Razer's FrameSync

With the Viper V4 Pro, Razer introduced FrameSync—no, not Meta's FrameSync, something else. It essentially does for mice what VRR tech does for monitors, syncing up hardware with your system's polling. FrameSync ensures the mouse sensor's optical capture sync up with the microcontroller unit (MCU), ensuring it only captures the data when the MCU is polled by the PC and asks for it.

One benefit is potentially to latency and jitter, but a good sensor doesn't really struggle with those things anyway. The actual benefit is to battery life, for one simple reason: there are fewer sensor snapshots required. That's how the Viper V4 Pro manages up to 180 hours of battery life at 1 kHz polling, despite the very performant sensor.

As far as I'm aware, Razer is the only company offering this kind of tech (Motion Sync is different). And we've seen from independent testing that FrameSync is indeed doing what it says it does.

SteelSeries' UWB and "true" 8K

SteelSeries was the last to the 2026 'new competitive mouse tech' party, and its new technologies aren't quite as exciting as the ones mentioned previously, but are still great additions to the competitive mouse industry's toolkit. The new SteelSeries mice have hot-swappable batteries, and they're done well, but it's not the first company to have done so. It's the other technologies in there that are the newer ones.

SteelSeries is the first company, as far as I'm aware, to use ultra-wideband (UWB) in a mouse, apart from niche Japanese brand Elecom, which announced a similar mouse just a few weeks prior. The UWB promise is for more stable and reliable wireless connectivity. SteelSeries is also offering "true" 8K, as it claims its polling doesn't bundle up data packets but sends one packet for one receipt. Elecom makes similar claims about its mouse. SteelSeries also lets you have a lower sensor polling rate than click polling rate, but I think sensor polling is more important so I'm not too fussed about that feature.

None of these technologies on their own are quite as exciting as haptic clicks or synced sensors, but if other brands follow suit and add similar features to their mice, I certainly won't be complaining.

Big brands risk it, others follow

After learning about all that niche brands have to offer, such as Chinese ones that make 'clones' of well-known mice, I did wonder for a while whether big brands like Razer, Logitech, and SteelSeries can continue charging so much for theirs. After all, you really can get great-performing, comfy, well-built mice for much cheaper than these big companies charge for their own options.

Perhaps these big brands started wondering the same, and rather than charging less, instead decided to use their big bucks to take the risk of investing in developing new tech. I'm sure much of this was done selfishly—to have something new and shiny to offer that other brands don't—but the positive side-effect for us consumers is that these new technologies are sure to spread out across the industry.

We should remember that with all these gaming mice, the mouse makers themselves don't make all their internal components (though Logitech does design its own sensors). Sensors, switches, and the like, are usually made in collaboration with distinct manufacturers of those parts. Which means that the new mouse tech we've seen this year isn't likely to be wrapped up with just one brand forever, unless the companies have very deep hooks in patents and whatnot.

The fact that it's the big brands that have been taking on the risk of developing and implementing new tech also has the benefit of giving these technologies a stamp of legitimacy plus widespread marketing. Not everyone is a competitive mouse enthusiast, and most probably won't try a niche brand's mouse tech, however good it might be.

But taking the Superstrike as a paradigmatic example, Logitech is a big enough brand and has put enough marketing into its haptic-inductive click tech that people generally now accept that the technology is legitimate, useful, and marketable. Thus why other brands haven't been scared to follow suit. No doubt it helps to have some working models in the wild to see exactly how to make it work technically well, too.

All of this is to say that yes, top-tier competitive mice from big brands are ridiculously expensive these days. And yes, I'd still recommend picking up one of the many cheaper but still-quality options out there instead if you don't have a big budget. But I also have to hand it to the big brands for actually pushing the industry forwards in a way that's likely to stick. Rising tides to raise all boats, y'know?

This is how I knew Dicevaders got its claws into me: the first thing I did this morning was boot up my Steam Deck (which is next to my bed, of course), just so I could get another run in before logging on for work. This kind of compulsive behaviour hasn't been part of my daily routine since Titanium Court back in May, and before that, Blue Prince in 2025—so Dicevaders is in good company.

You play the captain of an alien invasion force hurtling through the stars in this roguelike deckbuilder, which is about activating units on a grid using three dice. Each column on the grid corresponds to a number on the dice. You draft your units in each column, roll the dice, then the outcome determines which columns of units will score. As you can see below:

Your units don't actually go anywhere or fight anything. They each have a strength stat which forms the base score of each turn. Let's say you roll a pair of threes and a six, as I did in the screenshot above. Your units placed in the third column will have their strength stat multiplied by two, while the unit in the sixth column will only score its basic strength stat because one dice only equals a 1x multiplier.

The goal is to hit a target damage number across four turns, which successfully triggers the invasion. If you don't hit the number, you start losing health on each further turn until it's game over. Of course, you can also buy a suite of artifacts which positively affect the score in many ways, from increasing multipliers to bolstering the permanent strength stats of your different units.

Written down, all of this sounds pretty familiar. And it is! But what's key to Dicevaders' appeal is how much scope it gives you to affect both the outcome of each dice roll and your current run. Sure, chance is a factor in how you play, yet there's an intensive resource management layer here that makes it feel fair.

For example, you have a currency called 'Budge', which is self-explanatory: you can spend one Budge point to move a dice roll either up or down one per turn (so, a four becomes a five or three), and you can do this for all three dice. You can also spend another currency called 'Chrono' to re-roll the dice completely. That gives you quite a bit of scope to avoid the dice roll landing on the columns with all your dud units.

Both of these resources are finite. The game isn't that stingy with them, however, and you have numerous ways to get more, which is what gives Dicevaders its feeling of fairness. In between each turn, you're given cash to spend on units, artifacts and both these vital currencies.

You can also freeze an item to buy it on the next turn if you're short on cash—again, all of this adds to the feeling that the developers want to give you the power to turn your luck around, rather than write off a run early.

The other resources you're managing, of course, are your units. As well as their strength stats, most of them have specific abilities, too: teleporting around the grid between turns, attacking three times per turn but only if they're placed on the bottom row, or randomly activating other units around the grid to add their points to the score total. There are many other variants.

Managing them is about positioning and getting their strength stats as high as possible to increase your base score. In a fun touch, you can sacrifice one unit between turns and give their strength stat to another. You'll fatten up a unit's strength with one of your artifacts, only to feed them to a different unit that has the special ability to attack six times if they're played in the sixth column. Suddenly, that unit is six times more useful, and you've opened up another spot on the grid to drop another unit in.

Or maybe you'll have a network of Swarmers that share one giant strength stat with adjacent units of the same type. Which is exactly what I had going on with these yellow lads below, meaning they'd do the same base damage whether I rolled a 3, 4 or 5 in Prism Tower-like fashion.

"Shit yeah!" I yelled after figuring this out, before realising my artifacts weren't scaling fast enough to keep reaching the score target. It becomes apparent that there is a staggering number of strategies you can employ to hit the high numbers in Dicevaders, and it's excellent at teaching itself as you go.

Just by following a few simple tutorial screens, I'm punting scores into the millions already—but by no means do I feel like I totally understand the shape of the game yet. It's hit that roguelike sweet spot.

Dicevaders seems to repackage some of the art and characters from last year's well-regarded Starvaders, which was also a roguelike deckbuilder with more of a shooter bent. I haven't played that, but this seems rather different—the alien invasion stuff is just a pleasantly cartoonish skin for a game about managing a grid of increasingly outrageous numbers.

I can't honestly say that Dicevaders feels completely new and fresh, or that it'll bust the cobwebs if you're burned out on the hundreds of games trying to be the next Balatro. I can't even say I fully understand why certain numbers are triggering the way they do about 20% of the time.

But it's the real deal in terms of high-level synergies and how much control it offers you over each situation. I don't feel like I'm pissing time into an abyss, either, which is always the risk with these games—it's complex and has a lot of moving parts, and there are too many unit types available for you to become entirely dependent on a single strategy. It keeps you changing things up.

Now if you'll excuse me, I'm going back to bed to play some more of it.

My experiment to see if gamers were as interested in milk as they are in necks has yielded conclusive proof that they are not. Those pageviews don't shown above don't lie. Gamers don't care about milk. Gamers only care about necks. I will focus more on neck-related content from now on. Please do not visit this website if you are looking for milk. Thank you.

Well, I was mostly joking when I took credit for Ace Combat's director finally getting to fly in a real jet. Turns out our interview really was the catalyst. If anyone else has a dream waiting to be realized, give me a shout. Apparently I have the magic touch.

Just 1 day remains to VOTE in Round 1 of the FPS mode tournament. Four days in, here's where the polls stand in each bout. Many of them are still really close, so let your voice be heard!

• Team Deathmatch 75% // FFA 25%
• Battle Royale 52% // Extraction 48%
• Conquest 68% // Domination 32%
• Bomb Defusal 85% // Hostage 15%
• Payload 52% // Gun Game 48%
• Infection 61 % // Prop Hunt 39%
• Capture The Flag 91% // VIP 9%
• Attack & Defend 52% // King of the Hill 48%

At 8:35 am Central Time on Friday, October 2, PC Gamer audience development manager Cameron Bald shared a Twitter post by fan account GTA 6 Countdown. Miami's NBA basketball team, the Heat, is doing a cross-promotion event with Rockstar, "A Night in Vice City." The team will temporarily rebrand, though from what I can tell it's as "Vice City" and not "The Vice City Heat," which feels weird but what do I know.

None of us were particularly enthused by the branding exercise, but noted negative nelly and Glasgow-based PCG online editor, Fraser Brown, took particular umbrage, wondering "Who the hell doesn't know GTA is coming?" Cameron offered a fairly compelling rebuttal: "The super-casual types who are still on a PS4 and need convincing that GTA 6 is worth getting back into games over." Lead SEO editor Lauren Morton likened it to a chocolate bar at the checkout counter: This isn't an exercise in persuasion, but flooding the zone.

Fraser was not persuaded, doubting the efficacy of the campaign. We got our first indication that something was amiss at 8:54 am. "A basketball stunt is so much more niche than, say, the Netflix trailer," Fraser argued. Niche? The Miami Heat? The multi-billion dollar NBA franchise with three championship victories to its name? The one that signed LeBron for a while in the 2010s and made everybody mad (I don't really know ball either)? That Miami Heat?

Then, the whammy: "I guess it's gonna land differently with Americans. To me, this is insanely niche. I had to google Miami Heat."

Brits Who Don't Know Ball Count: 1

More step forward

I was just logging on to work myself at this time, and was floored at what had transpired. I let Fraser know that this was the most British thing he had ever said. PC Gaming Show editorial director Jake Tucker tried to liken it to the international popularity of British football clubs, which did not help, because Fraser also does not follow footy. Lauren pointed out that Fraser was effectively saying, "I don't see the marketing value of sports because I don't follow sports." Fraser dug in.

"I get using sports teams for marketing, but it feels niche when it's one local sports team in one country. But maybe Miami Heat is an extremely big deal all over the world. I would never know!"

I pointed out how I've seen guys in Russia wearing Chicago Bulls jerseys, to which Fraser responded that he was aware of the Bulls and has even owned merch. If there is one takeaway from this whole debacle, it is not the manifest weakening of America's global cultural hegemony. It is instead the continued dominance and recognition of America's finest city, the Windy City. The City of Big Shoulders. Chi-Town, baby. Did you know we have a pope?

"I have heard of the Miami Dolphins," Fraser remarked, perhaps as some manner of conciliatory gesture to his American colleagues, "but only because they featured in Ace Ventura."

Then, the other shoe dropped: "[To be fair], I also don't know what a Miami Heat is," news writer Joshua Wolens, who lives in England, unhelpfully proffered. "But I generally assume I don't know most of what's happening in the modern world."

Brits Who Don't Know Ball Count: 2

It was around this juncture that Fraser agreed to be subject to a formal write-up on PC Gamer dot com. I am not bullying my coworker. Buffalo-based PCG news writer Lincoln Carpenter helpfully reframed the argument at this time as well: "It's not so much that the Miami Heat specifically is a big deal. It's that NBA teams, as a rule, are big deals." Lincoln also shared Forbes' estimated valuations of the most expensive NBA teams in the world vs. the most expensive football clubs. For what it's worth, the basketball teams are more expensive.

At 9:06 am, UK-based social video editor Paul Broughton introduced the new argument that "basketballs are a myth created by 2K to sell their annual videogame," but I think it would be dishonest of me to add him to the counter. The work chat conversation then moved in different directions, but I was haunted.

Dateline: Lunch

I took my lunch break to play some of the Dark Souls 2 Seamless Co-op mod with PCG senior guides writer Sean Martin and freelance contributor Tyler Colp. I remarked on the Fraser/Miami Heat situation, and how I couldn't get it out of my head.

"What is the Miami Heat?" Sean sheepishly asked. Sean is also English.

Brits Who Don't Know Ball Count: 3

At almost the exact same time, former PC Gamer editor-in-chief Samuel Roberts, who has returned for some freelance work and is also an Englishman, entered the chat. I thought he was a man of the world. I thought surely he would know ball.

"I learned what they are two hours ago!" Sam informed us. "I'm aware of the Miami Dolphins." Unlike Fraser, Sam did not come by this knowledge through the works of Jim Carrey, but rather some kind of hazy osmosis through American podcasts. Sam did know about the Bulls though (Chicago baby da Bulls baby etc.)

Brits Who Don't Know Ball Count: 4

Then things took a turn for the strange. Senior editor Christopher Livingston, who has lived in the United States his entire life (and also Orlando, Florida for five years), revealed that he also probably couldn't have placed the Heat prior to this morning's events. Man, what the fuck.

Americans Who Don't Know Ball Count: 1

I can't stress enough that I'm not a basketball guy. I don't know why this lack of Miami Heat brand recognition is bothering me so much. Is this how my UK colleagues feel when I don't know what a chip sandwich, Mr. Blobby, or a bank holiday is? I feel like I'm being pranked.

To most, the highlight of this week's big Deadlock patch is the snazzy map makeover, new heroes, and tons of quality-of-life additions. To me, it's all about the patch notes.

I spend a lot of waking hours reading white-text-on-black-background changelogs in this line of work, so when a page comes along that was specifically designed to be pleasant and exciting, it deserves to be rewarded. Valve has a long history of designing beautiful, bespoke webpages to introduce meaningful changes to its games, but the graphics department is really going ballistic with Deadlock.

The City Never Sleeps patch notes are styled like a tourism brochure for Deadlock's refreshed New York City, walking readers through scenic stops across the four major districts (Chinatown, Theater, Haunted Lot, and Plaza). Descriptions weave between in-world storytelling and technical explanation where it makes sense, with Valve's splashes of humor reminding readers not to take any of this too seriously.

Dotted lines draw the reader to new points of interest as they scroll while furthering the map motif, and the page is stuffed with custom artwork for new items and mechanics that might only exist there. Valve did such an annoyingly good job with presenting the next era of Deadlock that I'm almost tempted to play a MOBA (but only almost).

Finally, some good food. Welcome back, Valve patch notes.

Valve's golden age of patch notes

It cannot be understated that Valve pioneered storytelling in multiplayer shooters with Team Fortress 2, arguably kicking off with the 2009 WAR! Update, aka "Soldier vs. Demo." This was before the concept of multiplayer games having seasons, before League of Legends had a TV show, before "live service" was even a thing—Valve had created a cast of nine lovable weirdos and new updates that weren't just dropping items, but telling stories that put the characters in conflict with one another and added context to the multiplayer maps we'd already been fighting in for two years.

It was weird in the first place for an FPS to receive so many free post-launch additions, and it was even weirder for a developer to treat the arrival of new weapons, modes, and hats as worthy of dedicated splash pages with accompanying comic books.

TF2 was the gold standard for post-launch support, and its patch notes drew massive interest, often dropping late on a Thursday or Friday, Pacific time, hinting that Valve may have been polishing until the last minute. Valve's blog posts were never the same month-to-month, often adopting new color schemes, layouts, and original elements for the occasion.

There was no single template they stuck to. The Engineer update introduced his advanced Gunslinger gauntlet and Wrangler as blueprints with hand-written notes, while Scout's update debuted the Force-A-Nature scattergun in a department store catalog. I especially love announcing the Mac version of TF2 with a white, sanitized home page complete with symmetrical boxes and tiny text in the style of Apple circa 2002.

Poring over the "history" section of the TF2 website in 2026 is like uncovering one of those lost civilizations that invented a ton of sophisticated things before everyone else.

We're in an era marked by formulaic seasons, videogames as advertisement platforms, and teams scrambling to alter plans when they're not immediately popular. And yet 15 years ago, Valve had so much confidence in its direction that it could decide to wage a war between Soldier and Demoman one day (live-tracking the kills between both classes—Soldier narrowly won with 6.40M kills to the collective Demomen's 6.37M), introduce a crafting system the next, and then rebrand as Scream Fortress for October.

It wasn't exclusively good vibes—Valve caught flak for its (now quaint) paid hats, paid loot boxes, and speculative marketplace that became a fixture of updates. In a move that I would be surprised to see a studio make today, Valve made fun of itself at the time with a subsequent "Hatless Update".

Deadlock's blogs are practically retro, it feels weird to say. I wonder what inspired Valve to go this hard again. Counter-Strike 2 and Dota 2's changelogs do not share the same sense of theater. Their patch notes are comparatively regular, functional bullet lists—perhaps in line with how often those games are updated. Valve does occasionally produce unique web pages for major CS2 announcements or Dota 2 events, but we're far from the days when an incremental Mann VS Machine update was announced with a lavish movie poster in the style of kaiju cinema.

TF2's exceptional, ever-changing patch notes were a reflection of the game they promoted. Valve leveraged the flexibility of an arena shooter and imagined a world where Red and Blu were real factions locked in stupid conflicts. You never really knew what elaborate scenarios Valve would think up next for its over-the-top action figures, and that filled TF2 fans with a sense of wonder that very few games have pulled off since. Maybe it's no coincidence that the only example of innovative multiplayer storytelling in recent years, Helldivers 2, is another over-the-top war game that finds comedy in the futility of endless violence.

Valve is tapping into that dormant TF2 energy in small ways with Deadlock, and it's great, though I wonder if, being a MOBA, the game's inherent sweat level will eventually lead to a regimented, low-nonsense future that's more focused on the minutiae of balance. Whatever Deadlock is up to years from now, I'll be keeping up with the patch notes.

The votes are in—the first of Deadlock's six new heroes just dropped. The Rat King is here, and one of his abilities lets you throw a bunch of rats at people, like that Eminem meme.

For a while now, AI guys have been arguing with the pope—Bishop of Rome, Primate of Italy, Chicago White Sox fan—over whether or not their chatbots and image generators are consistent with the will of the Lord, and in one recently-revealed exchange, whether making a computer talk constitutes creating life.

According to a New York Times report published this week, Anthropic lobbied the pope's advisers "to take the prospect of AI model consciousness seriously" back in May.

The pope, apparently unmoved, stated in his Magnifica Humanitas that "so-called artificial intelligences do not undergo experiences, do not possess a body, do not feel joy or pain, do not mature through relationships and do not know from within what love, work, friendship or responsibility mean."

Former White House technology adviser Dean Ball criticized the pope's letter at the time, saying it "puts the Church into the awkward role of the European technocratic regulatory advocate."

Ball is now head of strategic futures at OpenAI.

The latest in this ongoing beef between the pope and AI boosters is a new anti-slop message from His Holiness posted on X this week.

"In this era of artificial intelligence, it is becoming urgent to distinguish human art from what machines produce," wrote the pope. "There is an ontological difference, even before an aesthetic one, between art and what a machine can generate through statistical calculation based on millions of images created by others. Algorithms lack the spark of humanity. For this reason, the Church wishes to renew an alliance with artists and cultural institutions to safeguard our humanity."

Even on X, ruled as it is by the dunce king of tech and his Grok-riddled followers, there is a lot of support for the pope's stance. But of course there are also AI evangelists intent on schooling the Holy See about the beauty of "super intelligence," as it has been dubbed by people who must lack conviction in their own.

In one response I saw pointed out on Bluesky, the pope is asked "What about the Minions?" Indeed... what about them?

With the battle lines drawn between powerful AI interests and the Catholic church, will the next Great Schism be over whether or not Claude is a real person? Will an AI thoughtleader ascend to pope-like status of their own?

An event like that wouldn't be out of place in '90s cyberpunk-comedy novel Snow Crash. I'd once assumed that those satirical visions of mad techno-cultists and lawless megacorps would manifest in a somehow more buttoned-up way, more 'realistically.' I gravely misjudged reality's capacity for farce.

A tangentially-related case-in-point: Palmer Luckey, the guy who invented the first decent consumer VR headset, is now a weapons mogul with a personal UH-60 Black Hawk helicopter. Deus Ex bosses are real, and they wear Hawaiian shirts.

Want to play Arc Raiders but don't want to pay for it? Sorry to say, this is not your lucky day—but October 8 will be. From then until October 12, Arc Raiders will be free to play on all platforms to mark the launch of Frozen Trail, the biggest Arc update since the game's launch in 2025.

The freebie offers full access to the game, including the new content added in Frozen Trail—a new map, enemies, weapons, gadgets, and more—with no limits beyond the calendar. If you dig it enough that you decide you do want to pay for it (and I'd say there's a good chance you will, it's pretty great), Arc Raiders is also on sale for half-price—that's $30/£26/€30—during the Steam Autumn Sale, which also ends October 8.

A scenic welcome to The Etchery School of Magic and Melody

Musical magic-assisted gardening

Crystal ball cell phones with Charlie Brown-style "wah wah wah"

A flute rhythm game for mastering magic spells

The fun and hectic potion brewing minigame

My roommate's disastrous magical experiments

One very prickly shrub

There is no more room in hell—the dead are at the beach. Grand Theft Auto 5, already burdened and bedraggled by the parade of mods I have inflicted on it, must now contend with a new disorder: revenants from beyond the veil.

I have installed ZombieInfection, which adds zombie and, indeed, infection. In any given populated space, you will look about yourself to notice that some of Los Santos' denizens are more bloody and shambling than usual. This is because they have been rejected by the grave.

Whenever these undead pedestrians brush up against other city-dwellers, the latter converts instantly to the horde. Before long, what began as just two or three bloodied weirdos becomes a city-threatening catastrophe, which is both horrifying and a good way of demonstrating the power of exponential growth.

Fortunately, zombies are just as prone to the impact of tornadoes, cars, fire, and so on as anyone else. They're also rather slow. More often than not, they get taken out by one of Los Santos' countless ambient threats before they can do any real damage. A lesson for mayors everywhere.

Shockingly, the curse of the undeath is so strong that it can somehow break my own aura of immortality. Franklin—you may have noticed from previous articles, where he does things like surviving tornadoes and being used as a ramp by cars—is invincible in my GTA 5 install. But let a zombie brush up against him for long enough and he will succumb to the afterworld like any other mortal. It's very scary. Happy Halloween.

Silent Hill: Townfall is a suffocating experience. Monsters around every corner, limited supplies, and a whole lot of puzzles. But that all changed when I got my hands on the shotgun. Now I am the danger and these monsters are really bad at hiding.

Of all the games on the horizon, the one I may be most looking forward to Let's Build a Dungeon. It's a sim from Springloaded, makers of Let's Build a Zoo and the upcoming RollerCoaster Tycoon Wonderworks, and the premise is one we've all mulled at one point or another: what if I could make my own videogame?

And in Let's Build a Dungeon, you can. Dig dungeons, populate them with monsters and traps and loot, design quests, and watch simulated players play your game. You'll even be able to let real players play the game you make.

But there's also the simulation surrounding the game you're building. The development studio you've founded. The devs you hire. You'll have to deal with investors, finances, the public, the press (like me!), crunch, gaming conventions, hackers, and even text messages from your mom.

There's a lot going on in this sim. Like, a lot, a lot. During a recent preview and interview with Springloaded founder and Let's Build a Dungeon lead developer James Barnard, here's what leapt out at me as being the most a lot among the lot.

"We have, like, 700 [fictional] games or something, and the list keeps on getting longer."

Let's Build a Dungeon simulates Steam's backend and sites like SteamSpy where you can see your game alongside the competition. Lots of competition: Springloaded has invented hundreds of fictional (and unplayable, sadly) games to populate your reality.

"We have all these games, which obviously our concept artist, poor guy, he spent his his whole life drawing these things."

And look, there's even an advert for a gaming show. A computer gaming show. That's a great idea for an event! Someone should do that for real.

"You can see sort of how your game is doing with the wishlists and things like that. The objective is to get into events, and if you do, you get massive number of impressions. So we really use the impressions, click through rate, conversions, wishlists, and all of that stuff feeds into the chart."

"When you go from CGA to VGA, you have to upgrade some of your computers, and then the size of everything expands and becomes bigger, so suddenly you need more hard drive space because all your assets are now high resolution."

The fictional game you're making in Let's Build a Dungeon runs on fictional hardware, and as your game gets bigger, it takes up more space. Time is passing, too, meaning there are advances in PC hardware as well as your game's required specs, and that's reflected in the sim.

"We drew every single component of every computer, so there's about 150 components that we drew from, and it goes through the history of computing."

You won't just see a difference, you'll hear one. The soundtrack of the game will change based on the audio card your simulated computer is using.

Buying plane tickets and booking hotels for your devs to attend game showcases is a "ridiculous minigame" that even simulates layovers

"Once [your employees] head off to the [showcase], you get to pick who's going to go to the event, and then they aren't working, so they won't appear in your design board. If I send these two people to an event, they're going to disappear for three days and and, you know, fuck up my schedule.

"The flights kind of curve up in price as you get closer to the day, but then sometimes there'll be a bargain right at the end if they've got too many seats to sell, and the same for the hotel. So if you wait till the last minute, you sort of take this risk of: Am I going to spend too much?

"We calculate where you started your company and where the event is. We actually calculate the distance and how long it takes and we do the stopovers in the right cities, so where your office is, is gonna impact you. So if you get EGX Rezzed, it's just down the road for you, if you pick London."

Remember Cyberleek? That could happen to you

"This is some super nerd who's basically hacked your computer. Oh no, he's been following your investors' flights around the world, and he's decided that you are making an MMO, and he's looked at your financials and the other guy's financials, and then he holds you to ransom.

"He's either going to leak the game, or he's or he's going to convince you to put him in the game. There's lots of different outcomes."

Your mum sends you pie recipes and cat videos

"Your mum calls you. Have you eaten? And then she tries to make you eat different food, and gives you desktop screenshots and things for rewards.

"And this conversation, for example, you can get a song, you can get like different desktop images to cheer you up because she wants you to be encouraged in your daily life.

"One of the other things she gives you is a pie, and then she sends you the recipe for the pie, and then you get inspired, and you add a the ability for your designers to come up with a pie recipe, and then you get a pie that you can put in the game, and the players can eat, and you can adjust all that kind of stuff."

By the way, if all of this game dev studio simulation stuff isn't your thing and you just want to use Let's Build a Dungeon to design your own game, you can do that too! There's a campaign mode, build mode, creative mode, or just play the games created by other players.

Let's Build a Dungeon is coming to early access in February. There's a demo you can try in the meantime.

I am a disastrously untalented individual, but my biggest failure of all? My inability to sew. Holes in clothes? Unpatched. Long trousers? Unhemmed. Thrifts? Unflipped. It is both a pure skill and creativity issue, and I forever look on longingly at those far more talented than myself.

Turns out that extends to one of the hottest new cosy games of 2026, too. Dressmaker has absolutely taken over my life—and the life of many new virtual sewists—with its relaxing yet devilishly moreish garment creation. It's genuinely brilliant, a testament to how good games can be when you zoom in on a niche and go all-in on it.

Sketch dresses with different bodies, skirts, sleeves, collars; doodle in rough colour schemes and lay fabric samples over each other to find the perfect combination. Sift through bolts of silk, lace, linen, cotton, and velvet in an absurd number of colours, before laying out all the parts of your bespoke pattern and sewing them all together. It's brilliant, but I am naff at it. Literally, look at this dress I tried to design with the brief "what if Geralt of Rivia was my client?" in mind.

Where's the pizzazz, the drama? Thankfully, social media has been blessing me with people who actually understand how to make the most out of Dressmaker's gorgeous adornments and fabrics—for both good and evil. Here are some of my absolute favourites for you to feast your eyes upon:

This incredible armour-inspired piece

A stunning Van Gogh ballgown

This recreation of an upcoming Genshin Impact character, Tsaritsa

Of course, I had to include this amazing Emet-Selch dress from Final Fantasy 14

And finally, this deeply cursed but also peak artistic Excel minidress that I would 100% wear in real life

I played 2024's Lorelei and the Laser Eyes earlier this year, and it was a revelation—scratching exactly the kind of post-Blue Prince itch I'd been looking for. You go to a big mansion full of weird stuff, and solve puzzles to uncover an eerie mystery. The vibes are on point, and the puzzles find the exact right balance of difficulty—just enough friction to make you stop and think without tipping over into frustrating moon logic. And it passes the classic puzzle game sniff-test of being worth breaking out the notebook over. I love a game where you spend as much time looking at a page figuring things out as you do interacting with what's on screen.

It's $10 on Steam right now as part of the Autumn Sale, and if you're a puzzle and/or mystery fan who hasn't played it yet, it gets my recommendation.

In a surprise move, Bungie is bringing a bunch of stuff back to Destiny 2. All the campaigns, destinations and raids that were removed from the game back in 2020 will return at some unspecified point in the future.

It's a big attention grabbing move—one that's welcome, but that also acts as another frustrating reminder of how many unforced errors Bungie made across the length of Destiny 2's active, live-service run. For some, removing paid-for campaigns was the line in the sand—an unforgivable move that poisoned the well for how the wider gaming community viewed the game.

Right now, it's hard to say what any of this means for the future of Destiny. Rather than speculate, I'm going to focus on what bits of these returns I'm actually excited for. Not the campaigns—honestly they range from 'fine' to 'not very good'. No, I'm more interested in the small, hyper-specific parts of Destiny 2 that I've missed over the years—the little moments and memories that still live rent free in my head.

Here are seven such moments. Jump into the comments to let me know yours.

It's a fact: Hidden object games have a less-than-stellar reputation among the gamer cognoscenti. They're commonly viewed as low effort, vacuous, beneath the notice or caring of real gamers⁠—a sort of proto-slop, in many ways, that predates the rise of AI. They're games your mom plays. Ewwww.

Dramatic exaggeration? Not really. Back in 2016, we published a story entitled "My shameful obsession with hidden object games on Steam," whose author chose to remain anonymous to avoid the consequences of their humiliating admission—and yeah, maybe that was a bit of dramatic exaggeration. But it vividly illustrates the point that hidden object games are not taken seriously by serious gamers.

I'm here to change that. I'm here to tell you that hidden object games are good, actually, and that it's a valid genre worthy of respect. Because videogames can be anything. Yes, violence tends to be at the core of most mainstream gaming experiences, your Calls of Duty and your Dotas and your Grand Thefts Auto and whatnot. But there's so much more out there. You can drive a bus, manage a cycling team, collect mushrooms on another planet, or play weird card games. So what's the big deal about just sitting back and looking for things?

I was introduced to the hidden object genre in 2009 by Find Your Own Way Home, an 'advergame' for an REO Speedwagon album of the same name. I was shocked to find that it was actually really good—here's an old review, from my pre-PCG days, if you're curious. Sure, it didn't hurt that I was a Speedwagon fan from way back, but it was just fun, too—relaxed and undemanding. Kind of like listening to nostalgic album-oriented rock, but that's a whole different conversation.

The Speedwagon rocks and I am not ashamed to say so!

I've played an awful lot of hidden object games in the years since, and I'm not going to pretend that they're all good. But in that sense, they're no different than any other genre. Which is the point: You may not like them, but it's time to start showing them some proper goddamn respect.

And you might like them! If you've made it this far, then I have to assume you're open to at least the possibility that maybe there might be something here worth giving a chance. And you better believe I can help get you started:

BEHOLD: MY HIDDEN OBJECT GAMES!

Now look, I'm not naive. I don't expect that I've suddenly convinced 30% of PC Gamer's readership to stroke their chins thoughtfully and say, "Hmm, yes, perhaps I have been missing out." (I'd be thrilled to get 3% of you, quite frankly.) But I do think it's long past time that we put the 'shame' of playing them behind us: Like 'em or not, hidden object games are real games, every bit as valid and legit as anything else out there. (And seriously—try one! You might just like it.)

Final Fantasy 7 Revelation director Naoki Hamaguchi must be one of the least guarded interviewees working for a major publisher. Before I speak to him, I find tons of details about the final game in the Remake trilogy spread across a dozen different sources—everything from granular titbits about why Vincent Valentine has a unique skydiving animation to defending the sheer volume of minigames that make the cut. This is someone whose team has built a hell of a lot of game over the past decade, and he clearly enjoys discussing the sweeping vision of it all.

In Revelation, which launches April 8, series villain Sephiroth has summoned the destructive cosmic spell Meteor towards the planet, intending to destroy it. Cloud, Barret, Tifa and company stand in his way—and the planet itself begins fighting back in the form of Weapons, kajiu-sized creatures that emerge from an enormous crater and then unleash mayhem across the land and sea. The events in Revelation cover the last third or so of the original game.

This is the third in a series of remakes that have been defined, in some ways, by their extraordinary production values. I ask Hamaguchi whether he thinks the FF7 Remake trilogy could offer a more sustainable model for building blockbuster games in future.

"So I can't say whether in the future anyone else will decide that they're going to take a famous old game and remake it as a multi-part series, but regardless, I do think that this has left quite a lot of interesting knowledge as a case study," Hamaguchi says via a translator, explaining that his team has now been working together for 10-12 years.

"I think that this project has contributed hugely to Square Enix, not only in terms of the business as a successful game, but also in building this team that I can trust. But whether this becomes a model case or a template is, I think, a bit of a difficult question, because it becomes a question of whether or not other teams can recreate that."

Keeping the same person at the top, too, is vital to how the end product turns out.

"For example, I have been able to stay on for the whole project as the series director because I'm extremely motivated. I've been more than happy to pour all of my energy into this project, but there might be some people out there who are like, 'Well, I've done the first installment in this, and I'm done, I'd like to do something different.' And so if then the top person were to change, that can really change the trajectory of a project, the style of a project, even some of the themes that it's dealing with might be impacted by that."

It's true that the three FF7 Remake games feel like the result of a steady leadership team that knows what it wants to create. Even if someone else could convince a publisher to greenlight three games at once, that consistency is harder to replicate.

"Requiring a stable development environment for 10+ years is incredibly difficult," Hamaguchi says. "I really do mean this: even though I've obviously been in the leadership position, I've had my own skills to lean on and to lead this, it's because the same team has stuck with me that whole time that we've been able to achieve what we have."

Third time's the charm

It's undeniable that FF7 Revelation achieves the scope it does because it's Square Enix's third go-around: the increased size of the world map with both new and existing locations; the growing roster of characters who each have a rich suite of combat moves; more minigames; the FITS job system which confers additional abilities upon existing characters.

It's gloriously ostentatious as a project—or overstuffed, if you ask the more negative recent reviewers of Rebirth on Steam. I fall somewhere in the middle. I admire how unashamedly massive and generous these games are, even if the flab tested my patience in both Remake and Rebirth.

That may be because they've caught me in my time-starved late 30s. If these games existed at the peak of my Final Fantasy fandom when I was 17, I would've absolutely devoured them. I ask Hamaguchi how he thinks about pacing, and how Rebirth compares to Revelation on that front.

"Obviously, Rebirth has this world map with so much content, so much to explore, but if you just do the story, then what you'll find is that the pacing is extremely similar and the structure is extremely similar to the tight, story-driven experience of Remake," Hamaguchi says. "And we've essentially kept the approach the same for Revelation in terms of pacing."

More of the same, then. One thing that has changed since the events of Rebirth, of course, is that there's a big meteor heading towards the planet—which may change up the urgency of exploring its open world for players.

Hamaguchi and his team, however, have thought ahead of concerned fans on this topic. "So, you've got Meteor up there in the sky, and in the main story, obviously, you're going to have that time pressure, that sense that you really need to be getting on with things because there's this looming, impending threat," he says. "I've seen people concerned that all the side content may detract from that sense of urgency.

"But we have been really careful about how that's approached, and obviously that's something that [Kazuhige] Nojima has really been keeping in mind when writing the scenario. Obviously Cloud and all of the main characters are heading towards this final confrontation and they're very aware of that, but that means that they're also trying to find and discover their own motivations to make sure that they are certain of what [they're] doing, to find a reason to move forward.

"So it's not that you're just rushing into this final battle. They're saying, 'Well, if this is the end, then let's do what we want to do, let's do what feels right for us along the way.'"

So Queen's Blood, dog football and all the other minigames are still on the menu, even when the world seems like it's coming to an end.

Weapons-grade

The biggest surprise for me is how much Square Enix has decided to reveal about the game in its marketing campaign, including some things I considered sacred secrets of the original.

I wasn't surprised to see them spoil the playable Highwind airship and how that moves around the open world—that looks rad as shit—but the Weapon bosses were almost playground myths to me while I played the original. I ask if Hamaguchi had any qualms about spoiling them all during Gamescom, including how dauntingly huge they appear in the open world.

"First of all, I am glad to hear that it was a surprise that we would showcase the Weapons," Hamaguchi says, pointing out that the previous two instalments focused their marketing around the characters, and this time they wanted to dial in on gameplay. "I suppose that was what we were going for."

Hamaguchi is determined to match the spectacle of the Weapons in Revelation with players remember them in the original.

"In terms of how strong and how difficult the Weapons are going to be, as with the original, some of the Weapons are going to be part of the main story, and some of them are side content," he says. "And whether they're ones in the main story or side content, they have a lot of unique mechanics and interactive elements; some of them even have minigames in, and are quite strategic in that same way as well.

"In terms of the difficulty, obviously those that are part of the main story need to be defeatable by most players, so I would say the difficulty there is somewhat lower. For those that are part of side content, I would say those are hard, and you're probably going to need to be a higher level than you would have been to complete the game to take those on."

I use the rest of my time with Hamaguchi to ask about details of the original FF7 that still stick in my memory, decades after I first completed it, and how they'll be interpreted in Revelation.

FF7 Rebirth gave players a little sample of Highwind captain Cid, but in the original game he was quite a complicated and self-loathing character, stuck on the ground because his dream of going into space went kaput. The order of when that story occurs has changed, which fans already knew, but Revelation will be faithful to the specifics.

"Revelation does pay tribute to the original with everything that's going on in Rocket Town, [including] that mission from Shinra to launch the rocket, exploring the relationship between Cid and [Shera], and that experience of going to space and space travel," Hamaguchi says. "We really think that it'll allow players to explore Cid's internal world a little bit more."

As fans may have already seen, too, Rocket Town is a more expansive setting in Revelation, which requires its own form of transportation. "There was a buggy in Rebirth, of course, but this [time you] will be driving around in Cid's car. And you can put some background music on in the car if you like, and who knows, maybe if you do some more side content you might unlock some more tracks for his car and things like that, so there's plenty to explore."

I ask which characters get expanded upon the most versus the original game, since we've now spent tens more hours with some of these heroes than we did in the 1997 version. "In terms of extra depth and exploration, I think particularly with Revelation, the characters that we've really been able to explore in more detail, in more depth, are Yuffie and Vincent. Because in the original, Yuffie and Vincent were both optional characters, they weren't able to be so intricately tied into the main story."

Elsewhere, Hamaguchi has expressed his enthusiasm for folding in elements from the wider net of FF7 side projects. I've always been curious about the remake games' obsession with Zack Fair, a flashback character in FF7 who was spun off into the popular PSP prequel Crisis Core (which has since been remade and released on PC). Hamaguchi says this creative choice is driven by fans' enthusiasm for the character as depicted in the game.

"In Revelation, there are more playable sections with Zack, and they are more extensive than those in Rebirth," Hamaguchi says. "He'll actually be playable in battle with his own combat system that's unique to him, and there will be room for growth in a skill tree kind of way. It's very closely tied into the story experience, so it's on a much larger scale than what you've seen before, which I think will hopefully make Zack fans happy, and his sections, let's just say they are full of surprises."

Speaking of surprises: it took FF7 Remake only a few hours to break the seal on series antagonist Sephiroth, which perhaps robbed the character of his elusive potency in the original game. By the time Revelation comes along, it'll be the third time players have faced him—I'm curious how Hamaguchi and team will top the spectacle of Rebirth's prolonged Sephiroth encounter, which reached double digit phases.

"First let me just say that we haven't said whether there will be a dramatic showdown with Sephiroth in this third of the series," laughs Hamaguchi. "However, if there wasn't a dramatic showdown with Sephiroth, I do think the fans would be angry, so there will be one!"

He's keen not to spoil the surprise, but also can't help but drop a few hints—including a nod to Cloud's final Limit Break attack, a legendary moment of the original game's finale. "What I can say is that it's going to be a very extravagant, all-out battle that will far and above surpass what was in Remake and Rebirth in what I believe will be a very satisfying encounter. I know there are a lot of people out there who are looking forward to seeing the ultimate limit break [Omnislash] at the end of the battle with Sephiroth.

"Obviously we are putting in plenty of homages to the original, including to things like [that limit break]. We have crammed it full of everything that we can," Hamaguchi says, clearly excited to show fans another eye-wateringly high-end boss battle that will no doubt consume an entire evening.

While I think less could've been more with the FF7 Remake trilogy, I do enjoy Hamaguchi's absolute confidence in his vision of what he believes fans want. It's impossible to look at the Highwind cruising over the 1:1 scale world map in Revelation and argue that was a poor way to burn three games' worth of budget.

The odd thing about computer mice—gaming, ergonomic, or otherwise—is how subjective they are. I guess we've all got different hand shapes, finger lengths, and technical needs. I've been hunting for the perfect mouse for my particular hands for years now, and I've refined my selection down to two.

Unfortunately, they couldn't be more different, so I guess I'm a two-mouse sort of guy now. One is the Logitech MX Master 4, an ergonomic mouse with a poor sensor for gaming, but an excellent shape for all-day work usage. It's also near-silent, which the rest of my household is very grateful for.

And the other is the Razer Cobra HyperSpeed, a tiny rodent with exactly the sort of weight and technical specs I like for gaming, all for a relatively reasonable sum. Looking at the two together, they're completely chalk and cheese. Neither mouse is perfect, but switching between the two is the best solution I've found for all my computing needs.

As I sit here during a workday, typing out this article, it's the MX Master 4 that keeps me company. While I technically prefer the MX Master 3S, I managed to damage the rubber coating of mine when I took it apart for cleaning, so I've switched to the newer model.

It's not quite as comfy as the 3S, but it's still a weighty rodent with a horizontal scroll wheel for spreadsheets and a selection of programmable buttons that come in handy for my daily tasks.

When I want to play something fast-paced, though, I swap over to the Cobra HyperSpeed. It's tiny, which makes it perfect for quick fingertip movements. It's also got a speedy sensor, brilliantly clicky, satisfying switches, and a little dash of near-tasteful RGB lighting underneath.

It's a bit like cars. In an ideal world (in which I could afford to have two automobiles on my driveway), I'd have a big, wallowing cruiser for getting me to the office in comfort, and a little two-seater sports car to bomb around in on the weekends. Which is exactly how I use these two mice.

But the stark difference between the two makes me think that, for my purposes, the perfect mouse doesn't exist. I've tried lots of them over the past few years, but this combo is the one I've stuck with for a while now, and it's probably where I'm going to stay.

Neither is technically the best on the market for all purposes. But once you've found a system that works for you, it's difficult to change—which means I guess I'm a dual-wielder from this point forward. As are, I notice, several other members of the PC Gamer team. What's next, two gaming chairs? This double-hardware lifestyle is going to get expensive, I can tell.

I've yet to get my sticky mitts on the Steam Frame, as our review sample is in high demand. But I've just learned it can be used as a makeshift pair of night vision goggles, as demonstrated by YouTube channel azadovski. And that's just freaking cool.

You mean I can wander around my house at night like some kind of Sam Fisher wannabe? Sign me up. Apparently, this is down to the Frame's impressive IR-sensitive SLAM cameras, combined with the set's passthrough capabilities. It also means no one will see me look like a wally with a headset strapped to my face. Two birds, one stone.

If you ask me, Deadlock's new update is going great, except for the small fact that last night I got jumpscared while running away from a Drifter because I accidentally slid into this here troll. Take a look at this scary guy. What is he doing here? Will we have to fight him in the future? Will he scare me again? The answer's: hell if I know, I hope not, and yes—yes he will.

As we're in the latter half of the year, quite a few brand new, 2026 games are on sale in Steam's latest seasonal discount party, the Autumn Sale.

Here are nine standouts we spotted:

There are lots more great games on sale at the moment: SteamDB's sales section is the best way we've found to sort through the on-sale games and look for gems.

Real houses that look like something I'd build in survival game, Part 2. My first house is always a square. But what happens when I acquire too many crafting benches to fit in my square? Time to build a loooooooong square. (Don't call it a rectangle: we're not fancy here.) It's blue because I crafted a buncha dye made from surplus blueberries and you know I'm gonna paint somethin' with it.

The Talos Principle 2, my favorite puzzle game, is $3 during the Steam Autumn Sale. Croteam's Talos Principle sequel went underappreciated in 2023, which is wild, because this series is like if Aperture Labs dumped its entire warehouse of esoteric gizmos into the player's lap to tackle increasingly weird spatial conundrums. The puzzles are smart, peaceful, approachable, and many. Speaking from experience, it might be the greatest "podcast game" in the world.

ABOVE: A brief gameplay clip from Radiosol. You can't spend too long in the sunlight.

"A journey through a desolate world burned by a planetary cataclysm"

I related this experience in PC Gamer's work chat and multiple of us bought Radiosol, called by its developers "a journey through a desolate world burned by a planetary cataclysm," on the spot. It helps that it's only $9 on Steam, and that its jaggy megastructures look exceptionally cool.

As has become habitual when I see anything that looks mildly uncanny these days, I scrolled down to the generative AI disclosure on Steam: It was used for translations, the Moscow-based developer says, but not to generate any audio or art.

On X, developer TripletConcept also states that they used AI for "some coding and utility stuff like handling Git merges." The artist has been making art in this style since before the 2020s, as evidenced by their ArtStation profile.

I'm not far into Radiosol yet, so I'm still working out what I think—this is just my first impression, not a review. But so far, it's pretty sick.

You're a little wall-climbing spider-robot in the deserted ruins of megastructures, on your way to some kind of final battle for the fate of… it's unclear. Multiple subjects are broadcasting information to you as you work your way toward a pyramid for the big fight, leaping between shadows to stay out of direct sunlight.

So far, there's nothing in the way of combat. It's fun just being a spider-dude, executing big hops in the low-G environment—I have gotten the impression that this is not quite earth—to traverse unshaded stretches of desert. Currently, I'm seeking a "Megapol station" in the territory of the "Locus Group of Companies."

If you decided to check out Radiosol, my suggestions are A) prepare to have a lot of proper nouns thrown at you without context and B) commit the important parts of the menu layouts to memory, in the event that you can't help yourself from hitting the red button that turns off thinking.

Kingdom Come: Deliverance 2 is about a lad named Henry and his small role in kicking Sigismund of Luxembourg out of Bohemia in the name of the imprisoned King Wenceslas I. Henry and his newfound pals conspire, heist, assassinate, and sabotage to loosen the usurper's grip on the economic stronghold of Kuttenberg, but what they never try is barging straight in the front door.

Just take the damn city! It can't be that hard. I say around 20, 40 men tops could do the job. In fact, if the story quests won't do it, I will.

Step 1: Raise an army

Surprisingly, this is the easy part. KCD2, for all its freedoms, does not natively allow Henry to roam Bohemia with a warband, so the mod "Companion Squad" from Steam user Triget will be the engine powering this righteous campaign.

With just two keystrokes, my army began to take shape in front of me: 10, 20, 30 mercenaries with unique names and faces stood at attention, ready to attack at my command. The gates of Kuttenberg stood before us—doors wide open—its treasonous protectors oblivious to our plans.

Step 2: Call in favors

A "Heroes" section of the spawn menu caught my eye. With a few more clicks, I'd called up all of Henry's friends (and enemies) for a quick favor, including Hans Capon, the entire Jan Zizka crew, Godwin, Erik, Istvan Toth, and even Radzig and Hanush made the trip from Rattay.

With a strained framerate, my army was 43 strong. Time to take back Kuttenberg—for King Wenceslas!

Step 3: I have no pants

As I entered photo mode to witness the might of my army, I realized I've been pantless the whole time. This is the first time I've loaded this particular save on my newer PC, and somehow Henry's padded hose did not make the transition. They are not in my inventory and no longer seem to exist. At least I still have my mens' respect.

Step 4: Charge!

The guard who searches everyone entering the city didn't take kindly to my unsheathed sword. We exchanged a few blows before my warband formed into a bloodthirsty mob that I will henceforth call the "murder clump" and killed the guy in about two seconds. Another guard started a 1v1 with me and the murder clump ate him too.

It turned out the army was set to "defend" me, so they only raised arms when I was in an active fight. This isn't what I had in mind for a grand coup, so I pressed F6 to switch their attack pattern to something more offensive.

Step 5: Overwhelm

Finally, the murder clump branched out and started attacking guards without my direct input. Kuttenberg's finest simply did not stand a chance. With no time to prepare a proper defense and word traveling slowly throughout the town, the small squads of guards responding to the commotion were immediately overwhelmed by a blob of plate armor and sharpened steel. Once the eastern entrance was clear of law enforcement, I joined the clump and charged down the streets in the direction of city hall.

Then we passed by an inn, and I watched in horror as half of the murder clump broke off to ransack the peaceful business. This is when I realized that the army was set to "Bandit mode."

Step 6: Accidentally become the bad guys

The murder clump attacked everything that moved. Nobles, innkeepers, silver miners, musicians, and yes, all the guards too. Other than their tendency to get stuck in doorways, they worked with ruthless efficiency, turning a military coup into the sort of scorched-earth ransacking that upended Henry's life in the first KCD. I tried to switch between "attack" and "defend" mode to spare lives where possible, but the army had spread out into smaller murder clumps, and they didn't always listen to my commands.

This isn't how I wanted to take Kuttenberg, but it did speed the whole thing up a great deal. It took less than 20 minutes for the city to basically run out of guards, other than the ones who fled.

Step 7: Apologize to God, or something

By nightfall, the streets were bloody and quiet. I'd lost seven soldiers of my own, Hans and Zizka were super dead, and I had a foot in the grave, too, thanks to guards targeting my bare legs. We stormed city hall and found a series of empty rooms. Sigismund had presumably turned tail when he saw our numbers—the coward!

I entered a room with a little shrine and let Henry say a prayer. A quick apology for all of the senseless murder should do the trick.

Step 8: Take office

In the next room was an important-looking office with a big desk. I took my seat in a fancy chair and crowned myself king, mayor, or whatever, of Kuttenberg.

Job done, but I can't say I recommend this strategy: I have completely messed up my save by killing countless quest givers, and every town in the region wants me to hang for my crimes. But hey, it was a lot faster than finishing the main story.

Nerial, which made a splash with Reigns in 2016 and landed another hit with Card Shark in 2022, has decided to close up shop after 13 years of operation.

"While this marks the end of Nerial as we know it, it's not the end of the game dev for us," Tamara and François Alliot, respectively the studio CEO and creative director, wrote in a farewell message. "We're going back to our roots. François' unrelenting drive to make games is as strong as ever, but first we need to take a break and reflect on everything that's happened, before coming back with a new perspective."

Oh no...

— @nerial.bsky.social (@nerial.bsky.social.bsky.social) 2026-10-01T18:17:37.063Z

It rules that we still don't know who made myhouse.wad. The surreal, unsettling Doom mod had a sort of ARG-lite element to it: The mod's original creator is said to have died, with Veddge, the uploader, either having expanded on something he left behind—or, more troublingly, having found the haunted map among the original creator's possessions.

I love it as a bit of creepypasta storytelling, but what makes me even happier is that Veddge has never broken character—they never even made another post on the DoomWorld forums after sharing myhouse.wad. If you had made something so popular and beloved, wouldn't you want to trade on that clout? Talk to John Romero yourself, give interviews about your artistic vision, parlay the success into a level design job?

Veddge hasn't even logged into their DoomWorld forums account since 2024. I would never resent someone choosing to dine out on their own labor and success, but to eschew that in favor of mystery and letting the art speak for itself, that requires a rare discipline I can't help but admire.

Disregard that other thing I said. Grand Theft Auto 5 no longer only launches in windowed mode. It now only launches in fullscreen mode. We're choosing not to investigate this and are just hoping the whole thing works itself out.

Another thing to disregard: what I said earlier about Hulk: Ultimate Destruction. The greatest game of all time is, in fact, 2009's Prototype, which is about being a really angry flu who can take on the appearance of anyone he eats. You can turn your arm into a sword, you fight some sort of flesh-Christ in Times Square. There's a lot going on.

Anyway GTA 5 is like Prototype now, in that I have installed Shapeshifter V. This allows you to immediately become any pedestrian you happen to stealth attack, to no real discernible end. It is quite novel, though. So an outfit you like? Take it. Also, take the in-fit. You are a great roving blob on a quest to consume and to replicate.

I am fairly certain that the act of becoming a new person doesn't change your voice, so do brace yourself for the piercing screams of Shawn Fonteno to emerge from the throats of old men and young men as they find themselves whipped up in a passing tornado or teleported a few thousand feet into the sky.

But these are bagatelles. Overall, shapeshifting is another fascinating patch in the great GTA 5 tapestry I am forging. I just have to remember to only launch that tapestry in full-screen now. Or maybe tomorrow it will be windowed again. What an adventure.

I'm here to inform you the wrist rest included with the new Logitech G Pro X2 Rapid is very good and very wobbly. Watch it wobble below. But more seriously, I enjoy this wrist rest so much that it's relegated my old HyperX one, which I previously swore by, to the floor. The giant and sturdy-but-slightly-wobbly silicon goodness that forms this one from Logitech is the best I've tried. It's hard, which is good ergonomically, but not quite as hard as wood. Perfect. Plus, wobble. Just a shame the keyboard that it comes with costs $230.

And here's a pic of it not being all wobbly:

Like many of you, I love upgrading my PC and anything to do with my gaming setup. And in my privileged position as a PC Gamer hardware writer, I often get my hands on the latest gear for the purposes of review.

But in terms of what I've spent my own cash on this year, and my own personal possessions, the biggest upgrade I've made to my gaming setup in 2026 is this $20-$25 seat cushion:

Despite appearances, this is not for legitimate medical reasons. I am afflicted with a bony arse, a critical lack of junk in my personal trunk. And gaming chairs these days have a tendency to be hard as rocks, which leave my cheeks feeling sore after a long day.

So, I gave in and bought a cushion. It's magnificent, and has improved my comfort levels at least ten-fold in comparison to the firm seat of my steely-buttocked gaming chair. It also cost me £40, because the UK listing (in extra large) came with a lumbar support cushion that I swapped out for one I already owned.

Which also makes it one of the most expensive upgrades I've bought this year. Because 2026 has been the year of stupendous price rises across many sectors of the PC gaming hardware market, and I haven't been able to open my wallet wide enough to pay for component upgrades. So, for the most part, I've stuck with my rig as it is.

I'm lucky enough to own a good gaming PC already, and it doesn't struggle with the games I want to play. I'm also not averse to a dose of DLSS or frame generation to help boost the frame rate in the really demanding stuff. But I have to wonder how many people are out there, like me, waiting out this pricing storm. And how long we'll wait for, before we decide to bite the bullet and pay up for a component upgrade.

Still, when 64 GB of decent DDR5 costs well north of $800, I'm really not looking to upgrade from my 32 GB kit, bought for $100 or so three years ago. My SSD is a 2 TB model, which cost me $130 at around the same time. I'd love a 4 TB drive—but when the good ones cost upwards of $400 a pop, I really can't justify it.

Graphics cards? If I needed one right now, I'd be buying an RTX 5060 Ti 8 GB or an RX 9070 GRE, the two of the last GPUs still available for somewhat sensible money relative to their performance. Both represent good value given what's going on with GPU pricing at the moment, and I highly recommend them. But I can't believe how far we've fallen, when Nvidia's current "mid-range" option, the RTX 5070, costs $779.

And that's the cheapest version we can find. In this sort of market, getting by with what you've got often makes the most sense.

There is a saving grace on the horizon. Well, potentially, anyway. We're about to enter the major sales season, with October Prime Day and the juggernaut that is Black Friday beginning to loom into view. And I'm hoping, with all of my fingers crossed, that we still see some significant discounts on hardware this year—despite everything going on in the industry right now.

As any good hardware nerd will tell you, finding the right upgrade for your setup is one of the great joys of PC gaming. And I'm sure plenty of you are trucking along with rigs that would have otherwise received some new hardware by now, if AI server demand hadn't ravaged the consumer market behind so much of our hobby.

The other upside (and I'll take any I can get) is that gaming monitors, mice, keyboards, and controllers have resisted the tidal wave of price increases this year. We also tend to see major discounts on these items over the big sales season, so some sort of meaningful upgrade should be achievable for many of us—even if it's not the new GPU or memory kit our hearts may desire.

I really don't blame you if, like me, you've been sticking with what you've got for longer than you expected. Here's hoping we get some sort of relief this sales season—because personally, I feel like I've been sitting on my hands (and my now-cossetted butt) for a little too long.

If there's one thing I know about the age of information, it's that none of us have time for anything anymore, nor the attention spans to see them through. If I'm not getting a constant jitterbug hit of dopamine every two seconds from my doomscrolling, am I really awake? Don't answer that. I don't want to think about the answer to that.

And if there's one thing I know about videogames, it's that man, they're getting long. If only there was a way to make these things shorter, somehow? Like, say, giving our protagonist a gun? And not just a period-accurate flintlock or something, I mean an actual handgun. Let's just say a .45 pistol. If you know more about guns than me you're welcome to imagine something sexier.

I asked a few of my colleagues for their longest-played eligible games—that is, videogames that have an ending, do not feature guns as a common, standard feature throughout their runtime, and could be feasibly impacted by the inclusion of a pistol. Let's see how much time we can save…

On average: Yes, having a gun in games that do not have guns will save you time—and, depending on the game, irrevocably corrupt you. Or make you feel deeply uncomfortable about the parallels that might be drawn to the real world. However, you also might also get to see Genghis Khan with an AK-47. So there's benefits and drawbacks.

As someone who follows the game music scene closely, I am constantly on the lookout for interesting takes on NES classics. One of the best I've found in the last year has been Chips 'N Cellos, an artist who arranges classical music in the iconic style of Mega Man. The NES sound palette's fuzzy percussion and squeaking melodies are a perfect match for Bach, Mendelssohn, Mozart, and Dvorak, it turns out.

What's the most stunning revelation in this Gears of War prequel? Marcus Fenix used to have a jump button. Yes, the king of cover-based shooting, a man more rooted to the ground than a scarecrow, spent his youth jumping to some bits of cover. So E-Day contains at least one literal leap forward for the franchise. Shame it's trapped in a slog of a campaign that's otherwise anything but.

But before I moan about that, plenty of good news first. Gears has never felt better to play. These third-person cover shooters have always been a blast when they're working, and a miserable swearing fit when you dodge roll into certain death instead of snapping into cover like you wanted to. Again.

That nonsense has finally been excised, mostly, thanks to slightly more acrobatic characters and some wise button remapping. It's amazing what a difference sticking run on L3 and giving climb its own designated button makes.

Gears of War's biggest haters are liable to characterise its cover-shooting as a dull game of whack-a-mole. Perhaps on Normal difficulty, but Hardcore is where the experience sings. Here, staying in the same spot of cover is rightfully punished. You've got to keep gaining better ground, constantly weighing up the risks of lining up a sniper shot, a chainsaw insta-kill, or making a desperate dash for cover. It's a turn-based tactics shooter with a missing pause button. There's a reason that it translated so smoothly to a tactics spin-off.

E-Day introduces new weaponry that makes cowering in cover harder than ever. It loves a blast of acid, this game, either delivered from a massive evil frog or a new gun that shotguns it at you. Devastating, but a loving kiss on the cheek compared to the Goreshot, a grappling hook only interested in grappling your torso from your body. So gloriously over-the-top, it almost makes up for the insta-kill tedium from the elite enemy who wields it.

That stuff's good, but it's the renovations to the old guard that stand out. The spike trap now opens with a hugely satisfying thunk-thunk-thunk as its horrible insides prepare themselves for a good gouging. The explosive arrow-firing torque bow gets a great glow up—the sound design as it finds its target is wonderful, practically a doomsday drum roll, so good I still enjoy it even when a locust is aiming it at me. And if I'm ever called upon to assassinate God, this game's sublime sniper rifle is what I'm reaching for.

So if the gunplay's a treat and the core combat never better, what's the problem? Well, almost everything else, unfortunately.

Dis-may

E-Day is a prequel, referring to the fateful day when the locust got bored of living underground and burst free from the surface to say a very messy hello. This is covered in the opening cutscene of the original Gears of War. And if you're wondering what insights E-Day has that weren't covered in said cutscene, same here.

The game opens with Marcus Fenix and Dom 'boy isn't it great that my wife and kids are alive' Santiago. Instead of the cynical, traumatised, seen-it-all-before combat veteran of the original Gears, here Marcus is… a cynical, traumatised, seen-it-all-before combat veteran. Oh.

Discovering Marcus was once a flamboyant drag queen who was changed forever by E-Day into the man we know today was probably too much to hope for. But the fact he's essentially exactly the frikkin' same is the first alarm bell that this prequel is struggling to justify its own existence.

Once the locust arrive, E-Day tries cosplaying as Resident Evil for a bit, complete with a trip through the panicking city to the police station. Some of these horror moments work. The drone gets an excellent introduction, though not so much for the poor sap stuck in the interrogation room with it. Other attempts at horror atmosphere are hilariously clumsy. I find the blood-soaked helmet of a transit worker, and the game immediately shatters any sense of foreboding with text popping up saying 'Bloody Transit Worker's Helmet Found!' Er, hooray?

The game then has some dumb fun giving little origin stories to its iconography—chainsaws being attached to machine guns! Grenades being tossed in emergence holes! Problem is, by the start of Act 2, you have the weaponry, armor, and the squad. At which point E-Day just becomes standard Gears of War again. You explore the ruined city (not open-world, more wide-ish linear) with goals never more complicated than 'shoot those locusts' or 'survive this wave of locusts' or 'why haven't you shot those locusts yet?'

Gears 5 understood the value of variety. It had sections where you had to stealth around a mad scientist's factory to stealth kill infected robots. Or ride a skiff down an icy mountain. Or fight an enemy on the stage of a Hamilton-inspired musical which starts rotating at the worst moment possible (play Gears 5—it's one of the best 7/10s ever).

True, not all of Gears 5's ideas worked. But I wanted a sequel that improved upon them, not a regression that believes the only thing you should ever be doing in one of these games is endlessly pulling the trigger. It's just slightly remixed combat encounters all the way down. Battle a giant frog and several snipers! OK, now two frogs, one sniper, and several shotgunners! OK, OK, now three giant spiders that fire insta-kill rockets, and loads of grunts, and the last checkpoint was seven minutes back! …Hey, why are you suddenly aiming at me?

Is the shooting strong enough to sustain this? Yeah, just, though it does get exhausting. It's an action movie with everything ripped out that isn't bullets going into bastards. The 20+ hour campaign is also waaaaay too long considering how one-note it is (well, aside from two crap shooting-from-a-turret-inside-a-helicopter bits, but I was planning on being nice and not bringing those up).

Moderate improvements

New for E-Day are mod slots for your weapons and armour. Mods include less recoil, better scopes, faster chainsaw revving, etc. Not as useless and incremental as the crap you get in [insert whichever live service shooter you currently have the most beef with here], but it's borderline and hard to get excited about. Far better is the gizmo that can send out rippling shockwaves that stun enemies, perfect for a chainsawin'. I found a mod for it that also sets enemies on fire. Lovely.

You get these mods for completing sidequests or finding them in cases. But E-Day is so terrified of you missing anything that tiresome all-caps text saying HARD CASE NEARBY blazes across the screen. And the location of the case is immediately added to your map. Oh and if you activate whatever this game's version of Eagle Vision is called, we'll show you exactly where the case is. Ugh.

Gears 5—which I promise to stop swooning over soon—did all this so much more elegantly. You had a robot companion with abilities that were upgraded with currency you found through exploring. No map markers, screaming text, or other BS that belongs in the Ubisoft dark ages. You were actually incentivised to explore properly, with any world-building or character moments you encountered along the way a nice bonus.

E-Day's a less interesting place to explore regardless. A city in ruin is one of gaming's most overdone settings, so you really have to pull out the stops to make it interesting, like in The Last of Us 2, or the opening Leon section of Resident Evil Requiem. Otherwise, seen one ruined city block, seen 'em all, like in the second half of Resident Evil Requiem (at least E-Day is less grey and brown, shockingly).

Other frustrations just feel like they shouldn't be happening in the seventh game of a series. There's a special place in hell for games that put checkpoints before long dialogue exchanges that you can't skip through. Normal difficulty still isn't challenging enough. Opt for hardcore and you get the compelling challenge, but also have to swallow the occasional ocean of stale piss, with boss health bars are so overlong I'm amazed they fit on the screen.

And how can a game with such outstanding skull-popping, blood-geysering headshots still have such pitiful damage feedback against elite enemies? There's no satisfaction in emptying clip after clip into a monster, not feeling like you're having any impact whatsoever until it finally falls over. Do I actually love E-Day's sniper rifle, or is it the only gunshot against the more bullet-spongy cretins that feels like it has any kick?

A new enemy at least has the decency to have a nice big eye that it doesn't like being shot in, which means I actually feel the impact of my gunfire. This thing is called… actually, to try and describe it myself when I can let the game do that in the following screenshot would be like snatching the pen from Shakespeare. My apologies. Take it away, E-Day:

Thank you, Lucas. God this game is infuriating. Great shooting trapped in a horribly overstretched campaign, telling a story that clearly didn't long to be told. It feels more like Microsoft taking a page out of the Jack Donaghy playbook and tapping a sign saying 'make it 2007 again'. Here's hoping multiplayer's a triumph. Otherwise Marcus is gonna have to open Gears 6 with one Hell of a drag show to make up for this.

We'll publish the final, scored version of this review once I've had time to try out the multiplayer, which wasn't available pre-release.

Almost a decade ago, we published a list of our favourite RTS units. There are some good picks in there. But I want to revisit the topic, and not just by listing some cool tanks. Real-time strategy is competitive. I want to find out what the best unit is, and for that we need a tournament. No deliberating, no debating, just brackets and voting.

Last week, PC Gamer writers created a shortlist, and now I'm pitting them against each other in randomised face-offs. And you lot now have two days to vote for your fave, after which the victors will move to the next round and we'll do it all over again.

But what does "best" actually mean? That's up to you! Better in a 1v1 brawl? Better looking? Better at pretending to be a completely normal tree? The choice is yours.

The war begins

Welcome to the first round of our apocalyptic war to determine the greatest RTS unit of all time. We've got 16 competitors duking it out, from Peons to the Executor Super Star Destroyer. Hmmm. That doesn't seem fair. But war isn't fair. There will be tears. There will be surprises. There will be grudges that remain for centuries.

But for now, let's meet the competitors. This is also where you lot come in. Underneath each set of two units, we'd like you to vote for your favourite. Now, I can't make you vote for my picks—that would be incredibly corrupt—but I'd certainly appreciate it.

Since there a lot of units to get through in this round, I'm going to leave the polls running until Sunday evening, and then we'll kick off the quarter-finals early next week.

One last bit of housekeeping: In cases where these units crop up in multiple games in a series, we've just picked one version. So while the Peon features in all three Warcrafts, I've gone for the Warcraft 3 version (because it looks extra goofy).

Peon vs Glass Dragon

Peon (Warcraft 3)

The real heroes of Warcraft, Peons are mistreated, disrespected and undervalued by orcish society, but they are the most critical cog in the Horde's war machine. They get called "dogs" and "cowards", and yeah, they might enjoy the occasional nap—but they work hard! They deserve a rest!

Orcs are classist dickheads. Without Peons, you'd have no great halls, no barracks, no trained warriors. Peons avoid conflict not because they are cowards, but because they know they are too important to die in battle—that the future of their people hinges on them building a new gold mine or chopping down some trees.

And if it comes down to it, they'll fight, either directly (which they are, frankly, terrible at) or by holing up in a burrow. They can do it all! Zug zug, my friends. Zug zug. —Fraser Brown, Online Editor

Glass Dragon (Rise of Legends)

Rise of Legends is one of those RTS games that sometimes I feel like I hallucinated from whole cloth. Fraser assures me that he's played it and it's rad, so I'm including the Glass Dragon here under the assurances that I haven't made it up.

Rise of Legends is an incredible game that blends steampunk and Arabian mythology and aliens (!) in a beautiful, messy RTS stew. The Glass Dragon stands out in particular not only for its ability to slag tanks, but its beauty. Just look at those beautiful polygons! —Russell Adderson, Contributor

Mammoth Tank vs Petard

Mammoth Tank (Command and Conquer: Red Alert)

God bless these great, trundling beasts—implacable Soviet strength wrought in steel and pig iron.

Mammoth Tanks are unfathomably costly and painfully slow, but whatever. I'm convinced just one of them could probably win the entire RA1 Soviet campaign by itself. Akh-knowledged. —Joshua Wolens, News Writer

Petard (Age of Empires 2)

Greek infrastructure hates to see these guys coming. I love destroying buildings is what we're learning here. But can you blame me? The Petard is a unit with a noble and singular goal: to hurl himself at the nearest enemy structure and turn it to smoking rubble. Of course, the Petard dies in the act, but such is the price you pay for glory.

It might be grim, it might be heartless, but it's certainly effective. Also, it's fun—producing a horde of these guys and sending them rolling over to the enemy's nearest base like a horrible circus coming to town is, simply, a great lark. —Joshua Wolens, News Writer

Psyker vs Rohirrim

Psyker (Warhammer 40,000: Dawn of War)

I love a unit that's so powerful it hurts itself. Not only is Dawn of War's Psyker the best voice-acted unit in a game filled to the brim with fantastic voicework, but he's the perfect mechanical summary of the setting's relationship to the Warp. Imagine if, to cast magic, you had to tap into hell, filled with soul-hungry predators and daemons who'd happily possess you given the chance. Hey, or maybe your head will just explode from the strain.

This is represented by the Psyker's 'Perils of the Warp' mechanic, which gives him a small chance of dying anytime he casts one of his powerful abilities. So, while it's fun to hear him shout WITNESS YOUR DOOOOOOM as many times as possible, abusing his powers will lead to an untimely end. —Sean Martin, Senior Guides Writer

Rohirrim (Lord of the Rings: Battle for Middle-earth)

The Ride of the Rohirrim is a very influential movie moment for a young lad. I, for example, decided that the only faction I could play in Lord of the Rings: Battle for Middle-earth was Rohan. And the only unit I would enjoy playing were the Rohirrim.

I'd get my long-haired horse boys fresh out of the stable, hand them forged blades (made the tips of their spears glow), as much heavy armour as I could afford, then arrange them into a neatly-formed flying V formation. My entire operation was focused on powering through as fast as possible until I could get my horde of superpowered spearmen on horseback. Every playthrough—every damn playthrough.

These Rohirrim were basically a cheat code. They could easily trample Sauron's armies under hoof. Just line them up, set them off, and watch carnage ensue. I'm rewatching the Ride of the Rohirrim as I write this and it makes me want to boot the game right back up again—goosebumps. —Jacob Ridley, Managing Editor, Hardware

High Templar vs Pride of Hiigara

High Templar (StarCraft 2)

I'm not one for all this lore nonsense, though the High Templars have lore abound if that's your jam. What I'm into is seeing a mass of enemy Terrans melt under the AoE of Psionic Storm.

Back when I was a wee wannabe Grandmaster SC2 nerd, discovering Templar Storm was game-changing. Previously, I'd based my game around making the sweet and simple Protoss ball of death—an army of smaller units and couple of big Colossus (Colossi?)—then crossing my fingers, but before long I discovered I could tech into Templars for that AoE. Just one or two of these bad-boys pulled in and I could melt my opponent's entire army of Marines or Zerglings. I'd never experienced anything like it. —Jacob Fox, Hardware Writer

Pride of Hiigara (Homeworld 2)

While other ships are spitting out missiles and other little projectiles, the Homeworld Mothership is spitting out capital ships. It is both a unit and your base—an impossibly huge mobile factory that can carry your whole fleet inside of it. Its direct offensive capabilities are extremely limited, but like I said: It can spit out capital ships.

I've picked the Kushan/Hiigaran version specifically because of its iconic design, which for me is right up there with the Enterprise D and Star Destroyers. While it's largely stationary in the original Homeworld (at least in the campaign), it's fully mobile in Homeworld 2, giving it an extra dose of utility. —Fraser Brown, Online Editor

Mirage Tank vs Ballista

Mirage Tank (Command and Conquer: Red Alert 3)

Most tanks are performative. They're like those folks who film themselves in the gym, flexing their muscles, grunting and getting in everyone's way. But not the Mirage Tank—it's sneaky. You wouldn't even notice it in the gym. You'd just be left to wonder, "Who put this tree in the gym?" And then it cuts right through you with its spectrum dispersion cannon.

It was already one of the coolest units ever created in Red Alert 2, but Red Alert 3's version introduces more disguises and enhances the unit's DPS capabilities. It can be a sneaky assassin on its own, but a group of them can make short work of an enemy base. —Fraser Brown, Online Editor

Ballista (Warcraft 2)

I edited C&C: Red Alert's rules.ini file so that attack dogs barked Tesla coil zaps, which was pretty cool. But lightning dogs were not an official unit, so I will instead call into battle the Ballista from Warcraft 2. Iconic, effective, and straightforward: this thing shoots a giant arrow. What are these other units gonna do against a really big arrow? Nothing. —Tyler Wilde, Editor-in-Chief (US)

Attack Cycle vs Super Star Destroyer

Attack Cycle (Command and Conquer: Tiberian Sun)

The cheap and cheerful attack cycle is made out of recycled coke cans and implodes when it has a negative thought, but who cares? You can churn them out like paperclips, and a swarm of them will make short work of enemy walls, turrets, and foundries. They are the Nod philosophy crystallised: victory through numbers, speed, and lethal affordability. —Joshua Wolens, News Writer

Executor Super Star Destroyer (Star Wars: Empire at War)

My colleagues have, for some reason, chosen to prioritize things like "funny voice lines" and "subtext" while proposing their favorite RTS units. Sorry, gang: you're about to get crushed by 19 kilometers of steel and turbolasers.

This enormous Death Triangle is the ultimate wish fulfilment vessel in Empire at War, one of my favorite Star Wars games. It's not a top-tier RTS, but it is top-tier Star Wars fantasy in game form, letting you move around a bunch of little toy ships and play out the "what if" of throwing Rogue Squadron's ace pilots up against a Star Destroyer. They've got a real chance in that fight, but not against the Executor, Darth Vader's personal ride.

The damn thing is practically the size of Manhattan, and you can really feel that scale in the game. It makes regular Star Destroys look like Doritos by comparison. It's swimming with so many turbolaser batteries it can bully an entire Rebel fleet by itself. Don't even try that A-Wing trick against it—that sort of nonsense only works in the movies. —Wes Fenlon, Senior Editor

Atreides Sonic Tank vs Dolphin

Atreides Sonic Tank (Dune 2)

I couldn't let a list like this go by without a unit from the absolute goat, Dune 2. It was hard to pick just one, but the House Atreides Sonic Tank is not only an absolute beast of a unit that melts infantry like a pat of butter at the beach, but also represents all of the weirdness and imagination of the source material. —Russell Adderson, Contributor

Dolphin (Command and Conquer: Red Alert 2)

The Dolphin—what a superstar. You could be forgiven for treating these sleek, squeaky critters like nothing more than scouts, with their lack of armour and impressive speed. But you'd be wrong. They are killers.

In a group, Dolphins are unstoppable gods of war, able to deftly take out buildings and vessels with their sonic blasts. They should be feared and respected. Sure, the Soviets think they have naval superiority, but once the Allies start churning out Dolphins, it's game over, man. —Fraser Brown, Online Editor

Peewee vs Priest

Peewee (Total Annihilation)

In the dystopian future of Total Annihilation's all-out robotic war, the Peewee always seemed incongruously joyful to me. Though a basic Kbot, he happily marches around the battlefield swinging his arms like a proper soldier, and when the time comes to fight, he lets rip with his arm blasters, machine-gunning an endless torrent of energy balls. Frankly, it looks like fun.

Even the name "Peewee" gives me an image of a cute little blaster bot, which doesn't exactly fit its role as a warrior in a gruelling 4,000 year war between machine consciousnesses. —Sean Martin, Senior Guides Writer

Priest (Age of Empires)

"Wololo." I win. —Jody Macgregor, Weekend Editor