Innehållsförteckning för October 2025 från PC Gamer

The reason why Snake Eater remains the apex of the Metal Gear Solid series is due to the personal relationship that sits at its heart between Snake and his mentor, The Boss. Snake’s origin story is a mad, action-filled, philosophical tearjerker that grips you right from the start and then never lets you go until its incredible, sublime denouement. And now Metal Gear Solid Delta: Snake Eater is here to offer the definitive, Unreal Engine 5-powered remake of this bona fide gaming classic. You can read all about it in our killer lead feature, starting on page 38. Enjoy! SUBSCRIBE TO PC GAMER Check out our latest offer!SEE p48 ROBERT JONES Twitter @rnicholasj This month Wore PC Gamer Towers’ ghillie suit to secretly go behind enemy lines and infiltrate a…

I fear Grow a Garden’s entire premise was ruined for me less than 30 minutes in, when another player handed me a gigantic watermelon. The monstermel turned out to be worth 800,000 sheckles – I was still barely scraping 1,000 at a time from my handful of strawberry and blueberry bushes, and in a flash the joy of ‘number go bigger’ had been felled at the hands of a kind stranger. Even before a gigantic fruit squashed my sense of accomplishment, I couldn’t quite understand what it is about Videogame that’s caused it to become one of the most popular experiences on Roblox right now. When I was playing it during an early weekday afternoon, the Roblox app claimed to have 3.2 million people growing and cultivating their own non-denominational…

NEED TO KNOW RELEASETBC DEVELOPERTargim PUBLISHERTargim LINK store.steampowered.com Sometimes in this job, my decisions are easy. I see a game called Cop Bastard has released a demo, of course I download and play that demo. Simple. The question is, is there anything to it beyond a very good name? The answer: sort of? Set in ’90s Japan, but seemingly taking most of its cues from Hong Kong action movies, Cop Bastard casts you as… well, a cop who’s kind of a bastard, having decided to just murder his way through an entire building full of criminals. That makes for some retro shooter action – not quite boomer shooter, but in an older realm of fast-paced, uncomplicated blasting. You enter a room, you shoot whoever’s in it, you hoover up ammo,…

NEED TO KNOW RELEASETBA DEVELOPERWillis Studios PUBLISHERWillis Studios LINK s.team/a/3445040 Utterly charming, this relaxed city design game lets you build and rebuild without needing to worry about resources. There’s a big dollop of Townscaper in both the way it looks and plays, and if it can maintain these levels of chill and enchantment could be a great new addition to the genre. The island is a paradise. Bisected by a canal, it’s a maze of plazas, parks, trees and housing, topped by a stone castle keep on the highest part. Villagers keep joining the burgeoning settlement, as do dogs, cats, ravens, sparrows and watchmen, and they often comment on how much they love the trees. It’s not quite clear where they’re coming from, as no boats arrive, but I’m glad…

RELEASEAugust 21 DEVELOPERCrinkle Cut Games PUBLISHERPQube LINK s.team/a/2274620 Stardew Valley except you’re Pierre and people like you. Your store is a discount supermarket in a pixel-art village, selling cheap unlike the high prices charged in Pelican Town (though you do have a monopoly), and it’s up to you to lay it out, decide what stock you’ll carry, and how you’ll expand the business in the face of local opposition to a newcomer. Of course you’ll be able to win them around with good service.…

NEED TO KNOW WHAT IS IT?Isometric stealth, Swedish-style EXPECT TO PAY£34 DEVELOPERRiver End Games PUBLISHERNordcurrent Labs REVIEWED ONAMD Ryzen 3700x, 32 GB RAM, Nvidia GeForce RTX 4080 MULTIPLAYERNo LINK eriksholmgame.com Eriksholm: The Stolen Dream will dupe you. An isometric stealth game that puts you in control of multiple characters who each have their own abilities? You know what this is, surely? You’ll think to yourself, “This is a Commandos, this is a Desperados, this is a game about combining and applying your characters’ skillsets to creatively overcome obstacles.” And you’ll be wrong. Despite appearances, Eriksholm is a strict, tight, and mostly linear thing. There’s more in common with Hitman Go than Shadow Tactics here: the job before you is not figuring out your own solution to its artisanal, bijou stealth…

NEED TO KNOW WHAT IS IT?A new band of Phantom Thieves in a gacha’d-up JRPG EXPECT TO PAYFree DEVELOPERAtlus, Sega, Perfect World PUBLISHERSega REVIEWED ONAMD Ryzen 9 3900XT, 32GB RAM, Nvidia GeForce RTX 3070 STEAM DECKPlayable MULTIPLAYERYes LINK persona5x.com I consider myself an insufferable Persona 5 fan, but even I’m beginning to tire a little of the Phantom Thieves. If there’s one thing Atlus knows how to do, it’s milk the ever-loving god out of a videogame. I presume that’s exactly how we ended up here: Persona 5: The Phantom X, a free-to-play gacha game developed alongside Perfect World subsidiary Black Wings Studio, which has dabbled in this sort of thing before. It’s bizarre, because The Phantom X looks like Persona 5 (and sure does play like Persona 5) until…

NEED TO KNOW EXPECT TO PAYFree DEVELOPERFreshly Baked Games LINK bit.ly/TheNewFlesh It might be a game set at an intersection, but The New Flesh ably demonstrates how to keep a small space feeling exciting, even as you trudge round its streets for the third or fourth time. In this first-person exploration game, you’ve arrived in a weird parallel city looking for videotapes to cram into a flasher’s abdominal cavity. This creepy fella is your first quest-giver, though to be fair the tapes aren’t hard to find, as you explore a chunk of an empty city and get teleported to several fantastical locations. It’s like someone lopped off a wing of Cosmo D’s surreal exploration game Off-Peak, then made it a licensed tie-in for the band Red Vox. So yes,…

NEED TO KNOW EXPECT TO PAY£33.50 DEVELOPERMimimi Games PUBLISHERTHQ Nordic This is the second intro I need to rethink. I was going to talk about how it’s nice when a game’s systems are so sharp it doesn’t matter that they’re nonsensical. But I spent minutes searching for my daughter after she hid in a bamboo thicket. Apparently, bushes do make you invisible. Unlike in Desperados III, it didn’t end with a dagger being thrown at my throat. And the fact remains that the game’s system of cones, shrubs, and booby-trapped doctor’s bags is ridiculous. It shouldn’t work. But it does. And it does such a fine job of teaching you this stuff that I become proud of my stilted semi-competence far too early. I’m feeling good about myself because I…

Early in 2023, rumours began to circulate that Apple had plans to introduce a subscription service for iPhone hardware. Users would pay a monthly fee, and in return they’d get access to, but crucially not ownership of, the latest available iPhone model, whenever it was released. This was different to buying an iPhone in instalments, or a ‘buy now, pay later’ credit plan. There was no end point. No final payment, after which the hardware became yours. Like the software on Xbox Game Pass, users would simply have been paying monthly to use it and when the monthly fees stopped, the access dried up. By late 2024 those – rumoured – plans had been scrapped by Apple, said analysts. They cited regulatory concerns and software considerations. For anyone with a…

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 £102 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 £130 Intels’ budget chip is still fantastic value and a solid all-rounder. GRAPHICS CARD Radeon RX 9060 XT 8 GB AMD £300 AMD delivers what we…

NEED TO KNOW RELEASEFeb 26, 2016 PUBLISHERConcernedApe DEVELOPERConcernedApe LINK stardewvalley.net I’ve been playing Hades lately, and the worst thing that cosy farming life sim does to you is remind you that most games are not Hades. Revisiting my old Stardew Valley saves is fun as ever, but where is the upgrade-nabbing, boss-rushing madness my dopamine receptors have come to so ravenously crave? I say pshaw to hot dates, egg festivals and sprinkler maintenance. Give me unending violence or give me nothing at all. OK, I’m mostly kidding. But the combat Stardew Valley does have, lean and reverent to NES-era Zelda though it may be, is a fun little aside when delving into the mine and doing quests for the Adventurer’s Guild. Mod authors Tyler, TheHaboo and Therm thought so too…

It’s Mastercard’s world, we just live in it. That’s my understanding based on a recent communiqué from Valve to PC Gamer, which confirmed that, yup, the company really did recently remove a spate of adult games because they upset payment processors. “We were recently notified that certain games on Steam may violate the rules and standards set forth by our payment processors and their related card networks and banks,” Valve’s missive reads. “As a result, we are retiring those games from being sold on the Steam Store.” Valve is reaching out to devs affected by the change “and issuing app credits should they have another game they’d like to distribute on Steam in the future”. Just, you know, so long as those games get the seal of approval from Valve’s…

1 month METAL GEAR SOLID DELTA: SNAKE EATER RELEASE August 28, 2025 | DEVELOPER Konami Snake returns in, arguably, his most memorable mission to date. And this time he looks better than ever thanks to a UE5 glow-up. Tense espionage action awaits. HELL IS US RELEASE September 4, 2025 | DEVELOPER Nacon A stylish sci-fi third-person action-adventure game set in a future dystopia where the world has descended into civil war and strife following a mysterious calamity. BORDERLANDS 4 RELEASE September 12, 2025 | DEVELOPER Gearbox The mayhem-fuelled looter-shooter returns with promises of billions of weapons, outrageous enemies and intense co-op action. Here’s hoping it’s better than the movie! 2 months THE OUTER WORLDS 2 RELEASE October 29, 2025 | DEVELOPER Obsidian Entertainment Further interplanetary action and adventure from Obsidian,…

NEED TO KNOW RELEASETBA DEVELOPERYaza Games PUBLISHERMythwright LINK s.team/a/3119540 There’s very little that is funnier than a medieval illustrator trying to draw a horse they’ve never seen from an unaccustomed angle, and the developers of Scriptorium understand this. And they should, having released turn-based donkey-farting simulator and all-round good time Inkulinati way back at the beginning of 2024. This time around, you’re creating the illustrations. “It would be an honour,” exclaims our illustrator, a demure young lady, in response to a retired knight’s request to draw a beast. “Although I’ve never seen one…” So we start with a Great African Beast, with legs like oaks, a nose like a branch, and some big teeth. Getting to work, I use the body and head of a donkey as a base, with…

NEED TO KNOW WHAT IS IT?A Pac-Man Metroidvania, for some reason EXPECT TO PAY£25 DEVELOPERBandai Namco PUBLISHERBandai Namco REVIEWED ONAsus ROG Ally MULTIPLAYERNo LINK bandainamcoent.com/games/shadow-labyrinth Not since Bob Hoskins’ Mario shoved his face down a woman’s top have I witnessed such a bizarrely adult reimagining of a family-friendly character. While Shadow Labyrinth never goes that far this is still a game in which Pac-Man helps you slaughter monsters with brains on the wrong sides of their skulls. Then he helpfully swallows their spines afterwards so you can spend them at the shop. Well, technically it isn’t Pac-Man. Here your companion is called Puck, a cute nod to what was almost Pac-Man’s name/a helpful distancing of this monster from being considered the real deal. Because Puck is a manipulative, untrustworthy devil…

NEED TO KNOW WHAT IS IT?A co-op PvE shooter where you fight fungus EXPECT TO PAY£15 DEVELOPERPigeons at Play PUBLISHERDevolver Digital REVIEWED ONAMD Ryzen 5 5600G, 16GB RAM, Nvidia GeForce RTX 3070 MULTIPLAYERYes LINK store.steampowered.com/app/3247750/ Mycopunk/ Mycopunk is about as chaotic as a co-op shooter can get. You work for a megacorporation which mines the planet of New Atlas for Saxonite. But after a fungus infects the world, you’re sent down alongside other members of the New Atlas Hazard Crew to clear the way and gather helpful resources. Oh – and you’re directed by Roachard Cox, your line manager who also happens to be a talking cockroach. Try not to think about it too hard, you’ll be fine. Mycopunk is full of clutch plays, chaotic fights, and good old-fashioned kiteing…

NEED TO KNOW WHAT IS IT?An action-heavy Soulslike set in a plague-stricken 14th-century China EXPECT TO PAY£50 DEVELOPERLeenzee PUBLISHER505 Games REVIEWED ONIntel Core i9 12900K, 32GB RAM, Nvidia GeForce RTX 5090 MULTIPLAYERNo LINK store.steampowered.com/app/2277560/ WUCHANG_Fallen_ Feathers Wuchang: Fallen Feathers has almost nothing to add to the Soulslike genre. For all of its 40-something hours of monster battles and weirdo NPCs, all it does is poorly imitate the best moments in FromSoftware’s list of much better action games. Skimpy outfits, dull combat and an empty world cheapen the entire experience and bury the few things it actually does well. In Wuchang, the people of China aren’t turning into werewolves like in Bloodborne, they’re turning into birds. First they go blind and lose their memories and then they turn into tortured avian…

NEED TO KNOW EXPECT TO PAYFree DEVELOPERUpdog Software LINK bit.ly/OnesExile Games about grim survival usually invite us to make hard choices by killing or betraying other people, but what if the person you have to betray is yourself? That’s the question One’s Own Exile grapples with, as you try to escape a society where difference is feared, and ultimately eliminated. After your bazaar is ransacked, you decide to flee from tyranny and to the safety of the Northern kingdom. However, to do that you’ll need to pass through a heavily guarded checkpoint. Go as you are and the guards will kill you on the spot. But to pass as one of the regular townsfolk, you will need to strip away everything you are. Sybil, the protagonist, outlines it neatly…

NEED TO KNOW EXPECT TO PAY£50 DEVELOPERCreative Assembly PUBLISHERSega It almost feels illegal including a Total War: Warhammer game in They’re Back, because the title implies that it ever went away. In my case, that simply isn’t true. I’ve played it for hundreds of hours. But it feels similarly unlawful to exclude it from a list of interesting threequels. So in it goes. It’s so good that I want to stand on an oathstone and lecture you about how every single faction is potentially a game in itself; more, in fact, given the variation between legendary lords. But I need to be honest. I still basically only play as dwarfs. And when I’m not playing as classic dwarfs, I’m playing as their cursed, magic-using brethren instead. This is honestly the…

If you want to find out how good a graphics card is, you fire up the benchmark mode in a nice graphically demanding game. Same goes for a CPU, only you use a more CPU-bound title like Total War: Warhammer. You watch the automated sequence, you note down the numbers that the benchmark spits back out at you, and you use those numbers to rank one component against another. But when you want to find out how good a peripheral is, Night City can’t help you and the efficacy of that Hitman: World of Assassination benchmark with the stately home getting shot to bits is limited at best. It’s not that you’re going on vibes, exactly, since there are still reasonably empirical aspects like tech specs to compare alongside your…

TED LITCHFIELD THIS MONTHSaved the free world by crouch walking through Saudi Arabia. ALSO PLAYED System Shock 2: 25th Anniversary Remake My name is Agent Michael Thorton, and every dialogue is a minefield: two thirds of the options will turn me into The Most Cancelled Man Who Ever Lived. The Mass Effect-y archetypes I’m provided with correspond to the spy guy holy trinity: Borne (Professional), Bond (Suave), and Bauer (Aggressive). Aggressive Mike is a Renegade psycho, greeting an information broker by slamming his face into a bar. Suave Mike is a pervert. I want to strap him to the Clockwork Orange chair just to make him watch corporate anti-harassment training videos. Professional Mike? Nice guy. A little slow. I like the cut of his jib. And by god are this…

MATT ELLIOTT THIS MONTHContemplated growing old with a yakuza legend. ALSO PLAYED The Elder Scrolls IV: Oblivion Remastered A recent study from the Survey Center on American Life reported that 15% of US men said they didn’t have close friends in 2021, compared with 3% in 1990. In the same period, the number of men with 10 or more close friends decreased from 33% to 13%. It’s become known as a ‘friendship recession’ – the sad, once-removed cousin of the male loneliness epidemic. And, without wishing to sound flippant, I think I have the solution. Play Like A Dragon: Infinite Wealth, a game that teaches the value of drinking cup sake with middle-aged men who really want you to be happy. There’s something inspiring about Infinite Wealth’s celebration of sincerity.…

NEED TO KNOW RELEASE1999 PUBLISHERInterplay DEVELOPERXatrix Entertainment LINK steam.com L ike almost every game I played during the 1990s and early 2000s, my love of brutal FPS Kingpin: Life of Crime started with a free demo on the PC Gamer cover disk. Back then, its wall-to-wall bloodletting, prolific swearing and killer soundtrack were like flames to my inner moth. It’s hard to imagine a more exciting time for the genre than in 1999. Half-Life had basically just conquered the world the year before, and a trail of breadcrumbs and bratwurst would lead to Return to Castle Wolfenstein in 2001. With the hum of Quake II’s minigun still ringing in our ears, lesser-known developer Xatrix Entertainment had just finished its first official expansion, The Reckoning, and was about to launch…

NEED TO KNOW RELEASETBC DEVELOPERCrowbar Collective PUBLISHERTeam17 LINK s.team/a/1843840 Presumably the name Tom Clancy’s Syndicate was already taken, as Rogue Point takes the Rainbow Six template and fills it with mercenary goons working for rival corporations. They’re not cybernetically enhanced – at least not in the demo build – as Rogue Point takes a more realistic approach to its corpo-combat. This means you’ll die easily, and as with other team-based tactical shooters you’ll need a mix of planning, communication and teamwork to make it through the mission alive. Blasting the first merc you see with a shotgun may be effective in the short term, but this just means his boss inside is alerted, and will shoot you with unerring accuracy through the window while more bad guys (who come in…

With Jurassic Park back in the cinemas and not doing too badly, what better time to start running and screaming from dinosaurs? And so it goes, as you’re shipwrecked on a mysterious island and asked to survive in the face of human mercenaries with guns as well as actual living dinos. The cretaceous creatures aren’t always hostile. They’re wild animals, but thanks to a device provided by a disaffected employee of the company that’s behind both the reincarnated monsters and the mercs, you can attempt to communicate with them, control them to attack your enemies, or send them through small gaps to open new paths and sneak around the bad guys. There’s even a baby T-rex. This is tempered with the usual busywork of the survival game – foraging for…

Welcome to Saiadha. It’s nice here. There’s plenty of coastal real estate for refugees from Auriga to build a new life, rich in resources and blissfully separated by sea channels from other races who might be looking for a fight. There are none of the harsh winters of the first Endless Legend’s setting, but this new planet does have some meteorological quirks of its own. THE FRENCH DEVELOPER HAS PUT OUT FIVE PREVIOUS ENDLESS TITLES Endless Legend 2, Amplitude Studios’ new 4X which will be heading into Early Access this September, with a demo available on Steam by the time you read this, picks up after the first game, with the survivors of a hasty exit from its frozen planet – some familiar, some new – landing on an ocean…

NEED TO KNOW WHAT IS IT?A co-op or solo action-horror FPS which sees you take down hordes of monsters EXPECT TO PAY£35 DEVELOPERTripwire Interactive PUBLISHERTripwire Interactive REVIEWED ONAMD Ryzen 5 5600G, 16GB RAM, Nvidia GeForce RTX 3070 MULTIPLAYERYes LINK steampowered.com/app/1430190/ Killing_Floor_3/ I am but a simple creature, my idea of a good gaming time with friends is yapping about how our days have been while blowing monsters to smithereens, it’s a good way to take the frustration out. So in that respect, Killing Floor 3 does a great job. It places you and some friends into the heart of a horde of zeds with various weapons and says, “Have at it”. Killing Floor 3 is exactly what you would expect. It’s you and a bunch of guns against hordes of…

NEED TO KNOW WHAT IS IT?A point-and-click pulp adventure thriller with true grit EXPECT TO PAY£17 DEVELOPERPowerhoof, Dave Lloyd PUBLISHERPowerhoof REVIEWED ONAMD Ryzen 5 5600H, 16GB RAM, Nvidia GeForce RTX 3060 MULTIPLAYERNo LINK thedriftergame.com We meet Mick Carter as a homeless drifter. Due to some unspecified past trauma, he’s abandoned his settled domestic life in a nameless Australian city for a self-flagellating transient existence. He’s en route to home, where he’s been beckoned to attend his mother’s funeral. He does so reluctantly, because it draws him closer to a past he’s deliberately abandoned. Shit hits the fan almost immediately. Not only is Mick forcibly ejected from his train carriage by a mysterious, possibly supernatural presence, but he’s then framed for the murder of a homeless man in the seedy railway…

NEED TO KNOW WHAT IS IT?A cosy life sim set in a the small hobbit town of Bywater EXPECT TO PAY£29 DEVELOPERWeta Workshop PUBLISHERPrivate Division REVIEWED ONIntel Core i7 9700K, 16GB RAM, Nvidia GeForce RTX 4070 Ti MULTIPLAYERNo LINK talesoftheshire.com Bilbo Baggins’ trip to Lonely Mountain (and back again) in The Hobbit was roughly 2,000 miles. In Tales of the Shire: A The Lord of the Rings Game, I feel like I’ve run at least half that distance without ever leaving the tiny town of Bywater. I cook, I fish, I farm – but most of my time is spent using my big ol’ hairy feet to skip back and forth between the dozen hobbits who regularly need my help. That’s not unusual for a life sim – I sprint…

NEED TO KNOW WHAT IS IT?A cosy game about cataloguing weird aliens on an uncharted planet EXPECT TO PAYFree DEVELOPERsplendidland PUBLISHERsplendidland REVIEWED ONIntel Core i7-10750H, 16GB RAM, Nvidia GeForce RTX 2060 MULTIPLAYERNo LINK bit.ly/FormlessStar Like No Man’s Sky if it had been doodled into an exercise book, Formless Star is a game about visiting an alien planet and recording all the weird animals that live there. And there are some really fascinatingly strange creatures here: like a sentient die, and a big pane of glass that insists on recklessly dashing everywhere, and an ‘animal’ that is actually the coolest pixel art mech I’ve ever seen. But Formless Star isn’t a game about photographing these animals from a distance – it’s a game where you discover the creatures by sidling up…

NEED TO KNOW WHAT IS IT?That Difficult Third Zombie Movie: The Game (ask George Romero) EXPECT TO PAY£33 DEVELOPERCapcom PUBLISHERCapcom REVIEWED ONIntel Core i7-7700, 16 GB RAM, Nvidia GeForce GTX 1070 MULTIPLAYERYes LINK store.steampowered.com/app/952060/ Resident_Evil_3/ S ometimes, before you play a game, you think you have an intro already written. I was going to talk about how hard it is to make slow zombies scary in a post-28 Days Later world. But honestly, that’s bullshit: they’re dead people who moan and try to bite you. They walk funny. It’s an absolute pant-shitter. And somehow, Resident Evil 3 manages to elevate that. Perhaps it’s the setting, but the opening moments make everything feel so urgent I start sprinting everywhere. And this turns out to be risky, since the zombies keep getting…

You’d be forgiven for thinking that buying a GPU on a budget was a near-impossible task these days. But while retailer prices are still higher than we’d like, it’s possible to pick up a brand new 1080p and 1440p graphics-cruncher from the likes of Nvidia, AMD, and Intel for sensible cash. From the surprisingly affordable Intel Arc B580 to the mid-range-munching AMD Radeon RX 9070, there’s some serious competition in the reasonably-priced GPU market right now. So, if cash is king, these are your current options for keeping your bank balance frosty and your gaming PC bang up-to-date. 1 GeForce RTX 5060 NVIDIA £269 Budget, but at what cost? Nvidia’s budget GPU has, on paper at least, a fair bit going for it. With a £269 MSRP, it slots in…

IAN EVENDEN THIS MONTHLurked in the darkness, hoping not to be noticed. ALSO PLAYED Vampire: The Masquerade – Bloodlines Stealth games are something I’ve always admired, ever since I sat and watched a friend playing Metal Gear Solid on his PlayStation, but have usually been unable to participate in. There’s something about them that just rubs me up the wrong way. I’m not sure if it’s the insta-fail nature of many of them, where a single moment of exposure leads to an army coming down on your fragile protagonist, or if it’s the passive nature of hiding when you’ve invariably got an arsenal you could be using. I would much rather be an active participant in other people’s doom. I am not a subtle gamer. There have been moments, however,…