Civilization and Slay the Spire collide in 4X deck builder on Steam

God, Ghostrunner was good. I'd almost forgotten how good until I loaded up the Steam Next Fest demo for Ghostrunner 2, which is just Ghostrunner but with a 2 on the end. It's got some new tricks, but it's the same exhilarating first-person action romp under the hood, and I wouldn't have it any other way.

Grotty fantasy Soulslike Lords of the Fallen - which I have been cautiously looking forward to, despite Ed's efforts to temper my expectations - is getting its chainmail-wearing arse kicked by Steam players. It seems to be selling well, squatting at third on the platform's global top seller charts by revenue, but the user review consensus tells a different story. There are 1,320 reviews at the time of writing, and they are Mostly Negative, which is quite the showing for a game's first day on sale.

Scrolling through Steam Next Fest - Valve’s digital event celebrating upcoming games - can feel quite overwhelming. Mainly because there’s just so many good demos to chow down on, but also because playing through the hundreds of demos can feel like tonal whiplash. In the past few days, I’ve zoomed between euphoric roguelikes, open-world racers, and punishing LEGO-like apocalypses. But thankfully, the demo for Pioneers Of Pagonia offers a chill getaway for us poor, exhausted souls.

Give me an elegant roguelike with an interesting premise and I’ll go missing for days, repeating runs ad infinitum. The upcoming Cobalt Core almost had me under that trance with its interstellar take on Slay The Spire’s deck-building, but the Steam Next Fest demo ended just before I got trapped in its moreish loop.

The Steam accounts of multiple game developers were recently compromised and used to update their games with malware. Fewer than 100 Steam users had the games installed when the malware was added, and they've been directly notified of the risk by email, according to Valve. The company confirmed details of the story, reported earlier this week by GameDiscoverCo newsletter founder Simon Carless, in an email to PC Gamer today.

I might have a personal soft spot for Baldur's Gate 1, but it's impossible to deny that Baldur's Gate 2 is far more influential. It's tectonic: a game that codified a model of RPG making whose influence is still felt today, and it's in large part down to how it handled its companion characters. 

The backlash to Unity's controversial install fees has now gone far enough to inspire the ultimate protest: a satirical idle game called Install Fee Tycoon.

We recommended a dozen Steam Next Fest demos out the gate but that barely scratched the surface of the demo-o-rama. So after diving back into the demo pile myself, I have another recommendation for you: adventuring across the galaxy in roguelikelike spaceship deck-building dungeon-crawler Cobalt Core. If you enjoy Slay The Spire and FTL, do have a look, though I might argue that FTL's follow-up, Into The Breach seems a stronger influence. Ah, play the demo and see for yourself!

Kazunori Yamauchi is one of the legends of game development and his Gran Turismo games are a flagship title on every PlayStation game console with lifetime sales above 90 million. And while racing is his passion, he stands at one of the most interesting intersections in gaming.

By Sean Hollister, a senior editor and founding member of The Verge who covers gadgets, games, and toys. He spent 15 years editing the likes of CNET, Gizmodo, and Engadget.

In the Android vs. iOS wars, you're part of the Android faithful. So when the new iPhones came out last month, you held out for the release of the Google Pixel 8 and Google Pixel 8 Pro.

Yesterday I had a lovely chat with the brainy folk of Oxide Games, developers of Ashes of the Singularity and the forthcoming Ara: History Untold, a historical 4X strategy game that puts a baroque spin on the classic Civilization format with each player's turn unfolding simultaneously once you've queued up a bunch of commands.