Innehållsförteckning för October 2024 från PC Gamer

Although he began by teaching himself programming with books from the library that were “even at the time hilariously out of date”, Andrew Shouldice spent years learning before he was ready for a solo project, and to leave the game jams, and even the developer he’d eventually joined, behind. He reached the point where he decided, “I can do not all the things, but many of the things; enough to make a complete game. I will need help with audio and music, and maybe some business help, but I could do it.” That game was Tunic – though, when he first started work on it in 2015, it was initially called Secret Legend. The idea of a unique language was integral to development. “I’ve looked through old notes,” explains Shouldice,…

PLAYED IT NEED TO KNOW RELEASEQ3 2024 DEVELOPERProxy Studios PUBLISHERProxy Studios LINK s.team/a/1481170 Proxy Studios made Warhammner 40,000: Gladius, a well-regarded and luxuriously expanded 4X with the heavy focus on combat you’d expect from the grim darkness of the far future. I mention this only because Zephon is a 4X, is also set in a futuristic dark grimness, and has a familiar combat system. Rather than the galaxy-spanning civilisations of 40K, brought together on the planet Gladius for a big fight, Zephon is more Earth-based and tells the story of the end of the planet’s civilisation, and what comes after. A piece of artwork visible in the introduction shows apparently human figures in front of a tentacled beast, which is always a nice thing to see. Later, we’re told that…

NEED TO KNOW RELEASE August 23, 2024 DEVELOPER Firewalk Studios PUBLISHER Sony Interactive Entertainment LINK playstation.com Concord’s reveal trailer was met with some boos from the balcony: great, another Overwatch. It is a sci-fi PvP hero shooter, but after playing it, I can confirm that Concord isn’t Sony’s Overwatch. And it’s fun. We may not be looking at a Helldivers 2-level phenomenon, but Concord could be the multiplayer hit of the summer. There are obvious similarities between Concord and Overwatch – both feature a bunch of characters with unique guns – but it’s also obvious that a bunch of ex-Bungie devs work at developer Firewalk Studios. Most characters have double jumps, one I played had a triple jump, and another could temporarily hover. They can also dodge, which briefly pulls…

COVER FEATURE Warhammer 40,000: Space Marine 2 TITUS RENDS THE TYRANID HIVE TYRANT IN TWO WITH HIS CHAINSWORD.THEN THE CARNIFEX ARRIVES On the far reaches of my vision, on a distant horizon littered with bursts of flame, crumbling Imperial structures, and the remnants of heavily armoured vehicles, I see the Tyranid horde approaching. A mass of writhing carapace plates, talons, tails and bile, the horde swarms across the pock-marked battlefield as bunches of entrenched Imperial Guard begin frantically firing from dugouts to the left and right of me. But be under no illusion, these small squads of Astra Militarum are massively outnumbered. Just as I am, Demetrian Titus, formerly one of the Ultramarines’ greatest heroes, dispatched to Avarax to help hold back the tide. As the Xeno mass scurries to…

NEED TO KNOW WHAT IS IT? A charming cash shop cover EXPECT TO PAY Nothing/everything DEVELOPER MiHoYo PUBLISHER HoYoverse REVIEWED ON Intel Core i7-7700HQ, GTX 1070, 16GB RAM MULTIPLAYER No LINK zenless.hoyoverse.com Zenless Zone Zero adopts a zesty Hi-Fi Rush style of neon-accented sci-fi urbanism, a meaningless pushback on glossy businesses with political power. The graffiti is superficially artistic but has nothing to say, and the tech company sets up shop and then gives out neat trinkets. Zenless Zone Zero is a reskinned revenue stream designed to target a similar-but-different audience to MiHoYo’s other unstoppable gacha-style games Genshin Impact and Honkai Star Rail. It’s been created to capture a gap in the market. I’m not surprised. Gacha games like this are by design wallet-opening merch machines in disguise. The aim…

NEED TO KNOW WHAT IS IT? An isometric puzzle-platformer where well-lit floors are lava EXPECT TO PAY £19 DEVELOPER Ewoud van der Werf, Nils Slijkerman PUBLISHER Extra Nice, PLAYISM REVIEWED ON Windows 11, Ryzen 9 5900X, 32GB RAM, RTX 3080 MULTIPLAYER No LINK schimgame.com Back in 2007 or so there was a real trend for indie puzzle-platformers, usually about a sad boy who had to go from the left of the screen to the right for some reason. Though it’s not a 2D platformer, Schim reminds me of that era, when indie games would be about taking a single mechanic then expressing it through a different iteration in each level while squeezing as much emotional heft as possible out of storytelling on a budget. You play a shadow creature that…

NEED TO KNOW EXPECT TO PAY Free DEVELOPER Karolína Kuberová et al LINK bit.ly/MourningTide If Dredge has left you terrified of the ocean, get your sea legs wet again with Mourning Tide, which offers a lovely bit of fishing, no monsters allowed. Hmm, that’s a funny way of spelling ‘morning’. And that’s an alarming-looking fish. Oh no. Lovecraft has got his tentacles in this one too. To be fair: no actual tentacles. Just several increasingly unsettling fish. But despite the descent into horror, the fishing in Mourning Tide remains a delight. Unusually, it doesn’t follow the usual mechanics in fishing games, which have you hammering a button and pulling back an analogue stick to simulate the rod. Instead, after throwing the line into the ocean, you just have to…

NEED TO KNOW EXPECT TO PAY £20 DEVELOPERinkle Ltd PUBLISHERinkle Ltd I love the idea that in the future, aliens will analyse toilet graffiti to glean information about the human race. Cue a team of celestial beings, stroking their stardust beards as they unpick masterpieces such as “The naked man fears no pickpocket” and “Yer ma likes scotch eggs and she’s vegan”. Heaven’s Vault is predicated on a similar, if not identical premise. But instead of scrying filthy limericks on cubicle walls, archaeologist Aliya Elasra travels between planets, accompanied by her unsettling ghost-robot, Six, uncovering ancient script and piecing together fragments of lost civilisations. It’s a legitimately challenging, unusually satisfying puzzle that will please anyone with an interest in language or analytical thinking, but it’s an acquired taste. The pace…

Buying a graphics card feels increasingly like closing on a house or starting a small business. It was once as simple as saving up about 300 quid, triple-checking which slots your mobo supported, and then buying the big box with the fanciest-looking fantasy character on it. The more fireballs and face paint, the better the graphics card within. However, crypto farmers, lockdowns and egregious manufacturer price-hiking have made that purchase considerably more complex in the last five years. At least, that’s the excuse I’m giving people if they ask why I’m still using an RTX 2080 Ti. Once Nvidia’s pride and joy, the card they’d use on comparison slides with massive green bar charts showing all the extra frames it could produce, it’s now chugging along a bit. It doesn’t…

NOW PLAYING THE GAMES WE LOVE RIGHT NOW ROBERT JONES THIS MONTH Downloaded mods, lots of mods. ALSO PLAYED Dragon Age II, Crysis 3 I tried to like Starfield when it first launched, I really did. I’d enjoyed all of Bethesda’s past RPGs in some form or other but, as our Starfield review indicated could happen, I found myself cold, held at arm’s length from the developer’s biggest-ever virtual creation. But then, out of the blue, Starfield got the game’s new Creations centre, and it’s been the game-changer I’ve been waiting for. Creations is essentially a way to find and enable mods in your game, but where it differs from, say, just downloading Starfield mods from Nexus Mods, Creations is built in to the game and, crucially, tracks across…

RELEASED 2021 | TOP 100 SCORE 213.85 | PROMOTED BY Jacob Ridley Quality 7.44 Importance 7.00 Hotness 5.75 Playability 7.53 Sarah James: Valheim is still brilliant. It’s survival without the endless stress of managing resources. It can be as relaxing or as difficult as you want it to be, and is a game I regularly return to if I want to unwind. Jacob Ridley: There have been a good few additions to the game since 2021, including the Mistlands, where I’ve died a lot. Most of all I’m enjoying visiting towns I built with friends years ago – returning to make it all so much better.…

The Top 100 RELEASED 2009 | TOP 100 SCORE 220.30 Quality 7.87 Importance 7.80 Hotness 5.73 Playability 5.93 Harvey Randall: Every single companion character in Dragon Age: Origins is a complete home run – a feat that BioWare hasn’t quite pulled off since. Also you get a dog that can tank for you. What’s not to love? Robin Valentine: Origins was such a watershed moment for the genre, combining the glossy, cinematic feel of big-budget action games with an unapologetically deep and expansive RPG experience. You don’t get to Baldur’s Gate 3 without this game laying the groundwork. And I genuinely think it’s still the best one in the series to go back to – a rich and mature adventure, confident in its world-building and its old-school mechanics.…

The Top 100 RELEASED 2019 | TOP 100 SCORE 222.91 Quality 7.24 Importance 7.67 Hotness 7.79 Playability 7.71 Jacob Ridley: I mean we’re all still playing it, right? Tim Clark: Yes Jacob, yes we are. If you’d asked me this time last year whether Bungie had any realistic prospect of sticking the landing with The Final Shape, I wouldn’t have been taken any bets. But the landing was very much stuck. The new subclass is an all you can eat buffet, the story actually got tied off satisfactorily, and there were some genuine emotional beats landed. Briefly, the community was even… happy. Phil Savage: Destiny 2 has had plenty of ups and downs, but right now, thanks to The Final Shape, it’s absolutely worth playing.…

The Top 100 RELEASED 2021 | TOP 100 SCORE 225.00 Quality 8.55 Importance 7.83 Hotness 4.17 Playability 5.73 Jake Tucker: Max Payne lit a fire inside me like a bottle of hot sauce poured down my throat, a time when I talked like a half-baked noir character and wondered if it would be faster to get everywhere by shootdodging instead of the walking I’d done up until that point. Payne, emblazoned with the ever-grimacing mug of Remedy creative director Sam Lake, is a trauma-ridden cop having the worst night of his life, and by the time it’s done you’ll have killed every mook in New York in a series of brutal and frenetic firefights. It’s a dumb ’90s action movie in videogame form, but you’ll smile through every second. Andy Chalk:…

RELEASED 2020 | TOP 100 SCORE 225.30 Quality 9.00 Importance 5.75 Hotness 5.25 Playability 8.50 Jody Macgregor: There’s a mystery subgenre about detectives with unrelated day jobs – a retired cop who runs a restaurant, a pair of gardeners, etc. Strange Horticulture is that, only you’ve inherited a plant shop where half the mystery is what the unlabelled flowers are. While solving that you’re roped into a mystery with poisonings and druid rituals that can conveniently be solved by someone who has become an expert in occult botany.…

The Top 100 RELEASED 2000 | TOP 100 SCORE 226.00 Quality 8.17 Importance 8.75 Hotness 4.75 Playability 6.08 Rich Stanton: I’m not going to say that dungeon-crawling loot ’em ups never got any better than Diablo II, but hear me out: maybe they didn’t. Diablo II is perfectly happy just to let you build a little murder person, and run around with other little murder people spamming the bejesus out of attacks that turn monsters into bloody gibs. And then let you do it again. Tyler Wilde: The supposedly “dark” Diablo IV looks like a video slot machine next to Diablo II, which was so literally dark you couldn’t see to the edge of the screen. It felt lonely and dangerous.…

The Top 100 RELEASED 2014 | TOP 100 SCORE 227.90 Quality 8.08 Importance 8.10 Hotness 5.10 Playability 7.67 Elie Gould: The Binding of Isaac is the kind of love/hate relationship that I look for in all my roguelikes. Its witty writing and gory art set the bar back in 2011, and over a decade later, I’m pressed to find a roguelike I enjoy more. Robin Valentine: A lot of its humour has aged pretty badly, but its core roguelike mechanics, with their emphasis on discovering new wild and exciting builds every run, are still solid – and it’s easy to see how influential they’ve been on the rest of the genre.…

RELEASED 2000 | TOP 100 SCORE 231.22 Quality 8.36 Importance 9.31 Hotness 4.92 Playability 5.58 Ted Litchfield: One of the most beloved games of all time, and somehow still an underrated work of science fiction. Its more absurd or goofy elements belie a cannier understanding of the world than its self-serious 2010s reboot, and I still think Deus Ex deserves a Metal Gear Solid 2-style reappraisal for what it had to say about surveillance, the internet, and the co-opting of public institutions by private wealth. I’m glad we all agree it has phenomenal gameplay and vibes, though. Jake Tucker: I like it because it’s a science fiction sandbox where you’ll feel like a cinematic super-spy that can do everything. As long as that everything involves blowing up a load of…

RELEASED 2022 | TOP 100 SCORE 232.69 Quality 8.00 Importance 7.89 Hotness 6.53 Playability 7.94 Fraser Brown: For a very long time, my Steam Deck was essentially a Vampire Survivors machine. It existed purely to fill its screen with gaudy effects and deadly projectiles as I tried to murder death, and anything else in my way. I lost so much sleep fighting through this bullet hell, and it felt like heaven. Elie Gould: If you love turning your brain off and fighting the undead as much as I do, then Vampire Survivors is a must-play.…

RELEASED 2013 | TOP 100 SCORE 234.30 Quality 7.63 Importance 8.10 Hotness 8.30 Playability 7.75 Harvey Randall: Dawntrail might have floundered on the story, but its actual content so far has been some of the best the game’s ever gotten – A Realm Reborn to Endwalker is one of the best RPG stories out there, and maybe one of my favourite fantasy tales ever. A single dialogue prompt had me ugly-crying. I’ve given 4,000 hours to this game and I only want a handful back – here’s to 4,000 more. Sarah James: I’m still upset that I don’t play this. Mollie Taylor: FFXIV remains the only game that has managed to squeeze quadruple playtime digits. I may have taken a break during Endwalker but I’m fully back on the Dawntrail train. The…

RELEASED 2020 | TOP 100 SCORE 237.10 Quality 8.50 Importance 7.18 Hotness 6.10 Playability 8.11 Fraser Brown: It may have fallen down the list a wee bit, but Paradox’s irrepressible anecdote generator is still at the top in my heart. Even the less celebrated DLCs have given me an excuse to come back, adding plagues and propaganda masquerading as legends, but the core of this medieval grand strategy RPG is so wonderful that I really don’t need many reasons for frequent revisits. Where else will I get to plot the assassination of my brother while I’m participating in a jousting tournament and hooking up with a Satanist who is also my tax collector? It’s certainly never boring.…

RELEASED 2024 | TOP 100 SCORE 245.18 Quality 8.13 Importance 8.25 Hotness 8.24 Playability 8.20 Harvey Randall: Arrowhead has a lot of stuff to figure out – namely, how it’ll handle all eyes being on it going forward – but Helldivers 2 remains an absolute triumph in every way that matters. Being a scrappy little trooper in a hellscape of blood, metal and acid is almost always a riot. Sean Martin: Before Helldivers 2, my peak co-op shooter was Deep Rock Galactic, and though I still have a fondness for space dwarves, fighting a never-ending galactic war has won me over. From its sleek stratagems to its packed-sandboxes, Helldivers 2 really is a must for any fan of co-op shooters and egregious friendly fire. Jake Tucker: As an Arrowhead fan…

1 month STALKER 2: HEART OF CHORNOBYL RELEASE September 5, 2024 | DEVELOPER GSC Game World The long-delayed STALKER 2 has slipped again to early September this year. But from what we’ve played so far the wait is going to be well worth it. WARHAMMER 40,000: SPACE MARINE 2 RELEASE September 9, 2024 | DEVELOPER Saber Interactive Saber Interactive has been given a full extra year to make sure that Titus’ return against the relentless Tyranid hordes will be a triumphant one. And it’s looking like it will be. GREEDFALL II: THE DYING WORLD RELEASE September 24, 2024 | DEVELOPER Spiders The fantasy RPG series returns with a prequel. Explore the plague-infested lands of Gacane, using diplomacy, cunning or combat to achieve your aims. 2 months DIABLO IV: VESSEL OF…

‘Reclaim your country from a billionaire’ is a strong pitch for a game, and when he’s built you a monster-filled labyrinth it just gets better. This roguelite monster-hacker sends you off into a procedurally generated labyrinth full of creatures and NPCs. Rather than simply bashing the latter with a sword, however, you can make friends with them in the hopes of increasing your abilities. The game gets chaotic pretty quickly, with just about anything able to be turned into a projectile, including enemy shots (which are slow moving and telegraphed) and the enemies themselves, often bouncing around the screen unpredictably. In demo form it’s a lot of fun, and its Slay the Spire-style branching structure offers a great deal of potential replay value too. RELEASE January 2025 DEVELOPER Tea Witch…

NEED TO KNOW WHAT IS IT? Action-RPG about shooting and bludgeoning the undead with axes EXPECT TO PAY £33.50 DEVELOPER A44 Games PUBLISHER Kelper Interactive REVIEWED ON Intel Core i5-12500H, 16GB RAM, Nvidia GeForce RTX 4060 MULTIPLAYER No LINK playflintlock.com A flintlock is a firearm from ye olden days which uses flint-striking ignition to fire. It’s fallen out of fashion lately, mainly because it takes about 400 years to reload. The idea of trying to use one to kill several gods is pretty daunting. But I’d certainly rather take on that challenge than the far more terrifying one of being a Soulslike releasing less than a month after Shadow of the Erdtree. Maybe this game deserves a 90 just for bravery? You play as Nor, an axe-wielding warrior trapped in…

NEED TO KNOW WHAT IS IT? A holiday in someone else’s fantasy EXPECT TO PAY £24.99 DEVELOPER Microbird Games PUBLISHER Curve Games REVIEWED ON Windows 11, NVIDIA GeForce RTX 2060, AMD Ryzen 9 4900HS, 16GB RAM MULTIPLAYER No LINK dungeonsofhinterberg.com Lmuisa is a young lawyer from Vienna, and she’s burned out. Dungeons of Hinterberg leans into millennial malaise and twists it: she’s going to take a little break to find herself in a picturesque Austrian mountain town that’s recently been rocked by the arrival of magic. Instead of ski slopes, Hinterberg has dungeons. Surely slaying monsters will help Luisa solve the fear of being in your 20s and not knowing what to do with your life? The bulk of Luisa’s days are spent in dungeons in four different regions, each…

FREE GAMES REVIEWS COOL TITLES FOR NO CASH NEED TO KNOW WHAT IS IT? Re-imagines From Software’s classic Bloodborne as a PS1-era karting game EXPECT TO PAY Free DEVELOPER LW Media PUBLISHER LW Media REVIEWED ON Intel Core i7-10750H, 16GB RAM, Nvidia GeForce RTX 2060 MULTIPLAYER Yes LINK bit.ly/NightmareKart The idea of giving Bloodborne its own karting spin-off is so ridiculous that, of course, it had to happen. But all the joke needed was a couple of mocked-up screenshots before we could all sit back and watch the social media engagement roll in. No one would devote any serious time to making Bloodborne Kart an actual thing, right? Er, yes – and who better to undertake it than the developer of Bloodborne’s PS1 demake. One of the darkest games in…

THEY’RE BACK OLD GAMES REVISITED NEED TO KNOW WHAT IS IT? If the Hobbit movies were a) set in space and b) not dogshit EXPECT TO PAY £25 DEVELOPER Ghost Ship Games PUBLISHER Coffee Stain Publishing REVIEWED ON Intel Core i7-7700, 16 GB RAM, Nvidia GeForce GTX 1070 MULTIPLAYER 1-4 LINK store.steampowered.com/app/548430/ Deep_Rock_Galactic/ At the risk of sounding like I have terrible hand hygiene, I’m writing this with Citadel Trollslayer Orange on my thumbnail. This is relevant because I was highlighting Cthonian Beserks from Warhammer 40,000, which are as close as you can get to the dwarven heroes of Deep Rock Galactic. Every element of my life, apparently, needs to feature diminutive intergalactic miners. Space dwarves are difficult to get right, which is partly why an entire range of Citadel…

Summer is here and that means it’s time to think about how to keep your PC cool. You thought I was going to talk about going to the beach? Get a grip, you’re reading PC Gamer. I’m on the lookout for the most efficient case fan today – able to offer the best performance for the least amount of noise. Most PC fans may look alike but it only takes a small, seemingly inconsequential change for a night and day variation in performance. The gap between the fan blade and the frame, for example, seems like a tiny detail but this often separates the very best PC fans from the very worst. There are also differences imperceptible from the exterior. The choice of bearing will decide the performance, noise and…

KEY Budget build PC gaming is for everyone. Pick these parts if you want to build a new, well-rounded PC for a good price. Mid-range build You want to run every new game at 1080p 60fps. This recommended build will see you through. Advanced build You’re looking for the best PC on the market and superior components. But you still want to spend smart. BUDGET BUILD Enjoy 1080p gaming without breaking the bank MOTHERBOARD B660M Pro RS ASRock £103 This is as cheap as we want to go while still offering room for expansion and upgrades down the line. PROCESSOR Core i5 13400F Intel £170 With ten cores, six of them the Performance kind, this Raptor Lake Core i5 is fantastic value and a great all-rounder. GRAPHICS CARD Radeon RX…

NEED TO KNOW RELEASE November 30, 2023 PUBLISHER Feuillade Industries DEVELOPER Feuillade Industries LINK moddb.com T hief: The Black Parade is far more than just a level pack for Looking Glass’ landmark stealth game. It’s a fully-fledged, story driven campaign that acts as both a companion to and an elevation of the ideas explored in the original. Set across ten huge, palpably strange levels, it offers everything stealth fans could possibly want from such a project. Everything, that is, except Garrett. The Black Parade’s story runs alongside the events of The Dark Project, and as such you play as a new protagonist. Hume is a rougher, gruffer larcenist than Garrett, lacking the master thief’s near-supernatural skills. Indeed, The Black Parade starts with Hume returning from an eight-year sentence of…

The Top 100 RELEASED 2023 | TOP 100 SCORE 217.19 | PROMOTED BY Chris Livingston Quality 7.36 Importance 6.64 Hotness 6.69 Playability 8.25 Robin Valentine: There’s a real joy of discovery in Dave the Diver. Every step you take, some new system opens up to you – what makes the game special is that it’s always revealing itself to be bigger than you thought it was. The game’s other great stroke of genius is centring that experience on Dave, an immediately lovable character and a guy who feels like he’s just as vaguely bemused by all this weirdness as you are.…

The Top 100 RELEASED 2013 | TOP 100 SCORE 225.19 Quality 8.21 Importance 7.78 Hotness .22 Playability 7.80 Harvey Randall: One of the few games I’ve played that actually makes choosing to suck at it a mechanic itself. Papers, Please plays with the space of failure in games – often a mere punishment – and asks you just how many hits you’re willing to take to preserve goodness in a drab and heartless world. Fraser Brown: Look, it’s just fun to be really depressed and perform menial tasks under the yoke of an authoritarian regime. Hang on a minute… no it’s not. Yet Papers, Please remains exceptional – one of those special indie games that forever changed the texture of videogames.…

The Top 100 RELEASED 2018 | TOP 100 SCORE 225.66 Quality 7.92 Importance 7.73 Hotness 5.82 Playability 7.36 Wes Fenlon: Monster Hunter Rise is called the ‘anime bullshit’ Monster Hunter, and even with my extremely high anime BS tolerance I prefer the weightier World, which emphasises the natural ecosystem and doesn’t demand I literally herd cats and dogs. Robin Valentine: Rise definitely felt like a throwback, more suited to handheld – on PC, World is still the definitive Monster Hunter experience, an incredible modernisation of the series that makes its deep and nuanced systems more accessible than they’ve ever been before. There are few rushes in gaming as intense as bringing down a mighty beast together with your friends.…

RELEASED 2024 | TOP 100 SCORE 231.30 Quality 8.20 Importance 5.80 Hotness 7.20 Playability 8.40 Shaun Prescott: In this post-Hollow Knight world it’s exceedingly tough to stand out among modern metroidvanias. Animal Well adopts the time-worn pleasures of filling out a vast, interconnected map, but replaces increasingly yawn-inducing Soulslike combat with puzzle-solving. That doesn’t sound super inspiring as a concept, but the game’s success is all in the loving details: the cryptic subterranean ambience, the imsim flexibility of your tools, and – not insignificantly – the fact that the world’s secrets go so much deeper than most players will ever realise. Once the credits roll the real Animal Well begins, though you’re going to need the help of other players to see its end.…

RELEASED 2011 | TOP 100 SCORE 233.68 Quality 7.81 Importance 8.93 Hotness 7.00 Playability 7.12 Tyler Wilde: I’ve never finished Skyrim’s main quest – blah blah dragonborn, whatever – but the dozens of hours I’ve spent in this open-world RPG include some of my favourite gaming memories. Starfield didn’t bring about the same ‘I just wanna hang out in this world, maybe become a vampire’ feeling, so it isn’t just something all sufficiently large Bethesda games possess. Skyrim’s special. Mollie Taylor: I continue to be convinced that Skyrim is the ultimate comfort game and I won’t hear anything otherwise. There’s something ultra cosy about mounting a near-vertical cliff on your horse, gentle music playing in the background, and frantically mashing jump in an attempt to climb over the mountain instead…

RELEASED 2016 | TOP 100 SCORE 237.21 | PROMOTED BY Robin Valentine Quality 8.61 Importance 7.53 Hotness 5.56 Playability 7.76 Robin Valentine: I had to fight to keep XCOM 2 this high on the list, but by god it deserves it. Eight years on, after countless imitators, it’s still the king of the tactical strategy genre and honestly it isn’t even close. It ages like fine wine – still feels great to go back to, and only generates more and more amazing mod content to ensure you’ve always got something new to see. I’ve keenly felt the absence of a proper XCOM 3 or even a worthy successor, but it’s hard to be too sad when I can just boot this up and have as much fun as ever.…

RELEASED 1993 | TOP 100 SCORE 247.51 Quality 8.41 Importance 10.0 Hotness 6.81 Playability 6.81 Wes Fenlon: The purity of Doom’s shooting and serpentine levels appropriately earned it one of only two perfect scores for Importance this year. How could you rate it anything less? The real reason to play Doom today is its mod scene, which is still cranking out masterpieces 30 years later (play Myhouse.wad!). Most modders build on Doom 2, so consider this a vote for the duo: both still belong on any PC (or printer, or pregnancy test) in 2024.…

The Top 100 RELEASED 2022 | TOP 100 SCORE 259.81 Quality 8.68 Importance 8.65 Hotness 9.17 Playability 7.77 Fraser Brown: FromSoftware at its most audacious and unrestrained, Elden Ring is the pinnacle of the genre the studio created. With the huge Shadow of the Erdtree expansion, it’s now effectively two interconnected games, and both will ruin your life. Elie Gould: I can’t remember the last time I dedicated every waking moment to a game and didn’t get bored, even when hunting invisible turtles. Ted Litchfield: I’ve beaten it three times, coming up on two clears of the expansion, and there’s no end in sight. There are so many characters and builds I want to try, I want to beat NG+ with my first dude, I just started a Seamless Co-op…

The Top 100 RELEASED 2019 | TOP 100 SCORE 264.84 Quality 9.29 Importance 9.14 Hotness 6.60 Playability 8.95 Ted Litchfield: In People Make Games’ documentary about the fracturing of developer ZA/UM and the legal battle for ownership of Disco Elysium, one of the game’s writers, Argo Tuulik, said that setting creator Robert Kurvitz “has this uncanny ability to conceptualise things that already exist in a way that they seem completely fresh and new”. That’s one of my favourite things about this RPG: it’s somehow pressing, anarchic and punk while also feeling measured, mournful, almost anthropological in its fictional history. It’s a world with its own physics and technology, but the same political philosophies as our own, with a bizarre alternate world war and looming ecological catastrophe that make you look…

Ever wonder how many people it takes to make Steam? Barely any, it turns out. Documents from an antitrust suit against Valve show that the company consisted of 336 employees in 2021. That’s a fraction of the size of most big game publishers, even as Steam continues to shape PC gaming as a whole. The documents originate from Wolfire Games’ 2021 lawsuit arguing that Steam constitutes an unfair monopoly on PC digital distribution. The documents remain partially redacted, and were likely meant to have all the juicy details fully blacked out – a surprisingly common error in the US legal system that leads to sensitive data being made public. The Verge has a full chart of the year-by year number of employees and departmental payroll changes at Valve. The chart…

Unlike Microsoft and Sony, Nintendo is still holding out from porting its dragon’s hoard of exclusives to PC. And yet the PC still manages to be the best place to play Nintendo’s back catalogue. Case in point: an unofficial PC port of sci-fi espionage shooter Perfect Dark, available to anyone able to (legally, of course) source an N64 ROM file for the game. Of all consoles past, the N64 holds the dubious honour of being the one with the most overly ambitious games for its hardware. Even Nintendo’s own in-house productions struggled to hit their 20-30 frame per second targets, a problem that only grew over time. While there’s still debate as to whether Perfect Dark dethroned GoldenEye (it did), Rare’s ambitious spy-fi FPS was unquestionably one of the most…

OTK EXPO PREVIEW FIRST LOOK HOT GAMES FROM THE OTK LIVE STREAM A co-op roguelike bullet-hell-inspired third-person shooter is a lot of description for a game to carry, but Atomic Picnic shoulders the burden gleefully. An arena shooter that can be played solo or with up to three friends, this is a fast-moving game with hints of Borderlands and Fortnite about it in the way numbers pop off your cel-shaded enemies as you do them damage. In motion, it’s a colourful blaster with environments that are filled with ledges to jump on and cover to get behind, while killing monsters gets you crystals that can activate power-ups. The idea is that, following a calamity that has left the planet filled with monsters, survivors go on expeditions called ‘picnics’ to discover…

OTK EXPO PREVIEW FIRST LOOK Saving an animal shelter has to be one of the best motivations for diving into the chaos of fixing plumbing and cutting down trees with a sword I’ve ever seen. You play as Doug, an animal-loving handyman with the requisite facial hair and cargo shorts for the position but none of the skills we expect from those who strap on tool belts for a living. His heart’s in the right place, though, despite his attempts to beat an overflowing lavatory to death with a plunger, and he seems to be in demand so must be doing something right. Sadly, he’s a bit unlucky, and his jobs rapidly descend into mayhem, requiring him to stealthily dodge angry old ladies, sumo wrestlers and dinosaurs in order to…

PLAYED IT NEED TO KNOW RELEASE July 18, 2024 (Early Access) DEVELOPER Long Jaunt PUBLISHER Hooded Horse LINK www.norlandgame.com “Oh thank God, they’re having sex,” I sigh as my king and his wife, Harold and Carol, finally get down to business. This, I admit, is not a typical reaction to seeing two people express their affection for one another. But Harold and Carol’s unconsummated love life has been threatening the stability of my entire kingdom. It’s nothing to do with heirs, although one of those wouldn’t go amiss either. Harold, you see, is a deeply monogamous soul, but lately he’s been too preoccupied with his royal duties to see to his marital ones. Carol, meanwhile, has a libido to rival an entire warren of rabbits, to the point where she’s…

NEED TO KNOW WHAT IS IT? A fast-paced FPS with one of the most satisfying melee moves around EXPECT TO PAY £21 DEVELOPER Free Lives PUBLISHER Devolver REVIEWED ON Intel Core i5-12600K, 32GB RAM, Nvidia GeForce RTX 3070 MULTIPLAYER No LINK store.steampowered.com/app/1978590/Anger_Foot I don’t mean to pigeonhole Anger Foot by reducing it to First-Person Hotline Miami, but that’s pretty much the elevator pitch for the game. Enemies go down in one hit, but so do you (with a few exceptions) and levels are tight little labyrinths where each room demands you clear it with maximum aggression and efficiency. The other top-line gameplay feature is your titular angry foot – not to be confused with the game’s protagonist, Anger Foot. You’re a single button-press away from one of the better melee…

NEED TO KNOW WHAT IS IT? A classic puzzle adventure, expertly updated EXPECT TO PAY £29.50 DEVELOPER Cyan Worlds Inc PUBLISHER Cyan Worlds Inc REVIEWED ON Intel Core i7-7700HQ, 16GB RAM, Nvidia GeForce GTX 1070 MULTIPLAYER No LINK cyan.com/games/riven Atrus. Linking books. Ages. Weird, weird, puzzles. Riven, like its prequel Myst, is one of those old games that feels a little familiar – a little revered, even – to just about everyone of a (my) certain age. Going back to the original in the cold light of 2024 is hard: it’s a 640x480 flipbook of a game, much of its original multi-disk awe and wonder lost to time. This remake brings all of the ancient magic back in an instant. Looks amazing even on relatively lowly modern hardware At the…

NEED TO KNOW EXPECT TO PAY Free DEVELOPER Jon Topielski LINK bit.ly/PillowFightGame The whole deckbuilding roguelike thing can be traced back to Dream Quest, and now it’s come full circle with the unrelated but similarly nap-tastic Pillow Fight, which plays out as you’re trying to get to sleep. Knowledge of the genre will not necessarily help you here, however, as Pillow Fight makes big changes to the formula that was set down in pencil with Dream Quest, and in stone with Slay the Spire. Rather than your hand being dealt randomly every turn, you get a persistent set of cards that have cooldowns before they can be used again. You’re mainly playing with a set of white and black sheep tokens, which will earn you – or your opponent –…

NEED TO KNOW EXPECT TO PAY £5 DEVELOPER LucasArts PUBLISHER LucasArts It’s strange going into The Dig with zero knowledge of what it actually is. I assumed, for some reason, it would be a cheerful archaeology romp; Indiana Jones and the Fate of Atlantis without the whips and hats. The actual game is far weirder. The point-and-click equivalent of that kombucha gif. The story centres around an asteroid on a collision course with Earth. A team of experts are sent into space to divert its course, leaving it in a stable orbit around the planet, essentially making a naff sequel to the moon. I had absolutely no idea about this, and I spend the first five minutes wondering why more people don’t berate Michael Bay’s gormless cosmic action film, Arnageddon,…

Four-hundred is, as any of PC Gamer’s 12 editors will tell you, a large number. It’s an incredible volume of magazines spanning 30 years, housing PC gaming’s near-entire history. 400 pounds sterling, though, seems a smaller number. Particularly when you browse PC component retailers, rubbing your eyes theatrically at the number of extra digits that appear to have been mistakenly added to the price of – well, everything. For this historic 400th issue, an experiment is in order. Is it possible to build a gaming PC for £400 or less, during an era when the latest Nvidia GPUs cost seven Bitcoins each? In this accursed age it seems basically impossible to pop to the shop for a Pot Noodle and some Andrex without walking out £34.97 lighter in the pockets,…

HARVEY RANDALL THIS MONTH Loaded a new Elden Ring save for the first time since 2022. ALSO PLAYED Final Fantasy XIV: Dawntrail, Hades 2 B ack when I first played Elden Ring in that halcyon year of 2022, I made it my personal mission to slay the Tree Sentinel. He’s the first big bad you see when you enter into the Lands Between proper for the first time, so I thought it was my charge to knock him over. This was a mission I did not finish. This golden prick flattened my tarnished hiney so many times that I just gave up until I had more vigour to play with. So imagine my surprise when, after thoroughly enjoying my playthrough of Elden Ring: Shadow of the Erdtree, I rolled up…

IAN EVENDEN THIS MONTH Mined crystals and farmed twibbles for fun and profit. ALSO PLAYED Baldur’s Gate III, Stardew Valley I was reminded of Crystal Caves this month when looking at old PC Format magazine cover discs, because a man’s got to have a hobby, and noticed that a demo of it was given away with the first issue I remember buying. PC Format is long gone, of course, and sadly missed, but Crystal Caves endures – it’s on Steam and GOG in remastered form. This is an Apogee game, the company founded in 1987 that changed to 3D Realms, made Duke Nukem 3D, and got into a complicated licensing arrangement with another company called Apogee. But this is the Apogee that published Commander Keen and Wolfenstein 3D, and Crystal…

The Top 100 RELEASED 2022 | TOP 100 SCORE 222.09 Quality 7.92 Importance 6.79 Hotness 5.50 Playability 8.10 Rich Stanton: Death Stranding is 100% a vibes game. Though I watched the cutscenes my first time through, and am always interested in teasing out Kojima’s themes, this is an experience that (like hill-walking itself) needs a certain mindset. It’s a game I’ve been through twice and is now one I return to just to be in that zone again for a couple of hours, totally relaxed as I plan out my route, long past the stage of caring about timings or grades or even BTs. The days of being a hero delivery man are over: now I’m just Sam, out for a walk with BB and the camera, luxuriating in a virtual…

RELEASED 2012 | TOP 100 SCORE 223.29 Quality 8.07 Importance 8.00 Hotness 4.00 Playability 8.00 Jake Tucker: Ostensibly a combat title, Hotline Miami is really a puzzle game about how you can better murder an army of criminals in tightly designed levels. The throbbing soundtrack, endless parade of white-suited mobsters and vicious ultraviolence combine to create a flow-state fever dream. Stacks of indie games have tried to emulate the split-second brutality of Hotline Miami, but nobody does it better than Dennaton Games.…

The Top 100 RELEASED 2018 | TOP 100 SCORE 227.10 Quality 9.00 Importance 6.67 Hotness 4.67 Playability 8.67 Robin Valentine: A masterful combination of a classic point-and-click adventure with BioWare-style companions and moral choices. It feels like an experiment in how a very old-fashioned genre can be made to feel fresh and relevant, and the result is something really striking that I wish had been more influential than it was. Its urban fantasy world – where djinn and demons lurk just under the surface of mundane life – is so enthralling, and the perfect setting for a story that effortlessly weaves between moments of lightness and humour, and truly dark and terrible crimes. That central narrative is bolstered by developer Wadjet Eye’s extensive experience creating supernatural mysteries. Fraser Brown: Play…

RELEASED 2021 | TOP 100 SCORE 228.43 Quality 8.57 Importance 6.43 Hotness 4.33 Playability 8.57 Harvey Randall: I only have kind words for Wildermyth – XCOM rendered as a storybook. Its charming vignettes add just enough flavour to your characters to project all sorts of stories onto them, often dramatically changing them in the process. It helps that it’s a solid tactical RPG, too. Robin Valentine: I don’t think any other game evokes the feel of a rambling tabletop RPG campaign as well as Wildermyth does (sorry BG3).…

RELEASED 1999 | TOP 100 SCORE 236.43 Quality 9.14 Importance 7.71 Hotness 4.14 Playability 6.17 Jody Macgregor: Torment took the engine Baldur’s Gate was built on, but stripped out the trad fantasy trappings. Instead of drinking healing potions you get hit points back by eating blood flies and the available weapons include a severed limb and upgradeable teeth for your companion, who is just a skull. Torment is Dungeons & Dragons minus the elves and gnomes, plus the maddest shit you’ve ever heard. Joshua Wolens: Disco Elysium before there was Disco Elysium. Thoughtful, gorgeous, and with some of the best boss dialogue in gaming history. Shame about the actual boss battles, eh? Turn the difficulty down low and enjoy it as the visual novel it’s meant to be. Ted Litchfield: Cerebral RPGs…

RELEASED 2017 | TOP 100 SCORE 238.06 Quality 8.08 Importance 7.92 Hotness 7.50 Playability 7.73 Kara Phillips: I didn’t think much of metroidvanias before going into Hollow Knight, but I quickly found a home in Hallownest. One of the only games to drive me to pure fury during a boss fight, it still had me coming back to try again. Plus, it’s got an incredible soundtrack that never loses its charm no matter how many times you listen to it. Harvey Randall: Proof that a game can have a lot of bugs in it and still be really good.…

The Top 100 RELEASED 2004 | TOP 100 SCORE 256.61 Quality 9.10 Importance 9.53 Hotness 6.00 Playability 7.65 Phil Savage: It’s nearly two decades old, but Half-Life 2 is still one of the best FPS campaigns ever made. There are plenty of shooters with better feeling guns, or more exciting combat, but all too few have learned the important lessons about variety and pace taught by Valve’s all-timer. Each level is a classic, exploring different ideas to memorable effect – finding fun new uses for the tools it provides. And the legacy of Half-Life 2 extends beyond the games that have tried (and often failed) to imitate it. Its mod scene was responsible for entirely new genres – total conversions like Dear Esther and The Stanley Parable showcasing new ways…

The Top 100 RELEASED 2011 | TOP 100 SCORE 258.50 Quality 8.57 Importance 9.95 Hotness 7.70 Playability 8.26 Kara Phillips: For a game that’s all about stacking blocks, Minecraft is unmatched in holding its charm and the attention of its players. The creativity of the community helps make the experience whole. Lauren Morton: Minecraft deserves its place on this list for still being so all-round good. There’s no debating its importance – we have it to thank for the flourishing survival crafting genre. And though it’s not as hot as it once was, it remains a household name I can use to explain to non-gaming adults what I do for a living.…