Indholdsfortegnelse for June 2024 i PC Gamer (US Edition)

HIGHS Share the love Larian won big at the DICE Awards, and used its speech to speak out against layoffs. Incognito mode Steam has launched a ‘Mark as Private’ function, letting you hide your more, ahem, delicate games. Space Quest NASA has released a tabletop game that asks: what if a dragon stole the Hubble Space Telescope? LOWS Low blow Unionized YouTube workers were told they’d been laid off in the middle of a live-broadcast Austin City Council meeting. Out of the game EA let go of five percent of its workforce in February. Cursed Tomb Tomb Raider I-III Remastered on the Epic Store was mysteriously better than every other version, until Aspyr yanked it offline.…

Ah, the life of a medieval central-European peasant. Untroubled by the taste of Doritos or the mental anguish over whether to buy a Steam Deck or not, their only cares in life were where their pigs had got to and the constant threat of dying in a thousand imaginatively grisly ways. No wonder they’re such great fodder for videogames. Manor Lords contains many such peasants, doing wholesome things such as plowing with oxen and planing trees down into timber, but also features spearmen, disease and the leading cause of death among the common people of the time: lords of the manor. Despite its developer’s inspiration from actual historical events, Manor Lords isn’t set in any particular time period. And in contrast to a certain other game in this magazine’s preview…

First-person games tend to hand you a shotgun then send you off in search of someone to unload it into, so it’s a refreshing change to play a game in which the most dangerous thing you’ll be waving around is a cordless drill (and you’ll need some batteries for that too). Plane Accident is not a game about causing a jumbo jet to plummet from around 30,000ft, but instead casts you as an investigator, first on the scene following a crash and responsible for working out what happened using drones, email, and little flags that mark the location of debris. The tutorial mission is entirely set in a warehouse, with all the parts and items you’ll need in easy reach, but once you’ve sniffed out the reason this plane crashed…

SpellRogue is a roguelike that makes you feel like a genius. As you pick up spells you’ll start to create combinations that just feel too powerful and would surely have been nerfed if the developer had noticed. Then, after a while, you’ll realize this is exactly what they wanted you to do. Best described as Slay the Spire but with dice, SpellRogue is less about building a big deck of spells and more about making the most of your limited options. You’ll start out a run with three base spells and can add up to four more. You’ll have access to all seven spells every turn, but you will need to roll some dice and get some luck to use them. Some require specific numbers whereas others just require a…

NEW DUNGEONS Mystery Dungeon #1 These don’t have names yet, and I won’t attempt to invent one. It’s very lush and tropical though, with caves and rivers ripe for exploration. Mystery Dungeon #2 Much colder compared to #1, with giant purple crystals and a strange aura. It looks like there’s a fortress higher up, too. Mysterious. NEW AREAS Tuliyollal Yok Tural’s seaside town with some gorgeous South American-inspired architecture. Solution Nine A futuristic town lined with neon lights and towering glass skyscrapers, located in Xak Tural. Yak T’El A plush zone, home of the Xbr’aal group of Hrothgar and the Mamool Ja. Shaaloani An arid zone, giving big old-school desert vibes complete with mine railroads. NEW JOBS Pictomancer What if Banksy was a catboy? Pictomancer trades a sword for a…

HATCHING A PLAN 1 The trailer opens with a shot of a withered arm dangling from a cracked, round egg. This is Miquella’s cocoon. Found in Mohgwyn palace deep beneath Caelid, it’s through this cocoon players will access the Land of Shadow. ON THE TRAIL 2 This area with the graves was shown in the key art, with Miquella riding on horseback. The fact that the Tarnished rides through the same area demonstrates that players will quite literally be following Miquella’s trail. BOUGH TO YOUR MASTER 3 The tree looming over the Land of Shadow does not appear to be the Erdtree. Interestingly, Miquella’s Haligtree has a similar split trunk, although one of the splits is broken when the player visits the Haligtree in Elden Ring. The veils above the…

With sincere apologies to the Magnum Opus from Mad Max, the Saud Kruger Orca passenger liner from Elite Dangerous and Arthur Morgan’s horse, I have a new favorite ride: the station wagon in Pacific Drive. It’s amazing. It didn’t look like much at first: just a typical late ’80s family wagon with wood paneling and a hatchback trunk. But over the course of the last 35 hours I’ve turned it into an armor-plated, radiation-resistant tank positively bristling with sci-fi gadgets. And it’s only a little bit haunted. Those upgrades (and the ghosts in the shell) are the result of barreling through a hellscape of nightmarish weather, crumbling roads, and more horrifying anomalies per square mile than the entire STALKER trilogy combined. Pacific Drive, the debut game from developer Ironwood Studios,…

Lara Croft may need no introduction, but her first three artifact-swiping, wildlife-bothering, lever-pulling adventures were in real danger of becoming exactly the sort of forgotten relics she hunts for. Tomb Raider I-III Remastered hauls this trio of excellent action-adventure-puzzle hybrids and their original expansions—foundational examples of a style of game we’re still enjoying today—back into action. This is the definitive version of these games, feeling both 25+ years old and also brand new at the same time. Tomb Raider I-III Remastered runs fantastically: whether played on PC or Steam Deck, it scales to whatever my current display’s maximum resolution is without effort or fuss. No matter how long I played or how many times I jumped between games, saves, or hardware, it never did anything other than work exactly as…

Picture the scene: four soldiers make a desperate scramble for their dropship on an alien planet, pursued by enormous, dagger-clawed bugs. Machine-gun fire rattles, green goo erupts, the landing pad teems with beasts as the quartet piles through the boarding hatch and their ride blasts off at the last available second. It could be a Hollywood action sequence, but in Helldivers 2 it’s merely the end of another mission. Indeed, it’s amazing just how often a Helldivers 2 sortie climaxes in screaming, skin-of-the-teeth heroics. And it remains exciting time after time, because that Hollywood ending is never guaranteed. Maybe you get tagged yards from completing your great escape. Maybe by a spray of bullets from a wheeling teammate. Maybe the group’s impossibly overrun, yet one of you somehow dives home…

Persona 3 Reload isn’t just a re-release or hi-res tune-up of the 2006 turn-based classic Shin Megami Tensei: Persona 3. It’s a true remake, with nearly every aspect of the game other than the story changing in subtle or major ways. What feels like thousands of voiceover lines, impressive new persona animations, sharp graphic design and some nifty quality of life features give Persona 3’s solid story a high 2024 shine. Sixteen years ago, Persona 3 was a landmark release for RPGs. The way it combined a sim-style RPG about high school life with a dungeon crawler including both Pokémon and roguelike elements gave it lots of depth. Which is also a way to say that Persona 3 Reload is long. Really, really long. Enormously long. You’re playing for a…

The Warhammer Fantasy world is a wretched place to live. Beastmen in the forests. Trolls in the rivers. Giant rats beneath you. And, if Mordheim is anything to go by, flaming comets in the skies above. Worse still, if you survive the impact event, roaming mercenaries or deranged cultists will probably finish you off. That’s the setup for this PC adaptation of Games Workshop’s cult tabletop game. In some ways, Mordheim is the raucous city break of the Warhammer world. But instead of cologne-drenched white orcs on a stag weekend in Budapest, this features devout Sigmarite warrior priestesses and skittering bands of skaven on the hunt for precious wyrdstone. You start off with a weakling bunch of pre-grizzled adventurers, who gradually become more capable as they brave the city’s cursed…

It’s been around for long enough now that we take it for granted. A new game comes out, dripping in graphics, and occasionally when we run it at 4K it dips to an unplayable 58fps. So we go into the video options, turn the ‘DLSS’ option on, and get back on with walking through neon-lit streets in our game. But DLSS is worth paying closer attention to. This tech is indistinguishable from magic. It’s upscaling our games in real time, at the point that the frame is being rendered by the GPU. It’s able not just to take a 1080p image and produce a very convincing 4K version that doesn’t eat up resources, but also to interpolate between rendered frames for a smoother visual experience and a higher overall framerate.…

FIFTEEN MINUTES OF SLOW WALKING 63 CALORIES In the time if takes to stroll down to the bodega and back, you’ve burned as many calories than a full day of standing. SEVEN MINUTES OF RESISTANCE TRAINING 56 CALORIES More plates, more dates. Suns out, guns out. All these rhymes will suddenly seem hilarious to you when you start lifting. TEN MINUTES’ ROWING 68 CALORIES Nobody likes rowing, even the Olympic team probably have mornings when they don’t fancy it. But it involves a lot of muscles and it’s good for heart health. THREE MINUTES’ SKIPPING 68 CALORIES Or ‘jumping rope’ if the word ‘skipping’ feels a bit too friendly and comfortable for what’s actually one of the most efficient calorie-burning exercises possible.…

As a poker fan I’m always on the lookout for a new poker game. I’m especially keen to find games that use poker in interesting new ways, like RPG We Slay Monsters or roguelike Poker Quest, both of which use poker hands as their combat system. So, when poker-inspired roguelike deckbuilder Balatro came along I was eager to talk to its developer—not just about the game, but also what I assumed would be our shared love of poker. “It’s funny, I don’t play poker at all,” says LocalThunk, solo developer of Balatro. That is pretty funny, actually, because Balatro has, well, quite a lot of poker in it. You begin with a standard deck of 52 playing cards, you make poker hands like straights, flushes and full houses to score…

The thing about roguelike card battlers is you wait around forever… no, that’s not it. The thing about roguelike card-battlers is that they are legion, just keep coming, and absolutely will not stop. Breachway takes the genre, which is often rooted in fantasy, into space for a science-fiction twist on the Slay the Spire formula. Sent out in a small ship to investigate some wreckage, armed with a laser cutter and a shield, you try to sneak through patrols by turning off your reactor and going dark. Of course this doesn’t work, so the power gets turned back on and you start slashing your beam at any pirates foolish enough to approach. In the wrecked spaceship is something valuable but forbidden, possession of which will bring the system authorities down…

The upcoming Age of Mythology: Retold has just shown off its signature mythological monsters in detail, including the terrible Medusas, the flying Pegasus scout, and the titan Cerberus, and I’ve got to say the monsters are dang good looking. These visually punchy new models are part of the overall effort to make Age of Mythology: Retold a real upgrade from the original 2002 game, including changes to the models as you upgrade through the ages—though they come complete with a stack of classic sounds and twists on the old animations. The Medusa death sound is just as I remember it. That’s just what Age of Mythology: Retold producer Earnest Yuen had to say when I spoke with him about the remake, which will release this year on PC and Xbox.…

It’s been a wonderful decade of adventuring for our Warriors of Light, but Final Fantasy XIV isn’t done with us just yet. While Endwalker wrapped up the Hydaelyn-Zodiark storyline, Square Enix has flung the door wide open on a whole new adventure in upcoming expansion Dawntrail. It’s an exciting new arc that’s awaiting us, one which director and producer Naoki Yoshida described as “the very best summer vacation” during last year’s Las Vegas Fan Festival. I’m sure it’ll be a muchneeded pivot from the world-ending doom and gloom the Warrior of Light has dealt with for the last few years, and I’m dying to know more about just what Dawntrail will bring. Thankfully, I was able to have a chat with Yoshi-P—the nickname Yoshida is more widely known by—to see…

UNOBSTRUCTED EYEGLASSES No more choosing between a hat or some nice specs. Dawntrail is giving equippable glasses their own slot so you can both see and look stylish. TIME TO STRATEGISE Strategy Boards are coming to Dawntrail, offering a much nicer way to demonstrate mechanics and positionals. The UI is still in the works, but what we’ve seen looks like it’s gonna be helpful. MORE DYE SLOTS Take a dye slot, double it, and bam, you got two. Dawntrail will have two dye channels for a ton of its gear, letting you experiment with more color schemes and create unique palettes. PIXEL FACELIFT Dawntrail will start to trickle in a larger graphical upgrade. Things like shadows and lighting will be given a nice revamp too, giving the decade-old MMO a…

Why we love FromSoftware’s colossal RPG ELDEN RING Exploration has always been a part of FromSoftware’s games, but Elden Ring puts pushing toward the horizon at the front and center of its design. Like most of the studio’s games, Elden Ring’s key areas are guarded by brutally tough bosses. But Elden Ring doesn’t expect you to beat them through pure skill or grinding attrition. Instead, the emphasis is on tracking down the tools that will help you overcome the challenge and gradually accrue power. To this end, FromSoft builds a world that seeps adventure from every crag and crevice. Crucially though, The Lands Between aren’t simply large and beautiful. Since the days of Demon’s Souls, FromSoftware has exhibited a knack for infusing the familiar with the strange, beauty with horror,…

Like all FromSoftware games, Elden Ring has a fantastic array of boss fights. But its much broader scope also facilitates some battles of truly epic scale. Some of the key boss fights are properly massive affairs. Most notable is your duel with Starscourge Radahn on the dunes at the fringes of Caelid, although the confrontation with Rykard, Lord of Blasphemy is similarly spectacular, if less challenging. The battle against the Fire Giant high up in the mountains also falls into this category, although this is generally regarded as one of the weaker boss fights in Elden Ring. Nonetheless, many such encounters also happen while wandering around the world itself. The Lands Between are watched over by towering golems, whose ponderous movements and powerful attacks are clearly inspired by 2005’s Shadow…

The appeal of Skull and Bones is laser focused. It’s about being on a boat. You have to want the fantasy of sailing big pirate boats and you need to not want much else for your time and money. You may come wanting to live the fantasy of being a ruthless waterborne pilferer, but to live that fantasy you first need to love sailing a boat in the direction of crafting materials. In Skull and Bones you’re allowed to get off your boat, but only to interact with vendors, mission-givers, perhaps a buried treasure chest. In the vast island-dotted expanse of the Indian Ocean there are two major pirate settlements where blacksmiths, carpenters, refiners, and most contracts (missions) are doled out, both for the main quest and its endgame component.…

1 NO OBJECT This exchange happens every time you make a new social bond. “Thou” is a subject, not an object. This should be either “I am thee,” or in archaic English, “I am you”. 2 SO CLOSE “Thou art” is perfect. But again, “I” is not an object, even in medieval times. This should be “Thou art me”. Yes, I know this exchange is a Persona tradition… 3 DEAD (HOUR) ON …but the other 130 hours of the game sport nearly flawless English. This sentence nails “thou,” plus two tough and different verb forms.…

No one puts as much effort into a game’s presentation as Locomalito, developer of sidescrolling shmup Super Hydorah, and other games with a distinctly arcade sensibility. These are new games that look like retro rereleases, complete with hi-res screen borders, CRT filters and even box art to print out at home. That’s not to say the attention to detail is lacking in-game, as these feel like games that could have been unearthed from a ’90s time capsule. Toxic Tomb resembles a Master System game, with its looping, one-room stages and simple premise. You play as a demon trying to save a power plant, by killing the ghouls that have set up shop in its reactors—er, forget what I just said about that simple premise. But it’s just an excuse to…

Last this month is Castle Crashers, a game that sounds like a medieval reality TV pitch, looks like a banned cartoon Network show, and plays like a night terror after watching Krull too many times. Which, as it happens, was the inspiration for this month’s They’re Back. You could take away all the game’s flourishes and it would still basically be brilliant: a fast, chaotic, multiplayer action game that feels lovely to play. Enemies are numerous and varied. Weapons have a satisfying ‘thwomp’. But everything here is layered with the kind of mad creativity that’s almost humiliating for other games. That cool idea you had for an industrialized medieval stronghold? That’s a throwaway design in level 19. Your boss is a weird giant river cat? Cool. Castle Crashers already did it.…

After 15 hours with Suicide Squad: Kill the Justice League, I rolled credits. And in many ways, I regret those hours. By now there’s a good chance you will have heard about the polarizing reception to the new third-person action-adventure shooter, where Harley Quinn, Deadshot, Captain Boomerang and King Shark go head-to-head with Superman, Batman and co. As someone who is increasingly trying to spend less time online, it’s been a little difficult to not get sucked into the ‘dead on arrival’ narrative that has plagued the game months before release, yet I went in hopeful. This is Rocksteady after all—the studio that brought superhero games into the 21st century. And the Batman Arkham games have stood the test of time. Seriously! Check out Arkham Knight. It’s gorgeous! There has…

CRYSIS Imagine pressing a button in the graphics options and watching your framerate double. We’d have been able to play it. BOILING POINT The thing is, it wasn’t that bad. The pioneering shooter might actually have been playable, with AI’s help. GEOFF CRAMMOND’S GRAND PRIX 3 Trying to gain the upper hand over drivers like Schumacher, Hakkinenn and Villeneuve at 10fps was not easy. METRO 2033 2010’s finest barely playable tech demo. The shooting was really meaty too, not that you could ever enjoy it at the time.…

Helldivers 2’s galactic war is much more than a mission selector. In a short time, players have become invested in the status of their favorite planets and reacted to gains and losses in a sector’s liberation. The simulated conflict has become an unexpected focal point of the Helldivers 2 experience. Unexpected to players, that is. To developer Arrowhead Game Studios, the war is a product of planning and storytelling by a specific behind-the-scenes individual pulling the strings: what Arrowhead CEO Johan Pilestedt described to PC Gamer as Helldivers 2’s ‘dungeon master’. “We have an actual person with the job title of game master,” Pilestedt told PC Gamer in an exclusive interview. His name is Joel, and he takes his job very seriously. “We have a lot of systems built into…

Before entering game development, John Dennis was “an art teacher who really didn’t enjoy teaching!” as he puts it. A friend who was working at Team 17 encouraged him to apply for a game designer job there, which, after some hesitation, he did. “I was the first game designer they’d had.” Though at the beginning he wasn’t sure precisely what a game designer did, he was clearly a quick learner. He stayed at Team 17 for 15 years, and had advanced to the level of head of design, leading a team of 14, by the time he left. After a few years at Activision, he moved on to working with New Star Games and Five Aces, where he’s been for the past ten years. The game he worked on for…

Dungeonborne came out of nowhere to be the surprise hit of Steam Next Fest. A medieval fantasy extraction dungeon crawler that is effectively Escape From Tarkov but with swords and skeletons, it is difficult not to love. It also isn’t difficult to figure out where its inspiration came from. You’d easily be forgiven for thinking you’ve seen Dungeonborne in action before. Despite only breaking cover as Steam Next Fest kicked off, it will feel instantly familiar to anyone who is aware of Dark and Darker, the similar game that blew up last year only to be bogged down by legal battles. From the setting to visual style and of course, the main gameplay loop, almost everything in Dungeonborne feels like it has been taken straight out of Dark and Darker…

The first 22 seconds of a game trailer can tell you a lot. They set the scene, perhaps flash some publisher or engine logos, and establish the setting of the game in an easily digestible way. In Kingmakers’ trailer, we see armored warriors clash on the field of battle. Aha, you think. I know what this game is all about. With Manor Lords also donning its armor and hefting its sword in this issue, it might be forgivable to think that PC Gamer has been taken over by fans of medieval warfare. And while that might actually be true, following the siege of PC Gamer Towers in 2020 that saw nasty trebuchet injuries all round, it’s the 23rd second of the trailer that shows Kingmakers isn’t plowing the same ridge…

You might well ask why Elden Ring needs an expansion. FromSoftware’s brilliant fantasy RPG is already colossal in its scope and depth—several orders of magnitude larger than any game that preceded it. Yet any longtime fan of FromSoft’s work would have a quick and definitive answer—expansions are where the studio typically does its best work. From Dark Souls’ Artorias of the Abyss to Bloodborne’s The Old Hunters, FromSoft’s expansions see its games at their most vivid, intense and strange. More than simple continuations of the base, FromSoft’s expansions are often surrealist side adventures that fold back into the main narrative in surprising, yet essential ways. Much like the base game, Shadow of the Erdtree aims to be exactly that, only more so. Following two years of silence, FromSoftware has finally…

Elden Ring is generally regarded as the most accessible of FromSoftware’s games, but it would be more precise to say that it is the most flexible. Its emphasis on rewarding exploration also gives it the widest scope for character building, and FromSoftware go to great lengths to ensure all pathways to victory are equally rewarding. In particular, Elden Ring is easily the most enjoyable FromSoftware game to play with a magic user build. The game’s voluminous spell book includes some truly astonishing sorceries, such as Comet Azur and Rennala’s Full Moon, both of which let you launch celestial objects at your foes. Putting points into the Faith stat likewise unlocks a massive library of incantations, letting you wield the powers of dragons, or embrace the Frenzied Flame to defeat enemies…

One of the longest-running types of station wagon available in the USA, the Buick Estate was first introduced in 1940, with a model then brought to market in almost every year up until 1996. Multiple members of Pacific Drive’s development team experienced the Buick Estate at some time in their lives and, while making the game, bought one and photographed it to make the in-game car very detailed and authentic.…

Imagine the rush of winning at a high-stakes poker table. Now imagine you’re winning because you’re cheating so blatantly that you might as well be drawing your own numbers on the cards. You put down a 2, then another 2, then three more 2s, to make everyone’s favorite poker hand, 5 of a kind. This is a constant joy in Balatro, a roguelike deckbuilder that successfully scratches an itch to cheat in a casino that I never even knew I had. You start off with a deck of 52 traditional playing cards. Each round, you draw eight cards and can play four hands to try to score enough chips to beat the dealer’s score. Each playable hand has a set score and multiplier—eg a pair gives 10 points and a…

What a joy it is to be back in Celeste’s world, with its distinctive colour palette and chiptunes to warm your bones on its snow-covered mountain. Celeste 64 isn’t a sequel, but a small game made in celebration of its sixth anniversary. Collect strawberries in an intricate platforming level, while suffering a heroic number of deaths. Same as it ever was, but with one key difference: it’s now in 3D. It’s an alarming shift from the previous game, which is one of the most exquisite and precise 2D platformers yet made. When you failed to pass Celeste’s devious platforming challenges, you could only blame yourself. Likewise, when you succeeded, it was all down to you. It felt so good to jump and dash across its two-dimensional planes that the thought…

Diving back into the lore-heavy opening of Dragon Age: Inquisition should be overwhelming. In the first few minutes, the game makes reference to mages, Templars, the Chantry, the Divine Justinia and more. It’s easy to share the bewildered confusion of your character. And perhaps, more than this, it makes me realize that I was always fuzzy on the specifics of BioWare’s grand, high fantasy world. In this respect, the nine-year gap since release doesn’t really make much difference. I had, apparently, forgotten everything about Thedas anyway. This, in some ways, is a positive; there’s a sense that these byzantine, arcane institutions have existed for millennia, long before I ever started making informed beard selections in the Inquisition character creator. The fact that the specifics are lost on me is actually…

While avoiding doing any actual work one day, I stumbled upon something magnificently fiddly and nerdy that can work to improve the way older games look—as long as you have the right hardware. Nvidia has released a beta version of its RTX Remix tech, which uses the RT and Tensor cores in your GeForce RTX graphics cards (sorry, everyone else) to intercept the graphics pipeline of compatible games, upscale the textures and inject ray-traced lighting. At least, that’s the idea. You can find a list of working titles in places like Reddit and ModDB, and I was looking through it when one name caught my eye: Splinter Cell. Oh hell yeah. This game, released in 2002 when the GeForce 4 was all the rage, was notable for putting graphics cards…

Three new graphics cards in the same month—what a super way to kick off spring. These three new ‘Super’ graphics cards are a chance for the green team to tinker with core counts, buses and budgets to appeal to our PC gaming sensibilities, and I’m pleased to say this lot are a lot more appealing than the last. Each Super graphics card carries more cores than the non-Super variant of the same name, and that’s about the extent of the improvements for the RTX 4070 Super. However, the RTX 4070 Ti Super comes with an entirely different GPU to the RTX 4070 Ti. RTX 4080 NVIDIA $1,200 Much maligned 1 The RTX 4080 was launched in November, 2022 and for most of the time since I, and many others, have been…

We did a lot of things differently during the pandemic. Our trash went out more than we did. Socializing meant Zoom. Going for a 35-minute walk was an act of reckless abandon worthy of police intervention, bread flour was harder to come by than depleted uranium, and we all got very into our home working setups. Did you experiment with a standing desk in 2020? No, come on. There’s no shame in it. It was a different time. And anyway, I did. Terrified by the thought that my already sedentary lifestyle would be disrupted by a government-mandated period of remaining indoors and gleaning my only exercise through track running and walking, I panic-bought (among other crippling and regrettable expenses including a vast double freezer) a standing desk. This desk, I…