Rock, Paper, Shotgun

Is it still a Zachlike if it's not made by Zachtronics? Because The Signal State sure looks like a Zachlike. It's about solving logic puzzles inspired by modular synthesizers, which means you'll tinker with ornate machinery by twisting knobs and changing wiring. It's also wrapped in a post-apocalyptic story in which your actions will "change the fate of agriculture."

It's out now. Check out the trailer below.

Read more

Good news! Hitman: Game Of The Year Edition is now on GOG and 70% off. Bad news! The game requires an internet connection for so many singleplayer features that customers on the DRM-free digital store are real mad about it.

Read more

Valve's claim that the Steam Deck would run every game in your Steam library is looking more and more like fact. Yesterday Easy Anti-Cheat announced support for Linux and the Proton compatibility laters the Deck relies upon.

Today, BattlEye Anti-Cheat followed suit, announcing they'd support the Steam Deck and Proton in a tweet.

Read more

Okay, here we are: it is now autumn. I'm ready. I've folded my summer bedding away, pulled out the big duvet, and bought a bigger Thermos. And this is the nice part of autumn, when things are cosy and transitionary, before the feeling of death sets in. I was cheered by reading about your favourite autumn games this week. But anyway, what are you playing this weekend? Here's what we're clicking on.

Read more

Handcop is a work in progress "fist person shooter" that's just as neat as it is horrifying. This wacky prodecurally-animated cop hand has three legs and chest hair for goodness sake. I can't decide if three "legs" is better or worse than three finger "arms". Oh, and of course officier Michael McWrist is running about carrying a giant gun. It's relatively early days for Handcop right now, it sounds like, but its wacky animations are already catching the internet's attention.

Read more

"Dracula and Frankenstein are modern day 20-something flatmates who never see one another and only exchange sticky notes. Also they are both very sad. Also Dracula wears puple shades," is the kind of message I'd expect to see from one of my writing acquaintances with the timestamp [2:15am]. It's also the kind of thing I'd respond to with a "yes, do it," eager to find out exactly how the hell they would. That's the energy that I downloaded Frank And Drake's demo with, and it sure is a moody, somber narrative adventure about two unlikely housemates.

Read more

Dracula's back from the dead again and so are four Castlevania games from the aughts. Three different vampire stomping adventures originally hailing from the Game Boy Advance—and one SNES—have made their way into a new collection on PC via Steam. Two Belmonts, a Graves, and a Cruz all get their time to shine against those undead baddies in Castlevania: Circle Of The Moon, Harmony Of Dissonance, Aria Of Sorrow, and Dracula X. Konami launched the Castlevania Advance Collection yesterday, complete with some modern conveniences for us PC players in the year 2021.

Read more

Photo modes are undeniably in fashion now, so much so that I've just started assuming most major RPGs and third-person action games will have one built in at launch. I've never put in the time to get particularly skilled at lining up the best shots, but I'm always well impressed by those who do. It's a bummer though when a looker of a game doesn't have a way to really get up close and personal with its pretty cast and environments. Tales Of Arise, which just launched this month, doesn't have one yet, for instance. That's where the extremely nifty and very handy Universal Unreal Engine 4 Unlocker comes in. It's a mod that lets you toggle a free camera to take amazing screenshots in over 300 Unreal Engine games.

Read more

Might And Delight's "tiny Multiplayer Online RPG" Book Of Travels has scheduled itself a new early access launch date after its most recent delay. As M&D previously reassured fans, it is indeed a shorter wait than I'd feared. Their cozy online RPG is now setting out into early access on October 11th, with plans to work towards a full launch in two years.

Read more

Want to build an epic Castle in Minecraft? How about 8 castles? That’s how many we’ve got for you in this list, so you’d best get building! These castles look truly stunning, but we're sure they'll be even better atop the new mountains that are coming when the Minecraft 1.18 update launches later this year.

Check out all of these builds to get some inspiration for your own world in Minecraft, or just follow along with the Youtube tutorials if you like what you see!

Read more

Listen up, escape room fans. There's a new Korean drama you need to watch. It's called Squid Game, it's on Netflix, and it's real good. It's a show about 456 down and outers - folks with no life, family or who are in huge piles of debt - who enter a deadly competition to win a truck ton of money to help them turn their life around. All they need to do is compete in six games. Easy peasy, everyone thinks. How hard can that be? Only the first of those games, a riff on the classic children's game Statues / Grandma's Footsteps / Red Light Green Light - involves running toward a giant automaton with motion sensors in her eyes, as well as a team of snipers waiting in the rafters to take down anyone who does stay perfectly at the right time.

It's grim, but it's also the perfect blend of some of my favourite things ever: Zero Escape, Danganronpa and Battle Royale (the Japanese thriller, not the game genre) - and I implore you to give it a go.

Read more

I love doing this column because it means a) it is the end of a working week (working hard or hardly working, amiright?) and b) I get to play something nice and (often) small, and usually a bit weird. I am also, as it turns out, really smug about the theme I discovered for this week. Last night I had a bath, so am ideally positioned to extoll the benefits of dunking things in water. May I present to you three brand new indie games: a frog's tea party, a potion workshop and a rainy walk.

Read more

Stuck on the Warrior Path in Kena: Bridge Of Spirits? You're not alone. The sheer number of portals and zipping between locations throughout the Warrior Path has led many a player to distraction and frustration. At least, until they found this handy walkthrough, which guides you carefully through every part of the Toshi's Love quest, through every combat area and puzzle, until you reach the end and defeat the Warrior himself.

Keep scrolling to read our written and our video walkthrough of the Warrior Path in Kena: Bridge Of Spirits.

Read more

After rebooting Lara Croft with 2013's Tomb Raider, Square Enix's Crystal Dynamics studio are now helping reboot another vintage hero: Joanna Dark. They'll be chipping in on Microsoft's mysterious new Perfect Dark, helping out the mysterious Santa Monica studio named The Initiative. Secrecy might be thematically appropriate for a game about a futuristic superspy but we don't know much of anything about it so all you can really say is "Yup, I guess they're doing that."

Read more

It's all very silly. Having survived the grey, po-faced gruntman domination of the 2000s, I love that games can still be very silly.

Metal Dogs is a twin stick (sort of) shooter about sending heavy weapons platforms into irradiated future deserts to fight giant insects, ghost tanks, and robot hippos. Naturally, those heavy weapons platforms are strapped onto dogs.

Read more

Installing RAM is both one of the easiest steps to building a PC and one of the simplest ways to upgrade an existing gaming rig. In a physical sense, anyway. Just like installing an M.2 SSD, there are no power or data cables to worry about, and as long as your RAM sticks fit the RAM slots on your motherboard, ultimately you just need to push them in. There is room for error, though, hence why this article is going to continue beyond the introductory paragraph. See? RAM can be interesting.

Read more

Humans are boring. All fleshy and feelings and Netflix. Like this quiz, robots don't have hidden agendas. Robots want to wish Paulie a happy birthday, and we want to entertain you for quarter of an hour. It's the perfect match.

Read more

Following a short delay caused by Tennent's Lager (actual true story), Margaret Thatcher has returned from Hell to menace us once more. Thankfully, one doomed space marine will stand up and venture into the tenth circle of Hell (aka the UK) to put the reviled British prime minister down for good. Thatcher's Techbase is its name, and Doom 2 is the game you'll need to play this free mod now it's out. It is quite the thing, and even has a custom soundtrack from Paradise Killer's composer.

Read more

What's up 90s kids, how would you like to jump back into a SNES platforming city-builder that was first released 30 years ago? Last night's Nintendo Direct had a surprising amount of PC news on offer, including the announcement that a remake of ActRaiser is available to play on PC right now. Named ActRaiser Renaissance, Square Enix say they've given the game a "complete graphical overhaul", as well as added some new features for players to try.

Read more

Looking for a cool tower to build in Minecraft? This list is filled with exciting tower ideas that you can try out in Minecraft, with everything from a simple base to a magical Wizard tower.

Take a look through all of these suggestions to get inspired, or follow along with one of the videos and get building right now!

Read more

Where do you get Crystal Shards in Valheim, and what are they used for? Crystal has existed as a resource in Valheim for a while, but like many crafting materials in this Early Access cult hit, it's only recently been given a use. The Hearth & Home update has added Crystal Battleaxe and Crystal Wall recipes, and now this previously purely decorative resource is in high demand.

Read more

Wondering how to solve the Incense Pots puzzle in Kena: Bridge Of Spirits? If you've followed the Mask Maker path as part of the Toshi's Fear quest and you're stuck on these infernal Incense Pots, you've come to exactly the right place. There's not much to say here, so let's jump right into our walkthrough of how to solve this particular puzzle in Kena: Bridge Of Spirits.

Read more

How do you craft and use the Obliterator in Valheim? The Obliterator was added to Valheim with the Hearth & Home update, and exists to address a recurring problem experienced by Valheim players in older iterations of the Early Access smash hit. Previously, there was no way to actually get rid of items you didn't need — which could include a surplus of crafting materials and even trophies made from the body parts of slain enemies. The Obliterator gives you the option to neatly dispose of all the inventory junk you don't want to display or store.

Read more

Though Monster Hunter Rise isn't even out on PC for months yet, Capcom have announced an expansion is coming our way. During last night's Nintendo Direct stream they revealed Monter Hunter Rise: Sunbreak, which will launch simultaneously on Switch and PC in summer 2022. Hey, at least that means while consoleers had to wait over a year for the expansion, we'll have it after only a few months. Have a peek in the announcement trailer.

Read more

Nier director Yoko Taro is making a new role-playing game in which everything is depicted through cards, and somehow it's not called Yoko Tarot. Story? There are cards for that. Combat? Turn-based card battles, of course. Travelling through the world? Flip over some cards, see what you find! It's called Voice Of Cards: The Isle Dragon Roars, and it's set to release this October. On top of that, a demo will be available later today if you fancy trying it out.

Read more

Rise, brothers, to venerate Warhammer 40,000: Space Marine as it celebrates its tenth birthday this month. Relic Entertainment and Sega have a surprise for us all too, turning the third-person ork-smasher into an 'Anniversary Edition' which includes all the DLC as well as bonuses like the soundtrack. That's all for free, which is nice.

Read more

The Steam Deck has just broken through a major compatibility barrier: one that would have made it difficult for some of Steam’s most-played multiplayer games to properly function on the Valve handheld. Gabe and co. have Epic to thank for this one, though, as the latter’s Easy Anti-Cheat (EAC) tech is now extending support to Linux and it Wine and Proton compatibility layers. The same layers, you may recall, that the Steam Deck relies on to run games without native Linux ports. In other words, games with multiplayer components that wouldn’t have worked on the Steam Deck - because their use of EAC precluded Linux/Wine/Proton compatibility - should, in theory, be able to run in full.

Read more

Want to know how to find Slimes in Minecraft? Slimes can vary in size from annoying little blobs to giant monstrosities, but there’s one thing they all have in common. They all drop Slimeballs, which are extremely useful in Minecraft.

This guide will take you through everything that you need to know about Slimes, including how to find them, what you can use Slimeballs for, and how to make your own Slime farm.

Read more

Fuga: Melodies Of Steel is set during an anthropomorphic animal anime World War 2 in which your parents have been taken by the dog Nazis. Still with me? You and your fellow cat children find Howl's Moving Tank in a cave and set about getting your families back, with turn-based, RPG battles.

You also discover at the end of the tutorial that your giant angry house has a "Soul Cannon", which is a gun that only fires if you feed it the soul - and permanently kill - one of the children.

Still with me?

Read more

Breaking news: everything is normal and fine. Yesterday Halo Infinite developers 343 Industries mentioned during a livestream that they might need to delay this weekend's beta. Today they confirmed that's not the case, and posted an overview of what to expect.

Read more

The riot shield was probably the most divisive item ever added to Counter-Strike - and now it's back. New update Operation Riptide, out now, introduces the defensive item to Counter-Strike: Global Offensive's casual mode, alongside major tweaks to Dust2, new missions, shorter matches, and private matchmaking queues.

Read more

Diablo 2: Resurrected launched earlier today, offering players the chance to relive the classic hack-and-slasher. But why recreate the experience of one Diablo game when you could recreate the experience of two? Resurrected is also experiencing a bunch of launch issues related to its online mode, just like Diablo 3 before it.

Those issues include players being unable to see their existing characters, create new characters, or launch the game. Some might say essential features.

Read more

Terrible news continues to pour out of Blizzard like pus from of a festering wound around a splinter you forgot about and left for way too long. You should really get that looked at. Still, they must be drawing some comfort from the fact that Diablo II: Resurrected is out today, one of Blizz's most beloved games of all time.

Naturally, a lot of people will be excited for the remastered version. But if my tone is more immediately aggro than the last time I wrote about Diablerrected, that's because I was previously playing the beta through the rose-tinted haze of this game being very important to me and a big part of my childhood, and bonding with my older brother, and so on. This time, I have been playing the final version for several hours, and am cross.

Read more

When you've played a lot of games, or seen a lot of films, or probably eaten at a lot of restaurants or generally oversaturated your life with one subject, it's easy to start making rules and codes for How It Should Be. I given a lot of games a hard time for being opaque and failing to explain themselves. And yet here I am, finally writing about Mech Engineer after watching and playing it for nine months, waiting for it to hit the point where I can almost, sort of, not exactly recommend it... but share my fascination with it.

Read more

The primary function of ragdoll physics in video games, everyone knows, is to freak out and make people laugh. Everyone knows this. The technology was created explicitly to bring a subversive touch of merry mayhem to po-faced murdergames. Everyone knows this. But developers are wary of overdoing it or openly acknowledging this fact which everyone knows. This is why, sadly, Call Of Duty: Vanguard will indeed 'fix' the 'bug' which could make attack dogs turn into a giant maelstrom of limbs, teeth, and mashing meat noises, a phenomenom known as the 'dognado'. Tragic.

Read more

It’s funny to think how different the use cases are for setting up two monitors for your gaming PC, compared to setting up three. A trio of displays lets you play in ultrawide with a wraparound effect that even most purpose-built ultrawide monitors can’t match, but while you can configure a dual-monitor setup to run games across displays, it doesn’t make nearly as much sense. With the borders of each screen running straight down the middle, most of the best ultrawide PC games would be nigh-unplayable. Still! If you can budget for it, two remains better than one. It’s an expanded but focused setup for when you’re playing a full-screen game but also want a browser tab, video, or streaming controls visible at the same time.

Read more

Looking for the best classes and builds in Diablo 2: Resurrected? The shiny new remaster is finally here, but the gameplay of Diablo 2: Resurrected will be very familiar to veterans. If you’re playing for the first time, however, the game’s complex character progression can seem overwhelming. The foundations of your experience are your choice of class, and the skill(s) you build around on that class. Each of Diablo 2’s seven classes features multiple talent trees that grant you new abilities and define how you approach the game.

If you’re planning to play on Hardcore mode or push deep into Hell difficulty, you will want a quality build. Blizzard has not made balance adjustments to Diablo 2: Resurrected, so the long-established meta still holds in the remaster. Prepare for Hell with our guide to the best classes and builds in Diablo 2: Resurrected.

Read more

Trying to wrap your head around Runes in Diablo 2: Resurrected? Runes are the cornerstone of Diablo 2’s gear system. As there are no balance changes in Diablo 2: Resurrected, longtime players will be familiar. If you’re new, however, this system will look entirely unfamiliar, even if you’ve played Diablo 3 or Path of Exile. There’s nothing quite like Diablo 2’s Rune system in the ARPG genre. If you’re having trouble wrapping your head around the quirks of Runes and Runewords, we’re here to help.

Read more

Looking for the best farming spots in Diablo 2? An ARPG would be nothing without a grind. The grind in Diablo 2 is the foundation of the genre’s last 20 years. The genre-defining classic has seen very few changes for the remastered version, Diablo 2: Resurrected, so veterans of the original will have their strategies in place. If you’re a new player looking to optimize your character after beating the game though, you’ll need to know where to farm your gear.

Read more

This week on The Electronic Wireless Show podcast I was inspired by the extremely cute little monsters the Rot, who are you besties in Kena: Bridge Of Spirits, to ask Matthew and Nate about their favourite animal companions in video games. You will probably be able to predict some of their answers. Others, not so much.

A big digression about trains and commuter rage this week, as well as a shocking update from Matthew re. the farewell fizzy drink tour. But most exciting is that the Cavern Of Lies is replaced this week by a Cavern Of Announcements! Yes, we have very special news indeed, and you have to listen to at least two thirds of the podcast to find out what it is. But it is genuinely incredible.

Read more