Sand: Raiders of Sophie launched into early access today after a number of last-minute delays, so I finally got the chance to try out the first-person base-building extraction shooter.

My first thought after about two hours of play? It's like Sea of Thieves but on land, and if your vehicle gets destroyed you've gotta build a new one: you can't just wait a few seconds and respawn with a pristine new ride.

The walking bases, called tramplers, are the star of the game. Before you embark on a mission—you're in outer space, orbiting a desert planet on some sort of Victorian-era gaslamp space station, by the way—you need to prep yourself and your trampler. You can build one yourself by snapping together modules (I haven't played too much with this feature yet) or use a preexisting model.

Take a couple handheld weapons like a pistol, shotgun, or rifle, fill your pockets with ammo, then bring a crate containing heavy guns for your trampler, like 40mm and 80mm cannons.

Once you deploy to the planet, you need to run around your customizable walking base getting it ready for action: mount the guns in a few places on the exterior and load them up with ammo. Manually fire up the huge engine, then run to the steering emplacement and start throwing giant levers like you're Kenneth Branagh driving his spider-mech in Wild Wild West. Your big, noisy, smoke-spewling behemoth will begin slowly stomping across the dunes.

Even the smallest mechs are big enough that getting around on them takes time, having to clamber up ladders and dash through the different compartments to reach the guns, engine, steering, and storage areas. I've only played Sand solo, and there's definitely that same ultra-busy Sea of Thieves feel to it. I've got to pilot this huge mech, adjust how fast I'm going, and check the map, all while scanning the horizon for lootable locations and enemy tramplers (by spying ominous clouds of black smoke instead of distant sails).

I also have to leave my mobile base all the time, scurry nervously across the sand on foot when I want to do some looting, terrified the whole time that another mech is gonna stride up and start blowing mine to pieces. That's a very Sea of Thieves-like feeling.

When the shit goes down, I've gotta leave the wheel to man the turrets, some of which are located well on the other side of the vehicle. It's a mad rush to reload guns and aim turrets and repair damage and make sure the mech, which is still walking so it doesn't become a stationary target, isn't about to crash into something like a big rock or rusted ship. It's glorious chaos, especially for one person.

The sound design in Sand is excellent, too: the trampler makes fantastic mech noises, gears groaning and cables jangling as it lurches across the landscape. The mounted guns are deafening, really making you feel like you're firing a huge, deadly weapon. And you can hear battles taking place from well across the map, letting you know other players are somewhere in the neighborhood.

The PvE part comes in with ghoul-like NPCs who guard some lootable locations: I only ran into a few of them and they're not the most dynamic enemies, basically running toward me and shooting me on sight. More devastating are the automatons who (I think) come blasting down to the planet from orbit and begin stamping around after you. I ran into a trio of them, and while they're not as big as player-built tramplers, they still sock a punch with their artillery and take a decent amount of damage to bring down.

Like Sea of Thieves, Sand is harrowing and tense and it's definitely not a game meant for solo players: there's just a little too much to handle if you're playing on your own. There's one thoughtful feature, though: if you are playing Sand solo, you can join a server that is solos-only, so at least you won't get mobbed by larger crews. Even Sea of Thieves doesn't do that.

Once you've done some looting and stored your stuff in the cargo hold of your trampler, you can drive your trampler to an extraction point, where most of the combat takes place. You have to disembark and climb a tall tower to kick off the extraction sequence, wherein a ship takes a few minutes to come down from orbit to collect you. That's the cue for everyone in the area to stomp your way and try to blow you to hell first.

I've done three voyages so far, though two ended early due to launch-day server issues. My second mission was a fun one: my trampler got blown up by computer-controller walkers that swarmed me, and since I didn't die, I was able to run to an extraction point where another player was about to lift off. I stowed aboard his trampler, thinking it might let me sneakily extract along with him, but once he took off I simply died.

In my last mission, I looted some old ships I found in the desert, shot a few ghouls, bombarded a player attempting to extract (but failed to stop him), then extracted myself while a different player stomped over and took some cannon shots at me. Pretty fun, and I'm interested in crewing up with some friends and playing it more once the server issues have been resolved.

A story trailer for the gross-out horror game Ill dropped earlier this month, although frankly I didn't notice much in the way of story: I was too busy looking at, as cataloged by our Australian goremaster Shaun Prescott, the eye-scoopings, skull stompings, zombie baby punchings, and other such goings-on to really hone in on the narrative angle of the whole thing. Still, Max Verehin, CEO of developer Team Clout, assured me during a recent chat that there is indeed a story going on in there, and that those over-the-top visuals are actually inspired in part by one of the best-loved horror sequences in videogame history: Half-Life 2's We Don't Go to Ravenholm.

The Ill story trailer actually struck me as somewhat less extreme than the debut trailer that appeared at the 2025 Summer Game Fest, which was itself apparently somehow less worse than what the studio cooked up when it first decided to make the game. (And just as a gentle FYI, if you're sensitive to graphic violence and gore, you probably shouldn't be reading this and you definitely shouldn't be watching this trailer.)

"Our entire team has extensive experience in the horror genre, spanning games, movies, art, concept design, and so on," Verehin told me. "Like many players and audiences in general, we’ve reached a point where it's quite difficult to surprise us with anything in this genre.

"When we initially came together, our goal was to combine our experience and create a project that would feel fresh, unconventional, and stand out from the crowd even for us—something that could reignite those raw emotions that have grown a bit dull over time.

"That’s why during our initial brainstorming sessions, we try not to hold back and be bold, letting whatever madness we have run wild. Only after that do we look for a balance: how not to cross the line while still preserving our uniqueness. We aren't trying to do gore for the sake of gore, as our game isn't 'gore porn.' It aims primarily to scare and entertain, rather than just shock."

Which leads back to the narrative element of Ill's latest trailer, which Verehin said focuses on the game's characters and "our mysterious plot," although little of that is revealed: Some sort of unpleasantness in the world's worst hospital and you, who apparently just emerged from a coma, are elected as cleanup guy.

That's not the most original idea for zombie troubles I've ever run across, but it doesn't sound like a straight-up survival horror experience: Ill "combines horror and action," Verehin said, "and since we are fighting monsters rather than actual humans, we expect that tearing through them will bring a sense of fun against the backdrop of the general, oppressive horror."

That's where the Ravenholm comparison comes into play: A grim locale filled with headcrabs and zombie, Ravenholm is a memorable if somewhat incongruous chunk of Half-Life 2, but what really makes it work is the slice-and-dice combo of the gravity gun and numerous conveniently-placed buzzsaw blades. It's not bloody like Ill, but it's definitely a more visceral method of putting down inhuman horrors than just blasting at them with conventional firearms.

"We often look back at our own emotions playing through the We Don't Go to Ravenholm episode in Half-Life 2, how we fought back against the monsters, slicing them with saw blades using the gravity gun, blowing them up, and so on," Verehin said.

"Given the technology of that era, it created the perfect emotional impact. Today, the tech is vastly different, expectations are higher, and the bar for delivering those same emotions to players has risen. And we are doing our best to achieve that exact same effect, but with modern standards."

The tech has indeed improved in the years since Half-Life 2, and I asked Verehin if perhaps it had become a little too advanced—if the realistic depictions of, as Shaun put it, "skull explosions" might put some people off. Well, no—it definitely did, and does, put some people off.

But Verehin said that no single game is going to appeal to everyone, and based on the wholeheartedly enthusiastic responses to Ill trailers on YouTube, and the number of wishlists it's racked up on Steam—it now stands among the top 10 most wishlisted games, according to SteamDB—he thinks they're onto something.

"This audience knows exactly what they want and what they’ve been missing all this time, and they perfectly understand what we’re trying to achieve." And, he added, "we have a lot more content to share down the line, and players will get to see even more elements and mechanics that the game has to offer, which will naturally shape the overall perception as well."

I'll admit that I'm curious. I don't like horror games and I'm not a big gore guy, but Ill has put on enough of a wild freak show that despite myself, I really want to give it a try. It'ss set to launch sometime in 2027.

One of the most popular games on Roblox right now is a multiplayer FPS with zero idle mechanics or brainrots. It's called TTK, and as of this writing, it's been played over 7 million times.

TTK is the newest game from Sable Digital, a duo of Roblox devs who go by PoptartNoahh and CanyonJack. The first version of the game was published in April, but it blew up in a big way last week after clips of its realistic deathmatches went viral.

The version of TTK that everyone is playing right now is a free-for-all deathmatch with basic Call of Duty-like loadouts, but this is apparently just a vertical slice made for testing purposes. Future versions of TTK will focus on "co-op PVE squad AI mechanics" with "story-based doorkicker scenarios/missions" as well as team-based modes. The explosive popularity has caught the pair of devs by surprise, who say the Roblox algorithm "found us too early."

It's an impressive accomplishment for two people. Sable is upfront about its main inspirations here—everything about TTK's slow movement, floaty aiming, high-lethality, and immersive mechanics like magazine checking is meant to evoke bodycam shooters and SWAT games like Ready Or Not. They've done a great job of emulating the feel of Void Interactive's hit co-op FPS in Roblox, a platform that doesn't spit out decent shooters every day.

For a Roblox game, it's quite good. It looks great for something that'll run on a phone, and the absence of Roblox's default block guys is always appreciated. Guns are loud and dangerous, sound is directional enough to hear someone coming around a corner, and its handful of maps (while basic) already offer more interesting layouts than last year's Black Ops 7.

That said, TTK's popularity seems to be more about the Roblox of it all. While there have been viral shooters that borrow heavily from established FPSes in Roblox for years now, there are clearly many folks only now learning that the platform is capable of more than idle clickers, horror walking sims, and 'obbys' (obstacle platformers).

To me, the most notable aspect of TTK is that it's not trying to mercilessly extract money from 6-year-olds. The only way to spend money on it for now is a 400 Robux supporter pack that grants some profile effects—essentially a tip jar. It was nice to spend 30 minutes on this platform without stepping on a pressure pad that triggers a $20 purchase screen. I wonder if TTK will actually stay this chill—perhaps the only reason it's not heavily monetized is because Sable didn't expect all the attention.

Either way, if you've played the games that Sable is pulling from here, there's no rush to go play TTK yourself. It's fine, it's free, but it's also about as good as a number of Steam shooters that release regularly. This one just happens to be in Roblox.

The developers of co-op RPG Fellowship had to publish its season 3 patch notes across five separate Steam news posts, which should tell you just how much is changing in its latest update. Along with tons of balance changes, the new season veers away from its MMO-inspired roots to lean harder into being an action RPG with loot and character builds—a decision that didn't immediately go over well.

The team at Chief Rebel are confident that season 3 will be a turning point for Fellowship as a co-op experience that emulates the thrill of running dungeons with your friends without the baggage of MMO busywork. And a lot had to change to make that happen.

For starters, the old loot system had to go. Community director Hamish Bode told PC Gamer during a recent demo of season 3 that too many players would collect the best gear and immediately stop thinking about it. In the new system, "there's always something cool that can happen," Bode said, like finding a pair of gloves that supercharges one of your abilities.

Bode was speaking my language as someone who has spent the last few weeks playing tons of Path of Exile 2. Fellowship won't be quite as deep as loot-heavy games like Diablo, but the revised item system is an attempt to give players interesting choices to make about how they want to build their characters. It also means there's a real chase for gear upgrades that will help you survive the jumps in difficulty for each dungeon tier.

Necklaces, for example, will now carry random defensive bonuses for every hero, giving you a reason to keep checking for an upgrade every time you find new ones. If you get lucky and find an item perfect for your playstyle, you can now boost all the stats on it through the new Tempering system. From what I saw, Chief Rebel was careful not to add unnecessary bloat that would make it feel like you're gambling for power. Loot has variables, but not so much that you'll be waiting days to see something useful.

Bode said the team is "hyper aware" that the last thing players want is for Fellowship to suddenly feel like a grind. "I don't think it's fun when the game just kind of feeds you everything and kind of plays itself for you," he said. "It's a really tricky balance, but we also have crafting systems so you can have more agency over how you want to progress. Even if you, for example, go for a few runs without finding anything, you can salvage those items and pump those resources into the things that are really good for you."

Bringing back the challenge

Season 3's long list of changes also includes things that are a direct response to players who found the last season way too easy. Bode said the team tried to help onboard new players by making the dungeons easier, but failed to account for the sheer power of its new heroes. "People who were running the new tank and the new healer—it's almost worth saying—broke the game a bit," Bode explained. "It's one of the reasons why we leaned so hard into larger scale testing for this season."

Bode said he personally prefers when games give you the elation you get when you finally kill a frustrating Dark Souls boss. "I prefer to have that because it shows people are wanting to progress through something," he said. "If you go too far the other way and people are like this is too easy and they become apathetic and check out, that's a much worse situation for a game to be in, in my opinion."

Season 3 aims to turn things around from the last season with more challenging dungeons, including a new pinnacle dungeon with three brutal bosses. Every week, you'll be able to run a pinnacle dungeon and receive rewards from any other dungeon in the chest at the end. Completing it will also grant you a Bloodstone, which you can use to greatly enhance your gear.

All of this sounds really promising for a game that fills an important niche you can't find anywhere else. I ran two dungeons alongside Bode as the new melee damage hero Gunde and remembered why I still believe in Fellowship. Gunde joins its list of heroes who feel inspired by archetypes I know from WoW but are wrapped around a core mechanic to manage.

Gunde is a berserker who cleaves through packs of enemies with his twin axes, leaving them bleeding: I spent the first dungeon lining up his AoE attacks to keep enemies maimed and the second watching them melt when followed up with a finisher move that does loads of extra damage to bleeding enemies. Gunde isn't the kind of character I'd usually pick in an RPG, but I won't say I didn't enjoy slicing enemies up instead of casting spells for a change.

Fellowship is still less than a year into early access and already feels like a dramatically better game than it did at the start—and I thought it was pretty good back then. Season 3 is the first time I can sense a vision for the game that won't just appeal to people who need something to do at the end of a WoW season, and I'm extremely curious to see where it goes from here.

Season 3 starts today and you can get the game on Steam for $15, or almost half its normal price ($25) until June 29.

I'm a FromSoft fiend, but there are hardly any other soulslikes I can stand. I can dig something a bit more removed like the first-person Lunacid or 2D Mina the Hollower, but there's an uncanny valley effect for me with stuff like Lies of P or Nioh: It's so close to being the thing I love, but doesn't quite bring it home.

Enter Prison of Husks, whose demo is live on Steam: It carries the same risk of comparison to the champaign of Souls with its camera, controls, and vibes, but manages to be different enough to really get my goat. The first thing that won me over was its commitment to a retro PS1 rendering style, boasting little touches that come off as genuine retro expression rather than hopping on an indie trend.

Those touches include a forced 4:3 aspect ratio, 640x480 default resolution, and chunky console menus. Through that filter, Prison of Husks looks to be blending Demon's Souls vibes and level design with Sekiro combat, as well as some flourishes all its own.

I'm a sucker for a good perfect block parry, and Prison of Husks' had me running back a demo miniboss dozens of times until I buried it. It's not perfect: Sometimes it felt like I didn't have a big enough window to meaningfully counter after a parry, and Prison of Husks lacks the crystal-clear feedback of Sekiro's stagger meter. But the combat felt good—better than most lesser Sekiros I've encountered.

As for the atmosphere, I was intrigued. It's the grey, towering gothic structures and specific strain of cryptic "ooh cursed one" that I associate with Demon's Souls and, to a lesser extent, Dark Souls 1. You play as some kind of life-sized doll automaton possessed by a wayward soul⁠—or maybe more accurately, you play as a wayward soul possessing doll automatons⁠—and you really ought to do something about all this entropic curse stuff in the air.

Prison of Husks is also trying some mechanical experimentation that I respect: It's leaning more action/exploration than RPG, with equippable gear but no complicated stat/class/leveling system that I noticed. Reading into Prison of Husks' Steam page, it sounds like there will be some build differentiation in the weapons and supplemental accessories instead.

I'm also happy to report that it runs great out of the box on Steam Deck⁠—even with throwback graphics, that's not always a guarantee a game is actually lightweight enough for the Linux-based handheld. As a bonus, the Deck's 16:10 screen is also a nice fit for Husks' 4:3 aspect ratio. Prison of Husks is planned to launch sometime this year. You can wishlist it and check out its demo for yourself on Steam.

Stop Killing Games has had a hell of a run, going from a niche, long-shot consumer campaign to an "absolutely incredible" appearance in front of the European Parliament in just two years. But it's hit something of a bump in the road, as the European Commission says it "will engage with consumers and publishers by the end of 2026 to explore ways to improve industry standards," but will not propose any new laws requiring that publishers keep their games operational after their servers are shut down.

The full report has all the details if you want to really get into it, but the much briefer press release has the meat of the matter, which is essentially that existing law trumps proposed new regulations.

"The Commission considers that at this stage it cannot propose a legal obligation to keep videogames playable after they stop being provided commercially," the announcement states. "This is due, also, to existing intellectual property rights. Under EU copyright law, rights holders enjoy exclusive rights over their creations.

"In addition to copyright, other intellectual property rights may also be relevant as they may protect different visual and technological aspects of a videogame."

The commission said, as the UK did in 2025, that existing law already provides "important safeguards" by notifying consumers of a game's dependence on external servers and it may become inoperable when those servers go away. There are further remedies in place for cases in which "the content or service provided does not conform with the contract and what consumers could reasonably expect."

Still, the commission committed to taking "several" (actually two) steps to address the concerns expressed by Stop Killing Games: To "initiate an exchange with the videogame industry and consumer representatives with the aim to draw up an industry code of conduct on managing videogames' 'end of life'," and to work with consumer organizations and authorities to raise awareness of the existing consumer regulations.

In messages posted to Reddit, Stop Killing Games said there was "nothing surprising to anyone" in the decision, and that "the fight goes on."

"This movement is defined by action and we will keep acting, we owe Ross [YouTuber Ross Scott, who launched Stop Killing Games in 2024] and the millions of people that have put their trust in us," Stop Killing Games organizer Moritz Katzner wrote. "MEPs have recognized that, the California state assembly and even the courts have. Let's keep winning."

Katzner also laid out Stop Killing Games' plans for the next few months, which includes continuing work on the Protect Our Games (POG) Act in the US and adapting it for the EU, pushing efforts based on existing legislation in the EU, and building up its new Stop Killing the Internet team.

"One thing I want to say is, I am so glad we've been making inroads in parliament," Scott said in a video released after the ruling. "So do not be discouraged by this answer whatsoever. It's what we were anticipating and unfortunately it's exactly what happened So we can still go ahead and get amended into the Digital Fairness Act. We have majority support in parliament. Everything's still on course to go through with that."

Katzner expressed similar sentiments in the video, noting the organization's ongoing work in the US, France, and UK: "We're much more than just this single petition."

"We're where we are. We're definitely not stuck. I would go as far as saying we're on a very, very good track at the moment."

Plenty has been said about the hundreds of games that launch on Steam each week and the many features Valve has concocted over the years to funnel that waterfall of content through a straw an average player can actually sip on. Latest among them is the new "personal calendar" feature and you know what? I think this is finally the perfect way to recommend games to me.

A small Personal Calendar module now appears on the Steam homepage when you're logged in, showing a couple upcoming releases for each of the next five days that Steam judges you may like based on what's already on your wishlist and the tags of games you typically play. The calendar actually rolled out earlier this month in a Steam blog post but, look, June's been too busy for me to casually surf Steam and also the announcement really undersells the feature.

When you click through to the full Personal Calendar page, you'll see a list of games released in the past month, some from the past week, and then a forward looking calendar of the next two months showing a per-day preview of a few games (up to six for a single day, on mine) that you might like. You can also make the calendar page more specific by filtering for a specific tag like "farming sim" or "city builder" and some other options like games per page and showing or hiding games that are already on your wishlist.

I've given Steam deserved grief for leaning too hard on algorithms to tackle the Sisyphean task of curation, but this solution is the most visually attractive and immediately comprehensible to me, a human, that I've seen from the store in years.

I never really got on with Steam's Discovery Queue, for instance. I get the logic in attempting to pluck games for me out of the mad bucket of Legos that is Steam's glut of releases. Just shoving a new game in front of me every time I click "next in queue" doesn't really help me make sense of my options (and always reminded me of the StumbleUpon browser extension from the late '00s).

A calendar just works though. It's more digestible than Steam's storewide list of upcoming games or the queue that serves just one game at a time. My calendar reminded me that a new Game Freak game, Beast of Reincarnation, comes out on August 3, the day before House House's next game Big Walk, which is the day before the 1.0 launch of Fields of Mistria on August 5. That's going to be a big week for me!

The fact that it mixes in games it thinks I might like with things on my wishlist and the 1.0 launches for Early Access games already in my library is a genuinely good view of how I think about what I want to play next month. Thankfully, it also doesn't recommend a game for every single day which would have taken the concept from refreshing back to overwhelming.

It seems to do quite a decent job of surfacing smaller indie games I've not heard of too, though your mileage may vary if you don't routinely interact with small, weird games for work. It's shown me lots of options including a cute pixelated management game called Cat Isle. The calendars for my fellow PCG folks have included Bingle Bingle for Morgan Park who described it as "roulette Balatro" at a glance. Dinoblade for Lincoln Carpenter, and Cat Chess for Tyler Wilde who made us all watch a trailer of cats battling during a meeting. I think the feature is working.

There was a bit of concern from indie devs earlier this month fearing that changes to the "new releases" module on the storefront would push visibility away from small games. We'll have to wait for folks to report back on how the calendar feature has affected their discoverability. Speaking as a player though, I'm way more likely to peruse and buy from this screen than an overwhelming list of loosely upcoming stuff.

The day is here: Wider humanity has gotten its hands on the Steam Machine. Our own Steam Machine review is live, and with it, we've finally got confirmation of the Steam Machine's pricing scheme. The SteamOS-powered gaming box starts at a hefty $1,049.

In its slate of Steam Machine launch announcements, Valve has acknowledged that the price is higher than originally hoped due to the ongoing AI-driven supply crisis in computing components. But it's also provided an explanation for why it isn't subsidizing the Steam Machine's sale price, as videogame console manufacturers traditionally do: It would be a betrayal of Valve's reverence for a free market ecosystem—or at least its idea of one.

In a statement provided to The Verge, Valve said subsidizing Steam Machine hardware "might seem like an easy solution" for bringing prices down, but "it doesn’t align with our beliefs about how healthy ecosystems are built."

"If there’s anything we’re religious about at Valve, it’s our belief that open systems are better in the long run, for ourselves and customers. The openness of the PC ecosystem in particular has enabled it to be the primary driver of hardware and software innovation, because anyone with an idea for a way to do something better was able to take a shot at it."

It's common practice for console makers to strategically sell hardware at a loss, relying on the customer's additional purchases to drive profits. For example, Nintendo is reportedly selling the Switch 2 for less than it costs to produce with the expectation that the loss will be offset by following sales of exclusive game releases that can't be played elsewhere, subscriptions for online services, and accessories.

As a result, while Nintendo might be able to offer its customers a lower entry price by subsidizing the Switch 2, Valve says the practice creates an ecosystem that's ultimately worse for the consumer.

"When companies sell their hardware under cost for competitive advantage, or buy exclusive content for it, they’re doing that to build a more closed system, one where you don’t get to choose what software you want to use," Valve said. "We don’t want that for PC hardware, and we don’t think you should want it either. You shouldn’t feel like you have to buy Valve hardware; you should be able to view it as just one option alongside all the devices for playing games, and select the one that makes sense for you."

Valve reiterated that philosophy in its own Steam Machine launch announcement, where it rejected characterizing the Steam Machine as a console due to the associated connotations of a closed-off ecosystem.

"The traditional console model is to sell hardware at a loss and make up the revenue with subscription services or by selling games that are locked-in to the hardware. We think this can make sense for a single business in the short term but that open ecosystems are better for customers over the long term," Valve said in the Steam news post. "PC gaming's history proves this: The openness of the PC gaming space has enabled it to be the primary driver of hardware and software innovation for decades."

While Valve does have a bent towards promoting open ecosystems—its contributions to the general viability of Linux gaming through Steam Deck and SteamOS development being a strong example—we shouldn't necessarily accept its posture of libertarian benevolence at face value.

It is, after all, the operator of a platform that many developers characterize as having a monopoly over PC game distribution, through which it demands a 30% commission on game sales—a higher percentage than its competitors. While Valve claims to champion an open market, its higher commission fees aren't without implications for consumers: The sustainability of a game development project is a much different question for developers and publishers when accessing the vast majority of PC gaming customers, who rely on Steam as their primary or exclusive source of games, means losing almost a third of your sales in platform fees. If that percentage was lower, the selection of games on Steam would likely look very different.

I have no trouble accepting the business strategy of not wanting to sell computer hardware at a discount. But when we're told it's for our sakes, it's best to treat the claim with a healthy amount of skepticism.

Picture a huge metal beast lumbering through the sand dunes. As it lifts its mechanical legs and places its heavy metal feet down, you probably wouldn't be surprised if it stumbled, lurched, or even got stuck here and there for a bit.

That's what's been happening with Sand: Raiders of Sophie, a PvPvE extraction shooter where you build and pilot giant walking mechanical bases, stomp around in the desert on an alien planet, and battle both other players and their own walking bases. It's taken quite a few missteps on the long, sandy path to launch.

The first delay was last year, when plans for an early access launch in April 2025 were scrapped. Following that, the game pivoted into being a full release upon launch, which was planned for March 2026—but in the final few days of March it became clear that wasn't happening either, and the revised release was then targeted for June 10.

On June 9, the day before that new launch date, not only was the release moved again (to today, June 22), but the game shifted back to being an early access release again. Talk about walking in circles.

But here we are on June 22, and Sand: Raiders of Sophie is finally out in early access! That doesn't mean there weren't still a few more little stumbles at the starting line: as eager fans in the official Discord witnessed today, "a couple of wires got crossed that we need Valves help us uncross," the development team said, which delayed today's launch "an hour or two."

Three hours after that announcement, a 10-minute countdown appeared—which then expired and was replaced by a second countdown, this one for 20 minutes. Gosh.

But then! Before the second countdown could fully run out, Sand finally launched on Steam. It's really out this time! Fer honest!

How is it? Well, I bought it myself (it's 21% off for the next two weeks) but I've been busy writing this story while it's downloading. I'll jump in shortly and let you know if Sand was worth the wait.

I had several immediate thoughts when the Call of Duty movie was announced in 2025, most of them some variation of, why? Regardless of your preferred Call of Duty sub-series, movie theaters and streaming services are already awash in an array of movies telling tales virtually indistinguishable from the big-time military shooters. Slap a CoD brand on The Terminal List, and you've basically got yourself a Modern Warfare movie right out of the box.

Which brings us to today's news, delivered by Entertainment Weekly, that a Sea of Thieves movie is also in development. It's apparently still very early-stages as a director hasn't been signed, but the film will be produced by Destin Daniel Cretton, the director of films including Shang-Chi and the Legend of the Ten Rings and the upcoming Spider-Man: Brand New Day, through his Hisako Films production company.

"The main character of a Sea of Thieves game is actually the player and the community," Xbox chief content officer Matt Booty said. "So if you sit down to think about Sea of Thieves, it's not, 'who are the main characters? What's the plot?' It's a super social game, but there's a tone to Sea of Thieves. It's built on a very cooperative community, so you can start to sense what that's going to be like."

I can't say that really gives me a sense of anything at all, whether it's what kind of movie it will be or why it's being made in the first place. But the justifications for it do at least seem a little more solid than the Call of Duty movie, if only because there aren't as many examples of 'we have a Sea of Thieves movie at home.' Pirates of the Caribbean is the obvious choice—so obvious that an official crossover happened years ago—but otherwise? I'm admittedly not as hip to the pirate movie scene as I am to the war movie situation, but nothing else really leaps to mind.

Which doesn't necessarily make it a good idea, strictly speaking, but I think the open-ended nature of Sea of Thieves, which doesn't tie it down to a particular cast of known characters, gives it a better chance of finding an audience than a movie that has very rigid, fixed expectations right from the hop—and woe betide all involved if some aspect of it is wrong.

Far as that goes, you could even do a Pixar-style animated Sea of Thieves movie and pull it off—or, even better, ring it up in the classic Disney style for a real banger. Honestly, the more I turn this over in my head, the more I think that'd be a better approach than CGI'ing the hell out of a big-budget live-action production.

Yeah, you know what? I can see that working pretty well.

They just don't make 'em like they used to. At least, that's according to Eidos Montreal founder (and former general manager) Stephane D'Astous, who recently chatted with Thunderpick about the way the direction of the games industry—and the people setting that direction—have changed in the past 15 years.

"The big players 15 years ago are not necessarily big players [now]," said D'Astoud. "There’s new players. 15 years ago Tencent existed but it wasn’t the 800-pound gorilla it is today… If you look at the sovereign fund of Saudi Arabia that has unlimited resources buying up EA, 15 years ago who would have said that EA was on the chopping block to be bought?"

The scale of the companies involved in gaming in 2026—and the size of their pocketbooks—means the vibe has shifted decisively. "The people with the money and the decision power are much fewer, and their pockets are much deeper… they don’t have the same DNA of the decision maker 15 years ago; it’s much more Excel than passion-driven."

Which might sound a little rosey-hued—it's not like there was a time where videogame development was some sort of commune—but as we look back on too-many years of swingeing layoffs, ruthless and boneheaded corporate decisions, and various golden parachutes, it's hard to deny that things do feel markedly worse than they did back in D'Astous' heyday.

D'Astous puts some of the blame for it on the Covid-19 money spigot: "Thousands of projects were given money during Covid," said D'Astous. "When I saw some of those… I said, 'That idea was funded? Oh my god, this is bad news'... We’ll see the end results of that bad decision of this investment [a few years from now]."

As company scale has increased, so have executive expectations. D'Astous says he's been asked to make a "Witcher 3-like game with a limited budget in less than four years with a new team" multiple times, such are the baffling and unrealistic expectations of the people at the purse-strings.

Does that look set to change any time soon? It doesn't feel like it. Videogame companies are more desperate to amp up their revenues than they have been for some time. That's not the kind of atmosphere that's conducive to risk-taking and "passion-driven" game development, or at least certainly not in the traditional studio system where D'Astous cut his teeth.

The Steam Machine is finally here, with pre-orders now live, so long as you can get lucky in the reservation system lottery that is. And, honestly, we're kinda underwhelmed with the thing, beautiful wee companion cube though it is. Though that's more the fault of the AI apocalypse hoovering up all the memory and making the price of the Steam Machine utterly prohibitive for the entry level PC gamers it was originally aimed at. But Valve is still committed to improving the system, and has announced ahead of launch it is working directly with AMD to bring FSR 4 support in for the Steam Machine and its RDNA 3-powered GPU.

"We’ve been working with AMD on FSR 4 support for Steam Machine," we're told by Valve, "and can confirm that it will be coming soon."

Unfortunately that's all it's saying in regards to an actual release date, but then AMD itself has been rather cagey about when it's going to be getting FSR 4 support opened up beyond the original RDNA 4 target GPUs. Back in May AMD said it would be bringing FSR 4's machine learning-based upscaling to RX 7000-series graphics cards in July, but notably said during Computex that no decision had been made about whether it would be opened up to the RDNA 3.5 GPUs housed in its Ryzen AI Max APUs or the chips powering the latest AMD-powered gaming handhelds.

Which seems to suggest that July launch date is very much just for the RX 7000-series graphics cards alone and not a blanket level of support for the RDNA 3 architecture and above. That would also explain why Valve would have to be working directly with AMD to ensure its semi-custom 28 CU RDNA 3 GPU is going to get support for the improved upscaler in FSR 4.

"We can’t say more about timing," Valve notes, "but are excited for you to test it on your Steam Machine press units once it’s available. It should offer a significant improvement in upscaling graphical quality."

While the improvement in upscaling quality will definitely be a benefit for the Steam Machine, it's a double-edged sword of a feature. The Steam Machine's relatively weak GPU component needs upscaling and frame generation to be able to cope with modern games at decent graphics presets and at the sort of resolutions you'll want to see on a modern TV in your living room. So, chances are almost every game you play on the Steam Machine will want to be using upscaling.

That means it's a win that you'll get the best image quality AMD can muster for that upscaling experience. However, the machine-learning model of the improved FSR 4 upscaler is more performance intensive, especially for hardware that it was not initially designed for, namely RDNA 4 GPUs. And when performance is at a premium with the Steam Machine, that little bit extra hardware overhead for FSR 4 could mean that it's not an automatic on for some users, and could just be another balancing act owners are going to have to juggle with their new PC console.

The other thing to note is that FSR 4 support is not natively enabled in a whole lot of games right now. The list of supporting titles for FSR Redstone (inc FSR 4, AKA FSR Upscaling) looks extensive on first glance, but only around 20-odd have it natively built in; all the other games on the list need to have it enabled via the Adrenalin Driver software. How those games can get FSR 4 enabled in SteamOS is going to be interesting to see, if it happens at all.

Every long-running series benefits from an occasional change of genre. Yakuza dabbling in RPG-style combat works well. Dragon Quest going Dynasty Warriors for a bit is nothing but refreshing. Sonic racing about in a car makes a fun change of pace. Now it's R-Type's turn, the legendary arcade shmup series putting on a strategy hat and stuffing its UI with statistics and material costs.

On the PSP, where the two Tactics games exclusively appeared in the late 2010s, this unexpected shift in style easily stood out thanks to the handheld's relative lack of sci-fi strategy competition. In contrast 2026's PC gamers are utterly spoiled for choice: XCOM, Battletech, Xenonauts 2, and plenty more only a few clicks away—if they're not already installed. What does this release have to offer the kind of person already up to their eyeballs in metal death machines and alien menaces?

A lot.

Specifically, giant monsters with specific weak points waiting at the end of tight passageways. Force units—those glowing orange blobs that can attach to either end of compatible ships—reimagined as versatile mobile enhancements for compatible ships, able to offer a slew of different shot types or even head off independently and ram enemies so hard they're pushed a hex backwards. One stage is dominated by a giant space cannon, and it's on me to lure my enemies into its line of fire without decimating my own forces in the same blast. Weak walls can be shot to pieces, creating new routes and offensive opportunities.

The graphics responsible for showing me these wonders have been rebuilt from scratch, making another run through the original look as fresh as a phallic alien bursting straight out of someone's chest. Neon-coloured energy particles light up smooth metal surfaces, broken structures cast complex shadows on easily missed background scenery, organic horrors glisten in the starlight, and minor spaceships are so detailed it's possible to catch sight of tiny seats inside beautifully rendered cockpits.

Tactics' shmup heritage leaves an indelible mark on every aspect of the game, every feature directly drawing from a design template and visual language most strategy games never touch.

This unusual approach never overshadows the newfound tactical side of the game, which has more than enough depth to satisfy even the most spreadsheet-adoring strategy head. Ships now have fuel and ammo reserves to consider, the threat of being left defenceless and unable to move very real. A range of support craft prevent these new features from becoming a simple case of saving the big guns for the tougher enemies, with mid-flight resupplies and repairs an essential part of the flow of battle, temporarily retreating back to the safety of a mobile transport a sensible way to spend a turn, and slight detours to liberate a strategically placed facility (giving damaged units somewhere else to recover as I press on) well worth my time.

Terrain plays a much bigger role than expected in a game where almost everything can fly and many levels are set in the vast expanse of space. The side-scrolling nature of it all, mimicking the games it's based on, gives this tactical game an uneasy momentum: I have to push forwards, even though I know that's where all the danger is. Vertical drops are deliberately awkward to navigate. Sometimes I'm not facing the right way and there's little I can do about it because shmup law states I face one direction and that's the end of it.

Small maps and cramped spaces create a cautious, claustrophobic mood, forcing me to decide who's going to go first through a narrow tunnel and take the brunt of whatever might be lurking in the dark, or pick an unfavourable position that leaves a ship as open to friendly fire as it does the enemy's because it's the last spot available. Gaseous substances, ice blocks, and asteroid fields can slow ships down or need clearing out first, and at times I even have to consider the direction a waterfall flows in, rising upwards more difficult while I'm flying underneath them. Sometimes whole planets get in the way.

Even when I'm well prepared and on high alert, that sense of vulnerability never quite goes away. A nasty battleship-shaped surprise is always just around the corner, and the game isn't afraid of seizing any opportunity it can get to destroy one of my precious ships, or of letting me thoughtlessly stumble upon a screen-sized nightmare with more mouths than eyes.

The unforgiving nature of combat is constantly reflected in the brief commander's logs between each mission, campaigns painted not as brave expeditions undertaken by confident, well-supported armadas, but desperate fights to survive. In the first game I'm far from the best Earth has to offer, nothing more than the leader of a small scraped-together group wondering what the heck their superiors are up to and not receiving any meaningful answers.

In the sequel the peace I fought so hard for has soured into all-out civil war. The storytelling here takes a different tone to the sober political machinations in the likes of Tactics Ogre and Final Fantasy Tactics; there's a pervasive melancholy to it that still feels unique, as if I'm constantly marching towards my own funeral rather than on the cusp of a noble last stand.

Even the terrain descriptions make venturing into dangerous territory feel uneasy, simple labels like "Bydo Corpse?" and "Incubation Facility?" reinforcing the idea that my group's completely out of their depth to the point of not being entirely sure what they're looking at, never mind why they're fighting them.

R-Type Tactics doesn't just stand up to modern PC strategy games, it deserves to proudly stand amongst them. This is a polished PC release—mouse compatible and already working beautifully on Steam Deck (officially "Unknown", however)—that feels like it's finally found the right home. What format could be a better fit for a game full of lengthy battles that expect players to weigh up accuracy percentages, range, charge states, fuel consumption, and consider potential counterattacks?

There's never been so many missions to work through either: Well over 100 of them, split across three unlockable campaigns. The second set, brilliantly subtitled Operation Bitter Chocolate, have never been available in English before now, and the additional post-Chocolate "Cosmos" missions are completely brand new.

Here's hoping PC gamers embrace its unusual charms and send this strange spinoff into orbit.

Valve has announced the price of a Steam Machine, its new SteamOS-powered gaming PC. There are a few options available—two storage capacities and with/without a Steam Controller—and if you're still interested after seeing the price, you can sign up for a chance to buy one from today.

• 512 GB: $1,049 USD / 1,509 CAD / 1,039 EUR / 879 GBP / 1,609 AUD / 4,389 PLN
• 2 TB: $1,349 USD / 1,919 CAD / 1,359 EUR / 1,149 GBP / 2,109 AUD / 5,739 PLN

• 512 GB w/ Controller: $1,128 USD / 1,628 CAD / 1,108 EUR / 938 GBP / 1,728 AUD / 4,698 PLN
• 2 TB w/ Controller: $1,428 USD / 2,038 CAD / 1,428 EUR / 1,208 GBP / 2,228 AUD / 6,048 PLN

Both 2 TB models come with two additional faceplates, red fabric and solid walnut, which are attached with magnets. Though you could as easily make your own, as Valve tells us it will be releasing the CAD files.

The bundle with a Steam Controller is better value than buying one separately: it costs $99 on its own, but adds only $79 here. Not to mention availability of the Steam Controller is shaky, and you may end up having to wait until 2027 to purchase one individually.

Availability for the Steam Machine is also likely to be quite poor. Due to the ongoing memory crisis, Valve admits that some components it had originally intended to use in the PC have increased in price. Furthermore, some were altogether unavailable to purchase "at any price".

"More than anything else, this impacted our launch quantity," Valve says.

To deal with this limited launch quantity and to avoid a system which "tends to reward bots", Valve is rolling out a randomised reservation system for the Steam Machine. Similar to those for the Steam Deck and Steam Controller, wherein a user registers their interest in the product to purchase at a later date, where the Steam Machine reservations differ is in how the queue is formed.

Here's Valve's explanation:

• Starting right now, you can sign up for the Steam Machine model/bundle you're interested in
• If you're busy now, no problem: You can sign up anytime before Thursday June 25th at 10 a.m. Pacific.
• At that time, we will close signups and do a one-time randomization to determine the reservation order

After that one-time randomisation, Valve will let you know whether you successfully reserved a unit or were put into the waitlist for further units down the line. Valve hopes to have got through the reservation queue by the end of the year, which means those on the waitlist may be waiting a very long time indeed, likely into 2027 and beyond.

Valve explains that it felt it had a "good understanding" of how costs might change over time when it first started sourcing parts in 2023. This all changed with the memory crisis.

"Over the past year or so, that has changed quickly and significantly, most visibly for RAM and storage components," Valve says. "There are a variety of reasons, all of which are affecting hardware products everywhere. The overall effect is that our original goal for the price of Steam Machine is no longer viable. So the prices we're sharing today reflect the state of the world for manufacturing; or, more accurately, it reflects the price the components as we've secured them over the past 6 months."

It's that final line that gives me pause. Most PC gamers will likely have experienced price hikes for components and systems over the past eight months or so, especially with RAM but increasingly SSDs, too. Manufacturers have since warned of further sticker shock to come, as stockpiles of components dwindle and they are forced to buy new parts at further inflated prices. If Valve is delivering a price that's based on stock over the past six months, should the next six months be any worse, I think this leaves the door open to a price rise later on.

Valve recently increased the price of the Steam Deck due to increased component costs and 'global logistical challenges'.

We've heard mixed reports on RAM and SSD availability. There's been some suggestion that RAM prices may have levelled off since earlier in the year, but SSDs are still going up, but also reports from those in the know that prices are likely still to rise yet.

Valve also explains why it isn't "subsidizing" the price of the Steam Machine, ie putting some of that sweet, sweet Steam cash into making an affordable PC—profits be damned. The company's answer, it's not what PC gaming is about.

"When companies sell their hardware under cost for competitive advantage, or buy exclusive content for it, they're doing that to build a more closed system, one where you don't get to choose what software you want to use.

"We don't want that for PC hardware, and we don't think you should want it either. You shouldn't feel like you have to buy Valve hardware; you should be able to view it as just one option alongside all the devices for playing games, and select the one that makes sense for you."

For now, your best shot at a Steam Machine in 2026 is to sign up for that reservation system before June 25. Then cross your fingers and toes for an email landing you in the right queue and not on the waitlist.

I've just finished reviewing the Steam Machine, Valve's TV-friendly gaming PC for the masses. I think that was the initial idea, at least. Unfortunately, Valve's magic box has, thanks to the memory crisis, ended up with a price tag that simply doesn't add up.

For those who haven't heard, the base-level, 512 GB, non-Steam Controller-including Steam Machine retails for $1,049. Add a controller into the mix, and it comes in at $1,128. Back when we first took a whirl at predicting Steam Machine pricing, our average guess was around $525 for the base model.

Oh, how wrong we were. To be fair to myself, Valve, and my hardware team colleagues, this was back in November of last year. The pre-RAMpocalypse times, as we now call them. Before the AI server market swallowed memory module manufacturing capacity, and consumer electronics began to climb rapidly in price.

We adjusted our guesses more recently, and actually came kind of close, for the most part.

Still, the final pricing has me all hot and bothered, even if it's not far off what we eventually predicted. Because the Steam Machine, thanks to some lower-spec internal components now sold for high prices, represents poor value—and I feel like it deserves more than that.

And I haven't even got to the 2 TB model I reviewed yet, which is $1,349 without a controller, and a wallet-trembling $1,428 with one. That's a huge sum of money for a machine that struggles against budget gaming PCs, some of which come from the previous generation.

Gaming benchmarks

Avatar: Frontiers of Pandora (1440p Ultra)Cyberpunk 2077 (1440p RT Medium)Cyberpunk 2077 (Quality upscaling, 1440p RT Medium)Baldur's Gate 3 (1440p Ultra)Black Myth: Wukong (1440p Very High)Black Myth: Wukong (Quality upscaling, 1440p Very High)Metro Exodus: Enhanced Edition (1440p Ultra)

Avg FPS

1% Low FPS

Steam Machine

21

17

AtomMan G1 Pro | RTX 5060 | AMD Ryzen 9 8945HX

44

38

Lenovo Legion Tower 5i | RTX 4060 | Intel Core i5 14400F

33

25

Custom PC #11 (issue 413) | Arc B570 | Intel Core Ultra 7 265K

28

24

015304560

Avatar: Frontiers of Pandora (1440p Ultra) Data

Product	Value
Steam Machine	21 Avg FPS, 17 1% Low FPS
AtomMan G1 Pro | RTX 5060 | AMD Ryzen 9 8945HX	44 Avg FPS, 38 1% Low FPS
Lenovo Legion Tower 5i | RTX 4060 | Intel Core i5 14400F	33 Avg FPS, 25 1% Low FPS
Custom PC #11 (issue 413) | Arc B570 | Intel Core Ultra 7 265K	28 Avg FPS, 24 1% Low FPS

Avg FPS

1% Low FPS

Steam Machine

16

12

AtomMan G1 Pro | RTX 5060 | AMD Ryzen 9 8945HX

32

26

Lenovo Legion Tower 5i | RTX 4060 | Intel Core i5 14400F

24

19

Custom PC #11 (issue 413) | Arc B570 | Intel Core Ultra 7 265K

26

23

010203040

Cyberpunk 2077 (1440p RT Medium) Data

Product	Value
Steam Machine	16 Avg FPS, 12 1% Low FPS
AtomMan G1 Pro | RTX 5060 | AMD Ryzen 9 8945HX	32 Avg FPS, 26 1% Low FPS
Lenovo Legion Tower 5i | RTX 4060 | Intel Core i5 14400F	24 Avg FPS, 19 1% Low FPS
Custom PC #11 (issue 413) | Arc B570 | Intel Core Ultra 7 265K	26 Avg FPS, 23 1% Low FPS

Avg FPS

1% Low FPS

Steam Machine

28

20

AtomMan G1 Pro | RTX 5060 | AMD Ryzen 9 8945HX

86

69

Lenovo Legion Tower 5i | RTX 4060 | Intel Core i5 14400F

60

49

Custom PC #11 (issue 413) | Arc B570 | Intel Core Ultra 7 265K

81

74

0255075100

Cyberpunk 2077 (Quality upscaling, 1440p RT Medium) Data

Product	Value
Steam Machine	28 Avg FPS, 20 1% Low FPS
AtomMan G1 Pro | RTX 5060 | AMD Ryzen 9 8945HX	86 Avg FPS, 69 1% Low FPS
Lenovo Legion Tower 5i | RTX 4060 | Intel Core i5 14400F	60 Avg FPS, 49 1% Low FPS
Custom PC #11 (issue 413) | Arc B570 | Intel Core Ultra 7 265K	81 Avg FPS, 74 1% Low FPS

Avg FPS

1% Low FPS

Steam Machine

46

26

AtomMan G1 Pro | RTX 5060 | AMD Ryzen 9 8945HX

59

42

Lenovo Legion Tower 5i | RTX 4060 | Intel Core i5 14400F

60

40

Custom PC #11 (issue 413) | Arc B570 | Intel Core Ultra 7 265K

57

24

015304560

Baldur's Gate 3 (1440p Ultra) Data

Product	Value
Steam Machine	46 Avg FPS, 26 1% Low FPS
AtomMan G1 Pro | RTX 5060 | AMD Ryzen 9 8945HX	59 Avg FPS, 42 1% Low FPS
Lenovo Legion Tower 5i | RTX 4060 | Intel Core i5 14400F	60 Avg FPS, 40 1% Low FPS
Custom PC #11 (issue 413) | Arc B570 | Intel Core Ultra 7 265K	57 Avg FPS, 24 1% Low FPS

Avg FPS

1% Low FPS

Steam Machine

20

16

AtomMan G1 Pro | RTX 5060 | AMD Ryzen 9 8945HX

26

20

Lenovo Legion Tower 5i | RTX 4060 | Intel Core i5 14400F

23

17

Custom PC #11 (issue 413) | Arc B570 | Intel Core Ultra 7 265K

17

13

07.51522.530

Black Myth: Wukong (1440p Very High) Data

Product	Value
Steam Machine	20 Avg FPS, 16 1% Low FPS
AtomMan G1 Pro | RTX 5060 | AMD Ryzen 9 8945HX	26 Avg FPS, 20 1% Low FPS
Lenovo Legion Tower 5i | RTX 4060 | Intel Core i5 14400F	23 Avg FPS, 17 1% Low FPS
Custom PC #11 (issue 413) | Arc B570 | Intel Core Ultra 7 265K	17 Avg FPS, 13 1% Low FPS

Avg FPS

1% Low FPS

Steam Machine

31

26

AtomMan G1 Pro | RTX 5060 | AMD Ryzen 9 8945HX

37

33

Lenovo Legion Tower 5i | RTX 4060 | Intel Core i5 14400F

48

42

Custom PC #11 (issue 413) | Arc B570 | Intel Core Ultra 7 265K

27

17

015304560

Black Myth: Wukong (Quality upscaling, 1440p Very High) Data

Product	Value
Steam Machine	31 Avg FPS, 26 1% Low FPS
AtomMan G1 Pro | RTX 5060 | AMD Ryzen 9 8945HX	37 Avg FPS, 33 1% Low FPS
Lenovo Legion Tower 5i | RTX 4060 | Intel Core i5 14400F	48 Avg FPS, 42 1% Low FPS
Custom PC #11 (issue 413) | Arc B570 | Intel Core Ultra 7 265K	27 Avg FPS, 17 1% Low FPS

Avg FPS

1% Low FPS

Steam Machine

45

30

AtomMan G1 Pro | RTX 5060 | AMD Ryzen 9 8945HX

52

36

Lenovo Legion Tower 5i | RTX 4060 | Intel Core i5 14400F

53

36

Custom PC #11 (issue 413) | Arc B570 | Intel Core Ultra 7 265K

50

31

015304560

Metro Exodus: Enhanced Edition (1440p Ultra) Data

Product	Value
Steam Machine	45 Avg FPS, 30 1% Low FPS
AtomMan G1 Pro | RTX 5060 | AMD Ryzen 9 8945HX	52 Avg FPS, 36 1% Low FPS
Lenovo Legion Tower 5i | RTX 4060 | Intel Core i5 14400F	53 Avg FPS, 36 1% Low FPS
Custom PC #11 (issue 413) | Arc B570 | Intel Core Ultra 7 265K	50 Avg FPS, 31 1% Low FPS

It's not like the Steam Machine makes up for its shortcomings with a completely smooth user experience, either. It feels, at the time of writing, a little half-baked. I still found myself hunting through the settings menus to configure it properly on my home TV. I still had to enable compatibility game settings to get past some Linux… quirks.

It's got crunch, in places where, for the money, I'd hoped it would be more refined. It's virtually a premium product now, after all. But it doesn't quite feel like it in terms of the overall user experience. And it doesn't run demanding games like it, either.

In many ways, this isn't Valve's fault. The Steam Machine's diminutive, RDNA 3-graphics powered specs sheet clearly indicates that it should have been affordable, and was designed with a lesser price in mind. It should have been a lightweight, somewhat-entry-level machine that lives underneath your TV, capable of running indie games with little issue, and demanding ones if you were prepared to make significant compromises. For reasonable money.

I'd be pretty keen on it then, even with its flaws. Something deep within my heart wanted another Steam Deck-like PC gaming hardware moment. A budget machine with just enough go (and just enough convenience) to make it attractive. Another entry point into this expensive hobby of ours. A people's champion.

But no, it's got RAM modules. And an SSD. And therefore, it needs to be much pricier now than it was supposed to be when it was first specced out, if Valve is to make any money on it at all.

As a hardware reviewer, my job is to provide consumer advice. There's no point in recommending that you, the reader, buy something simply because it's interesting—without taking into account the value you get for your money. And at this price, the value proposition simply doesn't add up.

In some sense, I don't think my take on all this really matters. The Steam Machine will sell, I'd put good money on that. There are enough well-heeled enthusiasts out there to swallow up whatever launch stock Valve has on offer, even if it ends up being more of an executive-level desk toy than the great equaliser the rest of us might have hoped for.

It won't be a catastrophic failure for Valve, of that I'm fairly certain. But, given all of the above, the Steam Machine has, to my mind, become a damning representation of where we are in regards to PC gaming hardware in 2026.

We now live in a world where we're paying serious sums for meagre specs. And given that the memory crisis is expected to rumble on (and perhaps even worsen) into 2027 and beyond, this may be just the beginning of our woes.

I hate that. I hate that the AI-demand behemoth is pricing out average gamers from reasonably priced hardware, and reasonable hardware upgrades. I hate that I'm forced to give an interesting, if flawed, machine a lower score because it simply doesn't make any value-based sense—whereas for the right price, it just might.

Valve has worked really hard on the Steam Machine, and that's obvious to see. Even if it does feel underpowered, and a little rough around the software edges. But when all's said and done, I simply wouldn't spend this much money on one. And that, as much I wish it wasn't the case, is the truth.

It's finally here. The much-anticipated Steam Machine, a mini gaming PC designed for your living room, is in my possession—and it's a lovely device to behold. It's sleek, futuristic, and very, very Valve. I've been testing it thoroughly over the past week, and I'm sure you're anxious to know the results. Have all my mini gaming PC Christmases come at once?

Well, not quite. Because while Valve's attempt to bring PC gaming to your TV—and thereby the masses—has plenty of admirable qualities, it's got one giant caveat hanging over it: The price.

The 2 TB, Steam Controller-included Steam Machine bundle in my possession costs $1,428 (£1,208 / AU$2,228). The controller-less 2 TB variant is $1,349 (£1,149 / AU$2,109), while the 512 GB version, again without controller, is $1,049 (£879 / AU$1,609). Add a controller to the 512 GB variant, and you're looking at $1,128 (£938 / AU$1,728).

Much has been made over the Steam Machine's delayed launch and increased price tag, brought on by the ongoing memory crisis crippling the consumer electronics market right now. But holy moly, that's a lot of money for a mini gaming PC. Especially one with internals that, in 2026, feel underpowered before it's even officially released.

The RDNA 3-based GPU inside the Steam Machine has left me feeling, if I'm honest, rather deflated. It's certainly possible to drop the settings, bump up the upscaling, and squeak some smooth gaming performance out of the little black box. But the drawbacks feel like a step too far when you're paying this sort of cash.

The idea might be to bring the PC gaming experience to your living room, but if that experience includes smooth frame rates in demanding games, you're going to have to make some major compromises. And, because of its Linux origins, it hasn't been a flawless experience getting some of those games to run properly to begin with, either.

I want to get excited about the Steam Machine, I really do. It's a fascinating piece of design, and an admirable attempt to bring PC gaming from your desktop to your couch in one bite of the cherry. But like so much hardware these days, it's been hampered with a price tag that, given what you actually receive, feels like far too much to pay.

Steam Machine features

The Steam Machine is, by default, a black cube. Measuring 15.2 x 15.6 x 16.2 cm, its top is a touch smaller than a handspan. Or mine, at the very least. Underneath the removable magnetic front face plate (two extras are included in the box with the 2 TB bundle) is a small panel consisting of a power button on the right hand side, two USB 3.0 Type-A ports, and a microSD card slot.

Above them lies an RGB strip, which by default lights up in blue while you're gaming or downloading, and turns off at idle. Around the back are two USB 2.0 Type-A ports, a single USB 3.2 Gen 2 Type-C port rated to 10 Gbps, and a 1 Gbps ethernet connection. For display options, you've got a choice of a DisplayPort 1.4 connection, or an HDMI 2.0 port.

And of course, it can be bundled with a Steam Controller, which is a sizable symmetrical-style unit with twin TMR thumbsticks, eight face buttons, four rear grip buttons, two trackpads, haptic rumble, gyro controls, and a 35+ hour battery life. It's perhaps not the prettiest of objects, but as our Jacob found in his review, it sure is comfortable. Useful, too.

On the outside, the Steam Machine is a very unassuming little device, which is certainly by design. It's the internals, however, where things get really interesting.

Under the hood lies a semi-custom AMD Zen 4 CPU with six cores and 12 threads, alongside 16 GB of system RAM. The GPU is also a semi-custom AMD RDNA 3 job, with 8 GB of dedicated GDDR6 VRAM, 28 compute units, a sustained max clock speed of 2.45 GHz, and a 110 W TGP.

Being a semi-custom GPU, it's difficult to make a direct comparison with existing RDNA 3 graphics cards—although the budget RX 7600 XT from the same generation features 32 compute units and a similar game clock speed.

The Steam Machine comes in two different storage flavours: 512 GB and 2 TB. I've got the 2 TB model, which provides plenty of storage for many, many games. Should you opt for the 512 GB variant, you'll want to keep an eye on install sizes.

Speaking of games, the Steam Machine makes use of SteamOS 3, an Arch-based Linux implementation with the KDE Plasma interface, allowing you to directly interface with your Steam library and the storefront. Steam Deck users will be very familiar with this design, although there are of course more options to tweak in the settings menus for the Steam Machine itself. More on that later.

For connecting to the outside world, beyond the already-mentioned ethernet port you also get a 2x2 Wi-Fi 6E connection and Bluetooth 5.3 support. The Steam Controller connects via an integrated 2.4 GHz wireless adapter, although requires the included puck or cable to be used for pairing on initial setup.

It's pretty impressive to think of the sheer amount of hardware and connectivity options Valve has crammed inside such a relatively small chassis design. Especially when you consider that, in terms of cooling, air is moved by a single 120 mm fan around the back.

As our Jacob found when he held a caseless prototype model, inside is a substantial heatsink which obscures the motherboard almost entirely, distributing heat away from all of the internal components.

Overall, the Steam Machine feels… solid. More solid than I was expecting, actually, despite its reasonable 2.6 kg weight. Given the form factor, you could easily shove it in a decently sized backpack to take around a friend's house. Although the design here is definitely specced to fit within an under-TV living room unit—where it'll live, faceless and mysterious, next to your other consoles and set-top boxes.

Steam Machine performance

And so we reach the first major sticking point. The Steam Machine 2 TB bundle is, in essence, a $1,428 mini gaming PC. As a result, it's only fair the little black cube goes up against our gaming PC benchmark suite in competition with similarly-priced machines.

Put aside the tidy form factor, the SteamOS experience, and the delightful "Valve-ness" of the thing for a second. If you're buying one of these, you're going to want your games to run well, and for it to deliver comparable performance to a gaming PC you could have spent your cash on instead.

And I'm not going to sugar-coat it—the benchmarking results are a little ugly.

Gaming benchmarks

Avatar: Frontiers of Pandora (1440p Ultra)Cyberpunk 2077 (1440p RT Medium)Cyberpunk 2077 (Quality upscaling, 1440p RT Medium)Baldur's Gate 3 (1440p Ultra)Black Myth: Wukong (1440p Very High)Black Myth: Wukong (Quality upscaling, 1440p Very High)Metro Exodus: Enhanced Edition (1440p Ultra)

Avg FPS

1% Low FPS

Steam Machine

21

17

AtomMan G1 Pro | RTX 5060 | AMD Ryzen 9 8945HX

44

38

Lenovo Legion Tower 5i | RTX 4060 | Intel Core i5 14400F

33

25

Custom PC #11 (issue 413) | Arc B570 | Intel Core Ultra 7 265K

28

24

015304560

Avatar: Frontiers of Pandora (1440p Ultra) Data

Product	Value
Steam Machine	21 Avg FPS, 17 1% Low FPS
AtomMan G1 Pro | RTX 5060 | AMD Ryzen 9 8945HX	44 Avg FPS, 38 1% Low FPS
Lenovo Legion Tower 5i | RTX 4060 | Intel Core i5 14400F	33 Avg FPS, 25 1% Low FPS
Custom PC #11 (issue 413) | Arc B570 | Intel Core Ultra 7 265K	28 Avg FPS, 24 1% Low FPS

Avg FPS

1% Low FPS

Steam Machine

16

12

AtomMan G1 Pro | RTX 5060 | AMD Ryzen 9 8945HX

32

26

Lenovo Legion Tower 5i | RTX 4060 | Intel Core i5 14400F

24

19

Custom PC #11 (issue 413) | Arc B570 | Intel Core Ultra 7 265K

26

23

010203040

Cyberpunk 2077 (1440p RT Medium) Data

Product	Value
Steam Machine	16 Avg FPS, 12 1% Low FPS
AtomMan G1 Pro | RTX 5060 | AMD Ryzen 9 8945HX	32 Avg FPS, 26 1% Low FPS
Lenovo Legion Tower 5i | RTX 4060 | Intel Core i5 14400F	24 Avg FPS, 19 1% Low FPS
Custom PC #11 (issue 413) | Arc B570 | Intel Core Ultra 7 265K	26 Avg FPS, 23 1% Low FPS

Avg FPS

1% Low FPS

Steam Machine

28

20

AtomMan G1 Pro | RTX 5060 | AMD Ryzen 9 8945HX

86

69

Lenovo Legion Tower 5i | RTX 4060 | Intel Core i5 14400F

60

49

Custom PC #11 (issue 413) | Arc B570 | Intel Core Ultra 7 265K

81

74

0255075100

Cyberpunk 2077 (Quality upscaling, 1440p RT Medium) Data

Product	Value
Steam Machine	28 Avg FPS, 20 1% Low FPS
AtomMan G1 Pro | RTX 5060 | AMD Ryzen 9 8945HX	86 Avg FPS, 69 1% Low FPS
Lenovo Legion Tower 5i | RTX 4060 | Intel Core i5 14400F	60 Avg FPS, 49 1% Low FPS
Custom PC #11 (issue 413) | Arc B570 | Intel Core Ultra 7 265K	81 Avg FPS, 74 1% Low FPS

Avg FPS

1% Low FPS

Steam Machine

46

26

AtomMan G1 Pro | RTX 5060 | AMD Ryzen 9 8945HX

59

42

Lenovo Legion Tower 5i | RTX 4060 | Intel Core i5 14400F

60

40

Custom PC #11 (issue 413) | Arc B570 | Intel Core Ultra 7 265K

57

24

015304560

Baldur's Gate 3 (1440p Ultra) Data

Product	Value
Steam Machine	46 Avg FPS, 26 1% Low FPS
AtomMan G1 Pro | RTX 5060 | AMD Ryzen 9 8945HX	59 Avg FPS, 42 1% Low FPS
Lenovo Legion Tower 5i | RTX 4060 | Intel Core i5 14400F	60 Avg FPS, 40 1% Low FPS
Custom PC #11 (issue 413) | Arc B570 | Intel Core Ultra 7 265K	57 Avg FPS, 24 1% Low FPS

Avg FPS

1% Low FPS

Steam Machine

20

16

AtomMan G1 Pro | RTX 5060 | AMD Ryzen 9 8945HX

26

20

Lenovo Legion Tower 5i | RTX 4060 | Intel Core i5 14400F

23

17

Custom PC #11 (issue 413) | Arc B570 | Intel Core Ultra 7 265K

17

13

07.51522.530

Black Myth: Wukong (1440p Very High) Data

Product	Value
Steam Machine	20 Avg FPS, 16 1% Low FPS
AtomMan G1 Pro | RTX 5060 | AMD Ryzen 9 8945HX	26 Avg FPS, 20 1% Low FPS
Lenovo Legion Tower 5i | RTX 4060 | Intel Core i5 14400F	23 Avg FPS, 17 1% Low FPS
Custom PC #11 (issue 413) | Arc B570 | Intel Core Ultra 7 265K	17 Avg FPS, 13 1% Low FPS

Avg FPS

1% Low FPS

Steam Machine

31

26

AtomMan G1 Pro | RTX 5060 | AMD Ryzen 9 8945HX

37

33

Lenovo Legion Tower 5i | RTX 4060 | Intel Core i5 14400F

48

42

Custom PC #11 (issue 413) | Arc B570 | Intel Core Ultra 7 265K

27

17

015304560

Black Myth: Wukong (Quality upscaling, 1440p Very High) Data

Product	Value
Steam Machine	31 Avg FPS, 26 1% Low FPS
AtomMan G1 Pro | RTX 5060 | AMD Ryzen 9 8945HX	37 Avg FPS, 33 1% Low FPS
Lenovo Legion Tower 5i | RTX 4060 | Intel Core i5 14400F	48 Avg FPS, 42 1% Low FPS
Custom PC #11 (issue 413) | Arc B570 | Intel Core Ultra 7 265K	27 Avg FPS, 17 1% Low FPS

Avg FPS

1% Low FPS

Steam Machine

45

30

AtomMan G1 Pro | RTX 5060 | AMD Ryzen 9 8945HX

52

36

Lenovo Legion Tower 5i | RTX 4060 | Intel Core i5 14400F

53

36

Custom PC #11 (issue 413) | Arc B570 | Intel Core Ultra 7 265K

50

31

015304560

Metro Exodus: Enhanced Edition (1440p Ultra) Data

Product	Value
Steam Machine	45 Avg FPS, 30 1% Low FPS
AtomMan G1 Pro | RTX 5060 | AMD Ryzen 9 8945HX	52 Avg FPS, 36 1% Low FPS
Lenovo Legion Tower 5i | RTX 4060 | Intel Core i5 14400F	53 Avg FPS, 36 1% Low FPS
Custom PC #11 (issue 413) | Arc B570 | Intel Core Ultra 7 265K	50 Avg FPS, 31 1% Low FPS

Yes, that's a 28 fps average result in Cyberpunk 2077 at 1440p Medium RT, with Quality FSR enabled, no frame gen. RDNA 3-era graphics hardware usually struggles with ray tracing, and the Steam Machine's 28 CU semi-custom GPU is no exception.

It's particularly shocking when you compare it with the AtomMan G1 Pro, an RTX 5060-equipped (albeit with 1 TB of storage) mini PC currently available for around $10 more, which manages 58 extra frames on average at the same settings.

Similarly, the Avatar: Frontiers of Pandora benchmark gives the Steam Machine some serious trouble, resulting in a 21 fps average at Ultra settings. Compare that with the G1 Pro, which churns out over double the frame rate. In fact, even the RTX 4060-equipped Lenovo Legion Tower 5i manages a respectable 33 fps result at the same settings, which goes to show roughly where we're at.

That's not to say the Steam Machine gets completely trounced in every benchmark. It beats one of our custom, Intel Arc B570-equipped PC builds in Black Myth Wukong, both with and without upscaling. If we were to build that PC today, it would be slightly more expensive than the Steam Machine 2 TB bundle—mostly due to the beefy Core Ultra 265K CPU and pricey RAM.

Still, you could save some money with a weaker CPU and (slightly) cheaper RAM, and get very similar gaming performance. Again, the RTX 4060, Intel Core i5 14400F-toting Legion Tower 5i powers ahead of the Steam Machine in Black Myth (with upscaling enabled) quite convincingly. That's a budget gaming PC with last-generation components, no two ways about it. And it's got the little Steam Machine thoroughly licked across almost all of my benchmarks.

Steam Machine real-world testing

It's important to remember that the Steam Machine is designed for your living room TV, which these days is likely to be a 4K-native model. So, putting our comparative benchmarks aside for a second, I decided to jump into three relatively demanding (and very popular) PC games at 4K resolution, and see how far I had to drop the settings to get a mostly-solid 60 fps.

In the case of Cyberpunk 2077, I managed to get a 58-61 fps average by dropping the settings to Medium (no ray tracing), bumping FSR into its Performance mode, and enabling 2x frame generation. That means the base frame rate is still trundling away at somewhere around the 30 fps mark, even with the upscaler working at its hardest.

Which means added latency, and some messy visuals. It's not a straight-up bad experience at these settings, but you can definitely see the FSR/frame gen combo struggling with details and fast movement on a regular basis. Could I play Cyberpunk 2077 like this? Sure, I guess. Would I feel good about it, having dropped $1,000+ on a new piece of hardware? Hmm. Pass, I think.

In the case of the newly-released (and fairly well-optimised) Forza Horizon 6, you can forget ray tracing if you want 60 fps at 4K. At this point, that's probably no surprise. However, you can just about keep things smooth with a combo of FSR Performance and High settings.

There's the occasional dip into the low 50s in downtown Tokyo, but it's plenty playable. Cutscene characters look a bit fuzzy, though, and given that frame gen in this game is an Nvidia-only option, you'll need to drop things further if you want higher/more consistent frames.

And then there's Lego Batman: Legacy of the Dark Night. At Medium settings, with FSR set to Performance and with frame generation enabled, you can indeed live your best Batman life at 4K 60 fps. Just about. Again, there's the odd dip, and the base frame rate is pretty low, so the extra latency is definitely palpable.

And again, FSR in all its older iterations looks rough around the edges at Performance settings. Valve says it's working on FSR 4 support for the Steam Machine, but for now, older FSR is what you get as an AMD-specific option.

You might be finding this all a bit obvious. The Steam Machine isn't particularly powerful, so why would I expect high resolution and 60+ frames from my tiny under-TV box? Well, Valve said as much when it first unveiled the Steam Machine last year, stating that 4K60 in your Steam games was its benchmark. And 4K TVs are pretty much the standard at this point. While you can drop the res below native, you're really not going to want to if image quality is a concern.

And as for smooth frame rates? It's sort of PC gaming's thing, man. Especially when you're spending proper PC gaming money.

Can the Valve box deliver in the demanding stuff? Sometimes. As long as you're prepared to make some pretty major compromises in the upscaling, frame generation, and settings departments.

Steam Machine software

First time setup involves attaching the included power cable (and the rather meagre 1.8 metre HDMI cable), booting up the box, and connecting the Steam Controller via the wireless puck. After entering your Wi-Fi details and your Steam account login (and adjusting your screen scaling, which I'll go into below) you're then presented with the SteamOS interface, after any incidental updates.

Anyone who's used a Steam Deck (or indeed, the Steam interface in general) will feel like they're in familiar territory here. A press of the central Steam Controller button opens up a side menu to access your Library or the storefront itself, while also providing a litany of options menus. More still can be accessed with the three-dot button at the bottom of the input device.

One slight hang-up I experienced involved connecting the Steam Controller to the Steam Machine itself, so I could ditch the wireless puck. The menu system is a little obtuse, as the settings appear to want you to shutdown the controller while connected to the puck, boot it up, disconnect it, and then hold down a combination of buttons and bumpers to pair it with the internal connection while booting it up again. A three finger job.

I think. It took a few goes, and I'm not quite sure which combination I used to eventually cause it to pair. In fact, if I had one overall critique of the Steam Machine software experience, it's that the option menus often feel overly complicated.

Some are simple toggles, others are drop down menus, some are sliders, some are in strange orders, some are accessed with one button, some another… it's all a bit much when you're trying to lie back on the couch and game.

The onboarding process has other quirks, too. This could be user error, but on first setup I adjusted the scaling to fit my particular (ancient) 1080p TV, which the Steam Machine merrily ignored once I was booted into the OS itself. This led to much head-scratching as I figured out how to adjust it again from within the slightly unclear (and now poorly scaled) menu options.

Switching over to my 4K monitor, SteamOS seemed to recognise the native resolution immediately, and displayed the appropriately-scaled menus. I then jumped into several games, only to find the resolution maxed out at 1080p. According to Valve, this 1080p default is deliberate Steam Machine behaviour, designed "to ensure a good gameplay experience out of the box."

Though I thought this was supposed to be a 4K-ready device?

After some hunting around in the SteamOS menus, I discovered a secondary resolution option under the Advanced Display settings that was set to "default" in a dropdown menu. Adjusting this manually to the native resolution of my 4K screen allowed me to select higher resolutions in games. It had me stumped for a good 10 minutes or so, though, as the main resolution scaling settings didn't do the trick.

I've had the odd game-specific issue, too. Baldur's Gate 3, for example, repeatedly crashed on boot—until some searching revealed a similar issue with the Steam Deck. The fix is to enable a Proton experimental setting in the Compatibility menu, which handily works for the Steam Machine, too.

So, does Valve's new box provide a seamless PC gaming experience? Well it hasn't for me, I have to say. And while this sort of tweakery is common for those of us who do battle with the PC gaming gods—especially those of us who run Linux operating systems on the regular—I had hoped for a smoother ride from a living room-first machine. Valve says it's working on various aspects of the interface for a better experience, but for now, it definitely feels like a work in progress.

Steam Machine aesthetics

Opinions will vary here, but I'm a big fan of the Steam Machine's design. There's something high-tech, slightly ominous, and very Valve about the aesthetic. It looks and feels like an ancient artifact you'd find in a sci-fi shooter, some sort of key that unlocks a machine designed to bring about the end of the universe. I'm riffing here, but if you pick up one for yourself, you'll see what I mean.

Should the all-black, all-knowing cube design not be to your tastes, there's always the option to swap out the faceplates. These are attached with small magnets at all four corners to the front of the chassis, and pull themselves into place with a meaty thock.

Something I accidentally discovered is that, such is the force of the magnets, you can stack two together at once, although a single plate locks smoothly in line with the front I/O panel below. My top-end 2 TB Steam Machine bundle includes two extra plates, one covered in red fabric, and the other with a wood finish.

Tapping my finger against the latter, it appears to be an actual piece of tree—rather than a cheap walnut-style veneer. Very nice indeed, if you're into that sort of thing.

My main point, however, is just how unassuming the Steam Machine looks when tucked among my other set-top boxes and routers, even with a jazzy face plate attached. It looks like it'll blend in just about anywhere, and the front LED strip can be configured in a multitude of ways. You can set it to pulse through the RGB spectrum to deliver a gaming PC-like aesthetic, or you can turn it off entirely, among other options.

At which point, you may end up forgetting you've got a Steam Machine under your TV at all. It's well-sized enough that I don't think anyone will have a problem integrating it into their setup with ease.

As for the controller? Well, it's a sizable beast, that's for sure. Still, with an all-black, relatively muted design, I don't think your average non-gamer would notice much of a difference between this and a standard Xbox controller unless they picked one up.

Temperatures and noise

The Steam Machine is quiet. I mean, really, really quiet. The single, geometry-optimised 120 mm fan at the back does an admirable job of moving large amounts of air at whisper-like levels, so much so that I don't think you'd notice it at full pelt over any other ambient noise.

Temperatures

Gaming TemperaturesIdle temperatures

Avg CPU Temp (°C)

Max CPU Temp (°C)

Avg GPU Temp (°C)

Max GPU Temp (°C)

Steam Machine

68

74

65

69

AtomMan G1 Pro | RTX 5060 | AMD Ryzen 9 8945HX

89

91

77

67

Lenovo Legion Tower 5i | RTX 4060 | Intel Core i5 14400F

64

76

67

71

Custom PC #11 (issue 413) | Arc B570 | Intel Core Ultra 7 265K

57

81

66

71

0255075100

Gaming Temperatures Data

Product	Value
Steam Machine	68 Avg CPU Temp (°C), 74 Max CPU Temp (°C), 65 Avg GPU Temp (°C), 69 Max GPU Temp (°C)
AtomMan G1 Pro | RTX 5060 | AMD Ryzen 9 8945HX	89 Avg CPU Temp (°C), 91 Max CPU Temp (°C), 77 Avg GPU Temp (°C), 67 Max GPU Temp (°C)
Lenovo Legion Tower 5i | RTX 4060 | Intel Core i5 14400F	64 Avg CPU Temp (°C), 76 Max CPU Temp (°C), 67 Avg GPU Temp (°C), 71 Max GPU Temp (°C)
Custom PC #11 (issue 413) | Arc B570 | Intel Core Ultra 7 265K	57 Avg CPU Temp (°C), 81 Max CPU Temp (°C), 66 Avg GPU Temp (°C), 71 Max GPU Temp (°C)

CPU (°C)

GPU (°C)

Steam Machine

38

41

AtomMan G1 Pro | RTX 5060 | AMD Ryzen 9 8945HX

51

38

Lenovo Legion Tower 5i | RTX 4060 | Intel Core i5 14400F

29

30

Custom PC #11 (issue 413) | Arc B570 | Intel Core Ultra 7 265K

37

46

015304560

Idle temperatures Data

Product	Value
Steam Machine	38 CPU (°C), 41 GPU (°C)
AtomMan G1 Pro | RTX 5060 | AMD Ryzen 9 8945HX	51 CPU (°C), 38 GPU (°C)
Lenovo Legion Tower 5i | RTX 4060 | Intel Core i5 14400F	29 CPU (°C), 30 GPU (°C)
Custom PC #11 (issue 413) | Arc B570 | Intel Core Ultra 7 265K	37 CPU (°C), 46 GPU (°C)

It runs relatively cool, too. Certainly much cooler than the AtomMan G1 Pro when you crank it up to its top whack, which is significantly noisier, too. Valve has clearly prioritised refinement when it comes to both the Steam Machine's size and sound, which is a good instinct to follow when it comes to a living room-friendly box.

Steam Machine value

When the Steam Machine was first announced, we on the PC Gamer hardware team took a look at the specs and all came to the same rough conclusion. It's relatively low-powered, it's designed for your living room, and it's gunning for a position next to your other consoles. Therefore, it'll have to be reasonably priced.

That was in the before times, of course. Back when cheap memory modules were abundant, and the idea of a $550-$600 base-level Steam Machine seemed quite possible. Then the AI server market hoovered up all the manufacturing capacity, the consumer market got stuffed, and we've been living in a world of ridiculous pricing ever since.

Given all this, on the surface, the $1,049 Steam Machine 512 GB seems almost reasonable. Let's put it this way, it's not as highly-priced as we feared, given everything that's going on at the moment and the recent price hike of the Steam Deck. But the unfortunate truth is that budget gaming PCs—while being much larger, noisier, and more unwieldy than Valve's magic box—can still be found for the same sort of figure.

A perusal of our cheap gaming PC deals page reveals several 1 TB-equipped, RTX 5060-toting models for under $1,000. And, as I've shown with the AtomMan G1 Pro, anything with Nvidia's current-gen budget card is likely to give the Steam Machine a good thrashing in the performance stakes.

Speaking of which, the AtomMan machine can be found (at the time of writing) for $1,439 at Amazon. That's pretty pricey for a mini PC, but it does come with a beastly laptop CPU, said RTX 5060, and 32 GB of RAM. You only get a 1 TB SSD, it's true. And like the PCs above, it doesn't have an included controller, nor a couch-native SteamOS interface.

But it's only $11 more than the top-spec Steam Machine 2 TB. And Steam Big Picture mode in Windows works great for gaming on your TV. As for the controller? A suitable model doesn't cost a whole lot extra (particularly if you go for something budget-yet-brilliant, like the GameSir Nova Lite).

I just can't square the Steam Machine's performance with any idea of consumer value. I really can't. The first question you need to ask yourself as a hardware reviewer is this: Would I buy one?

And despite the little black box's lovely design, excellent controller, and sheer curiosity value, the answer is no. Not when I can still pick up a regular gaming PC for the equivalent cash, with much better overall gaming performance.

Because, when it comes to the PC gaming experience, I think you should ask yourself what it means to you. To me, it means better graphics than consoles. It means higher frame rates. It means flexibility, and it means spending more money in return for a better experience when I actually play the games.

Having a neat little PC gaming box tucked away underneath your TV is all well and good, on paper. But when it feels underpowered (and internally outdated) right out of the gate, while still costing north of a grand for the base-level model? I'm simply not sure it makes much sense.

You can now sign up for a chance to buy a Steam Machine. Yes, a mere chance, not a preorder, as Valve is doing something different with the launch of its Linux-powered cube. Rather than forming an orderly queue, it's taking names, throwing them in a hat, and drawing them out at random to decide who gets a reservation and who gets lumped on the waitlist.

The Steam Machine starts at $1,049 for the 512 GB model, and if you're still interested in purchasing one after hearing the price, you're going to want to take heed of the new reservation process. It's different to what Valve has done in the past, and for good reason.

"In an effort to improve the purchase experience and limit resellers, we're implementing a reservation system," Valve says.

• Starting right now, you can sign up for the Steam Machine model/bundle you're interested in.
• If you're busy now, no problem: You can sign up anytime before Thursday June 25th at 10 a.m. Pacific.
• At that time, we will close signups and do a one-time randomization to determine the reservation order.

"Based on the reservation order, you will receive an email on June 25th indicating one of two things:"

• You've been added to the reservation queue and a Steam Machine has been reserved in your name.
• You've been added to the waitlist and we'll let you know when more units become available.

In theory, this deters bots from hammering the reservations faster than any real human and securing units for resellers to sell at inflated prices. It also means that it's become a lottery for all involved.

By signing up on June 25, you give yourself the best chance of purchasing one before the end of the year. Those lucky enough to make it into the reservation queue will begin receiving emails asking them to make their purchase from June 29.

If you miss this date, you'll be added to the back of the waitlist and presumably in for a long wait.

Valve has said it intends to get through the reservation queue by the end of 2026. That means those on the waitlist are unlikely to be able to purchase a Steam Machine before 2027—unless people drop out of the queue without purchasing one, in which case the offer extends to whomever is next in line. Those offered a unit will have 72 hours from receiving their notification email to checkout before Valve passes it onto the next person in the queue.

What you need

To make your initial sign up, you have to have a few things in order:

• a Steam account in good standing
• made a purchase on Steam prior to April 27, 2026.

There's also a limit of one per household. Valve says it will check payment information, shipping address, and other information to remove duplicate entries. So if you're in shared accommodation with a bunch of fellow PC gamers, looks like you'll have to share your Steam Machine, too.

Each region has its own sign-up list. These are North America, United Kingdom, European Union, and Australia, which Valve is organising directly. Valve's official distributor, Komodo, will be dealing with orders in Japan, Taiwan, and Hong Kong.

So, why the new system? Why not just do what it did with the Steam Deck and have a first-come, first-serve system?

Valve says it's both because of resellers and lower availability than it would have liked for components used in the Steam Machine.

"Over the past year or so, that has changed quickly and significantly, most visibly for RAM and storage components… the overall effect is that our original goal for the price of Steam Machine is no longer viable," Valve says in an FAQ.

"Price wasn't the only thing impacted by all of this: availability was as well. We found we couldn't source some of our components at all, at any price. More than anything else, this impacted our launch quantity."

We've heard this before: memory chips are a precious commodity right now and they're being sucked out of the market before ever reaching us consumers by big businesses with even bigger bank accounts. Even the biggest companies are feeling the heat. Valve is no small fry, but it's nowhere close to the size of OEMs like Dell, HP, or similar. Everyone's scrambling for whatever the major memory manufacturers can give them, which isn't enough.

When a manufacturer is this honest about availability concerns from the get-go, that usually means things really are tough out there. This launch is going to be a very long, drawn out affair from the sounds of things. Make sure you're there before June 25 for the best chance at a Linux console this year, or be prepared to be patient. Heck, as Valve points out in its FAQ, you could always build your own Steam Machine with SteamOS 3.8 as a shortcut.

Good luck.

Now that Destiny 2's massive final update is here, it's more or less set in stone forever. Destiny is calcified—no more FOMO, no need to re-grind gear, and the end of a seasonal treadmill.

That should make me sad, and it does, more so because it's over rather than that it's easing off the gas. I've always loved playing it, so seasonal updates were a good excuse to keep looting and shooting. But there's no avoiding that, at times, playing Destiny was a chore of Bungie's own design.

With the threat of a Power cap increase or power-creep removed, you're now free to do whatever you want, whenever you want. You don't need to race through quests to be 'raid ready', or complete seasonal tasks and grind specific god rolls before they vanish into oblivion. And honestly, it's bliss.

Ironically, this is basically how Destiny used to be. The first game was built around major expansions, which would see the player count naturally rise and fall in accordance. And this is how Destiny 2 began as well. However, at some point, we all became fed up with the idea that we'd run out of new things to do and play something else for a little while.

Enter the live service-ification of Destiny, giving rise to unceasing seasonal updates and yearly expansions to keep the good times flowing. As fun as this era was, it's clear that it was practically impossible to sustain for Bungie. Live service games are expensive, and Bungie was one of the very few attempting it from a predominantly PvE angle, where content tends to be very one-and-done compared to infinitely queueing multiplayer matches in Call of Duty, for example. Plus, forcing every story arc to fit a weekly cadence like a TV show wasn't ideal either.

It didn't work for Bungie, and I'd argue it didn't really work for us, either. From my observations, the community is oddly happier with the game in its current state, in spite of it being the end. Of course, people are enjoying the new content, but mostly, I think we're enjoying being able to play Destiny without the pressure. It's nice, isn't it?

Plus, I'm older now and have less time to dedicate to one, let alone multiple live service games. It's an existential threat to a game like Destiny, where the most die-hard fans who picked up the first game in their 20s would be in their late 30s or 40s by the earliest time Destiny 3 could arrive. I figure Bungie will have a hard time getting everyone on board for a return to the seasonal treadmill, or convincing a new generation away from their already-established live service mainstays.

So, in the theoretical situation where we eventually get a Destiny 3, my big question would be what form it would take.

Maybe an MMO-like subscription model would better support a sequel designed from the ground up to be the live service MMO Destiny 2 aspired to be. But perhaps not, since there are very few MMOs left standing these days, and maintaining this would be an expensive venture. And that 'from the ground up' bit is an important note, as Destiny 2's dated infrastructure has constantly shot Bungie in the foot, most obviously in the form of the Destiny Content Vault that removed a whole chunk of game.

Maybe Bungie opts for smaller/spinoff games to more economically tell stories in the same universe, akin to Halo 3 ODST and Halo Reach. I miss the days of focused shooter campaigns and some tacked-on multiplayer, and I love Destiny's world, so I'm not opposed to this at all. However, it would feel like a bit of a gut-punch, downsizing one of the biggest franchises in gaming.

Despite the inherent risk, I'd argue it's best we return to a full-fledged expansion schedule and sequels, and come to peace with the fact that it's alright to put a game down once you've had enough to return when something's piqued your interest. More time to develop large expansions, more time for game-changing sequels. That's effectively how Borderlands works.

Whatever the approach, it's clear that change is required. Destiny 2 died for a multitude of reasons, but new-player onboarding, removing content, and the maligned Portal system are among the largest. These issues can't return. But hopefully the universe of Destiny can.

This article contains spoilers for Critical Role Campaign 4, episode 30.

I've been rather enjoying Campaign 4 of Critical Role—a 13-player, three-table epic that plans to reinvent the West Marches type of game for a modern actual play show. It's almost daedalian in scope, pure and utter hubris. It shouldn't work. And yet, 30 episodes in, it absolutely has.

The first four-episode overture was impressive. As I wrote back then, Brennan Lee Mulligan set up and spun 13 individual plates with the ease of someone who has been doing this his whole life—because he has, wielding a documented history with LARP, TTRPGs, and improv comedy with experience and ease.

But the recent arc, where all three parties have come back to the main city of Dol-Makjar, seemed to me a higher task. It's one thing to juggle three tables of players when the story's just finding its feet, it's another to bring those three groups back together and tie off their stories in what essentially constitutes the actual-play equivalent of a first-season finale.

The Hallowed Round; playing host to the history of the rungjani and their failed, but inspiring rebellion, turned into a ritual to heal a scar on the face of the world. Wicander Halovar somehow duping the shrewd matriarch of her house, a prodigal son returning with his fingers crossed behind his back, bearing witness to the judgement of the Tachonis patriarch in front of his equally power-hungry peers.

And, most importantly, an ill-fated expedition into the house of Tachonis itself while papa's away—the focal point of my effusive praise, and something I'm going to spoil, including the ending of episode 30. You have been warned.

No pulled punches

One promise of the 13-player campaign that hadn't (until this point) really taken flight was the idea that any character could die, something oft-repeated by Mulligan but never really practised.

The idea is this: With a thicker-set cast comes more opportunities to be lethal and uncompromising in character design. It also fits with the Game of Thrones-esque plot afoot, the revving-up narratives of institutions grasping tight to their power. Sometimes the hammer comes down.

But 30 episodes in, and not a dropped body in sight (well, apart from Occtis, but he got better). Not for lack of trying, mind—there have been plenty of close calls, including one at the very tip-top of episode 30 itself. But the doom of one Teor Pridesire within the Tachonis Manor finally scratches the very last itch I had: Legitimate consequences for poor play.

Up until this point, a winning streak of good luck had protected the cast against destruction, and there have been some truly miraculous turnarounds. Not just Bolaire narrowly dodging a disintegrate spell that would've certainly killed them, but also—well, pick any one of Azune Nayar's natural 20s.

While I've never assumed Mulligan would pull his punches when the time came, he has been absolutely given a lot of good dice-rolls to justify softening his blows. It's one thing to know, in theory, that anybody can die and that encounters are not tailor-balanced to the party—it's another to throw that lever yourself.

The tragedy of Teor's wrong turn, and the dice rolls that led to it, ran the show's erstwhile paladin headfirst into an encounter which, as Mulligan outright states, was designed for the possibility of six fully-healed party members.

And to his credit, Mr. Mulligan wound up that haymaker and threw it as hard as he could. Both justifying the existence of the Desperate Measures mechanic—which lets players mark off death saving throw failures for powerful boons, and nearly had Teor vanquish a great evil before he went down—and establishing, properly, the stakes for the campaign going forward.

I'll miss the Pridesire brothers, but this fate was an important vital brick in the construction of this campaign. Without the looming threat of death—resulting from bad choices, inopportune rolls, or a mixture of both—nothing about the oppressive weight of the Sundered Houses works. You can't have a world flooded with institutional big bads if none of them are actually scary.

Episode 30, even more so than the frankly impressive full-house episodes that came before it, confirms for me that this whole campaign could be a masterpiece. I ended the Overture overstimulated, but frankly grateful its cast would be splitting into three more manageable groups—now I'll be counting down the days until the parties converge again.

When Atlus announced its remake of Persona 4 (or more accurately, of Persona 4 Golden), a cry went up around the land. Mostly, I think people were rightly excited about Kanji Tatsumi in 4K, but there are a few peccadilloes in the original game's design that some folk—including here at PC Gamer—were eager to see Atlus iron out. Namely, those dungeons, which in P4 and P4G were quite the slog: a series of procgen corridors that went on for around 10 floors each.

"I think Persona 4 Revival should veer off from Reload's changes," wrote our Mollie Taylor last year. "Each of its dungeons are the perfect vessel to go full Persona 5 style. Palaces that serve as grand setpieces for each character, handcrafted to get real into the weeds of their insecurities and internal conflict."

I'm not sure Atlus has gone quite that far. From the snippets we see in its recent Persona 4 Revival Broadcast, Yukiko's Castle and the Bathhouse both look to be the many-floors-of-corridors affairs of the original games, though I don't doubt Atlus has put in more events and NPC dialogue to spice up the grind, much as it did before in Persona 3 Reload. To be fair, we only get a brief glimpse, so perhaps the studio has something more up its sleeve, but that design looks very familiar to me as someone who has experienced a lot of Persona 4 over the years.

One thing which is quite a bit different, though, is the combat you'll be doing in those dungeons. The Investigation Team/Scooby Gang has a lot of new toys at its disposal for fighting shadows, all lavishly coloured and animated. The three Atlus focused on in its broadcast were: Baton Pass, Send Flying, and Prime Time. Baton Pass is an easy one—it's the mechanic introduced in Persona 5 that lets you give your turn to another party member after downing an enemy.

The other two are more novel. Send Flying is a new mechanic that lets you, more or less, turn individual enemies into vectors for disease. Afflicted a shadow with the fear ailment? You can attack it to send it flying into another foe in the arena, inflicting them with the exact same debuff. Which, hey, great. I've always thought that Persona should let me ravage my foes with communicable viruses.

Prime Time, meanwhile, is a meter that fills as you do battle. Once it tops out, you can, well, activate Prime Time, which drops all your skill costs to 0 and lets you hit foes with a "Prime Time finish," which looks a lot to me like a P3R Theurgy attack.

The only other new combat mechanic that seems notable to me is the addition of a Guard manoeuvre in the overworld. Initiating combat looks much the same as it did in base P4: hit a foe when they're off-guard and get advantage, get hit yourself and get disadvantage. But guarding adds a new wrinkle: if an enemy hits you while you're guarding, they'll bounce off and become dazed, letting you either gain advantage in the full battle or else run away.

Which is all very slick and fun, but I do have to wonder what Atlus is doing to compensate for all these new tricks in your toolbox. Persona 4 was not a difficult game (with the possible exception of Yukiko's bossfight), and the addition of these new combat mechanics feel like they'd make the battle system entirely trivial. Here's hoping the shadows get some new toys to make your life harder, or else I'm going to start feeling bad.

Xbox is under fire yet again. It's teasing layoffs as part of a "reset", reportedly closing Double Fine, Ninja Theory, and more, and it can't present a coherent plan—all just days after unveiling upcoming games at its Xbox Games Showcase.

Rightfully, Xbox has been criticised by industry figures in response, including a former PlayStation exec. Now, Moon Studios CEO and Ori creator Thomas Mahler has taken to X (spotted by VGC), damning Xbox Game Pass.

"The Game Pass strategy could've worked if people would've shown up for it," Mahler claims, suggesting that the service's offerings (particularly new, exclusive games) weren't enough to keep people paying every month.

"You need those games your studios are producing to become smash hits, cultural events that everyone wants to play—but what was the big Xbox game in recent years that was just delightfully good? That game doesn't exist.

"Almost every single first-party studio in recent years has been floundering. You'd want Bethesda to create a 'Skyrim in Space' that ought to be better than Skyrim was cause that was an old game: But we got Starfield instead…[Xbox] need to have good deals with devs so developers are actively incentivized to produce massive hits, not just slop out mediocre content like a factory."

Mahler adds that Game Pass is "a little like Communism," in that if you don't give people an incentive to pitch in and subscribe, then the whole system "comes crashing down". When Xbox raised the price of Game Pass last year, it lost "millions" of subscribers, according to Matthew Ball, games industry analyst and newly-installed Xbox chief strategy officer.

It's worth noting that while Xbox's first-party lineup has struggled arguably since the launch of the Xbox One in November 2013 (ouch), Game Pass has served up some third-party hits. In fact, three of last year's game of the year nominees—Expedition 33, Hades 2, and Hollow Knight: Silksong—were available on the service day one. Kingdom Come: Deliverance 2 joined a while later, too.

The issue is that these games are available elsewhere, so they're not solid incentives for players to sign up for an expensive subscription. Forza Horizon 6 is the first big exclusive game for Xbox in a long time, breaking the records set by its predecessor. But one (timed) exclusive isn't going to move the needle to the degree the company demands.

Guild Wars 3's on the horizon—and as part of that release, developer ArenaNet got a little nostalgic in a news post last week. It shared a healthy handful of details on its incoming MMO, including an aim to fix something that shook PCG's own Lauren Morton off the second game.

It also shared an interesting tidbit about the first Guild Wars game. Namely—try as they might, ArenaNet couldn't shake off the MMO tag: "Guild Wars Reforged is, at its core, a game about a small team: a player and their assembled team of henchmen or hero NPCs or other players they want to bring along with them, overcoming challenges in a predominantly instanced game.

"Unless you invited them along, you never saw other players except in the game's social hubs. When we released the original Guild Wars, we branded the game as a CORPG (cooperative online RPG); however, the branding never stuck, and everyone informed us we'd released an MMORPG."

I suppose I'm guilty of doing the same—though it makes sense, given I'm a Final Fantasy 14 fan, and that also happens to be a set of basically single-player RPGs that just so happens to share an online world. Granted, there's plenty you can team up for, but the same goes for Guild Wars 1.

It's particularly interesting because the things that ArenaNet determined as setting it apart from other MMOs are actually more popular in modern MMOs than they've ever been. FF14 and World of Warcraft both have systems where you can fill out your party members with NPCs, and a higher emphasis on soloable content as the years have gone on.

It was a point of contention for Raph Koster (who worked on Ultima Online and Star Wars Galaxies) when I spoke to him earlier this month for our MMO column—observing that open-world sandbox MMOs, the type Guild Wars 1 sought to set itself apart from, fell out of favour in exchange for instanced theme parks with social hubs.

In other words, when you describe a game where you rarely interact with players outside of social hubs, you can describe a ton of modern MMOs depending on how strict you're being—sure, I'll see players occasionally divebomb a mob in my periphery in WoW or join a mob of particle-effect flinging adventurers for a public event, but I'm not exactly talking to anybody.

Anyway, ArenaNet eventually leant in: "We even won multiple MMO-of-the-year awards! We gave up on the CORPG angle since it didn't stick with players, and we simply embraced what everyone told us: we'd shipped a unique kind of MMORPG."

Every Monday morning I scroll through the previous week's new games on Steam. I've always enjoyed doing this. It can surface niche gems I might otherwise not have found, and it's also useful for detecting new trends in their infancy.

But if I'm perfectly honest, the reason I've always loved to browse through Steam's raw and unfiltered new release list is because it's fun: Steam is hilarious and bizarre. For every earnestly developed roguelite deckbuilder or metroidvania there's something like, I dunno, Fuck's Quest 2, or Milk inside a bag of milk inside a bag of milk. Lost in the murkier corners of Steam, untouched by recommendation algorithms, are some of the strangest, most distinctive pieces of software you're likely to ever see, most of which won't ever make the front page.

Most people don't see these games. What we see on Steam's front page is overwhelmingly determined by what Steam already knows about our gaming habits, or what's trending in our region, or what's discounted. Which is increasingly for the best, because in 2026—and I hate to complain about this—Steam bulges with more useless, tasteless, low-effort churn than ever before. It increasingly feels like a waste of time scratching beneath the guardrailed, algorithmic surface.

As I pointed out last week, AI-generated games are rife on Steam. You can usually tell straight away because the capsule art is obviously AI-generated, with that tell-tale uncanny AI sheen. Despite how ostensibly low effort these artefacts are, there's a uniformity among them that you may charitably call an aesthetic.

Take Store Simulator Pettikkada and Chiggas - Survival of the Mitiest as examples. That the capsule art is AI generated for both is basically unquestionable the moment you see it. Pettikkada has that familiar near-photographic illustrated realism that smacks vaguely of Grand Theft Auto loading screen art, while Chiggas adopts the wide-eyed Pixar tack, a style so ubiquitous in popular culture that it's basically become a generative AI default setting. Click through to the store pages themselves and the screenshots reveal an audacious disjuncture between capsule art and the game you actually get.

I do acknowledge that this contrast has been a feature of box art since the beginning of the medium. Atari 2600 box art never looked like the Atari 2600 game on the cartridge, for example. Doom didn't look like this. But key art created with generative AI has that certain grotesquely generic patina which immediately tells you that clicking through will be pointless and perhaps harmful to your senses.

These games are all by different developers:

In the distant olden days before generative AI, a game's Steam capsule art and the general professionalism or care afforded to it, could signal straight away whether a game was likely a 99 cent asset flip or a possible unsung indie gem. Now there's greater ambiguity. Chiggas could very well have the same production values as The Smurfs - Dreams, until we click through to the page itself and discover its cheap, rudimentary in-game screenshots.

I think most people would agree that a game's Steam capsule art is a hugely important determinant for whether they click through to a store page or not. Capsule art tells us what kind of game we're probably going to see when we click, but it also captures the spirit of the thing: the atmosphere of the game, its art style, its genre, whether it'll make us laugh, rage, shudder in terror, zone out, and so forth.

The capsule art for the games above do none of those things. Like most generative AI, these images are not designed to persuade or entice: they exist to fill space. They're steely, clinical, affectless, chillingly inhuman, and most offensively: they're freaking ugly. They immediately signpost waste.

And there's more and more of this churn with every passing week, gradually undermining the pleasures of curious Steam users who like to dig deeper for unsung gems. In 2026, your new favorite game may remain eternally ignored, wedged between a vape store simulator and Total Simp Death.

Will Valve ever allow us to reliably filter out AI-generated churn? It's hard to imagine no one in Bellevue has noticed how ugly the store has become. Surely it's only a matter of time?

Top Steam games by revenue (June 9 - 16)

Steam releases its top sellers charts on Wednesdays, so the below chart doesn't factor in some late week releases that might have been big, though it wasn't a big week for splashy blockbusters.

The obvious outlier here is Meccha Chameleon. It's a multiplayer hide-and-seek game starring white, featureless bodies who must blend in with their environment using paint brushes. Since releasing on June 10, the $6 game has sold 7 million copies. Elie Gould wrote about it last week.

Interestingly, its Japanese creator Lemorion has been very prolific: it has released six games since late 2024. None of them have achieved anywhere near the success of Meccha Chameleon, not even this free-to-play Penguin-themed take on Exit 8. Meccha Chameleon's immediate predecessor, Link Penguins, released only two months ago and is also an online multiplayer game.

Destiny 2 continues to see a resurgence since the announcement of its sunsetting. EA FC 26 is currently 80%, hence its return to the chart.

Last week's Steam deep cuts

Steam review of the week

"Slop 👍"

BigFloppa332, with poetic succinctness, on Slop Fighter.

Sjoerd De Jong, an Unreal Engine expert from its early days who joined Epic Games full-time in 2014—first as "lead evangelist" and most recently as the senior director of an unannounced project—has left the company, he revealed last week in a LinkedIn post.

"After 27 years of Unreal Engine, and 12 years at Epic Games and Unreal Engine I have decided to move on. Last week was my last week at Epic," De Jong wrote. "This has been an awesome ride that has been truly life changing in so many ways. I didn't have an easy childhood or youth and things weren't going anywhere, but all of that changed entirely when I discovered Unreal Engine."

De Jong's history with Unreal goes back to when he was 15 years old, modding the original 1998 FPS. He was such a prominent map creator he was directly approached by Epic to work on Unreal Tournament 2004, where he designed levels like DM-Rankin and ONS-Torlan, the former of which was the most-played UT2004 map of all time according to server stats cataloged on the Unreal wiki. The portfolio on his website offers a bird's-eye overview of his other work on games like Killzone and The Ball.

While he worked at a variety of studios over the years, including Starbreeze and his own indie company, Teotl Studios, Unreal Engine has long been a passion and specialty—so much so that Epic Games dubbed De Jong the engine's "lead evangelist" when it hired him in 2014.

In the recent LinkedIn post, he talked about how much working with the engine's various incarnations at Epic changed his life: "Dozens of countries visited, hundreds of studios visited, hundreds of talks presented, tens of thousands of people met, and millions of developers supported every year."

As for why he's decided to leave Epic now, De Jong wrote that "this era has come to a close, and it is time to move forward."

"The games industry has always been an industry where change is relentless and inevitable, but it feels like we are reaching a pivotal point now and a potent mix of things," he wrote.

Epic recently unveiled its plans for Unreal Engine 6, which will merge Unreal Engine 5 and Unreal Editor for Fortnite, and is focused on "enabling content, code, and economies to become portable and interoperable across games, ecosystems, and engines through open standards," as well as generative AI integration.

Moving forward, De Jong says it would be strategic for him to "come to terms with where [the industry] is heading and to work out how to adapt and excel at solving the challenges and opportunities that we face."

Morrowind, the gloomiest and mushroomiest of all the Elder Scrolls games, is getting on in years—and it was never the most polished game in town, even upon its release a whopping 24 years ago. If you're sick of those rough edges, you need look no further than OpenMW, a fanmade open-source engine which makes the game play nice with modern hardware and operating systems. If that sounds like your thing, you'll be pleased to know it just got a huge update.

The full patch notes are worth a read if you want to sift through the technical details, but the big highlights are up top: for instance, modders can now create custom magic effects using OpenMW's scripting API, which means that certain additions in popular mods like Tamriel Rebuilt—which previously would have only worked on the original engine using a script extender—can now be remade the open-source engine.

That and other changes, like the ability for all characters to cast enchantments, are laid out in a video breakdown of 0.51.0's additions (embedded above). Even if you care about none of this, it's an entertaining watch, and some of the new graphical bells and whistles are an impressive sight.

The update addresses a slew of technical issues, too. The notes state 0.51.0 fixes "many Lua-related crashes" as well as "annoyances with gamepad menu navigation." And if you're already mid-playthrough using OpenMW, there's no need to start over—it's safe to use your existing saves with the patched versions, though you can't take new saves into the old versions due to a file format change.

It's nice to see the elder Elder Scrolls RPGs and their surrounding communities thriving all these years later, with superlative fan projects like OpenMW and Daggerfall Unity keeping the games accessible to whippersnappers like myself who were two years old when Morrowind released. If that's too boring for you, maybe give a look to mods like Muffinwind Rebaked instead.

Obsidian Entertainment, developer of Fallout: New Vegas, Avowed, and The Outer Worlds, is being sued in a class action lawsuit that alleges it "engaged in a systematic pattern of wage and hour violations under the California Labor Code and Industrial Welfare Commission ('IWC') Wage Orders."

As reported by GamesRadar, the case has been ongoing since October last year, but it was raised to attention by Reddit user macken_zee on the r/pcgaming subreddit, following an amended class action complaint being filed in January.

The case and subsequent amendment were filed by plaintiff Victoria Turner, which matches the name of a QA lead on The Outer Worlds 2 who has also worked on games like Mass Effect 3 and Deus Ex: Human Revolution. The suit currently defines the class as anyone currently or formerly employed at Obsidian "as non-exempt employees in the State of California" from October 9, 2021 up to the date of the class certification, though Turner is also looking to certify class members who left employment at the company on or after October 9, 2022.

The complaint alleges that Obsidian "increased their profits by violating state wage and hour laws" by failing to "pay all wages (including minimum wages and overtime wages)" as well as wages "due upon separation of employment."

The suit also claims that Obsidian failed to pay wages due to the plaintiff and class members in a "timely" fashion during employment, and that it failed to "provide lawful meal periods or compensation in lieu thereof" and "lawful rest breaks." It further claims that Obsidian did not "reimburse necessary business-related costs" or provide "accurate itemised wage statements."

In a response filed in early March, Obsidian said that it "denies, generally and specifically, each and every allegation" made by the class action lawsuit. It then laid out 38 points in its defence, including that employees "consented to and/or acquiesced in the alleged conduct by Defendant of which Plaintiff now complains."

There's been little movement on the case since March.

Back in 2019, Obsidian senior designer Brian Hines told PCGamesN that "Obsidian is not a crunch studio, which is one of the things that keeps people staying there for a long time." Employees would occasionally be asked to put in additional hours "for a week or so", but this was "always a request" that developers were free to decline, he said.

It's not very often I get to see my love of rock music and my love of videogame music intersect in interesting ways. But almost every single time I do, one game can be found at the core—Final Fantasy 14.

Part of that is certainly thanks to The Primals, the MMO's official in-house rock band. It's led by FF14 composer Masayoshi Soken, accompanied by localisation lead Michael-Christopher Koji Fox and non-developers Eikichi Iawi, Tetsuya Tachibana, and GUNN.

Sporting a raw sound with distorted, screeching guitars and high-energy vocals from Soken and Fox, The Primals manages to strike this incredibly interesting balance of being right in the heart of nerdom while also putting out the kind of music that wouldn't sound amiss at your local rock show or festival.

It's no surprise, then, that The Primals felt right at home at Download, the UK's biggest rock and metal festival. It was the band's first non-Fan Festival appearance outside of Asia, and despite a short timeslot it was an absolute corker. I had the opportunity to sit down with Soken, Fox, and GUNN the day after their high-octane set, and it immediately struck me just how jazzed all three seemed to be—even after a night to sleep off the post-performance high.

I thought part of that might have been the release of all the nerves building up to the main performance, but it turns out the band didn't have much time for that. "[Download] took us around [the festival site] before we started, and the buggy that was supposed to take us back didn't come," Fox said.

"So we didn't get back until like, 10 minutes before we were supposed to go to the stage. Normally you sit around and you get nervous because you're thinking about it, but because all this was happening I didn't have time to get nervous. And by the time you get on the stage, it's like 'go, go, go'. And of course, once you see people, you take all of that power and go."

Scions and sinners

The Primals is rocking with a pretty decent discography at this point, but curating it to appeal to both fans and potential newcomers (some of whom may have never even played Final Fantasy 14) was important when it came to putting together the five-song setlist.

"Not everyone knew [Final Fantasy] 14, so we approached it from that perspective," Soken told me. "We wanted to make the most of the time we had, so we knew that we couldn't just rely on the songs that get a really good reaction at Fan Fest." Making sure The Primals could show their musical talent to "get everyone on board and make sure they're having a good time" led to a tight selection of some of the band's biggest, most energetic tracks. A choice which, as Fox tells me, actually proved a challenge in execution.

"[The Primals concerts] have the ups and the downs—you have the heavy songs, then you go into the slower songs, more electronic stuff. This time we focused on the heavy, on the power, on the 'go, go, go,' and our drummer was probably this close to dying," he said. "Even though it was 25 minutes—our shortest set ever—I think that's the most tired we've been after a set because it was just 'go, go, go, go, go' all the way to the end, 100% of the way."

Soken leaned forward, telling me: "Shouting. I just shouted the whole time."

Fox joked about the exhaustion he felt by the time the band's final track, Under the Weight, came around. "I was like, am I gonna pass out on stage? But if I pass out on stage, that'd be pretty fucking cool. I was like, I wanted some oxygen!"

While my favourite moment was hearing Absolute Tyranny—one of the game's more recent tracks from this January's last batch of Arcadion raids—the two tracks Not Afraid and Under the Weight were perhaps the most fitting energy for Download Festival, and the ones that The Primals plucked out as the one that had the biggest chance of reeling in new listeners.

A sound reborn

Seeing a videogame band giving it their all on a stage surrounded by tens of thousands of rock fans sprawled across half a dozen stages really drove home just how much closer the two worlds have become over the years, something which the band wholeheartedly agrees with.

"10, 15 years ago, when we were starting out with this kind of thing, there was game music and there was rock music. And there was a divide in between the two," GUNN said. "But in the past few years, I really feel like they've come a lot closer together, and in fact, sort of within that same bubble now."

But as Koji points out, videogame music has always banged—the technology just wasn't always there to fully realise it. "You look back at the music in games 20 years ago and go 'Oh, that's game music,' but it's only because that's how it was sold. You go back and listen to some of those soundtracks from Mega Man. They hit hard. You've got some rocking beats, bass lines that are just crazy.

"But it was because the technology limited it, so you got the bleeps and the bloops, and it was 'Oh, that's just game music'. But you go back and listen to that now and you're like, 'Oh, I see what they were trying to do. If only they had the technology they have now.'"

Now that The Primals has tackled one of the UK's biggest festivals, what's next for them? First of all, a new album, Soken tells me—which should be plush with rearrangements of music from Dawntrail's stellar Arcadion raid series.

But doing this also seems to have given the band the desire to take their music all over the world. "We've never had any opportunity to go and meet our fans in Australia. I want to make contact with The Primals fans in areas and regions where we haven't been able to get in touch with yet. So the next goal: Primals world tour."

I remember when Klei's self-explanatory classic Don't Starve came out, survival-crafting games as we know them now felt new and novel. "Surely this is a passing fad," I must have thought. Well, my adolescent hot takes aged about as well as a Beefalo steak in the hot sun—Don't Starve Together is bigger than ever, having just hit a new all-time concurrent player count peak on Steam, according to SteamDB.

The last time this happened was in 2023, when a steep discount caused the game to go from around 50,000 players to around 100,000. It's a similar story this time, as right now the game is available for less than $2, and peaked earlier today at 122,662 players all not starving simultaneously.

As I write this, it's settled down to around 68,000 players, which is still absurd for a game of its tenure—DST originally released in 2016. Its singleplayer counterpart is still on our list of the best survival games on PC, and its hand-drawn art style has probably helped it along; the game hasn't visibly aged a day in all that time.

If you're unfamiliar with Don't Starve, the title could serve as a full instruction manual. I think the kids these days might think of it as "wikislop," given how deep the rabbit hole goes on its various crafting systems and secrets, but that's half the fun.

Unlike some other survival-crafts, which quickly bloom into creative sandboxes, Don't Starve is more about adding as many years as possible onto your best time, trying to stave off hunger, monsters, and insanity for as long as you can. You can get to a point where it's possible to explore at your leisure, but you've got to fight for it.

Given that the original, solo-only Don't Starve only has a few thousand people playing it on Steam right now, it makes sense that the upcoming Don't Starve Elsewhere is focusing on co-op as well—the series' transition to multiplayer has clearly been a huge hit. Here's hoping that new game lives up to the hype that ferments in a decade.

Since the advent of generative AI and contemporary chatbots, there's been endless debate about the ethics of using them in game development. But how does AI measure up through a purely pragmatic, business-minded lens? According to a blog post from Game Oracle written by market data analyst Ross Burton, the technology's reputation can ward off prospective players.

Game Oracle sampled 9,879 games released between January and October 2025, "filtering out spam and purely commercial releases," as well as free-to-play games (granted, this could exclude some relatively popular free-to-play games and those which have been accused of using undisclosed AI art, like FragPunk, which is both). Of the sampled games, 17.9% disclosed AI use.

Taken as a whole, AI use was correlated with slightly less enthusiastic reception. Games without AI disclosures had slightly more reviews, fewer of them had no reviews at all, and "when focusing on games that received at least 100 reviews," the median rating was about 4% higher.

However, with the methodology adjusted specifically to compare games that were alike in other ways, things were different. The report states: "After controlling for publisher, developer experience, and game type, developers using AI see a ~53% reduction in reviews compared to those who do not."

"To explain away the observed penalty, an unmeasured X-factor would need to be strong enough to nearly triple the odds (2.7x) of AI adoption while simultaneously causing a 22% reduction in review counts, independent of publisher backing and developer experience."

The full breakdown behind these findings is in the report, but it also states that this effect was more pronounced the bigger and more accomplished the developer was. "Our data suggests that for low-quality games, AI makes no difference," it reads. "But for high-potential games, the 'AI Stigma' is real and severely punishes developers who otherwise would have succeeded."

Games which used AI extensively and remained hugely successful like The Finals, Game Oracle reckons, "highlight the nuance around how AI is used … AI can be used well, or it can be sloppy, and that matters." The study concludes that "AI is a tool" not to be avoided, but approached cautiously. "Would you avoid using a hammer to build a shed? No, of course not. Just don't go around hitting everything with it."

It's worth noting that plenty of game devs are skeptical of AI's potential as a mere tool, and things have changed even since 2025. Clair Obscur raked in awards last year despite its use of AI-generated placeholders, and Crimson Desert has sold millions of copies already this year after doing the same thing—but with the new Crazy Taxi, for instance, it feels as though the developer's AI use has been talked about more than anything in the game itself.

This is all further complicated by the prevalence of undisclosed AI use, with industry figures like Epic CEO Tim Sweeney pushing back on the very notion of the disclaimers, as well as the ways huge studios continue to invest in the tech. Given that Sony touted AI tools as a means to "unleash the creativity of studios" just a few days ago, I wouldn't expect these findings to signal an industry-wide shift anytime soon.

Bryce Clark, game director on Poppy Playtime, grew up playing DOS games on his family PC. His favourite childhood game was the 1994 fantasy RTS Dominus, which had unfortunate ramifications for his father. "It was nearly impossible to get working," Clark recalls. "My poor dad ended up spending so many hours on the hard line trying to call tech support. 'Why is this videogame not working for my son?' It was a lot about troubleshooting way back."

A game developer for 20 years, Clark has worked at studios like 343 Industries and Blizzard. He joined Mob Entertainment in 2023 as its lead technical artist, and last year became Game Director for Poppy Playtime: Chapter 5, which released in February.

"Our goals were to find ways to improve the gameplay flow," Clark says. "What are the ways we can try and make chases more compelling? What can we do to make the puzzles harder in places where you do not have to complete them and easier in places where you do… and just generally trying to find ways to better integrate the narrative into the gameplay experience."

Clark took a break from mascot horror to show me around the digital toy factory of his PC. And, as you will soon discover, there are a lot of toys in Clark's factory, so many that he struggled to pick just one for most of the questions posed.

What game are you currently playing?

I'm a bit of an oddball in that I'm always playing somewhere between three and six games at a time. I'm a bit obsessive with learning the market, learning different genres. I love trying new and unique things as well.

I'll try to be brief about them, but most recently I've been playing a few. One's called Aethus, which is an inspiringly well-executed solo developer project that's focussed around base building, crafting, mining. But it carries, to me, a lot of Subnautica energy with the way the narrative is playing out, the exploration works with the oxygen system, delving into the depths of—instead of [an] ocean, it's caverns—learning the greater mystery.

But also, [I was] trying out most recently on Steam Strange Antiquities, the sequel to Strange Horticulture. Great mix of narrative, discovery, puzzle, mystery. Have a lot of fun with that one.

The super niche one I'm exploring right now is Prosperous Universe, which is, I would say, it's a real-time economic MMO set in an 'interstellar corporations' kind of setting, and all the players are companies that are producing products and shipping, and they're working together to complete production lines, and it's a whole system of politics and economics.

But it's run in real time, so you'll put an order in at one of your production facilities, and in like eight hours it'll be done. I treat it like an incremental game, because it fits into the gaps in my life.

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

Most recently I played a little $5 experience called Librarian: Tidy Up the Arcane Library! This is a game about being in an arcane library, and 3,000 books that are stacked in this library have been scattered all over thanks to some nefarious little imp … so it's all about categorising them in the correct places.

It captures that PowerWash Simulator energy, where there's a soothing element to this rote process, but also [there's] something I find fascinating about representing a gigantic problem. Like, here's this incredible mess of 3,000 books, get it done, and you have to develop your own process for tackling that problem.

I think the most compelling [game] as an art piece, was Cairn, which is one of the most soulful climbing games I've played in recent years. Beautifully well executed, fantastic, thoughtful story, some of the best climbing mechanics I've seen that represent how actual climbing can feel in practice.

I'm still working through Forza Horizon 6. I'm no stranger to the less niche products out there, and Forza [6] has just been a phenomenal entry to the series. I'm not even that big of a car or racing person, but I've just been having a great time.

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

I have a 2016 game and a 2017 game installed right now, and these are No Man's Sky and The Hunter: Call of The Wild. I occasionally boot up older games, but these two have been hard for me to keep uninstalled.

I find that a lot of what draws me into games is the learning and discovery and the novelty, and at a certain point, once I feel like I've fully understood what the game has to offer and where the game is going, I'm not always very compelled to actually finish it … I'm like 'okay, I'm done here', which is a bad habit. I've been trying to get better at it.

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

Well, I have about 20 games that are over 250 hours each, just on Steam. I have about 23,000 hours on my Steam account in 18 years, so I actually have quite a lot of games with a lot of time in them. That's not including secondary platforms or consoles and all that.

My top games are Rocket League at 745 hours, Ark: Survival Evolved at 651 hours, 7 Days to Die at 538, and it just kind of keeps going. There's a lot of competitive stuff in there. There's also a lot of survival craft and exploration games.

We used to say the first 500 hours of Rocket League are learning how to hit the ball, and the next 500 hours are learning when not to hit the ball. There's just so much that goes into it. I love the purity of the game experience. But as a competitive game, of course, it's super engaging. There's always somebody out there that's going to be better than you. You can always get better at Rocket League. The skill ceiling is so far up that you can always get better at it. It's hard to feel like you've mastered Rocket League when there's something yet more crazy you can learn.

What game will you never, ever uninstall?

There are two experiences that I keep coming back to … because they're my comfort game[s]. When everything else is challenging in life, one of these games will bring me some peace and joy, and it's between The Hunter: Call of the Wild and Subnautica.

The Hunter: Call of the Wild is a funny one to talk about … it seems like an odd one to some folks, and I'm not actually in support of modern sport hunting … for me it's a gorgeous walking simulator. It's getting a little long in the tooth now, years down the road, but still, you're going to these beautifully rendered environments, these park locations, and you get to just hike, and I let myself be immersed in the environment and listen to the sounds.

When I do stumble on some quarry to hunt, the experience transitions from calm, peaceful, immersive exploration to now you're stalking, now you're hunting, now you're like 'Okay, how do I get the position to get the right shot.' And then there's this moment of skill expression that all comes down to your bullet choice, your position of how you fire.

Subnautica carries a similar energy … that combination of tension with also the calm exploration that I just find very soothing, so I always come back to that.

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

I'm torn between Snagit and WinDirStat. Snagit is an enhanced screenshot and video recording tool. It just overrides your print screen button, gives you some enhanced lineup features for sampling a section of your screen, and all that's fine. But what I really love about it is that when you take a screenshot, it'll pop up in the editor, and it's a real lightweight fast launch, and it has markups so I can write on it or I can draw text on it.

WinDirStat is a super lightweight, no-nonsense tool for inspecting what's eating up all your hard drive space. It'll go through and analyse basically your entire folder structure and categorise it based on how much memory it's taking off your disk …. For me, when I'm having to juggle a bunch of different games and art tools, disk space can be super important and valuable.

Generally, how tidy is your desktop screen?

I used to be one of these people that had so much on the desktop because I'd have categorised caches of desktop shortcuts. But I think over the years, as some of the operating system features for Windows [has] caught up to other places, most of the time I just search fore the apps that I need now, and all my notes are in one place.

All my daily use applications I have pinned on my taskbar, and I can just launch them straight to the taskbar, and then anything else I just search through the search bar now. So these days I have almost nothing on my desktop, which is very different from what I used to be.

I needed no further incentive to check out this video that explores why a SimCity game set in the United Kingdom wouldn't work, but even if the idea of comparing metropolitan systems of government isn't thrilling to you, you're going to want to watch it just to see who crops up at the end. It's so unexpected that I think it probably counts as a jump scare, and while I can't say whether it makes the video better or worse, it's sure as hell makes it fascinating.

The subject of the video—which is by YouTuber Chris Spargo—delves into how a SimCity set in Britain would differ from the standard, Americentric version of the game, using SimCity 4 as its case study. As Spargo points out, you can manage some "British" cities in SimCity 4, like London. But it doesn't really look or act like London, because it's built according to the US system of city governance.

As Spargo lays out, the differences between British and American cities are many and run deep. Even some of the most fundamental things diverge radically, like who runs a city in each nation. As with most modern urban city-builders, SimCity 4 puts players in the role of mayor, which works fine for American cities because mayors wield most of the power within a city. But in the UK, or at least, in England, power can be much more widely distributed among councils and boroughs.

Other differences include SimCity's fundamental mechanic of zoning. Spargo points out that zoning in the US is very rigid, hence why they end up with sprawling residential districts with no nearby amenities. The UK has a much more nuanced system that allows for multipurpose zones, but it's also much harder to build anything due to extensive planning permission requirements.

The video also delves into things like what public services a British "mayor" would actually control, and also tacitly explains why UK councils never seem to have any money (short answer, centralisation and massive social care costs).

It's all very interesting, but as the video seems to be wrapping up, Spargo says he "got the chance to speak to someone who seemed like he might know some things about this". Cut to Spargo chatting with UK Prime Minister Sir Keir Starmer, who he credits as a "Part-time YouTuber (51k subs)."

For context, Spargo appears to be at some sort of event also attended by the PM, who explains that he's a big advocate of devolution as he thinks "people who live and work in their community make better decisions about what's best for their community than people sitting in Whitehall or Westminster, frankly."

Starmer then points out that this is why the Labour government has "given more power to, particularly our mayors", which, given Starmer is seemingly about to be replaced by the former Mayor of Greater Manchester Andy Burnham, is a tad unfortunate.

Putting aside surprise Starmer, Spargo makes some valid points, and it has given me a hankering to play a game that more accurately replicates the challenges of municipal management in the UK.

Special commentary on this classic PC Gamer review provided by:

Dishonored review - PC Gamer issue #246 (UK, December 2012)

From the archives: The review below appears as originally written, with only minor changes in formatting and presentation. By Tom Francis

I think I can jump onto another light fitting from here. I’m wrong. I slip, fall, and land inches behind a gold-masked Overseer looking out of the fifth-story window. I only have a split second headstart in getting over our mutual surprise at the situation, and I use it to stab him in the neck.

A second after his body hits the ground, I hear carpet-softened footsteps coming down the hall. Panic. After mentally rejecting three even crazier ideas, I hoist the Overseer’s body over my shoulder and jump out of the window.

Dishonored is mostly a stealth game, where you play a kind of assassin, in a somewhat steampunk city. Those floundering qualifiers are part of the fun: you don’t have to hide, you don’t have to kill anyone, and while the city of Dunwall mixes matchlock pistols with crackling Tesla tech, it’s a rusty, crumbling place that feels unique.

If you don’t manage the stealth part, the first-person swordfight that breaks out is surprisingly fun, and surprisingly survivable. Time your blocks right and you can take out a squad of guards with vicious counter-attack executions. It’s not always viable later on, and I’m keen to avoid it on this mission anyway. My target is the Grand Overseer, head of Dunwall’s witch-hunting religion, and any alarm will send him running to his underground bunker.

As I sail out of the window, still holding the dead guard, I twist round and Blink back onto the window ledge. There are only six magical powers in the game, and you probably won’t use them all, but you’ll definitely use Blink. It’s a short-range teleport spell that’s almost free to cast, and quickly becomes your main way of getting around the game.

It’s silent, so it makes stealth faster and more versatile: you can Blink past the path of an approaching guard to stab him in the back when he investigates your former location.

And it also gives you a precise and reliable way to climb on the scenery. The game shows you the spot you’ll jump to as you aim the spell, so the kind of player who habitually falls off light fittings can still blink to a fifth- story window ledge without falling to his death.

City blocked

The ledge is safe and out of sight, but I don’t think it’s wide enough to drop the body on. And the huge, rainlashed courtyard below is crawling with guards. I circle half the building before I finally see an open dumpster at ground level. I think I can toss him into it from all the way up here.

I’m wrong.

Dishonored’s missions unfold across huge chunks of this plague-infested city. The best of them spend that space in breadth as much as length, letting you explore several city blocks outside of the building you plan to infiltrate. You’re free to sneak through the rat-riddled alleyways, clamber up to the rooftops and Blink between them, or dive into every open window and ransack the buildings for secrets and loot. It’s a fantastic sense of freedom.

There are even side quests in these extensive regions, and masses of incidental storytelling. Books, notes and diaries offer you enigmatic clues to stashes of loot, safe combinations and magical items.

The city watch patrol most of it, but other sections are ruled by thugs, the gutters crawl with plague- zombies, and some apartments are inhabited by stranger folk altogether.

This courtyard, though, is patrolled by Overseers. And a very dead Overseer has just fallen out of the sky and landed heavily on a spiked metal fence, dangling from it like a gruesome warning. I freeze.

They haven’t seen it yet. I slip quietly back in through a different window.

I’m in the meeting room my target is headed for, and there are two glasses on the table. My mission is to kill the Grand Overseer, but there’s an optional extra: he’s about to poison one of the few good men left in the city watch, and I’ve been asked to prevent it. I’m just about to do something clever with the glasses (see ‘Who to poison’) when the doors swing open.

Underseers

I Blink behind a screen in the corner of the room and hold my breath. The guards yell in alarm, I switch to grenades and brace for them to... rush out through the other doors.

They didn’t see me! They must be responding to something else going on. Oh, the bloodied Overseer I just threw off the building? I guess that might be it.

An objective note tells me I’ve prevented the poisoning, with my ingenious and totally intentional distraction technique, so now I just need to take out my target. I slip back out of the window before the metal shutters come down, and Blink down to street level. There’s a gutter down here with a tiny window into the Grand Overseer’s safe room, so all that’s left to do is to load my crossbow and wait.

As well as the openness of the levels themselves, there’s a pleasing amount of flexibility in how to tackle your targets. Prescribed solutions like the poisoning are blended with emergent ones, like planting a razorwire tripmine on the route to the target’s saferoom, or rewiring security to kill him for you.

Sometimes key information about your targets’ location or identity is randomised each time you play, so you have to gather clues through exploration and eavesdropping every time. And there’s even a nonlethal way of dealing with every target.

I won’t spoil what it is in this mission, but it’s a good one. In general, too, I like the ridiculous idea of a game about a ‘supernatural assassin’ going to such lengths to cater to the extremist player who’d want to leave every single person alive. And how many people you kill actually changes the later levels: the more corpses you leave in your wake, the more rats and plague zombies you’ll encounter.

I like all that. But Dishonored goes further. Characters start to moan at you if you kill too many people. The nonlethal objectives sometimes involve substantial side-quests that you miss out on if you don’t want to take that weird path. The game itself even says ‘Optional objective failed’ if you’re so audacious as to actually assassinate the person you were sent to assassinate. And if it feels you’ve killed more than it deems morally acceptable, you’re punished with a deeply unsatisfying ending.

It’s a strangely sanctimonious attitude for a game whose most interesting features all revolve around arranging inventively horrific murders. Particularly when the nonlethal objectives are often crueller than death—one of them leaves a woman unconscious at the mercy of a terrifying creep who’s in love with her.

If you take the hint and try to avoid killing, you hit a practical problem: there’s only one nonlethal weapon.

Your trademark retractable blade, your upgradeable pistol, crossbow bolts, incendiary darts, explosive rounds, grenades, proximity- triggered springrazors, the Jedi-like Wind Blast, the rat-powered Devouring Swarm, rewired Arc Pylons, Walls of Light and Watch Towers all kill.

Sleep darts don’t, so the merciful play style is limited to those and a very slow sleeperhold move. There’s still a quiet satisfaction to playing this way, but it’s much more repetitive than messing around with all the rest of the horrible toys the game gives you.

Gilded cage

The other thing that makes Dishonored slightly less exciting than it initially seems is that it peaks early. The most liberating missions are all in the first half of its 13-hour story. Some of the later ones are too plot-driven to give you that same freedom, and others are just too crowded with guards. One is set on a bridge, but if you drop down to the water to swim around part of it, you’re stopped by invisible barriers.

The game never becomes as straightforward or restrictive as a conventional shooter, it just doesn’t manage to play to its strengths all the way through.

What it never loses is the feeling of a world full of interesting systems to tinker with. Take the technology: every security device is wired to a control panel, and everything that needs a lot of power is wired to a whale-oil battery. Every panel can be rewired to turn the device to your side, and every battery can be removed to turn it off.

At one point I couldn’t find a way past an Arc Pylon: a Tesla-coil that obliterates any intruder in a certain radius. The panel to rewire it was in range of the Pylon itself, impossible to reach alive. The battery that powered it was on a low platform that I also couldn’t get to without going near the Pylon. But I could see it, and I happen to know that whale oil batteries are highly explosive.

I shot it with a crossbow bolt, the battery blew, and the Pylon powered down. While the guards investigated the blown battery, I crept over to the control panel and rewired it. There were a few more batteries in a nearby storage room, so I stole a new one and powered it back up, now working for me. It fried so many guards that I eventually had to replace the battery.

A perfect swarm

Part of the reason Dunwall’s oppressive government installs automated security like this is to curb the spread of rats, which are a system in themselves. They’re everywhere, but they don’t pose a threat unless they gather into a bona fide swarm. That tends to happen around corpses, which they flock to wherever they find them. Once they’ve picked the body clean, the swarm will happily move onto living targets: you or your enemies.

I got cornered by a swarm while sneaking through a manor house. I’d slipped past two thugs to get into a bedroom, but now the swarm was between me and the door. So to solve two problems at once, I shot the wall.

The thugs ran over to investigate the noise, the rats ran over to investigate the thugs, and while the seething mass of vermin and flesh wrestled with itself, I skirted round it and sneaked upstairs.

Then there’s the Possession spell: once you’ve invested enough in it, you can take control of any man or beast for a few seconds. The limitations are pretty strict: you can’t attack, you die if they die, and when the spell ends, you step out of your victim rather than returning to your original location. But you can use Possession to slip past security systems without hacking them, or to escape a crowd of angry guards. I loved taking control of a Tallboy, the towering archers on stilts. The rest of the guards just see you vanish, and search for you while their heavy backup mysteriously wanders off to be alone.

Something else Dishonored never loses is its aesthetic flair. Dunwall is a rotting city port defined by the sharp divide between rich and poor.

Everything is weathered, faded and crumbling except for the pristine soapstone mansions of the aristocracy, and the game art relishes that grotesque contrast. Every monied bureaucrat wears a caricature of a sneer, every plague victim an exaggerated look of permanent dismay.

The masquerade mission is the visual centrepiece: a silk draped party in a manor of dazzling opulence, attended by nasty socialites whose monstrous masks seem like an externalisation of their ugly indifference to the plague. In the street outside, its vomiting victims are cut down by the guards’ explosive arrows if they stumble too far out of the gutter.

Dishonored’s whole world is textured with an oil-painted smudge that brings out the 19th-century vibe—despite the sci-fi tech. That’s part of what makes its atmosphere so intoxicating: we don’t often get to explore a setting like this.

For all those reasons, I recommend turning off almost every part of the interface. There’s a thrillingly nerdy array of options for this, and I found myself getting more and more lost in the game once I’d tinkered with them: I learned to listen for the noise of my mana recharging, read street signs to figure out where I was going, and notice the way I was holding my weapon to check whether I was in sneak mode.

This is all PC specific, and our version gets all the special attention we like: field-of-view options, responsive mouse movement, graphics options—you can even ‘Disable rat shadows’. +5 to the score right there.

Assassin’s speed

The only thing I can’t vouch for is performance: Bethesda aren’t letting code out of their office at time of writing, so I’ve only played it on a 2.8GHz Core i7 with a 2GB GeForce GTX 670 graphics card.

On that setup—contain your shock—it ran smoothly.

The fact that someone’s still putting real effort into the PC version of their multi-platform game is one good reason to buy it. But with Dishonored, there are quite a few. The fact that it doesn’t have any unskippable boss fights. That it’s one of the few major new games that isn’t a sequel or a remake. That a developer went to huge lengths to allow players this much freedom, and a publisher gave them the time and money to make it this slick.

It’s a big, shiny example of so much we keep asking for in games, but rarely get. Luckily, the best way to vindicate it is to buy and then play an amazing game.

It's quiet, save for the faint pings of a street light shifting ever so slightly in the wind down the street. So quiet, in fact, you'd be forgiven for forgetting this is Grand Theft Auto 4.

What's before you better resembles Fargo. It flies closer to the likes of Twin Peaks, reimagined in video games over the years by the likes of Alan Wake and Deadly Premonition. Here in Heartland, an enchanting WIP total conversion mod from creators Kultur-Remix, less is more. Which is hardly how you'd describe Niko Bellic's over the top exploits under the bright lights of faux-NYC Liberty City. But that is sort of the point.

"Cities are nice and all," says Kultur-Remix, "but many of us have only seen Los Angeles or New York through a television screen. How many of us have been through boring suburbs or rolling plains and crop fields in flyover country? Sure, it sounds boring, and if you aren't familiar with suburbia or rural America, this may not be the game for you.

"But, if you grew up with them like our devs, or are at least willing to open your mind and explore a part of America that isn't frequently explored, you'll be in for a treat."

There's an omnipresent calm-before-the-storm vibe to Heartland. It doesn't quite stride into the realms of anxiety—that would do its placid, welcoming nature a disservice—but there is a distinct uneasiness that underpins its suburban purview. By design, it's hard to put your finger on it. It's perhaps body and mind-related, a point of muscle memory that extends to controlling the character models and animations of GTA 4 and simply expecting chaos.

The rise of liminal spaces horror in recent years, not least on social media feeds, treads a similar line in that the super-mundane can project more than meets the eye. In Heartland, this eerie minimalism is illustrated by Sharon's place in 2006 Midwestern America, where crop is king and opportunities are scarce. The mod's blurb describes the protagonist's life as "driven by video games and her job delivering food for the local pizza joint"—a situation that goes awry and is then untangled over the course of 30 missions as the hero finds herself exploring worlds "she never knew existed". In reality, all of the above was inspired by the creators' formative experiences while carving a path in rural suburbia two decades ago.

Kultur-Remix adds: "One of the lead writers has a job delivering pizzas and did it for a few years in a 1980s Buick Skylark. The setting in Heartland is based on many of our developers' lives in boring suburban and exurban hometowns; a boring teenage-young adult life screaming to be let out.

"Despite trying to draw from real life parallels as opposed to doing what GTA normally does and drawing from movies, the closest piece of media we could allude to Heartland would be 1979's Over the Edge. That said, no direct parallels or references have been made to it in the development process of Heartland. Sharon being based on Mary Lynn Rajskub's role as the pizza delivery girl in Weezer's The Good Life music video is probably the only deliberate reference to an outside piece of media in the mod."

From its top-down beginnings last millennium to GTA 5 and the lawless murder grounds of GTA Online, the Grand Theft Auto series has hardly taken a breath in 30 years, and so projects like Heartland, for me, deserve credit for what they don't do as much as anything else. That's not to say it's without its moments of unbridled chaos, but at its core, it's a game about a disenfranchised young adult, forged by its creators' experiences and designed to be relatable to its players.

"First and foremost, we want to bring a unique experience to a great game," Kultur-Remix says. "A story about post graduation young adult angst and a desire to fit in with a crowd, regardless of how bad that crowd may be. Sharon's story will be one many of us can relate to, regardless of social class or country of origin.

"But we would also like to design a map for roleplaying potential. Mods like LCPDFR are quite popular and we would be remiss if we didn't design it for mods or roleplay servers like that. For example, we have a town hall interior fully-modelled with a wing for the sheriff's department. It has zero relevance in Sharon's story but, if someone were to make a roleplay server with the map, they wouldn't have to look too far to find a place to start their game as a cop. We are hoping to make it all open source upon release so it can be adapted to whatever people please.

"Ultimately, through all of this, we are creating a time capsule within a post-9/11 world, depicting pre-recession life in America. Most of our devs have lived through it and remember what it's like, seeing all kinds of shitbox cars on the road before Cash for Clunkers got rid of them all; and turning on the radio and hearing nu metal and pop rock being referred to as 'new' music."

Of course, the rise of the cozy genre and, going back a little further, walking simulators have a lot to answer for here. Games like Gone Home, Tacoma, Firewatch and What Remains of Edith Finch are standout examples of era-specific worlds defined by nostalgia, and Heartland in many ways feels like the Grand Theft Auto modding community's answer to all of the above. There's a story, characters with rich lore, missions that follow the familiar GTA framework—but there's also wider themes of economic crises, the slow death of the middle class and the omnipresent threat of war on the world stage and how that impacts the daily lives of the blue collar workforce.

As a result, Heartland feels like one of the most authentic total conversions to surface from the GTA hobbyist scene in recent years, as a grittier, warts-and-all look beyond the action movie facade more closely associated with the series in 2026 and now on the cusp of its next blockbuster outing. It's for this very reason that the team chose GTA 4 as opposed to its successor to build Heartland on in the first place.

Kultur-Remix adds: "The short answer as to why we've chosen GTA 4 for the mod is because it's the underdog of the series, just like us.

"San Andreas, while a good game (and with all due respect to those who are doing story mods for 3D-era games), just isn't the best for character-driven stories because it's quite stiff. Heartland was originally a Vice City mod but switched for GTA 4 due to budgetary reasons.

"When we saw the HQ model of Sharon taking running and sliding to cover, we knew we'd made the right decision. Why we didn't choose 5 is mostly because it doesn't do driving, gunplay, etc. as well as the fourth main series entry did. We don't want to reinvent the wheel to tell a good story, so the logical step is to make it for number four.

"From here, we're focused on refining scripting, voice acting for the main characters, mixing radio stations, and working on interiors. And bug fixing too! We'll be damned if this comes out broken, given how long we've spent working on it."

Follow Heartland's development here.

The infamous launch of Cyberpunk 2077 was a low point in CD Projekt Red's history. With hype levels at critical mass, the RPG released in a buggy, unoptimised, and downright unfinished state that was so bad the PS4 version of the game was pulled from the PlayStation store. The company's share price tanked, investors filed a class action lawsuit, and CDPR's reputation was left in tatters.

Yet at the same time, Cyberpunk 2077 was a huge commercial success, and CD Projekt used some of those profits to fix its broken blockbuster. Its 2.0 patch, combined with the excellent Phantom Liberty expansion, addressed many of the RPG's problems, successfully turning around the game's reputation and cementing its place as a roleplaying great.

As far as I'm concerned, all is forgiven. But CDPR co-CEO Michał Nowakowski doesn't believe this is the case for everyone. In a live interview at DevGAMM Gdańsk republished in the Edge magazine's Knowledge newsletter (via GamesRadar), Nowakowski lamented that Cyberpunk's launch debacle likely lost the studio some fans permanently.

"I'm not 100 per cent convinced we went through the full redemption arc," Nowakowski told interviewer Jörg Tittel. "I'm convinced that we lost the faith of some people indefinitely, and that's a fair thing. But I do hope we will be able to make it back—if not with The Witcher 4, then with whatever comes next."

While there may still be some holes in CDPR's reputation, the experience of fixing Cyberpunk did leave the studio in an advantageous position. Not only financially, but also in terms of its team. "We were left with seasoned, battle-hardened veterans; leaders who were able to carry a different kind of challenge on their shoulders," Nowakowski explained.

This, according to Nowakowski, is why CDPR was able to spread into a multi-project company, with both The Witcher 4 and Cyberpunk 2 currently in production, as well as the mysterious Project Hadar. The goal is to become a more prolific developer. But not too prolific.

"Our dream is to be making more games, although we never want to turn into the studio that's going to be launching a big game every year," Nowakowski said. "It may happen. But this is not the goal. We have a rough ten-year rolling plan, but the goal is not to flood the games market with CDPR games."

It's going to be a while before we see the results of CDPR's more prolific structure. The Witcher 4 isn't due until 2027 at the earliest (and I suspect is more likely to arrive in 2028). Cyberpunk 2, meanwhile, may not arrive until 2030.

This is probably why CDPR has greenlit a third expansion to The Witcher 3: Wild Hunt. Songs of the Past, which is being built by The Thaumaturge developers Fool's Theory, is due to be released next year. The expansion is expected to provide a big extra chunk of Witcher-ing, estimated to be similar to Blood & Wine in scope.

Season 2 of Marathon kicked off earlier this month, and thus far it's been a season of ups and downs. Things started badly, with Bungie's traditional launch woes undermining its free-to-play week. But new features like the Night-time Dire Marsh map and its Sponsored Survival quickly proved hits popular with the community.

A few weeks in, however, new problems have emerged. Basically, progression in Marathon has become too easy, which is ironic considering the game's formidable reputation. Where you felt lucky to extract with anything of value in Season 1, Season 2 players have apparently been hoovering up so much loot that their vaults are overflowing with goodies, throwing the game's economy into disarray.

Earlier this week, Bungie published a Steam post explaining what had gone wrong, and what might be causing it. "Out of the gate in Season 2, progression and access to power moved much faster than the previous season," the developer wrote. "For reference, the average wealth in week two of Season 2 is similar to what we saw in weeks 11 and 12 of Season 1. And while we did want to increase progression speeds, we didn't land at a place that's healthy for the game."

Oops. As for what's causing this issue, the answer appears to be a combination of factors. For starters, there were several contributing bugs that Bungie says it's now fixed, such as "guaranteed gold drops in places that shouldn't have them". The rush of Sponsored Kits at the start of the season also gave progression a boost, as did a combined issue with "Sponsored Survival grind" and a valuable chest in the Complex Control area, with players milking Marathon's mostly PvE mode for all it was worth.

The primary factor remains somewhat elusive, however. According to Bungie, there's an issue making higher rarity loot proliferate through the game. But the team doesn't know exactly what's causing this. "This isn't something we've seen in our internal playtests, and we're still unravelling the source." Curious.

While it investigates this, Bungie has made some other "tweaks" targeting progression, such as turning off boosted containers and nerfs to Cradle XP rates. But these are temporary measures, which Bungie plans to "reverse later in the season when we have other solutions in place." Hopefully the team will figure out the root cause of the problem soon, though I'm sure there are some players who don't mind having a slightly easier time of it on Tau Ceti IV, at least in the short term.

The endless online battle of Guild Wars is about to spill over the borders of the MMO genre. Having only just announced Guild Wars 3 earlier this month, ArenaNet and its parent NC has revealed that it's also taking the series into an entirely new genre, through an official Guild Wars card game called Mistbound.

Mistbound is licensed by ArenaNet and developed by NC with the involvement of bilibili—the Chinese equivalent of YouTube.

"We felt it was time to give Guild Wars fans a new way to play together, inspired by the card game roots of the franchise, where they could compete in a competitive PvP arena in a CCG game space," said ArenaNet studio head Colin Johanson in a statement. "Having all those experiences they love of the characters and creatures and the sounds of the world of Tyria brought to life in CCG."

By "card game roots" Johanson is referring to the fact that Guild Wars was inspired by Magic: The Gathering, specifically in how character attributes can be modified to create bespoke builds. Mistbound's twist on the digital CCG formula is basically to give you cards that can move around. Its key feature is a dynamic 5x3 tactical grid where units and commanders—which are deployed as cards—can then reposition turn-by-turn in response to enemy movement.

Apparently, this system—which NC calls "dynamic movement gameplay" is intended to make the inherent complexity of a card game like Magic a bit more intuitive.

"One challenge with pursuing deep strategic combinations in card games is that the cards themselves can easily become overly complex,” said Mistbound producer Hwang Sunwoo. "Rather than placing that complexity on individual cards, we wanted to express it through the battlefield."

During battle, players will be able to exploit numerous mechanics like knockbacks, pulls and flanking. Alongside standard units, familiar Guild Wars characters can step onto the battlefield as commanders, bringing unique abilities and tactics for you to take advantage of. You can also expect a soundtrack with contributions from Guild Wars' original musicians, and voice performances for all those Guild Wars regulars.

The bilibili angle of this seems to be on the community development side. The press release says that development of Mistbound is being guided not just by the developers' design knowhow but by "direct, high-quality player input". I also imagine NC is looking to build an audience for Mistbound out of the game, possibly with a mind to the game becoming an esport a-la Hearthstone.

There's no release date for Mistbound as yet, but I doubt this will launch much before the end of the year, and we're most likely to see it sometime in 2027.

From the archives: This story originally ran in PC Gamer (UK) #279.

Crysis 2 gets a lot wrong. Its AI is criminally stupid. Its story is a convoluted mess. Its characters are hackneyed archetypes. Worst of all, its narrower environments and more limited nanosuit restrict the potential for emergent play, which was the essence of the original game. As far as sequels go, many of Crytek's design decisions for Crysis 2 are utterly baffling.

Yet for all its mistakes, Crysis 2 gets one thing right: destruction. From its low-key beginning to its apocalyptic final act, this grim fairytale of New York is a master-class in disaster fiction. If you embrace this theme of obliteration rather than fighting it, Crysis 2 is at times even more enjoyable than the original.

The game puts you in the boots of US marine and personality vacuum Alcatraz. Within five minutes he’s seen half his platoon massacred by the alien menace known as the Ceph, been shot half to pieces himself, and been given the task of saving New York by Prophet, the nanosuited squad leader from Crysis 1.

Crytek recognised that the most interesting aspect of the first game was the nanosuit, and so built Crysis 2's story almost entirely around it. The nanosuit is the game's real hero, synthesising a cure for the alien virus as the story progresses.

Alcatraz is merely a bag of leaky meat who provides the suit with locomotive abilities to get from objective to objective. Our FPS protagonists are often defined by their suits and little else (Half-Life and Halo are two notable examples) so why not give the suit some of the credit for once?

It's a fun idea, but Crysis 2 fails to walk its talk. During play it actually reduces the suit's functionality from that of the first game. It decreases the number of active abilities from four to two, armour mode and cloak, while speed and strength become passive abilities with little impact on how you play.

There are no walls to punch through, and chucking objects and enemies about is fiddly and unsatisfying. You can Power Kick cars and certain objects, which feels good. But having played the game three times, I’ve never once used this successfully in combat.

Cloaking, meanwhile, is almost too effective, letting you waltz past enemies as they forget about you the moment line of sight is broken. It's always tempting to exploit Crysis 2's artificial idiocy, but I’d strongly advise against it, simply because a pure stealth approach isn’t the way to get the most out of the game.

Instead, use Cloak to navigate your way to the nearest mounted machine gun. Tear it off its mounts. Then activate armour mode, identify a target, and let rip. Feel the kick of the HMG judder up your mouse arm as it spits bullets the size of table knives, listen to the stomp of your feet as the nanosuit’s hardened shell collides with the tarmac. Marvel as CELL troopers and Ceph alike crumble in the face of your merciless onslaught.

This is what Crysis 2 is really about: glorious devastation, using your cloak to place yourself in a position of supremacy, and then ripping through the enemy ranks before they have time to blink. It simply takes a while to make this fact obvious.

Yet there are glimmers of a love for breaking things in the first few hours. Early on a beleaguered alien spacecraft smashes into a skyscraper, tearing a huge hole in its upper floors. A couple of levels later, a whole section of the FDR highway collapses before your eyes, leaving a thick cloud of dust that you can use to quietly pick off mercenaries investigating the cause. Yet these are merely scripted vignettes interspersed between long stretches of small-arms combat, as you evade and engage groups of CELL mercenaries on your mission to meet up with a hacker known as Gould.

It's only when you regroup with the marines, around a third of the way through the game, that Crysis 2 kicks into its highest gear. The familiar grid-like streets of Manhattan are transformed into canyon-like gouges in the earth, as the city is slowly torn apart by the alien's root-like virus dispersal pipelines. Your arsenal become more powerful and your enemies larger and more numerous.

Additionally, your role in the game turns much more defensive, as you assist the army with the evacuation of the city. A standoff against a thunderous assault by the Ceph concludes with you bringing down one of their mighty gunships, while the best level in the game —'Unsafe Haven'—sees you fighting through the Ceph battle-lines in order to prime and detonate demolition charges on a multi-storey building, bringing it crashing down across the Ceph’s artillery trajectory.

It's this gradual escalation that makes Crysis 2 so satisfying for me. The city's destruction becomes an inversely-proportional progression tracker. As the fight becomes more and more desperate, the city becomes less and less recognisable. It's reminiscent of Half-Life 2's 'AntiCitizen One' and 'Follow Freeman' chapters, but drawn out over a longer period. Also, rather than being on the assault, you're on the back foot, simply trying to buy time as you attempt to get the city's populace to safety. Crysis 2 excels at making the Ceph feel like a genuine threat, always capable of matching and exceeding Alcatraz’s own superhuman capabilities.

Unfortunately, while the mid-to-late section is excellent, the final mission is a massive anticlimax. Once again it lets you breeze past most of the enemies, and the ending is a big dollop of nonsense that leaves you mystified and disappointed.

Although I like the slower start, and admire it for not frontloading its action, that failure to build to a satisfying climax damages the game considerably.

In the end, Crysis 2's limitation on emergent play proved to be an error in judgement, one that Crytek tried (and failed) to rectify in the undercooked Crysis 3. But there are still moments of greatness in there. Crysis 2 gets a lot wrong, but we shouldn’t let that obscure the things it got right.

When PC Gamer senior editor Wes Fenlon wrote about Luna Abyss last month, he said it left him "already hoping for more of its kind." Sadly, it doesn't look like that will happen—the entire team that made it has just been laid off.

The news came in the form of a LinkedIn post from Kwalee Labs CEO Hollie Emery posted June 16. "The entire team has been made redundant; a decision that was completely outside of our control," Emery said.

"As a result, the entire team is available for work as of today … Thanks for your endless support, and whilst we’re sad it ended like this—I have no doubt that our team will go on to make amazing things." The nine affected developers are listed on the LinkedIn post, and Emery encouraged potential employers (or anyone in contact with potential employers) to reach out directly and share the post.

While Luna Abyss was celebrated critically, it appears that didn't translate to good sales. According to SteamDB, the game has a concurrent player count of just 43 as I write this, and at its peak only ever reached 317. The bullet hell has always been niche, but Luna Abyss further tested that with a cutting-edge genre fusion. Still, the game released less than a month before all this on May 21—its chance to draw folks in was cut absurdly short.

If you're unfamiliar with the game, it merges the bullet hell with the FPS for a unique combination of autoaim-infused blasting and pattern dodging. In his impressions, Wes said it "is proof the bullet hell FPS should be a thing … the bullet hell is more than 30 years old, but all Luna Abyss had to do to make it feel fresh was put it in first-person, robbing you of the peripheral vision Returnal is kind enough to offer."

It's a somber reminder that even making a great game won't protect you from the innumerable sorts of turmoil killing jobs in the videogame industry, even as it, from a bird's eye view, rakes in cash like never before.

The gaming industry's in a bit of a state, defined these days by extreme consolidation, massive waves of layoffs as the pandemic boom fades into memory, and skyrocketing hardware prices we're calling the RAMpocalypse. But that doesn't mean less money's going around: quite the opposite, in fact.

A quarterly Global Games Market Report was published last Thursday by gaming market research firm Newzoo, and it states that the "global games market closed 2025 at $201.6 billion (+9.1% year over year), crossing the $200 billion threshold for the first time." This surpassed prior estimates from Newzoo, and is despite "weaker-than-expected" performance from Nintendo and generally "modest" console market growth.

In other words, PC led the charge with Newzoo's strongest recorded growth rate so far: $43.6 billion (+12.0% year over year). The report reckons the sheer variety of popular games across different price points is responsible: full price mega-hits like Battlefield 6 were balanced out by acclaimed, cheaper games like Clair Obscur. Microtransactions are a big slice as well, with games like Roblox raking in cash.

For comparison, console revenues were a bit higher at around $44.7 billion, but came with a much smaller growth rate of +2.8% year over year. As you might expect, mobile revenues were the highest with over double what PC or consoles brought in: a whopping $113.3 billion. Still, its growth rate remains just under that of the PC.

You can read the full analysis in the report, but the highlights are what you might predict: memory costs are making it harder to get into gaming, analysts expect GTA 6 to hit the market like an atom bomb, and Newzoo doesn't foresee PC having quite the stacked year it did in 2025 this time around (even with September full to bursting as it is with hotly anticipated games).

It's remarkably dissonant with, say, the current 'Xbox reset' which has Microsoft cancelling games and looking to ax studios left and right. With the console wars resuming and unions still battling to get a word in, it's hard to conclude all this cash is being used to sustainably bring the industry forward.

Much has been said about the way generative AI is worming its way into game development pipelines, and David Gaider—former BioWare writer and lead writer on the first three Dragon Age games—recently spoke to GamesRadar about some of the dangers he foresees for future teams working with these tools.

Gaider said that AI's lack of consistency would make appraising, troubleshooting, and cleaning up its work difficult. The process of having to go back and touch up its output, not knowing why it spat out a certain result "would be frustrating as hell … it's not ready for prime time," he said. "There's just a lot of executives who really, really want it to be."

The writer also told GamesRadar that the idea that AI can replace rote tasks often handed off to junior developers isn't necessarily a good thing, either: "How are we going to train up the next generation of devs if we eliminate every entry-level task?"

AI tools have been used in a 'creative' sense as well—the explanation often goes that they're just used for placeholders or helping with early prototypes and concepts—but Gaider is wary of this application too, given that artists haven't agreed to have "their data pillaged." The reaction to the new Crazy Taxi game suggests that a lot of players are also skeptical of AI's creative applications.

Many other devs were quoted in GamesRadar's feature, and while not all of them shared the exact same concerns about AI, their feelings were along the same lines. Iron Lung and Dusk creator David Szymanski, for instance, said he's not "not categorically against AI as a whole technology" but finds it a bridge too far to "hand wave all the ethical concerns about plagiarism, environmental impact, and job security." Marvel Rivals executive producer Danny Koo said the worries about plagiarism were of particular concern, saying the team avoided AI art tools to ensure the game's assets weren't "poisoned."

The ongoing Neverwinter Nights mod campaign, Swordflight, feels like the CRPG equivalent of fans circulating the tapes, a forbidden, perfect bootleg of the greatest hardcore set ever performed. It's one of the most cleverly-designed, bracingly difficult RPG campaigns I've ever played, and it's a hobby project one guy has been cranking away at since 2008.

Swordflight is a series of discrete playable chunks or "modules" for Neverwinter Nights, BioWare's awkward middle child between Baldur's Gate 2 and Knights of the Old Republic (that we still can't help but love). NwN's Aurora Toolset is one of those legendary mod platforms that balanced ease of use with power and flexibility, resulting in a flowering of fanmade projects.

Think the Doom or Thief mod communities: Not everything is a gem, but so many people took to Aurora and so many projects were made that the best of the best still encompasses several full games' worth of RPG goodness. The Alazander modules, Aielund Saga, and Swordflight are among that best of the best.

Swordflight's first module came out in 2008, and its most recent released in 2022, with at least one more chapter on the way to finish the story. It's a zero-to-hero D&D epic like very few I've ever played: There are low-level adventures like The Temple of Elemental Evil and plenty of level 1-20 campaigns, but very few games or series of games that capture the feeling of coming back to the same character and dungeon master over a span of years.

Swordflight, the original Baldur's Gate duology, and arguably Owlcat's 100-hour campaigns like Kingmaker fit the bill. Many RPG designers rightly fear D&D's early levels, wanting to juice you up to level 3+ as quickly as possible to get you to that midgame sweet spot and past early game one-hit kill, missing your attacks doldrums, but Swordflight creator Rogueknight333 embraced that design challenge.

He felt no need to rush players through Neverwinter Nights' 40-level adaptation of D&D 3E rules, but instead has luxuriated at every possible stage of character development. Swordflight's first chapter, for example, is easily a 10+ hour experience, but you need a fairly optimized character and completionist play to reach level five by the end of it.

Making guys

To date, I've only played the first two of five finished chapters, but multiple times each. That 60 hours or so of roleplaying has hit me with one of the worst cases of reroll-itis I've ever caught, tied with Owlcat's Pathfinder: Wrath of the Righteous. Neverwinter Nights has a particularly excellent version of D&D's class system⁠—its 11 base and 12 prestige classes presaged Baldur's Gate 3's smorgasbord of 48 subclasses and Wrath of the Righteous' triple-digit madness.

That's already led me to plenty of hemming, hawing, buildcrafting, and rerolling in other Neverwinter Nights campaigns, but Swordflight squeezes even more juice with its gnarly difficulty. Like Wrath of the Righteous, part of the rerolling appeal is wanting to make a guy strong enough to rise up to the challenge.

Swordflight made me look at Neverwinter Nights, a game I'd played for hundreds of hours before even touching the mod campaign, in a whole new light. Rogueknight333 increased the duration of all potions and other magical buffs while making it all but impossible to rest anywhere but an inn with the door locked. Creative restriction of how often you can rest is a big part of difficulty balancing in any D&D-derived game, and most just let you take a nap to get all your spells and health back whenever you want.

Swordflight's restriction makes it a game about planning, resource management, getting maximum value out of every tool at your disposal, and mounting little expeditions from your safe zones.There are potions I never would have given the time of day to in base NwN that become precious commodities in Swordflight⁠—shout out to Barkskin⁠—and you basically never want to go into a fight unbuffed.

Spellcasters have to be super-disciplined with their limited spell slots, but Swordflight makes up the difference with a generous and creative economy of consumable magic items. The aforementioned potions, but also wands, rods, and assorted geegaws. More than pure wizards or warriors, Swordflight rewards adaptability, being a fantasy boy scout with a tool for every occasion, and having a build that can effectively use as many magic items as possible.

Rogue and bard multiclasses are killer in my experience, but you also have to be able to tank or solo incredibly challenging combat encounters. Swordflight carcinization, in my experience, bends all builds toward some flavor of JRPG protagonist "jack of all trades spellsword who also hits like a truck," but even in this niche, there's a ton of variety. I've rocked:

• Fighter / Bard / Red Dragon Disciple
• Fighter / Rogue / Weapon Master
• Rogue / Paladin / Shadowdancer

And I'm feeling the urge to make yet another Swordflight guy, this time maybe a Rogue / Fighter / Shadowdancer with a greatsword to Hulk smash sneak attack helplessly knocked down opponents.

Something that's always struck me is that these deep systems were always there in Neverwinter Nights, waiting like a sculpture in a chunk of marble, but no one ever took advantage of them. It took the unique perspective of this non-professional designer to tease it out, and that's just cool to me.

[Paladin]: "Cool special Paladin dialogue goes here"

Another draw to constant rerolling is how much Swordflight takes your race, class, alignment, and prior choices into account at seemingly every turn. In the starting area of chapter one, people will comment on your class, there are dozens of special alignment and skill interactions, and one jerk has unique racist dialogue for every possible character creation choice⁠—at least he's equal opportunity, I guess.

In Neverwinter Nights, every character race is almost always suboptimal compared to human, given our extra feat at level one. Swordflight's difficulty further encourages powergaming, but its high degree of written reactivity makes it so much more meaningful than usual to go with your heart and pick something fun. The fact that my customary half-orc is at least a little bit disadvantaged, requiring a mechanical sacrifice on my part, lends the choice even more meaning and value to me here. It's like rooting for the White Sox: You gotta really love being an orc to stick it out in Swordflight.

Chapter two introduces special side quests by class, some better than others. Fighters get to clear some jerk's basement of golems, while rogues get a full Thieves' Guild questline. That last one gets to one of the weirder bits I love about Swordflight, part of the reason I often refer to it as RPG "outsider art:" Author Rogueknight333's very specific, exacting standard of ethics and how he applies them.

Every single object stolen earns you an alignment shift toward evil. Even just unlocking an owned chest or disarming its trap: Evil. Killing wild animals unprovoked? Now that's a point toward chaos, a distinction I'd definitely argue with. Swordflight chapters one and two both take place in Calimshan, a slave society in the Forgotten Realms, and I chafe against how Swordflight defines "law," "good," "evil," and "chaos" in such a context.

But it's so good at letting you roleplay and own your choices, I love encountering these disconnects with my far-removed dungeon master. It feels like I'm in conversation with the game and its creator, and this unfamiliar moral code makes for something truly substantial to push on and roleplay against. This is one of the only games where I'm ever comfortable being "Chaotic Evil," for a given value of both chaos and evil.

Swordflight's prose and dialogue can be stiff and voluminous, but it tells an interesting yarn with some clever twists and mechanical flourishes. Chief among them: You're not actually the protagonist here. The true hero is endearingly annoying, YA novel lead girl wannabe Zarala Galhadr, while your created character sits at the intersection of Obi-Wan Kenobi and Gurney Halleck. Your own, personal development on D&D's moral spectrum is mirrored by your ward and tracked across Swordflight's chapters.

There's so much more I could gush about, but I should try getting a character past chapter two first. RPG blogger Lilura1 is how I first heard about Swordflight, and she has a number of resources and guides dedicated to the series, as well as an interview with creator Rogueknight333.

Neverwinter Nights Enhanced Edition is compatible with Swordflight and every fanmade module I've tested, and can frequently be found on sale on GOG and Steam⁠—I might buy this game yet again in the upcoming Steam Summer Sale to see how it plays on Steam Deck. Swordflight itself, meanwhile, can be downloaded for free from the Neverwinter Vault, and you can support Rogueknight333 on Patreon.

Microsoft has spent the past few years laying off thousands of workers from its collection of game studios, which ballooned under former Xbox CEO Phil Spencer. Now it's set to cut more jobs and close more studios as part of new CEO Asha Sharma's "Xbox reset."

That years-long Xbox cost-cutting campaign has led to more game cancellations than we know about, ending huge projects that, at least on the surface, were exciting.

Were these "hard decisions" genuinely the pragmatic ones? The 2020s certainly have been marked by some massive flops, and it's possible that some of these projects were money pits. A couple of them were especially risky propositions: big, hard-to-make online games.

But as Microsoft doubles down on console exclusives and tries to hurry along heavy-hitters like The Elder Scrolls 6, I've got to wonder if it was wise to toss so much in-progress work, some of which was highly praised internally.

It's the risky games that are the most exciting, and while Gears of War: E-Day looks impressive in ways, it's not exactly an electrifying proposition this far removed from the 2010s. Given how profitable Microsoft is as a whole—it's making billions even as it dumps money into AI—was it really pragmatic not to let some of its best cooks cook?

Here are five of the big games Microsoft recently crossed off the upcoming list.

'Odyssey,' Blizzard's survival game | Cancelled in 2024

We first heard that Blizzard was making a survival game in 2022. Codenamed Odyssey, it had been in development for almost five years at that point, and Blizzard devs on and off the project were hyped about it.

Former Blizzard president Mike Ybarra said that he'd "played many hours" of the game and was "incredibly excited about the team's vision and the brand-new world it presents for players to immerse themselves in together."

"All I can say is it's gonna absolutely rock," said novelist and Blizzard writer Christie Golden. "Hella beautiful too. I cannot wait!"

Microsoft acquired Activision Blizzard in 2023 and cancelled Odyssey in 2024. Ybarra left the company at the same time.

According to a Bloomberg report, development of Odyssey had started in Unreal Engine, but struggled under a mandate to switch to "an internal engine that the company had originally developed for mobile games." Odyssey was not close to release when it was cancelled, the publication reported.

Maybe it was a classic case of development hell, but a survival game with Blizzard's polish, storytelling, and art direction sounds like a good idea to me, and unlike some genres, co-op survival hasn't calcified. Even in a quite unfinished early access state and after lots of corporate drama, Subnautica 2 sold over 4 million copies this year.

Everwild | Cancelled in 2025

We never got a complete picture of what Everwild was going to be. Rare is best known these days for Sea of Thieves, in which players battle it out on the high seas in search of treasure. Everwild, by contrast, appeared to be a game about being kind to animals.

Everwild had been development for a long time when it was cancelled, and was reportedly rebooted once, which probably didn't help convince Microsoft that it should continue to fund a game that contained no exploding barrels or grimacing men.

But the pitch for Sea of Thieves probably raised eyebrows, too. A casual game to play with your friends, but it's PvP and players can grief each other? No progression beyond cosmetics? And you want to spend how much time making the water look awesome?

Rare's creativity shines in the trailer above: I don't know what's going on with the giant amphibian that carries fish (or its young?) around in its mouth, but the vibe is great.

Everwild was cancelled in 2025 during one of Microsoft's mass layoff waves.

Perfect Dark | Cancelled in 2025

The 2025 cuts also claimed a reboot of classic Rare first-person shooter Perfect Dark and one of the studios that was making it, The Initiative. ("Several unannounced projects" were also vaporized that day.)

The gameplay video above is the last we saw of the FPS. An immersive sim-ish shooter campaign with sci-fi gadgets is perhaps not a cutting-edge concept in 2026, but you can say the same about Gears of War: E-Day and the Halo campaign remake. Perfect Dark is a beloved classic, and the response to the gameplay reveal was positive.

Take-Two reportedly tried to take the game off of Microsoft's hands, but couldn't reach a deal. The GTA publisher clearly believed it had potential, though, because it snatched up the former leads on the game to found a new studio.

Contraband | Cancelled in 2025

Contraband was a collaboration between Microsoft and Just Cause developer Avalanche Studios Group. It was going to be a co-op smuggling game set in the '70s, but Avalanche announced in 2025 that active development of the game had ceased. It could theoretically still happen without Microsoft, but it doesn't seem likely.

We never found out much about Contraband, which was announced in 2021 with the gameplay-less teaser above, but an open world co-op crime game from the Just Cause developer sounds like a good time.

Project Blackbird | Cancelled in 2025

ZeniMax Online Studios, the developer behind Elder Scrolls Online, had quietly been working on a new MMO—codenamed Project Blackbird—for over six years before Microsoft cancelled it alongside the other games it tossed out in 2025. Phil Spencer reportedly liked the game a lot, but that wasn't enough to save it.

ZeniMax Online Studios founder Matt Firor resigned as a result of the cancellation, and said earlier this year that he'd been waiting his entire career to make a game like Project Blackbird. In a separate interview in April, Firor said that Blackbird would've been "fantastic" and that Microsoft missed an opportunity by not following through.

The reason it got the axe, Firor says, is that public companies like predictable, consistent revenue growth, and an MMO with lots of front-loaded development costs represents "a very large bet."

"It's just: Big business is big business," he said. "Microsoft is Microsoft, right? And a giant successful videogame on the Microsoft level was frankly not that stimulating to them."

Some of the laid-off Blackbird team went on to form a new studio with a wry name, Sackbird, and are now at work on a new project.

"After years in AAA, we wanted the freedom to take smart risks without waiting for a greenlight or chasing quarterly targets," Sackbird COO David Worley said when the studio was announced. "We're fully employee-owned and funded, which means we only answer to people who are passionate about games."

If you've never endured a corporate cybersecurity training session, here's the gist: every USB stick is a gift from god. If you find one, errant in the street, it's your solemn duty to slam that thing into the nearest available port with such enthusiasm it fractures your wrist. If that USB stick is labelled "From North Korea"? Even moreso, probably. It's travelled a ways to get here.

I have been playing with RedStar OS 3.0, a homegrown national Linux distro of the Democratic People's Republic of Korea (though plenty of machines in the country stick to various versions of Windows). In what security experts are calling "A really good idea, Josh," I have been tinkering with it in a virtual machine—or several—on my PC. It's all very normal and fine and not worth bothering the IT department about.

You might be thinking "Haven't you done this before?" in which case I salute your memory. Yes, I have mucked about with RedStar OS, all the way back in December 2022, when I investigated which pariah state OS is best for gaming.

What led me back? Two things. The first, I am not running vanilla RedStar OS this time. I'm running RedStar OS 3.5 (or trying to—more on that later), a, uh, fan mod of base RedStar that claims to hack out the spyware, more easily switches the OS to root, quickly turns most of the GUI English, and—notionally—adds "a new 64bit kernel, new compiler, new 64bit libraries, and a lot more."

Which is quite a big deal, really; RedStar 3.0 is long in the tooth. It's based on Fedora 15 (for reference, Fedora's most recent release is 44) from 2011, and in its default mode runs using a 2.6 version of the Linux kernel. RedStar 3.5 promises to cram a 5.something kernel in there, alongside various other more recent gubbins, which I thought might ease the process of playing games on the thing. Or, indeed, using it.

Which leads me to my second reason to return to RedStar: I know what all that means, now. When I first touched RedStar back in 2022, Linux was mostly a mystery to me. Now? I'm a loyal openSUSE Tumbleweed user, familiar with at least the basics of running a Linux system. I felt that these two factors, combined, would make my return to RedStar OS much, much smoother sailing than it was four years ago.

A horrible nightmare from which there is no escape

The first riddle with which RedStar OS presents you is running it. Back in 2022, this was agony—a process of booting and rebooting a virtual machine until it inexplicably didn't crash at launch.

This time? A little easier. Installation proceeded smoothly using Virtual Machine Manager. Alarmingly easy, really. The VM booted from the .iso, the installer ran fine—presenting me with three possible timezones to choose from in the DPRK, Japan, or Russia—and the VM seamlessly rebooted into a full RedStar OS session. Briefly.

Issue one: I could not login. I really wanted to login. I'd set up a user account during the install process and everything. But during the boot process RedStar would, invariably, crash as soon as it got to its login manager, glitching out into a green/blue mess that did little except remind me of the proud nation of Sierra Leone.

But it's fine, right? I'm a Linux guy now. If the GUI login manager was crashing, I knew I could probably force the machine to kick me to the tty—the purest form of the command line, completely free of modern graphical nonsense—by holding Shift, Alt, and randomly pawing at function keys.

This… worked? This worked! RedStar booted me to the CLI like it had never even heard of a graphical user interface. Then, uh… then what? What was the plan from there, Josh?

It wasn't completely stupid. My original plan was to login via the tty then get back into the graphical desktop environment—basically taking a detour around the suicidal login manager—using the 'startx' command. Except that didn't work. Startx told me in no uncertain terms that I could sod off with that sort of low trickery, leaving me logged in but graphics-less.

This was a problem because I was not, at this point, actually using RedStar OS's modified version. The modifications that hack out the spyware run after you successfully login the first time, meaning I was A) not even as far as I managed to get back in 2022 and B) potentially faxing the entire contents of my SSD to an office in Pyongyang.

RedStar OS has a documented feature of rapaciously watermarking media files that are in any way exposed to it—documents, images, audio and the like The reason for this, presumably, is to easily trace media within the DPRK itself. If someone has media they shouldn't have, you can trace it to the machine that originally produced it, and possibly any other machines it touched along the way.

Which, hey, my computer already has the eyes of my own government and probably yours (if you are from the US) on it, so the notion of the Kim family knowing I have an .mkv of War and Peace in my Downloads folder doesn't concern me overmuch. Maybe you can put so much spyware on your machine that they all get in each other's way, like the diseases in Mr Burns' body.

But it didn't thrill me, either, and I was anyway eager to see what a modified RedStar ran like, regardless of whether the unmodified version was stitching a Josh Wolens nametag into my Steam version of Desperados. This led me on quite a long and winding road which concluded with me attempting to hack myself root access in the CLI before I realised I had comprehensively lost my mind.

I turned to the official RedStar OS 3.5 Discord, where after some searching I found out that my problem was the QEMU-based virtualisation of my VM software, upon encountering which it seems RedStar's login manager immediately executes itself.

I tried again, this time with VirtualBox.

Into the fire

The good news: it worked! Whatever Ellison-based blood magic Oracle injected into its VM software made RedStar's login software very happy, and it was a mere jiffy before I was sat happily in the glow of its familiar green desktop.

The bad news: it worked! My travails with RedStar did not end after the login screen. Mercifully, the first stage of the 3.5 modifications—the ones that strip out the spyware and grant you the root access necessary to start getting real weird with the system—kicked off faultlessly. The 3.5 iso is, on top of being the installation media for base RedStar 3.0, also the host for the mod files, and all you have to do to make them work is disconnect and reconnect your VM's disc drive.

But the second stage? Harder. This is the one that's meant to comprehensively remodel the OS, adding in the 64-bit kernel and libraries that might, possibly, have made my quest to play a game on the damn thing a little bit easier.

I tried. I really did. The second-stage mods take a long time—we're talking hours, and the three separate times I tried to get them working (which probably cost me six hours, all told) all crashed at the same point, leaving me with a spyware-free but still deeply archaic OS.

Making matters harder is the fact that RedStar essentially can't connect to the 2026 internet. In its default form, it's designed exclusively to work with the DPRK's nationwide intranet, the Kwangmyong, and trying to point it at addresses outside of that confuses the hell out of it. An advantage of the first-stage 3.5 mods is that they automatically scrub its usual IP tables, making it able to chat to the global internet.

But it can only do that via certain internet-facing terminal commands (like 'wget') and its built-in Naenara—Korean for 'our country'—browser, which is based on an ancient version of Firefox. Do you want to use Google? Buddy, you're in luck, because that's the only website that Naenara can load in 2026. Anything else throws an error.

My aged and inert OS was at least in English, thanks to the mods, but it was otherwise dead in the water. Even the built-in yum package manager—which I could perhaps have used to install extra stuff to grease my way to playable videogames—only spoke to a single, very limited software repository, which was in Korean, strangely enough.

I still made a valiant effort. I downloaded an ancient version of Tux Racer, wrote its files to an .iso, and loaded into my RedStar VM, but the damn thing's Makefile—which should have prepped a playable version of the game—refused to play ball, even after I installed a thick wedge of new libraries with yum (not entirely sure where those even came from, I must admit, and prefer not to think about it).

All I was left with was RedStar's default library of apps: a songbook/music notation program, a reskin of GIMP called Hwansang, and various others, including a version of Korean chess, which is the closest I got to running games on this thing.

Things got bad enough that I even turned to Google Gemini—I know, I know—to see if a data centre the size of Houston could help me out. The data centre the size of Houston could not, and seemed to have remarkably little data on running videogames on North Korean operating systems. So much for the future.

Without a break

My attempts to finagle RedStar 3.5 into working ended as a damp squib, I'm sorry to say, and as much I'd like to conclude this piece with something climactic. I am deeply, profoundly in love with the idea of a version of RedStar OS that has been aggressively retrofitted to more-or-less function on modern machines, and I will be keeping my eye on the RedStar OS 3.5 project as it goes on. Come hell or high water, we're gonna get The Witcher 3 running on this thing somehow.

As for its current version? Well, I think Linux is good enough to replace Windows now, but against all expectations I do not think a 2011 version of North Korea's domestic OS is the version of Linux to do it. I'll say this, though: back in 2022, my struggles with RedStar were as much due to my own unfamiliarity with Linux as they were due to the peccadilloes of the operating system itself.

Today, I'm pretty comfortable saying that absolutely nothing is my fault. In general, but also as regards RedStar. I've come a long way since 2022, and Linux has come a long way since 2011. It might have eaten an entire day of my life, but I'm glad RedStar reminded me of that.

Stellaris is one of those games I've never played, but I'm delightfully confounded by it from afar, as occasionally one of my friends will send me a message about how her robotic gestalt consciousness is doing. And here I was thinking this was about annexing provinces, or whatever! If you'd like to be confounded up close, now seems like an ideal time—the game is free to play this weekend on Steam.

That's good through June 22, but you'll have a bit longer—until next Thursday, June 25—to decide if you'd like to buy it at a discount. Until then, the game is 70% off, bringing it to $15 for the base version or $18 for the "anniversary edition," which packs in the Galactic Paragons, Aquatics, and Leviathans DLCs.

If you want everything, that's on sale too, for the cool sum of just under $148. Hey, it's still a Paradox game. If you want to dip into that lifestyle before fully taking the plunge, you can subscribe to the game for $10 a month to get access to all the DLC instead, but there's no discount on that.

If you can look past the associated shedload of DLC, Stellaris is quite the game. PC Gamer EIC Phil Savage scored it a respectable 70% when he reviewed it back in 2016, saying its superlative early game revealed its potential as an "instant strategy classic." It's only refined things since with each new overhaul, and as Leana Hafer said in a recent story for PC Gamer, "1.0 and 4.3 are almost hard to recognize as the same game." Game director Stephen Muray joked back then that Stellaris is "the Spaceship of Theseus."

As for the new expansion, Nomads? Senior guide writer Sean Martin wrote in his impressions that it could "use some work," but its additions of Mongolian throat singing and nomadic factions are welcome indeed.

Claude Guillemot, one of the five Guillemot brothers who co-founded French publisher Ubisoft, has died in a plane crash.

Reported by Oest-France (via Kotaku), a Cessna 421 light aircraft crashed in the French commune of La Baule-Escoublac, within the Northwestern department of Loire-Atlantique, on Friday afternoon.

According to reports from Loire-Atlantique's SDIS 44 fire and rescue service, Guillemot was one of two people killed after the aircraft crashed near the La-Baule aerodrome, alongside the aircraft's owner and operator.

The mayor of La Baule, Franck Louvrier, issued a statement following the crash. "It was a Cessna 421, a twin-engine propeller, with eight seats," Louvrier said. "The plane was on approach for the landing phase, when, according to witnesses, it made a turn and crashed."

Guillemot co-founded Ubisoft in 1986 along with his brothers, Michel, Christian, Gerard, and the publisher's current chairman CEO Yves. From its origins as a software distribution business, Ubisoft grew into one of the biggest videogame publishers, and has developed numerous world-renowned series including Assassin's Creed, Far Cry, and Rainbow Six.

Claude Guillemot sat on Ubisoft's board and was executive vice president in charge of operations. Since 1997, he was also chairman and CEO of the Guillemot Corporation, which owns the Hercules digital audio brand and the Thrustmaster accessories label, and through which the Guillemot brothers maintain their stake in Ubisoft.

Ubisoft confirmed Guillemot's death in a press release, stating that it had learned "with deep sadness of the death of Claude Guillemot, co-founder of the Group and President of Guillemot Corporation, in an accident. Our thoughts are with his family and loved ones during this difficult time. No further statements will be made at this time"

Claude Guillemot was 69. The cause of the crash is not currently known, but French aviation authorities are expected to open a formal investigation.

Inside me, there are two people. The first, a rational adult, understands the legalities of private servers, and how typically incompatible they are with… well, existence. I can't say that certain servers, like TurtleWoW, played it safe either—while you do need to pay developers, opening up a cash shop for a game you're running off a stolen IP isn't smart.

The second has a grim understanding of the state of the genre by virtue of writing this very column. Not only have I personally observed that MMOs are an aging genre with very little in the way of newcomers, but I'm also not the only person who has identified a problem—I spoke to Raph Koster (Ultima Online, Star Wars Galaxies) earlier this month about the miserly state of things. Jack Emmert of City of Heroes fame also thinks there are huge problems. It's not just me getting nostalgic and misty-eyed.

Regardless of the cause, one thing is true: New MMOs aren't surviving, or they're being shut down. There are a couple indie outliers like Project Gorgon that're doing just fine for themselves, but we aren't getting the big hitters anymore.

And while I might not mourn servers like TurtleWoW or Project Ascension quite like I might, say, wince in sympathy for poor Matt Frior—who made Project Blackbird for years only for it to be slain in the cradle by Microsoft—I still feel a little sad to see Blizzard folding in on them, even if they're well within their rights to do so.

Because it's not like Blizzard isn't taking pointers, right? Of course, Ion Hazzikostas isn't gonna walk out one day and say "yeah, we were inspired by the private server we shut down". But there's absolutely a pattern. Blizzard will muscle in on a private server, and then a year or two later, come out with their own version of what that server was doing.

The original example is, of course, Nostralius, which Blizzard came for in 2016. The server reached a major height of popularity as a version of oldschool World of Warcraft maintained by passionate fans, something Blizzard had previously rebuffed with the now-infamous quote: "You think you do, but you don't."

Two years after Nostralius shuts down, Blizzard opens up World of Warcraft Classic, an experiment so successful it's still working through expansions today, both in the OG Classic and in Anniversary servers that are doing the whole time loop again.

I also don't think it's a coincidence that a lot of these servers were offering Classic-adjacent experiences with clever twists around the time Blizzard put out its Season of Discovery servers or Remix events, either. Or, indeed, that Blizzard has a mysterious "Project Camelot" on the horizon in the wake of these C&Ds.

I'm not accusing Blizzard of copying homework, mind. These versions of WoW are very much distinct from the dying servers—whether that be Project Ascension's ability draft or TurtleWoW cooking up entirely new classes. But they were made in an environment where there was concrete proof that an appetite for interesting, experimental takes on the good old days are incredibly popular.

To be clear: I'm certainly not in the business of defending Microsoft, and I don't think Blizzard needs defending when it comes to what it's done. Stating that Blizzard has a right to shut these servers down is an outlining of the facts, rather than what I purposefully believe should be the case in a utopian society. The law and what I want are two different things.

But the facts are: We do live in a capitalist society with copyright laws. Blizzard is legally obliged to snub these things to protect its IP. There are alternatives, such as NCSoft's treatment of the City of Heroes server Homecoming—but that was achieved under years of meticulous and very, very careful manoeuvring by the private server's devs, who never once accepted donations beyond what they required to run the server.

They certainly didn't open a cash shop. Again, TurtleWoW did itself absolutely no favours, even if I think what it was doing was rad in a vacuum.

So why am I still sad? Well, two reasons.

Well, in isolation, I think these private servers are often just doing cool stuff. I think it's neat that Project Ascension had an ability draft version of WoW. I think it's neat that TurtleWoW was cooking up entirely different classes and zones—just as I thought it was neat that Homecoming made new archetypes and story arcs.

While the scale of passion projects to actual illegal business varies from server to server, the MMO genre is a space that's in dire need of innovation. And if Blizzard has been taking notes, it's these servers we have to thank for a lot of the precious scraps of invention the company has been allowed to make.

Not necessarily because the devs have been nicking ideas. As a matter of fact, I think they're plenty creative—but they're bound to the laws of capital in a way these private server mavericks just aren't, and they can't just disagree with management because… well, it's their career. A private server getting popular, however, means developers can point at their playercounts when pitching to the people with money.

I am willing to bet that we probably wouldn't have WoW Remix or SoD without some of the servers that're getting shut down. We certainly wouldn't have had Classic without Nostralius.

But I'm also sad because, in a healthier videogame industry, with fewer layoffs and studio closures, might some of these private server devs have found positions within actual studios? In a world where companies aren't obligated by copyright law to send cease and desist to fan projects, could these private servers tick along just fine?

And more to the point—in a world where the MMO genre wasn't suffering from companies hounding after the next quarter (and, to be fair, ballooning development costs)—would these servers even exist in the first place?

It's a pipe dream, I know. But I think private servers are a symptom of a wider illness, not a disease—and I have watched genuine creativity and effort be poured into them by people I can't rightly blame for being unable to find legitimate work in this utter hellscape of an industry. It's a sorry state of affairs, one I doubt will change in my lifetime—but I'll quietly wish it would.

I've spent an inordinate amount of my life watching Grand Theft Auto machinima over the last decade. And while I can certainly appreciate the amount of editing and effort that goes into each video's production—I don't always think of that toil when gawping at the finished article. According to filmmaker Jordy Veenstra, however, that polished end result only tells half the story.

To this end, Veenstra recently broadcast a pair of "Machinima Dev Streams" on YouTube and Twitch, offering viewers a rare look behind the curtain at the often messy, highly technical process of creating films inside GTA 5. Rather than focusing on a completed project, the streams documented the work as it happened through the lens of location scouting, scene-staging, camera planning, technical troubleshooting, and the occasional game crash for good measure.

"Instead of sharing and reflecting upon the final cinematic product, the streams showcased the creative process in real time," Veenstra explains. "The viewers could observe how environments were not merely evaluated for their aesthetics but also for factors such as symbolism, lighting conditions, narrative intentions and composition."

The streams also highlighted the less glamorous side of machinima production. Veenstra demonstrated the use of tools such as Menyoo and ScriptHookVDotNet while experimenting with staging techniques and in-game programming solutions. Some ideas worked, while others didn't. At one point, the game froze entirely, forcing a restart mid-stream.

"Sometimes things don't work the way we want to and we must work around them," Veenstra says, describing it as one of the key lessons of machinima production. "In true machinima-type fashion, the game even crashed a few times live on stream or froze in such a way that the stream had to be restarted: all with live debugging.

"These events are all examples of the hands-on and participative nature of machinima (such as testing, rehearsing, adjusting and on-the-fly decision-making) and I think the streams captured them very well from a wide angle perspective."

Veenstra explains that the idea for the streams emerged from a simple question—that after spending countless hours working alone on projects, he'd wondered whether there might be value in sharing the "creative process, lines of thought, hardships, euphoria, bugs/workarounds and other events" that filmmakers encounter during production.

Through this, the response has been positive enough that more streams are already being considered. Future broadcasts could explore subjects ranging from framing and depth-of-field techniques to virtual lighting systems inside VRChat, Veenstra says, where creators can build real-time light shows using DMX protocols commonly found in physical venues.

Veenstra adds: "I hope during future Machinima Dev streams that I am able to share broader creative insights from a multitude of technical angles, software and games, all within a typical hands-on fashion.

"I started this series of streams on a single line of thought. I was working by myself on machinima projects for hours on end and simply wondered: wouldn't it be interesting to share some of the creative process, lines of thought, hardships, euphoria, bugs, workarounds and other events that I encounter on a day-to-day basis for fellow filmmakers, machinima artists or other enthusiasts to see?"

Ultima is one of PC gaming's most important cultural touchstones, with Richard 'Lord British' Garriot's roleplaying series blazing trails across numerous genres. The mainline CRPGs received critical acclaim for their rich, dynamic worlds, while spinoffs like Ultima Underworld and Ultima Online were key texts in the evolution of immersive sims and MMOs. Ultima's influence still echoes through to today, with Ultima 7 being a major inspiration for Larian Studios when developing Divinity: Original Sin and Baldur's Gate 3.

Yet it's been a long time since Ultima itself was a going concern. The keys to the series have been in the pocket of Electronic Arts since 1992, when Garriott sold developer Origin Systems to the publisher. While some good Ultima games were developed afterwards—most notably Ultima Online—the series has largely been left dormant by EA, barring a couple of ill-fated experiments like 2010's Lord of Ultima and 2013's Ultima Forever. But it's possible that may soon change, as control of the series could return to Garriott in the near future.

This was reportedly explained by Garriott himself to Inside Games' Brian Gaar. Recently, The Phrasemaker reported that EA filed new trademarks related to the Ultima series. This prompted Gaar to call Garriott to find out what, if anything, Garriott knew about this. According to Gaar, Garriott stated that he has repeatedly attempted to revive Ultima while the series has been under EA's purview. "Every decade or so, I tried to work with EA on a revival of Ultima. They always seemed interested enough to start talking, then abandoned talks just as quickly."

Now, though, Garriott is reclaiming the copyright to the series back from EA. This is thanks to a rule in US copyright law which allows creators (or their heirs) to reclaim a copyrighted work after a period of 35 years. Since Garriott sold the Ultima rights to EA in 1992, this means he can reclaim those rights in 2027. "And so, I have been waiting… finally, the time has come!" Garriot told Inside Gaming.

The important caveat here is that Garriott is reclaiming the copyright to Ultima, not the trademark. EA still owns that, so Garriott couldn't make a game simply titled "Ultima". What he could do, though, is make something with a slightly different name like "Lord British's Ultima", which appears to be his plan. "Lord British's Ultima will regain all the copyrights of my original work," Garriott said to Inside Games. "What it will become is the next challenge."

There's arguably never been a better time for an Ultima revival. Larian and other developers like Owlcat have proved that hyper-detailed CRPGs can be monstrously successful. Whether or not that aligns with Garriott's plans remains to be seen, however. Garriott may reveal more details at this year's Dragon Con, which he is attending. By then, he hopes to have "more thoughts together" about what reclaiming the rights to Ultima will mean.

There's part of me that feels like I've somewhat fallen for the sunk cost fallacy of VR. I've always liked VR headsets, but don't think I've quite got the same value out of them as I did with the very first one I owned in lockdown at the start of 2020. That is, until now.

After buying myself a Meta Quest 3, I thought, "This time, I'll recapture that feeling". I thought the years since really being a big VR would deliver me a trove of awesome games, and there are certainly some standout offerings like Asgard's Wrath and Batman: Arkham Shadow (both of which were helped by Meta, which has seemingly jumped ship from VR gaming), but nothing quite willed me to strap the headset on my face every single day.

That was, until the start of 2026, when I thought I'd fully try committing to VR exercising as an experiment and commitment to my future health. One thing I can say right off the bat is that I became less adventurous after the first month. Where I tried a decent few apps and exercises in January, I basically stuck to my FitXR subscription and used that almost exclusively. Any other VR exercises I did were just a welcome consequence of playing VR normally.

Even now, I coudn't call FitXR the best way to VR exercise, simply because I haven't tried enough other ways to know. In the same way that I picked my local gym when I signed up and called it a day, with exercising, I'm looking for convenience. I'm looking for something to slot into my day, a quick fifteen minutes at lunch, or ten minutes to wake myself up.

And wake me up, it does. I find VR's immersiveness not only engaging, but I willingly pushed far beyond where I would in a normal exercise. I found myself panting and sweaty after half-hour sessions, and I would previously struggle much more to get there with simple callisthenics or walking. A gym is always an option, but I think the public, social element of it has always made me a touch too self-conscious to fully go for it. I don't mind an exercise so tough it leaves me on the floor, in the comfort of my own home. And that's before mentioning the trek home after the gym.

The convenience of VR is its biggest selling point to me. If I have a spare ten minutes, I can simply throw it on and go for a little while. More formal exercise requires a level of preplanning that ends up eating up more of my time than I often plan for.

It does have its defined downsides, though. Despite paying hundreds for my Meta Quest 3, I'm still paying around $10 a month for my subscription, and though it's cheaper than a gym, I don't get any of the equipment that a gym membership affords me. As well as this, there's nothing quite as distinctly uncomfortable as a sweaty faceplate.

I find a wipe-down and air out, and maybe a spare faceplate does the job, but it's still a bit messier than I would otherwise like. But I knew going in that I'd have to push through uncomfortability. And I've done a lot of that over the last half a year.

I've woken up with sore legs because I've decided to take on a course with a lot of jumping, or found my arms sore because I wanted to push it with a hard HIIT exercise. And I've managed to find some joy in that. I've found myself liking a little burn in my leg because it feels like a sign of how much exercise I've done.

I set myself a few rules before I went into this whole experiment, to make sure I had some consistency. My ground rules were pretty simple a few months ago. Apple has an exercise function, where you can make 'rings' and you fill those rings by doing a pre-structured amount of exercise. It has a red ring for movement, a green ring for exercise, and a blue ring for standing.

I tend to finish the red and blue ones naturally, but the green one, at 30 minutes a day, is something I consciously have to fill. And that is what VR is for. But if, somehow, I manage to fill that on a normal day, I promised myself I would still exercise. I simply couldn't let the headset get dusty because I happened to take a few flights of stairs at work, or felt like going for a hike. These ground rules have pretty much stayed the same ever since.

I have missed days. I have forgotten about it, found myself away from the headset for a few days, or simply been too lazy. But I've been holding myself accountable with my own health, and know that I'm a little too cheap to pay the subscription and let it go to waste.

Since the start of January, I've lost around 35 pounds, and though I think a part of that is the VR exercising, another big part is that I simply don't want all my effort to go to waste. I don't want to strap the headset on my head nearly every day and not feel healthier. So I started eating better this year. I started tracking my progress. And I've tried to be as honest with myself as possible when I'm making progress and why.

Recently, I haven't made as much progress. I took things pretty lax around my birthday, I found it harder to will myself to exercise in the British summer heat, and hay fever has sapped my energy, but most importantly, I just became a tad complacent with it. But in a sense, that's the joy here. I hold myself accountable, and the shame of returning to the gym after an absence doesn't really exist. I simply got back onto the VR horse without a second thought.

And this is all before mentioning that I have fun exercising now. I make a regular habit of activating the passthrough mode on my headset, popping something on the TV and doing some combat exercises while watching anime or listening to a podcast. Yes, I know it's dorky to watch a shounen battle scene whilst pretending to punch the air with a big screen slapped onto my eyeballs, but I can be as much of a nerd in my headset as I like, and I can feel better while doing so.

Effectively, the VR headset exercises almost every day have been a way to remind me of how conscious losing weight and getting healthier has to be for me. I have to stay aware of it, and need to keep pushing if I want to reach my goals. And my goals right now are simply to feel better. They are to be able to do long hikes, to go for a run, to exercise and feel like I'm putting in less effort than before. VR has given me a fun, stress-free avenue to improve my life little by little, and I'll continue doing it for as long as it stays that way.

Since large-language models like ChatGPT can generate natural language responses that appear human-like in tone, this has led to considerable discussion over whether LLMs might themselves be sentient. At present, there are far more reasons to conclude that AIs are not and will never be conscious. But the idea persists regardless.

This is partly because of our broader tendency to perceive human-like qualities in non-human things, and partly because AI companies have equivocated over the issue. In any case, one Microsoft researcher has become particularly fed up with it, to the point where he decided to demonstrate how ridiculous the notion is by building an LLM in Age of Empires 2 powered by goats.

As reported by 404 Media, Microsoft AI researcher Adrian de Wynter built a neural network within Microsoft's strategy classic, then wrote a paper describing the results titled 'If LLMs Have Human-Like Attributes, Then So Does Age of Empires II'.

If you think this title is preposterous, that is entirely the point. "I have this tendency to dial up things to 11 when I really think I need to make a point," de Wynter told 404 media, observing that "absurdism is pretty standard in philosophy and theoretical computer science."

De Wynter constructed the LLM in AoE 2's scenario editor, building a functioning NOT AND gate and 1-bit perceptron (a simple form of neural network) using objects in the game world to represent computer binaries. Grass represents 0, bridges represent 1, and goats play the role of bits. It's similar to how some players have built neural networks using Minecraft redstone, but de Wynter specifically wanted to use Age of Empires 2 because it is a less obvious choice.

There are videos of De Wynter's goat-powered LLM in action on his GitHub page. To the casual observer, the processes look completely baffling, which de Wynter reckons demonstrates his point.

The processes going on here are, fundamentally, those which power tools like ChatGPT, Claude, etc. But because the fundamentals are goats and grass rather than natural language, it prevents observers from perceiving the resulting behaviours and output as human.

"The point of the paper is to formally show that we anthropomorphise too readily, and that sometimes the claims we make with regards to LLMs capabilities are too strong," de Winter said, going on to add that. "This is why I used the goats: there are things which make the LLMs what they are in themselves (i.e., the relationship between weights as defined by some operation), and there are things which make them what they are perceived as."

The reason this is important is that assuming LLMs have human-like properties without demonstrative proof could lead us to all manner of problems, such as in scientific research. In his paper, de Wytner says he has peer reviewed more than 300 computer science papers in the last two years, finding that over half of them began with the assumption that LLMs have human-like traits.

"I propose that we need to stop assuming that LLMs behave like humans just because they were trained with natural language," de Wynter said. "Instead, we should perform experiments that allow us to see LLMs as how they are, not how we believe they should be."