In today's Forza Horizon 5 livestream, developers Playground Games offered details of the open-world racer's free "Explore The Horizon" update. It'll launch tomorrow and includes six new cars, new photo mode features, and new pathfinder challenges.
Inkbound is a co-op turn-based roguelike, a jumble of genres I've seen so many times in the past decade they no longer conjure any feelings for me. It's also from the developers of Monster Train, however, the uncommonly good card game about stopping an onslaught aboard a multi-storey train to hell. That pedigree means it's worth noting that Inkbound is now in early access.
Right now you can pick up a great deal on a powerful RTX 4070 Ti gaming PC over at CCL, equipped with a Core i5 12400F processor, 16GB DDR4-3200 RAM, an MSI Pro B660M-E motherboard and 1TB Kingston NV2 NVMe SSD - all for £1260. That's an awesome spec for gaming at 1080p, 1440p and even 4K - such is the power of this mighty GPU!
To get this price, plus two freebies - a copy of Diablo 4 (£60) and a gaming headset (£30) - select the "No OS" option and use code GAMER40 at the checkout.
You can of course opt to get Windows preinstalled if you prefer, but you can also use a USB stick and any unused Windows keys you've already got, including those from previous versions of Windows, to install the OS yourself. And, as the Steam Deck proves, gaming on Linux is getting pretty damn good - and of course, Linux is completely free (as in beer and as in speech).
For the last six years, my Skyrim wood elf has been stuck in some godforsaken cave in goodness knows what corner of Tamriel. I don't remember why they were there, or what goal they were trying to achieve. It was just 'one of those caves' that looked cool and interesting when I came across it and I thought, 'Yeah, all right, let's have a go then, shall we?' But while other Skyrim caves I'd come across could be easily polished off in an office lunch-time - as that was often how I played Skyrim back then - this one was different somehow. It was so large and twisty, so infinitely befuddling, that I seemed to be trapped down there forever. Sure, I could have probably turned back, but I'd been down there for ages, and felt like I'd come too far to simply not see it all through to the bitter end. But the end never came, and I eventually abandoned my save as a result, whisked off by the prospect of newer, more exciting games that didn't involve trying to figure out how to escape its narrow, bioluminescent hellscape.
Logitech's G920 and G29 wheel and pedals sets are my go-to recommendations for aspiring racing fans, offering a noticeable improvement in control and feedback over a gamepad while costing far less than more advanced direct drive alternatives from the likes of Fanatec. Today both models are discounted to £170, a healthy discount from their usual £240 price point and more than 50% off their UK RRP - nice.
The G920 is the Xbox-oriented model, meaning it works on PC plus Xbox Series and One consoles, while the G29 is for PC plus PS4 and PS5 - so choose what's most useful to you!
Alan Wake 2 has yet to receive an official release date from developers Remedy Entertainment, but according to the voice actor playing its titular, torch-bearing thriller writer, we can apparently expect it to arrive sometime this October. So far, Remedy have only committed to a general 2023 release for Alan Wake 2, but voice actor Matthew Porretta told the Monsters, Madness And Magic podcast that it's "supposed to come out in October". That means it should be well clear of ye olde Starfield, but that "supposed to" also suggests the date isn't set in stone yet. Here's hoping we get a more formal date at this year's Summer Games Fest, perhaps.
Every weekend, indie devs show off current work on Twitter's #screenshotsaturday tag. And every Monday, I bring you a selection of these snaps and clips. The difficulties of writing a column reliant upon a collapsing platform continue to be felt in a week when the #screenshotsaturday tag became overrun with spambots, but the games still shone through. This week, my eye was caught by colourful driving experiences in run 'n' guns and visual novels, multiple terrible squiggly beasts from horror games, a cute N64-style platformer, and lots more attractive and interesting indie games. Come see!
Planet of Lana has all the hallmarks of a story-rich platformer. Across its six-hour run time, you'll encounter a string of environmental puzzles, an evil plan concocted by a group of baddies, a rich orchestral soundtrack that swells at all the right moments, a cute animal companion, and a gorgeous world that needs saving.
On paper, it has everything you could possibly want from this kind of game, but in practice, it can also be Lana's undoing at times. It does everything well - admittedly some much better than others - but it feels like this sci-fi tale is missing something. That gut punch, that sigh of relief after a thrill, that unexpected surprise... You know, that extra edge to really make it sing. It’s still a very enjoyable adventure, but its lack of emotional highs means it doesn't linger long in the memory once you've seen the credits roll. Is that a roundabout way to say that Planet of Lana is a solid 7/10? Maybe, but we don't do that here.
Add another one to the list of weird and delightful ways to play ye olde Doom: teletext. A new mod converts Doom to a teletext signal, letting you play the seminal shooter rendered in blocky teletext art on a telly. You can even control it with your TV remote. Have a look in the video below! I really, really like the smiley face replacing Doomguy's gurn.
Sundays are for sinking into a couch. Before you put your legs up, let's read this week's best writing about games (and game related things).
Prison Architect has received "the Sunset Update", which developers Double Eleven say is "focused on improving the player experience as much as possible." That's because it's their last update to the prison simulator originally created by Introversion Software. The update was also released alongside a trailer thanking fans for supporting the game, which also seemingly teases a 3D sequel.
American Truck Simulator's first released version included only the state of California, and its developers have been working their way eastward with each new state added via DLC. Work is currently ongoing on both Oklahoma and Kansas.
SCS Software have got better at replicating the long roads and countryside of the United States, however, so they've also been going back periodically and revamping their very first. Five cities in northern California were updated last year in a second update, and work is ongoing on a third phase of revisions that should arrive soon. SCS Software this week shared screenshots of their new Santa Cruz, which has been "revamped from the ground up".
I have a soft spot for Overdungeon, a maximalist real-time mashup of tower defense and collectible card game, and I sang its praises three years ago. Its developers, Pocketpair, haven't updated it since, instead pouring their work into similarly expansive "everything game" Craftopia and the Pokémon-alike (but with guns) Palworld.
Now Pocketpair have released a content update for Overdungeon and say that previous radio silence was because they were "a bit tired and struggled with our contract with the publisher."
Crypt Of The NecroDancer developers Brace Yourself Games have laid off around half their staff. Employees began tweeting about being affected cuts yesterday, with Brace Yourself Games later confirming the decision to "lay off a portion" of staff. The studio had around 43 employees before the cuts, according to LinkedIn.
It's a simple formula: good weather + time outdoors + exercise = a happy me. I know this formula to be true. I have learned to leverage this formula. I crave this formula. And yet, every year, around this time, here I am going "Oh my god I feel so good why do I feel so good all of a sudden why did I feel so bad for so long." Good weather and time outdoors and exercise, Alice. You know that. You've only had time outdoors and reduced exercise. That's why it didn't work. I hope you too are relearning this. Anyway! What are you playing this weekend? Here's what we're clicking on!
Extremely high-speed DDR5 memory is becoming eminently more affordable, with this DDR5-7000 kit costing just $125 for 32GB at Amazon US. That's an awesome deal, especially for a RAM kit with RGB lighting addressable via Corsair's popular iCUE software.
Razer's BlackShark V2 X is an incredible value gaming headset even at its £60 RRP, but today you can pick it up in a fetching white colourway for just £37 at Amazon UK. That's by far the cheapest we've ever seen this model and a pretty much unbeatable bargain for a gaming headset of this quality.
Kujlevka is a strange, clever game about an ageing village bureaucrat already troubled by political upheaval and dreams about death and trauma, suddenly given responsibility for communicating with and controlling access to what appears to be humanity's first contact with an alien intelligence.
All those themes suggest a heavy, self-serious game. But Kujlevka's great strength is its levity. While not particularly funny, its consistent wry humour perfectly counterbalances all the talk of political chaos, existential futility, and petty greed. Its opening should have been a clue, really, considering you hang out with skeletons while drinking and commenting on the food on a train in outer space.
Of the various corporatised fictional universes out there, Star Wars is the one I'm most emotionally invested in. But my affection for George Lucas' brain-baby is less about the stories and characters, and more about the general vibe of the galaxy itself. I love its retro-futurist junkpunk style, the rusty spaceships, dusty planets, and fusty aliens. That's why I've more fondness for games like Dark Forces and KotOR than any of the films or TV shows, as they let me poke around locations like Tatooine and Ord Mantell at my own pace.
Hence, the idea of being properly, immerse in Star Wars, to be physically surrounded by it and able to touch it, is probably my ultimate VR fantasy. Sod the imaginatively inert virtual spaces of Horizon Worlds, if Mark Zuckerberg really wanted to sell the Metaverse to me, he'd build the whole thing out in Mos Eisely chic, and let me run my own virtual cantina selling NFT space-drinks to legless bounty hunters and idiot Web3 prospectors.
Ten years after its initial release - and about three years after it came to PC - former Wii U exclusive The Wonderful 101: Remastered is getting some much deserved love. Platinum Games bought their mini superhero game to PC through crowdfunding, where backers blew past several stretch goals including one that promised a future DLC drop. Today, the game received its first bit of free new content in the form of a side-scrolling shoot ‘em up called The Wonderful One: After School Hero.
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"Does that pommel horse have a grenade launcher?" is one of many bizarre questions I found myself asking while playing HROT. This Slavic shooter revels in the strange, straddling the line between hyper-bleak Soviet satire and goofy memetic joke factory. This isn't the best thing about HROT, we'll get to that in a couple of paragraphs. But the balancing of these two personality strands is what defines HROT's quality. At the outset, they exist in perfect symbiosis, but the relationship becomes less stable as the game goes on.
The year is 1986, and something is seriously wrong in the Czechoslovak Socialist Republic. What that might be isn't explicitly stated, but given the year, the ambient chatter of Geiger counters, and the soldiers vomiting through their gasmasks as they prowl the abandoned streets, a nuclear disaster at an infamous Ukrainian power plant isn't a vast stretch of the imagination. In any case, anyone who wasn't killed by the fallout is now being hunted by an army of (presumably Russian, but again, it isn't explicated) soldiers. Emerging from a bomb shelter beneath Prague's Kosmonautů Metro Station (now named Háje), you take it upon yourself to defend your glorious homeland from these invaders.
Take a deep breath! Slayers X: Terminal Aftermath: Vengance Of The Slayer is releasing on June 1st with a simultaneous Game Pass drop. It’s an old-school shooter set in the same retro-futuristic universe as Hypnospace Outlaw, but this time the focus is on fan-favourite character Zane Lofton, who actually “made” Slayers X in the fiction of the game.
I’ve been playing a lot of The Legend Of Zelda: Tears Of The Kingdom this week. It’s good. Really good. I know you’ve all been waiting for your favourite PC gaming-focused website to offer their take on it so there you go. It’s properly, properly good. The best open-world adventure since Elden Ring, except arguably better because it doesn’t pull your trousers down and point out the colour of your underwear every time you dare to explore a forest or watch a sunset.
As you’ve probably seen, the game’s biggest new draw is “Ultrahand”, which allows Link to pick up loose objects and glue them together. Three logs make a raft. A plank and four wheels make a car. Two stones and a log make a... Ahem. You get the idea. In addition to this are “Zonai Devices”, components that give life and movement to your doohickeys. A fan pushes your raft across the lake. A steering stick lets you manoeuvre your little car. It’s a marvellous construction system that leverages the pre-existing physics engine seen in the game’s predecessor, Breath Of The Wild, to startling results. Does this all sound familiar?
Co-op horror prequel The Outlast Trials is out now in early access. Playing under-the-bed peekaboo with brainwashed killers can be an overwhelming ordeal, so now you can drag along a friend and spread out the trauma. This time, those snotty shakycam Blair Witch-type chases are set in a Cold War-era facility where you’ll be put through some gruelling experiments. The early access launch trailer below lays out some of the titular trials you can expect.
Developer Strange Scaffold have announced another genre-blending adventure, Teenage Demon Slayer Society, this time mixing turn-based strategy combat with some character action flare. The game follows teen figurines, who are already struggling with the hellish world of high school crushes when an army of demons invades their world. Demonic invasions and teenage angst are - as we all know - a match made in heaven. Or hell. Either way it looks cool.
Update (22nd May): This is the final day to grab this excellent deal on an Ergotron-built monitor arm! Original article continues:
Ergotron make some of the best monitor arms around - reliable, capable and generally brilliant - but they're also pretty pricey. That's probably why Amazon hit up Ergotron to make its Amazon Basics monitor arms, which offer the same excellent quality in unbranded form for considerably less money.
Today though one of these arms is even better value than usual, as there's a ridiculous 40% off voucher available on Amazon's take on the Ergotron LX, dropping this high-end monitor arm from £81 to just £49. That's a brilliant price for an arm that can support monitors up to 11kg in weight with full tilt, swivel, rotation and height adjustability.
The Corsair MP600 Pro LPX is a high-end PCIe 4.0 SSD with TLC flash memory and a DRAM cache, and I'd rank it right behind the (more expensive) Samsung 990 Pro and WD SN850x as the best gaming SSD on the market. Unlike those drives though, the MP600 Pro LPX comes with a heatsink by default and is often priced more aggressively, making it a great value choice that doesn't sacrifice performance. Today this drive has dropped to £74.98 on Amazon UK, a historic low price that makes it easy to justify an SSD upgrade for your PC or PS5.
Is there a bad idea for PowerWash Simulator DLC? I'm not sure, but this seems a particuarly good one. So far the clean 'em up has been expanded with free crossover levels set in Lara Coft's Manor and Final Fantasy VII's Midgar. Next up? Bikini Bottom from SpongeBob SquarePants.
Free is free and spooky shooter Metro: Last Light is currently free to keep from Steam. It has been made available by developers 4A Games in order to celebrate its 10th anniversary. The catch, sort of, is that this is the Complete Edition, a version that does not normally even show up in Steam search results. The slightly-improved Metro: Last Light Redux will still cost you a few quid or bucks.
From now until May 25th, you can nab Death Stranding for free from the Epic Games Store and keep it forever. If you always meant to go for a hike across Hideo Kojima's strange, sci-fi package delivery sim, now's your chance.
The Epic Games Store has introduced a "rewards program" through which players can get 5% back on eligible purchases. That means that if you buy a game for £20, you'll get £1 back to spend on a future game.
Today is also the start of the Epic Games Mega Sale, which includes discounts on games across the store and an additional 25% off eligible games with the Epic Coupon.
A sequel to Hawken was certainly not on my 2023 bingo card. Five years after the multiplayer mech FPS shut down on PC, now requiring a fan-made fix even just to play offline against bots, I didn't expect to ever again dash around its cool sci-fi cityscapes as a charmingly scrappy little stomper. So I was excited when publishers 505 Games announced singleplayer follow-up Hawken Reborn on Monday then launched it into early access two days later. Having now played it, oh dear. You know, it's okay for the dead to stay dead.
It’s time for another Humble Games Showcase, and this year the company is celebrating its three-year anniversary as well as spotlighting its newly refreshed publishing roster. This year, we got to see a special behind-the-scenes interview montage of the cast from David Gaider’s musical game Stray Gods as well as six new indie games for us to look forward to. We’ve listed everything that was announced at the show, so feel free to have a leisurely scroll through. Here’s everything you missed from the Humble Games Showcase 2023.
It's difficult not to start out by namedropping Dwarf Fortress. Songs Of Syx will compare to probably every colony sim you've played, in fact, but it feels like a fundamentally different game conceptually.
The usual parts are there. Chop some trees, chip some stones, and chep some crops to get your pioneers' basic needs met, then get to expanding. But Syx isn't interested in testing you or manufacturing drama. It's not about surviving, not about building a happy little colony. It's about how growth changes not just the scale, but the nature of a settlement. Despite similarities with its influences, it defines itself with a different dynamic, a whole different ethos to its peers. And it's one that even playing it my own awkward way hasn't broken.
The Electronic Wireless Show is not bound by your mortal rules, which is why even though this is a PC gaming podcast we're going to talk about Zelda, dammit all, because everyone else gets to talk about Tears Of The Kingdom and we're just as cool as them. We (attempt to) talk about our favourite Zelda games of the past, our favourite Zelda-likes on PC, and I explain how Tears Of The Kingdom works to Nate and James. Honestly though, we don't make it very far, because it turns out the lads haven't ever played a Zelda game before. At least, Nate might have. We're not entirely sure.
We do also talk about what we've been playing this week as well - which include some old favourites, some new secrets, and Gaben's tiny hands - and give some great new recommendations. Nate also delivers a very involved mini-game involving beans and aliens, and James doesn't talk about the Asus ROG Ally.
Soulslike RPG Lords Of The Fallen - previously The Lords Of The Fallen - is coming out on October 13th, an appropriately spooky date considering how many twisted monsters are on display. Halfway between sequel and reboot, this newest game is set a thousand years after 2014’s original game of the same name, and features all the dark fantasy tropes you love from the Soulslike subgenre. Take a look at the very metal gameplay reveal below.
Mortal Kombat fans have been relentlessly teased these past few weeks with MK12 name-drops in the middle of an investor call, developer jokes online, and brief clips that hinted at a timeline reset (plus a nasty case of leakage). Developer Netherrealm have now ended the speculation and announced the next game in their brutal fighting series: Mortal Kombat 1. And it's coming September 19th.
Lego 2K Drive has stirred up a surprising amount of thoughts, perhaps moreso than any other video game so far this year. I think it's because the game is an open world kart racer, a combination of words that sing to my nostalgic love for old-school racers, where as a kid I'd worshipped the majesty of Muppets Race Mania and Mario Kart (this is the only time I mention Mario Kart). In all respects, 2K Drive nails Lego's historically strong presentation, with slick courses and a genuinely lovely combo of grassy hills and dusty plains which certainly seem like a chip off Forza Horizon's shiny paint job. Building is upheld too, as a mighty garage lets anyone create an interesting set of wheels. The wheels start spinning, though, as the live service gates start closing. I don't think the gates totally shut off what's meant to be a fun time, but it certainly tries. Even an innocent kart racer can't escape the perils of live service, it seems.
Hey hey, we’re finally getting some real mid-rangers in the RTX 40 series, as Nvidia have announced the GeForce RTX 4060 Ti and RTX 4060 GPUs. These will finally bring Nvidia’s Ada Lovelace architecture, complete with improved ray tracing performance and DLSS 3 support, beneath the £400 mark.
