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THE WORLD’S N U MBER O NE P C G AMES MAG A ZINE

FIRST LOOK

TOTAL WAR: ROME REMASTERED A STRATEGY CLASSIC RETURNS IN STYLE

WORLD EXCLUSIVE

GENSHIN IMPACT

MIND CONTROL Could G ab really c e Newell our tho ontrol ughts?

THE PHENOMENON THAT NO ONE SAW COMING

ISSUE 356

HARDWARE

MECHANICAL KEYBOARDS TIME TO FIND A BOARD YOU CAN CLICK WITH

MORTAL KOMBAT

A FILM ADAPTATION THAT’S GOT GUTS

ALIENS: FIRETEAM

YEP, IT’S LEFT 4 DEAD WITH XENOMORPHS

WELCOME

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“HOW DID GENSHIN IMPACT BECOME SUCH A PHENOMENON?”

ROBIN VALENTINE Specialist in Expecting the unexpected Twitter @robinlvalentine This month Got a little flustered at this picture of himself as an anime lady.

OK, maybe this isn’t a typical PC Gamer cover – but if so, that’s just the latest convention Chinese free-toplay RPG Genshin Impact has smashed. You might not be playing it, you might not have even heard of it, but it’s one of the biggest mega hits in PC gaming right now. It’s got more players than CounterStrike, more momentum than Fortnite, and some seriously ambitious plans for the future ahead. How did Genshin Impact become such a phenomenon? That’s the question we’ve investigated for our cover feature, uncovering a story of zombies, waifus, and a group of nerds who want to save the world… SUBSCRIBE TO

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The PC Gamer team

A N DY K E L LY

FRASER BROWN

STEVEN MESSNER

MOLLIE TAY LOR

Specialist in Alien 3

Specialist in Forgetting realms

Specialist in Gacha journalism

Specialist in Tree speech

Twitter @ultrabrilliant

Twitter @FraserIBrown

Twitter @stevenmessner

Twitter @mollietayy

This month Found a new excuse to go on about how much he loves those aliens whose heads look like rude bits.

This month Finally figured out how to spell ‘Drizzt’ and ‘Catti-Brie’ properly. Just in time.

This month Kept opening PC Gamer loot boxes until an epic Genshin Impact cover feature dropped.

This month Learned how a videogame could plant a million real trees. Also assigned birds human personalities.

MAY 2021

Contents

#356 M AY 202 1

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Monitor

08 THE TOP STORY

Bethesda officially joins Microsoft.

10 THE SPY

The latest Elden Ring rumours.

12 SPECIAL REPORT

How an indie game is planting forests.

14 POSITIVE INFLUENCE

The inspirations behind Shipbreaker.

16 DNA TRACING

The lineage and legacy of Rockstar.

Previews

20 Sifu 24 Aliens: Fireteam 27 Total War: Rome Remastered 28 Dark Alliance 30 Stonefly 32 Potion Craft: Alchemist Simulator EARLY ACCESS 34 Hellish Quart 36 Rhythm Doctor 38 HROT

Features 42 Genshin Impact 54 Groups of Wrath 62 True Blood

The developer of Absolver returns with a new singleplayer martial arts adventure with a dash of Old Boy, a pinch of John Wick, and a whiff of Jackie Chan.

How did a Chinese RPG become the biggest PC success of 2020? Find out inside.

Why do gaming communities so easily turn toxic? We discover the psychology of hate.

SIFU

MAY 2021

GENSHIN IMPACT

GROUPS OF WRATH

Reviews

54 62

70 Evil Genius 2: World Domination 74 Loop Hero 76 Narita Boy 78 Stronghold: Warlords 80 Monster Energy Supercross 4 82 Curse of the Dead Gods 84 Nebuchadnezzar 86 HellSign 88 Little Nightmares II FREE GAMES 90 Locust, U.S.A. 91 Overflow 91 Castaway THEY’RE BACK 92 XCOM 2 93 Halo 3 93 Outer Wilds 93 Hypnospace Outlaw 93 Catastronauts

Hardware 96 GROUP TEST 100 TECH REPORT 102 BUYER’S GUIDE

Extra Life

124

106 NOW PLAYING

Turns out it takes longer to learn a skate trick than to build an empire.

110 UPDATE

Rachel explores the latest additions to monster-farming game Ooblets.

112 MOD SPOTLIGHT

The best user-made mods to make Valheim better than ever.

TRUE BLOOD Director Simon McQuoid takes us behind the scenes of the latest Mortal Kombat film adaptation, as we investigate whether it’s truly faithful to the iconic series.

116 HOW TO

Build your perfect Valheim home.

124

Discover the six best mechanical keyboards for gaming – one of them’s sure to click with you.

James dives back into a beloved adventure game of his youth to discover if it holds up in the harsh light of 2021, or if he needs to get his spectacles de-tinted.

MECHANICAL KEYBOARDS

PAJAMA SAM

118 DIARY

The final part of Rick’s adventures with the mayhem of GTA V: Chaos Mod.

122 WHY I LOVE

Steven on Valheim’s carefully-crafted sense of mystery.

124 REINSTALL

Pajama Sam: No Need to Hide When It’s Dark Outside sure is a long name.

128 MUST PLAY

Rachel shares her current favourites.

MAY 2021

MONITOR NEWS | OPINION | DEV ELOPMENT

It’s wild to think of Microsoft owning Doom, but this is the world we live in now. For his part, John Carmack just hopes he gets the chance to work on some of id’s old IPs.

A MATCH MADE IN SKYRIM

fter getting the approval of the United States Securities and Exchange Commission and the European Union Commission in March, Microsoft has now officially announced that the acquisition of ZeniMax Media, owner of Bethesda, is complete. Xbox head Phil Spencer welcomed the eight studios under ZeniMax (id Software, Bethesda, ZeniMax Online 8

MAY 2021

Bethesda officially joins Microsoft Studios, Arkane, MachineGames, Tango Gameworks, Alpha Dog and Roundhouse Studios) and said it was “an honour” to have them join the team. A selective list of just some of the game series Microsoft has

DOWN THE ROAD THEY WILL PRODUCE GAMES THAT ARE EXCLUSIVES

acquired includes Doom, Dishonored, The Elder Scrolls, Fallout, Prey, Quake, Rage, Starfield, Wolfenstein, and The Evil Within. The reaction of some Bethesda fans to this acquisition, which has been known about for some time, has been fearful: mainly because of Microsoft’s history with studios like the now-defunct Lionhead. Spencer thus went out of his way to emphasise it was “vitally important that Bethesda continues making games the way it always has”, and added that Xbox wants to help

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MISUNDERSTOOD NOODLES

FROM RUSSIA WITH TRUCKS

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GOING POTTY

SAVING THE TREES

ETS2’S NEW EXPANSION

PRODUCER FLUNKS OUT

Sneki Snek, Razer’s friendly, mascot, has finally come into being. With each purchase equating to ten trees saved, Razer is on the path to conserving one million trees together with Conservation International. The design evolves with every milestone reached, from plushies to headrests. KW

Euro Truck Simulator 2, is having a big year. Not only is the Iberian peninsula being added to the game, but a new Russia expansion has also been announced. This will add new roads to the map going as far as the Volga river. AK

Hogwarts Legacy was dealt a massive blow after it was discovered the game’s lead producer had a years-long side gig as an anti-social-justice YouTuber. The producer has since parted ways with the studio, though says he remains on “good terms” with Avalanche and WB Games. NC

Highs & Lows

HIGHS Valheim

The Early Access hit has reached five million sales and counting.

“make future Bethesda titles the biggest and most popular games in their history”. ABOVE: An idea of the range of games that are now under the Microsoft umbrella. Looks like it couldn’t find room for Blinx the Time Sweeper. BOTTOM: The most immediate fallout from the deal is Bethesda’s games adding to the value of Game Pass, which is already a pretty great deal.

’SOFT REBOOT

The immediate impact of this will be with these studios’ games finding their way to Microsoft’s Game Pass service, while down the road they will begin producing games that are exclusives, though what that word means is pretty flexible these days when it comes to PC. “Gamers should know that Xbox consoles, PC, and Game Pass will be the best place to experience new Bethesda games, including some new titles in the future that will be exclusive to Xbox and PC players,” said Spencer. The completion of the deal had a tinge of sadness, coming as it did shortly after the death of ZeniMax Media co-founder Robert A Altman. Spencer called Altman a “close friend” who “believed deeply in the power of gaming”. He also said, “I know that his spirit will live on in the shared work we do and motivate us to make this partnership all he envisioned.” Microsoft’s false starts in PC gaming over the years are many, from the unmitigated disaster that was Games for Windows Live, to its ill-advised focus on service games in the early 2010s. But over the last decade it has been making big investments in its firstparty strength, and is combining this with a strategy of cross-platform releases and the value proposition of Game Pass. Zenimax and its many great studios is the biggest and riskiest investment in Microsoft Game Studios’ history: let’s hope it doesn’t screw things up. Mollie Taylor, Rich Stanton

GTA Online

A modder managed to reduce GTA’s loading times by 70%, earning him a $10k bounty from Rockstar.

Microsoft Mesh

Microsoft showed off Microsoft Mesh, an incredible AR HoloLens environment where folk talk to holograms of one another.

Dogg gone

Snoop Dogg streamed Madden on Twitch, quit after 14 mins, but left his stream running for seven hours.

Fail of Duty

Police arrested an escaped prisoner when he emerged from hiding to buy the latest Call of Duty game.

Rotten Apple

Apple’s been trying to get Steam data. A judge said Apple has “salted the Earth with subpoenas”, but Valve has to release it anyway.

LOWS

MAY 2021

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The Spy B U T W H O WAT C H E S T H E S P Y ?

his month, The Spy was struck by the terrifying realisation that broadcasting your exploits each month, in print, for a magazine sold in shops across the country, is actually terrible spycraft. Is this why The Spy has never been headhunted by a government agency, or even a morally questionable clandestine mercenary outfit, and has instead spent the last couple of decades pilfering games industry secrets each month, to deadline? Why did nobody alert The Spy to this massive blunder?

THE SPY

The Spy can’t be talked into turning back.

Considering this, maybe author George R R Martin is the opposite of The Spy. Where The Spy has spent too long sharing information that shouldn’t see the light of day, the Game of Thrones author seemingly loves to not share information that should. The fifth book in the A Song of Ice and Fire series released back in 2011, meaning fans have been waiting nearly a decade for the series’ continuation. And yet, despite that, Martin also has myriad other projects on the go, not least of which is Elden Ring, a videogame collaboration with FromSoftware that is somehow also making its fans wait an absolute age for some new information.

FLOPPY WIENERS

Since its announcement back in 2019, fans have been

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eagerly waiting for publisher Bandai Namco to release almost anything else about the game beyond its title and creative leads. And yet, nothing. The situation grew so desperate that the Elden Ring subreddit community transformed into a performative art project in which members created fictional lore, scenarios, and bosses, and then further creating memes about their creations. Picture, then, the celebration back in early March when some leaked footage began to circulate. The quality isn’t great – it’s not direct capture for one thing, but rather a phone camera pointed at an angled screen that’s showing a partial section of a trailer covered in watermarks. But still: it’s something. Based on the footage, Elden Ring is for sure a FromSoft game. It features lumbering giants pulling carts, overwrought NPCs hamming up lines like “Oh! You tragic thing!”, and caverns and ruins and all that good stuff. There’s a bit with a monstrous swordsman posing in front of a prominent moon, and another bit where the player character slowly and laboriously pushes open a massive door. There is a dragon of course. As for when any of this will be officially unveiled, there is, of course, no date. In fact, there’s even the suggestion that this leak has delayed an official reveal, as Bandai Namco works to find out how this happened, and stop it from happening ever again. This is what those in the business call an irony, one made all the more bitter by rumours that the game as a whole has been delayed due to the COVID-19 pandemic. Still, maybe the subreddit was on the right track after all. If you were to write down everything you assumed would be true of a collaboration between the makers of Dark Souls and George R R Martin, there’s every chance it would feature a lot of what exists in this footage. And maybe The Spy was on the right track after all. Once you’ve established a pattern of writing everything down, you can write anything down, and people will struggle to discern the truth from the fiction. The Spy is going to space now, and you can’t actually prove whether or not that’s true. Spy out. The Spy

BASED ON THE FOOTAGE, ELDEN RING IS FOR SURE A FROMSOFT GAME

This month in… 2011 ISSUE 226, May 2011

ON THE COVER Star Wars: The Old Republic

IN THE CINEMAS Source Code

It’s not particularly notable that this issue featured three MMOs – that was just the way of things in the early 2010s. What is notable is that all three of them still exist. Star Wars: The Old Republic, Guild Wars 2 and, yes, even Rift, are all games you can play to this day. An unprecedented coincidence for the most turbulent of genres.

MAY 2020

Crysis was a good PC game with a few problems that could have easily been addressed by a sequel. Alas, Crysis 2 was much less interesting.

Richard Cobbett takes us on a tour of the best deals on Steam. And even ten years ago – with far fewer games available on Valve’s store – there’s a lot packed into this eight page feature, from classics like The Fallout Collection and The Last Express to more recent (at the time) gems like BioShock 2 and Torchlight.

Special Report P C G I N V E S T I G AT E S

Alba’s a jack-of-alltrades – vet, carpenter, photographer, litter picker, and errand girl.

BRANCHING OUT How ALBA: A WILDLIFE ADVENTURE is making change in the real world

verybody understands trees,” says Maria Sayans, CEO of Ustwo games. It’s maybe not the kind of pitch we’re used to hearing from developers, but that sentiment does get to the roots of Ustwo’s mission. In just two months this indie developer has helped plant more than half a million trees with its 2020 release Alba: A Wildlife Adventure. The game follows a young girl visiting her grandparents on a Mediterranean island, lush with gorgeous nature and wildlife. The idea initially came from art director David Fernández Huerta’s love of bird watching. “You’re spotting the animals and you’re like ‘Oh my God, it flew away,’” says lead designer Mishal Mistry. “‘OK, well, maybe I’ll just wait for it to fly back and take another picture’. And so [Huerta’s] like ‘This feels like a game, why don’t we try making a game out of it?’” In order to capture the beauty of nature in the most accurate way possible, the team would go out on bird watching trips together – something that Mistry had never been interested in before. “I think we did two or three over the course of the project… it was incredible, because it was transformative for all of us.” That chilled-out joy of discovery really comes through in Alba. Playing it is a truly tranquil experience,

MAY 2021

peacefully skipping around and soaking in the lush Spanish landscape. But what initially presents itself as a game that’s just about snapping pictures of birds becomes a bigger narrative shaped around the environment and our treatment of it. “You spend your time cataloguing the wildlife, taking pictures of animals and enjoying nature,” explains Mistry. “But as you do that, you kind of realise there’s more stuff going on on the island. Some stuff is in disrepair, and you start learning about the effect of humans on nature and back and forth. And eventually, you realise the whole island is in jeopardy.”

TREE-MENDOUS

So how does all this lead into planting trees in the real world? Studio head Sayans says that initially Ustwo games was looking for a way to offset its carbon footprint. The studio is already a B-corp, a for-profit business that meets the highest standards of environmental accountability. Sayans says they wanted to use their position to make a bigger impact, and began talking with organisations including Count Us In and the United Nations. These conversations eventually lead Ustwo games to Ecologi, an organisation dedicated to reducing the planet’s carbon footprint and fighting climate change through reforestation projects.

Planting prowess Where do all the trees go? Ecologi and Ustwo games have split the seedlings across three different reforestation projects. The first is a mangrove planting project in Madagascar. The other two are standard reforestation projects, one in Mozambique and the other in the Bosawas Biosphere Reserve in Nicaragua.

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FAR LEFT: Alba: A Wildlife Adventure celebrates even the smallest of victories, like repairing a birdhouse.

WISE QUACKERS

COLLARED DOVE

Spend too much time birdwatching and you’ll start wondering what they’d have to say…

A bit of a space cadet. Thinks Gordon Freeman is the bloke who narrated The Shawshank Redemption.

EURASIAN HOOPOE

Went to a Black Sabbath concert in 1972 and has based their entire personality on that day.

“As we started to look at Ecologi, we realised we could do more than just offset,” says Sayans. After spending more than two years developing Alba, it seemed only natural to turn the game’s conservation message into something physically tangible. “I think it would be very difficult, maybe even impossible, to try and make a game about nature today and not think about ‘What’s the impact that humans have on nature?’” Sayans says. “We just feel like you’d have to be completely out of touch to not be pondering these themes and not to try to have a positive impact on these themes.” The studio decided that for every copy of the game sold or downloaded (Alba is also available on Apple Arcade, a mobile subscription service) they would plant a tree. “We tried to make it really simple,” says Sayans. “One copy of the game, one tree.” Alba has become the mascot for the tree-planting project and Ustwo’s goal for a more environmentally-kind world. Her face is the logo on Ustwo’s Ecologi page, which also happens to be named Alba’s Forest. Her in-game conservation group, AIWRL, is used to promote initiatives that Ustwo games work with. Bringing Alba’s world to life has also put her creators more in touch with our own. “Even down to things like people being able to recognise species of birds that they would have never had any chance of recognising before,” Mistry says. “I’d say specifically the animators and artists now are like ‘Yep,

EUROPEAN GREENFINCH

She’s a little sensitive, loves iced coffee, and runs a small Etsy business selling various kitschy earrings.

COMMON KINGFISHER

Will ask if you have any games on your phone. Loves a bit of Fortnite. And fishing (for kings) probably.

that is definitely a wood pigeon. I can tell by the specific colours’, and it’s like ‘Wow, that’s good!’” Sayans feels like the combination of a game like Alba: A Wildlife Adventure and the ongoing COVID-19 pandemic has given people a chance to think again about their relationship with nature. “Suddenly things that maybe you weren’t paying attention to, whether it’s making bread or the birds in my garden, or the flowers on a walk. You’re paying more attention to them because your world has become so much smaller… and I think that in my case, Alba definitely inspired me to pay attention to those things.” Despite this, both Mistry and Sayans say that the objective isn’t explicitly to educate. Alba was designed as an accessible experience that crosses over with our world in a meaningful way. “We were very careful not to describe it as educational… because that kind of puts you in a little corner where we didn’t want to be,” Sayans says. “But the truth is with our games, we try to do more than entertain.” The ultimate goal for Ustwo games is to plant one million trees, a milestone they’re already halfway to hitting. But beyond that? Well, Sayans says they’ll just keep going. “I can’t imagine us stopping once we reach one million trees, right? That would feel unnecessary. Our commitment is to use our power, our position of influence as a force for good. And so I think we’ll continue to use that as an inspiration on the games that we make in the future.”

THE STUDIO DECIDED THAT FOR EVERY COPY OF THE GAME SOLD, THEY WOUILD PLANT A TREE

MAY 2021

Positive Influence I N S P I R AT I O N S A N D C O N N E C T I O N S I N G A M E S

AFTER EARTH HARDSPACE: SHIPBREAKER’s inspirations are rooted in terra firma

ometimes a name simply drifts through space, awaiting the perfect project to dock with. Blade Runner was originally the title of a little known 1974 sci-fi novel about a black market medical equipment supplier – until Ridley Scott bought the rights, keeping the name and jettisoning everything else. Similarly, the name ‘Shipbreaker’ pre-exists the game it now so perfectly describes. Hardware: Shipbreakers was originally the working title of Deserts of Kharak, the Homeworld RTS that became Blackbird Interactive’s first release. It was years later that Blackbird would develop a game about shearing huge chunks of metal from the carcasses of starships – but even then, somehow, the team missed the title that was staring them in the face. “We ran a bunch of internal focus groups trying to figure out what the name of the game was,” art director Chris Williams remembers. “We invested a lot of time into it. And there was a moment where a bunch of people came up with ‘Shipbreaker’. We made a game that coincidentally hit that.” This bizarre origin story is perhaps explained by the fact that Blackbird, as a studio, has long been fascinated by the real-world profession of shipbreaking. On the beach of Alang, India, where tankers and ocean liners go to die, workers carve apart ships weighing up to 657,019 tonnes. “On the one hand, it’s incredibly awe-inspiring,” says game director Elliot Hudson. “These ships get swarmed by hundreds of people with blowtorches who just slowly peel them apart like ants, and then you have these massive pieces of metal crash onto the beach. It’s very cool and intriguing to see.”

SHIP BREAKDOWN The blueprints for construction of Hardspace’s vessels

HOMEWORLD

Blackbird was founded by Relic veterans, and there’s a colour and majesty to its ships that recalls the classic RTS series.

MAY 2021

FALLOUT

Since ships would need to be pulled apart, Blackbird built a modular art pipeline partly inspired by Bethesda’s open worlds.

KINGDOM HEARTS

The Gummi Ship, which resembles a chunky child’s toy, warned the team against the dangers of an overly cubic aesthetic.

On the other hand, Alang’s shipyards have become notorious for the conditions under which their breakers work. Breakers risk death from falling and gas explosions, and some have been crushed under the enormous steel plates that drop from the sky. At least 137 were killed between 2009 and 2019, according to industry monitoring organisation Shipbreaking Platform, while many more succumb to diseases and cancers after exposure to toxic fumes and materials. “It’s very cool to see in action, but it’s not a positive experience for the people who are working on it,” says Hudson. “It has this subtext of class and danger. We wanted to explore that duality.”

TIGHT COLLAR

Players in Shipbreaker follow the job description of their real-life inspiration almost to the letter, despite the far-flung setting: they strip vessels for anything of value, down to the antennae and passenger seats, while contending with the ever-present possibility that a blast may rip through the hull if they burn through the wrong panel with their blowtorch. Their exploitation, however, has a distinctly Western vibe to it. Paying off the hidden costs for equipment feels a lot like buying a cheap flight – while the warm language your employers use to cover up their callous policies recalls today’s gig economy. “Extrapolating where we’re at right now to 300 years from now, those systems of exploitation are probably just going to get more fine-tuned and prevalent,” says Hudson. Bad as things are for Hardspace’s shipbreakers, the game makes it clear that others have it worse. Back home on Earth, nothing awaits but unpaid bills, food shortages, and desperation. Out in the yard, away from the clamour of a species in its death throes, it’s at least quiet – peaceful despite the danger. Blackbird drew on the blue collar fantasy of the Roaring ’20s, captured by the iconic photograph of construction workers lunching on a girder suspended high above Manhattan. Then there’s the #bluecollarlife movement, which is big on Instagram. Memes about ramming all of your tools under the seat of your truck rub up against posts from trade apps, advertising to the tens of thousands tuning in to watch rodbusters at work. In the 2020s, as in the 1920s and perhaps even the 2320s, blue-collar workers take personal pride in their labour – and companies seek to profit from that pride. “We were very careful not to fetishise the blue collar lifestyle, but to try to honour it,” says Hudson. “To explore how that class of people is often exploited by the white collar, the people that manage them.” Jeremy Peel

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“THOSE SYSTEMS OF EXPLOITATION ARE PROBABLY JUST GOING TO GET MORE FINE-TUNED AND PREVALENT”

LEFT: An early prototype had you grappling and severing objects as they fell to Earth. BELOW: Every last piece of Hardspace’s ships can be pulled off and sold.

MAY 2021

DNA Tracing GAMING’S LINEAGES EXPLORED

THE STUDIO’S FIRST INTERNATIONAL SUCCESS WASN’T GTA, BUT LEMMINGS

MAY 2021

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NORTHERN STAR Rockstar made millions selling Scotland’s natural export: dark comedy

he Houser brothers were born heirs to the world of gangster cinema. Their mother, Geraldine Moffat, was the glamorous actress who rescued Michael Caine in a convertible in Get Carter. “You didn’t know you had a fairy godmother, did you?” she yelled over the wind and engine noise, before speeding Caine off to a multi-story car park to be assigned his next mission: the killing of a crime boss.

Sam Houser, the eldest brother, grew up on a diet of films like The Getaway and The French Connection, ’70s car chase movies that were cool, brutal, and lacking the clear moral centre of the Hollywood thrillers that had come before. When he was five or six, Sam’s wealthy solicitor father took him to a London jazz club to meet Dizzy Gillespie. “What are you going to do when you grow up, son?” the legendary trumpeter asked. “Are you going to be a bank robber?” Sam would do better than that, enabling millions of bank robberies the world over. Grand Theft Auto didn’t start in London, though. It was born further north, in the Dundee offices of DMA Design. Though titles like Menace and Blood Money might have suggested vicious Steve McQueen flicks, they were in fact sidescrolling space shooters, part of the ’80s post-arcade culture that made the fortunes of early game development moguls like DMA founder Dave Jones. However, the studio’s first international success wasn’t GTA but Lemmings, the darkly comic yet family friendly puzzleplatformer. Lemmings was the Assassin’s Creed of its day, spawning sequels and spin-offs through the ’90s (Oh No! More Lemmings, All New World of Lemmings, Lemmings Paintball, Holiday Lemmings 1994). It funded multiple teams, a motion-capture studio, and even a team of in-house musicians – sufficient sprawl that GTA could be developed by a team that, for the most part, had never shipped a game before.

COPS AND ROBBERS

Jones, having built his terrarium for digital lemmings to mill about in, wanted to upgrade to a virtual living city – a dynamic crosshatch of streets where pedestrians strolled and cars honked. As with many such simulation concepts, the problem was coming up with a purpose for the player within it: the GTA team initially strove for the moral centre missing from The French Connection, casting players as a cop who stopped at traffic lights and was punished for running down civilians. But according to David Kushner’s GTA biography Jacked, some internally dismissed the game as ‘Sims Driving Instructor’, a simulation dedicated to recreating a boring reality. The project only found its direction when the team implemented a carjacking animation, for which the player was awarded 100 points. Suddenly, GTA became transgressive. The role reversal made immediate sense to BELOW: Liberty City Sam Houser, by then a producer at has long been defined DMA’s publisher – as a child, he’d by its sharp played the quintessential PC verticality. simulation Elite as a “space mugger”. BOTTOM: This GTA was a hit, and the first crack cul-de-sac appeared in a philosophical schism. Jones, a in GTA V too. Grove celebrated businessman in Scotland, Street for life! grew uncomfortable when the nascent Rockstar recruited the

IN-HOUSE Three key GTA figures whose surnames aren’t Houser

BRIAN BAGLOW

Set GTA’s darkly funny tone as the original game’s writer, before enacting Rockstar’s controversial marketing strategy as ‘head of propaganda and indoctrination’.

LESLIE BENZIES

Rockstar North’s studio head left after a sabbatical in 2014 – but later claimed he had been locked out of the office against his will, and sued Rockstar over royalty payments.

DAVE JONES

Scottish games industry luminary and founder of DMA Design. After selling the studio, Jones led development on Crackdown, one of GTA’s few serious rivals.

MAY 2021

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KEY DMA Design Rockstar North Realtime Worlds

LEMMINGS

The cuddly hit that, ironically, enabled GTA.

CA REER C RIMIN A L S Three decades of degenerate software

GRAND THEFT AUTO

Introduced the cities of Liberty, Vice and San Andreas.

BODY HARVEST

GRAND THEFT AUTO 2

A chunky N64 prototype for jumping into vehicles in 3D.

Still in 2D, but with an ambitious future setting.

GRAND THEFT AUTO III

The birth of the open world game as we know it.

APB: ALL POINTS BULLETIN DMA’s Dave Jones designed this proto-GTA Online. It was… messy.

GRAND THEFT AUTO: VICE CITY

Left grey NY for a pastel ’80s holiday.

MANHUNT

GRAND THEFT AUTO: SAN ANDREAS

Splinter Cell for sadists.

The g-funk era, with a taste of the countryside to come.

AGENT

GRAND THEFT AUTO IV

Moved beyond cinematic pastiche for a grittier story.

GRAND THEFT AUTO V

Three great gangster stories in one.

GRAND THEFT AUTO ONLINE The eternal heist generator.

MAY 2021

Unreleased stealth-action spy thriller. Still classified.

DNA Tracing notorious publicist Max Clifford – later found guilty of eight counts of indecent assault against four girls and women aged between 15 and 19 – to promote the game. Clifford whispered in the ears of UK politicians, and GTA was condemned in the House of Lords before it was even released. He’d opened Pandora’s Box, dooming Rockstar North to a lifetime of public notoriety. With that reputation came a certain cachet – a series that might be made illegal was instantly cool – but it was no surprise when Jones cashed out of the company, and the Housers moved the core GTA team to Edinburgh.

LEFT: Ray Liotta starred in Vice City, but Rockstar has embraced lesser-known actors since.

NY STATE OF MIND

From then on, Rockstar North’s leadership came undisputedly from the New York loft office where the Houser brothers had set up their publishing label. With Sam’s younger brother Dan established as a co-writer on GTA, this transatlantic setup would define the tone of the series. The Housers had long loved the excess of America, and now they had a front row seat. They couldn’t relate to GTA’s cash-strapped criminals – at St Paul’s public school in London, Sam was a classmate of future UK chancellor George Osborne. But the brothers’ status as expats made them the perfect satirists, close enough to observe but with a distant perspective that allowed them to identify the country’s absurdities with ease. That view was reflected by the team in Edinburgh. “It’s like living on the moon,” Dan Houser once said of Los Angeles in an interview for The Guardian. “Some of the guys from Scotland adore it, some of them can’t stand it.” That tension has been evident in every one of the 3D worlds Rockstar North has made for GTA: superficially beautiful, tremendous fun, and morally bankrupt. The studio has celebrated the country’s pop culture through its radio stations, while skewering its media and corporations – who in GTA tend to say the quiet part loud (“Weazel News: confirming your prejudices”).

PUBLIC ENEMY

Rockstar North has mostly been able to have it both ways, holding up a mirror to US society, while letting players live out a warped fantasy within it. But its most extreme game, Manhunt, almost caused a mutiny within Rockstar, as it was deemed indefensible for its plastic bag asphyxiations and genital mutilations, all carried out by the player. The high scores awarded for these killings might have been a logical extension of GTA’s points-for-carjackings, and its white supremacist victims further proof of the studio’s fascination with the ugliest sides of America. But it proved to be too unflinching a reflection, and too obvious a form of bait for the decency brigade Clifford had first hooked. The same was true for Trevor, the psychopath protagonist of GTA V. Murderous, unpredictable and unhygienic, he was the behaviour of GTA players made flesh – and not all players liked what they saw. But there too in GTA V was DMA’s heritage, in the rounds of golf and the cable car that took you up to Mount Chiliad: a simulation of life in all its mundanity. Perhaps there’s a little of Dave Jones left in Rockstar North after all. Jeremy Peel

“SOME OF THE GUYS FROM SCOTLAND ADORE IT, SOME OF THEM CAN’T STAND IT”

MAY 2021

PREVIEW Sifu

NEED TO KNOW RELEASE Autumn 2021

DEVELOPER Sloclap

PUBLISHER In-house

SIFU A singleplayer kung-fu brawler from kung-fu enthusiasts here’s a hallway fight in the Sifu trailer that two PC Gamer staffers separately reacted to by saying, “Ah, Oldboy.” It’s a kung-fu brawler with obvious inspirations: The Raid, John Wick, the prop combat of Jackie Chan, the power of Bruce Lee. Sifu is meant to be a martial arts movie you can play.

You’ve got to be a little skeptical of a game that sets out to emulate movie legends like that, but what’s exciting about Sifu is that the developers behind it might actually have the chops (and punches, kicks, etc) to pull it off. Its creator is Paris-based studio Sloclap, whose first game was the fantastic online fighter Absolver, one of the best martial arts games out there. I could go on and on about Absolver and how it deserved much more love than it got, but I’ll just point out the bits relevant for comparison with Sifu. The focus of Absolver is PvP, but there are NPCs to fight and there’s light storytelling to guide new players. Its fighting is complex, with both manual stance changing and moves that start and finish in different stances, precision timing (especially to smoothly chain together combos), stamina management, weapons, and on top of it all, a moveset editor so you can mix and match attacks of different styles. Just writing about it now makes me want to redownload it – it’s £25 on Steam, and any claim at being a Souls-like aficionado is questionable if you haven’t played it. While aspects of Sifu’s fighting should look very familiar to Absolver players, it’s quite a different game. Sifu is entirely singleplayer, for one thing, and there’s no moveset editor. It isn’t so much a spiritual sequel to Absolver as it is another martial arts game from a studio that loves to make martial arts games.

FIRST LOOK

LINK sifugame.com

The Sloclap team will do more online projects in the future, Sifu executive producer Pierre Tarno told me over a Zoom chat a day after the game’s announcement, but for this one, they wanted to “put all the development efforts in the gameplay” without having to worry about the technical complexities of online game development. The result is a “linear adventure” which gives Sloclap new possibilities for structure and storytelling. And because Sifu doesn’t need the considerations about symmetry called for by a player-vs-player game – you’re always fighting AI, who can behave however the developer chooses – the focus of the combat can be different, too. “The fantasy we want is that sort of Jackie Chan movie fantasy where it’s one versus many,” says Tarno, “whereas Absolver was very much 1v1.” That’s reflected in the trailer’s hallway fight, where the hero takes on seven combatants, one of whom he knocks out by hurling a pipe at their head. There’s also a nightclub level that’s reminiscent of the John Wick scene – except without Keanu Reeves shooting guys in the neck.

THE WORLD IS MY GYM We haven’t seen any guns, but there will be other weapons. Also, in the style of Jackie Chan, who due to a fundamental property of the universe is always near a ladder, you’ll be able to use your environment to your advantage – climbing on ledges, throwing objects, pushing furniture, picking up makeshift weapons and so on. Driving these fights is a story about a kung-fu student seeking revenge against the five assassins who murdered his family, which tells us something of Sifu’s structure: we’ll be beating up goons on the way into each assassin’s hideout, where, naturally, we’ll face off against an assassin boss. We’ve seen an apparent glimpse of one such fight, which appeared to be a 1v1 bout, so maybe it’s not all crowd brawls. Absolver included some truly challenging NPC bosses, though, so it’s not as if

A MARTIAL ARTS GAME FROM A STUDIO THAT LOVES TO MAKE MARTIAL ARTS GAMES MAY 2021

PREVIEW Sifu This corridor reminded us of Oldboy.

Sloclap can’t make mano-a-mano fights work, too. Bosses can always call in reinforcements, as well. (On that note, Tarno stressed that we only beat up the low-level baddies because they’re in the way. The assassins are our real targets.) One curious thing we see in the Sifu announcement trailer is that it’s possible to come back to life if you die along the way, but there’s a catch: the character grows older each time. That led me to speculate that there might be some kind of roguelike structure to Sifu, but Tarno says that’s not quite right. He wasn’t ready to get into details, but pointed out that in the trailer, the character stands up from where they were knocked down. He also said that the character does not become weaker as he ages – he’s becoming an old kung-fu master, of course. Tarno was able to be a little more specific when I asked whether something like Absolver’s moveset customisation system would show up in Sifu. The short answer is no. The character’s moves will evolve throughout the game, but there won’t be a combo editor or different martial arts styles to choose from. There will only be one combat style, and that fact is an essential part of Sifu. “This game is about Pak Mei kung fu, and so the moveset of the character reflects that,” says Tarno. “And so it’s really more about learning [Pak Mei], mastering it, understanding the different properties and uses in combat, adapting to situations within that moveset. There will be some evolutions of the movesets, without going into too many details, but there will not be full creation or customisation that you have in Absolver.” The word ‘sifu’ refers to a master, and there’s a real kung-fu master involved with the game. Sifu’s creative director, Jordan Layani, studies under Sifu Benjamin Culos, a master of Lao Siu Leung Pak Mei, which he learned in Foshan, China. Culos now runs a school in Paris called Lao Wei San Pak Mei, after his own master. As you can tell, lineage is an essential part of the art’s teachings and traditions, and that comes through in the game: the trailer begins with the protagonist meditating in front of a picture of his own sifu. That’s the kind of scene where a real master’s

“THIS GAME IS ABOUT PAK MEI KUNG FU, AND SO THE MOVESET REFLECTS THAT” 22

MAY 2021

expertise was useful. “The incense should be there,” says Tarno, expressing how Culos would give feedback, “and the text on the side should say this, and you wouldn’t have training mats on the right.”

SIFU’D Culos is also advising on combat. So far, we’ve seen lots of fast punches followed by powerful kicks, but that’s just a glimpse. Whatever the moveset looks like, I suspect that mashing buttons will only take a person so far. Even if the customisation and stance system from Absolver haven’t transferred over, I’d expect to see something like its rhythmic, thoughtful combat in Sifu. In other words, I expect it to be difficult. Tarno counts both the movements and values of Pak Mei as the inspirations for Sifu. Regarding values and the story, he didn’t want to reveal too much, but hinted that it’s not necessarily a straightforward revenge tale. He pointed out that ‘kung-fu’ refers not to combat but “mastery through practice” as in the gongfu tea ceremony. “Is one life enough to have kung-fu?” he asked. The ageing system is part of the answer to that question. At the same time, Sifu is about beating dudes up, and it’s easy to see how “mastery through practice” can refer to our progression through the game. Tarno confirmed that the theme of mastery applies to the difficulty of the combat. “We see this as a challenging game,” says Tarno. “Also, that creates interesting things relating to the ageing. But it would do a disservice to the game if we sort of gave away that fantasy right away, you know in Batman or Spider-Man, where from the get-go you’re superpowered. No, there has to be a learning curve, and for the experience that we want to bring to players to be coherent with the vision, you’re going to have to need to earn it, and progress in your mastery of the systems.” What difficulty options may or may not be available is uncertain – Tarno doesn’t have any definitive answers on that topic right now – but Sifu is definitely not going to be a cakewalk. Dark Souls was among the inspirations for Absolver, and though perhaps in a subtler way, it shows up again here in the sense that “mistakes have a cost”. Tarno wondered if the trailer should’ve shown the player taking more of a beating to communicate that. Sifu doesn’t have a release date yet, but it’s scheduled to come out this autumn on the Epic Games Store.

Tyler Wilde

Bottles, tables and pipes are just a few of the improvised weapons we’ve seen.

PREVIEW Sifu

The stacks of money suggest that ‘kung-fu assassin’ is a lucrative job.

MAY 2021

PREVIEW Aliens: Fireteam If all else fails, whip out the flamethrower.

NEED TO KNOW RELEASE Summer

DEVELOPER Cold Iron Studios

PUBLISHER In-house

A L I E N S: F I R E T E A M It’s Left 4 Dead but with xenomorphs, basically n this new co-op survival shooter you create your own Colonial Marine, team up with three friends online (or bots), and battle xenomorphs, rogue androids, and other Alien-themed enemies across four campaigns. Set 23 years after the movies, you’ve been sent to protect colonies from xenomorph attacks, which have become a regular occurrence.

LINK aliensfireteam.com

they really do seem relentless, crawling from every corner of the screen. Players are frequently downed by the creatures, forcing allies to rush in and revive them, which again is very Left 4 Dead. Zinkievich also says that the xenos’ acid blood will be a major concern on higher difficulties. In action, Fireteam looks fine. The third-person combat reminds me a lot of The Division, with deployable gadgets such as portable turrets to help you in battle. But overall, I was a little underwhelmed. It looks like a perfectly serviceable shooter, but lacks a certain spark. It didn’t excite me.

GAME OVER, MAN

As I watch one squad member insta-kill a dozen drones in a row with a shotgun, bad memories of Gearbox’s dismal Colonial Marines come drifting back. This could be a better game, but I guess I’ve just been Developer Cold Iron makes it clear that the spoiled by Isolation. In that game, Creative inspiration here is Aliens, not Alien. And I Assembly made the xenomorph, finally, can’t help but think, “Haven’t we done this feel like more than just cannon fodder. already?”. So many shooters have riffed Between missions you’ll hang out on a on James Cameron’s 1986 sequel that it’s warship, the Endeavour, where you can become a cliche. And after Alien: Isolation, talk to characters and find lore items. Fireteam feels like a step backwards. While there will be some connections From how the developer to the movies other Alien media, FIRST describes Fireteam’s campaigns, Zinkievich stresses that this is an LOOK Left 4 Dead seems to be a big original story. He says it’s “not a inspiration. There are 11 species of tourism game”, which honestly xenomorph, each with different abilities strikes me as a missed opportunity. I’d and behaviours. Zinkievich talks about “an love to blast my way through the algorithm running behind the scenes” Nostromo, Hadley’s Hope, and Fury 161. changing things on the fly as you play, Fireteam will have an RPG-style which recalls Left 4 Dead’s AI director. And progression system. Your marine will level up, getting access to better gear, cosmetic the story-driven campaigns are being items and weapons that can be designed to be dynamic and customised. You’ll also be able to apply unpredictable, encouraging repeat plays. modifiers called Challenge Cards to each Zinkievich says a lot of work has gone run through a campaign to mix things up, into the xenomorphs’ AI and how they and switch between classes mid-game. move, describing the game as a “3D Cold Iron didn’t go into much depth about shooter experience”. This means the the classes, but their names – gunner, xenos will be, in theory, extremely mobile, demolisher, technician, doc, and recon – able to crawl along ceilings, scale walls, are pretty self explanatory. and skulk through air vents. Fireteam has potential, but the In a hands-off demo I see a four-player concept hasn’t blown me away. There’s so squad fend off waves of xenomorphs, and much that could be done with the Alien IP, and a co-op shooter based on Aliens feels like the lowest hanging fruit. Aliens is well-trodden ground for videogames, so it remains to be seen whether Cold Iron can make its own mark on the franchise. Andy Kelly

THE STORY-DRIVEN CAMPAIGNS ARE BEING DESIGNED TO BE DYNAMIC AND UNPREDICTABLE 24

MAY 2021

Never seen these glowing head xenos before.

PREVIEW Aliens: Fireteam

It wouldn’t be an Alien game without a gross hive.

More hot (literally) flamethrower action.

MAY 2021

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PREVIEW Total War: Rome Remastered

he history nerds at Creative Assembly have decided to explore their own history for the next Total War, enlisting Feral Interactive to dig up the original Rome and give it a good dusting. The result is Total War: Rome Remastered, sporting a 4K upgrade, 16 new factions, and a few other modern bells and whistles.

TOTA L WA R: ROME REMASTERED

FIRST LOOK

The classic Total War is back for another fight NEED TO KNOW RELEASE April 29

DEVELOPER Feral Interactive, Creative Assembly

PUBLISHER Sega

LINK totalwar.com

Rome’s probably the oldest Total War that’s worth remastering. It was the series’ first big leap, and it’s the most recognisable of the original trio thanks to the 3D units and fleshed out campaign map. Even after nearly 20 years, there are plenty of common threads that run from Rome through all its successors. “What better excuse than the 20th year of Total War to revisit a grand master?” says Rob Bartholomew, chief product officer at Creative Assembly. “The original release of Rome marks a special time for us as our first major breakout title; it’s amazing to get the opportunity to remaster it with our friends at Feral.”

HANDLE WITH CARE David Stephen, Feral’s managing director, describes it being “a bit like recutting the crown jewels”, so the remastered edition isn’t mucking around too much with the fundamentals. Diplomacy is being overhauled, however, along with the UI,

camera, and controls. In battle, you’ll be able to use a tactical map, while the campaign will feature heat maps and icon overlays. You’ll be able to rotate the camera in the campaign, and you can expect wider zoom levels throughout. When you get tired of battering the AI, you’ll also be able to duke it out in cross-platform multiplayer between Windows, Mac, and Linux. Sixteen formerly unplayable factions are being tossed into the war, bringing the total to thirty-eight. Spain, Scythia, Thrace, Numedia, Armenia, Pontus, Macedon, and Dacia will be included in the main game. The Berbers, Burgundii, Celts, Lombardi, Ostrogoths, Romano-British, Roxolani, and Slavs will be playable in Barbarian Invasion. Along with that expansion, the Alexander content is also getting the remaster treatment, though the faction number will stay the same. Instead of making it look a bit like Rome II, the remaster preserves the original Rome’s visual identity, while gussying it up with a 4K upgrade and overhauled models and battlefields. It looks like the lighting and reflections have been improved, too, and boy doesn’t that shiny armour look nice? Judging by the screenshots, it’s a version of Rome that matches my rose-tinted memories. With Warhammer and Three Kingdoms, it feels like Total War is the best it’s ever been, so I’m not sure how long this trip down memory lane will hold my attention before I start to ache for the present. But nostalgia is a powerful force and the opportunity to play what was once my favourite strategy game with a fresh coat of paint is too tempting to pass up. Fraser Brown

MAY 2021

PREVIEW Dark Alliance

Missions also contain tougher monsters lurking off the beaten track, like this frost troll.

Of course you’ll be able to get into a brawl with a dragon.

Dark Alliance has become a lot flashier since it ditched the top-down view.

MAY 2021

PREVIEW Dark Alliance

NEED TO KNOW RELEASE June 22

DEVELOPER Tuque Games

PUBLISHER Wizards of the Coast

DARK ALLIANCE It’s D&D, but with more death and fewer dice uque Games’ Dark Alliance is D&D for the impatient. It’s got the setting, characters, and language of D&D, but they’re draped over an action game that will see you fighting without ever worrying about dice rolls. Kill goblins, grab loot, admire your new cloak – it’s about the simple pleasures.

Drizzt’s best special ability is that he gets all the cool cloaks.

LINK darkalliance.wizards.com

D&D staples in interesting ways, like the rest system. You can find campfires that let you take a short rest, healing and recharging you, but they also provide a checkpoint. You can choose to ignore them, however, and you’ll be rewarded with better loot for taking the risk. While Dark Alliance can be played solo, it might be a bit tricky, especially since there are no AI companions. It’s really designed for co-op parties, with abilities that are meant to synergise and fights that will be a lot easier with teamwork. For the demo, I’m accompanied by a developer playing another member of the quartet, Catti-Brie.

NO CLASS

Technically, Drizzt is a ranger and Catti-Brie is a fighter, but the R A Salvatore novels that made them D&D stars are less Though technically the third game in the tied to the concept of classes than the Dark Alliance series, the slate has been tabletop game, and Dark Alliance follows wiped clean for its PC debut. Previously a suit. Drizzt has more in common with a top-down action-RPG exclusively for fighter or rogue, alternating between consoles, Dark Alliance is now a thirddiving headfirst into the throng of person action game where clicks have monsters and turning invisible so he can been replaced by combos. go in for the backstab. He can also As celebrity drow Drizzt summon his panther from the astral Do’Urden, I rush around Icewind plane to briefly attack his foes. PL AYED Dale, dodging, leaping and Cattie-Brie, meanwhile, serves as IT backstabbing with the goblin body ranged support, peppering enemies count rapidly rising. While I buttonwith arrows, trapping them with bash my way through the mostly linear magical vines and healing her pals. mission map, there’s still an RPG working Dashing around with twin scimitars, away under the hood, but things like ability summoning astral panthers and turning scores and feats have been reshaped invisible makes it easier to overlook that around a game that’s mostly pure action. I’m fighting goblins again. My main target, I can choose to level up my charisma though, is a group of verbeegs, a lesser attribute, for instance, but in Dark Alliance known type of giant-kin that I don’t think I’ve ever seen before. It turns out that it has nothing to do with persuasion. they’re avid singers, and their bellowing Instead, it determines how quickly my accompanies me throughout the mission, ultimate ability recharges. I’ll have to wait growing louder and louder as I approach until after the mission, though, because their camp. The pace of the demo doesn’t levelling up, unlocking feats, and leave a lot of room for Dark Alliance to equipping new gear only happens back at display much personality, so the inclusion camp. When you’re on a quest, there’s of some musical giants is very welcome. nothing to distract you from the action. With the verbeegs defeated, it’s time to Dark Alliance doesn’t just pay lip service teleport back to camp and admire all my to D&D, and Tuque has adapted various rewards. The greatest of them all, of course, is being able to unlock some new cosmetic appearances for my gear sets, purchased from my deep gnome pal. Even with action taking centre stage, there’s always time to look nice.

ON A QUEST, THERE’S NOTHING TO DISTRACT YOU FROM THE ACTION

Fraser Brown

MAY 2021

PREVIEW Stonefly

RELEASE Summer

DEVELOPER Flight School Studio

PUBLISHER MWM Interactive

LINK stoneflygame.com

S T O N E F LY Discover a wonderfully miniature world

HAPPY CAMPER

In your base camp, you can chat with your rag-tag group of explorers, upgrade your mech with Annika’s newly found inspirations, and take stock of what resources you’ve found.

MAY 2021

light School Studio has left the electrifying pinball hack-n-slash action of Creature in the Well behind for a tranquil jaunt through nature in Stonefly. This game puts a magnifying glass over a forest’s undergrowth, letting us take a peek at an entire bug ecosystem all from the safety of the world’s most adorably tiny mech suit. You play as an enterprising young engineer named Annika whose love for inventing has led her on a quest to find a lost family heirloom. Piloting your mech, you’ll need to help Annika search the dizzying highs and dangerous lows of the forest’s miniature hidden world. Rachel Watts

NEED TO KNOW

FIRST LOOK

GIRL GENIUS

The main character of Stonefly is engineer Annika. Following in the footsteps of her absent father, she’s a mech-building genius whose inventions are inspired by nature.

PREVIEW Stonefly

NUTS AND BOLT S

Sleek modern aesthetic meets insect-inspired design with Stonefly’s mechs. They may look heavy, but they’re sprightly machines and will help you gather resources in the wild, hopping and gliding with ease.

BUGS LIFE

Most of Stonefly’s bugs are friendly and will only need a light gust to keep away, but the bigger ones will need a more hands-on approach.

MAY 2021

PREVIEW Potion Craft: Alchemist Simulator

Haggling is the least enjoyable part of owning a potion shop.

This is chemistry porn. Avert your eyes.

Gathering ingredients just involves a five-second trip to the garden.

MAY 2021

PREVIEW Potion Craft: Alchemist Simulator

NEED TO KNOW RELEASE 2021

DEVELOPER niceplay games

PUBLISHER tinyBuild

P O T I O N C R A F T: ALCHEMIST SIM U L ATOR Become a small business owner thanks to your trusty cauldron hen I was still in single digits, I went through a potion-brewing phase. Inspired by Roald Dahl’s George’s Marvellous Medicine, I was convinced that with the right ingredients I too could concoct a magical elixir. Instead of hitting up the medicine cabinet, I took advantage of all the farms and woods nearby to create my brews.

I’m a bit worried about the lack of masks and goggles.

LINK potioncraft.com

You’ve got to take your concoction on a journey, which is expressed literally via a map full of magical effects and dangers you’ll want to avoid. Each ingredient takes the potion in a specific direction, following its own path. The more you add, the further afield your potion goes, passing through experience nodes and effects, until you decide you’re done. Then you can slap a label on it and give it a sexy name. Every screen is a separate room. Below the potion brewing area is a basement taken up by a tangle of tubes, jars, valves and, at the centre, an imposing furnace. This massive chemistry set is where you’ll start tinkering away even more with your potions. There’s also a garden, where you can pick up ingredients, a bedroom that lets you move to the next day, and then the money-maker: the shop.

BAD BUSINESS

I’m a wee bit less enchanted with the retail side of things, but that’s mostly down to Plants, mushrooms, manure – everything the haggling system. Every customer went in the bucket. I never could find any comes in with a story and a potion guinea pigs, sadly, and there was no way I request. If you can find what they need, was going to slurp down that bubbling, they’ll name their price. Then you can try foul-smelling bile first. But now, to bleed a bit more money out of thanks to Potion Craft: Alchemist them in a mindless haggling PL AYED Simulator, I’ve got queues of people minigame where you keep slamming IT willing to pay for the privilege. the haggle button at the right time. I Creating each new recipe in think I’d prefer just losing the cash. Potion Craft is like going on a mini Otherwise, it’s got a lot of potential. adventure, with each ingredient pushing There’s a reputation system that can you further into the unknown. And you do attract and put off customers, but there’s this without leaving your cauldron’s side. also the hint of something more complex It’s weird, but it captures the magic of – that maybe there are benefits to a bad invention and creation in a way more reputation. As well as folk popping in to ‘realistic’ crafting systems often don’t. get indigestion cures, you’ll be I found myself charmed before I even approached with more sinister requests. opened up my potion shop, after gawking One bloke needed some poison, no at screenshots of art inspired by medieval questions asked, and was clearly up to no manuscripts. In-game, the parchment good, but I sold him the foul stuff anyway, springs to life as you mash up ingredients at the cost of my good reputation. Then he with your mortar and pestle, or work the came back, looking for more, and made it bellows. All the mashing, stirring and very clear that I was in this with him now. pumping is done by hand, making it tactile, Potion Craft could probably get by on but never hard work. There’s no QTEs, charm alone, but thankfully it’s also when you’re making potions at least. shaping up to be a clever, abstract alchemy sim. If gritty, numbers-heavy business management is your obsession, this probably won’t scratch your itch – it’s not really a conventional business sim – but you might as well download the Steam demo anyway, because it’s great. Fraser Brown

I FOUND MYSELF CHARMED BEFORE I EVEN OPENED UP MY POTION SHOP

MAY 2021

E A R LY A C C E S S P R E V I E W Hellish Quart

NEED TO KNOW EXPECT TO PAY £13.50

DEVELOPER Kubold

HELLISH QUART

PUBLISHER In-house

LINK bit.ly/2N57B2Q

includes animating Geralt’s moves for The Witcher 3. I especially love the way the characters boast after slaying an opponent, strutting around in an uncannily modern way.

DOUBLE-EDGED SWORD Blocking is handled automatically, but if you block too much your opponent may cut through your guard. At close range, where it’s impossible to swing a sword properly, regular attacks automatically become knees and elbows that push your opponent back with a brief stun. It’s also ’m so enthusiastic about this swordfighting game that I’d better start with a possible to manually push your disclaimer: Hellish Quart is in Early opponent’s sword hand away, although I Access, and it’s pretty rough. The menus rarely manage to pull the move off as the look like placeholders, the planned campaign is timing is quite tricky. Harder yet is to land absent, and the only way to play online multiplayer a grab on the AI, which results in an is streaming. But it’s just so fun regardless. automatic round win – a nasty decapitation move, for some characters. Unfortunately, I don’t have anyone to Hellish Quart (weird name, I know) is a 1v1 play local multiplayer with, but just fighting duelling game: the goal, naturally, is to the AI has been fun enough to kill five slice or stab your opponent to death, or at hours. Steam Remote Play Together does least strike their dominant arm hard enough that they drop their sword (or their make online multiplayer possible (you can also use a service called Parsec), but I hand flies off). There are hidden health didn’t have a great result. My opponent, bars, but like PS1 classic Bushido Blade, it who was just 90 miles northeast of only takes one deep slash or gut stab me, found the lag too disruptive to to end a round, and your opponent’s PL AYED play properly. Your results may vary, life. A lot of rounds end in draws, IT it just depends on the particulars of since it’s possible for both fighters to the broadband environment you and strike vital arteries at the same time, your friend are in. or even one after the other. It doesn’t Future plans for Hellish Quart, which necessarily matter that one fighter is spurting blood and the slow-mo death Kubold expects to be in Early Access for a cam has already kicked in. As they die, couple of years, include more fighting their body is going to finish whatever it styles and characters (with the help of was doing, which can include landing a mocapped fencers), more AI types, more killing blow of their own. arenas, a story campaign, and full Parsec Rounds often end with a scimitar in integration for more seamless multiplayer, someone’s head within two seconds, but a which is nice, but still not ideal. quick resolution isn’t a given. If the AI and I As for the story campaign, right now both survive our opening gambits, a fight there’s just a teaser cutscene, and you can go on and on as we trade nicks, shove don’t get the sense that it’ll be the game’s and block, and dash in and out of range. strong suit. No big deal: I’d be happy just The animations occasionally get wonky to see some refinements to the fighting – physics will do that – but they’re mostly system. As I get better at Hellish Quart, great. Hellish Quart has just one I’m starting to desire a finer level of control developer, Jakub ‘Kubold’ Kisiel, whose CV over my stance and the motions that initiate my attacks. If you’re not sure you want to go along for the Early Access ride with this one – and it is a bit sparse right now – there’s a free demo you can try. You can find it on Hellish Quart’s Steam page. Tyler Wilde

The most authentic 17th century sword-fighting game you’ll play

IT ONLY TAKES ONE DEEP SLASH OR GUT STAB TO END A ROUND 34

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It’s satisfying to turn a loss into a draw with a late hit as you go down.

E A R LY A C C E S S P R E V I E W Hellish Quart Everybody wins!

Sometimes a small movement is all it takes to open a wound.

The 17th century Polish-Lithuanian Commonwealth was not very cheerful.

MAY 2021

E A R LY A C C E S S P R E V I E W Rhythm Doctor Nicole’s constant panic and exhaustion makes her awfully relatable.

Politics and medicine, together again.

If the visual glitches don’t distract you, the stunning art might.

MAY 2021

E A R LY A C C E S S P R E V I E W Rhythm Doctor

NEED TO KNOW EXPECT TO PAY £12.40

DEVELOPER 7th Beat Games

PUBLISHER In-house, indienova

RHYTHM DOCTOR Groove is in the heart in this quirky rhythm game

LINK rhythmdr.com

throw at me. That, and the incredible music. While rhythm games usually have a few duds, every song in Rhythm Doctor’s current catalogue is a certifiable bop. There’s a genre to suit everybody’s taste – from lo-fi study beats to the incredible vocal tracks peppered across the game.

HEART-BREAKER

Every level in Rhythm Doctor has something to offer, but the bosses are where the game’s creativity shines. The visual tricks turn from simple jitters to wild glitches, performing acrobatic flips around hen I think of rhythm games, I picture inputs chaotically dancing across the my monitor to the beat of the song. It screen, each begging for my attention. sounds like it should be a nuisance, but it But Rhythm Doctor only demands only adds so much power and urgency that one – just hit the spacebar every seventh beat. separates the bosses from the regular Seems simple enough, but this game is not for the levels. Act two’s boss battle is so faint of heart. Well, unless you’re one of its patients. spectacular that it left me in tears, prompting an immediate replay. Rhythm Doctor dropped me right in the Rhythm Doctor plays with your heart of Middlesea Hospital, a struggling expectations and then ramps that up to institute that’s trying out an experimental the nth degree. Every inch of this game new type of rhythm-based healthcare. I’m has been designed with a level of creativity the new intern, a simple disembodied arm that will have you smiling, laughing, or and a silent face behind the screen. crying. Even the tutorials have been given There’s a whole cast of characters an insane amount of care – like one scene demanding my time, including a where a politician angrily interrupts poorly samurai who’s suffering from the tutorial prior to his level, shooing PL AYED a wi-fi virus. and the hospital’s the poor tutorial character off the IT hapless barista who can’t quite kick screen before taking his place. that nasty smoking habit. The way the cast interacted with All their treatments come in the form me, and each other, was something I of the single-button gameplay, which hadn’t expected. I’m not usually a fan of utilises some clever audio and visual storylines in rhythm games, but it feels so tricks. The screen will pulsate or shudder integral to the Rhythm Doctor experience. during the heavier beat tracks, doing its Each character plays a part in each other’s best to throw me off. Each song plays stories, offering a humorous and often around with tempo and irregular beats, heartbreaking look into the world of ramping up the intensity when the beat medicine. The story isn’t finished, but the drops, forcing me to stay on my toes. foundations laid have me eager to return. Some songs even introduce several 7th Beat Games has been working on patients, each with different timings. Rhythm Doctor since 2014, and it’s come Occasionally one of the doctors will be a long way since the last itch.io demo. The there to assist, other times I’m left to level of refinement is beyond what I’d manage each one alone. expect from an Early Access game. It’s these types of variations that left Rhythm Doctor isn’t just a rhythm game me wanting to jump straight into the next – it’s a beautifully crafted story, and a level, just to see what the game would feast for the eyes and ears. Every flashy pixelated graphic or stutter in the beat plays into the overall narrative, evoking emotions I didn’t know were possible from this genre. If development continues this way, Rhythm Doctor will solidify itself as one of the best rhythm games ever. Mollie Taylor

Like those clickbait mobile ads, except the gameplay’s real.

ALL THEIR TREATMENTS COME IN THE FORM OF THE SINGLE-BUTTON GAMEPLAY

MAY 2021

E A R LY A C C E S S P R E V I E W HROT The action sequences really get the blood pumping.

NEED TO KNOW EXPECT TO PAY £15.50

DEVELOPER Spytihněv

PUBLISHER In-house

HROT

LINK bit.ly/HROTGame

HROT is a game with a devious sense of humour. And necessarily so, I think. Without these little jabs and gags to temporarily relieve the tension, it could almost be too much.

TOO HROT TO HANDLE Of course monsters spawn right behind you, at the precise moment you clunk a switch. But I wasn’t expecting a gang to appear immediately after a boss fight, in a hilariously cruel twisting of the knife. Every level feels authored – not just a maze full of keys and monsters – with the action t’s not a popular opinion, but I love a good sewer level. All those rusted grates swelling and subsiding, before it builds and walkways, and gallons of sloshing, again to a crescendo. It’s a surprisingly suspect water. It’s where industry meets modern approach to first-person action. the underworld, and HROT is especially good at it. Just as it swings between horror and A good chunk of this Early Access FPS is set in the comedy, from catacomb spiders to crude bowels of its apocalyptic Czechoslovakia. toilet humour, so HROT is equally keen to swerve from its claustrophobic Not just sewers, but metro tunnels and underworld to the city above. I think it’s catacombs, and each is oppressive, set in Prague – or a version of Prague claustrophobic, and stuffed to the gills populated by hazmat-wearing zombies, with monsters and hidden surprises. You missile-flinging floating heads, and find the gold key for the gold door, and rampaging horses – and there’s a suitable then a wall opens from nowhere and a slab of brutalism in its boxlike architecture. masked pigman waddles out of it, Dreary tower blocks rub shoulders with grunting as he launches a ricocheting grim municipal buildings, dismal grenade. This is Doom, but mostly parks with boarded-up shopfronts, PL AYED Quake: a convincing, retro-styled and everything is drowning in a sea IT FPS rendered with jagged, low-res of muddy, soupy brown. textures and every available shade of But while there’s little variation in the colour brown. The guns feel great, the the colour palette, HROT’s levels will take double-barrelled shotgun feels great, and you all over the shop. A typical stage will you skate around each boxy murder-maze encompass a building, its underneath, and with the appropriate amount of speed. a section of city around it, and have you One of the things I like best in old looping back on yourself in pleasing ways. shooters is the extraordinary level of Keys and weapons are teased behind interactivity. The developers took the time blocked passageways, in classic retro to model a toilet, so why not let the player style. And when you finally locate them, flush it? Why not let them hack it to bits? obviously it’s all the more satisfying – And, hell, let’s hide some shotgun shells in these are classic game design principles, the U-bend while we’re at it. You’d better and they work well here. believe HROT has flushable (and It took me about five hours to finish smashable) toilets, but it also includes a HROT’s first episode, and I’m excited that football pitch and snooker table, a drivable two more episodes are planned. For now, motorbike, and other surprises you should there’s also a horde mode ( set in one of really discover for yourself. For all its the maps featuring the motorbike), as well bleakness, its Soviet Union-era drabness, as an option to replay levels with randomised enemies and pickups. HROT barely seems Early Access, given how polished it feels, but with two more episodes on the way, I’m hardly going to look a gift horse in the mouth. Even if it is charging at me with a gasmask on. Tom Sykes

Dive into the sewers for some retro first-person shooting

YOU’D BETTER BELIEVE HROT HAS FLUSHABLE (AND SMASHABLE) TOILETS 38

MAY 2021

HROT swings masterfully from humour to horror.

E A R LY A C C E S S P R E V I E W HROT

There’s a drivable bike, which actually handles pretty well.

The guns feel great, and there are quite a few of them.

MAY 2021

C O V E R F E AT U R E Genshin Impact

IMP 42

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C O V E R F E AT U R E Genshin Impact

ACT GEN

y RPG d. a l p o t se free ered the worl e n i h C How AC T conqu essner SHIN IMP ven M By Ste

MAY 2021

C O V E R F E AT U R E Genshin Impact

to create an RPG that manages to feel both nostalgic and innovative. Or how its developer, MiHoYo, would come to exemplify China’s evolving games industry.

hen Genshin Impact launched last year, no one saw its huge success coming. It was obviously pretty, sure, but it was also easy to write off as another Chinese free-to-play mobile game filled with microtransactions and high-pitched fairy sidekicks. What wasn’t apparent was how it would transcend the negative stereotypes, pulling inspiration from beloved classics like Nier: Automata and The Legend of Zelda: Breath of the Wild

In the span of just a few months, MiHoYo has become one of China’s most prestigious gaming companies. And since its 2020 launch, Genshin Impact has raked in an estimated $874 million and still continues to pull in around $175 million a month – and that’s just from mobile players alone. To put that in perspective, it took Fortnite’s mobile version nearly two years to cross the billion dollar threshold. Genshin Impact is not only fantastic, it’s also the biggest global launch of a Chinese game in history. Not bad for a company that, just a decade ago, was made up of just three anime nerds who were fresh out of university.

E T A E R C TO D E D I C E “W E D N Y TO M A K E A COMPAAMES THAT A N I M E G C I T I N G F O R U S” WERE E X

OTAKUS SAVE THE WORLD

If you started reading this and had to flip back to the front cover to double-check that this was still PC Gamer, I don’t blame you. But don’t be deceived by its roots in mobile games; Genshin Impact is a big step toward a future where games are free from the barriers of your chosen gaming platform. A future where big-budget open world RPGs look virtually indistinguishable between their PC and mobile versions. And all this started because MiHoYo’s three founders, Cai Haoyu, Liu Wei and Luo Yuhao really love anime. “Our inspiration was born from our passion for technology and [anime, comics and gaming] culture, 44

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F E AT U R E Gamenamexxxx

and we wanted to share this passion with the world,” Cai tells me. “The other reason was we didn’t see many anime-style games that really intrigued us, so we decided to create a company to make anime games that were exciting for us.” Traditionally a Japanese word for socially-incapable dorks obsessed with anime, Cai, Wei and Luo have turned ‘otaku’ into a badge of honour. It’s baked right into MiHoYo’s slogan “Tech otakus save the world”. That emphasis on games for otakus, by otakus came to define MiHoYo’s first few games. Before the company was even officially founded,

WAIFOGR APHY

F LY M E 2 T H E M O O N 2011

A simple, cutesy mobile game similar to Flappy Bird. Collect stuff, avoid the obstacles, reach the end of the level.

the trio released FlyMe2theMoon, a simple mobile game where you control a cutesy anime girl with a jetpack, gliding through twisting levels to collect gems and stars. But even the release of MiHoYo’s earliest mobile games like undead brawlers Zombiegal Kawaii and Guns GirlZ demonstrated two things: a shrewd awareness of what was popular in gaming (both games came out around the time that zombie survival games like DayZ were exploding) and a knack for killer art. Early on, Cai explains, MiHoYo found success by sticking to what it knew. Instead of following the trend

ABOVE: There’s even the option to play co-op, though it’s relatively limited.

of a lot of popular Chinese free-toplay games, which were competitive but also flagrantly pay-to-win, MiHoYo went in a different direction. It gambled everything on otakus’ thirst for anime girls. “In the early years of our company, we sought to make products for a rather niche market and user demographic,” Cai explains. “Our team was also still very small at the time, so we narrowed our focus to a specific player base.” During the China Games Industry Annual Conference in 2017, Liu described this approach as “paying for love”. The philosophy was simple: if you make the girls cute and

A quick overview of MiHoYo’s previous games

ZOMBIEGAL K AWAII 2012

Sidescrolling shooter where you play chibi anime girls with guns fighting off big packs of ravenous zombies.

HONK AI IMPACT 3RD 2016

MiHoYo’s first breakout hit, Honkai Impact 3rd is a character-action game that combines tons of genres.

GUNS GIRLZ 2014

Guns GirlZ is a spiritual sequel to Zombiegal Kawaii, with more story and characters to fill out the experience.

TEARS OF THEMIS 2020

MiHoYo’s first ‘otome’ game, a visual novel or dating sim geared toward women. Not available in English yet.

MAY 2021

F E AT U R E Gamenamexxxx

personable enough, players will pay out the nose to unlock them. But as MiHoYo grew and took on more ambitious games, Cai said that mission broadened too. MiHoYo’s flair for character design didn’t have to appeal only to thirsty dudes. But despite a rapidly swelling audience, the studio was still struggling – like most Chinese developers – to make games that appealed to an audience outside of Asia.

LEVELLING UP

It’s not news that gaming is a big deal in China, but it’s important to realise just how big it really is. Analysts predict that soon there’ll be more PC gamers in China than the total population of the United States, and PC gaming is just one slice of a larger gaming pie that is mostly made up of mobile gamers. But despite being a $40 billion industry, it’s also one of the most regulated in the world.

Before any game can be sold in China, for example, the government requires it to undergo a rigorous censorship process that can take months to complete – and if your game is overly violent, sexy, or features anything from political commentary to occult magic, it runs a decent risk of being rejected. The mobile version of PlayerUnknown’s Battleground, for example, was infamously remade into Game For Peace, a pro-China reskin where players politely wave goodbye after you shoot them in the face. That kind of censorship has created a desperate need to make games that don’t just rely on the volatile Chinese market, but the obstacles are just as daunting. It’s not just that games need proper localisation or themes that appeal to players outside of China, either. China’s game development scene is also undergoing rapid ‘industrialisation’ as Daniel Ahmad, a

TOP: Genshin’s story is typical JRPG nonsense, and yes that’s good. BELOW: You can almost feel the seasonal allergies.

senior analyst at Niko Partners, tells me. For years, Chinese developers were stuck either making free-to-play MMOs and pay-to-win mobile games or working as outsourced mercenaries for big-budget studios outside of China. Even Ubisoft’s Shanghai studio, founded in 1996, was mostly a helping hand for the main teams in Montreal and Toronto. Because all the money was in mobile games or MMOs, China’s games industry was a lot more homogenous than in other countries. The indie explosion that took the global games industry by storm around 2010 was just a gentle breeze to most Chinese developers. But that’s changing as the industry matures and new technologies like Unity, the consumer-grade game engine Genshin Impact is built on, become more ubiquitous. “We’re now in a position where Chinese game developers are able to reach [all kinds of ] players,” Ahmad explains. “Not just on mobile in China or globally, as it had been for the past few years, but also now on PC and console to the same extent as Western developers.” On PC, that means regularly seeing new Chinese indie games dominate Steam’s top-seller charts, like Dyson Sphere Program and Tale of Immortal. But it also means independent Chinese developers, like MiHoYo, finally have the talent and tools to compete with the world’s most popular studios. All MiHoYo needed was a killer game that could appeal to as many players on as many different platforms as possible.

CLONE WARS

If there’s a secret sauce to all of MiHoYo’s games, it’s that each 46

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C O V E R F E AT U R E Genshin Impact

liberally swipes ideas from a variety of beloved genres and games. Honkai Impact 3rd, which released on PC in 2019, is literally the kitchen sink of games: a hack-’n’-slash RPG that also somehow manages to incorporate everything from bullet hell shoot-’emups and MMOs to dating sims. Genshin Impact is a more focused experience, but a big part of its initial appeal was its similarity to other games. Not everyone found its imitation flattering, though. When Genshin Impact was first announced, players were incensed by its obvious similarities to Breath of the Wild. In addition to a ton of online backlash, one player went so far as to smash his PlayStation 4 in public at the ChinaJoy gaming convention in protest. Cai says the team never saw the outrage coming. “Honestly, we were quite surprised,” he says. “Although we had various betas before the game’s official global release in September 2020, only a small number of players were actually invited. So, given that most people hadn’t personally experienced our game yet, it’s only natural that there were some misconceptions and misjudgments.” Genshin Impact was never meant to be a malicious clone, riding on the coattails of more popular games. It was a love letter to them. “I remember that the Breath of the Wild developers gave a presentation at the 2017 Game Developers Conference where they shared their thoughts behind the design of the world, gameplay, and art style of the game,” Cai remembers. “For instance, they talked about turning a passive game into an active game. An example of this was removing the barriers created by walls so that players could go anywhere they saw on the map. Another example was how the ability to glide from high places using the paraglider greatly increased the freedom of movement for players. Such designs implemented alongside

a multitude of actions and areas gave birth to limitless possibilities for gameplay and exploration. This approach had a big influence on us when we set out to create the open world of Genshin Impact.”

PICKING UP STEAM Steam has become a haven for Chinese games. Here’s three you should check out

BREATH OF THE WAIFU

Those misconceptions were short-lived once Genshin Impact actually came out. While some might scoff at a game willing to shamelessly borrow Breath of the Wild’s most innovative features, many more players were just excited to be able to play a game that had that Nintendo level of quality without needing a Switch. And Genshin Impact is also so much more than a mere Breath of the Wild clone. Cai says the team also took notes from Grand Theft Auto V – if you can believe it – in how to deliver story exposition without forcing the player into a long cutscenes traditional to

CHINESE PARENTS

One of the first notable breakouts on Steam, Chinese Parents is a clever and charming life sim about the modern pressures of growing up in China.

GUJIAN 3

A sprawling and epic action RPG that has a lot in common with The Witcher 3, Gujian 3 is a ‘xianxia’ RPG about divine beings, martial arts, and cosmic wars between spirits.

AMAZING CULTIVATION SIMUL ATOR

It’s like Rimworld except instead of building a colony on an alien planet you start a martial arts school and ascend your character to godhood.

AT H T L A R TU A N Y L N “I T ’S O E R E S O M E THERE W EP TIONS AND C N O C S I M S” T N E M G MISJ U D MAY 2021

C O V E R F E AT U R E Genshin Impact

JRPGs. MiHoYo also studied The Elder Scrolls for how to design good open-world quests, while it’s melee combat clearly took lessons from Nier: Automata. But at the heart of Genshin Impact’s genius is its eclectic and ever-growing cast of characters. Drawing upon all the lessons learned from its previous games, Genshin’s anime roster is immediately lovable and surprisingly family friendly when you consider the company’s original mission to cater to horny boys. Cai explains that the process of designing these new characters is extremely intensive, each one taking about nine months, “The most challenging part of making a character comes down to one question in the end: how do we create a character that players will like? No one can guarantee that the character you create will be popular, but what we can do is improve through a constant process of

creation, experimentation, feedback, absorption and then creation again.”

GROWING STRONGER

It’s a loop that MiHoYo has been practicing since its very first game, and it’s hard to overstate how good it’s become at making loveable anime goofs. But Genshin Impact’s appeal isn’t just its characters. It’s due to how so many of its strengths fit together to create a game that feels like it should cost $60 but is instead completely free. That I can play it on my PC and then jump over to playing on my phone seamlessly makes Genshin Impact astounding. Even its microtransactions, though sometimes annoying, are entirely optional. “It’s more based around paying for things that you want as opposed to paying for things that you need,” Daniel Ahmad explains. “What that means is that you can essentially play Genshin Impact for free for a really

long time. There’s no real pressure, at least in the first 30 hours of the game, to pay for anything.” In hindsight, it’s no wonder that Genshin Impact has become as popular as it is. But the ace up MiHoYo’s sleeve is that it’s just getting started.

ONLY THE BEGINNING

Since Genshin Impact launched last year, it has already had four major updates adding new characters, limited-time events, quests, bosses and even a new region. And all of that has come at a rapid pace that puts many other live-service games to shame. It’s most recent update, for

S R A E Y E K TA L L I W T I “ LL U F E H T TO T EL L F STORY O IMPACT” G ENSHIN 48

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example, will add a massive festival alongside a new dating sim-style mode where players can spend one-on-one time with different characters to unlock unique rewards. But Genshin Impact’s world is also a lot bigger than the two regions of Mondstadt and Liyue that are currently in the game. “Rather than focusing on our short-term performance in the game market since release, I pay more attention to whether or not players will be able to continue enjoying our game in the future,” Cai says.

“Actually, this is related to our long-term operation strategy: When we started work on Genshin Impact, we had already decided that there would be seven regions, of which we have only released two so far. It will take years to tell the full story of Genshin Impact.” And that is just a sliver of Cai’s vision for the future. Now that China is primed to deliver more global hits, Genshin Impact and MiHoYo are going to have to rapidly evolve to keep pace, and Cai has an ambitious idea of what that might entail.

ABOVE: Genshin’s combat is fast and vicious, so you’ll need a good party.

“We believe that the virtual world is the future of humanity and technological development,” he says. “There are so many possibilities and fun things to be found in the virtual world which simply can’t be achieved in the real world – the virtual world makes the impossible possible. We hope that as technology continues to develop, we can create a virtual world for our players and users where infinite unknowns and possibilities await, a world that can bring them more joy. I suppose this is what can be considered as our mission.”

J U S T G E N S H I N S TA R T E D Genshin Impact is big, but MiHoYo has plans to add around five new regions. Here’s the ones already available

MONDSTADT

Pastoral fields surrounding a medieval kingdom terrorised by an evil dragon, Mondstadt is maybe a little too similar to Hyrule, but it sure is pretty.

LIYUE

Genshin’s visual potential comes to life in this country inspired by ancient China, complete with terraced villages, mountains, and a resplendent coastal city.

DRAGONSPINE

The latest zone added to the game, Dragonspine is a frigid mountain wasteland where players have to fight to keep warm or else freeze to death.

MAY 2021

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MAY 2021

F E AT U R E

What turns communities toxic? What makes fans abuse community managers? It’s a matter of psychology. By Luke Kemp

MAY 2021

F E AT U R E

MAY 2021

F E AT U R E Groups of Wrath

W hen I speak to Will Overgard, he’s enthusiastic, friendly, and immediately likable; attributes which serve him well on Twitch, where he streams as Viking_Blonde. Bursting with energy, he gleefully chats with me about his previous life in the games industry working for companies including Creative Assembly, Improbable, and RocketWerkz. I warm to him within seconds. So why did three total strangers once wish him death by cancer? Why does anybody on the internet suffer threats and hatred from people they don’t know? The answer (for community managers I’ve spoken to, at least) is complicated, and leads me to realise that you and I aren’t as many steps away from such behaviour as we may like to believe. Take another, particularly horrifying example of harassment that Will gave me: “A group of individuals came up with a horrible story involving children,” he says. “They leapt into the YouTube comments and started telling the story at each other, like ‘Oh, did you hear the story of Will doing this horrible thing?’ ‘Oh, I did hear that, but did you hear this fact?’ ‘No, I did not hear that, did you hear this fact?’ And they tell this horrific story in the comments, and then upvote each other.” There’s no shortage of people within the industry with similar horror stories. Today, James Bartholomeou works at PR firm Ico Partners, but for two years he was a community manager at Focus Home Interactive. Like any job, it involved both highs and lows, but one of the worst times was when a highly anticipated game he was looking after was repeatedly delayed. This infuriated some members of the community so much, things took a dark turn. “Eventually it got to the point where we were getting death threats,” James says, with a casualness that actually shocks me. “I 56

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think I’m quite lucky in that I only got a few too, especially talking to other colleagues.”

PROFILE

THREAT BOARD

But why? How do people become so vicious towards complete strangers managing the community of a videogame? It’s worth noting that every community manager I spoke to told me that they never experienced any such vile behaviour at in-person events, nor would they ever expect to. It’s no secret that online anonymity lends people the confidence to say and do things they’d never repeat in person, but there’s another anonymity at play, too – that of the videogame developers themselves. Dr Alison Lamont is a lecturer in sociology and criminology at the University of Roehampton, and she’s conducted extensive research into the behaviour of online communities. “I think [community managers are] not seen as individual human beings,” she tells me. “It is a corporation that people are attacking and, you know, the way capitalism is we are very often at the wrong end of corporations and profit seeking. And, yeah, it becomes, you know, fair

WILL OVERGARD

Twitch streamer and former community manager.

ABOVE LEFT: After a few Black Ops II multiplayer tweaks, design director David Vonderhaar received death threats. LEFT: Minecraft is so phenomenally popular, it has both the best and the worst of communities.

F E AT U R E Gamenamexxxx

THERE’S NO SHORTAGE OF PEOPLE WITHIN THE INDUSTRY WITH SIMILAR HORROR STORIES

GAMES DONE QUICK Communities can be great; money raised by GDQ’s events $4m

$3m Money raised

game. ‘Alright, why don’t I just fire off some angry comments to these people who must be making loads of money?’” As Dr Lamont points out, community managers do not make loads of money. “I think this is getting into the issues with online communication … [the] asynchronous aspect of it. It’s not a real-time conversation. It’s not connected, you don’t see the whole of somebody’s life so you tell yourself ‘I’ll write this horrible message, but it’s OK because they’re in a really privileged position.’”

$2m

$1m

UNFAIR COMMENT

As tempting as it is to think that the likes of death threats and vile insults aren’t delivered at in-person events

$0 Jan 2019

June 2019

Jan 2020

August 2020

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Jan 2021

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due to cowardice, this is a gross oversimplification that entirely bypasses the psychology that is at play. If you meet (for example) a member of a videogame development team for the first time, you have a real human person in front of you, and you act accordingly. If you’re replying to some text on screen, or if you’re typing out something to an avatar on Twitter or a forum, you’re not talking with someone. You’re talking at some thing. At best, you’re directing your thoughts to a construct in your head, a construct with no available evidence to prove or disprove its accuracy. The opaque nature of game development was often cited to me as exacerbating existing problems, 58

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inflating grievances because communities don’t understand how games are made. And how could they, if nobody is telling them? One example of a negative community reaction cited to me by just about everybody I spoke to, including Dr Lamont, was Hello Games’ No Man’s Sky, and the ferocious backlash it suffered when the finished product didn’t match the initial reveal. Game development is iterative, with multiple changes along the way par for the course. With none of this visible between announcement and launch, many people had been expecting a game that matched the very first trailer precisely. There’s anecdotal evidence that being transparent about

PROFILE

MAX DOWNTON

Senior brand manager at Splash Damage.

development, and putting names and faces to individual members of a development team, can minimise toxicity within a community. Max Downton is senior brand manager at Splash Damage. While he’s no stranger to negative behaviour in communities, his experience has largely been a positive one, something he attributes in part to encouraging transparency in the development process.

GIT GUD BEHAVIOUR

“One of the things that I was really pushing the company to do is to actually put names and faces out into the public,” Max tells me. “I’ve always believed that by putting out names and faces you can undercut

F E AT U R E Groups of Wrath

TOXICITY IS NOT A VIDEOGAME PROBLEM – IT IS ACTUALLY A HUMAN PROBLEM

THREE SPEECH There actually are some lovely communities out there

DARK SOULS TRILOGY

Sure, you can invade (and be invaded by) other players, but there’s no shortage of friendly Souls fans willing to help others within the community.

STARDE W VALLE Y

With a subreddit full of joy and fanart, it’s little surprise that the 2021 five-year anniversary saw gratitude from developer and community alike.

any of that kind of anonymous hatred, because I think my belief was that people would find it much more difficult to be hostile and aggressive and rude to a human.” It’s important to remember that toxicity is not a videogame problem – it is a human problem. Dr Lamont surprises me by telling me that similar behaviour arises in fine art communities. “Some of it’s horrendous,” she says. “People have had exhibitions close down, people have had serious talks with funders about whether or not the funders are still happy to support an exhibition…

SEA OF THIEVES

It’s become so popular, the presence of some bad eggs is inevitable, but there’s no shortage of friendly pirates willing to sail you through the basics.

this is an internet communication issue, I think, much more than it is a videogame issue.” Toxic, poisonous behaviour is – whether we like it or not – a very human thing that will never go away. For all the good that it’s brought to the world, modern technology – and specifically the internet – has proven to be the ideal breeding ground for the darker side of human nature. Once you sever the human connection, reducing other people to words and images on a silent screen, negative behaviour is never very far away. Most of us would never dream of intentionally hurting a stranger, but a cold and distant bundle of words that say something we don’t like? So what? In this way, the internet combines dehumanisation with an unprecedented ease to doing harm to create something quite sinister. Referencing the book This is Why We Can’t Have Nice Things by Whitney Phillips, Dr Lamont considers the example of the YouTube comments attack on Will in the context of trolling.

ROCK AND TROLL

ABOVE RIGHT: Splash Damage, developers of Dirty Bomb, strove for transparency to prevent community toxicity. RIGHT: The Sims community is full of people sharing jokes, mods, screenshots, and stories.

“For some people, that is entertainment, just seeing somebody get worked up and knowing that they can’t touch you and they can’t get back at what you’re saying. I think that ultimately that’s what the dynamic probably is. “You could sit with a friend and chat and say it would be hilarious to have a go with this guy and just watch him lose his temper online, and there’s nothing [they] can do about it. ‘Let’s do it!’ I can’t think of a non-virtual forum which would enable you to do that so fluidly.” You would perhaps expect that being part of a group would keep everybody in check, nobody wanting to embarrass themselves in front of their peers. The opposite is true, MAY 2021

F E AT U R E Groups of Wrath

however. Sometimes, when negative behaviour begins in a community, it’s easy for it to spread if it is not very quickly stamped out – and people can begin to engage in behaviour they otherwise never would have. It could happen to any of us, given the right circumstances. Dr Dean Burnett is a neuroscientist and author who’s written about everything from mental health, to why you can walk into a room and then forget why you went there. He explains the potential for extreme behaviour within groups in terms of something that is called group polarisation. “We’re social creatures, but we’re also very hierarchical, we are really concerned with status, we want to be respected by others, we want them to look up to us or like us… the main way we do it is to earn the approval of the group. So if you have a group that is consistent in that we all think this one thing, we all believe this thing… you try to embody the group beliefs as much as possible.” Nonetheless, there’s no reason to give people who engage in hateful behaviour a free pass. Repugnant personal beliefs can certainly play a part. When I asked community managers if there were any issues more likely than others to spark controversy or toxic behaviour, I was time and again told that introducing any kind of diversity – or even acknowledging that it exists – was a point of contention for toxic elements. Max tells me of one innocuous example that resulted in some pushback.

TOXIC CRUSADERS

“We did a video series called Ask Splash,” he says, “which was, like I was saying, about putting faces out there, with their job title and people talking about what their role is and what their favourite games are. And

one of the first videos that we did just so happened to be an International Women’s Day video. And it’s so inoffensive, it’s just ‘here’s a bunch of women who work at Splash Damage, here’s what they do’. And I think one woman said ‘you know, in my experience, it has been kind of difficult sometimes for these reasons’. Obviously, that garners negative reaction.” “Some people point towards ideas of masculinity,” says Dr Lamont, “and the idea that gaming communities have become, or were originally seen as, very male spaces which are now

BEING FACED WITH EXTREME NEGATIVITY AND HARASSMENT CAN TAKE A TOLL

TRIPLE TROUBLE These launches were memorable for all the wrong reasons

NO MAN’S SKY

The game was far from what was seen in the first trailer, and players were not shy about yelling at Hello Games about it. They weren’t loving the alien.

MAY 2021

CYBERPUNK 2077

A vicious, vocal minority of fans defended the game with toxic behaviour prior to release – then turned their anger onto CDPR when the game arrived.

FALLOUT 76

Some fans were ferocious when Fallout’s take on MMOs launched buggy, a situation that Bethesda’s reluctance to comment on only made worse.

TOP: Getting just five matches of Rainbow Six Siege in a row without teamkills is depressingly tricky. ABOVE: Creative Assembly (Total War) is just one studio where Will served as community manager.

being infiltrated by non-white, non-male players, and that kind of defensiveness again that goes back into this idea of identity and trying to protect an identity, [regardless of ] the validity of that identity.” Community managers are individual, real, human beings; and being faced with extreme negativity and harassment can take a toll. In February, videogame charity Safe In Our World announced a free mental health training programme for community managers. James is incredibly happy to see the initiative. “It’s huge, and I’m surprised it wasn’t done earlier,” he says. “I left community management because of harassment and stress. I started having stress ulcers.” Hopefully, this

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course will be the first of many such initiatives to come. Despite the negativity and often terrible consequences, there’s still a positive side to game communities, something that everybody I spoke to was keen to emphasise. James, in fact, provided one example that stood out to me. It’s his belief that niche games are more likely to foster positive communities, something that he saw with Spintires: MudRunner.

TRUCKING AROUND

“[People like to] drive their own trucks [which they own in real life]. You would have people come into the group and say ‘Hey, I’d like to buy Spintires: MudRunner, but I noticed it doesn’t have…’ whatever truck they

had, and you would have modders be like ‘Oh, I’ll do that for you.’” Although they get lost in amongst the headline-grabbing negativity, gaming communities are dotted with little acts of kindness like this all over, which can even extend to more meaningful help such as with medical bills. The positive, as with the negative, can be explained in sociological terms. As Dr Lamont explains, “With the emergence of this always-on interconnectivity comes the possibility to have an awful lot of weak social ties with lots and lots of different people,” she says. “You can pull a lot of energy and resources through that … [if ] you’re tapping into your gamer connections nobody’s going to donate, say, £100,

PROFILE

ALISON LAMONT

Lecturer in sociology and criminology at the University of Roehampton.

because they don’t know you that well, but you might know 100 people who all chip in £1.” Ultimately, the benefits of online communities of all kinds in the modern world outweigh the drawbacks, something we should remember. As Dr Burnett tells me, they are “giving people a sense of community, a sense of status, a sense of appreciation, friends… These are fundamentally important parts of what the human brain requires. I think hopefully, through [the pandemic] will be a reappraisal of whether online relationships or online connections are valid or not, because clearly they are keeping people afloat and that should be acknowledged in the future”. MAY 2021

F E AT U R E

Guts, grapples, and Goro – director Simon McQuoid hopes to bring a faithful vision of MORTAL KOMBAT to the silver screen. By Robin Valentine

MAY 2021

F E AT U R E True Blood

he relationship between film and games has always felt… frayed. There’s a sense that Hollywood doesn’t quite understand this medium of ours – and there are so many failed game-to-film adaptations in the rear view that it’s hard to take a new one seriously.

The new Mortal Kombat film, due in the spring this year, is… well, it’s not necessarily set to change that situation much. It’s not shaping up to be a movie with grand, serious ambitions, or Oscars twinkling in its eyes. But it does look like a film that actually understands its source material – not just in terms of story and characters, but in spirit. “I said it to everyone who came on board ‘We are not changing the DNA [of Mortal Kombat],’” explains director Simon McQuoid. “And the DNA is built out of a few different, really key ingredients. There’s a brutality. There’s a sense of humour that runs through it. There’s a sort of epic world-building, a nobility and respect for its serious canon. And there’s a thread of silly.” We see all of that in the first official trailer, a whirlwind of violence, dark humour, and cheesiness that does immediately feel like something out of the more recent games’ cinematic story modes. With

its rapid-fire character reveals and fan-pleasing moments – including Liu Kang performing his memorable (and ridiculous) fire dragon summoning move – it feels like a statement of intent as much as a taste of things to come. Particularly so in its deployment of blood and gore.

BLOOD SIMPLE

Violence is perhaps the most iconic part of that Mortal Kombat DNA. More so even than ninjas, Outworld and ‘Get over here!’, it’s the fatalities that the series is known for, both among fans and in the wider world. And yet the ’90s MK movies were PG-13s, with nary a spine-rip in sight. Not so here. In the trailer alone we see impalings, throats slit, a heart torn out, arms exploded, and a man impaled with a knife made out of his own frozen blood. Thanks to the film’s R-rating, the violence looks more gorily faithful to the games than any fan could have dreamed. And despite the risks conventionally accepted to come with making an R-rated movie – “it’s sort of obvious, you’re limiting, not expanding, your audience”, as McQuoid puts it – that was an element the producers at New Line were committed to even before the director was brought on board. “I think the guys at New Line realised very early on that, actually, there was great power in that, and it was worthwhile to do it that way,” says McQuoid. “Those guys were

A WHIRLWIND OF VIOLENCE, DARK HUMOUR, AND CHEESINESS

MAY 2021

F E AT U R E True Blood

really interested in making something unique, something that really respected the material. And that’s what I wanted to do too.” With that mission statement in mind, McQuoid began the production by “going back to Mortal Kombat University”, putting in the research to really understand the series. In fact, that effort never stopped throughout the project. “It’s so dense and rich – there’s so much to know. I don’t profess to know everything!” he says. “We really, really, really tried our best to get it as authentic and truthful and respectful of the Mortal Kombat canon as possible. “So, you know, I read a lot, I played the games, I watched countless YouTube clips. And we were just constantly doing that, through the whole process of the film. We never stopped looking, searching, finding things out. It wasn’t like I did it to start with, then I was fine. You can’t stop. There’s too much to know.”

that canon McQuoid is keen to be respectful to has tied itself into knots anyone would have trouble unpicking. The most recent three games, the most story-heavy of the series to date, used multiple kinds of time travel to soft reboot the setting and create brilliantly over-the-top fan-pleasing moments. In the process, they created a timeline so tangled that the only appropriate medium for explaining it would be thread and pins on a conspiracist’s corkboard. A truly faithful recreation of Mortal Kombat’s story is probably too much to ask for, then – especially in a form that could be palatable to a movie-going audience, perhaps not familiar with the origins of the Cyber Lin Kuei, the corruption of the Jinsei, or who ‘Blaze’ is. McQuoid chose to focus instead on being faithful to the identities of that story’s key players – the film features Raiden, Kano, Sonya, Jax, Liu Kang, Kung Lao, Kano, Shang Tsung, Shao Kahn, Subzero, Scorpion, Goro, Mileena, and more, and each is immediately recognisable even from a few seconds of footage.

“IT’S REALLY THE CHARACTERS THAT SORT OF BIND IT ALL TOGETHER”

TIME TO KILL

Much of it pretty convoluted, it must be admitted. Over decades of games,

ABOVE: Liu Kang, played by Ludi Lin. BELOW: This is McQuoid’s first feature – but he’s directed actionpacked adverts for Sony, Activision, and Microsoft.

“It’s really the characters that sort of bind it all together,” says McQuoid. “So in pre-production we had this huge room, and in that room each character had a giant wall of their own with every single iteration of how they’ve ever looked on the wall. “What was very important to me was taking these characters and elevating them to be sort of real but powerful, in a considered, respectful way. And certain things with the costumes don’t really work [in film]. You cannot let it end up feeling like [a] Halloween party, right? Everything has to have this sort of richness of detail and layering and so forth. “So each character had their wall, and then we looked at it and said ‘OK, so what are they about? What’s the throughline here? What are the commonalities? Where have they taken license in the past?’ What we can’t do is come out with some crazy, weird interpretation, it has to be rooted in the truth that’s in all these aspects of where these characters have been.”

HOT AND COLE

It’s perhaps a surprise, then, that the film actually introduces an entirely new character to serve as its protagonist. Cole Young, played by Lewis Tan, is a down-on-his-luck MMA fighter who just happens to have a birthmark in the shape of the Mortal Kombat dragon logo – something that seemingly makes him 64

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predestined to fight in the tournament, or else be hunted by Subzero and the Lin Kuei. Teaming up with the champions of Earthrealm, he’s the newbie for more familiar heroes to explain the nature of the strange and supernatural too. He’s sure to be the film’s most controversial element among series diehards – especially seeing as, in the otherwise exciting and fan-pleasing trailer, he comes off as a rather bland lead. But McQuoid sees even Cole as a perfectly natural extension of the spirit of the series. “We really felt there was precedent,” says McQuoid. “Mortal Kombat brings new characters out all the time. So, you know, it’s sort of

ABOVE: Getting Jax’s arms right was a long process – ultimately the team decided on a modern spin on his classic original look. RIGHT: “Josh Lawson, who plays Kano, is an incredibly gifted comic actor,” says McQuoid. The character helps bring a dark sense of humour to the film.

V I TA L S TAT I S T I C S The Mortal Kombat trailer in numbers Arms exploded

Ninjas murdered

Dragons summoned

Fireballs thrown

‘Get Over Here’

Fatalities

almost surprising to me that people are asking [why we added him]. It’s like well, have you played the game? There are always lots of new characters! It’s not like it’s just the classic set that’s stayed there the whole time. If it was only the original roster forever, if they hadn’t evolved and added 80 odd characters, I’m not sure we would have ever put a new character in. But it just seemed normal for the series.” And, of course, Cole helps to serve as an audience surrogate for those less in the know about the series’ lore. “It’s trying to expand the Mortal Kombat fanbase really, and so this is a way to sort of educate people a bit as he gets brought into this story as well,” says McQuoid, who goes on to

liken Cole to being the “player one” of the film. Though he’s keen to add he doesn’t mean that in a literal or meta sense. (“It’s not like, what were those films recently with Jack Black and The Rock?” “Oh, er, Jumanji?” I reply. “Yeah, we didn’t do that.”) I’m left cautiously optimistic for the final product. It’s impossible not to have misgivings about a project like this – we’ve been burned too many times before – but I found it oddly refreshing to discover how thoughtful McQuoid is about one of gaming’s most endearingly ludicrous series. It gives me hope that this film will, at the very least, have its bloody heart in the right place. But either way, stay tuned – we’ll have our full review in an upcoming issue. MAY 2021

PROMOTION Another Eden: The Cat Beyond Time and Space

STEP BACK IN TIME WITH

ANOTHER EDEN T H E C AT B E YO N D T I M E A N D S PA C E A fresh take on classic JRPGs by industry veterans ou’d be forgiven for thinking you’ve been transported back in time to the heyday of old-school JRPGs as you lose yourself in the world of Another Eden. The enthralling story, characters, and battle system pay homage to classics such as Chrono Trigger and Xenogears — but presented with a contemporary polish.

From master storyteller Masato Kato (Chrono Trigger, Final Fantasy VII), this epic story unfolds across the Antiquity, Present, and Future. You’ll find yourself thrown headlong into adventure as Aldo, a boy from a small village hurled 800 years into the future by the villainous Beast King. You must set off on a journey, gather allies, and travel across time and space to find Aldo’s sister, Feinne, and save her — as well as the world— from destruction. Another Eden boasts a vast and vibrant world, with a map that spans multiple eras and continents. Each area is brought to life with a rich art style, thanks to the direction by prominent illustrator Takahito Exa (Bincho-tan). And just as you’d expect, this JRPG employs a strategic turn-based battle system, reminiscent of early JRPGs such as Xenogears and classic Final Fantasy games, so long-time fans of the genre will feel right at home. Employ devastating chants, special skills, and combo attacks between party members, with over 100 playable characters.

©︎ WFS

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You get to play at your own pace and immerse yourself fully in the world. There are no limited time events, social integrations, or PvP, so you can take your time without the pressure of ‘staying ahead’. There’s plenty to keep you busy though — aside from the endless content associated with the main story, crossover content from both Persona 5 Royal and the Tales of series are permanent and allow you to add Joker, Morgana, Cress, Yuri, and more to the party for free by playing through the associated content. And as with any self-respecting JRPG, there are over 60 songs on the live orchestrated soundtrack - and the main theme song comes courtesy of Yasunori Mitsuda, the composer behind the music from Chrono Trigger, Chrono Cross, and Xenogears. Another Eden was originally launched on mobile — 2017 in Japan, and 2019 in the US, EU and globally — this means that there are hundreds of hours of story content to explore. So between working your way through spin-off episodes, side quests, character quests, collaboration stories, and dungeon and battle content, you’re going to be hard-pushed to run out of things to do and places to explore. If you’re keen to jump in and see for yourself everything this game has to offer, you’re in luck. The game is out now on Steam and PC and ready to download. Play free today: bit.ly/AnotherEdenPCUK

PROMOTION Another Eden: The Cat Beyond Time and Space

MAY 2021

REVIEW

HOW WE REVIEW

We review each game on its own merits, and try to match it to a reviewer who’s a passionate expert in the field. The main aim of reviews is to help you make buying decisions. To this end, we’re selective about what we review, and try to focus on the notable, interesting, exciting or surprising.

DOWNLOADABLE CONTENT

DLC might be new missions for a game, or it might be a single new item. If we think you want to know about it, we’ll review it.

EARLY ACCESS

Any released alpha, beta, or otherwise unfinished game that you can currently pay for. For these games, we won’t assign a score, but we will tell you whether they’re worth your time.

THEY’RE BACK

Whenever there’s a bargain or re-release of a significant game, our expert will revisit it and tell you whether it holds up today. With jokes.

OUR SCORING SYSTEM EXPLAINED 00%-09% Broken or offensively bad; absolutely no value. Example Leisure Suit Larry: Magna Cum Laude 10%-19% We might be able to find one nice thing to say about it, but still not worth anyone’s time or money. Example Gettysburg: Armored Warfare 20%-29% Completely falls short of its goals. Very few redeeming qualities. Examples Family Guy: Back to the Multiverse 30%-39% An entirely clumsy or derivative effort. There’s little reason to play this game over a similar, better one. Examples Trials of the Blood Dragon 40%-49% Flawed and disappointing. Examples Aliens: Colonial Marines 50%-59% Mediocre. Other games probably do it better, or its unique qualities aren’t executed well. Examples Primordia, Homefront: The Revolution 60%-69% There’s something to like here, but it can only be recommended with major caveats. Examples No Man’s Sky, Ghost Recon: Wildlands 70%-79% A good game that’s worth playing. We like it. Examples Prey, NieR: Automata

Glitch switch Fate’s a funny thing, sometimes. This month my PC decided to have a bit of a breakdown, leaving me unable to play demanding games. With new hardware still in short supply, it’s not a fun time to be trying to get replacement parts. But at the same time, the incident has forcibly detached me from my pile of shame, and forced me to play only the month’s smaller, lower-spec games – which have turned out to be its best. From the retro-inspired yet thoroughly modern genius of Loop Hero to the wonderfully punchy roguelike action of Curse of the Dead Gods, I’ve been having an oddly fulfilling holiday from the world of AAA releases. If I hadn’t had these technical problems, perhaps I wouldn’t have found the time or space for some of 2021’s best releases. That said, I’m still pretty keen to get it working again before Deathloop comes out…

80%-89% A great game with exceptional moments or features, and touches of brilliance. We love it. Examples Overwatch, Night in the Woods 90%-94% A compelling recommendation for most PC gamers. Important to PC gaming, and likely ahead of its time. Examples Bayonetta, Dishonored 2 95%-96% Far and away one of the best games we’ve ever played. We recommend it to the entire world. Examples Half-Life 2, Kerbal Space Program

ROBIN VALENTINE PRINT EDITOR

robin.valentine@ futurenet.c om

97%-100% Advances the human species. Boosts the immune systems of nearby children and small animals. The Editor’s Choice award is granted in addition to the score, at the discretion of the PC Gamer staff. It represents exceptional quality or innovation. Find out more www.bit.ly/pcgreviews

MAY 2021

LET US KNOW WHAT YOU THINK

Email us via letters@ pcgamer.com with your reactions, or simply tweet us your thoughts @PCGamer

80 84

Contents 70 74 76 78 80 82 84 86 88

FREE GAMES

Evil Genius 2: World Domination Loop Hero Narita Boy Stronghold: Warlords Monster Energy Supercross 4 Curse of the Dead Gods Nebuchadnezzar HellSign Little Nightmares II

90 Locust, U.S.A. 91 Overflow 91 Castaway THEY’RE BACK

92 93 93 93 93

XCOM 2 Halo 3 Outer Wilds Hypnospace Outlaw Catastronauts

This month’s villainous reviewers…

RICK LANE

E VAN L AHTI

R ACHEL WAT TS

ROBERT ZAK

LUKE KEMP

TOM SYKES

MAT T ELLIOT T

Specialist in Maniacal laughter

Specialist in Letting games play themselves

Specialist in Tron logic

Specialist in Spirit tracks

Specialist in Divine retribution

Specialist in Breakout hits

Specialist in Spacing out

Currently playing Narita Boy

Currently playing HellSign

Currently playing Locust, U.S.A.

Currently playing XCOM 2

This month Got sucked into a games console – the worst fear of any PC gamer.

This month Learned how to hunt ghosts. It’s satisfying, but there’s not much meat on them.

Currently playing Curse of the Dead Gods

This month Learned to love hitting a ball with a paddle like never before.

This month Found a game that doesn’t cater well to his ‘never tell me the odds’ policy.

Currently playing Evil Genius 2 This month Threatened to blow up the Moon if we didn’t let him review Evil Genius 2.

Currently playing Loop Hero This month Discovered that vampires can be good for your health.

This month Was cursed to write game reviews for a dead medium.

MAY 2021

REVIEW Evil Genius 2: World Domination

DESPICABLE GLEE EVIL GENIUS 2: WORLD DOMINATION simulates both the devious delights and fiendish frustrations of being a frothing megalomaniac. By Rick Lane

hanks to Evil Genius 2, I now understand why so many criminal masterminds are bald. It’s because they’ve torn all their hair out through sheer frustration. When a James Bond knockoff rocks up to your secret lair and murders a bunch of henchmen with an exploding cufflink or whatever, that’s all well and good for the henchmen, who are now on a permanent lunch hour, but nobody considers the administrative headache it causes for the boss.

have ripped my own skull out and Now you’ve got to train new thrown it at the screen. henchmen to replace the old ones, which means dipping into your pool of workers and sending them to the BASE DROP equivalent of thug university. This in Placing you in the role of one of turn means hiring more workers, several cackling megalomaniacs, Evil which costs money you Genius 2 sees you don’t have because you constructing a secret spent it all on replacing Recruit various lair on a volcanic island the traps that doubleout in the Pacific, then types of not-seven also broke. that lair to sow underling to using This means spinning chaos through the help realise more moneymaking world. You’ll construct schemes, which cost rooms to service both your plans yet more henchmen to your minions’ needs set in motion, thus and your dastardly starting the whole cycle over again. desires, recruit various types of Being a master villain is one big underling to help realise your headache for your big bald braincase, nefarious plans, lay traps and and it’s this villainous bureaucracy obstacles to bamboozle enemy agents, that Evil Genius 2 replicates. Mostly and ultimately construct a terrifying for the better, but sometimes for the doomsday device to make the world worse. When all’s said and done, it’s a bend at the knee. fine management title that balances This starts with a base-building brilliantly presented base-building bonanza. Unlike, Dungeon Keeper or with some genuinely challenging Two Point Hospital, which mete out plate-spinning. But thank goodness it the different rooms you can build features a mechanic that lets you across multiple levels within the randomly shoot your minions, game, Evil Genius 2 more or less lets because otherwise at times I might you build all of its rooms at once.

NEED TO KNOW WHAT IS IT? Real-time strategy with evil on its mind EXPECT TO PAY £35 DEVELOPER Rebellion PUBLISHER In-house REVIEWED ON AMD Ryzen 7 5800X, Radeon 5700XT, 15GB RAM MULTIPLAYER No LINK evilgeniusgame.com

CHOOSE YOUR GENIUS Which megalomaniac are you?

MAXIMILIAN Faster minions Starts with more guys Good at acquiring gold Short

MAY 2021

RED IVAN Extra guards Rocket launcher Brian Blessed Batshit insane

From barracks for your minions through cafeterias and training areas, all the way up to your genius’ gold-plated inner sanctum, you’ll have the basic layout of your base established within the first five hours. This part of Evil Genius 2 is pure entertainment, not least because the base-building both looks and feels superb. Like Two Point Hospital, Evil Genius 2 boasts a vibrant, cartoon style, and although it’s less Aardman it still bears some resemblance to the original and considerably craggier Evil Genius. Your minions mine out rooms with bulky, underslung laser cannons, then use those same cannons to put objects and furniture into rooms, which fall into place with a mighty whomp. But the real treat here is the animation, which is both meticulous in its detail and delightfully comic. I love the way guards lumber through corridors, clad in red spandex like an evil Mr Incredible, a stark contrast to the superior, stiff-backed stroll of your scientists. But the highlight of Rebellion’s animation work is found in your interrogation room, where your minions torture captured agents by tickling their feet or dropping sticks of fake dynamite into their laps. It’s a fantastic game to watch in motion, which is just as well because after this feast of construction comes something of a fallow patch. Once you’ve built your inner sanctum, Evil Genius 2 falls into a holding pattern as your scientists research new traps, upgrades, and room objects, while you begin to grapple with your ultimate goal of world domination.

CRIME PAYS

ZALIKA Scientific genius Faster research Instant repairs Terrible fashion sense

EMMA Ex Spymaster Efficient covert ops Spider chair Probably voted ‘leave’

The emphasis switches to two activities: expanding your criminal network across the globe and defending your base from enemy agents. The former involves dispatching groups of minions to establish relay stations in different areas around the world. Each of these provides a small amount of residual income, while also unlocking

The animations are flawless. Just exceptional work.

This is fine.

Maximilian is famous for his subtle, understated décor. Agents who spend long enough in your cover operation will leave of their own accord.

Standard agents arrive along with tourists by boat. Special agents arrive by… a smaller boat.

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Freeze Ray!

The torture animations are brilliant. And yes, that was weird to write.

Crime bosses must first be fought before they can be recruited as henchmen. If a region gets too much heat, it locks down, cancelling ongoing missions and triggering a wave of agents.

You’re fired.

Minions can be trained to perform better in combat, though they won’t be as capable as guards.

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REVIEW Evil Genius 2: World Domination

schemes, which will pull in larger chunks of income. Schemes bring in much-needed cash, but minions dispatched on Here are the first underlings you’ll encounter them don’t come back, and they also WORKER SCIENTISTS generate heat. This ultimately leads Your common Spend most of to the various world governments or garden their time in dispatching agents to investigate and lackey. Will dig the lab sabotage your lair. Initially, these are new rooms, researching incompetent private detectives, but place new new tech. But over time, the agents become more equipment, they can also and monitor be used to numerous and more capable, systems. gather intel. including super agents, who can waltz through your security infuriatingly easily. GUARD VALET The first of Valets work in Unwelcome snoops can be dealt several your cover op, with in various ways. In proud Evil “muscle” looking after Genius tradition, you have a range of minions, tourists and eclectic traps to deploy, ranging from guards will distracting freeze rays and giant fans to searing man posts and agents from attempt to the lair’s true laser grids and shark-infested stop agents. purpose. plunge-pools. Should these fail, you can set the base to high alert, whereupon your minions will descend upon enemy agents and What doesn’t help is that the clobber them into submission. missions are not always that My favourite way to deal with engaging. They have cool concepts, agents, however, is to distract them like kidnapping rival crime bosses or with the cover operation, a glittering stealing the Declaration of casino front complete with cocktail Independence, but most of the action bars, baccarat tables, stage shows, and happens off-screen. Meanwhile, the much more. Watching a spy get cutscenes that bookend objectives fleeced at one of your roulette tables are let down by some iffy voice and head home even more emptyperformances. The geniuses are all handed than when he arrived is superbly acted, as you’d expect when incredibly satisfying. Rebellion has sourced All of this is voice talent such as Rebellion enjoyable to grapple Brian Blessed, but the with, but there’s minions and has sourced inescapably a subordinates are stilted voice talent somewhat empty and unconvincing, such as Brian which has the effect of feeling to Evil Genius 2’s middle game. Part of your geniuses basically Blessed the problem is that the shouting at missions you must mannequins. complete to progress are extremely The result was a good few hours long-winded. Each has four or five where I spent most of my time sub-objectives to complete, some of waiting. Waiting for a new which involve completing multiple technology to unlock. Waiting for my side-stories that themselves have four helicopter to transport minions to a or five sub-objectives to complete. mission site. Waiting to accrue These long and complex chains of enough money to dig a new room objectives make it easy for the through ‘hard rock’, which is simulation to creep in and obstruct disproportionately more expensive to your progress. Alongside money, mine through than regular rock. there are a bunch of different Everything takes too long to resolve, resources you need to manage like and there’s not enough going on to broadcast strength needed for occupy your time during these expanding and upgrading your periods. There is a fast-forward criminal network, and intel, required function, of course, but using for starting higher-level missions. this is risky, as you might miss Meanwhile, if a base station in a an agent sneaking into your region hits max heat level, that region base, or a region with a mission locks down. If a mission is in progress ongoing slipping into lockdown. when lockdown hits, it’s cancelled This problem never quite and you have to restart. goes away, but it does become

MEET YOUR MINIONS

less acute once you start working on your doomsday device. At this point, you’ve unlocked enough new items and accrued enough funds that your base needs considerable expansion. Enemy agents become more numerous and more challenging, including one who waltzed through my security and blew up half of my communications network before I knew he was there. Your minions become more diversified, and you unlock more lucrative missions on the world map, making it easier to manage heat levels and providing more space to tinker with your base while other stuff’s going on.

NECESSARY EVIL

When Evil Genius 2 is on form, it’s one of the best management games out there. Not only is it imaginative and fun, it’s also genuinely challenging. Trying to juggle your finances while monitoring the world to negate heat lockdowns, while also fighting literal fires as an agent stalks through your corridors, disguised so he’s invisible to everyone but you, is super engaging. There are also some other cool features that I haven’t yet mentioned, like how you can recruit rival crime bosses to become your henchmen, but only after thoroughly putting them in their place first. You can also brainwash enemy agents and turn them into minions, while minions that are dissatisfied with their lot may attempt to desert your lair leaving you minionless. But there’s no getting away from the fact that the game’s feedback loops are too stretched out. It feels like it could offer a tight 20-hour game, more than enough considering there are four different geniuses to play as. But it’s stretched to 40 hours by overlong missions and a whole lot of waiting for stuff to happen. Despite taking a roundabout route to get there, though, in the end I think Evil Genius 2 successfully replicates the cat-stroking, moustache-twirling, mad-cackling fun of being a calculating supervillain. On the scale of criminal masterminds, I’d rate it a Dr Evil. It’s funny and it’s got the right stuff, but it’s not quite the full Blofeld. VERDICT A superbly stylish and challenging management game, Evil Genius 2 is let down only by its tendency to bloviate. MAY 2021

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REVIEW Loop Hero

RINGER Charming micro RPG LOOP HERO is one of this year’s first true gems. By Evan Lahti

rom the moment its 16-colour title screen fades in alongside dramatic chiptunes, Loop Hero feels like some forgotten, VGA-era fantasy RPG, a game that contains the mystery and difficulty of 1991, gently modernised to 2021. Behind that charming intro screen isn’t empty, indulgent nostalgia, but a novel gameplay format that’s strangely engrossing, considering much of your time playing Loop Hero is hands-off. I want more games like this.

NEED TO KNOW WHAT IS IT? A hands-off retro roguelike laden with mystery EXPECT TO PAY £12.50

days. And if you play a tenth The setup is dead-simple: you send DEVELOPER mountain or rock card, a goblin one of three heroes (warrior, rogue, Four Quarters encampment will randomly spawn or necromancer) on repeated PUBLISHER on the road, churning out some nasty, expeditions to an empty road. As Devolver fast-attacking enemies. your little hero auto-walks around REVIEWED ON These surprises are this stone path, you Intel Core i7-4770K, arbitrary and delightful. populate the blank Nvidia GeForce 3080, 16 GB RAM It’s refreshing to play a world around it by It’s game that doesn’t even playing cards like unexpectedly hint at how to unlock MULTIPLAYER graveyards, battlefields, No fun to have some of its powerful villages, or mountains LINK zero control effects. But by the time one by one. These loophero.com pieces in turn alter over combat I was 25 hours in, once I’d discovered almost hero or enemy stats like everything, I did want attack speed and HP, more of these surprise interactions. and spawn corresponding enemies that you fight automatically as you pass through them. LOOT HERO Each run essentially becomes a The other side of Loop Hero’s small experiment, another crack at interactivity is swapping out pieces piecing together a level that’s tough of gear, an almost constant task of enough to give you good XP, changing out helmets, shields, and resources and gear but not so brutal enchanted weapons. As you kill that it kills you outright. What monsters, new gear of differing rarity happens if I play a bunch of spider pops into your inventory for cocoons and sand dunes, which lower all creatures’ HP? What will river cards do if I intersect them with the road itself? Can my warrior survive two adjacent tiles filled with Combo certain cards together to create giant sandworms? secret interactions Loop Hero is about tending this little gauntlet. It’s unexpectedly fun to have zero control over combat and worry mostly about arranging these little tiles. My favourite design element within Loop Hero’s buildBLOOMING COUNT’S LAND MOUNTAIN MEADOW PEAK Place a Vampire your-own-dungeon concept are the Place a Meadow Place nine Rocks or Mansion adjacent hidden effects that trigger when you adjacent to any Mountains to a Village to turn play certain cards. Drop nine other tile to boost together in a grid, it into a Ransacked mountain cards in a 3x3 grid and they its healing power. and they’ll form a Village full of transform into a massive Everest-like But it doesn’t work Mountain Peak that ghouls. After three if it’s diagonally boosts your health more loops, it’ll peak, granting a mega boost to max adjacent, so even more – but turn into a Count’s HP. But, surprise: harpies now live in choose your also spawns Land that heals the mountain you built, a challenging placements dangerous harpies more and gives enemy type that will fly down to a carefully. across the map. better quests. random part of your board every few

SLEIGHT OF HAND

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consideration. It’s fun and effective in practice, a hyper-distillation of action RPGs like Diablo: would you rather have 25% more attack speed or 33% evasion? One knock against all the loot management is that, like its mysterious card effects, Loop Hero doesn’t explain the relative value of every combat stat. Likewise, some enemy abilities aren’t easy to understand, even though the game contains tooltips. The in-game encyclopaedia does mitigate some of this confusion, but has to unlocked via hard-won resources. Even without control over your character, there are wonderful little pockets of depth in combat. When you’re playing the necromancer, fights with multiple enemies turn into pleasant battles of attrition, where your hero struggles to summon enough skeletons to soak damage. The dual-wielding rogue, meanwhile, only earns loot once he reaches the campfire tile, so you’re often holding your breath until you reach the finish line, praying you make it alive to heal up and gear up. Loop Hero is the concentrated experience of watching numbers get bigger in a videogame, but it’s a grimly enchanting one. Its biggest point of success is that it makes a home in this middle zone between watching, planning, and acting. Supporting each and every moment is some excellent music and sound design – scraping slashes, a giant mosquito’s buzz, the clattering sound of a skeleton reanimating. This is the sort of smart, focused resurrection of old games I want more of, something that feels retro and new with every expedition step. I managed to put more than 40 hours into this quote-unquote small game. VERDICT Loop Hero has the spirit of early ’90s fantasy games, cleverly revived in an original and digestible form.

Late-game levels are a bramble of enemies.

Boss fights are big payoffs where you sit back and watch your build roll.

The story is intriguingly strange and mysterious.

Build structures back at camp to unlock new cards, buffs, and classes.

MAY 2021

REVIEW Narita Boy

CONSOLE WARS NARITA BOY is a vibrant retro-futuristic adventure about cyber heroes and digital legends. By Rachel Watts

t’s nothing short of blasphemy to mention a gaming console inside a magazine that is strictly about PC gaming and hopefully, the print between your fingers hasn’t been set ablaze at the forbidden word alone. But, I think the PC gaming gods will forgive me writing about Narita Boy, a platforming action adventure that takes place inside a gaming console, whose circuits, wires, and lines of code have all been transformed into an intricate digital empire.

mysticism together to create a truly Playing as the eponymous hero Narita Boy, you have been summoned engaging setting. The spirituality of the world isn’t to save the Digital Kingdom from a just meaningless symbols and signs. crisis. Travelling through each of the Throughout the Digital Kingdom you kingdom’s three regions, you must get to dip into the memories of the defeat the evil servants of HIM, a person who built this dark program that place, The Creator, the wishes to see the The spirituality god in this digital realm Digital Kingdom fall. who happens to be a It’s the usual ‘hero of the world –balding, pit-stain of a saving the world’ isn’t just dude in the real world. narrative, but with the meaningless As you delve into his twist of it being inside a memories, you begin to retro gaming console symbols understand how his life from the ’80s. has informed the game, I think the idea for from his early childhood in Japan Narita Boy is brilliant. Every piece of a gaming console has been assigned a living with his religious mother and the family struggles he faced with his role within this fantasy universe, and father. These moments are quietly with enough lore to rival Game of reflective and act as a great Thrones. It has a certain mysticism too, like how the high-priestess of the counterbalance to all the fun ’80s macho power-fantasy present entire kingdom is a supervisor throughout the rest of the game. program named Motherboard, other sentient programs called technofathers worship complex algorithms, HACK IT floppy disks act as keys to the holiest Narita Boy is a combat-heavy of temples, and lines of code are platformer, but thankfully your pixel treated as ancient scripture. The hero is decked out with some smooth game brings technology and moves. Slicing and dicing through

BOY’S GOT MOVES Here are the best techniques in Narita Boy’s arsenal

DODGE

Your best friend in any combat-heavy game – gets you out of trouble.

MAY 2021

ENERGETIC CHARGE

Literally a lifesaver. Heals one square of your life bar.

SHOULDER BASH

Knock enemies off balance and rush in for the kill.

UPPERCUT

This swoop lets you reach higher places and slice enemies in half.

NEED TO KNOW WHAT IS IT? An ’80s inspired platformer with a digital-fantasy twist EXPECT TO PAY TBA DEVELOPER Studio Koba PUBLISHER Team17 REVIEWED ON AMD Ryzen 5 3600, 8GB RAM, AMD Raedon RX 5700 XT MULTIPLAYER No LINK naritaboy-game.com

enemies feels punchy, and there are plenty of ways to take out a foe without spamming the attack button. Enemy attacks are clearly choreographed, letting you breeze past most encounters, and boss battles feel more about showing off the idea behind the creation rather than being actually challenging. In one climactic fight I had to dodge a giant mecha-carp in a bathhouse as I surfed on a huge floppy disk. Fun! Narita Boy’s story is strictly linear, with clearly marked goals to follow as you run around its pixel-perfect backdrop. There’s some back and forth between certain areas, but so much of the game is decorated with incredibly striking scenes that it’s a pleasure whenever you do have to double-back. But as pretty as they are, I was constantly getting lost in Narita Boy’s world. Trying to remember all the names of things can get confusing. I kept getting tangled up in the world’s lore, not knowing where I could find the Servo-Horse, what the Hackernauts are, how I could get to the Techno-Algorithm Hall, what the Gallery of the Cosmovisions is – it left me dazed. This coupled with the graphics of the game can cause a real headache. As much as I love the retro-era visuals combined with the look of an old VHS tape, platforms and doors blend easily into the background. However, these are small hiccups in an overall slick adventure. Plunging your sword into the digital hearts of enemies feels great, and learning about how this kingdom came to be is a wild ride of heartbreak, creepy cults, and flamboyant rock. Narita Boy removes the vapidness of ’80s nostalgia and couples it with an epic fantasy narrative and an earnest core. VERDICT Narita Boy’s digital twist on a classic fantasy tale is engrossing. Unfortunately it can get disorientating at times.

A horned shadow plagues the creator even outside the game.

A giant stone noggin is a gateway to the creator’s memories.

Yes, that’s a giant digital fetus you’re seeing in the sky.

Bombastic battles are balanced with serene scenes.

This is what horses look like in the Digital Kingdom.

MAY 2021

REVIEW Stronghold: Warlords

KHAN’T COMPETE Can STRONGHOLD: WARLORDS rebuild the foundations of the series? By Rob Zak

he original Stronghold holds a special place in my heart. You build a medieval barony, surround it with a labyrinth of impassable walls, and stave off waves of attackers while keeping the serfs living within happy, well-fed, and welltaxed. It had real character too, with a lovely soundtrack, snappy unit soundbites and memorable villains.

points, which you can also use to buy Stronghold: Warlords feels a million a warlord’s loyalty. The system gets miles away from that game. It’s the most sprawling entry series in the yet very messy in the late game as you and enemies get embroiled in an – largely abandoning the principle of endless diplomatic tug of war by building a feudal gauntlet for waves throwing your points at warlords to of enemies in favour of a more traditional RTS setup featuring larger win their fleeting loyalty. maps and symmetrically placed HOLDING ON Equipment is The actual warfare enemy bases. The warlords varied, ranging works much better. system is the twist Siege equipment is from here. Beyond your base varied, ranging from trebuchets to trebuchets to kamikaze and the enemy’s, there are several smaller kamikaze oxen oxen to a rudimentary estates on the map held medieval rocket by neutral warlords. launcher, and watching Defeat these warlords and they’ll join a city burn before funnelling your your side, sending you resources on troops into it remains one of gaming’s demand, offering mini-forts to shelter crueller pleasures. Familiar melee, your troops, and even launching cavalry, and ranged troops are joined attacks on your enemies. by Far Eastern classics like samurai, It’s a decent idea in principle but warrior monks, horse archers, and falters on a couple of levels. Firstly, it ninjas. It’s a solid roster, making means that your main keep doesn’t combat tactically richer than earlier see a ton of action. Most of your time games while retaining some of the in a skirmish match will be spent series’ trademark whimsy. scuffling over these warlord forts that Back on the homefront, you’ll you don’t have any hand in building need to keep the people happy with except for preset upgrades. You buy food, clothing, tea, and temples if you these upgrades with diplomacy want to crank up those taxes. You can

STRONGEST HOLDS

The best three games in the series

STRONGHOLD HD

STRONGHOLD CRUSADER HD

Excellent villains, wonderful voice acting, and a beautiful soundtrack that’s as memorable for its ambient medieval tunes as it is for the stentorian battle music.

MAY 2021

Ramps up the scale and gives everything a Middle-Eastern makeover. This was still very much a siege game with one side attacking and one defending.

NEED TO KNOW WHAT IS IT? Base-building real-time strategy game set in the Far East EXPECT TO PAY £27 DEVELOPER Firefly Studios PUBLISHER In-house REVIEWED ON AMD Ryzen 7 5800X, Radeon 5700XT, 16GB RAM MULTIPLAYER Online co-op and PvP LINK stronghold warlords.com

choose whether to be a popular if feared lord through entertainment buildings like theatres on the one hand and public torture instruments on the other. Managing people and economics within your walls was always a strongpoint of the series, and Warlords upholds that tradition. It’s a joy to see an efficient stronghold in motion, as the little people scurry between buildings, make use of fancy stone roads, and offer little soundbites on the state of things when you click them. There are five lengthy campaigns set across Vietnam, China, Japan, and Mongolia, each casting you as a real-life historical ruler of the respective region – from galloping around the plains of Mongolia as Genghis Khan to guiding Thuc Phan on his quest to become king of the Au Lac kingdom in the jungles of modern-day Vietnam. None of these have much in the way of narrative development – no cutscenes, no big personalities, and no mid-mission twists that force you to rethink your strategy. They’re a glorified and protracted tutorial for the meat-and-rice of the game: skirmish mode and multiplayer. Stronghold: Warlords still shines during sieges, when piles of enemies collapse beneath swarms of arrows and soldiers fly out of towers toppled by catapult fire. There’s enough customisation in the skirmish mode that you can manufacture these gruelling attritional standoffs, but there’s not enough substance in the downtime between them. I’m still waiting for the day when this series reels things in and builds on its sturdy siegecraft foundations, instead of diluting them with generic RTS trappings and other systems that don’t quite click.

STRONGHOLD LEGENDS

None of the Stronghold games since those mentioned have been great, but at least Legends had a bunch of fairytale silliness over a so-so strategy game to give it some charm.

VERDICT A decent strategy game that lacks the big personality and siegecraft that made the original special.

Most battles are classic RTS skirmishes rather than the singular sieges of Stronghold past.

Don’t be fooled by the sturdy walls – Team Red is about to get catapulted into oblivion.

With enough time and resources, you can build some formidable forts. The Mongol campaign involves a lot of horses and open plains, which doesn’t make for the most spectacular battles.

The economic campaign is a nightmare of random fires and protracted resource gathering.

MAY 2021

REVIEW Monster Energy Supercross – The Official Videogame 4

FLOW RIDER MONSTER ENERGY SUPERCROSS – THE OFFICIAL VIDEOGAME 4 raises pulses and health insurance premiums alike. By Phil Iwaniuk

f I told you it took me several races in Monster Energy Supercross – The Official Videogame 4 until I stopped getting lapped by the very easy mode AI, would you laugh? I know, I know. I have considered getting gud. If you’ll spare me too much mockery, though, I can explain why I think that’s actually a big selling point.

lapped by the very easy mode AI and None of my experience with other people will laugh at you. Milestone games was going to help That is, if you’re playing in event me here, it seemed. But I enjoyed or championship mode. The AI in the those pastings, because Supercross 4 licensed series – 250 East, 250 West was forcing me to learn a new and 450 – is more challenging than in discipline, distinct from mastering the ebb and flow of MXGP’s forgiving career mode, where the real meat of outdoor layouts. AMA Supercross is a the experience lies. Series veterans will note a newly law unto itself, fought extended route to the out in tight tracks full The revamped 450 championship. of challenging expect an NBA undulations, one after track editor Don’t 2K-calibre ‘started another. It’s all about allows for all from the bottom’ finding the right flow manner of journey, though: as a through the obstacles, rookie you’re racing the or paying for it in tweaking same 250cc bikes in the handfuls of time if you same locations as the don’t stick to it. higher ups, then unlocking new The physics underpinning it all championships sequentially. aren’t perfect, as you’ll notice on The focus is on developing your occasion when you land awkwardly rider, ticking off training events (don’t and watch both bike and rider get excited, they’re truncated races) achieve some very odd contortions, and spending points in an upgrade but they’re coherent enough for you tree until you’ve built the next to respect the challenge the game Jeremy McGrath. MotoGP players throws at you. To find the right flow will feel very familiar with everything through a track, you need to but the racing itself in Supercross 4, coordinate the rider’s position as you from the rewind function (itself hit a jump and as you land after it. You need to scrub and whip in the air cribbed from Codemasters’ F1 series) to the impressive Unreal Engine to control your height and trajectory lighting and vibrant texture work… by leaning the bike and rider in and the slightly anachronistic UI and opposite directions, converting race presentation. How often since, upward momentum to forward oh, 2002, have your ears been treated momentum. And you need to do this to butt rock while you race? on every jump. Otherwise you’ll be

YES, I DO WANT SOME SCRUBS

NEED TO KNOW WHAT IS IT? A licensed motorcycle racing game from a prolific developer of those games. EXPECT TO PAY £40 DEVELOPER Milestone S.r.l. PUBLISHER In-house REVIEWED ON i7 9700K @ 3.6GHz, RTX 2080 TI, 16 GB Ram MULTIPLAYER Online competitive and co-op LINK supercross thegame.com

Deal with it, TLC

EASY RIDER

And if the world of racing is getting you down; if you’re jaded by all the men in snapbacks who look like they listen to Five Finger Death Punch, duking it out in races with more energy drink logos per square inch than a Kyle’s recycling bin, there’s always the compound. In this freeform area, Supercross 4 goes quasi-open world, inviting you to hunt for collectibles and blaze your own trails, finding sick jumps and daring routes over, under and often in bone-shattering collision with environmental features. Elsewhere, the revamped track editor allows for all manner of granular tweaking, whether on existing tracks or new creations. And just as 99% of Trackmania creations are nighimpossible successions of loop-theloops, surely the point of this is to build something nobody else can ride. Competitive multiplayer never really works out in Milestone bike sims, and that’s not strictly the developer’s fault any more than the source material: if you mess up on a motorbike, you fall off. You’re not winning the race after that. So it proves in Supercross 4’s online mode, whose netcode seems solid enough but often hosts races of everdwindling participants for the aforementioned reasons. Still, for the dedicated few, it’s there. It’s a feature-rich game, then, for something carrying a relatively niche licence, and Milestone’s passion for Supercross just oozes out of every customisation menu and QWOP-like manoeuvre. Its hardcore fans will judge it more on meaningful progress between releases though, and the pace of that progress is about the same as Milestone’s MotoGP series: slow and steady. VERDICT

Here’s how to scrub: first, hit the ramp nice and central.

MAY 2021

In the air push the left stick to the right and the right stick to the left.

On descent, switch to the opposite direction on each stick to level out.

Ride away with at least some parts of your skeleton intact.

Not the finest physics simulation ever, but good enough to convey a challenging discipline. Lots of content, too.

But do I actually land it? I’ll never tell.

A good quality fluro race suit never goes out of fashion, as my nan says. Photo mode’s handy for capturing your highs. (And lows.)

Deformable terrain’s been a calling card since Milestone’s first MXGP.

MAY 2021

REVIEW Curse of the Dead Gods

CURSE CORRECTION CURSE OF THE DEAD GODS is a sharp and atmospheric roguelike dungeon crawler. By Luke Kemp

ho are you? Where are you? Why are you here? These questions and many more are gleefully ignored by Passtech Games. After a brief tutorial it’s a case of ‘here are some weapons, there’s a temple full of monsters and treasure, get on with it’. A bold choice for a roguelike in the post-Hades world, perhaps; and one that provides the first sign that comparisons with Supergiant’s colossus are misleading.

random curse, a twist on play that Curse of the Dead Gods takes many makes things more difficult for you. cues from traditional action You can carry up to five curses at adventure games, and benefits from a time, with the fifth and final one them enormously. The most obvious one is probably the fact that the game slowly sapping your HP until it hits is essentially split into levels. The first one point. So, you know, you want to avoid that. But! You’re temple tier contains regularly tempted to three ‘levels’, with They didn’t just willingly increase your three more tiers and a It’s the only total of seven more put ‘curse’ in corruption. way to heal in the rare levels above that. Each the title healing chambers, and completed level is because it anything available at a permanently marked shrine – weapons, with a satisfying green looks cool upgrades, buffs – can tick. It’s a sign (along be had for a corruption with more levels cost if you aren’t carrying enough becoming available) of achievement gold. It’s a very interesting example and progress, which is an important of balancing risk and reward, part of player feedback that many particularly for the longer runs. roguelikes fumble. Combat is brilliant, another example of more traditional DEAD GOOD influences. Though familiarly Mind you, it’s difficult to lay out the dependent on stamina points, it has a rules of the game, as the developers speed and flow that ensures battling take such delight in regularly the horrors of the temple is always a rewriting them. This partly comes joy. They didn’t just put ‘curse’ in the through the curses, which might title because it looks cool, either. encourage you to embrace the dark Each time you pass through a door rather than shy away from it, or leading to a new area, you gain 20 ensure you have at least 300 gold corruption. Hit 100, and you gain a when passing through a door or pay

NEED TO KNOW WHAT IS IT? Proof that gods are trouble even when they’re dead EXPECT TO PAY £18 DEVELOPER Passtech Games PUBLISHER Focus Home Interactive REVIEWED ON GeForce GTX 1650, AMD Ryzen 5 3550H, 8 GB RAM MULTIPLAYER No LINK focus-home.com/ en-us/games/ curse-of-the-dead-gods

D E A D T O M E A few of the cosy characters you’ll meet

1 YOU

3 BMLAASDTEE-R

This is you – an unnamed explorer trapped in the temple. Don’t die.

DREADFUL OFFSPRING

Not a commentary on the music of the American post-punk band.

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2 4 3 1

These warriors are really fast, so keep a close eye on them.

4 PG EUTARRIDFIIAE ND

Hits hard with wide swings, but slow enough to avoid if you’re careful.

the difference in health. The rarer buffs and weapons meanwhile have their own spins on the experience, such as reducing the corruption inflicted when passing through a door, or increasing your damage according to how many relics (buff-bestowing items) you’re carrying. After a few hours, you’ll start to see the same room layouts creeping in, but it always feels fresh. Randomness plays a strong part in the experience – it’s still a roguelike – but you’re given the opportunity to slightly nudge things in the direction of your choice. You can spend your persisting currency to expand and (to a small extent) dictate your choice of starting weapons, and even gain tokens to reroll what’s on offer at the shrines you encounter during each run. It’s a welcome element (illusion?) of control. The curses, while an important part of what makes the game unique and enjoyable, could do with a bit of balancing. The importance of some depend on your playstyle, but it’s much easier to ignore some (chests must be parried on opening or they deal damage) than others (regular enemies spawning poisonous ‘vermin’ on death). There’s one curse in particular, which swaps corruption gain on opening a door for a constant accumulation over time, that can completely kill a run if you gain it at the wrong time. Just before a boss fight, after which you can remove it? Not too bad. Just after a boss, with a curse already on board and several rooms to get through? Best prepare for that HP drain. That’s annoying, but it’s also my only big criticism of the game, because just about everything else clicks together wonderfully, for a fantastic roguelike experience. VERDICT A perfect introduction to roguelikes, or a hugely enjoyable and unique adventure for veterans of the genre.

Plan your route based on the kind of loot you want.

Purple denotes evil, which we already knew because of Decepticons.

Heavy weapons drain stamina with alarming speed.

You’re a door-to-door soulsman.

Fire good, statue with red eyes bad.

MAY 2021

REVIEW Nebuchadnezzar

GOT MILK? NEBUCHADNEZZAR is a capable city-builder, but one that becomes less fun as it goes on. By Rick Lane

city-building throwback that throws players all the way back to the cradle of civilisation, Nebuchadnezzar arouses fond memories of games like Caesar III and, to a lesser extent, Age of Empires. Its classical style both looks and sounds great, while its systems delve considerably deeper than what is apparent on the surface.

to the ever-increasing demands of Unfortunately, as Nebuchadnezzar your populace. There are three grows in scope, it becomes different classes of citizen, each of increasingly burdened by which lives in a different building micromanagement, while a couple of type that also has multiple stages of significant design flaws threaten to evolution. Regular workers will sink the whole enterprise. begrudgingly reside in a half-finished Set in ancient Mesopotamia, hovel. But supplying Nebuchadnezzar’s these houses with campaign tasks you Successful city bread and milk will with building some of the house, the world’s oldest and management upgrade enabling more workers greatest cities – Ur, involves to live in it. Nineveh, Babylon, etc. mastering Supplying a house Guided by Gilgamesh like this is itself the through the game’s logistics culmination of a chain four introductory of different processes. missions, the remaining To supply bread you need a crop nine levels involve constructing farm to produce the wheat, a bakery thriving metropoli, capping each one within range of the farm to turn that off with a great wonder such as wheat into a loaf, and a poor market Ashurbanipal’s Library, the Hanging within range of the bakery to sell that Gardens of Babylon, or your own bread to local houses. Citizens won’t custom-designed temple complex. just rock up at the market Nebuchadnezzar may look dry in automatically either. You must screenshots, but it’s a different establish sales routes through experience in motion. Towns and individual neighbourhoods, at which cities hum with activity. Farmers scatter seeds across their fields, while point your market vendors will take the bread, milk, etc to the houses. market vendors wander the streets carrying baskets filled with bread and balancing water jugs on their heads. IT’S ANCIENT HISTORY As your city expands, its buildings Initially, Nebuchadnezzar seems like evolve and grow, with hordes of new an ideal chillout experience, one to settlers flooding the streets in a while away an evening building scramble to inhabit your new abodes. increasingly lavish districts and Successful city management chipping away at your temple or involves mastering logistics and hanging gardens using the custom production chains, as well as catering monument designer. Unfortunately,

HAPPY FOLK LEVEL 1 Default

MAY 2021

What it takes to get a house to max level LEVEL 2 Bread Milk

LEVEL 3

Ceramics Water

LEVEL 4

Tablet maker Beer

NEED TO KNOW WHAT IS IT? A retro styled city-builder. EXPECT TO PAY £16 DEVELOPER Nepos Games PUBLISHER In-house REVIEWED ON AMD Ryzen 5 3600, Nvidia GeForce 2080 Super, 32 GB RAM MULTIPLAYER No LINK nepos.games/ nebuchadnezzar

the deeper you delve into the game, the more stressful the experience becomes. Establishing distribution routes for your market vendors becomes a chore in any settlement. Not only must you establish a new route for every vendor in the city, you’ll also have to alter the route whenever you add buildings to that area, which you do constantly. It can be difficult to identify problems within your production chain. In one mission, I had a warehouse overflowing with beer, but the nearby markets simply would not distribute it, no matter what I did. The consequences for a break in your production chain can be severe too. At one point, a single warehouse in my city became overstuffed with bread and could no longer accept milk. Within five minutes my working classes had completely abandoned the city, a problem that took half an hour to rectify. Nebuchadnezzar’s biggest issue has to do with trade. You can only construct new buildings by spending gold, and gold is earned only through trading with other cities. But cities will only deign to trade with you once you reach a certain prestige level, and even then, you have to butter them up with a (usually substantial) gift first. Because of these significant initial demands, it’s entirely possible to build yourself into a corner, where you run out of money and cannot earn any more. There’s much about Nebuchadnezzar to appreciate, from its wonderful presentation to its dynamic city simulation. But the core systems are too stern and austere compared to the payoff of successfully building your city. It isn’t lacking for class, but really needs to dial up the fun factor. VERDICT Nebuchadnezzar’s city-building fun is hindered by micromanagement and trading issues.

Market vendors travel through towns to sell their wares, somewhat defeating the point of having a market.

The information layers are nice and clean.

The Great Milk Revolt of 3000 BC was, as one historian put it, “A royal pain in the arse”. Trading is the only way to earn money, which can become a serious problem.

Building temples is fiddly and time-consuming. But they do look cool once finished.

MAY 2021

REVIEW HellSign

TO HELL AND BACK Some cool and clever ideas come together, but are HELLSIGN’s bad jujus worth the squeeze? By Robert Zak

ell this is an oddly paced game – but it’s also a game with vision. HellSign casts you as a ghost hunter in an Australian town decimated by demons, and populated by the very worst scummers and vagabonds who seek their fortunes there in a kind of ghoulish gold rush.

doesn’t quite have the precision and You’re one of these undesirables, carrying out missions for the skeevers responsiveness to incorporate these Souls-like combat elements smoothly, at the local bar to make some which leads to some frustrating money… and to work out why there’s moments. The a demon inside you awkwardness is that brings you back from the dead Many of your compounded by your vision, which whenever you perish. perfectly timed limited means that many of You pick your dodge-rolls your perfectly timed missions from a map will be right dodge-rolls will be screen, where you can right into walls, tree see the type of contract, into walls roots, or dining chairs its difficulty, and its that block your path. location type. You gain You get to do some baby detective XP and build a character based on work too. Gather enough signs and your desired playstyle – be that a evidence on a mission, and you can researcher, gunslinger, or trapmaster. cross-reference the body parts and Once you’re in a mission it’s a blood splatters you find with those in mishmash of gunfights against monsters and hunting for clues, using an arsenal of weaponry, traps, and paranormal-tracking paraphernalia. The best tools are the ones that feed into the game’s hideously good Tools of the trade sound design – mics that pick up manic laughter and spooky chanting, or the radio device that you tune to track demonic whispers. Using these tools, heat sensors for areas affected by tendrils, and plenty of corpserummaging, you track down signs FIRST AID TRAPPER and get an idea of where the ghoulies No matter how Forget grenades good you are at and baits, traps lie in wait to ambush you, letting you dodging, you’ll be are much more flip the script back on them with the getting hit a lot. fundamental to right preparation. This skill will let the game. Get Each monster has distinct you use medkits. them ASAP. patterns, and learning them is a big part of the fun. Ghouls cling to ceilings and trees, so fight them in open spaces; shadow beasts hate UV light and can pull you into another dimension; while scuttling enemies like spiders and giant centipedes are PRIMARY MAGNILIGHT best funnelled through narrow spaces WEAPONS BLACKLIGHT and killed with fire. Reload times can This useful tool be a real killer in will make Your defences rely on a mix of HellSign, so unlock clue-gathering dodge-rolling and making sure your this skill to avoid much less of a slog armour has enough stability, lest you those penalties. early in the game. get stunlocked to death. HellSign

FINDING THE FUN

MAY 2021

NEED TO KNOW WHAT IS IT? A paranormal investigation shooter with RPG elements EXPECT TO PAY £15 DEVELOPER Ballistic Interactive PUBLISHER In-house REVIEWED ON AMD Ryzen 7 5800X, Radeon 5700XT, 15GB RAM MULTIPLAYER No LINK ballisticinteractive.com

your beautifully stylised demonic encyclopaedia. Do your deductions right, and you’ll find out the nature and weaknesses of the optional boss that awaits at the end of each level.

BAD OMENS

HellSign has a solid gameplay loop, but the early-mid-game is a chore. The three environment types quickly grow stale, and the imprecise early-game tracking equipment results in you spending too much time searching for signs. In combat meanwhile, you’ll hit pretty rigid difficulty walls where you’ll struggle to progress without the relevant upgrades. But you can’t just save up and buy the right equipment and tools, because most of the things you can wear are locked behind skill points, forcing you to jump through the double loop of XP and money grind. It means a lot of retreading the same few environments and a lot of XP spent on just getting the essentials rather than building a bespoke character. Despite all this, after about 12 hours I actually started having a good time. I found the perfect tools to zero in on signs efficiently, I had enough battery power to anticipate ambushes, I understood beasts’ behaviours, and I was fully utilising equipment like traps and night-vision goggles. I felt efficient and professional, doing that wanky thing where I’d adjust my headset’s earcup with a stern frown on my face while tuning my ghost radio. Finally, I had become the grimy ghostbuster I always wanted to be. HellSign is a down-and-dirty game in both style and spirit. There is a satisfying pay-off if you keep on at it, but the journey to get there sure is an arduous one. VERDICT HellSign is an incredibly tense, atmospheric game that’s tangled in the tendrils of poor pacing and lots of grinding.

Expect interdimensional doors, glitching, and other surreal disturbances the deeper you go.

There’s a lucrative job for whoever’s willing to clean up the bloody mess you leave behind.

Skills offer some build variety, but some should be integrated with your character from the off.

The boss fights are tough, climactic, and take a lot of grinding to beat.

The deciphering and deduction aspects of the game are simple rather than serious sleuthery.

MAY 2021

REVIEW Little Nightmares II

DREAM ON LITTLE NIGHTMARES II is a horror fan’s dream come true. By Stacey Henley

arsier Studios’ Little Nightmares II is a horror game which understands modern horror in ways most games haven’t wrapped their heads around. The Babadook, Midsommar, Hereditary… these iconic modern films have eschewed jump scares in favour of slowly building chills, unsettling atmosphere, and a constant sense of dread. Little Nightmares II, much like its predecessor, laces all of these feelings through its gameplay while others in the genre are still focusing on things that go bump in the night.

NEED TO KNOW WHAT IS IT? A horror-infused platformer which gets creepier the deeper you go EXPECT TO PAY £25

horror staple in the walls of grabbing Speaking of wrapping your head DEVELOPER Tarsier Studios hands, as well as a bizarre puzzle around things, Little Nightmares II where you need to find different serves up what I’m pretty sure, even PUBLISHER Bandai Namco chess piece toppers to complete the early on as we are, will be my biggest Entertainment set. The king’s topper, videogame chill of the rather than the wooden year. In Little REVIEWED ON Nightmares II, you play Even the more ornament, is instead a Core i7-8750H, Nvidia GTX 1050 Ti 4GB, 6 GB – possibly once living as a small boy trying to elaborate RAM – puppet boy, slumped make his way through puzzles never MULTIPLAYER over the chess piece, a world full of No get too eyes closed, limbs oversized, horrific roped in place, with a looking grown-ups, and LINK frustrating bit.ly/3aSnAdR small, yellow crown on one of these grown-ups his noggin. is a strict, elderly school teacher. That already sounds scary, so imagine my terror when her DON’T LOOK NOW neck starts to slither out from her It’s tempting to keep talking about shoulders with a deeply sinister Little Nightmares II’s visuals, but twitch. Eventually, it becomes a little while the aesthetics do play a big part overused and loses its sting, but the game always seems to know when a monster’s terror has become diluted, and shuffles them out for a new, often more horrific, beast. Six, your Even when the game over-eggs it companion a bit, you have to give it credit for throughout how much variation it squeezes into levels which, at first glance, seem the game, has incredibly similar. It’s hard to find a many uses screenshot which doesn’t have a Giving you puzzle greyish-blue hue, deliberately hints. underlit, with one small glow around the player character and something Helping you move lumpy looming in the shadowy heavy objects. background. Just looking at the Giving you a boost images in isolation, you’d be forgiven up ledges. for thinking the art style would get Throwing ropes old after a while. However, thanks to down for you. some intelligent level design puzzles Reaching out a and a relatively short runtime, it hand to help you never really does. leap across valleys. This is helped by the fact the set Getting pieces are so strange and compelling kidnapped, and that they become the centre of therefore giving you a attention. As well as the snakepurpose in life! necked school teacher, there’s an old

THE HELP

1 2 3 4 5 6

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in elevating the game’s inherent creepiness, the gameplay doesn’t just exist to lead you from one scene to the next. It offers very little instruction or handholding (apart from the literal handholding mechanic with your partner, Six), but that suits the eerie tones, and such trust in the player is welcome. For being a 2.5 platformer, Little Nightmares II makes the most of open spaces. You can wander off into the background and explore, finding hidden collectibles or Easter eggs nestled away. There are still limits to this – the camera remains fixed and eventually you’ll hit an invisible wall – but it makes the levels feel more like actual places and not like simple A to B throughlines as some sections can feel like in other sidescrollers. While exploration makes the levels more expansive than they initially appear to be, the puzzles often happen in small, truncated spaces. This makes it much easier to explore every nook and cranny for that hidden key, that secret lever, that solution satanically scrawled on the wall in erratic chalk markings. As a result, even the more elaborate ones never get too frustrating, because you always know the solution is here somewhere, you just have to find it. Unfortunately, whether it happens in big spaces or small spaces, the combat is pretty bad. Thankfully, it’s used sparingly, but if you ever have to fight your way out of a situation, prepare to be endlessly frustrated. That’s because all the melee weapons you’re provided with are too big for you, so you have to drag them across the floor, heave them up, then crash them down. Trying to get the timing right is tricky. Little Nightmares II gets most things right, but the combat is a swing and a (very slow) miss. VERDICT Little Nightmares II from Tarsier Studios understands exactly what it wants to be, and mostly pulls it off.

You spend most of the game as the hunted, not the hunter.

Ladling out death.

Buckets on strings = death, Home Alone style.

The game’s creepy environments are awash with thin light beams.

Is someone in here?

MAY 2021

FREE GAMES REVIEW COOL TITLES FOR NO CASH by Tom Sykes

They aren’t really balls, but the heads of the four protagonists.

Grab all the letters and the paddle will expand.

THAT’S A PADDLING

Breaking new ground in the Stranger Things-inspired LOCUST, U.S.A.

’ve never been much of a fan of Breakout, the venerable, pinballesque arcade game where you shunt a ball around using a paddle. There’s a lot of tedious waiting round while the ball slowly does its thing, then a few moments of frantic paddling as you try to both catch the ball and direct it to somewhere useful. I’m not saying that Locust, U.S.A. has converted me, but it has made Breakout fun, and I’m not sure I would have thought that possible. The theme of this is such fun. Basically, this is Breakout but Stranger Things is the primary Stranger Things, with every stage of flavour, but there’s also a dollop of the game themed around a creepy ’80s horror movies, and a big, high school or facility, and with Tron-shaped crouton at the top of sumptuous synths warbling over the the pot. I suppose that sounds a bit top. You’re still trying to whack messy, but it just means blocks with a paddle that every stage is and ball, but here those Every stage is surprising – right up blocks are joined by until the abrupt enemies and switches, surprising ending. collectible coins, and – right up until cliffhanger My favourite thing letters that spell out the cliffhanger about Locust, however, ‘LOCUST’ (that’s the is how it builds on the name of the town). ending ancient Breakout Every one of the formula. As with a handful of levels is physical pinball table, you can ‘nudge’ markedly different, in location and the screen to alter the trajectory of layout, but also in its objectives – the ball, giving you a tiny bit of input although you’re generally trying unlock/bust open a door, and then go while the thing is ricocheting around the level. It sounds like cheating, and through it. Interstitial bonus stages I’m sure in real pinball it is, but here offer the chance to improve your it’s limited by a timer that ensures score, while random events keep you can’t over-indulge. It just offers a things interesting by doling out little oomph to get you out of tricky boons, or occasionally curses, situations – or dump you in them multiple times during each level. 90

MAY 2021

NEED TO KNOW WHAT IS IT? Breakout meets pinball meets Stranger Things. And why not? EXPECT TO PAY Free DEVELOPER Harley Wilson PUBLISHER In-house REVIEWED ON AMD A4-6300@3.7GHz, 6GB RAM, GeForce GT 610 MULTIPLAYER None LINK bit.ly/LocustUSA

when you nudge at the wrong moment. It’s a nifty ‘gamble’ button, and it’s not the only random thing ‘ve found in Locust.

UPSIDE DOWN

There’s also the event meter, which fills up automatically as you play. When the bar is full, a slot machine starts rolling, and you’re either given a tasty reward or a kick in the shins. You might be given a bit of health back, or watch your paddle shrink before your eyes, or be gifted with a couple more balls to shunt around. These events, and the bonus stages, can be turned off in the options menu, but they don’t swing the action too wildly, and I enjoy the element of chance they introduce. Even more than the theming, it’s these quiet innovations that kept me interested in Locust. Whether they improve the Breakout formula, or just distract from it, I’m not sure, but I could play a whole lot more of this strange mash-up. VERDICT A great theme and solid innovations make this a worthy play for fans – and non-fans – of Breakout.

FREE GAMES REVIEW

WELL, WELL, WELL

Water every plant to win the stage.

Water works in creative puzzler OVERFLOW

he well of block-pushing puzzle games is not dry yet, and here’s another standout example in the form of Overflow: a game about sloshing water around in a bucket. You play as a cute little gardener attempting to water a bunch of plants, while trying to avoid watering the weeds placed all over the ground. There’s also a well that gradually fills, before overflowing with water. If that happens, you’ll fail the stage and have to restart. So yes, this is a little more complicated to grasp than many block-pushing games – there are no blocks, and no pushing for that matter, but it’s the same grid-based puzzling beneath the surface. The difference being the bucket, which allows you to ferry water from the well to all the thirsty, thirsty plants, but that will also leak onto every

other tile you visit. If you step on a weed while carrying water, it will turn into a movement-blocking bush on the next turn, and that’s clearly a bit of a hindrance in a game like this. Every single action matters here. You have to be extremely careful over your order of movement, although levels are short enough that restarting them is not really that much of a big deal. The concept soon expands with plants that need to be watered multiple times, and in increasingly demanding layouts. It’s a strong, inventive premise that’s only lightly explored in Overflow, but part of me likes that it hasn’t been wrung for all it’s worth – there’s room to grow. While I doubt I’ll be able to recall it in a few weeks’ time, this is the kind of quietly inventive puzzler that will perk you up on a dreary afternoon and it’s better than doing real back-breaking gardening.

You’ll need to water some plants twice or three times.

NEED TO KNOW EXPECT TO PAY Free

DEVELOPER shmoozey

LINK shmoozey.itch.io

PARADISE FOUND Deciphering CASTAWAY ON A WEIRD ISLAND

t first, Castaway is just utterly baffling. What does all that stuff on the screen mean? Even with the aid of the help button, it was quite a few runs before I understood it – but I’m hugely impressed by what’s going on. It’s a roguelike/puzzle game reminiscent of Minesweeper and sudoku, as it’s all about making educated guesses in stages that are swathed in a fog of war. You’re a castaway on a desert island – or should I say islands, as you’re forever leaving one blob of rock for another filled with hidden enemies and power-ups. Ignoring all that stuff at the screen borders for a moment, you can just uncover each tile randomly, by blundering into a scorpion, or a skeleton, or a restorative spa with the mouse or arrow keys, before you either find the raft and progress, or you die. That

would be fun enough, I suppose, but those borders are actually a veritable trove of information. Let’s start from the left. That pile of icons informs you of enemies and objects that are adjacent to one another, though not where exactly they’re located in the world. The icons at the top tell you, ‘this thing is in this column somewhere’, while the table on the right lists any objects near the sea, and how many aquatic tiles are surrounding them. So that’s three types of clues to jumble satisfyingly in your head, though you’re never given quite enough to eliminate the need for guesswork. That’s great, frankly. What would a roguelike be without an element of risk, after all? It’s the secret ingredient that binds this heady concoction together, and it’s kept me returning time and again to try and improve my score.

You can use guns and wands to defeat enemies remotely. Gems can be spent to unlock extra information.

NEED TO KNOW EXPECT TO PAY Free

DEVELOPER Captain Games

LINK captaingames.itch.io

MAY 2021

THEY’RE BACK OLD GAMES REVISITED by Matthew Elliott

Mall Santa surviving is the worst part about this.

I’ve honestly fluffed shots like this.

BRIAN XENO Fighting for my future in XCOM 2

t’s standard practice with an XCOM game to rename your troops after your friends. You can throw the ones you like less recklessly into battle. Or perform heroic deeds using the people you slightly fancy so you have a fresh reason to initiate conversation. But we like to push boundaries here at PC Gamer, so I’m entrusting no less than my potential happiness to XCOM 2. excuse for carelessness. I love the Instead of friends, I’m naming my gathering storm of the setting. It was squad after possible futures. It will hard enough to win an ongoing war break my heart to watch some of in the original XCOM, let alone one them die, so I’m hoping rookies that humans already lost 20 years Screenwriter and Bake Off Winner ago. The stakes are deliciously high will inspire me to take extra care. I’m and that collective desperation makes less worried about Deliveroo Driver. me take it all very And although all this seriously, even if my sounds a bit silly, XCOM 2 is so good that Sure enough, I squad names suggest what starts as a joke lose one of my the opposite. The game doesn’t quickly becomes a career choices waste any time keeping knuckle-whitening in the first me safe. Even the obsession. I have to tutorial features a keep Screenwriter alive mission hopeless death, as if to at any cost, and not just acclimatise me to the because she wears a cool bandana and has been promoted constant spectre of failure. And, sure enough, I lose one of my career three times. choices in the first mission. So long, There are other reasons to be Director: if I wanted you to live I invested. The opening missions, should probably have studied film, which establish the unlikely, heroic not law. (I can always be a producer return of your commander, make me instead.) I barely have time to adjust feel personally responsible for every to this loss before things get worse. death, which is appropriate given I’ve forgotten that XCOM rarely lets there’s literally nobody else to blame. “But I had a 67% chance to hit!” is no you sit back and wait for conflict to 92

MAY 2021

NEED TO KNOW WHAT IS IT? A crash course in learning to deal with failure. Plus aliens EXPECT TO PAY £35 DEVELOPER Firaxis Games PUBLISHER 2K REVIEWED ON Intel Core i7-7700 CUP @ 3.60GHz, 16 GB RAM, NVIDIA GeForce GTX 1070, Windows 10 MULTIPLAYER No LINK bit.ly/37I4hlm

come to you. Instead, the game twists and surprises like a belligerent eel.

CASHING OUT

One of the sectoid enemies mind controls Millionaire from a distance, essentially turning them into a human explosion who’s happy to destroy themselves if it means killing my team. I can’t risk it. And so, in what might turn out to be a depressing snapshot of the future, I sacrifice wealth for creativity: Screenwriter ends Millionaire with a sniper round to the head. A more superstitious man might take this as proof that I’ll never get rich writing, but it’s not going to stop me calling a character ‘Billionaire’. And if that fails I’ll settle for ‘Comfortable’ and never let them go on a mission. By the end of the mission all I have left is my heroic Screenwriter and a gravely wounded Pianist. Thankfully, Mall Santa is waiting back at base, ready to get stuck in if my fortunes fail to improve. VERDICT The sort of game that demands your attention no matter how flippantly you approach it. It’s tactical brilliance.

REVIEW

FLOOD DAMAGE

Switching weapons here would be admitting defeat.

Pretend the last 14 years didn’t happen with HALO 3 “

onestly, what is the point of re-reviewing Halo 3?” you might say. “It’s perfect.” You are correct. But it’s important I confirm it’s perfect in the way I want. I need to know I can set up a custom game via Steam with the settings I like and the weapons I prefer, and play the same four maps until I turn to dust. I’m pleased to report that, unlike the original release of The Master Chief Collection, this is mostly possible. There are a few hurdles to get over. I have to log into my Microsoft account before I can even get to the menu, which is the sort of thing that should appear on a Buzzfeed list of things that make you irrationally angry alongside accidentally yanking out your earphones. Even the chipper way the game asks boils my piss. “Let’s get you signed in.” Don’t talk to me like that, game. You’re not a

Very similar to the hammock I write all my articles from.

cuddly nan pouring me hot chocolate to lift my spirits on a dreary day. Let me sign in after I get to the main menu, because this is my game and I’ll do what I want. The purist in me hates that I can’t limit the weapons on the map to the classic Halo 3 selections, too. Yes, I want random weapons, but I don’t want that bullshit Sentinel Beam. And 343’s wretched menus mean that even changing teams is now a faff. So now I’ve got 50 words left to justify that score. Multiplayer is magnificent – an echo of childhood gaming sessions where hours fall away like clumps of snow. The maps are so good that even now, 14 years and thousands of games later, I’m still finding fresh angles and tactics. The interplay of weapons is peerless. Even if every game of Halo 3 was hidden behind a cursed wall, I’d still risk it just to play 2v2 on Blackout.

HYPNOSPACE OUTLAW

NEED TO KNOW EXPECT TO PAY £7

DEVELOPER 343 Interactive

PUBLISHER Xbox Game Studios

File under ‘screenshots you can hear if you’re over 30’.

OUTER WILDS erhaps Outer Wilds is the worst game imaginable for someone as easily distracted as me. I find it hard enough to even get off my folksy home planet without checking on its inhabitants, let alone traverse a neat galaxy of interesting things in search of buried truth. It’s like trying to make a Labrador traverse a snack corridor just so he can do long division. Thankfully, the central mystery in Outer Wilds is compelling enough that I’m happy to repeatedly hop into my ship and jet into space, even if I do it so often I begin to see wooden launch towers in my sleep. I don’t even mind that the autopilot flew me directly through the middle of the sun. Technically, that’s my fault.

If you play Halo you can hear this green.

lright, so I’ve gone for a loose theme of space this month – but I never specified what kind of space. And there’s something about Hypnospace Outlaw that’s both comforting and deeply unsettling. It’s pleasant because it recalls a simpler time of dial-up modems, constantlyengaged phone lines, and comedy AOL email notifications. But it’s also harrowing, because what feels like recent history is now a period piece for some people. The stuff on display here is further in the theoretical past than the setting of That ’70s Show was in the ’90s. Thankfully, the gentle detective work on offer here is a compelling distraction from the grinding wheel of time that will pulverise us all.

Are solar flares the real enemy? No, it’s other people.

CATASTRONAUTS

hile ‘Overcooked in space’ isn’t a very accurate description for Catastronauts – that would just be rehydrating bags of curry and sucking up gobbets of energy drink as they floated past. Which, to be fair, is a game I’d definitely play. This is more like a 3D, multiplayer FTL, where everything goes wrong at once and you watch your hopes and dreams turn to cosmic debris. It’s much more fun than I’ve made it sound, and at least this way you have somebody else to blame when everything explodes.

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96 GROUP TEST

The best mechanical keyboards around.

100 TECH REPORT

102 BUYER’S GUIDE

Three great builds to get you started, no matter your budget.

Will Gabe Newell control our minds one day?

MAY 2021

GROUP TEST

MECHANICAL KEYBOARDS Can you even call it a mechanical keyboard if it doesn’t make a satisfying clack? By Jacob Ridley

OFFERS HIGH FLEXIBILITY WITHOUT SACRIFICING FUNCTIONALITY

MAY 2021

HARDWARE Group Test

he wonderful thing about PC gaming is that just about anything can be an input device if you try hard enough, yet I can think of no better way to game than by making a ruckus with every lovely button press on a mechanical keyboard. The sweet, slick key press of a mechanical switch will have your fingers feeling less fatigued, your response times swifter, and your key presses more absolute. There’s also room for more personalisation beyond the rubber dome. From a smooth linear action to a typewriter-esque clack, and a range of RGB lighting configurations, there’s something for everyone in the land of mech boards. That’s why we’ve rounded up a selection of gaming keyboards for this month’s group test – everything from wireless low-profile kit to the latest in optical switch tech – to find out which are worthy of your dextrous digits.

G915 wireless

GMMK

LOGITECH £210

GLORIOUS £129

Smooth going without a wire

Flexible and customisable

If you must pick up a wireless keyboard then the Logitech G915 is a fine candidate. You’ll be required to spend a little bit more for wireless functionality over what we tend to see for wired mechanical keyboards with similar features – the Logitech G915 is £210. There’s a cheaper TKL version, but not so much so that we’d instantly recommend it over the full-size model. What you get for that cash investment is a sleek and sturdy board plated in brush aluminium. There’s some smart media controls in the upper right-hand corner of the board, including a

Known to most as the GMMK, the Glorious Modular Mechanical Keyboard offers high flexibility without sacrificing functionality. That’s namely down to the inclusion of a hot-swappable base board able to be fitted with a vast range of mechanical key switches for expansive customisation. Pick up 105 switches of your choice, or a combination of a few, and you can mix-and-match to your liking – no solder required. There are also a few standard options from Gateron and Kailh if you prefer to make a single purchase. Each offers a slightly different twist on the

lovely volume wheel, and there’s a handful of macro keys down the left-side of the keyboard. These can be programmed to whatever you see fit on a per-app or per-game basis from within the Logitech G software. Beneath that stylish exterior lies fantastically responsive Kailh-made GL key switches. You can pick from linear, tactile, or clicky, and we recommend the latter if you really want to make a racket while playing.

VERDICT Decent battery life Top quality build Snappy low-profile switches

firm linear favourites, from tactile and clicky sets to switches with rapid actuation. To do all that while retaining RGB lighting is pretty damn impressive as well, and the included keycaps make sure this board shines bright amongst the others. I just wish it had some discrete media keys to top it all off. However, when it’s available for around half the cost of the next keyboard on this list, these omissions are easily forgiven.

VERDICT Interchangeable switches Minimal style Damned affordable

SPECS SWITCH: GL LOW-PROFILE / SIZE: FULL-SIZE (TKL AVAILABLE) / BACKLIGHTS: RGB / PASSTHROUGH: NONE /

SPECS SWITCH: INTERCHANGEABLE / SIZE: FULL-SIZE / BACKLIGHTS: RGB / PASSTHROUGH: NONE / MEDIA

MEDIA CONTROLS: DEDICATED / WRIST REST: NONE / KEYCAPS: ABS / CONNECTION: LIGHTSPEED WIRELESS

CONTROLS: FUNCTION KEY SHORTCUTS / WRIST REST: SOLD SEPARATELY / KEYCAPS: ABS / CONNECTION: WIRED

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GROUP TEST

HANDLES PRETTY MUCH EVERYTHING YOU COULD WANT FROM A GAMING KEYBOARD

K100 RGB Platinum Optical

Everest Max

CORSAIR £229

MOUNTAIN £230

As good as mechanical keyboards can currently get

A seriously solid, ultra-versatile board

There’s no getting away from the fact that this is a serious pile of cash to drop on a keyboard. An absolutely impressive keyboard, to be sure, that handles pretty much everything you could want from a gaming keyboard, but it’s fair to say that there are plenty of cheaper keyboards that also tick that particular box. It’s the myriad of extras that sets this apart from the rest though, and not just the per-key RGB lighting, although that is impressive. The volume wheel has a reassuring solidity and the media keys work well, while the new control wheel offers up even

If you want to go all the way with the Mountain Everest gaming keyboard then you can find yourself down a rather expensive rabbit hole. But down in that particular den you can craft a board to suit your every whim, should you be able to afford it. The Everest Core Barebones is the heart of the package, a brushed aluminium tenkeyless RGB board that you can buy without switches or keycaps, for you to build your own custom keyboard however you want. If that seems too much effort you can pick the Everest up in TKL form with the standard Core, its

more immediacy to your shortcuts. There’s also the 4,000Hz polling rate and 1mm actuation point to help drive home that you are in control while gaming with it. Despite using optical switches it’s worth noting that it doesn’t support variable actuation points or analog input. Instead, Corsair has focused purely on the more-traditional mechanical keyboard experience, and that’s something it nails brilliantly.

VERDICT Responsive optical switches All the RGB, all the time Premium build quality

simple black keys and choice of Cherry MX mechanical switches. Go further and you can add a numpad – which attaches on either side of the board – and a media control with customisable LCD display. As a newcomer to the market, the Mountain software was initially an issue, but that has improved considerably since launch. It’s a fantastic package, and one which has become a mainstay of my videogaming setup.

VERDICT Your board, how you want it Really well built Neat LCD display

SPECS SWITCH: CORSAIR OPX / SIZE: FULL SIZE / BACKLIGHTS: RGB / PASSTHROUGH: USB / MEDIA CONTROLS:

SPECS SWITCH: CHERRY MX RED, BLUE, BROWN, SILVER / SIZE: TKL OR FULL SIZE / PASSTHROUGH: USB / MEDIA

DEDICATED / WRIST REST: DETACHABLE / KEYCAPS: PBT DOUBLE-SHO / CONNECTION: WIRED (USB)

CONTROLS: DEDICATED / WRIST REST: DETACHABLE (MAGNET) / KEYCAPS: ABS / CONNECTION: WIRED USB TYPE-C

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HARDWARE Group Test

WIRED OR WIRELESS?

For most PC gamers wireless connectivity is something of a nonessential – a wired model will offer simple and battery-free operation that will prove itself just as performant as any cable-free alternative. Yet there are some cases where a wireless keyboard makes sense. Take those of us with standing desks, for example. A wireless board makes for one less cable run to worry about when shifting desk height. Similarly, if you’re a fan of gaming from your couch then a wireless model makes it that much easier to get gaming in comfort. Wireless keyboards also make for a cleaner desktop, if that’s your thing. Although you’ll have to worry about battery life, which can be a pain especially if you’re already attempting to juggle multiple battery-powered devices.

Huntsman v2 Analog

KM360

RAZER £250

G.SKILL £56

So close, yet so far away…

Super bright, solid, and simple

The promise of the Razer Huntsman v2 Analog is something quite spectacular in PC gaming terms. It offers the twin benefits of precision mouse and keyboard control and the fine, analogue control of a game pad’s thumbsticks. The new Razer Analog Optical Switches are designed to translate control all the way along the travel of the switch. That means a simple keyboard switch can become something akin to an analogue trigger, or a thumbstick, or even have dual operation. The example is to have the first actuation point equip a grenade

and the bottom of the travel prompt your in-game character to throw it. The way it ought to work is you set a gaming profile in software, tie WSAD to simulate analog movement in-game, and you can finally use a mouse and keyboard to do the sort of stealthing about you’ve not previously been able to. But, in reality, it doesn’t always hook into every game, and sometimes it disables my connected USB joypads entirely.

VERDICT Razer’s switches go analogue Lovely new wrist rest Can disable USB controllers

There is a trend towards £200+ gaming keyboards in the market at the moment, but that doesn’t mean there aren’t quality mechanical switch boards available at a more reasonable price. Often you’ll find these more budget-oriented options offering cheap switches from other manufacturers, but the G.Skill KM360 comes featuring the classic Cherry MX Red linear switch out of the gate. If you can’t cope with your gaming board not lit up like a rainbow then you may be disappointed with the singlecolour option, but damn, the

white LEDs on this G.Skill board are the brightest I’ve ever seen. Normally I like to keep at maximum brightness all day long, but the KM360 would burn out my retina if I did. This TKL board is basic, but what it does, it does very well. It’s solid, well-built, reliable and looks pretty decent too. There’s no wrist rest, no passthrough, or media controls, but I’ll happily give it a pass in favour of affordable functionality.

VERDICT Affordable Reliable Cherry MX switches Bright white LED

SPECS SWITCH: RAZER ANALOG OPTICAL / SIZE: FULL SIZE / PASSTHROUGH: USB 3.0 / MEDIA CONTROLS: DEDICATED

SPECS SWITCH: CHERRY MX RED / SIZE: TKL / PASSTHROUGH: NONE / MEDIA CONTROLS: INTEGRATED / WRIST

/ WRIST REST: DETACHABLE (MAGNETIC RGB) / KEYCAPS: PBT DOUBLE-SHOT / CONNECTION: WIRED USB TYPE-A

REST: NONE / KEYCAPS: ABS / CONNECTION: WIRED USB TYPE-C

MAY 2021

T EC H REP O RT

Image credit: University of Essex

A transcranial magnetic simulation unit being used to induce currents in cortical neurons thereby changing cortical signal processing.

DEEP THINKING Could Gabe Newell’s mind control dreams become reality?

abe Newell, chief plumber at Valve and part-time Half-Life 3 tease, held forth on New Zealand TV show 1 News earlier this year on the subject of braincomputer interfaces.

It turns out he’s all in favour of them, and Valve is working on software to interpret the signals from our brains, using hardware described as being ‘like a modified VR helmet’. From our experience, that means it will be largely sampling from around the eye area, but that’s probably where the ‘modified’ part comes in. He’s been working with OpenBCI, a company taking an open-source approach to BCIs, and told 1 News, “If you’re a software developer in 2022 who doesn’t have one of these in your test lab, you’re making a silly mistake.” Wise words, indeed. Newell has been hanging out in New Zealand to shelter from the pandemic, and BCIs seem to have become his pet project while he’s out there. Newell’s not necessarily talking about connecting you directly to your games, however, but reading your mind-state to improve the immersion of the interactive experience you’re playing. If a BCI can measure whether you’re excited, frightened, or elated, it can better tailor the experience to push those feelings further. Newell took things another step, however, speculating about being able to write feelings back to the brain. “You’re 100

MAY 2021

used to experiencing the world through eyes,” Newell said, “but eyes were created by this low-cost bidder that didn’t care about failure rates and RMAs, and if it got broken there was no way to repair anything effectively, which totally makes sense from an evolutionary perspective, but is not at all reflective of consumer preferences. “So the visual experience, the visual fidelity we’ll be able to create – the real world will stop being the metric that we apply to the best possible visual fidelity. The real world will seem flat, colourless, blurry compared to the experiences you’ll be able to create in people’s brains. Where it gets weird is when who you are becomes editable through a BCI. One of the early applications I expect we’ll see is improved sleep – sleep will become an app that you run where you say ‘Oh I need this much sleep, I need this much REM.’”

READ ONLY MEMORIES Which sounds rather terrifying, but it is not out of the realms of possibility according to Professor Reinhold Scherer, who studies and builds BSIs at the University of Essex, “Neurostimulation can induce or evoke feelings, and also sleep,” he explains. “The question is how targeted the stimulation must be to create a specific effect or perception. There are several invasive and non-invasive approaches to modulate cortical activity so, in principle, it is ‘easy’ to stimulate the brain.”

Digging deeper Planting electrodes in the brain has been used as a treatment for Parkinson’s disease since 1997, and epilepsy since 2018. The implanted electrodes are powered by a battery pack under the skin, and after a week to settle are switched on and fiddled with until the maximum benefit is reached.

HARDWARE

FAR LEFT: A multichannel EEG and eye-tracker being used in a videogamelike situation to study decision making. LOWER LEFT: A volunteer plays World of WarCraft with his mind as part of a trial into BCIs.

Image credit: University of Essex

Image credit: Miha Fras

Tech Report

How BCIs can be put to use Image credit: Card79

M I N D O V E R M AT T E R

1 TRE ATMENT

Deep brain stimulation can be used to treat Parkinson’s disease.

2 STIMUL ATION

And it can be used to treat OCD too – this X-ray shows a patient.

What’s much harder, though, is stimulating, or reading, it accurately – at least without drilling holes in someone’s skull. Elon Musk may brag about his monkey that can potentially play Pong through a BCI, but there’s more Black & Decker than black magic involved there. “It’s not an unhappy monkey,” Musk said during a talk on Clubhouse, some sort of new social media app we don’t really understand and can’t be bothered to look into. “You can’t even see where the neural implant was put in, except that he’s got a slight dark mohawk.” Which makes it OK, we guess. As the monkey certainly discovered, there’s hair, skin, a chunk of bone, some membranes and a layer of fluid between the surface of your brain and any electrodes that want to read its activity. The bits of your brain underneath are not always the same size or in the same place from person to person either, making calibration of a BCI a tricky process. “If you play a lot of piano, then probably your hand-eye coordination area will be larger than someone who plays [football], who will have more coordination with his feet,” says Scherer. “When you’re measuring from the outside, it’s like being a reporter at a [football] stadium. You have a mic and a helicopter, and you’re sent 5000m above the stadium and are asked to record a conversation between two people.” Put like that, we can see the attraction of lowering your mic further into the stadium by drilling through its osseous roof. In a 2016 Pew Research survey of US adults, however, only 34% were either ‘very’ or ‘somewhat’ enthusiastic about having chips implanted into their skulls, whereas a nice 69% were

3 HEARING

This baby’s cochlear implant directly stimulates the auditory nerve.

4 STYLE

This is the visible part of a Neuralink device, designed by Card79.

either ‘very’ or ‘somewhat’ worried about the idea. The cyborgs of the future may be a rare breed. Musk defines much of the population as cyborgs already, however, because we have a ‘tertiary digital layer’ provided by phones and PCs. “With a direct neural interface, we can improve the bandwidth between your cortex and your digital tertiary layer by many orders of magnitude,” he said. “I’d say probably at least 1,000, or maybe 10,000, or more.” Back at Essex, where they have a strict no-drills policy, the impetus is on improving the sensitivity of electroencephalograph headsets, and training users to do things with them. Things such as playing World of Warcraft, where it took about 20 hours for players to train their brains to emit the right signals. Luckily, though, “Once you establish the specific pattern, it is rather robust,” says Scherer. “I trained with the students, and we went on to do a different project that interfaced to Google Earth so you could move around and play music from different countries.” Having trained in Cerebro-World-of-Warcraft, it took much less time to start using Mental Google Earth. There’s a sense here of some very rich men speculating about the future of BCIs, and academics shaking their heads and raising signs that say “I think you’ll find it’s not as easy as that”. Some limited BCIs are already with us, and whatever the pace of development, they’ll keep coming until we’re finally offered the opportunity to have a chip embedded in our motor cortex. Who amongst us would turn that down?

MUSK DEFINES MUCH OF THE POPULATION AS CYBORGS ALREADY

Ian Evenden

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101

YOUR NEXT PC

BUYER’S GUIDE Build the best PC for your budget

ADVANCED

MID-RANGE

BUDGET

KEY Budget build

Mid-range build

Advanced build

PC gaming is for everyone. Pick the parts you want to build a new, well-rounded PC for a good price.

You want to run every new game at 1080p 60fps. This recommended build will see you through.

You’re looking for the best PC on the market and superior components. But you still want to spend smart.

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HARDWARE

MOTHERBOARD PROCESSOR GRAPHICS CARD COOLER

Wraith Stealth

MEMORY

Vengeance 8GB DDR4 (2x4GB)

POWER SUPPLY

CX Series CX550

SSD

WD Blue SN550 500GB

HDD

WD Blue 1TB 7200rpm

Neos

AMD £115 AMD has packed its Zen 2 architecture into a speedy four-core package, and that’s great for gaming.

Gigabyte £165 The GTX 1650 Super is much more than a rebrand of the GTX 1650, securing it the budget crown.

AMD Free with the CPU Gone are the days when a stock cooler was little more than a bonus paperweight. AMD’s Wraith Stealth delivers.

Corsair £40 The new norm for gaming is 16GB, but dual-channel 8GB memory is enough to get by for most.

Corsair £74 Corsair’s reputation for quality PSUs precedes them. You know you’re in safe hands here.

Western Digital £67 Just because it’s a budget SSD, doesn’t mean it has to be slow, as the WD SN550 proves with its speedy NVMe connectivity.

Western Digital £37 You don’t necessarily need a HDD in 2020, but if you’re a virtual hoarder, this’ll give you loads of useful extra space.

DISPLAY

BitFenix £36 You’ll want to minimise how often you rebuild your PC, so make sure to give it a good home. This case’ll do nicely.

GW2280

KEYBOARD

T O TA L £849

GeForce GTX 1650 Super

MSI £95 A healthy dose of ports and PCIe SSD support has this B450 at the heart of our budget build.

G213

MOUSE

Enjoy 1080p gaming without breaking the bank

Ryzen 3 3300X

G102

HEADSET

BUDGET BUILD

B450-A Pro Max

CASE

Buyer’s Guide

BenQ £105 A 1080p60 VA monitor will see you through in style and, once you upgrade, will make a superb second monitor.

Logitech £40 It may be a membrane switch board, but it’s stylish, and well-built. Sometimes that’s worth more than cheap clicky switches.

Logitech £35 A classic shape delivered in a sleek shell, this mouse fits all hand sizes and grips. A solid option for the money.

HS35

Corsair £40 This headset delivers in-game with its punchy drivers and clear microphone – perfect for video calls and multiplayer alike.

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HARDWARE

104

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MOTHERBOARD PROCESSOR GRAPHICS CARD COOLER

Wraith Spire

MEMORY

Ballistix 16GB DDR4 (2x8GB)

POWER SUPPLY

CX650M

SSD

S70 1TB

HDD

WD Blue 1TB 7200rpm

CASE

Eclipse P400S TG

DISPLAY

T O TA L £1,438

GeForce RTX 3060 Ti Founders Ed.

AOC G2590FX

KEYBOARD

Our recommended build for playing the latest games

Ryzen 5 3600X

Alloy FPS

MOUSE

MID-RANGE BUILD

B450 Tomahawk Max

Model O-

HEADSET

Buyer’s Guide

Blackshark V2

MSI £120 A reliable platform for your build, the Tomahawk Max also comes in black to complement any style.

AMD £198 This CPU is one of the greats, and uses the Zen 2 architecture to dominate in gaming and productivity.

Nvidia £369 The RTX 3060 Ti is a little overkill but we’re willing to make sacrifices elsewhere to make it work.

AMD Free with the CPU We love a freebie, especially one as capable as the cooler included with the 3600X. This’ll keep your machine running smoothly.

Crucial £75 With plenty of capacity at 16GB, this unembellished memory has everything you need for gaming and more.

Corsair £93 The heart of your gaming PC is your PSU, and this 650W Corsair promises to keep your rig ticking nicely.

Addlink £70 Building on a budget doesn’t mean sacrificing speed – the Addlink S70 proves you can indeed have both.

Western Digital £37 Just like in the budget build, this HDD isn’t strictly necessary, but for a pretty low price it’s nice to have plenty of extra space.

Phanteks £70 An ATX case is all you need for this build. We like this one because it’s simple, functional, and really nice to look at.

AOC £173 Everything a PC gamer could want: Full HD, 144Hz refresh rate, 1ms response time, AMD FreeSync and Nvidia G-Sync compatible.

HyperX £80 As the name suggests, this keyboard is built like an absolute tank, with a steel frame and Cherry MX switches.

Glorious £59 Lightweight and responsive, the Model Ohas made a name for itself among streamers and pros thanks to its clever design.

Razer £94 The Blackshark V2 offers up some killer audio quality to rival the greats. And at a reasonable price too.

HARDWARE

MOTHERBOARD PROCESSOR GRAPHICS CARD COOLER

Kraken X63

MEMORY

Vengeance RGB Pro 32GB DDR4 (2x16GB) @ 3,200

POWER SUPPLY

SuperNOVA 1000 G5 Gold

SSD

WD Black SN750 1TB

HDD

860 QVO 2TB

CASE

600C

DISPLAY

T O TA L £3,666

GeForce RTX 3080 Founders Edition

Nitro XV273K

KEYBOARD

Go above and beyond with a PC powerful enough to end worlds

Core i9 10900K

G915 Lightspeed

MOUSE

ADVANCED BUILD

MPG Z490 Gaming Carbon WiFi

G502 Lightspeed

HEADSET

Buyer’s Guide

Arctis 7 Wireless

MSI £260 A heady mix of enthusiast motherboard functionality and build quality that stops short of god-tier motherboard pricing.

Intel £529 If you want the fastest gaming CPU, look no further than Intel’s flagship Core i9.

Nvidia £649 The RTX 3080 is the flagship graphics card of an entire new GPU generation.

NZXT £123 One of the most stunning AIO coolers rebuilt with an updated pump and, of course, RGB lighting for more pizzazz.

Corsair £176 If you truly want to show off, even your system memory should be aglow with RGB.

EVGA £200 This calibre of gaming PC draws a lot of power. Thankfully, this PSU can handle it with high efficiency

Western Digital £169 Western Digital is back on Samsung’s heels with this brilliantly fast, yet affordable, 1TB M.2 NVMe SSD.

Samsung £195 Built on QLC flash memory, it’s not the quickest storage around, but it’s a speedy alternative to an HDD.

Corsair £135 If you’re going big on parts, you should grab a case that has plenty of room for upgrades down the line. This one will do just fine.

Acer £780 This one’s an easy choice – 4K and 144Hz for under a grand is an offer we can’t refuse, and neither should you.

Logitech £210 Low-profile mechanical switches are just the icing on the cake that is the superb, wireless Logitech G915.

Logitech £110 With a lengthy battery life and a phenomenal sensor to keep you gaming at your best, the G502 is undoubtedly one of the finest.

SteelSeries £130 If you’ve settled on a wireless keyboard and mouse, the last thing you want is a pesky cable to your headset.

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105

EXTRA LIFE CONTINUED ADVENTURES IN GAMING

The more planets you colonise, the bigger your empire can grow.

“Establishing slipways is as simple as drawing a line between two planets” Building a space empire in SLIPWAYS, one trade route at a time very strategy game or management sim I play, the same thing happens. I love it at first, but then my city, space empire, civilisation, or whatever it is grows to a certain size, and the micromanagement becomes unbearable. The joy is sucked out of the experience and I quit, destined never to finish a game.

I’ve lost count of how many abandoned empires are sitting in my Steam cloud saves, destined never to be completed. So when I heard about Slipways, a new strategy game that lets you build a space empire without the busywork or time investment, I felt like someone had made a game specifically for me. 106

MAY 2021

A N D Y K E L LY THIS MONTH Created a vast space empire in time for dinner. ALSO PLAYED

Yakuza Kiwami 2

Start a new game and you emerge from a wormhole into an unexplored, randomised galaxy. Launch probes from the wormhole and planets are revealed, which can be colonised. Each planet, depending on its biome and available natural resources, supports a different kind of industry, such as farming, robot manufacture, water production and many more. The key to building a successful space empire is connecting these

planets with slipways – think sci-fi shipping lanes – in such a way that your planets work together. An agricultural world will be able to produce a small amount of food on its own for the factories on a nearby planet, but production will speed up dramatically, and the factories will be happier, if you supply them with a steady flow of workers. So if you’ve settled another planet in the region that produces workers, connect it to your farming world with a slipway and you’ll create a supply

THE MAGIC OF SLIPWAYS IS HOW MUCH FUN CREATING THESE LITTLE ROUTES IS

N O W P L AY I N G THE GAMES WE LOVE RIGHT NOW

You can zoom into colonised planets for a closer look.

Tread carefully in the temples of the dead gods.

You can’t cross one slipway over another, so it pays to think ahead.

“Learning how each one operates is vital” Learning to love traps in CURSE OF THE DEAD GODS chain that boosts your profits and keeps the factory workers happy. But here’s where things get tricky: the planet producing the workers needs resources too. A clean water supply, perhaps. So you’ll need to connect their world to a planet that produces water with a slipway, otherwise they’ll experience a resource shortage and the happiness of your empire will suffer. And if people grow too unhappy, or you go bankrupt, it’s game over.

MILLIWAYS

But the magic of Slipways is how much fun creating these little routes between planets is. The game’s interface is readable, snappy and simple to use, and establishing slipways is as simple as dragging a line between two planets. Watching the slipways form, and tiny resources being beamed back and forth through them, is extremely satisfying. And not an inch of the UI is wasted, presenting all the key data in a way that allows for quick decision making. It’s one of the best-feeling games I’ve played in ages, with a clean, presentation and a relaxing ambient soundtrack that perfectly complements its laid back vibe. I also love that there’s no combat whatsoever. This is really refreshing, and as someone who just likes building stuff, only makes me love it more. Slipways is out later this year, and it’s worth keeping an eye on.

ROBIN VALENTINE THIS MONTH Got killed by an ‘elemental egg’ and liked it. ALSO PLAYED

Legends of Runeterra, Loop Hero

hese days it takes a lot for a roguelike to stand out, so it was a pleasant surprise for me this month to be so wowed by Curse of the Dead Gods (see our review on p82). The punchy combat, grim atmosphere, and meaningful decision-making sucked me in immediately. But one of the things that impresses me most about it is the traps.

I struggle to think of any game where I’ve found traps fun. Usually they’re anti-fun – the thing that slows you down, or punishes you for inattention. But here they’re a thrill. As you explore the dark temples, you encounter all manner of deadly devices left behind by the architects – from electric landmines to living statues. Learning how each one operates is vital to survival. Avoiding them is simple, in theory – each has a short animation before it goes off, giving you just enough time to dodge. But all of the game’s other systems factor in to how you approach them. You only have limited stamina for dodging, for

example – which means if you run into a trap when you’re out of breath, you won’t be able to escape. Light is important, too – being in darkness causes you to take more damage from foes, but it also obscures traps, driving you to always be seeking out sources of illumination.

GET OVER HERE

But they can be turned to your advantage, too. Enemies don’t set them off, but they do take damage from them – and one of the items in the game allows you to recover health every time a monster is killed by one. Kiting foes doesn’t just feel like some awkward way to cheese fights. It’s an exciting test of your evasion and timing skills. Traps even interact with other traps. A fire launcher might set webbed ground alight, which then reaches an explosive pot and sets it off, for example. Often these interactions are woven together into cascading gauntlets, triggered by your approach. Rather than being a nasty surprise, they’re an inviting challenge, baited with gold. Can you figure out what’s going to happen when you step over the threshold? How much treasure do you think you can gather as you sprint to safety? That’s the key to it – traps aren’t an added annoyance, they’re another layer of decisions in a game already full of them. I think for the first time ever, I don’t feel hard done by when I die to spikes underfoot. MAY 2021

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N O W P L AY I N G THE GAMES WE LOVE RIGHT NOW Taking bets on whether I land this.

Your board gets knackered with each fresh trick.

“I veer off course, stumble over my feet, and send the skater careening” Breaking virtual shins in SESSION ast September, I made the ill-considered decision to get into skateboarding as an adult – and not to brag, but I reckon I’ve gotten rather good at it. But while I got in a good few weeks of tearing through town while the weather held up, a Scottish winter predictably binned my plans to spend every free minute busting out sick moves. So, in the meantime, I’ve started popping a few ollies around Session, one of the growing number of skate-’em-ups gunning for Skate’s long-absent throne.

Let’s be real for a moment. Session is rough. After a year and a half in Early Access, the game’s still very clearly not done, with rampant physics glitches, unfinished character models, and only the most barebones structure. It’s only this year that the game stopped hilariously ragdolling you at the smallest collision. But for all its jankiness, Session actually gives me the same sort of dopamine rush I get whenever I throw down a board at the local park. See, while there are some loose challenges and missions to take on, Session largely wants you to find your 108

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Final Fantasy XIV Online, Halo 3

own spots – to explore its facsimile of some iconic New York streets and skateparks and figure out how you wanna shred ’em. I spot a ramp popped in front of a trash heap with a long, gentle downwards incline leading up to it, and decide I’m gonna treflip over the garbage. It takes a good dozen or so tries – I veer off course, stumble over my own feet, and send the poor skater careening into the street after clipping a bin bag. But with enough persistence, I nail it and I feel incredible. It’s a similar sensation to when I finally landed a 50-50 grind off the steps in town after spending an afternoon battling the trick a week

MY DIGITAL SKATER CAN PULL OFF MORE TRICKS THAN MY WOBBLY, UNTRAINED LEGS

prior, or finally landing my first ollie after months of trying. Obviously, my digital skater can pull off more tricks than my wobbly, untrained legs, so the lines are more complex – and more dangerous. I have a bash at chaining a grind into a nose-stall at the edge of a five-storey building, an act that breaks my skater’s neck ten times over. Twenty minutes later, I land it. Didn’t even have to call an ambulance.

NOLLIE

Between spots, I get to hone my tricks with every passing curb or bench. Like Skate, tricks are a little more difficult to do than slamming a gamepad button, as the analogue sticks are tied to your front and back feet. It’s fiddly at first, but much like how I’ve built muscle memory for popping an ollie, I’m slowly beginning to internalise how to wrangle the sticks to form a shuvit, kickflip, or noseslide. Cruising around New York, I can see a future where I too can effortlessly flip and slide down Edinburgh’s streets. Tony Hawk’s Pro Skater 3 pushed me to pick up a board for the first time. Now, over 20 years later, Session is motivating me to become a better skater. I’m down with that.

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“Leaderboard rivalries are called ‘friendships’ in 2021” The ennui of staring at better players’ scores in HITMAN 3’s leaderboards hree minutes and three seconds. That’s Phil Savage’s time in the Dubai level of Hitman 3. The closing chapter in IO Interactive’s trilogy only recently launched, and I’m fifth out of the seven friends I’ve accumulated on the Epic Games Store for the purposes of comparing leaderboard scores. I’ll never beat Phil’s score in Dubai. I’ll never beat former PC Gamer writer and game developer Tom Francis, either. I’m filled with shame.

My friend Dave, though, is at the bottom of the leaderboard with a score that’s around a third of mine. Ha! Good old Dave. He always knows just how to cheer me up. Leaderboard rivalries are what we call friendships in 2021. The problem is, I’ve wiped my progress in Hitman 3 and I’m starting again. I played the game before release, being in the privileged position that I am to receive review code, and I knocked through all the levels in story mode pretty quickly. By importing my Hitman 2 progress, however – where I waged a leaderboard war with Phil back in The Dartmoor level really captures the dreary atmosphere of… England.

The levels in this game are great, and amazing in a couple of cases – Dartmoor’s immersive murder mystery is dazzling the first time, and it’s a top level to try and optimise in subsequent playthroughs. Mendoza, a giant Argentina-set stage where Agent 47 can infiltrate a Bond lair-style locale which is hidden by a vineyard, is one of the best levels of the entire trilogy. It’s so big, though, that I’m struggling to get really good at bringing my time down in that one.

SAMUEL ROBERTS THIS MONTH Became a desperate version of Agent 47. ALSO PLAYED GTA Online, Destiny 2

2018 – my Hitman 3 progress has been reset. And now I’m crawling back to the top, bit by bit, with every costume swap and new starting point in each level taking me closer to number one. I won’t get there. I’m too tired to be competitive in 2021. I’m reminded of the guy in The Wire who gets out of jail after many years, tries to get back into drug dealing, then realises it’s become a game dominated by younger, hungrier entrepreneurs. Instead, he picks a different path and forms a youth club where kids can take up boxing. Maybe that’s what I should do instead of trying to beat Phil.

HIT ME UP

THE LEVELS IN THIS GAME ARE GREAT, AND AMAZING IN A COUPLE OF CASES

That said, the magic of Hitman is that even its most sprawling levels seem to shrink in your mind the more you play through them. They slowly go from feeling intimidating to weirdly cosy, like locations in real life that you love revisiting. I haven’t gotten this comfortable with Hitman 3’s levels yet. But I have a plan. When everyone loses interest in Agent 47 during the summer, I’ll have spent months mastering Dubai – and that’s when I’ll beat Phil’s three minutes and three seconds score, tweeting him at the dead of night with a screenshot of our times to let him know the deed has been done. How embarrassing! For me.

Hitman lets you live out fantasies that so rarely play out in real life these days, like punching a billionaire in front of their butler.

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U P D AT E WHAT’S NEW IN THE BIGGEST GAMES

OOBLETS Updates introduce two new areas into the world of Oob. By Rachel Watts he cute crittercollecting game Ooblets is gradually growing in size, and since its Early Access release last July, Badgetown and its surrounding areas have developed into something bigger. With regular content updates and brand new zones to explore, players have been keeping busy with the game’s two biggest updates: Wildlands 0.6 and Nullwhere 0.4.

First up is the Wildlands update, which introduced an open forest area north of Badgetown where giant herds of ooblets frolic in the wild. A major issue that players were running into was ooblet overpopulation, and if you had been playing the game since launch like me, you more than likely had a small ooblet army distracting you from your farm work. The Wildlands act as an ooblet overflow area where you can drop the critters off and add them back to your farm as much as you like, without fear of facing the incredible guilt of which ooblets you’ll have to permanently release into the wild due to space shortages. The Wildlands also has a new fishing spot, where you can nab a bunch of resources, and the Nurny Mines which is a rocky heap where

NEED TO KNOW RELEASE July 2020

DEVELOPER Glumberland

PUBLISHER In-house

LINK ooblets.com

you can mine for nurnies, which are used for crafting. Having two new areas for gathering resources in Badgetown is incredibly handy, and gives players more opportunities to turn trash to treasure and craft to their heart’s content. You won’t have access to all the Wildlands’ opportunities straight off the bat. The mines and fishing spot are locked behind a levelling system, the first that Ooblets has introduced. Completing tasks on the revitalisation notice board increases the area’s redevelopment progress bar, structured in levels. Ooblets often gives you task-ticking checklists to fill your day, but this Wildlands system takes an incredibly long time, and many of the tasks ask for specific ooblets and items that could take days to find and grow. It’s heavily unbalanced, and for a game that has hit every mark for a chill and relaxing sim, this is the game’s first misstep.

OOKY-SPOOKY

If you need a break from Badgetown’s sunshine and rainbows, Nullwhere

TOO CUTE TO SPOOK Even with a Halloween edge, the Nullwhere critters remain as cute as ever

GLANTER

I think it’s a witches hat? Doesn’t matter really, still adorable.

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LICKZER

I have not thought about what Lickzer’s liquid tastes like, I promise.

NAMNAM

This is a cat that’s been given way too much catnip.

GLOOPYLONGLEGS A gloopy blob with legs for days, it’s in the name really.

will be for you. The second biggest update introduced a new swamp region with dark clouds, crooked trees, and marshy ponds with plenty of creepy ooblets. The Nullwhere update has a short but sweet story. When first arriving in Nullwhere the region’s residents are quivering in fear at the area’s entrance. It turns out that they’ve been kicked out by a bunch of goofball kids called the Creep Cult who have taken over Nullwhere because it matches their spooky aesthetic – classic teen antics. The Creep Cult needs to learn some manners, and you’ll need to beat each member of the group in an ooblet dance-off and convince them to stop bothering Nullwhere’s native residents. With only a handful of Creep Cult members, the battles are a breeze, apart from Spooky Steeve (with an extra ‘e’) who won’t let you pass without giving him five bungle buns. The cheek!

BEAT EACH MEMBER OF THE GROUP IN AN OOBLET DANCE-OFF There are a handful of new crop styles and items, but my favourite feature of the Nullwhere update by far are the potions that can change the size of your ooblets, morphing them into being comically big or small. I started feeding my ooblet, the appropriately named Legsy, potions that would increase his size, and now he is the Goliath in my ooblet crew. This has no impact on dance battles or the story, it’s just something silly that you can do for no good reason, and I love it. If you don’t like the changes, you can feed your ooblet other potions to make them normalsized again, but my giant Legsy is staying with me for life. Both Wildlands and Nullwhere are very exciting additions to Ooblets, and seeing the world expand with each update just gets me more pumped for the game’s full release. Glumberland isn’t quite done with updates before the full game releases later this year, and the team has pencilled in two more major additions to be released in the not too distant future, with the next one being the Port Forward update, due out in mid-2021.

EXTRA LIFE

I think Badgetown has an illegal dumping problem.

The good folk of Nullwhere don’t appreciate the shenanigans of spooky teens.

One of my ooblets is not like the others…

Gimble’s balloon is the only way to travel in Ooblets.

Gaze in awe at my farm empire.

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MOD SPOTLIGHT MAJOR MODS, ANALYSED Import Sauron’s tower right into your game

Move full chests without having to empty them.

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VALHEIM Mods to make the game amazing. By Christopher Livingston ou’ve probably been hearing a lot about Valheim lately, the co-op Viking survival game that’s attracted millions of players just a few short weeks after it launched into Early Access. It’s a survival sandbox game playable in co-op or solo, taking place in a procedurally generated (and extremely massive) open world. Valheim is a bit Minecraft, a bit Skyrim and a bit Legend of Zelda, and as scores of players have discovered, once you’re a few hours in it can be hard to stop playing.

Valheim is already highly suitable for different playstyles. The world has one relatively peaceful biome, perfect for constructing a Viking home and spending hours refining, building and crafting with only the minor threat of occasional greydwarf raids. But other players will be pushing themselves deeper into the world and thus into more dangerous territory, clashing with trolls in the Black Forest, draugrs in the swamps, goblins on the plains, and battling Valheim’s bosses so they can find new resources to craft and build with. No matter what kind of Viking you are, there are mods to enhance your experience.

Share map data with friends in co-op.

FA S T T R A V E L L E R The various ways to get around Valheim’s massive world

RUNNING

You’ll definitely do a lot of this. And for some it’s the only way to travel.

SAILING

The sea has lots of allure (and a few monsters), so get out on the waves.

MOUNTS

You can probably ride a troll. But we really wouldn’t advise trying.

PORTALS

Only problem is you need to run and sail a lot to build them.

DYING

You’ll lose all your stuff, but you’ll appear back home. It’s fast travel!

FORT NIGHTS

Naturally, since so much of Valheim’s focus is centred around gathering materials and building a fort, a number of mods are aimed at tweaking the building system to be more robust, precise, and user friendly. Valheim’s vanilla building system is already pretty great, even though a quick glance at the build menu shows only a handful of building pieces. But it’s more clever than it first appears, and imaginative players have been able to use the small selection of parts to build massive forts, longhouses, and they’ve even been recreating buildings from other games like Skyrim and Assassin’s Creed Valhalla. There may not be all that many

A NUMBER OF MODS ARE AIMED AT TWEAKING THE BUILDING SYSTEM TO BE MORE ROBUST pieces to build with at this stage of Early Access, but they’ve still resulted in some really amazing bases. A few mods make the building system even better. Valheim Plus (among tons of other features) has an advanced building mode that lets you construct your home with almost surgical precision. Instead of just snapping a piece to the grid, Valheim Plus lets you select the placement of each piece by finely rotating, tilting, and even raising and lowering each piece on the X, Y, and Z axis. It’s easy to get the hang of, and the advanced building mode even frees you up to move your character around while building, leaving the object you’re placing stuck in place. It makes it easy to check out your placement from all angles if you’re trying to fit MAY 2021

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MOD SPOTLIGHT MAJOR MODS, ANALYSED

an object into a tight space with clipping through anything. Even better, there’s an advanced editing mode for building. In Valheim, if you want to move an item you’ve placed, you’ll need to destroy it and rebuild it, which is a bit of a hassle, especially if it’s in a hard to reach spot or there’s something else built on top of it. But with the editing system in Valheim Plus, you can now edit each item’s placement even after it’s been built. Is that wooden beam off its mark by a hair? Is one of your stone walls sticking out a tiny bit? Do you want to move some chests without destroying them, picking up all their contents, rebuilding them, and placing everything back inside? It’s all made much simpler, and the ability to adjust everything you’ve built without destroying them first will no doubt have some players spending even more time labouring over the Viking home of their dreams. Even with these new building systems, there are still restrictions— Valheim’s structural requirements, like having enough supports to hold up your roof or high walls, remain unchanged. But there’s still much more flexibility and choice available with Valheim Plus. I especially like it when a mod’s name explicitly tells you what it does, and the Craft and Build From Containers mod does exactly that. It’s also a huge convenience for any Viking who loves building – instead of having to visit your stack of storage crates and add the items you need into your inventory, it will just pull resources from any chests within range. No more overloading yourself with tons of metal bars and watching your poor Viking drip sweat while they shuffle slowly back over to the workbench or forge. As long as you’ve got the materials stored somewhere nearby, you’re good to go and can build freely. I can see there being a downside to this mod, if you’re blissfully

building and crafting and aren’t aware that you’re consuming resources you’d earmarked for other purposes. So, don’t get carried away. But it’s a big timesaver if you’ve got a project that requires lots of resources.

does, and rather impressively. You think getting crushed by a falling tree or hammered into paste by an angry troll is fun in third-person? It’s way more immersive in first. I’m not sure how much of Valheim you’d really want to play in firstperson view – there’s a lot of running and tree-chopping and crafting that’s much better in the vanilla thirdperson view. But this is nice for a change, and the mod doesn’t lock you into first-person mode exclusively. You can use the mouse wheel to scroll into first-person and back out to third-person, so you can choose whichever view you want at any particular moment. Very nice. Mods aren’t just for singleplayer, either. If you’ve been playing co-op with friends, you’ve probably noticed that everyone has their own version of the world map. If you go off exploring, your map will show the areas you’ve reached but your friend’s map, if they haven’t been there too, will still be obscured by shadow.

IMPORT DUTY

And if, like me, you’re not a natural builder, no worries. I’ve spent hours

YOU CAN IMPORT STRUCTURES CREATED BY OTHER PLAYERS RIGHT INTO YOUR OWN GAME working on my home and it’s still, essentially, just a crude box with a bed and a workbench. But another mod will let other people do all the design and construction for you, and you’ll still be able to enjoy the results. The AdvancedBuilding mod means you can import entire structures created by other players right into your own game. For instance, I was able to import a lovely, tall tower base crafted by another player, which is a big upgrade over my little home. I also borrowed a charming boathouse, a two-story tavern, and even a massive stone replication of the Eye of Sauron, perfect to intimidate the local greydwarf population. With AdvancedBuilding, importing and placing these buildings is simple with a single command entered into Valheim’s console window, and they can be removed just as easily. If you’re really looking to change things up, the First Person View mod might be worth a try to give you a whole new perspective. Instead of looking over your Viking’s shoulder, you can peer right through their eyes in first-person. It seems like it shouldn’t quite work, but it actually

SYNC OR SWIM

THRIVE AND SURVIVE Other Early Access survival games that broke the mould

DAY Z

Brutal – and broken – it shaped the genre for years to come.

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ARK: SURVIVAL E VOLVED You could ride dinosaurs. That’s hard to resist.

SUBNAUTICA

A true gem and one of our favourites in the genre. Survival with a damp twist.

GROUNDED Beautiful and extremely promising in Early Access.

ASTRONEER Colourful interplanetary exploration done right.

Since you’re sharing a world, and most likely a base, it makes sense that you’d be able to share a map, too. There are a few different mods that tackle this. Valheim Plus, which we mentioned earlier, has a feature that will let you share map progress with your co-op friends (if they have the mod installed), but only if you’re all online at the same time. Another mod, called Map Sync, does something similar but it sounds a bit more immersive and fun. With the mod installed, you’ll need to stand close to your friend and press F10. When you do so, your map data will be shared with them. If they press F10, their map data will be shared with you. It’s almost as if you’re meeting up and describing your discoveries with your friend. Pretty cool! And another mod called ServerSideMap does something similar, sharing everyone’s map data with the entire server, so you’ll have an updated map even if you’re offline while your friends are playing. Since Valheim is still in Early Access, and doesn’t officially support mods, before you mod your game you’ll definitely want to back up your world and character save files. It’s also worth keeping in mind that as the game is updated, mods may become disabled or defunct. There’s the possibility that all your hours spent busily working on a modded world may, at some point, be lost or become unavailable at times. We don’t really know at this early stage of things, so mod at your own risk!

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I didn’t (and can’t) build this myself.

Mood: godlike, thanks to mods.

A few mods can be used online, if everyone installs them.

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BUILD YOUR DREAM VALHEIM HOUSE Craft a tasteful fortress in this ferocious Norse world. By Harry Shepherd NEED TO KNOW DIFFICULTY Easy TIME One hour VITAL LINKS Best world seeds: bit.ly/3smBH11 Workbench crafting: bit.ly/3u3v0lZ Campfire guide: bit.ly/2ZzI193 Top survival tips: bit.ly/3dpmV5n

HAMMER TIME

LEVEL PLAYING FIELD

TRIAL AND ERROR

First, the basics. You start with a 1 hammer and use it to build close to a workbench. Select the hammer on your hotbar and click right-mouse button to access the build menu. Use the middlemouse button to scrap, and scroll to rotate.

Save yourself plenty of bother later by 2 ensuring your foundations are level before you start building. With the hoe – which you can craft at a workbench – you can raise and decrease the ground to make sure your components are nice and stable.

There is little consequence if you make a mistake while building: there’s no resource cost. If you place a wall incorrectly or want to scrap a construction again, you’ll lose no materials for doing so. Use that freedom to experiment.

LOCATION Your base’s location is important. Build on the coast and construct a dock so you can easily explore beyond your starter island. It’s also good to be close to biomes with rarer resources, like the Black Forest.

STABLE CONDITION While your creativity isn’t limited by resource cost, it is by gravity; if your parts don’t have enough support, they’ll fall down. Hovering over a component with the hammer equipped shows its stability level.

START SIMPLE It’s easy to get overwhelmed by ridiculously impressive Reddit constructions, but don’t be afraid to start small. Put together something simple to shelter your workbench and campfire to get the tools you need first.

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NO SMOKING Speaking of campfires, this’ll be an early problem that’ll need tackling. Your fire needs to be sheltered from the rain, but with ventilation for the smokem as it’s harmful to inhale. Check out Chris’ campfire guide in ‘Vital Links’ for more.

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Save time by collecting wood the easy way 2 PLACE A WORKBENCH

Spend ten wood to craft a workbench. Once you have the materials, equip your hammer, right-click to open the crafting menu, and select the workbench.

1 FIND RUINS

The traditional way to get wood is by picking up branches and chopping trees with a stone axe. However, the quicker way is by finding abandoned buildings in your world.

3 DESTROY!

Just as you would disassemble your own builds at no resource cost, you can now use your middle-mouse button to take the wood from the ruins for yourself, quickly and efficiently.

RAISING THE STAKES

FIXER-UPPER

MILLIONAIRE’S ROW

Before you really give your home 8 some TLC, make sure it’s protected against invading enemies by throwing up a ring of stakes around your settlement. Note also that most wooden parts will decay in the rain or if placed in water.

If your base has suffered an attack, or 9 a downpour, check the durability of your components by hovering over them and checking its yellow health bar. Then equip the hammer, open the build menu, and left-click to repair the component.

When you craft a workbench, you can only craft with it in the white circle that appears around it. However, if you want the space to craft bigger and better builds, just build more benches and you’ll soon be able to build in more places.

TEAM WORK Hit a plateau? Consider starting a server with a friend. That way you may get some inspiration from builds they’ve created on their world or you can have even more fun by making a whole new base from scratch together.

STONE COLD Later in the game you’ll have access to more durable building parts. Once you have a pickaxe to mine iron deposits, you’ll be able to use iron ingots to create a stone cutter. Then loads of sturdier components will become available.

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DIARY

T RY I N G T O S TAY A L I V E I N

GTA V: CHAOS MOD PA R T I I Tugboats, dancing citizens, and one pissed-off Jesus. It’s all happening in Los Santos. By Rick Lane

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EXTRA LIFE NOW PLAYING

THE RULES

Every five minutes, a random event will occur.

Random events must be played through.

No reloading except upon death.

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fter battling his way through suicidal traffic in the climax to last month’s diary, I left Grand Theft Auto V’s Michael De Santa sunning himself by his swimming pool. It was a well-deserved reprieve from the antics of the Chaos Mod, which triggers random and usually ridiculous effects in GTA’s world at regular, player-dictated intervals.

But the gangster Michael owes money to isn’t going to leave his legs unbroken for long, so it’s time for the retired bank-robber to find himself a big new score. But what mischief and mayhem will the Chaos Mod throw at us this time around? Alien invasion? Anti-gravity? Well, for a worryingly long time, the answer is ‘none whatsoever’. I travel to the home of Michael’s old friend and accomplice Lester in an entirely normal and unchaotic manner. Lester agrees to help Michael do big crimes on the condition that he scratches Lester’s back first, by assassinating the head of social media platform LifeInvader, Jay Norris. Michael grabs the explosive phone Lester has prepared, drives to a nearby clothes shop to dress up like a techbro, then heads over to LifeInvader’s offices. All of this happens without anything exploding or falling on me or turning me inside-out. It gets to the point where I’m tapping on the screen as if it was a dodgy microphone. The bar at the top of the screen is definitely moving, but so far GTA V has been its normal, only moderately ludicrous self. Arriving at LifeInvader’s HQ, I’m let into the building by some douchey software developer who mistakes Michael for an IT guy and needs help clearing his PC of viruses. Doing some stupid dance that seems entirely in character, he tells me to follow him upstairs. I start walking, but douche-dev doesn’t. He just stands there pulling his pathetic moves. Suspicious, I ascend to the second floor without him, where I discover everyone in the office is doing the dance. It isn’t some weird techcompany initiation rite either. Glancing out the window, I see the entire city is jiving to the same unheard tune.

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DANCING IN THE STREETS

It’s as if I’ve acquired the ‘Dancing Peds’ power-up from Carmageddon II. But the sudden outbreak of Saturday Night Fever at least makes it easy for me to swap the phones. As I return downstairs, I hear the sound of nearby explosions. Heading outside, I discover that my old friend the tugboat has spawned on the road, causing a screaming, flaming pile-up just outside LiveInvader’s offices. I sigh with relief because the Chaos Mod is officially back on its bullshit. With Norris’ death arranged, Michael returns home and changes into a suit ahead of another meeting with Lester. When I get back into Michael’s car, however, I discover that I cannot exit the garage. I can drive, but the Chaos Mod has goofed my steering, meaning I’m pinballing off the sides of the garage. Exiting the car, I walk down to the road with the intention of stealing a different vehicle, but I’m immediately punted into the shrubbery by the bonnet of a black saloon. Climbing to my feet, I realise that all the traffic has been set to what I can only describe as ‘doughnut mode’. And I really mean all the traffic. Gazing off to the distance, I spy a jetliner cartwheeling in the sky as if waltzing to the Blue Danube, before it disappears behind Los Santos’ skyscrapers, presumably crashing somewhere downtown and resulting in hundreds of fiery deaths. The more I play the Chaos Mod, the more I realise how GTA’s simulation often masks the initial impact of the mod’s changes. Many of its effects tend to creep up on you, and you’re often dealing with the consequences of them before you’ve fully grasped what’s happening. After the meeting with Lester, I embark on a bike ride along Vespucci beach with Michael’s son, and it’s only when I glance down at the nearby car-park I realise the game has turned every vehicle in the city a lovely shade of blue. Later in that same mission, Michael ‘rescues’ his daughter from a yacht party with a bunch of drug-dealing hoods, and it’s only after the ensuing jet-ski chase that I notice the Chaos Mod has set my character to permanently accelerate, forcing me to catapult Michael back onto the beach like an overweight missile.

I SPY A JETLINER CARTWHEELING IN THE SKY AS IF WALTZING

Damn hippies.

WILD MAN

After this, the Chaos Mod goes dormant for a while. It’s still doing stuff, like changing the weather, but nothing that radically alters how GTA V plays. I was hoping for some heist-related hijinks, but Michael and Franklin’s first job together goes off without a hitch. This all changes when Trevor is introduced, as if the mod understands the significance of the occasion. Within minutes of his gloriously grotty arrival, GTA V’s psychopathic star is off on his bloody vendetta against the biker gang The Lost. The Chaos Mod celebrates this event by sending every NPC in the game absolutely fucking bananas. I first notice the change in behaviour when they start leaping MAY 2021

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DIARY PERSONAL ADVENTURES IN GAMES

out of their moving cars as I pass them on the road. But the new world order is fully hammered home when How chaotic were the Chaos Mod’s effects? a random fellow lurking outside a shop in Grapeseed whips out a minigun and atomises Trevor’s truck. Whale 10 Rain Respawning at his trailer, I return to Aggressive 9 Grapeseed and plant a bullet between NPCs Christ on 8 Mr Minigun’s eyes before he can a bike Surprise raise his mighty weapon. I’m walking 7 Tug Doughnut back to the truck when a rocket 6 Cars hisses past Trevor’s ear and blows up Dancing 5 a car behind me. I whirl around to NPCs 4 see that a huge battle has Coloured commenced between the town’s 3 cars residents, with multiple individuals 2 closing in on me, wielding everything 1 from police batons to assault rifles. 0 What follows is a blur of bullets Effects and bombs, as war erupts on the road through Grapeseed, with ever-more cars rolling up and their drivers PLANE SAILING rushing to join the slaughter. At the height of the battle, the fire brigade shows up. But instead of dousing the The mod does pull one of its more dastardly tricks during flaming vehicles and immolated corpses, the fireman join this collection of missions, however. After a mission that the firefight, and I’m forced to put them all down. It also involves flying a pair of planes to drop off a weapons seems the police-response system has been temporarily shipment in the ocean, Trevor and his, erm, acquaintance disabled, as they’re the only emergency service that Nervous Ron wheel them around to the nearby airport. doesn’t show up to the fight. Landing planes in GTA V (and indeed, reality) is not the Eventually, the fighting literally dies down, and I’m easiest skill to master, so I’m pleased when I get the plane free to make my way to the actual mission, made back on terra firma without burying it into the tarmac. extremely easy due to the vast arsenal I collected during At this point, the Chaos Mod immediately teleports the the Grapeseed Massacre. Afterward, Trevor embarks plane to the top of a nearby mountain. So not only do I upon various entrepreneurial endeavours to expand have to try to take off on the mountainside, I also have to Trevor Phillips Enterprises, during which time the Chaos land the plane a second time, while the other plane idles Mod is relatively quiet, restricting itself to changing the on the runway. To my own amazement, I manage both of colours of the cars (silver this time) and making all the these feats, although the second landing is less ‘threedoors on vehicles open and close as if they’re attending point’ and more ‘three falls and a submission’. some sort of vehicular rave. Once the future of his ‘business’ is secure, Trevor returns to his trailer, his attention swivelling to his pursuit of Michael, Trevor survived all this. No really. who he’s just discovered is still alive. Trevor’s forming plans in his trailer when, mid-cutscene, all the physics in the game cut out, and he collapses in a pile of limbs on the floor. I’m forced to spend the next five minutes watching Trevor flop uselessly across his cockroach-ridden trailer until the effect, which is mercifully short, ceases. The next effect spawns an object behind Trevor as he clambers to his feet. Turning around, I have just enough time to exclaim “Christ on a hoverbike!” before our Lord and Saviour blows Trevor to smithereens. Trevor respawns outside his trailer while I’m reeling from the fact that I just got nuked by Jesus. Fortunately, Christ can’t get his hoverbike through the door, so I’m safe from his holy wrath. I could leave him hovering inside like an angry wasp, but something tells me Trevor wouldn’t let getting decked by the Son of God go so easily. Besides ‘Trevor versus Jesus’ is too tantalising a grudge-match to ignore, the rural equivalent of Alien vs Predator. Anarchy level

THE CHAOS-O-METER

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Hello tugboat my old friend. You’re causing carnage once again.

xxxxxxxx xxxxxxxxxx

My first plan is simply to run into the trailer and gun Jesus down, but he casually repaints the walls with Trevor’s insides (I don’t know what Christ is wielding, but it certainly has godlike power). After this failure, I then throw a bunch of grenades through the door, but it appears Christ is impervious to explosives. Finally, I try the same tactic, but with bullets instead of grenades. This is very effective, if anticlimactic, and soon Christ is off his hoverbike, bleeding out on the floor of Trevor’s trailer. I walk in to find out what Christ was pummelling me with. Turns out it’s a railgun. Never let it be said that religion doesn’t get you anything. I’ll be having that. With Los Santos County now officially the devil’s domain, Trevor travels to the city for his long-awaited rendezvous with Michael. The confrontation is aborted, however, with the revelation that Michael’s daughter Tracey is about to embarrass herself on Los Santos’ premiere reality TV show, Fame or Shame. Together, the two veteran criminals ride-out on a mission to ‘rescue’ Tracey. I’m thinking that now would be a good time for the Chaos Mod to throw in something that fits the scene, when, as if on cue, it starts raining whales. Soon, the streets are running red with the blood of fallen humpbacks, while Michael and Trevor weave between the whales and the ensuing traffic apocalypse to reach Fame or Shame’s studio. By the time we arrive, the cetacean clouds appear to have cleared up, and Michael and Trevor head inside for a little chat with Fame or Shame’s host, the inimitable and incorrigible Lazlow.

18-wheeler. As we exit the car-park I notice that, contrary to my initial assumption, the weather is still podding it down. The result of this is the single most absurd chase sequence I’ve experiencedm in a videogame, as I’m forced to dodge plummeting seaborne mammals in a hulking truck while trying to keep up with Lazlow’s puttering go-kart. Oh also, my truck can jump, but given the broader situation this barely registers. Somehow I evade all the falling blubber and force Lazlow into a final confrontation beside the Los Santos river, which is now filled with whale corpses. After giving Lazlow a taste of his own shame-based medicine, Trevor heads off, while I’m returned to the body of Michael. With the sun setting, I’m about to return home for another afternoon by the pool. But the Chaos Mod has one last trick in store. As I leave the whale-strewn riverbed, Michael is suddenly teleported to inside what appears to be an airport control tower. I’m noodling around for an exit, when an alarm begins to sound. Worried now, I ascend some stairs, bumping into two men wearing camouflage sporting assault rifles. Oh no. I’ve been teleported into the military base.

THE MOST ABSURD CHASE SEQUENCE I’VE EXPERIENCED IN A VIDEOGAME

FISH FLINGERS

The chat soon turns into a chase, with Lazlow in his electric hatchback and the two stooges driving an MAY 2021

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WHY I LOVE WHAT MAKES GAMES SPECIAL

THE SENSE OF MYSTERY IN VALHEIM How Steam’s latest Early Access hit nails exploration. By Steven Messner LEFT: Gorgeous lighting is a cool contrast to Valheim’s low-poly look.

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t’s rare to feel a genuine sense of mystery about a PC game these days. Between overlyaggressive marketing and hyperengaged communities, any secrets a game may hide are excavated and detailed on wikis just days after release. It makes me long for that feeling of first setting out into the frozen wilds of Dun Morogh as a level one dwarf hunter when World of Warcraft launched in 2004 – of being set loose in a vast, enchanting world waiting to be discovered. Thank god for Valheim.

The words ‘Early Access survival game’ might make you roll your eyes (I don’t blame you), but Valheim is the exception. Not only does it run remarkably well, it’s also an exceptionally deep survival game that’s more akin to Minecraft than Ark: Survival Evolved. It’s more about having epic adventures with your buds than waking up to find that a malicious group of players obliterated your entire base while you slept. If you’ve played survival games, you know what to expect. You’ll cut down trees, build forts, hunt wildlife, and go exploring. Valheim doesn’t necessarily reinvent the wheel, but what’s made it one of my favourite games of the past few years is how Valheim creates joy in the simple act of exploration and discovery. Upon starting a new character, you’re thrust into a staggeringly large, procedurally generated ocean dotted with islands. A mysterious raven named Hugin appears and acts as a tutorial system, but you’re really only given one clear objective: find and slay primordial monsters scattered across the hundreds of kilometres of lush meadows, swamplands, open oceans, and craggy mountains. Right

NEED TO KNOW RELEASED February 2, 2021

EXPECT TO PAY £15.50

OUR REVIEW N/A

LINK valheimgame.com

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VIK ING VARIE T Y Three other great Viking games to play

ASSASSIN’S CREED VALHALL A

HELLBLADE: S E N UA’S SACRIFICE

Our score: 92

Our score: 78

Our score: 82, 86, 90

Why it rocks: Valhalla is like if The Witcher 3 were set in medieval England. It’s gorgeous, the story is full of twists and likeable characters, and the combat is bloody fun.

Why it rocks: Hellblade is a dark odyssey about a woman’s journey into the underworld to save her lover. Play for the gruelling combat and totally engrossing story.

Why it rocks: Three separate games that all tell one story about a band of Viking refugees escaping the end of the world. It’s like Oregon Trail, but the trail is infested with monsters.

now there’s only five of them to find, but more will probably be added before Valheim’s full release.

DUE NORSE

Each of these different biomes is home to different monsters, resources, and treasures. But Valheim is full of fun (and nasty) surprises. Giant trolls stalk the forest, eager to kill unprepared adventurers. Sea monsters prowl oceans, and that ominously glowing pile of branches might actually be the nest of nefarious greydwarves protected by ultra-powerful shamans with poison magic. It’s a world that, when explored with a friend or two, feels like it was torn out of the notebook of a fantastic D&D dungeon master. Last weekend, for example, I sailed my boat into an uncharted and extremely dangerous region called the Plains. Curiosity killed the cat, but what I didn’t expect was to be murdered by giant, very angry mosquitos. Respawning back at home base but with my boat and valuable armour now leagues away, my friend and I had to launch a rescue operation. I thought it’d take 15 minutes or so, but after we were waylaid by a sea monster and forced to run our ship aground, it quickly

BANNER SAGA TRILOGY

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became clear that our rescue operation might require yet another rescue operation. These moments of drama are enhanced by how staggeringly beautiful Valheim is. That’s a weird thing to say about a game with textures and models that look more at home in a 1996 issue of PC Gamer, but Valheim is beauty in motion. It has some of the best real-time lighting I’ve ever seen, and when you’re surrounded by its dense and dangerous forests, these tense moments take on a storybook quality. There’s a certain majesty to seeing the silhouette of a deer grazing in morning fog so dense I feel like I can taste it, and a palpable dread when you spot the glowing green eyes of a greydwarf shaman stalking you in the distance. Valheim’s forests are unpredictable and mysterious – stuffed full of terrifying trolls, precarious terrain and hives of monsters guarding valuable loot. It makes the return trip to my little cottage all the more sweet. And because Valheim is primarily co-op, I never have to worry about unwanted guests breaking in and ruining all our

WHAT I DIDN’T EXPECT WAS TO BE MURDERED BY GIANT, VERY ANGRY MOSQUITOS work. I instead can focus on venturing out into the unknown world and finding resources, bringing them back to camp and figuring out how to turn them into something useful. Discovering these interactions is fun – I was very excited when I discovered greydwarf eyeballs could be used to make portals to help me easily travel Valheim’s vast distances. Each day I play, I feel like I learn something new about Valheim’s world. But those revelations only lead to more mysteries that need to be puzzled out. Coupled with its moody and often frightening forests, and it’s clear that Valheim is a game that knows how to do exploration right.

LEFT: Valheim’s forests are dangerous and moody.

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R E I N S TA L L OLD GAMES, NEW PERSPECTIVES

Liberating carrots via song and dance. Kid stuff!

PAJAMA SAM: NO NEED TO HIDE WHEN IT’S DARK OUTSIDE Revisiting the adventure games we grew up on. By James Davenport ’m not afraid of the dark. I’m not! But I am afraid of what PC gaming would look like without Pajama Sam. A whole generation of PC gamers grew up after the heyday of adventure games, but were too young and oblivious to notice the rapid descent of a genre. All kids knew was the computer desk, a treasure trove littered with old CDs, many of which had a game

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from Humongous Entertainment tucked away somewhere. And it was scratched to hell probably, sending CD-drives into whirring, heaving fits – working nevertheless. Playable cartoons. That’s what we thought of them, and Pajama Sam’s big adventure in a surreal nighttime world hidden in his closet might’ve been the best of the bunch. In Pajama Sam: No Need to Hide When it’s Dark Outside, you take on

the role of Pajama Sam himself, finally confronting the darkness hiding away in his closet. As a kid, he’s scared of the stuff, but it’s not as easy as stowing away the concept of darkness into a lunchbox like Sam hopes. Once in the closet, the kid trips and falls into a Pee-WeeHermanesque realm of darkness where everything has a face, from trees to meat grinders. After the transdimensional fall, Sam loses some key darkness banishing items, so your task is to find them and march up to the tip-top of a spooky treehouse to finish the fight off. From here it plays like an abbreviated LucasArts point-andclick adventure, and for good reason. Ron Gilbert, of Maniac Mansion and The Secret of Monkey Island fame, teamed up with producer Shelley Day to create Humongous Games in 1992, a name contributed by none other than LucasArts cohort Tim

NEED TO KNOW RELEASED 1996

DEVELOPER Humongous Entertainment

PUBLISHER In-house

LINK humongous.com

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Real ones will remember this nightmare.

Another one that went over my head as a kid and landed now.

No one ever found the body.

Schaefer. Writer of The Secret of Monkey Island and its sequel LeChuck’s Revenge, Dave Grossman, came on to pen Pajama Sam, so it retains a familiar mix of visual gags propped up by a simpler, but equally goofy form of adventure game logic in the puzzles.

WITHOUT A PADDLE

What I mean: to get across a river, Sam needs to convince a boat that the rumours aren’t true, wood doesn’t sink. So you fish a plank out of a creek, framed and animated so prominently in the scene that no kid would miss it, and toss it in the water near the beached boat. Its mind blown, the boat leaps into the water and offers to take Sam wherever he pleases – but the moment you leave the scene, the plank, still floating there in the foreground, quietly sinks. I barked like a dog, a joke that flew over my head years ago smacking me in the dome all these years later. That boat’s going to fucking drown. The art and animation still stand up, though I remember it looking nicer on a fuzzy CRT. They had a way of blending the low-res pixelated scenes into something that more

BIG BUDS

FREDDI FISH

Banished ghosts and caught hogfish rustlers. Flipping loved solving cases.

Meet the original Humongous squad

PUTT PUTT

Terrifying. First game: Parade. Second game: Moon?!

mirrored what I was watching on TV every Saturday morning. Even so, Sam never stiffly tiptoes between scenes. He springs up and leaps and dives, an elastic little guy with almost no repeating keyframes. An entire room of living furniture has an infinite dance party, a talking minecart takes Sam on a ride through a mountain on a physics-defying track, Sam liberates carrots from the kitchen in a cute musical number – No Need to Hide is lovely in motion. Pajama Sam knows kids aren’t going to make it through the space between narrative beats, the time in

SPY FOX

Aimed towards older kids, 007 parody. Peak cheese humour.

FAT T Y BE AR

For the youngsters, a body-shamed failure. One game. Sad. Do not hug.

every adventure game where you’re stuck staring at an idle screen, pixel-hunting for a missed object or interactive piece of scenery. Click on nearly any part of a screen and something will happen. A tree root will grow a face and moan about how they didn’t have videogames back in their day. A pizza will fall out of the sky onto a tennis racket. Flowers will play Patty Cake. A gorilla will appear in a smudge of darkness, whip out a banana, and have a quick snack. Sam doesn’t acknowledge any of the animations, a bizarre purgatory between the reality of the player and MAY 2021

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This looks like a job for… a child!

Honestly, if you could hear the tune you’d join in.

Sam in some convincing tree cosplay.

the fiction taking place – but as a kid, it was a damn cartoon buffet. There are dozens of tiny, bespoke animations to stumble over on the way to the next item or clue, and nearly every one of them is funny, or just so odd you can’t help but laugh. It’s honestly the level of interactivity I would’ve welcomed in adventure games designed for any age. A simplified verb set and a reactive environment go a long way in preserving patience. Sam’s a lovable kid, too, in large part thanks to Pamela Adlon’s enthused performance. You’d probably recognise the voice instantly. Adlon’s also behind one of the greatest animated characters of all time: Bobby from King of the Hill. More recently you might’ve seen her on the excellent series Better Things, where she writes, directs and plays the lead. Coincidentally, I started watching it the same week I returned to Pajama Sam. An odd thing, to hear the same voice go from being scared of the dark to making jokes about going through menopause. Humongously entertaining, indeed. Pajama Sam had to be. A single adventure game had to sustain four 126

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kids, minimum, for a couple weeks. I met most of my friends at Julie’s, someone that kindly watched half the kids in the neighbourhood. Miraculously, she gave us free rein on the computer. We played together, bunched around the computer after school almost every day. Back at school we discussed theories in the sandbox and spouted epiphanies when our swings passed. We should use the doorknob on the door without a doorknob! Baby geniuses. We never did crack the whole case on our own, stuck trying to find where to read the water meter in the mines in order to win a quiz show hosted by living doors. While Pajama Sam never got to rubber-with-apulley-in-the-middle levels of convoluted, it was still quite difficult to parse for our developing minds. Kids are pretty dumb, turns out. The bottom dropped out when my buddy Brian’s family got internet and we discovered GameFAQs. The local adventure game market crashed overnight for most of the neighbourhood. We ripped through the whole Humongous catalogue in about a week at Julie’s. I lost a family that day. But I also found a new one

CLICK TRICKS Odd stuff you’ll see clicking around a scene 2

1 OR OL DO TMSA N

An old man rambles about life back in ‘his day’.

2 CMOI LOKK I E S N

Cookies appear and commit suicide by milk.

3 BASEBALL Click the baseball and bat for a tiny minigame.

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Classic LucasArts-style adventure game scene design.

I CAN SLEEP IN TOTAL DARKNESS AND NOT WET THE BED ONCE ALL NIGHT in the CD bargain bin at Staples. The LucasArts Archive collections probably changed a lot of lives – $10 for Day of the Tentacle, Sam and Max Hit the Road, and a handful of other LucasArts games would do the same to anyone. Revisiting Pajama Sam has been a heartwarming reminder of my own PC gaming origins, and I’m sure I’m not alone here, which makes it an easy recommendation to pick up and play again no matter your age. It’s a breezy two-hours for my big adult brain. Join me: humiliate the memory of your stupid kid self. Luckily, most Humongous Entertainment games are easy to find and play today, thanks to Nightdive Studios, the studio responsible for keeping dozens of old games working on modern machines, including the upcoming remake of System Shock. I expected to get frustrated and bored with Pajama Sam, to play purely for the nostalgia,

but I was delighted throughout, even if the narrative is literally: the dark isn’t that bad. Believe it or not, I’ve already overcome my fear of the dark. I can sleep in total darkness and not wet the bed once all night. Sure, I have to pay bills now and my brain eats itself in new ways, like fearing the death of my parents or the collapse of a state’s entire infrastructure or the incoming eco-apocalypse, but Pajama Sam helped me nip that whole dark thing in the bud for me 25 years ago. I’m actually very grateful.

BOTHERED BY BUGS

The only major caveat weighing down my hot air balloon ride into the past are a couple bugs present in the Steam version of Pajama Sam. Some scenes don’t always load in crucial interactive objects properly, or at all. A late game puzzle requires Sam to find some oars in order to fish something out of the water. They’re normally propped up on a wall in a room with an organ and a talking bust, but in my instance? Nothing. No oars, even though I could climb the organ and leap on the chandelier to initiate an

interactive swinging sequence in which the oars snap into existence. Worse, though, is that even though I could see the oars, I couldn’t ever finish the swinging minigame. Sam would reach out, I would time my clicks to give him momentum, but the oars were forever just out of reach. A quick Google search confirms little game-breaking bugs like this are somewhat common, so keep that in mind before dipping back in. If it’s any assurance, it’s a short game already, and you can jam escape to skip literally any animation. I got back to the same sequence, unbugged, in about ten minutes. I was adamant about seeing the game through, bugs and all, so maybe Sam’s got some staying power. If you’re a mother, father, uncle, aunt, babysitter – whatever, humour me. Plop a kid in front of Pajama Sam, see what happens. Kids are growing up with touch devices, so the point-andclick interface should be pretty easy for them to figure out. Tell them you have a new cartoon for them to play, say it’s from the creators of Baby Shark or whatever. Lie to them. This is important. Because if they like it, Quake is right around the corner. MAY 2021

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RACHEL WAT T S

Pulled from the fuzzy aether and jumbled junk in my brain, I present eight vital games that I think you should play. Immediately.

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AIR MILES

ACE IS HIGH

PHASMOPHOBIA

AIRBORNE KINGDOM

THE SOLITAIRE CONSPIRACY

kineticgames.co.uk

airbornekingdom.com

bithellgames.com

This is the go-to co-op game for my multiplayer squad. Our fumbling attempts trying to document paranormal activity combined with the game’s slapstick jankiness are constant sources of stomach-hurting laughter. You stop chuckling quick when an angry ghoulie locks all the doors, though.

In Airborne Kingdom your only enemy is gravity. It’s a city builder where you control a giant flying fortress, searching for resources, expanding your city, and finding old technology all from the dizzying heights of the sky. It’s a gorgeous game and gliding above the patchwork map is simply serene.

How Mike Bithell managed to merge solitaire with a spy thriller baffles me – it’s nothing short of wizardry. Solitaire games play out as tactical missions where you control each suit as if they were a spy crew. With striking character art and a flair for drama, this is the slickest it’s ever felt to play cards by yourself.

OMORI omori-game.com

The newest cult horror hit to join RPGmaker’s hall of fame, Omori is the cutest psychological RPG I’ve ever played. You follow a group of friends as they navigate a dream world filled with nightmarish monsters. Although it has some truly unsettling moments, it’s a game with a lot of heart too.

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FRENEMIES

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MUST P L AY A PERSONAL LIST OF THE BEST GAMES YOU CAN PLAY RIGHT NOW by Rachel Watts

A FINE HARVEST

SAKUNA: OF RICE AND RUIN sakunaofriceandruin.com

I never really realised how much I love farming in games until Sakuna: Of Rice and Ruin made me plant 100 individual rice seedlings. Coupled with a monster-filled island and combo-heavy hack-and-slash combat, this is about as exciting as rice farming can get. Hold that thought, my harvest is ready…

DARK ROAST

COUNTRY LIVING

MAJOR FEELS

NECROBARISTA

WELCOME TO ELK

IF FOUND…

necrobarista.com

Welcometoelk.com

dreamfeel.ie/iffound

If I died and was granted one last night in a hipster cafe, drinking coffee and dabbling in the dark necromantic arts like in Necrobarista, I’d be at peace with that. If you like your visual novels sweet with a hint of dark bitterness, then this is the brew for you. Now they just need to make a game like this about tea…

Welcome to Elk is an anthology of short anecdotes about the residents of a rural Scandinavian community. Don’t be fooled by its fun paint-bynumbers art style, this is an adventure that hits a lot harder than it looks – while some of the stories are light and breezy, others are surprisingly dark and emotional.

One of the most poignant coming-of-age stories of recent years, If Found… is a visual novel about Kasio, a young trans woman returning to her family home in a small rural Irish town. A queer story written by queer creators, If Found… is hard-hitting, heartbreaking, but most importantly hopeful.

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IT’S ALL OVER...

Here in the laboratory our scientists are hard at work to develop ever more unbearable Twitter discourse, before deploying it via our network of ‘Hot Take Drones’.

You thought the global GPU shortage was down to scalpers and crypto miners? Nope – we stole all your 3080s and SLI’d them together just so we can run Crysis at max settings.

Geothermallyfuelled machines harness the enormous power of the volcano itself to allow us to torrent up to 10TB of pirated anime per day.

Here, partly lobotomised writers tap away at a stream of deliberately wrong game reviews, generating the angry comments we need to fuel our rage-powered satellite lasers.

BAD NEWS

Step inside our secret lair

urns out writing game reviews and half-baked opinion pieces doesn’t pay the bills like it used to, so here at PC Gamer we’ve decided to pivot to super-villainy. Join us for a tour of our new office space, conveniently located inside a volcano.

...UNTIL

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