Innehållsförteckning för Issue 295 från PC Powerplay

Special Report PCPP INVESTIGATES MONITOR News. Development. Opinion Talking to Obsidian design director Josh Sawyer forced me into a harsh realisation: I have the handwriting of a peasant. Decades of education and the internet's infinite resources at my fingertips, and yet my messy chicken scratch would fit right in with a 16th century Bavarian peasant's in Pentiment. It's some consolation that Sawyer says his would, too. In our defence, the printing press is a bit more established in 2022 than it was in the 16th century, when your writing spoke volumes about your education, social class, and profession. That granularity is why Obsidian partnered with design firm Lettermatic to create six unique fonts for Pentiment, each telling you something about the characters you meet and talk to while trying to solve…

Martin is senior community manager for World of Tanks, and is in fact in charge of community managers in the European region. This follows a journey of ten or so years, a journey he began when he decided to switch focus from graphic design in the printing industry to videogames. In his early teens, he discovered what he describes as the “magic” of multiplayer games via LAN gaming and internet cafes. When he later in life decided to focus on games professionally, it was something of a challenge. “I come from the Czech Republic,” he says, “and in central Europe it was not as easy, right? Unless you had a lot of experience.” So, he started a ‘quest’ to gain that experience, which began with IRL community management. Martin would,…

PREVIEW Dead Space NEED TO KNOW RELEASE January 27,2023 DEVELOPER Motive Studios PUBLISHER EA LINK ea.com/games/dead-space When I think of Dead Space, I picture voiceless engineer Isaac Clarke creeping through the mining ship Ishimura, his face always obscured by the glowing green bars of his helmet. His only company is the gurgling roars of necromorphs and warnings finger-painted on the walls in blood. When I visited EA to play a few chapters of the upcoming remake, I wondered why Motive Studios did away with that lonely mood. It turns out my memory just sucks. It's true that Isaac doesn't speak in the original Dead Space – he does in the remake, sparingly – but he's no loner. He's got a girlfriend, for crying out loud, and his crewmates and others bug…

PREVIEW Evercore NEED TO KNOW RELEASE 2023 DEVELOPER Vela Games PUBLISHER In-house LINK evercoreheroes.com Our team of heroes huddles against a rock, hiding from the deadly blizzard that's swept into this arena. Dotted around the screen, our opponents do the same, each of the four teams of four taking shelter during this phase as they race to take down a towering troll boss. Only one group of heroes can claim the glory of being first to slay this intimidating beast, but the catch is that despite being in the same place at the same time, noone can see exactly how their opponents are holding up. Evercore is the debut title from Vela Games, a studio headed up in part by two early League of Legends veterans. It subverts several key aspects…

In my favourite moment, late in Scorn, you transition from the industrial underbelly of this forgotten civilisation to its alien and terrifying, yet also still somehow mournful, regal capital. The entire game up until now you've seen the gruesome brown machinery of this ancient people churning and grinding to do something, ripping familiarly human-like beings apart, sometimes while they're still alive, for some unknowable purpose. Here in the Polis, you see a decaying cathedral adorned with colossal statues of these same being's, some taking heroic poses, others cradling red, glowing wombs, and many of them copulating. How did this civilisation digest the contradiction in how it represented itself versus how it treated its people? This grey cathedral bathed in lilac light was the part of the game that most reminded…

You can fit a surprising amount into a 64x64 resolution. For example, a whole golf-based platformer, with a world to traverse and plenty of things to whack with your iron. That is, if you don't mind pixels the size of your head, or playing in a window on your monitor. A submission to (and winner of) this year's LOWREZJAM, Zolf is a glorious mash-up of golf and 2D platformer, where you solve puzzles with the aid of your tire iron and a little ball-shaped alien. After crash-landing on a planet, your only hope of escape is to repeatedly whack the alien with a slender stick punting the critter to too-high ledges, where it can get to work flipping switches that will let you progress. You control both the golf-playing humanoid…

THEY'RE BACK Before the Marvel movies, before Uncharted, there was one master of the posttrauma quip. His name was George Stobbart and he was a patent lawyer from Idaho. Over time, George became more rugged and cynical before reverting to type for Broken Sword 5. But this iteration of him, drawn by Dave Gibbons and voiced by Rolf Saxon, is one of the most relatable and understated characters in gaming. There's something reassuring about the fate of civilisation being placed in the hands of a man who's happy to make gentle jokes while tied to a chair in a burning room. The plot doesn't have the same conspiratorial wallop as the first game, but this is still thigh-slapping stuff. It's the sort of game that celebrates the varied functionality of…

EXTRA LIFE The games we love right now ROBIN VALENTINE THIS MONTH Learned that umbrellas can turn Into demons. Be careful. ALSO PLAYED Rollerdrome, Nioh 2, Gotham Knights The sheer atmosphere of Ghostwire Tokyo is hard to beat. Out on the streets of the city, monsters roam by the light of neon signs and glowing phonebooths; inside the buildings, eerie stillness gives way to ghostly manifestations that make walls shift and paintings bleed. It's all the more chilling for its emptiness. The entire populace has been turned to spirits by a dark ritual, so suddenly that their clothes and belongings are left in little piles wherever you go. As you adventure across the city, the only things that move other than you are ghosts and monsters, and even they are rare.…

BUDDY UP 1 In the fast-paced action of Overwatch 2, it can be easy to lose track of your teammates. Make sure to pick a buddy and stick with them throughout the match, so you can combine your strengths and avoid getting picked off. TAKE THE HIGH GROUND 2 In Overwatch 2's winding streets and alleyways, it's important to take the high vantage points, fighting for them if you have to. Using natural cover, such as walls or doors, is also a great way to mitigate unnecessary damage before you commit to a dust up. SHOOT TO KILL 3 Playing a damage hero is all about searching for ways to surprise your opponents. Hunt out angles that let you approach the enemy team without taking damage, then strike when they…

VETERAN Lord Warren Hammer's soldiers are as skilled as their faces are swollen (from countless bee stings inflicted in the Honey Wars). Ceremonial gas masks hide their lumpenness from the general population. ZEALOT Adherents to holy scripture revealed to them by a disgraced sci-fi author, zealots hurl themselves into battle to distract themselves from the self-loathing generated by their church-mandated haircuts. PSYKER Driven mad by their inability to sleep in the presence of their own glowing hands, these space wizards telepathically bombard their enemies with controversial podcast recommendations. OGRYN Though genetically they have more in common with a tin of spam, these lumbering giants are vital allies to humanity, providing their aid on countless battlefields by getting ammo tins down from high shelves. …UNTIL JAN 30…

MONITOR News. Development. Opinion CD Projekt is on the comeback trail. Ever since the botched launch of Cyberpunk 2077 the studio has been quietly improving Night City, stopping only to confirm a new Witcher is in the works. A new update says core studio CD Projekt Red has been working on two AAA projects since the beginning of 2022, and revealed a boatload of future projects in development elsewhere. Necessary caveat: we won't see some of these for ages. We already knew the ‘mainline’ series is continuing with the game codenamed “Polaris”, but CDPR now says this is the first in a trilogy which will release “in a six-year period starting with Polaris”. The idea is that the first will be the foundation for the second and third, which CDPR thinks…

PRINTERS’ FONT Printing press operators carefully arrange their letter blocks before they begin speaking. LORENZ'S FONT You can see the darker ink spots where Lorenz re-dipped his quill. Must be using one of those cheap quills… VILLAGERS’ FONT Even Pentiment's peasants have better penmanship than me, which is odd, but then I've never handled sheep before. MONKS’ FONT The Monastic script is by far the most intense, both to read and to write, with all its extra lines and fanciness.…

PREVIEW Uncle Chop's Rocket Shop NEED TO KNOW RELEASE TBC DEVELOPER Beard Envy PUBLISHER Kasedo Games LINK kasedogames.com As developer Beard Envy gears up to show me Uncle Chop's Rocket Shop, I realise I actually have no idea what this game is about. I'd been pulled in by the incredibly vague trailer, touting a surreal kaleidoscopic vibe straight out of Cartoon Network's renaissance era. As a complete sucker for that stuff, I was curious, yet worried that would be where my interest ended. But as it turns out, I had nothing to fear. Uncle Chop's Rocket Shop is all about spaceships in some far-flung southern American future. You're fixing them up and paying rent in the hopes Uncle Chop won't straight-up murder Wilbur, the humble repairman you play as. He's…

EARLY ACCESS PREVIEW The Pegasus Expedition NEED TO KNOW EXPECT TO PAY $25 DEVELOPER Kalla Gameworks PUBLISHER Fulqrum Publishing LINK thepegasusexpedition.com Stop me if you've heard this one before. An alien race is threatening Earth. Three major powers send fleets into space in the hope of finding a new home for humanity among the twinkling points of light in the night sky where it can thrive and build and frolic under alien suns. What actually happens is that your fleet comes out of the wormhole in the Pegasus Galaxy (presumably UGC 12613 beloved of Stargate Atlantis fans) to find an unwelcoming star system surrounded by alien armadas. Yay! The Pegasus Expedition is a 4X, placing you in command of a human faction, its leader making a rousing speech before blast…

1 HANDY No matter how many times you entrench it in the head of a heretic, this patented grip will make sure your shovel stays firmly in hand. 2 CUSTOMISABLE While any damage to Munitorum property will be deducted from your earnings, a tweak may bolster your shovel's efficiency. 3 FOLDABLE For the guardsman on-the-go, a folding joint will let you stow your shovel with speed, ready for ambushes or close quarters combat. 4 DIG FOR VICTORY In the rare likelihood you are directed to use your shovel for digging report to a sergeant for instruction in dirt exhumation practices.…

A confession: I'm not very good at building with Lego. This is a revelation as much as it is an admission, something I really only figured out while playing Lego: Bricktales over the weekend. It's one thing to place random Lego bricks in an aesthetically pleasing way; it's another thing entirely to, as Bricktales bids its players to do, construct architecturally-stable structures out of nothing but bricks and basic guidelines. The game starts off simple enough. You are a young builder who has been summoned to an abandoned theme park by your wacky inventor grandfather, known forever as Grandpa Grandpa has built a portal that can take people to other locations, but first, you have to help him restore power to his basement lab after an accident fried all the…

Have you ever wondered, what would it be like to fell into a black hole? Then this might be a game for you. Not because it answers the question, but because it offers an experience akin to dancing on reality's edge. Perspective, time and space all break down as the game encourages you to push beyond your limits. Which is funny for a game about chasing high scores and shooting monsters, something games have done since their inception. Edge magazine might never have bothered to say “If only we could talk to the monsters” if shooters then had felt as transcendent as Hyper Demon. Sorath's last game, Devil Daggers, was a distillation of '90s shooters, specifically Doom and Quake. Boiling down their essence into a pure and spooky shoot-'emup that…

Despite not having taken a survey, I feel pretty confident that nobody at PC Powerplay is more afraid of spiders than I am. They petrify me – unless they manage to get on me, at which point I flail around like I'm on fire. And I'd rather be set on fire than feel a spider crawling over my skin. Given this, it's ridiculous that I'd put myself in a situation where I had to review a game that was full of them. But for a survival game as good as Grounded, I'm willing to live through one of my worst nightmares. Grounded is a time travel device, dragging me back to the garden where I used to spend long, sunny afternoons pretending I was in Etemia or Third Earth, collecting…

REVIEW Uncharted: Legacy of Thieves Collection Uncharted, I've missed you. The reckless personalities, lush environments and ridiculous action set-pieces are unlike anything else we have in games, and coming back to the series with this PC port of the fourth game and its standalone expansion (The Lost Legacy) has been a pleasure. I've always loved Nathan Drake because he's a morally grey hero who, with a cheeky quip and mischievous smile, can get away with almost anything. Where Lara Croft claims she's just an archaeologist, despite her chaotic exploits, Drake and crew are self-confessed thieves, mercenaries and rogues, with silver tongues and dark pasts. In his wake, history is destroyed one collapsing temple at a time, but in the end he always makes the right choice… and ends up no richer…

The word ‘spooky’ really tells you everything. This browser game might take place in a house with monsters in it, but they're not scary at all, and they're not out to get you. They're obstacles, or puzzle pieces – links in a sublime puzzle chain, in this streamlined and minimalist adventure game. Though it looks small, The Spooky House is actually a sizeable game, full of items to pick up and places to use them, with stripped-down inventory management that makes it playable with a single button. And, well, the cursor keys, which move the little person around. Breaking into an abandoned mansion to search for some missing diamonds, you'll have to poke into every nook and cranny to find them. Your interaction key is Z: it picks up items,…

We'll finish this month's list of blade-adjacent titles with a tonal U-turn. We're leaving the reassuring nuzzle of point-and-click conspiracy behind and replacing it with the strangling hands of Shank: a game where being stabbed in the head is as close as you'll get to dying peacefully in your sleep. It's slightly jarring, because at first glance Shank looks like that should be on Cartoon Network after Dexter's Lab. It's only when you discover your standard heavy attack is an actual goddamn chainsaw that you realise you're actually playing hatred shaped like a game. If Danny Trejo brought out his own aftershave, Shank is what it would smell like. It's a tale of dead pregnant girlfriends and bloodied headbands and elephantine Mexican wrestlers with Betty Page tattoos. Literally everyone, from…

MOD SPOTLIGHT Major mods, analysed Fallout games and aliens are no strangers. In Fallout 2 a crashed flying saucer can be found with two alien skeletons inside. In Fallout New Vegas, another spaceship and more aliens can be spotted. Fallout 3 has DLC that actually lets you board an alien spacecraft called Mothership Zeta. And in Fallout 4, there's yet another crashed flying saucer, and one angry alien survivor. Maybe it's time the aliens stopped flirting with the world of Fallout and just got down to business. Maybe it's time for a .full-scale alien invasion. That's where the Zetans! mod created by modder RascalArt comes in. They know we're here, and we know they're here. It drops the pretence and lets the invasion finally begin. THE ARRIVAL Granted, the aliens in…

HIGHS Ferret out Obscure sci-fi text adventure Ferret is now complete… forty years after development started. No Man's High After years of excellent updates No Man's Sky has hit 4.0. Ultima sanction The 25th anniversary of Ultima Online saw a dev tell of the time he identified cheaters and burned their (in-game) houses down Disco Dissolution Disco Elysium creatives Robert Kurvitz, Helen Hindpere, and Aleksander Rostov have left Studio ZA/UM Streamer injury After jumping into a foam pit during an event at TwitchCon San Diego, streamer Adriana Chechik broke her back in two places. Metalegs Meta's “most requested feature” for VR, according to Mark Zuckerberg? It's legs for the avatars.…

Look, The Spy needs to level with you all, The Spy hasn't had the time to go out and find any rumours this month. The Spy's been busy, you know? There's a stack of emails that The Spy needs to answer, and they're the ones where you need to do something before you reply to say “yup, it's done”. But doing the thing, while not hard, is a distraction from some other thing you were working on, and so you put it off and just feel kind of bad about it until it a) goes away, or b) becomes an actual problem. And then there's the meetings! Sandra from accounting gets in touch asking for a “quick chat” about a recent expenses claim, and suddenly The Spy's on the other…

1 month THE CALLISTO PROTOCOL RELEASE December 2, 2022 | DEVELOPER Striking Distance Studios A spiritual successor to Dead Space from some of that game's original creators. Escape a prison full of mutants on Jupiter's second-largest moon. MARVEL'S MIDNIGHT SUNS RELEASE December 2, 2022 | DEVELOPER Firaxis Games Create your own superhero to lead a team of iconic Marvel characters through turn-based battles in this strategy RPG from the creators of the modern XCOM series. HIGH ON LIFE RELEASE December, 2022 | DEVELOPER Squanch Games Inc A colourful shooter from Justin Roiland, creator of Rick and Morty. Depending on your sensibilities you'll either find its rapid-fire dialogue very funny or intensely irritating. 3 months FORSPOKEN RELEASE January 24 | DEVELOPER Luminous Productions A modern day New Yorker is transported to…

COVER FEATURE Warhammer 40,000: Darktide While browsing the gallery of convicts that form Darktide's character creator, I can't help but be reminded how different the human perspective of Warhammer 40K is. For most people, the towering Space Marine is their touchstone for this setting, clad in immaculate MK IV plate armour, inscribed with battle honours, and adorned with fluttering oath papers. There's nothing of that here. The closest thing these rejects have are their tattoos; symbols of hive gangs or ex-imperial Guard slogans etched in a shaky hand in the bowels of some prison ship, or the trenches of a forgotten warzone. This is the human reality of 40K, rarely seen beyond Black Library books, and I love that Darktide recognises that. Another thing I really like is the shovel.…

Never work with children or animals, the old showbiz adage goes. And while the sentiment doesn't usually stretch to games, it's a brave developer who would place an impulsive five year old at the centre of a harrowing action adventure, or try to construct logical systems atop a horde of ravenous rats. Yet Asobo Studio managed exactly that with A Plague Tale: Innocence, and its bold sequel raises the stakes with an even defter touch. Despite the unorthodox casting of its beasts and youngsters, Innocence largely worked within boundaries set by bigger names, most notably The Last of Us. Requiem, by contrast, feels like a spread of the wings, buoyed by its predecessor's success to forge an unmistakable identity. In terms of production values among comparable titles, it still bows…

My team of anime mind-thieves deftly jump across chandeliers, then take cover to avoid the gaze of a patrolling guard in the corridor that follows, zig-zagging behind him to initiate an ambush. As the jazzy soundtrack reminds me, he never saw it coming, and taking advantage of the weakness of the demon who lives inside him we tag-team attacks to wipe it out in seconds. It's tlie kind of dynamism you might not expect from a turn-based JRPG, but Persona S Royal is fine with bucking tradition to execute this near-flawless adventure. Even now, a few years since its original release, this is the genre's pinnacle. Despite being later to the heist on PC, this is an excellent version – perhaps the best one on the market. While clearly intended…

My first attempt to reach space in Dual Universe ended in disaster. I'd purchased a Space Bike, which is the cheapest space-viable craft Novaquark's ludicrously ambitious space sim offers, with die intent of doing a test flight from the planet Alioth to one of its nearby moons. But through a combination of ignorance and ineptitude, I foiled to escape the planet's gravitational pull, and ended up crashing 60 kilometres away from the nearest transportation. In Dual Universe, distance is measured at a 1-to-l scale, and without the resources to repair my bike, I was faced with the prospect of a two-hour trek back to civilisation. Having already battled with the game's byzantine systems at seemingly every turn, I tempted to bin it off completely. After sulking for a bit, I…

THE MYSTERIOUS DEVICE This central location is close to where you first begin and is abundant in resources and critters. It's a great place for a starter base, but watch out for spiders just beyond the tree line. THE POND The rocks at the edge of the pond, east of the oak tree, are close to two labs, basic and advanced resources, have loads of building space, and you can jump into the water to avoid bugs. THE SANDBOX You won't beableto handle the sandbox for a while, but if you're a well-equipped veteran and can handle some nasty creepy crawlies, you can make your own desert encampment.…

FREE GAMES REVIEWS COOL TITLES FOR NO CASH by Tom Sykes Cards and the Old West go together like fireside beans and competitive farting, so it's not a stretch to see them as the premise for this text-based adventure. Card Cowboy is a narrative sandbox that sets you off on a revenge mission – a stranger has seduced your mum, murdered your dad, and perhaps worst of all kicked your dog – but how you achieve it really depends on what's in your hand. Luckily, said stranger has set up camp at tlie edge of the map. To confront them, you have to travel from node to node, resolving events with the aid of your cards, while acquiring a hand you can draw on for your showdown. There's an event at…

THEY'RE BACK OLD GAMES REVISITED Many consider it poor form to begin a review with an anecdote. But, at the same time, I urgently need to tell you that I just conjured a hair dragon from a swirling portal so it could swallow whole an angelic cherub golem. Also, my clothes disappeared. This partially describes Bayonetta's delirious proposition: finding a balance between desperate titillation and scandalous power fantasy. The lengthy cutscenes would have you believe it's more complicated than that. They present a story that's both crudely drawn and dizzyingly confusing. Clumsy, fuhgeddaboudit spivs reside in a setting cribbed straight from Dante's Divine Comedy. None of it makes much sense, most of it is a struggle to comprehend, and ‘sexy amnesiac witch’ sounds like something from a list of forbidden bedroom…

EXTRA+LIFE CONTINUED ADVENTURES IN GAMING FRASER BROWN THIS MONTH Killed millions of monsters from the comfort of my bed. ALSO PLAYED Sunless Skies, Pathfinder: Wrath of the Righteous Thank Gabe for my Steam Deck. If it wasn't for Valve's handheld miracle, I'd know nothing of the joys of Vampire Survivors, thus allowing the vampires to win. Before the Deck arrived, I'd heard of Vampire Survivors, of course, but it was hard to see the appeal, even amid its growing popularity. There are few places as saturated as the indie roguelike space, and it just looked like another ugly, pixely time sink designed to kill me over and over again. My Steam Deck's arrival heralded a new obsession: trying to play every game I can think of on the device. I've…

EXTRA LIFE The games we love right now LUKE KEMP THIS MONTH Created unspeakable horrors for your entertainment. ALSO PLAYED Return to Monkey Island, Rakuen, Gotham Knights Spore is one of those games I've been long curious about, but never got around to playing. I know enough, however, to recognise that this is basically a Poundland version of it. As a result, this might be the only game I've ever played where I would have been happy to have paid five times the asking price. This game is janky, unpredictable, thoroughly imperfect, and I love it. It's a bundle of contradictions. There are dozens of little touches that I adore. The way that the screen is black and white until you place eyes on your creature; the fact that one of…