Innehållsförteckning för Christmas 2025 från PC Gamer

Nintendo has had a lengthy history of legal skulduggery, but after initiating last year’s patent lawsuit against Palworld developer Pocketpair, the house of Mario has descended into outright moustache-twirling IP villainy. September, however, saw Nintendo armed with a particularly troubling weapon for its legal arsenal: US Patent 12,403,397, a patent on summoning and battling characters that the United States Patent and Trademark Office granted with alarmingly little resistance. According to videogame patent lawyer Kirk Sigmon, the USPTO granting Nintendo these latest patents isn’t just a moment of questionable legal theory. It’s an indictment of American patent law. “Broadly, I don’t disagree with the many online complaints about these Nintendo patents,” says Sigmon, whose opinions do not represent those of his firm and clients. “They have been an embarrassing failure of…

NEED TO KNOW RELEASE TBC DEVELOPER Nyamakop PUBLISHER Nyamakop LINK  steam.pm/app/3255890 That belongs in a museum,” was a great line when Indy said it, but he never mentioned that museum being in the artefact’s country of origin. Relooted takes a practical approach to antiquities languishing in places they perhaps shouldn’t be: taking them back. After all, is it really stealing? Well some people think it is. Set in a future version of Johannesburg, and created by a South African developer, your liberation crew with its eye on the spoils of colonialism held in Western museums is led by an art historian and made up of scientists, hackers and even MMA fighters (the game is non-violent) rather than safe-crackers, burglars and knife-wielding maniacs. Main character Nomali is an acrobat, able to jump and free-run…

As you push back the fog of war on the continent of Jadame, you’ll often stumble over ruins. Moss-covered standing stones and mana-infused obelisks, cracked open by thick vines and the passage of time. Towering trees of burnt orange and violet jostling for room with kneeling statues, their stone palms turned upward in supplication to a god no one remembers. TO A GENERATION OF PC GAMERS, HEROES OF MIGHT AND MAGIC IS A MYSTERY It’s a fitting backdrop to Heroes of Might and Magic, a turn-based strategy classic which defined the genre before dropping out of it completely. Original developer New World Computing died in 2003, after which point the series bounced between different studios, never finding a permanent home. Amid diminishing returns, publisher Ubisoft simply stopped making it. For…

NEED TO KNOW WHAT IS IT? An action-adventure horror game set in 1960s Japan, full of horrific monsters and puzzles that are somehow even scarier EXPECT TO PAY £70 DEVELOPER NeoBards Entertainment PUBLISHER Konami REVIEWED ON AMD Ryzen 5 5600G, 16GB RAM, Nvidia GeForce RTX 3070 MULTIPLAYER No LINK  steam.pm/app/2947440 Silent Hill f isn’t some spin-off or experiment for Konami to indoctrinate its players into performing perfect dodges – it’s the next step for the iconic horror series. Watching as the fog settled on Ebisugaoka, I felt the same pit in my stomach that I experienced back when I stumbled across Silent Hill as I searched for Cheryl. Silent Hill f may leave behind that old rural town, but it has more in common with previous games than just its title. The new protagonist, Shimizu Hinako…

NEED TO KNOW WHAT IS IT? Getting Over It With Bennett Foddy only make it 3D EXPECT TO PAY £17 DEVELOPERS Gabe Cuzzillo, Maxi Boch, Bennett Foddy PUBLISHER Devolver Digital REVIEWED ON Intel Core i9 13900-HX, 32GB RAM, Nvidia GeForce RTX 4060 MULTIPLAYER No LINK  babystepsgame.com Baby Steps is a parody of open world games, and our collective punishment for using the phrase ‘walking simulator’. You play Nate, a basement-dwelling loser mysteriously teleported from his couch to the wilderness like the Pevensie children being magicked to Narnia, only instead of plucky youngsters full of Blitz spirit you are a 35-year-old failure full of pizza. There’s a mountain in the wilderness and maybe if Nate climbs it he’ll be able to go home. It’s as reasonable an assumption as any, so off you set, taking your first…

NEED TO KNOW EXPECT TO PAY Free DEVELOPERdietzribi LINK bit.ly/DeepSnake If the snake from Snake fell into the event horizon of a black hole, it would be something like Deep Snake. You’re still grabbing fruit and growing into a bigger snake with a pesky tail, but now you’re doing that while exploring a dizzying hole. It begins simply enough, with just a bit of depth to the game space. You steer the snake by pressing Left or Right, and as you do so, it tunnels deeper, towards the centre. Sometimes the fruit is at the rim of the void, sometimes it spawns right at the bottom of it. And every time you chomp ten apples, the bottom falls off and the hole gets bigger. Two words to describe the effect…

NEED TO KNOW EXPECT TO PAY £13.50 DEVELOPER Bad Viking PUBLISHER Iceberg Interactive As I write this, flanked by three real house plants and one Lego one, camouflaged like a Navy SEAL in a budget ’80s action movie, I wonder if my obsession with foliage has gone too far. But, after 20 minutes with Strange Horticulture, I realise I’m nothing but a novice. I am an ungerminated pod in a world of fronds, worts, woad and nodes. And the worst thing is that I’ve been left in charge of a shop. A shop full of plants. I can just about tell a dieffenbachia from a calathea in real life, but Strange Horticulture requires a huge level of knowledge. And while that should be stressful, it actually isn’t. Time works differently here. My patient…

It all feels like an odd dream now. Stepping out onto our doorsteps to bang on our pans every Tuesday evening. Nationwide shortages of baking ingredients. Terrible, self-administered haircuts and vast lines outside supermarkets, shoppers spaced two metres apart and wearing face coverings that you’d previously only seen in news reports about SARS in Asia. However surreal the events of 2020 might seem now, five years later, the COVID-19 pandemic’s effects were very real. As nations imposed their own lockdown rules of varying stringency, supply chains broke down and waiting lists lengthened exponentially. Zoom in on the PC hardware market, and PCB shortage completely disrupted the market. Lockdown restrictions in China, Taiwan and Korea, where the vast majority of circuit boards are manufactured, left the entire sector without its most…

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 B760M Steel Legend WiFi ASRock £150This board is affordable, DDR5 ready, and packed with features, including Wi-Fi support straight out of the box. PROCESSOR Core i5 13400FIntel £120Intels’ budget 10-core chip from the Raptor Lake generation is still fantastic value and a solid all-rounder. GRAPHICS CARD Radeon RX 9060 XT 8 GBAMD £260AMD delivers what we…

Things start off rather simply in Mars First Logistics: take control of your rover to pick up a ladder and deliver it to an outpost. Then, you’ll be delivering a crate of oranges, a paint can, and other basic items. The rover blueprints you’re provided with do the job, and it’s fairly obvious how they work. Soon, I was attempting to haul a metal beam across rather hilly terrain to a construction site, but the default rovers wouldn’t cut it; the beam was too low on the ground and too long to get a good grip on. So, like any budding mechanic, I tweaked the designs, shifting the crane to the back of the rover and adding a joint so it could rotate, my idea being that I could lift…

Hollow Knight: Silksong finally put an end to seven years of agony and speculation by abruptly existing. Isn’t it nice when that happens? Team Cherry, the studio that refreshingly continues to do whatever the heck it wants, all but shadow-dropped Silksong back in September, suddenly going from almost no communication whatsoever to, “Hey, y’all, it’ll be out in two weeks,” much to the delight of fans of the original platformer. Now that it’s finally here, there’s plenty of much-expected conversation around the game’s difficulty – our review calls it a “Sisyphean exercise” but one that was absolutely “worth it”. It probably won’t come as a surprise to you, then, that most of the mods you’re about to skim through make the game a bit easier. I’m not here to judge…

Classic RPGs make up some of the most formative examples of late ’90s to early 2000s PC gaming in my memory, but I also remember when they weirdly disappeared. If you loved games like the original Baldur’s Gate, Icewind Dale, or Planescape, and also wondered why we stopped seeing these kinds of titles for a bit there, well it turns out you can blame physical retailers for the decline in Dungeons & Dragons-style PC RPGs. The Infinity Engine was used to power isometric roleplaying games such as the ones above. It allowed game devs to take many of the sentiments and mechanics used in D&D and translate them to videogame experiences. It helped a lot of people to have these kinds of adventures for the first time, especially when good…

1 month ANNO 117: PAX ROMANA RELEASE November 13, 2025 | DEVELOPER Ubisoft Mainz The latest entry in the long-running Anno series promises to let gamers shape the Roman Empire in their image, be that via strong economic growth or bloody warfare. CALL OF DUTY: BLACK OPS 7 RELEASE November 14, 2025 | DEVELOPER Treyarch, Raven Software Robots, zombies and guns, lots of guns. The latest co-op and multiplayer shooter promises to be the most mind-bending Black Ops ever. YAKUZA 0 DIRECTOR’S CUT RELEASE December 8, 2025 | DEVELOPER Ryu Ga Gotoku Studio Fight through the entertainment districts of 1980s Tokyo and Osaka as yakuza Kazuma Kiryu and cabaret club manager Goro Majima. It’s time to crack skulls. 2 months CODE VEIN II RELEASE January 29, 2026 | DEVELOPER Bandai…

NEED TO KNOW RELEASE TBC DEVELOPER Bulwark Studios PUBLISHER Kasedo Games LINK  steam.pm/app/2532480 We’ve known Warhammer 40K’s version of XCOM starring the gribbly transhuman weirdos of the Adeptus Mechanicus is getting a sequel for a while, but now there’s a demo on Steam, and it’s good to see that Bulwark Studios has embraced the Mechanicus’ guiding philosophy by performing some upgrades. The most notable is the repositioning of the turn queue from the top of the screen to the right, which somehow feels like a better place for it despite Baldur’s Gate III’s equivalent being at the top. The demo functions as the game’s tutorial, so you’re not faced with a huge amount of resistance, just a few Necrons. These skeletal aliens housed in bodies of living metal seem to have become the…

RELEASE November 4, 2025 DEVELOPER Aesir Interactive PUBLISHER Mindscape LINK  steam.pm/app/2697000 Windstorm raised a lot of money on Kickstarter, and the fruits of this are beginning to show in its sumptuous open world. The setting is 13th century Mongolia, and you are a courier on a horse. While it may look a lot like Red Dead Redemption 2 as you trot between message drops, there’s also a bit of Death Stranding here as you plot routes across the steppe, fight off wolves, and deliver packages. A unique aspect of the game comes in breeding and training your own horses, combining bloodlines to produce mounts better suited to the conditions you’re facing. Equine behaviour has, apparently, been refined and approved by experts, so there should be a bit more to it than nuzzling everyone…

NEED TO KNOW WHAT IS IT? One of the finest strategy RPGs ever made, now on PC EXPECT TO PAY £40 DEVELOPER Square Enix PUBLISHER Square Enix REVIEWED ON Intel Core i9-13900HX, 32GB RAM, Nvidia GeForce RTX 4090 STEAM DECK Playable LINK  steam.pm/app/1004640 Somebody pinch me. They’ve done it. They’ve actually done it: not only can I finally play Final Fantasy Tactics on my PC, but this timeless classic has been done justice. It’s not some old game hastily shoved in an emulation wrapper and sent out to die. It’s not some brand-new thing so polished and changed it feels ashamed of its heritage, either. It’s simply everything I had hoped for. I dived into the classic mode first, keen to see how the decades-old strategy game I first fell in love with on a PlayStation…

NEED TO KNOW EXPECT TO PAY Free DEVELOPER Susana G Chueca LINK bit.ly/ScratchAndReveal In an age of increasingly fake photographs and videos, if only you could grab a coin and scratch away to find the truth of the matter. Well – you guessed it – that’s the gist of the joyful Scratch and Reveal, which has you defacing photographs to uncover their authentic incarnations. The original photographs were taken at the turn of the 20th century by Bolette Berg and Marie Høeg, and show the Norwegian women dressing up as soldiers, explorers, and other distinctly unladylike professions. One of their brothers gets in on the fun too, by dressing up as a woman in some wonderful photos. Scratch and Reveal adds another layer to the photographs – literally. In this browser…

NEED TO KNOW EXPECT TO PAY £12.80 DEVELOPER HeR Interactive PUBLISHER HeR Interactive I picked this because I had it on good authority that this is the most autumnal Nancy Drew game, but it does accidentally mean that we have two titles this month set in leafy northeastern American schools. But, functionally speaking, I’m not sure it’s conceivable for them to be more different. For a start, the main threat here is receiving a rude letter, rather than having your head flushed down the bog by a jock with a hormone disorder. Not visually: this is a point-and-click game from 2009 made by a team that’s churned out 34 Nancy Drew games in 26 years. The NPCs look like digested Lego Friends and everything has a Vaselinesmeared nebulosity that makes it feel like…

If there’s one phrase that’s guaranteed to make you come across like a third-year humanities student who’s got life figured out and now simply watches civilisation from the sidelines with a wry smile, it’s this: ‘late stage capitalism’. It’s a term that implies society’s imminent downfall at the hands of corporate greed. Whatever indicator of late stage capitalism the observer has noticed is also an indicator that these are the end times, before our economic and philosophical status quo is demolished and replaced by… well, whatever comes next. Nobody’s sure about that minor detail. Generally speaking, then, it’s quite a blunt rhetorical device. Nobody can see the future, so there’s some considerable confidence inherent in calling anything related to the present day ‘late stage’. Still, when you see an $8,000/£6,000…

Dampness and comic horror go hand in clammy hand. It’s bad enough coming to the slow and devastating realisation that you’re a meaningless speck in a vast, indifferent, and unfathomably alien universe. But doing it with damp shoes is so much worse. And while Frogwares’ other Lovecraftian tale, The Sinking City, surpasses Sherlock Holmes: The Awakened in terms of sheer overall moistness, this is a more thoughtfully paced and enjoyable game. I’m lucky enough to be playing it on a night when wind and rain are battering my windows, much like they do in-game at 221B Baker Street. I was already sold on the presentation of The Awakened – gas lamps, crackling fires, a broad selection of equipable hats – but actual rain just makes it even more effective. It’s…

Let me tell you, stranger, about the game I install on just about every gaming PC I use, whether it’s so powerful it dims the lights when I switch it on or whether it’s getting by on integrated graphics. It’s the 2004 remake of Sid Meier’s Pirates!. You see, when I was a child my family owed money to an evil Spanish nobleman, the Marquis de la Montalbán. He betrayed my father the day before that debt was due, dragging him away into servitude. I escaped, and swore a terrible revenge. Later, I travelled to the Caribbean under the flag of the English, mortal enemies of the Spanish, led a mutiny against an abusive captain, and took his ship. From there, I sailed from Florida to Trinidad, a letter of…

RELEASE November 21, 2025 DEVELOPER Oneway Ticket Studio PUBLISHER Oneway Ticket Studio LINK  steam.pm/app/2795540 A zombie extraction FPS for one or three players coming soon to Early Access, Midnight Walkers features a crafting system you can only access if you successfully escape a level. Die, and you lose everything you had in your pockets. Poison gas that seeps into the floors of Liberty Grand Center doesn’t help matters, and other survivors – split into the categories of tank, support, sniper – are an even bigger threat.…

NEED TO KNOW WHAT IS IT? A roguelike action RPG with a cast of Greek gods and goddesses EXPECT TO PAY £25 DEVELOPER Supergiant Games PUBLISHER Supergiant Games REVIEWED ON Intel Core i9 12900K, 32GB RAM, Nvidia GeForce RTX 5090 STEAM DECK Verified LINK  steam.pm/app/1145350/ Hades II almost had me questioning Supergiant’s decision to make its first sequel. I loved Hades, which brought all of the studio’s past experience to bear on a killer action game for the roguelike curious, but I wasn’t convinced a sequel would be a better follow-up than whatever new idea for a game Supergiant could come up with next. It took some time, but Hades II convinced me it was worth it. It’s a sequel worthy of the title that expands but doesn’t diminish what made the first game great. I…

NEED TO KNOW WHAT IS IT? The latest adventure game in a loose series about a monstrous creature with glass teeth EXPECT TO PAY Free DEVELOPER Beyond Booleans PUBLISHER Beyond Booleans REVIEWED ON Intel Core i7-10750H, 16GB RAM, Nvidia GeForce RTX 2060 MULTIPLAYER No LINK  bit.ly/Snarl Beyond Booleans has released some excellent adventure games over the last few years. I reviewed Teeth of Glass last year, and now a prequel has arrived in Snarl, which tells a new tale of cosmic horror featuring the monstrous ‘grey man’ and his mouth full of jagged glass teeth. He’s not a guy you want to mess with, as he can tear you apart with a flick of his hand. Snarl takes place in the 1970s, which was already horrific enough without a demon’s involvement. The game begins with two…

NEED TO KNOW WHAT IS IT? Grand Theft Auto’s delinquent, doomed, soon-to-be-incarcerated New England nephew EXPECT TO PAY £10 DEVELOPER Rockstar New England PUBLISHER Rockstar Gamer REVIEWED ON Intel Core i7-7700, 16GB RAM, Nvidia GeForce GTX 1070 MULTIPLAYER No LINK  store.steampowered.com/app/12200/ Bully_Scholarship_ Edition The menu music for Bully, composed by Shawn Lee, is an obvious homage to the work of Goblin, the progressive rock band most famous for their work with Italian director Dario Argento. At first I thought this an odd choice. But, on reflection, referencing a horror about a new student joining a monstrously evil place of learning could not be more apt. At the risk of sounding traumatised by the British education system, nothing provides a more stark reminder of feral barbarity of school quite like this. Initially, it seems quite benign: a…

Should you wish to free yourself from a tinny headset mic, a good standalone microphone should be high on your shopping list. And I’ve got good news for you – gone are the days when a good recording setup meant XLR cables and complicated interfaces, as a simple USB connection is now all you need for excellent vocal capture at home. So for those looking to raise your audio game, it’s never been easier to capture excellent sound from the comfort of your home. But with so many microphone options on the market, which do you pick? 1 Capsule Elite NZXT £85 Rich and fruity This NZXT mic is sure to split opinions on first viewing. Some will find its design charming, while others (myself included) will think it looks…

I creep forward through the fog, mud underfoot, as I tentatively search the plantations around my rural village for my friend, Shu Iwai. I really could do with finding him as, well, things have got a little sticky in Ebisugaoka as of late. One moment, I was just minding my own business as schoolgirl Hinako Shimizu, talking with my friends and having fun. But then the next moment, the entire village has been covered in fog, my friends have disappeared, I’ve been chased by a shadow doom monster through Ebusugaoka’s streets, and I’ve had to brutally club to death a series of knife-wielding demonic flesh puppet monsters with a lead pipe. Worse still, I’ve not had a chance to pick up this month’s issue of PC Gamer magazine. So, here…

Prey is a ridiculous game. Ridiculous in many ways, but mostly in terms of creative ambition. At its core, Prey is still an FPS, so you run forwards and sideways and, occasionally, backwards, while shooting stuff in the head. The shooting is good but not great. But surrounding that solid core is a game that drips with a level of ambition and creativity that few first-person shooter games have ever delivered, or even attempted to deliver. And it starts with the game’s narrative setup, which immediately tells you that you’re not in FPS Kansas any more. You’re Domasi ‘Tommy’ Tawodi, a former soldier with Cherokee Native American blood running through your veins, and all you want to do is get off this god-damned reservation with your girlfriend, Jen, and start…