Indholdsfortegnelse for January 2025 i PC Gamer (US Edition)

Diablo is a game about puppeteering your little hero around and clicking monsters until they pop into piles of loot. It’s easy to wrap your head around a loop like that. Blizzard designs both the piñata and the bat we hit it with. But it can be easy to forget just how much work goes into making you believe you’re doing all of this in a dark gothic world with centuries of history. Diablo IV probably reckons with this challenge more than its predecessors. Videogame open worlds are expected to be beautiful and navigable, especially ones where players expect everything to get out of their way as they massacre thousands of demons. The last thing you want to do is get lost on your way to finish a quest. But…

1 month MICROSOFT FLIGHT SIMULATOR 2024 RELEASE November 19, 2024 | DEVELOPER Asobo Studio The latest iteration of the long-running and increasingly scarily accurate flight simulator promises new aircraft, flight modes, engine graphics and more. STALKER 2: HEART OF CHORNOBYL RELEASE November 20, 2024 | DEVELOPER GSC Game World After many delays, the much-wanted survival-horror FPS is launching in the penultimate month of 2024. Explore and fight in a dystopian nuclear exclusion zone. INDIANA JONES AND THE GREAT CIRCLE RELEASE December 8, 2024 | DEVELOPER MachineGames Indy’s back with a new whip-cracking adventure that is set between the events of Raiders of the Lost Ark and Indiana Jones and the Last Crusade. Hype! 2 months SID MEIER’S CIVILIZATION VII RELEASE February 11, 2025 | DEVELOPER Firaxis Games The new installment…

Giant ants have a long history in videogames, all the way back to 1989’s Cinemaware classic It Came From the Desert, but while they may look gigantic, the ants in Empire of the Ants are normal sized. They’re just very close, and packed with all the detail Unreal Engine 5 can manage. So what you get are heads, thoraces and abdomens that are sharp down to the little hairs that protrude from them. Mandibles gnash and gape, legs skitter, antennae wave and slugs leave trails of slime. The tiny world is rendered with care, light bouncing off carapaces and the shadows of towering plants creating a contrasty place to explore—though there’s a fair bit of repetition as swarms of ants and termites cover the screen. This isn’t the dev’s first…

In a hands-off presentation shown to me by lead producer Maciej Krzemien and CEO/game director Mateusz Michalak at Gamescom, I was able to see quite a hefty chunk of gameplay, as well as get a little insight into the development process behind Mouse: PI for Hire. Fumi Games has a unique task put before it, after a video posted to TikTok by the game’s lead programmer “went viral” as Krzemien explains. “It gained huge traction, like a huge amount of views, and back then, we already knew ‘all right, people like this, we have something cool on our hands’.” The challenge, as both developers highlight, is making sure that Mouse stands on its own two rubber-hose legs, “Many people,” Krzemien says, “upon seeing our game, tend to call it ‘just…

Starfield’s vision of the future was just too timid. The squeaky clean corridors of New Atlantis did less for me than the crime-riddled backwater of Riften, and the average planet’s points of interest were spread so thin I felt like I was bushwhacking through miles of desolate space just to find something memorable. So I went into Shattered Space with some anticipation: maybe a more focused experience would allow me to see the potential that Bethesda had previously spread too thin. Unfortunately this DLC had the opposite effect on me. The stage is set to dazzle: it’s a handcrafted zone densely packed with quests and NPCs with competing interests. There are new weapons to find, unique enemies to use them on, and a fresh narrative far from the shackles of…

In a little over a year since its release, Diablo IV transformed from a decent action-RPG into one of the best, a post-launch metamorphosis that few games can pull off so swiftly. After realizing players didn’t want to go on a months-long journey to click demons until they pop, Blizzard took everything they didn’t like about it and made them better. And it worked: Diablo IV is easily one of the best action-RPGs of the last decade. Its first expansion, Vessel of Hatred, marks the end of its redemption arc and the start of its vision for the future. That vision includes a brighter, more expressive Diablo IV than before, one where its story isn’t so bleak that it borders on parody (an overcorrection after complaints that Diablo III was too…

Shadows of Doubt is a procgen immersive sim that’s a love letter both to noir crime fiction and any videogame that’s ever had an 0451 code in it. Its voxelized cities are shrouded in darkness even at midday, and every building is connected by a network of traversable air ducts the game spins up when you load in. You’re a PI: a private dick with no money, no flex and a police scanner, picking up murders and kidnappings the corrupt local cops won’t solve and piecing them together yourself for cash and social credit—a gamified class system that confers perks and privileges on a rarefied few as they ascend the ladder. Climb high and you get the ultimate prize: retirement. But really, why retire? Your city, which you generate at…

Makers of modern adventure games have largely decided to follow the LucasArts model rather than the Sierra one, meaning very few of them feature sudden, unforeseeable deaths. Sierra games would kill you just for crossing the street, for examining an object, so it’s a good thing all that has gone away. Right? Sure, it’s less fraught, meaning you don’t have to save the game constantly, but there was an enjoyably cruel wit to those inventive game-overs. Terminal City is a game of constant next times, turning the adventure game into a gauntlet where everyone, where everything, is out to get you. It’s only seconds before your first test: a low pipe that you have to slide under, by typing DUCK (or one of its synonyms) at the appropriate moment. This…

It seems insensitive to follow a game about the absence of sound with a mesmerizing aural masterpiece, but apparently that’s exactly what I’m doing, like a cruel relative in a Roald Dahl story celebrating their favorite child. Eat your fish heads and stop crying, The Quiet Man. You’re putting Tetris Effect off her Wagyu beef. If it’s any consolation, it’s much easier to write about why The Quiet Man is terrible than why Tetris Effect is great. It’s a game that has to be experienced, ideally in VR, to understand fully why it’s so special. On the face of things, it’s still just Tetris, which honestly, I really shouldn’t have to explain to anyone. It still feels lovely to stack the blocks up. And it’s uniquely rewarding when you slot…

1 I FOUGHT THE LAW The main function of the council is to pass laws in the city, but you’ll need enough delegates to support your law if you want it to pass. 2 REVOLUTION As you research technologies, pass laws, and make decisions, it might lead to new reactionary factions appearing in the council. 3 BREAKING PROMISES It’s all too easy to become tangled as you promise different factions you’ll pass their laws but don’t have enough council sessions to do so.…

Intel launched its first NUC mini-PC in 2013, so compact computing is nothing new. The ability of such tiny machines to competently run games, however, is a fairly recent development. Mini PCs are driven by laptop-level Accelerated Processing Units (APUs), comprising a power-efficient CPU and an integrated graphics chip, and advances in the latter have helped the form-factor shrug off the cheap productivity suit and party. In this regard, AMD’s 2023 Radeon 780M iGPU set a new standard. Still, expectations should be managed. For mini PCs which rely on an iGPU for gaming, we’re talking 30+fps at 1080p for AAA games at medium settings, though they really can shine with less-demanding indies. Three of the machines on test here add a discrete laptop GPU to the mix, enabling higher performance…

Steam has made a little change to its shopping cart page: a new message that very clearly lays out to one and all that you’re not buying a game—you’re buying a license. The message itself is brief, “A purchase of a digital product grants a license for the product on Steam”. A link to the full Steam Subscriber Agreement is also provided. The change follows Valve modifying its subscriber agreement last month to remove a forced arbitration clause. Of course, for practical purposes, all you need to do is forget your Steam password to get a real sense of just how much you ‘own’ your games. You can’t bequeath your Steam library to anyone upon your unfortunate passing either, which of course you would be able to if you really…

Shortly before my hands-on with Indiana Jones and the Great Circle, a developer from MachineGames explains that this is “not action-adventure, but adventure-action”. He promises that this isn’t just a cinematic skin over the studio’s usual FPS combat, instead prioritizing the feel of an Indiana Jones adventure. The problem is, I think that’s only half true. As a statement of intent, it’s exactly what you’d want. It certainly wouldn’t feel true to the character if Jones was simply going room to room mowing down Nazis like BJ Blazkowicz. You want to see him bash some heads, for sure, but also exploring, escaping, outwitting and pulling off the impossible. The problem is, I don’t think what the studio’s made here really is “adventure-action”. After roughly three hours with it, I think…

Little Big Adventure (also known as Relentless: Twinsen’s Adventure) is either the 38th best game ever (PC Gamer, 1997) or the 91st (GamesMaster, 1996). The 1994 release from French studio Adeline was a big hit in the days of interrupt requests and 8MB of RAM, and spawned a sequel and a more recent mobile port. So what’s new in this remake? The visuals have had a makeover, as has some of the music, but the big change is that it’s a lot easier to start playing. MS-DOS was great, but clicking the Play button in Steam adds a new level of convenience for a game that was always on the player’s side—it was a hard game, but also one of the first to use autosave. The adventure is that of…

The bad news is Tthat Path Of Exile II’s Early Access debut won’t be the full game, as initially hoped. The good news is, even limited to half of the main story and six of the planned 12 classes, this is shaping up to be one of 2024’s best action-RPG releases. That’s saying a lot, given that PoEII will be going up against a refreshed and expanded Diablo IV, as well as recent rivals like Last Epoch and No Rest For The Wicked. But with a dozen hours of a near-finished build under my belt, I’m confident in that assessment. With just weeks to go until the launch of Grinding Gear Games’ ambitious ARPG sequel, I was invited to visit their offices in Auckland, New Zealand, to play the upcoming…

Remnant 2’s third RDLC, The Dark Horizon, released earlier this year—and it represents a victory lap for Gunfire Games, a dev that has made a game I’ve been a pretty large advocate for. It’s felt like a bit of an oasis in a sea of live service speculative tailspins—Gunfire decided to simply release three quite-good DLCs in the span of a year at a reasonable price point, with nary a battle pass in sight. In addition to getting an early peek at The Dark Horizon, I also got to sit down with CEO and game director David Adams, as well as co-founder and development director Ben Gabbard, to talk about the history of the game and its design philosophies for its first anniversary. Initially, Remnant: From the Ashes spawned from…

When you picture what a Final Fantasy game is, what does your mind jump first to? Shiny, pretty landscapes? Even prettier hair? Cute little creatures? Final Fantasy XVI really doesn’t fit that mold. With high-stakes action combat and a much darker tone, FFXVI flips all of your expectations upside down. The world of Valisthea feels as grubby as Game of Thrones. Both have medieval(-ish) worlds full of warring nobles vying for power with a cruel approach to their citizens’ welfare, and both face impending doom—in Final Fantasy XVI’s case, a blight that is draining life and magic from the world, slowly consuming it and leaving it barren. While there absolutely are areas of verdant nature, with idyllic countryside and villages, as well as bombastic castles dripping with might and right,…

I’m knee-deep in a swamp doing the math for aluminum production: three miners pulling ore means I’ll need six pumps for water, pushing out about 420 cubic meters of alumina solution per minute, which needs a big holding tank—so I slap one down and climb up on it. Now above the treeline I can see the sheer scale of what I’ve organized and built in the last 50-or-so hours. I can see the towering field of nuclear reactor cooling towers about a mile off pumping up gentle white clouds. Past that there’s the cliffside facility, tiny at this distance, that I set up 20 hours ago as my first aluminum plant. And above it all I can see the top of my main factory complex, peeking over a jungle-covered ridge…

You know all those pictures of people seeming to lean on the Tower of Pisa, or hold monuments in the palms of their hands? Well it’s all a matter of perspective, as you’ll discover when you play this sweet, short puzzle game, which has you staging cute, Pisa-style photographs. It’s rare for a puzzle game to have no standout gimmick just the very real, but no less magical science of forced-perspective photography. In each scene, you’re given a person and a landmark to capture, along with the outline of the necessary shot, and then you’re left alone with your camera to recreate it. How to turn the Washington Monument into a pluckable little baguette, or Mount Rushmore into a shelf of normal-sized heads? It’s all about where the subject stands,…

Finally, we have Unheard, a game that’s the direct opposite of The Quiet Man in that it’s a) about using sound instead of visuals, b) playable and c) has a story that ChatGPT wouldn’t be ashamed to share. Yes, I know I’m berating The Quiet Man again. I’ll stop now. Anyway! Unheard. You unravel mysteries by listening to sounds and conversations. The pitch is that you’re an acoustic detective who returns to scenes of various crimes and pieces together exactly what happened. It’s a thoughtful concept, and I especially like it because ‘acoustic detective’ sounds like the name of a band who’d be nominated for an indie music prize but probably not win. By replaying audio and moving around each level, you gradually piece together a mental image of events.…

Don’t worry, the printers haven’t made a mistake and dropped a spread from Console Enthusiast Quarterly in with this month’s PCG. You are going to see the PS5 Pro mentioned quite a lot in these pages though, because its overdraft-troubling pricing has sent a ripple out across the industry that extends beyond the traditional platform boundaries. In dollar terms, it isn’t the most expensive console that Sony’s ever brought to market. When you adjust PlayStations past and present for inflation, PS3’s $599 launch price adjusted for inflation is $936. And that was the base console, not an upgraded latter-day version. That fact in isolation makes it seem as though critics of the PS5 Pro’s pricing are being short-sighted, or unduly wary of price-gouging. Today’s prices are 1.56 times as high…

Ergonomics. We think about it when we sit in an especially comfortable (or uncomfortable) chair. We give it a moment when we wrap our hand around a nicely shaped mouse. And then it leaves our sphere of awareness again, to make room for CS2 callouts, the names of Doom WADs we downloaded in 1997, and figuring out what was actually going on in Alan Wake 2. Which means we don’t often stop to consider the longstanding design conventions that govern what a computer mouse looks like. And nor did I, if we’re being honest with each other. Until one late-evening YouTube rabbit hole took me to a video called ‘I Built the World’s Comfiest Mouse’. The resultant 3D printed peripheral that YouTuber Play Conveyor creates is… striking. It’s almost unrecognizable…

HIGHS Finally redeemed Red Dead Redemption is finally hitting PC, 14 years after its initial launch. Well AI never Activision claims a 43% drop in ‘disruptive voice chat’ in COD thanks to its robo-snitch. Infernal union Cult of the Lamb built a replica of the Lamb’s temple and officiated two actual weddings at PAX Australia. Nintendon’t Switch emulator Ryujinx has shut its doors after Nintendo “offered an agreement” it couldn’t refuse. Power word: Stop Baldur’s Gate III’s publishing director has implored scalpers to pack it in as they ruin the collectors’ edition for everyone. Bad influence An influencer wrecked a $200K car on livestream, then asked his bleeding passenger to keep recording. LOWS…

As the zombie horde surrounded me just moments after taking down my two remaining teammates, the writing was really on the wall. Armed with just a chef’s knife, it was clear I stood no chance, but I was going down swinging, hoping for a miracle… it didn’t come. Being so close to success in the final area, after adventuring across the giant No More Room In Hell 2 map for over 45 minutes, made the failure even more depressing. I’d finally managed to team up with a couple of other survivors, we’d looted a couple of locations such as an abandoned church and building yard to get some weapons that should have given us a good shot in the final stage, and then headed to the power plant at the…

Everything in Windblown happens in a blink. The lightning-quick dash barely has a cooldown. Time only slows for milliseconds when you dodge just as an enemy’s swing is about to connect. Downtime is in short supply, and the exhilarating flow state needed to survive Windblown had me thinking half a dozen inputs in advance. My favorite expression of this is the game’s alterattacks—special combos that only activate after you’ve swung a few times with one weapon and then immediately switch to another. There’s a rhythm particular to each weapon, but the results are often explosive. I picked up throwing knives that mark enemies with a stacking debuff I could detonate for big damage. However, the knives themselves don’t do a ton of damage, so I quickly learned I could risk my neck…

Citizens of New London: as you prepare to banish me from our city forever, I hope you understand that I always had good intentions. I never meant to run out of food, let hundreds of you perish from cold, or have the streets patrolled by giant fascist robots who stomp entire buildings flat while trying to prevent a single starving child from stealing a chocolate bar. Things just… got outta hand. But before I step out onto the frozen tundra to die despised and alone, I would like to point out that a lot of what went wrong is, from my perspective, entirely your fault. If you could agree on a school curriculum our city wouldn’t have roving gangs of knife-wielding children. If you’d let me harvest dead citizens for…

British TV show Knightmare can be quite difficult to explain, as it was basically a dungeon crawl for kids shown on ’90s primetime TV—seriously, YouTube it. Its mixture of early CGI, live actors, grisly traps and a team of children yelling about stuff could almost have existed just in someone’s imagination. It’s been repurposed as such in the spooky Frontiers of the Mind, which takes Knightmare and adds unethical psychic experiments. The show—fictionalized here as Maze Masters—has been broken down in extraordinary detail, from the basic setup to the paranormal experiments and nightmarish discoveries that were really going on behind the scenes. More than, say, Fun House, Knightmare is the perfect vessel for this sort of hauntological re-imagining, because it seems so unlikely that it ever existed in the first…

The thing about re-reviewing loads of old games is that most of them are good in a boring way or bad in a boring way. I am pleased to report, then, that The Quiet Man is so terrible it surprises and delights me. It’s a child’s magic show where the cards are on fire and the doves all smashed. You play as Dane: essentially a My Chemical Romance DLC costume for Jill Valentine. He’s not so much a character, as a series of childhood traumas crammed inside some Doc Martens. We learn, through a series of narrative flashbacks, with all the grace of a washing machine in lingerie, that Dane’s probably-mum was the victim of gangland violence. There’s more to it than that, but who gives a witch’s tit? Literally…

There are two immutable facts you should know about me: I will always find a way to mention my dog in pretty much every conversation (done!), and I will always come back to World of Warcraft. Usually at the start of the new expansion, but this time I actually returned to Azeroth at the start of the year, and it’s maintained its hold over me month after month. It is a prison from which I will never escape. Dragonflight ended up being one of my favourite expansions, up there with Wrath of the Lich King and Legion, but the changes that Blizzard has made for The War Within have ensured that the typical burnout has yet to appear. Previously, I’d get a few months out of WoW before its repetition…

I never wanted to be Han Solo. I was very young when I saw Star Wars for the first time, and his type of misbehavior was completely alien to me. Why wouldn’t you do the right thing, straight away? Don’t get me wrong, I was happy he shot first and all, but my Star Wars journey was different. I was the good farm boy turned hero, who became a one-handed zero, before dropping his lightsaber and refusing to fight. A lot of midi-chlorians have flowed under the bridge since then. The Jedi in the stories that followed became overpowered, oversaturated and more about war. All those good intentions leading to the dark side. You often get to be a problematic space wizard in gaming, but I’ve yearned to play something…

NVIDIA RTX 4060 Sony claims that the Pro is 45% faster than the base console, so we’re guessing this $300 card is the closest PC GPU. AMD RYZEN 7580 0X Sony’s machines use a bespoke AMD APU, but this affordable ($180) chip from Team Red will give you equivalent grunt. 16GB RAM Easy one. $40 will get you a 2X8GB DDR4 kit to match the Pro’s specs, leaving a little coin left for—well, everything else. DUALSENSE EDGE CONTROLLER For a mere $200, your hands can be tricked into thinking they’re operating a Sony console. Sleek and customizable.…

BLACK FINISH It’s sleek. It’s serious. It hides the years of hand-gunk you’ve allowed to build up on it. Plus, every other peripheral you own is black so it matches the setup. AMBIDEXTROUS SHAPE Yeah. Can’t really knock this one too much, can we, Southpaws? But must the specific lefty-friendly shape always be exactly that of a 2002 IntelliMouse? ONE SMALL SPOT-UV LOGO Or if you must, a white one, but always in the exact same place at the bottom of the mouse, just by your wrist. If produced before 2018, RGB is allowed here too. ONE UNREACHABLE/IMPRACTICAL BUTTON “That’ll be handy. I’ll map it to throw grenade or reload or something.” Six years later it’s awaiting its first input.…