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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Check out everything revealed at the PC Gaming Show.

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

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

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

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

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

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

Check out everything revealed at the PC Gaming Show.

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

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

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

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

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

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

Check out everything revealed at the PC Gaming Show.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

I did a lot of hitting the dirt beneath it.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Like so:

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

It helps that Rhell leans into such mistakes.

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

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

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

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

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

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

How to unlock new tools and recipes in Outbound

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

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

Tips for downloading new recipes at Outbound's signal towers

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

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

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

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

Outbound features

What kind of crafting game is Outbound?

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

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

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

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

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

Is Outbound worth it?

Will you like Outbound?

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

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

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

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

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

How to unlock the Vehicle Research Station

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

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

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

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

All Outbound van upgrades

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

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

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

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

How to repair the broken bridges

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

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

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

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

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

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

How to lower the drawbridge in Outbound

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

How to unlock co-op in Outbound

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

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

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

How to invite friends to co-op

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

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

How co-op progression works

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

PowerWash Simulator 2 developer FuturLab has announced a Star Wars DLC pack for its much-loved spray-cleaning sequel, publishing a preview teaser that promises players a chance to introduce the joys of pressurized purgation to the deserts of Tatooine, the frigid expanse of Hoth, and wherever the Rebel Alliance might have decided to park its X-wings.

The paid Star Wars pack isn't the first time PowerWash has paired with a licensed property: The original PowerWash Sim had similar collabs with Warhammer 40K and Shrek, and there's already an Adventure Time DLC available for PowerWash Sim 2. But it's the first time in too long that a game has paid proper attention to the most critical component of Star Wars: grimy machinery.

Star Wars is an aesthetic experience built on a bedrock of filth and beat-up technology. The heart of Star Wars isn't a lightsaber; it's a decaying moisture vaporator in desperate need of a fresh power converter. It speaks its history with the vocabulary of weathered cowling and cobbled-together junk.

The Millennium Falcon is one of Star Wars' most potent icons because it's the space opera equivalent of your cool uncle's prehistoric station wagon, with all the accumulated grime that implies. Every malfunctioning landing gear and sweat-stained seat cushion is proof of life lived a long time ago.

A Star Wars pack for PowerWash Sim is one of the series' more interesting videogame offerings in recent memory, because—in a setting overstuffed with Skywalkers and Mandalorians—it's a chance to embody its true heroes: Those maintenance personnel tasked with fighting a losing war against the grime of galactic-scale entropy to make it a little more livable.

Of course, while watching that preview trailer, you might be tempted to ask how much the DLC pack will be respecting that spirit when you'll be pressure-washing X-wings to a spotless sheen. To that, I'd say it's a chance to relearn one of the prequels' more crucial lessons: that a Star Wars stripped of its dirt and disrepair has lost something along the way.

Also, I hate sand.

Power Wash Simulator 2's Star Wars pack doesn't have a release date yet, but FuturLab says to expect it on Steam sometime this summer.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

The naked guy happily reaching out towards what I promise is a giraffe adds a certain je ne sais quoi to the scene, don't you think? A quirky touch of class, maybe? A dramatic representation of humanity's desire to strive for the unknown?

Perhaps I'm getting a little too deep in my inkwell after being asked to recreate the long-necked animal, as described by a guy who knows a guy who definitely thinks he saw one once, using whatever familiar illustrative parts I happen to have lying around. Still, at least the client's happy with the apparent accuracy of my cheese-slice yellow creation—monster jaw for horns, monkey butt under the tail because… because it's my picture and I can do whatever I like—and it's a good thing too, because in Scriptorium another equally bonkers request or three is never more than a bird-delivered scroll away.

Take the person who wants me to draw them a magnificent bed, just like the one they saw in a dream. Something with bells and wheels and a pigeon on it. Or the dog who excitedly licked a page clean and urgently needs it fixed before anyone finds out.

The ongoing saga of Vexed Latrine Guy vs Royalty resurfaces from time to time, the task required escalating from basic health and safety tips to distracting window-sized posters. The world of medieval illustration has never felt more lively, or full of laughs.

I honestly have no idea what I'll have to make next. Sometimes a man just really wants to be reunited with his beloved snail, and needs me to create the fanciest border I can imagine to try and draw people's attention to his missing pet poster. A knight insists there was a time the king rode him like a horse, and it's on me to bring that image to life in whatever degree of safe-for-work-ness I choose. After a string of requests like these my grip on normality starts to falter, and so when a client asks for a basic combat manual full of animals, I find myself smiling as I assemble a dual-wielding sword frog to go with the battle hedgehog and axe-brandishing squirrel I already put together.

The success of Scriptorium's unusual style of creative comedy stems from its two-pronged approach to my inky work. First of all: it's relentlessly, joyously absurd. One moment I'm building an elephant out of trees, the next I'm turning a royal decree into an illustrated masterpiece, or visualising a viciously petty divorce settlement.

Nothing could prepare me for the twists and turns found in the main plot threads and smaller side stories brought to my ink-stained table—or even in the UI. Fresh colours are made by grinding petals into a paste, using a weary live turtle as a pestle. The shells that hold my ink are cleaned in a water dish "sailed" by a boat full of jolly rats. The game never wastes a single opportunity to raise a smile.

But the second part of it is, if anything, even more important: The game truly does not care what I create, so long as it meets a few extremely broad pieces of criteria. The client may ask for a verdant natural scene, but in truth the game makes clear that all it's actually checking is that I've put 30+ things from the nature category on the page, and maybe eight bits from the animal tab for good measure. Whoever I'm working for will love a forest of golden mushrooms just as much as a beautiful selection of carefully selected foliage.

Heck, there's nothing stopping me from recolouring, resizing, and generally twisting about a bunch of overlapping pink flower petals until they resemble a giant floating brain—the freedom I'm offered ensures it counts just the same.

For all the dubious would-be saints hoping I'll recreate their "divine" struggles and elderly mice hoping I'll draw peace with cat-kind, ultimately I'm the only person I need to creatively satisfy here. I always have the space to make something I like, something that makes me laugh, and if that involves painting monkey heads blue so I can use them as the scales of a giant sea monster, then so be it.

If that's somehow still not enough freedom, Scriptorium's sandbox mode is ready to help me conjure up absolutely anything I like. It even offers a bit of optional inspiration to help spark my imagination, beginning with a simple how-to on dressing up a person in various ways before descending into waving skeletons, royal canines, and a beautiful flower made mostly out of bunny bottoms.

Spending an hour on this makes the entire artistic world feel like my inky oyster—and I bet I Scriptorium would let me build that shellfish out of something's bum if I really wanted to.

AI is coming to take my job, so I'd better start looking for a new one. Luckily, there are a ton of job simulators on Steam, and I'm going to play as many as I can until I find my next career. This week's job: Gun Store Simulator, an early access sim about running a gun store.

America has a gun problem, and the problem is this: with roughly 400 million privately-owned firearms in the United States, how am I going to sell people even more guns? There are already more firearms than humans in this country: that's what you call market saturation.

That's my dilemma in the early access retail management sim Gun Store Simulator, but it solves itself almost immediately: it turns out I can't sell guns in my gun store anyway, at least not for a while. As a level one weapons distributor, I can only buy a permit to sell three kinds of weapons: bats (the baseball kind, not the leathery, flappy, blood-drinky kind), brass knuckles, and knives.

Aren't people going to be disappointed, if not furious, when they walk into a gun store called "Gun Store" (the game will not allow me to change my store's name) and not find any guns for sale?

Nope. Not even a little bit. I buy shelves, stock 'em with knuckle dusters and baseball bats, and open the doors. People wander in, march robotically to the shelves, grab a small stack of non-guns, and come to the counter eagerly holding out a credit card or cash. I take their money, give them change, and they leave with a big camouflaged bag containing zero guns—but with zero complaints.

Maybe I'm actually doing something good here by not selling people guns. Instead of the local citizens settling their minor disputes by firing wildly at each other, they'll have to resort to beating each others' heads in and pulverizing each other's faces. After all, you can't punch someone from across the street or from inside a moving car: you really have to get up close to harm them. Maybe that's how violence should be in this town: deeply personal.

I decide right then and there that I won't sell guns from my gun store, not ever, not even when the gun license becomes available. Heck, I won't even sell knives because you can throw a knife at someone from a distance. Not personal enough! Bludgeoning will be my stock and trade. If I could rename my store—and that should really be a basic feature of a store sim, by the way—I'd call it the Blunt Hut.

My gun control strategy seems to be working. I give up selling bats quickly: they're too cheap and take up too much space, but becoming a 100% knucks business lets me quickly earn enough to hire a guy in camo pants named Jackson to work the register. All I have to do now is order more knucks and stock the shelves, because there's quite literally nothing else to do in this early access sim. Even when I level up enough to buy a gun license, I just keep selling my knucks, row after gleaming row of them.

Something I should mention because it becomes a fixation for me: each order of brass knuckles comes in a small wooden crate, and every time I empty a crate I drop it on the floor of my shop. I assumed that these crates would be magically cleaned up by the next morning, because surely the game wouldn't let me accumulate dozens and dozens of physics objects for no reason.

But it does. The crates just lie there, the pile growing every day. There's a dumpster outside I can drop them in to dispose of them, but at this point I want to see how many empty crates I can collect.

While I'm turning a nice profit from my brass knuckle business, progress is a bit slow. I can mark my knucks up to about double their actual value, but each time I use the computer to place an order my eye is drawn to the other weapon I'm allowed to purchase at early levels: the knife. It's hard to ignore just how expensive they are: a knife costs $58, while knucks only cost $17. If I can jackknife the price of knives way up, same as I do with my dusters, I could really be rolling in it.

Reluctantly, I give it a try. I buy one shelf and set it way across the other side of the store, as if the added distance will somehow lessen my guilt for betraying my "blunt damage only" promise. And sure enough, I can crank the cost of knives through the roof and people will still happily buy them. I raise the price to $75, then $100, and then $115. My customers don't even blink (probably because they can't blink because they are mindless, soulless weapon-buying automatons).

Despite my misgivings, my knife business does so well that I can afford a clone of Jackson the Camo Cashier to stand behind a second register in my store, and I can spend $10,000 on an addition to my shop: the shooting range. I know what you're thinking because I had the same question: can I open a gun range even if I don't have any guns for sale? That's exactly why I spent all that money, to find out.

The answer is yes, I can open a shooting range. Unfortunately, and I guess I should have seen this coming, but the customers of my gun range want guns. They state it very plainly. "Picture Of A Gun," my first visitor says in a large word bubble.

There's no option to let him beat, punch, or stab a paper target, so I just leave him there, forever requesting a gun he shall never receive.

Having spent so much on that pointless shooting range, I'm in a financial hole. I can't restock all those empty knife shelves, and since I notice that customers walk to a specific shelf and then leave the store if there's nothing on it (they really are completely robotic), I take most of my shelves down to consolidate my limited stabby inventory. I even fire one of the Jackson clones and work the second register for a bit to save money.

But the reversal of fortune doesn't last long. Nothing can dampen the desire of people to arm themselves with deadly weapons, and even stocking just a few knives quickly puts me back on top. I'm so flush with knife money I even hire a third Jackson clone, who doesn't even have a register to work so he just stands outside the store staring at a brick wall all day. I've got that kind of money.

Then I reach a new level of financial independence. At level five I can purchase hunting items like rifles and .308 ammo—but who cares, because there are now camo hats and backpacks available. Backpacks sell for $115, which I can jack up to well over $200.

No more knives. No more knucks. This is now a backpack shop and they sell so fast I can barely keep the shelves stocked. "Gun Store" has gone completely violence-free and fashion-forward, and the only thing stacked higher than empty crates are my profits.

Performance evaluation

Masters of Albion has Peter Molyneux's paws all over it. The art style and arch British humor channels Fable, and it's even set in a place called Albion (not the same Albion as Fable, of course). It's all very gentle, very quaint, like I've just opened an Enid Blyton or Jill Barklem picture book.

But then my in-game mentor, who instructs me in all things being-a-god, goes hell for leather: "Fuck off it's a fucking zombie!" she cries. It's a response commensurate with the severity of the situation—midnight zombie attack—but it's the funniest case of tonal whiplash I've experienced in a game for a while. Imagine if Maru in Stardew Valley called you a cockhead every time you proffered a snow yam. That's how it felt.

Masters of Albion is a funny thing and yes, it kinda feels like the explicit, unadulterated version of previous Molyneux games mashed together. It's a god game, because I play as a godly hand in control of everything. It's a management and production line sim in ways that recall both Theme Park and Dungeon Keeper. It also has some light action RPG elements. It definitely feels like Molyneux and his team are making a game designed to be widely played rather than as an experimental commercial gambit, possibly for the first time in 22cans' existence.

God hand

The first order of the day is to revitalise the little hamlet of Oakbridge. In Masters of Albion the protagonist—the god, the hand—is also the mouse pointer. I can construct buildings out of pre-fabbed blocks, all the better to get a little bit of industry going on in this backwater. My farm keeps a nearby mill supplied with wheat, and the mill keeps a nearby factory supplied with flour. At first my town's specialty is making weird sandwiches, which I'm tasked with making manually, by way of learning how the mini in-game economy works. From a selection of ingredients—stale sourdough, moldy white, lettuce, tomato, rat—I click and drag ingredients onto a plate, and the customer delivers their verdict.

It's a wholesome way to live. But the problem with this revitalisation plan is there's a graveyard nearby and it tends to spawn vicious undead by night. Masters of Albion is also, therefore, a tower defense game of sorts. I can fix or mend fences, build catapult sentries, and eventually open a heroes guild where the heroes I employ bed down.

I really love this aspect of the game. My heroes automatically fight zombies by night and I can even help out from the firmament, at first with lightning rods but later with fire. I can also inhabit my heroes and wander the world as them, effectively turning Masters of Albion into a third-person action RPG (you can inhabit workers as well, but no thanks).

Not a very good action RPG though, or at least, not yet: this being early access, my heroes traverse the terrain awkwardly, and the land is rife with weird invisible walls. But inhabiting one of my heroes means I can explore chunks of Albion that my godly hands have yet to win dominion over, and it also falls to them to reconstruct towers that can extend my divine reach, all the better for me to take control over more of Albion. Each of my heroes levels up independently and, eventually, once I've built an armory and weaponsmith, can be kitted out with better gear.

Rat sandwich

The management elements are fine but a little tedious at times. At one point, hundreds of pounds in debt, I needed to build a bunch of new worksites and homes for incoming workers. The only way I knew how to get out of debt was to manufacture 28 "balanced" sandwiches, the problem being that my wheat field was depleted and I needed more than a grand to irrigate purified water to the plot. Thankfully my mill was stocked up with plenty of flour already, but once my supply was depleted I still needed to make 15 pies with only 37 pounds at my disposal.

Manufacturing is slow too: needlessly so, because Masters of Albion doesn't pit you against any clock. Days will run forever until you choose to end them, the idea being that you should be well-equipped to take on the night's zombie incursion. It's possible to speed up production on my farms, mills and factories by double clicking on them—think of it like a foreman's stern tap on the shoulder—but this is still pretty slow as well.

Anyway, I ran out of money and wheat before I could fulfil this task and felt at a loss until I realised I could go adventuring for coins. Sidequesting as one of my heroes is actually a pretty effective way of making money, or at least it is until all sidequests are done. Manufacturing sandwiches is pretty lucrative, but so is bashing hornet nests from trees, and kicking chooks back into their run (it wouldn't be Molyneux without fowl cruelty).

Once I got the money I bought my stupid water purifier, only to struggle endlessly with its placement, which raises the problem of building in general: it's awkward. I want my town to look nice, but it's usually more expedient to just stack required blocks one on top of the other until I have a veritable skyscraper of, say, farmer workshops, all the better to employ workers and boost production. It's also annoying how willing new blocks in hand are to snap to buildings I don't want to be a part of.

The UI, in general, is a bit of a mess. And performance is pretty woeful: my laptop sits pretty much exactly on the recommended specs, but even on minimum settings the game would often lurch, especially when on foot as one of my denizens. 22Cans also writes that the game is Steam Deck ready, and it kinda is, but you're going to need to be comfortable with frame rates that hover around the 22 fps mark on the lowest possible settings.

Yep, it's an early access project alright. But through the mid-development murk I can see huge potential. It's full of fun touches, like the ability to pick my subjects up and drop them into the ocean, though maybe that stands out because there aren't a heap of other ways to assert my divinity. The writing is often superb, and despite the ropey performance it looks really nice on high settings.

I enjoyed my time with Masters of Albion despite its myriad problems, though for anyone less than fanatic about Molyneux' work or the god genre in general, I'd probably advise to wait for further updates. Of course, this being a Molyneux project, you're justified in worrying whether it'll ever be completed. Assuming that it is—22cans predicts a 12 month dev cycle—it's shaping up to be the best Molyneux game since the Fable years. Is that a high bar to cross? Not really, but I'll definitely be coming back.

We're just a few hours out from the early access release of Masters of Albion, which creator and legendary hyperbolist Peter Molyneux is pitching as both his swansong and "redemption title." To mark the occasion, Molyneux recently took to YouTube to field questions from fans about his career, Masters of Albion, and where his god-game obsession stems from.

It's that last one that's most significant to me right now, because Molyneux—a founding father of the whole god game genre thanks to Populous, which he designed—says his obsession with the godly genre is making him a bit sad these days. Why? Because they've sort of all gone away.

"I think the big thing that made me the most saddest is to see that god games were withering," said Molyneux. He's not wrong. For whatever reason, god games feel permanently trapped in the late-'90s and early 2000s.

You get the odd modern iteration—Reus 2 hit in 2024, for instance—but it sure doesn't feel like a genre many people are thinking about these days. Which is sad, because more videogames should let you yeet villagers so hard they dip beneath the curvature of the Earth.

"If you compare it to other genres, like first-person shooters or battle royale, or even RTS games and roleplaying games, they've all moved forward. If you just look at the HUD of any game, pretty much, the HUD—the icons on the top of the screen have reduced and reduced and reduced in all those other genres, and it was a real sadness to me that god games have kind of been left behind." Videogame HUDs feel like an odd thing to zero in on specifically, but I think ol' Molyneux is treating them as metonymic for 'how far a genre has come forward' in general.

The way Molyneux tells it, it sounds like there's a vicious cycle going on where waning interest from devs leads to less appetite from publishers which, you guessed it, leads to waning interest from devs. "If you go to a publisher and say, 'Hey, we've got this great game. We're working on it. It's a god game.' They kind of turn their nose up and say, 'Well, we've run the numbers and god games are such a small slice of the overall games that people play; we're not interested in signing it'."

This is why, says Molyneux, 22cans is self-publishing Masters of Albion—though it's worth noting even Molyneux's curtain call isn't just a god game; there's a lot of Fable and Dungeon Keeper-flavoured stuff in there. I haven't been too blown away by what I've seen of it so far, but if Masters of Albion could help revive the god game genre, at least a little? That'd be fine by me.

Peter Molyneux is playing the hits with Masters of Albion, returning to the god game form he helped define. Towns can be built, townsfolk can be menaced—all through the awesome, lightning-bolt throwing, boulder-dropping, peasant-flinging power of an omnipotent, hovering hand, just as tradition demands.

And it's all happening when Masters of Albion launches in early access in just a few hours. If you'd like to know precisely when you can extend your godly hand over your hapless subjects, then take hold of mine: I've listed the Masters of Albion launch time below for timezones around the world.

When does Masters of Albion launch in early access?

Masters of Albion launches in early access at 1 pm EDT / 6 pm BST on Wednesday, April 22. That provides a comfortable amount of launch day play time for the US and Europe, but anyone in Australia who's eager for a Molyneux rendezvous is going to be bleary-eyed at unlock hour.

Here's the Masters of Albion launch time for timezones around the globe:

• Los Angeles: 10 am PDT on Wednesday, April 22
• New York: 1 pm EDT on Wednesday, April 22
• London: 6 pm BST on Wednesday, April 22
• Berlin: 7 pm CEST on Wednesday, April 22
• New Delhi: 10:30 pm IST on Wednesday, April 22
• Sydney: 3 am AEST on Thursday, April 23
• Auckland: 5 am NZST on Thursday, April 23

If your timezone isn't one of those listed above, just plug the launch time into a handy timezone converter to find when you'll be able to play.

Does Masters of Albion have preloading?

It doesn't seem like it; there's been no mention of preloading on either the Masters of Albion Steam page or its various social media feeds. Its system requirements only ask for 20 GB of space, however, so it won't be a terribly long wait compared to the beefier install sizes we have to deal with nowadays.

I consider World of Tanks none of my business. Other than a brief window over a decade ago when I dabbled in Wargaming's treads-based shooter, the free-to-play oldie has otherwise turned me off with aggressively monetized progression that favors players with deep pockets.

So it's with skeptical eyes that I'm playing World of Tanks: Heat, a new hero shooter-adjacent spinoff of the original PvP tanker that's currently running a closed beta. It wasn't on my radar a week ago, but so far it's a blast.

I say "adjacent" because, while Heat has hero shooter trappings like abilities and ultimates, it's also got World of Tanks simulation stuff running under the hood. Location damage is modeled down to the individual armor plate, with impact angle, distance, and ammo penetration determining whether a shell glances off without making a scratch or immobilizes your tank entirely.

Still, Heat's tone is fantastical—the Steam page reveals that it takes place in an "alternate post-WW2 timeline shaped by rapid scientific progress and global cooperation." That sure does sound like a fantasy these days.

The promise of a leaner, faster, "instant action" take on World of Tanks' plodding face-offs was was backed up when I loaded into a 5v5 Kill Confirmed match (a mode straight out of Call of Duty) and pressed F to summon a Reinhardt-like energy shield in front of my tank. As an enemy tank drove circles around me in a futile attempt to outmaneuver my shield, a teammate sniped their fuel tank from a mile away, blowing them up instantly and collecting their dog tag.

Wargaming is bringing the, ahem, heat that I'm in the mood for these days—matches are short, modes are simple and recognizable, but the combat has a totally different rhythm than anything else I'm playing. Because you can't just leap around a corner or slide into cover, Heat is more about positioning and timing. You're going to take damage, but you can outplay other tanks by protecting critical components (fuel tanks, ammo bays, crew chambers), flanking, and making yourself the smallest possible target.

Again, that's all true if you've played World of Tanks any time in the last decade, but the limited match size, smaller arenas, and quick respawns of Heat give it a gladiatorial pace. It's a far cry from my dated memories of hiding in bushes and getting shelled by artillery tanks kilometers away. I'll pass on simulating being killed by an enemy I can't even see.

The words "critical hit" accompany a gratifying "ding" when you damage something important. Triggering my ultimate plays a cutscene where my "agent" Chopper calls in an artillery strike from inside the tank. Earlier I flanked a team by climbing up an aircraft carrier, then shot a guy while barrel-rolling off the side of the upper deck. My tank bounced 12 feet in the air and took zero damage from the fall. Heat is goofy—I like it so far.

There's also a whole progression system where you can level up tanks and equip different modifiers. I haven't messed with that yet, and most of it isn't present in the beta right now, so there's still time for Heat to muck it up by giving paid players the best tanks or something silly like that. Fingers crossed.

If you want to one-up my barrel roll, the Steam page has sign-ups for the closed beta running for a few more days.

After last year's celebrated Chapter Four expansions that extended Crusader Kings 3's map across Asia with systems for playing as Mongolian nomads, Chinese courtly bureaucrats, and god-kings of Indonesia, Paradox isn't resting on its laurels. Today, the studio unveiled its future plans in a Chapter Five reveal video, previewing a pair of major paid DLC aimed at overhauling CK3's religion gameplay and introducing new mercantile playstyles.

If you've been waiting to play Pope—and I'm sure you have—you'll be getting your chance later this year.

By God Alone, the first of Chapter Five's two major paid expansions arriving in Q3 2026, brings a rework to CK3's religion systems—particularly for Christian characters. In the reveal video, design lead Mikael Andersson said Paradox's is "fleshing out the Christian church to make the institution itself feel like a living entity."

By God Alone will introduce systems for modeling how faith in the medieval era continually evolved on both local and cross-continental scales. A new Rites mechanic will represent localized variations on and divergence from religious convention. Rites have their own religious leaders, who potentially risk being declared heretical by church authority.

Or, thanks to the expansion making theocracies playable, you can finally step into the Pope's shoes and do some excommunication of your own. Worst case scenario, you usher in an exciting new schism. Everyone loves a schism. Religious characters in general will interact with a new spiritual fulfillment system, influenced by reworked religious tenet mechanics that Paradox says "now center characters' relationships to their faith."

Chapter Five's other half, Silk & Silver, will be available for purchase in Q4, and brings a new merchant playstyle in which you, as the head of a trading company, will establish trade routes, secure monopolies, and undermine competitors to amass both wealth and political influence. That'll feed into a new Republic government type, where you'll jockey with other merchant families to set the republic's constitution, pass laws, and form trade confederations in league with other republics for mutual commercial and military benefit.

To help set the stage for Chapter Five, Paradox also dropped a free update today. The 1.19 changelog includes a new modular Stories system that presents special event chains in a more visible and coherent format, the addition of age-related ailments (because getting old in the medieval era apparently wasn't miserable enough), and quality of life features like a Ledger window that provides useful realm, character, and world information.

And as a delightful bonus, it adds a Kingdom Come: Deliverance collaboration. If you're playing from an 867, 1066, or 1178 start date, you might encounter Henry as an in-game adventurer. Hopefully his CK3 incarnation doesn't acquire any ailments if he tries to ride a horse beneath any low arches.

With so many sim games launching on Steam each week, it can be difficult to stand out. On the face of it, a "handyman simulator" just sounds like more of the same, but Primal Repairs does offer one very strong twist that caught my eye today: it's set in what is basically the world of The Flintstones.

That means that as you go about your rounds in the prehistoric suburbs, you'll be replacing stone wheels on cars, mowing lawns with a dinosaur on a trolley, building furniture out of bones and hide, and waking up sleeping mammoths so they can go back to their jobs as water fountains.

You even have a velociraptor assistant, Velly, who's essentially a living multi-tool, able to fill the role of a car jack, drill, hammer, and more, in addition to being rideable.

A weirdly realistic art style only makes the setting all the funnier, and I appreciate how much it follows through on the weird logic of the various contraptions. If your lawnmower hits a rock, for example, it'll give the dinosaur toothache, requiring a quick bit of dentistry before you can continue. And making your breakfast in the morning requires feeding chillis to a captive fire-spitting dino so it can heat up the meal (which is, of course, a huge slab of meat on the bone).

How any of this will actually play, however, remains to be seen. The footage does make it seem like it might just be a linear series of jokes rather than a more freeform sim, but as long as the jokes land, that might be enough. On the other hand, the store page suggests it will be an open world you're free to explore as you wish.

Primal Repairs doesn't have a release date yet, but you can wishlist it on Steam to follow along. Let's just hope it's not being developed on a stone computer.

If you've just jumped into Hello Kitty Island Adventure's City Town DLC, you'll want to start befriending the game's newest character, Usahana, as fast as possible. This isn't just because she's a fantastic addition to the crew of Hello Kitty and her friends, but because this is your key to making your way through City Town's "story". The friendship quests you unlock via Usahana are what help to bring the majority of City Town to life and begin to open up the new space.

Unless you've got a plethora of Friendship Blossoms and Bouquets, gifting and levelling up her friendship can be a pretty lengthy process. As always, you can only give three gifts a day to Usahana, so it's best to make the most of them if you don't have any of these magic flowers. Here's what you need to know about picking the perfect present for your new pal.

Best gifts for Usahana in Hello Kitty Island Adventure

Usahana likes any gifts tagged with Imagination, Mochi, and Rainbow. So, if you've found anything that matches one or more of these, you're probably onto a one-heart gift at the very least. The following table lists the easiest gifts you can gather for Usahana around City Town to save you from having to spend a lot of crafting materials or a lot of time wandering, at the very least:

Colorpillars are by far the easiest gift to start collecting to give Usahana as you'll be able to catch them around City Town from the very moment you arrive. Even if you don't need one for a quest, I'd suggest catching them every time you see one so you've got a surplus to hand should you need something to tip Usahana's friendship to the next level.

Once you've hit friendship level 3 with Usahana, you'll be able to complete the "A Whole New Menu" quest too, which unlocks the ability to make mochi. As long as you've got Rice Flour, which can be crafted by taking Rice to the Chef's Station, you can use any ingredient you've gathered from Friendship Island to create mochi which Ushana is happy to receive.

Aside from these extra ingredients, much like Cogimyun's preferred gifts in the Wheatflour Wonderland DLC, all of Usahana's favourite gifts can exclusively be found in City Town. This does make it slightly harder to know where to start with gifting, but as soon as you start baking and collecting the critters around City Town, you'll realise just how happy Usahana is to receive all sorts of gifts.

Hello Kitty Island Adventure is one of my go-to cozy games, but even I log in occasionally and struggle to know what to do. Besides waiting outside of Pompompurin's ice cream boat like a crazed fan, I've exhausted all the friendship quests and challenges that Friendship Island has to offer. The Wheatflour Wonderland DLC from last year certainly helped to reignite my love for my Sanrio pals, but eventually I found myself with few quests to complete there too. Which is where the game's newest DLC, City Town, comes in.

City Town, much like Wheatflower Wonderland, is an extension of Friendship Island that brings an entirely new setting for you to explore and a new character to befriend. This time around, we're going with another one of Sanrio's most underrated yet most adorable designs: Usahana. This cheery, colourful bunny is the only character who lives in City Town when you arrive, which becomes pretty obvious pretty quickly when you realise that nothing really happens there.

All of the shops are locked and practically boarded up, and the streets are only inhabited by the occasional critter like rainbow caterpillars and what is essentially the Hello Kitty equivalent of pigeons. But it doesn't take long at all for the ball to get rolling and for you, alongside Hello Kitty and her friends, to start breathing a new life into the city. This involves completing a number of quests for different characters, which in turn slowly restores the shops which are manned by a variety of friends you've already made.

The quests to restore these shops aren't just one and done either. You slowly make your way through them across days at a time, meaning you can't just sit and rinse through all the content at once, which is usually what I find myself doing—especially with a game I already love so much. The pacing feels frustrating at first, since I just wanted to get my hands dirty and start rebuilding City Town, but after a few days I definitely appreciated that I had reasons to check in with the game each day.

Usahana's friendship quests act similarly, giving you one main story quest every couple of days (depending on how many friendship blossoms you've got stocked up) which helps the pacing of the DLC. It's definitely reminiscent of the start of Animal Crossing New Horizons where you just want to get stuck in but have to wait a few days for things like the Museum to be built, or the Town Hall, or even for your villagers to move in. But just like how I felt with Animal Crossing, those restrictions never put me off playing. If anything, it gave me more of a drive to play.

Unlike Wheatflour Wonderland though, City Town feels more like a tack on Friendship Island rather than its own standalone unit—but that's certainly not a bad thing. It expands the experience and gives you more to do and see each day, rather than being a location you mostly visit in the DLC and then again if you need to farm materials, like I found Wheatflour Wonderland becomes. City Town's setting really makes it feel like the world of Hello Kitty Island Adventure can become so much bigger than just the island itself.

Having really enjoyed the Wheatflour Wonderland DLC, City Town had some pretty big boots to fill, and it's safe to say that it achieves the goal. After playing through Wheatflour Wonderland, I felt like it would be a waste of potential for DLC's like this to not be the way forward for Hello Kitty Island Adventure, so it's nice to see that Sunblink clearly feels the same way. If anything, each time one of these DLCs rolls around it makes me feel more excited for what they might do next. After thoroughly enjoying the experience at hand, of course.

Euro Truck Simulator 2 has been going strong for 14 years now, and at this point I don't think I'll be able to cope when SCS Software stops supporting it. Driving around computer Europe in various trucks is one of the best ways to wind down after a long day tolerating existence. You don't even have to care about trucks.

Following two major DLC drops in December, SCS has just announced the first for 2026: Soul of Anatolia, as the name implies, opens up the huge eastern expanse of Türkiye, which used to be rendered Turkey in English before the Turkish foreign minister requested it be changed in 2022.

"Your route will take you from bustling Istanbul all the way to Aksaray, the easternmost point of this expansion, beginning with engineering marvels: cross the record-breaking 1915 Çanakkale Bridge, the longest suspension bridge in the world, or the impressive Yavuz Sultan Selim and Osmangazi Bridge, each a gateway into Anatolia," the Steam entry promises. "At the heart of your journey lies Ankara, the capital city and a vital crossroads of the region. Soon, the road may lead you past the shimmering expanse of Tuz Gölü, or through the vibrant tourist cities of Antalya and Alanya, where grand hotels rely on your cargo deliveries."

That sounds exciting to me. There is no word on a release date as yet, but the trailer below will give you a feel for it.

I didn't really consider ever trying a Truck Simulator game before Andy Kelly's brilliant appreciation in 2015. They're obviously made with trucking enthusiasts front of mind, but they're also, almost by accident, brilliant zen games.

Every time Gloomwood goes on sale I check to see if it's received its long-promised controller support. For years the answer has been "no" or "not yet", and believe me, on most normal days there's a new thread in the Gloomwood Steam forums asking about it. But as of today, the answer is "yes".

That's good news for me and many others who want to play this stealth-oriented immersive sim on Steam Deck or any other handheld PC. While Gloomwood has been 'Playable' on Steam Deck for a while, you needed to make do with your own (or the community's) jury-rigged gamepad layout, and gamepad glyphs weren't in the game. That's a very annoying way to play a first-person Thief-like with complicated controls, but such is people's enthusiasm for Gloomwood that they've been doing it anyway.

The gamepad support is comprehensive: tutorials have been updated for gamepad users, and you can rebind to your heart's desire.

The new update also adds "a new shop in the market plaza" which means nothing to me because I've been waiting for gamepad support for Gloomwood before I play it. But apparently that's good.

Gloomwood launched on Steam in 2022 and is still in early access, but players are happy—it has over 5,500 "overwhelmingly positive" reviews—and it's updated frequently. In January it got a major new map featuring the game's "largest, most vertical open area" yet.

If that's not enough, Ted Litchfield declared all the way back in 2023 that Gloomwood has already passed the "early access threshold", which is to say, it's worth playing even if incomplete. "It kicks ass, and it's definitely time to get into Gloomwood," he wrote.

As it happens, Gloomwood is currently 25% off on Steam at the moment.

Graveyard Keeper 2 was announced this month at the Triple-I Initiative, and to celebrate that the original was made available free for a limited time. It's a sensible way to get people familiar with the series and to build anticipation for the sequel, but there's another upside to this kind of giveaway. As Alex Nichiporchik, CEO of publisher Tinybuild explained on Twitter, it's earned "almost 250k usd from selling DLCs for the original."

And that's just on Steam, where the DLC is currently 80% off. (The giveaway for the base game has ended, I'm afraid.) The main purpose of the giveaway is to draw attention to the upcoming sequel of course, and that seems to have worked as well. In a followup tweet, Nichiporchik announced Graveyard Keeper 2 was in Steam's top 100 most-wishlisted games, having been wishlisted 450,000 times.

It hasn't all been good news for Graveyard Keeper 2. Slava Cherkasov, co-founder and CTO of developer Lazy Bear Games, posts a lot of pro-AI stuff like a defense of DLSS 5 based on the idea its critics just "hate full lips and makeup", which has some players concerned that Graveyard Keeper 2 will replace its characterful style with something more generic and AI-generated. The developer ended up having to state that "we're not using the AI in Graveyard Keeper 2."

We'll see how it turns out when Graveyard Keeper 2 comes out later this year. You can join the 450,000 people who have already wishlisted it on Steam.

If you're an avid Hello Kitty Island Adventure player like me, the release of the City Town DLC is bound to cause some excitement. Not only will this expansion of Friendship Island add an entirely new setting for us to make our way around, but a new character will be joining the roster too: Usahana.

Which means there's some preparations to be done ahead of time, especially if you're planning to hit the DLC hard once it releases. Hello Kitty Island Adventure isn't afraid to pace its DLC's in a way that forces you to make progress over a number of days, as we saw in the Wheatflour Wonderland DLC, but there are still a few things you can do to make your time on Friendship Island and now City Town more efficient.

How to prepare for the City Town DLC in Hello Kitty Island Adventure

Nothing has been explicitly shared to suggest we need to do anything to prepare for the DLC, but that's not to say there aren't a few things you can start doing in advance to make your life a little bit easier when the DLC does release. These are a few things I plan on doing ahead of time.

Work on your friendships with a handful of characters

The trailer for the City Town DLC showed mostly Badtz Maru, Tuxedo Sam, Kuromi, Keroppi, and Chococat, so it's safe to assume they will be the characters playing a significant role in the upcoming story. So, it's best to start focusing on levelling those friendships now, should there be any specific quests you need completed before you can make your way over to City Town. I'm aiming to have each character at level 7 at the very least, which shouldn't take any time at all given how many adventures we've already been on.

Stock up on Friendship Blossoms and Friendship Bouquets

The most exciting feature of the DLC is the addition of Usahana, and there's no doubt that she'll be the key to making your way through City Town's story too. Which means levelling up her friendship as quickly as possible so you can start unlocking all the friendship quests you need. This is where both Friendship Blossoms and Friendship Bouquets come in handy, as these will reset how many gifts you can give a character in a single day, rather than being limited to just three.

They aren't exactly easy items to come across though. Both are given as gifts by My Melody on specific days of the week. Friendship Blossoms will be given on Tuesday and Thursday, whereas you will receive a Friendship Bouquet on Saturdays. They function slightly differently, too, with Blossom's resetting the daily gifts of one specific character and Bouquets resetting the entire roster of Sanrio characters. Use them wisely, but there's no better time than now.

Craft basic items like Sparks, Mechanisms, and Logs

As is the way with a DLC like this, there's probably going to be some element of crafting. Since your foragable items like rubber and sticks are tied to a daily limit in Hello Kitty Island Adventure, it's best to plan ahead and start crafting some of the items that go into the vast majority of larger crafts. Sparks and Mechanisms are particularly useful to have on hand, especially if Chococat is involved in any way. You do need to have a decent stash of Gizmos though, which you can only get from giving Chococat gifts. At least this levels up your friendship anyway.

It's worth foraging in general for a number of basic items like rubber and sticks, alongside ingredients like Cinnabloom and Pineapple, as you never know when you'll need them. Without knowing what sort of quests Usahana is going to send us on, it's always better to be safe rather than get stuck by some sort of foraging or crafting-based roadblock. There's no harm in a bit of preparation, anyway.

When it was announced that medieval cemetery management sim Graveyard Keeper was getting a sequel this week, the reveal attracted some uneasy comments on social media. Players thought the new key art had some of the uncanny hallmarks associated with generative AI, and it pushed some fans to scrutinize things further.

"The promo art looks very much like generative AI, and is an immediate turn-off," said user RottenRailing on Reddit. "The OG art was charming, and certainly more unique!" A thread from user PotatoChaaaaps quickly followed calling out the "elephant in the room": Lazy Bear CTO and co-founder Slava Cherkasov posts a lot of pro-AI stuff on X.

"Hordes of AI haters hate full lips and makeup and everything AI. The other camp is trying to prove them wrong with reasoning," Cherkasov said on X a day after DLSS 5 was unveiled. Last year, he posted here and there showing off images he'd made, including Graveyard Keeper-inspired graphics, with AI. "Image creation by ChatGPT is fun," he said last March.

Cherkasov replied to the thread on Reddit, saying "You may not believe me, but we’re not using the AI in Graveyard Keeper 2. Yes, I’m experimenting with every AI model I can find. This is what every tech guy should do now." While that account is not specifically identified as Cherkasov, he has been referred to by the "soulburner_spb" username in posts from LazyBearGames.

"I’m constantly creating some small experimental projects that are not shared with the audience and have nothing to do with Graveyard Keeper," said Cherkasov. "I’m not doing the art—we have about 8 artists for that. I’m not doing sound or music either. I’m just a tech guy that is experimenting with the tech to understand what it can do."

Player reactions to the sentiment are mixed. "I'm happy now," said Reddit user Chelcherine. User darlawatters said on the same thread, "I’m pretty good at spotting AI and nothing about the trailer or art made me believe AI was being used. Folks are so quick to jump and assume."

"Yeah, doubt. I hope it's true but I'll wait for the final game and trailers before deciding to support it," commented Reddit user Mistbiene in response to Cherkasov's statement. "He's testing how much AI we are willing to tolerate in Graveyard Keeper specifically. It's important that we keep up the firm anti-AI stance if a leader of the project is blatantly exploring it."

If you found a ticket that let you fly all the way to Amsterdam just lying on the beach, what would you do with it? Would you turn it in or try to sell it at your own pop up trash shack on the beach? Hypothetically speaking, I'd sell it at my pop up trash shack on the beach. But you know what I wouldn't do? Sell it to some stranger for only three gold.

In Treasure Beach's demo, which is part of Steam's Hidden Objects fest, you can rummage around in the sand looking for trinkets which you can then fix or polish up to then sell at your beach shop. It may be primarily a scavenging game, but I've found bartering with shoppers is actually a big part of it, especially if you want to earn more gold and get yourself some handy upgrades.

During my treasure hunting on the beach I found everything from a pill box, which I'm pretty sure I shouldn't sell, to luxury watches, top secret files, and boarding passes. I then took them back to my workshop where I got to work fixing them up.

Some items which are wet, for instance, need to be hung out to dry for at least a day. Others such as electrical items need to have the sand cleaned off them, polished, and dried in an electronic dryer before you can take them to your beach shack to sell.

At one point I almost had a completely full store, with all the items I described above as well as some binoculars and a children's fairytale book. I was waiting eagerly for any passersby who may be interested in my wares, and then they actually turned up.

I started off strong, getting 32 gold for the luxury watch after I battered with the initial offer of just 27. Then some lady came up to me and said she was interested in the mystery bottle of pills. She was only offering a measly two gold for them, but as I was pretty sure I was doing something illegal I sold them to her, just to get them off the shop.

Then someone asked for the boarding pass to Amsterdam. I thought to myself that this was going to be a big sell—have you seen flight prices recently? There was no way I was going for anything under 25 gold. So you can imagine my shock when the guy only offered a measly five gold for it. I think the salty sea air may have gone to his head.

After a few minutes of bartering and both of us getting angry at one another the sale fell apart. I wasn't giving in and neither was he. Time to wait for the next shopper.

Luckily, I didn't have to wait too long until someone else came over asking to take a look at the boarding pass to London, but they only offered me two gold. Ok, sure, I wouldn't buy a boarding pass to London for more than two gold, but I also only live an hour and a half away. This person, however, is clearly on a lovely tropical sunny island far away from the rainy, smog full—oh wait, yeah, I get it now. That was probably a fair price.

In the end I didn't manage to sell either of the boarding passes. But I did shift the watch, pills, story book, and binoculars, so it wasn't a complete loss. I ended up buying myself an incense holder for the store which would give the shoppers more patience when it came to bartering. Something that I'll clearly need if I ever want to sell that Amsterdam boarding pass at a reasonable price.

Treasure Beach's demo is only short, but it offers up an excellent snapshot. It's fun, light, and just quirky enough to pique my interest. But if you're not completely sold yet then you can also check out it's demo on Steam during the Hidden Object fest—I'd say it's well worth a look.

I played nearly 50 hours of Graveyard Keeper in 2018 and its grim take on a Stardew Valley life sim turned me into one of the most evil characters I've ever played. As the caretaker of the dead, I quickly came to view human body parts as just another crafting resource to be harvested for profit—and business was booming.

I used human fat to craft prayer candles for the local church. I donated buckets of blood and human skulls to a cultist so he'd do me favors. I sold human meat to a restaurant, authorized by a counterfeit royal stamp I'd illegally acquired. All in a day's work.

Looks like I'll get the chance to delve back into the organ trade this year, as Graveyard Keeper 2 was announced at today's Triple-I Initiative showcase and will launch in 2026. While the trailer begins with some standard life sim activities like chopping down trees and fishing in ponds, it gets down to the real work quickly enough: burying bodies, decorating the graveyard, and battling the undead as they try to invade your grim little town.

You'll eventually go from mild-mannered undertaker to full-on necromancer: the trailer shows a basement laboratory where reanimated corpses are pushing a wheel in a circle, presumably to provide power for your workstations. There's automation, too, as conveyor belts trundle resources to crafting benches where they can be assembled into products like suits of armor for town defense.

"Become the Inquisitor and lead your undead army into battle to save the Kingdom from a zombie apocalypse. Build towers and fortifications, craft powerful armour and weapons, arm and train your not-so-smart troops, and slash your way to victory!" says developer Lazy Bear Games.

"Help the townsfolk rebuild their homes and complete quests throughout the city, as your undead workers take care of the heavy lifting behind the scenes. With zombie-based automation and structured systems, you can transform local efforts into a scalable and profitable operation."

There's an extremely nifty bonus to the announcement of the sequel: the original Graveyard Keeper is now a real keeper, by which I mean it's free to own on Steam until April 13. Give it a try if you haven't yet, just try not to be quite as evil as I was.

The Working Together quest is Pocahontas' second friendship quest in Disney Dreamlight Valley. You'll automatically unlock this quest once you've hit a level four friendship, and you'll need to initiate it by talking to Pocahontas to accept the mission. Before it shows up though, you'll need Cogsworth and Stitch unlocked in your valley too.

Just like The Three Sisters Garden quest, this one is all about preparing for the Celestial Celebration. Except this time, there's a problem with the music, which Pocahontas explains as soon as you begin the quest. Here's what you need to do from here.

How to complete the Working Together quest in Disney Dreamlight Valley

Pocahontas will explain that Cogsworth and Stitch had a stage built for the celebration, but it's mysteriously broken. Head to the Dream Castle and listen to the argument between Stitch and Cogsworth, then speak to Pocahontas once they've finished. The two of you will try to mediate the argument before giving them both new roles where they don't have to work together.

Your role will be taking pictures around the valley of places you've found inspiring, so head to the following locations and take some selfies:

• The Wishing Well in the Plaza
• One of the ponds in the Peaceful Meadow
• The bridge in the Frosted Heights

Bring these pictures to Pocahontas once you've taken them, and she will ask for your help creating an Imperfect Bouquet for Cogsworth to show him not everything needs to be perfect. Gather the following flowers from around the valley:

• 5x Dandelion
• 3x Black Passion Lily
• 3x Green Rising Penstemon

Give the flowers to Pocahontas and she will prepare the bouquet for Cogsworth. You then have to create a Stage Repair Kit for Stitch by gathering the following items:

• 1x Stage Blueprint from inside the Beast's House
• 10x Hardwood
• 4x Iron Ingot
• 3x Rope

Craft the Stage Repair Kit and take it straight to the Dream Castle. You'll need to dress in casual clothes to help him fix the stage too, so open your wardrobe and use the filter button to only show you the casual clothes. Once you're dressed, go up to Cogsworth and Stitch at the broken stage and watch them rehearse. When they've finished, give the kit to Pocahontas.

She will repair the stage and give it back to you to place in Dazzle Beach. You can place it anywhere in the biome, but much like the picnic from her first friendship quest, you'll want a bit of space around it so you can all take a photo. Snap a picture, and talk to Pocahontas one final time to finish the Working Together quest.