PC Gamer News, Tips, Tricks, Ideas

What is it? A surreal survival horror sequel that also ties into Control and Remedy's other past games.Release date 27 October 2023Expect to pay $50/£40Developer Remedy EntertainmentPublisher Epic Games PublishingReviewed on Nvidia Geforce RTX 3080, AMD Ryzen 9 5900X, 32GB RAMSteam Deck N/ALink Official site

Realms of Ruin, an overly simplistic RTS that focuses on low unit count skirmishes, definitely evokes the spirit of Age of Sigmar, which is unfortunately the worst version of Warhammer. It's far more forgiving than its grandiose Old World counterpart, Total War: Warhammer, but only a fraction as satisfying or interesting to play. Clumsy movement and a baffling hands-off approach to combat consign Realms of Ruin to the ever-growing graveyard of mediocre Warhammer games.

What is it? A casual life sim full of Disney charm. Release date December 5, 2023Expect to pay $40/£33.50Developer GameloftPublisher GameloftReviewed on 1.80 GHz,Intel® HD Graphics 620, Intel® Core(TM) i5-8250U CPU @ 1.60GHz,  8GB RAMSteam Deck VerifiedLink Official site

What is it? A single-player interactive adventure with your favourite dog family.

What is it? A time-bending metroidvania that marks a new era of Prince of Persia. Release date January 18, 2024Expect to pay £45 / $50 Developer Ubisoft Montpellier, UbisoftPublisher UbisoftReviewed on Nvidia GeForce RTX3070, AMD Ryzen 7 2700X, 32GB RAMSteam Deck N/ALink Official site

What is it? A city builder with Dungeon Keeper-like layers, set in a world of steampunk robots.Release date December 1, 2023Expect to pay TBCDeveloper The StationPublisher Thunderful PublishingReviewed on Nvidia Geforce RTX 3080, AMD Ryzen 9 5900X, 32GB RAMSteam Deck PlayableLink Official site

What is it? Mass Effect but isometric, dystopian, turn-based, and not that much like Mass Effect.

What is it? A casual building sim about restoring houses and selling them for profit.Expect to pay $40/£35Release date Dec 14, 2023Developer Frozen District, EmpyreanPublisher Frozen District, PlayWay S.A.Reviewed on Intel Core i7-10750H, 16GB RAM, GeForce RTX 2060Steam Deck TBDLink Official site

What is it? Survival management plus pausable RTSRelease date Out nowExpect to pay $40/£35Developer Ashborne GamesPublisher THQ NordicReviewed on Radeon RX 6800 XT, Ryzen 9 5900, 32GB RAMSteam Deck PlayableLink Official site

It all starts off so well for The Last Faith, another entry in the growing «Fine, we'll make our own Bloodborne for PC» subgenre. A new dark fantasy game that makes me go shopping with my own XP? One more moody adventure steeped in blood? Another chance to fell gigantic bosses with too many insides on their outsides and celebrate with a bit of NOUN VERBED text afterwards?

What is it? A narrative-led first-person adventure based on Stanislaw Lem’s 1960s sci-fi novel. Release date November 6, 2023Expect to pay TBADeveloper Starward IndustriesPublisher 11 bit studiosReviewed on RTX 2070, i7-10750H, 16GB RAM Steam Deck TBALink Official site

What is it? A platformer, a rhythm game, a branching story—in other words, another inkle narrative experiment.

What is it? A turn-based strategy spin-off of Persona 5. Release date November 17, 2023 Expect to pay $60/£55 Developer P-Studio Publisher Sega Reviewed on RTX 4080, Ryzen 7 7700X, 64GB RAM Steam Deck Verified Link Official site

Robocop: Rogue City's combat feels like straight up murder: I totally lost it when I punched someone for the first time and Robocop's fist flew out with the force of a particle accelerator, instantly atomizing their skull. A few minutes later I had to take a breather after picking up a dumpster and squashing four guys into a corner with it, like it was a malevolent hydraulic press adorned with Oakleys and Punisher skull stickers. When taking out hordes of Detroit street trash, Robocop: Rogue City is an absolute blast, but brutally uneven pacing and a coma-inducing plot leave it in the same mediocre arena as the film's sequels.

What is it? A roguelike city builder about making the best of a doomed world.

What is it? Third-person cooperative battler with middling comedy and combat

What is it? A Far Cry-like set in the world of James Cameron's AvatarRelease date December 6, 2023Expect to pay $60/£50Developer Massive Entertainment, Ubisoft Shanghai, Ubisoft DüsseldorfPublisher UbisoftReviewed on Radeon RX 6600, Ryzen 7 7700x, 32GB DDR5 RAMSteam Deck TBALink Official site

I played 2018's For The King by chance, when I randomly stumbled across it on Xbox Game Pass. It's the type of game I'd have never played if I'd had to pay for it first, but I ended up sinking so many hours into it that I eventually just bought it outright. I explored every single map and unlocked every scrap of lore, easily putting in over 50 hours. So when I heard that IronOak Games was making a sequel, I was excited to do everything all over again—although perhaps not quite to the degree that For The King 2 has in mind.

What is it? Shadowrun but steampunk instead of cyberpunk.

What is it? A direct sequel to Modern Warfare 2Release date November 10, 2023Expect to pay $70/£65Developer Sledgehammer Games, TreyarchPublisher Activision BlizzardReviewed on GeForce RTX 2080 Super, Core i9 9900KS, 32GB RAM  Steam Deck UnsupportedLink Official site

What is it? An update to the classic action-roguelike with a few new elements in the mix.

What is it? A Yakuza side-story, set during the events of Yakuza: Like a Dragon.Release date November 8, 2023Expect to pay $50/£45Developer Ryu Ga Gotoku StudioPublisher SegaReviewed on Ryzen 7 3700X, 32GB RAM, RTX 3080TiSteam Deck TBALink Official site

After a short stint wandering the orange canyons of Cocoon's opening area, you come across a curved groove in the ground, like a smile with indented lips. At one edge sits a large metallic ball, which you grab and yank until it reluctantly leaves its rectangular base, yet remains connected by a chewing gum string. Once the gum's elasticity approaches its limit, the base starts to move too, gliding across the mouth as if you're opening a zipper.

Whatever help you need to solve today's Wordle, you'll find it right here. There are general tips that'll give every guess a little lift, a brand new clue especially for the January 12 (937) game, and today's answer if you need to turn a tough game around. 

Esoteric Ebb seemed like a game tailor-made for me, and that left me nervous. An irreverent, dialogue-focused RPG proudly announcing its Disco Elysium inspirations⁠—my mind jumped to all those soulslike games I've gotten my hopes up for that just don't quite have the FromSoft magic.

Would you like a game controller that «can suggest button remaps and sensitivity adjustments» based on how you use it? What about a gaming mouse that «adjusts DPI settings in real-time, ensuring that your cursor movements are always accurate and fluid?» Or a keyboard that will «suggest key remaps and macros tailored to your gaming habits?» Those are all the promises of AI Shark, a new peripheral maker from the former US CEO of the company that launched the GameShark in 1996.

Embark Studios is clamping down on aim assist in The Finals in a new patch. It's a rare move for an FPS to make in our crossplay climate, but Embark says the changes were informed by «an in-depth review of how aim assist works—something we've only been able to validate with a player base as large as ours.»

There was a time when game demos were standard. Developers gave away a chunk of their game and if you liked it, you handed over some cash for the rest of it. In fact, the original Prince of Persia was available in a «shareware» version that gave players the first two levels of the game, after which they could pay for the remaining 11 if they wanted to keep going. 

Just one day after streaming service Twitch announced that it is laying off 500 employees, Discord has joined the parade: A report from The Verge says the company is cutting 170 employees, representing 17% of its workforce. A Discord representative confirmed with PC Gamer that The Verge's report is accurate.

Just a week after releasing an impressive «first slice» playable build, work on Portal 64, a fan-made effort to bring Valve's beloved Portal to the 1996 Nintendo console, has been halted. Developer James Lambert said he was asked by Valve to take the project down, because it «depends on Nintendo's proprietary libraries.»

We've been fans of Ducky keyboards for a while here at PC Gamer, and beyond the fantastic build quality and the delightful naming schemes, one thing the company is normally pretty good at is nailing the visuals. From the super-pink and super-wonderful Ducky One 3 Fuji through to the subtle RGB of the Ducky Shine 5 RGB, we've delighted at Ducky's refusal to adopt a stereotypical gamer aesthetic. However, it's just released the limited edition Ducky x Doom SF 65% keyboard, and if I'm honest, it's just not doing it for me.

Old School Runescape players are on another level, man. The game's flooded with zero-sum games where the house always wins: yet compared to the person who gathered 1 million of the same crappy fish, this is small pennies. Despite this, I'm still somehow surprised whenever somebody goes so far out of the way just to prove a point.

As part of another adventure in numbers incomprehensible to the human mind, Microsoft has gained the upper hand in its rivalry with Apple, attaining a market value of $2.87 trillion and becoming the most valuable company on the planet. 

Well it's not every day that a PC Gamer writer stumbles across an indie horror collection themed around an alt-history and deeply cursed version of PC Gamer, but here we are (thanks Dominic Tarason for the spot). PC Cursed is an impressively elaborate and free grab-bag of 22 indie horror games which comes complete with a 60-page version of the imaginary magazine and even printable CD inlays (because the whole schtick is that this is a lost 1998 cover disc).

We live in an era of AI hype and everyone has a take. But while most of us are a bit concerned about what the rise of ultra-predictive-text means for human creativity and criticism, a few Silicon Valley types are worrying themselves about Artificial General Intelligence, or AGI, which is basically a serious-sounding term for self-teaching AI with sentience and, potentially, an unslakeable lust for human blood. Or something of the sort.

Momodora: Moonlit Farewell is the final instalment in the Momodora franchise—designed, as the series' creator states, to «close the book on many of the past games’ mysteries and questions». While I've not had the pleasure of playing a Momodora game before, I do like a good metroidvania—and I've been pleasantly surprised so far as a latecomer to the series.

The US Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC) has approved Bitcoin exchange-traded products (ETPs) following years of opposition—though not without stern warnings about the «myriad risks» of investing in cryptocurrency. The news was greeted with enthusiasm by crypto-lovers and has led to a minor spike in Bitcoin's value, with one Bitcoin being worth around $44,000 on 8 January and at the time of writing just over $47,000.

Tributes are flooding in across the games industry following the death of game designer, artist, and transgender rights activist Jennell Jaquays, who died yesterday of complications caused by Guillain–Barré syndrome.

Lucasfilm has registered several new domains for Indiana Jones and the Great Circle, including one that specifically refers to the title as a game. The registrations were first spotted by X user Kurakasis and include:

Virtually all laptops come with a webcam these days, nestled either in the bottom or top of the screen's bezel. They're generally not very good as the available space constrains how big the camera can be. Well, Lenovo's latest ThinkBook 13X and 16P laptops sport a new 4K webcam that's (a) absolutely massive and (b) fully modular. Yes, that's right: If high-res images of your face, warts 'n' all, aren't needed, then you'll be able to replace the webcam with a host of other devices. How does an aromatherapy scent emitter sound?

CES is renowned for showcasing the latest and greatest display technologies, and the 2024 edition is no different. Samsung and LG always bring something new to ogle, and this year it was transparent screens that wowed us with gorgeous holographic-like images, like something straight out of Star Trek.

Need help winning Wordle? If you're struggling to turn those yellow letters into greens (or find any yellow letters at all), feel free to take a peek at our helpful hint for today's puzzle. Need something a little more direct? You've got it. The answer to the January 11 (936) Wordle is only a click away.

Thought we were done with this whole 3D TV trend? Think again. Samsung has some new 3D tech on show over at CES 2024: a gaming monitor that delivers glasses-free 3D gaming using eye-tracking technology.

After the less than perfect launch of Intel's first generation Arc Alchemist graphics cards, work on the second generation Xe2 Battlemage architecture appears to be coming along nicely. That's according to comments made during an interview at CES 2024 by Tom Petersen, a current Intel Fellow.

I've seen many gaming laptops at CES 2024: budget-friendly Gigabytes, Cyberpower ones with liquid cooling loops, Meteor Lake-powered MSIs, and Razer Blade laptops that'll blow your socks off. Yet my pick of the bunch has to be the redesigned Asus ROG Zephyrus G14 2024.

Team Fortress: Source 2, an ambitious fan project aiming to rebuild the venerable Team Fortress 2 in the Source 2 engine, has reached the end of the road. Amper Software, the team behind the project, said on Twitter today that it's been forced to pull the plug after receiving a DMCA takedown notice from Valve.

If I ever needed more evidence that Build Mode and Live Mode players of The Sims are built different, this is it. Sims player Kewlcy has exemplified a Live Mode sicko by building not just one underground kidnapping bunker but an entire hidden city «for capturing and storing men.»

Two years after Twitter introduced hexagonal NFT avatars, they're gone: As reported by TechCrunch and confirmed by numerous users, the social media platform has quietly dropped the feature, and reverted all existing NFT avatars to standard ones.

Despite having very little information about it yet, Diablo 4's next season is now confirmed to go live in less than two weeks. The current season, the Season of Blood, will close at an unannounced time (likely around 10 am PT) on January 23 and season 3 will begin within the same day.

Despite some technical misgivings we rated Forza Motorsport quite highly when it launched in October 2023, but others haven't been quite as impressed. Take a trip around to Steam and you'll quickly notice a «mostly negative» user rating across nearly 5,000 user reviews. There's a range of complaints: Some users are struggling with bugs and performance issues, while others find it lacking in content and «personality,» as one negative review puts it.

The Screen Actors Guild-American Federation of Television and Radio Artists (SAG-AFTRA) has announced a «groundbreaking AI voice agreement» as per the union's website—and despite its claim that the agreement was «approved by affected members of the union’s voiceover performer community», a lot of industry vets feel like their voices weren't heard.

AMD's Fluid Motion Frames (AFMF) technology has been part of a regularly updated preview driver since late September, and the red team has been adding support for a host of different RDNA 2 and RDNA 3 GPUs since then. And buried in the unveiling of the Radeon RX 7600 XT at CES 2024 this week is the announcement that AFMF is going to be part of the release driver for the new mid-range graphics card.

AMD and Nvidia are in a cat and mouse game. When one launches a new upscaling technology, the other follows. DLSS, then FSR. Frame Generation, then Frame Generation (AMD style). You get the idea. Traditionally we've come to expect Nvidia to lead and AMD to follow, but that's not how AMD's Aaron Steinman sees it.

With a rather understated press release, Ayaneo announced a new model PC in its Next series of handheld PCs, the Next Lite. Why understated? Because Ayaneo decided to not make too much of a fuss about its standout feature: It's the first non-Valve handheld product to use SteamOS as the operating system.

Tabletop RPG design studio Son of Oak has had enormous success with City of Mist, a game that combines superhero action with a setting steeped in noir atmosphere and mythological magic. In fact, it's so full of cool ideas that I put it in our list of the best alternatives to D&D. 

AMD's last generation of desktop CPU socket, AM4, first appeared in September 2016 and most of us assumed that once the current AM5 hit the market, there would be no further CPUs released for the old socket. That's definitely not the case and in this year's CES event, AMD has announced four more AM4 processors: the Ryzen 7 5700X3D, Ryzen 7 5700, Ryzen 5 5600GT and 5500GT.

It's a new year, and the devs at CD Projekt Red are turning their eyes away from Cyberpunk 2077 to focus on its upcoming sequel from the studio's new Boston office. In a tweet, Cyberpunk narrative director Igor Sarzyński said that the team is ready to «officially kickstart our Orion [the codename for Cyberpunk's sequel] journey» in the wake of Cyberpunk the first's very successful Phantom Liberty expansion and 2.0 update.

If you've got your own booth at CES it makes a whole lot of sense to fill it with some of the brightest, shiniest doo-dads right at the front to tempt passing traffic your way. While some might view this as a cynical attempt to draw attention to products that might not otherwise be worthy of note, you do occasionally get a diamond in the rough, as is the case here with MSI's limited edition MEG Maestro 700L PZ chassis. 

You know how it goes: sometimes you aim for Spyro and land on Boss Baby. At least, that's how I assume Riot arrived at the initial design for Smolder, League of Legends' newest champion. Announced last week, Smolder is an "audacious dragon cutie" whose design was intended to evoke a kind of mascot-ish, Pixar/Dreamworks-style cuteness that fans and fan-artists could latch onto. 

It's been almost 20 years since the Monster Hunter action RPG series first appeared on the PlayStation 2 and to celebrate its ongoing success, Capcom and MSI have collaborated to produce a range of Monster Hunter-styled products, including a gaming laptop, PC case, monitor, and gamepad. Some of it looks really neat but others come across as a missed opportunity, though.

World of Warcraft: Dragonflight won't be getting a fourth raid—which is something we've known for a while, as per an interview with game director Ion Hazzikostas. It will however still receive a fourth season with Fated Raids, alongside a recycled tier list the community can vote on as Blizzard revealed yesterday.

Humble Bundle's dropped another great TTRPG deal—this time for Lovecraft lovers with its Call of Cthulhu book bundle. At the time of writing, the bundle has raised over $22,000 for the World Wildlife Fund. It's also a pretty damn good deal from a buyer's standpoint, too.

They say imitation is the sincerest form of flattery, which means MSI must really like Nvidia's Founders Edition design. It's taken the core concept of Nvidia's RTX 30- and 40-series FE cards, the push/pull fan concept, and reimagined it with its own RTX 4080 Super 16G Expert.

Someone's always trying to change how we build gaming PCs—bold new concepts are commonplace at CES—but very few ideas actually succeed in changing anything at all. Yet it really looks like one trend could stick around this year, and that's motherboards with all the connectors and cables hidden around the back.

Looking for some Wordle wisdom? Instantly turn your game around with our help. Give your guesses a boost with our tips, find your own way to a January 10 (935) win with a clue, or go straight for the win with today's answer. However you want to play, we've got it covered.

Asus has unveiled its long anticipated ROG NUC at CES 2024. After Intel handed over the reins of its NUC business to Asus, there was always the hope that a company with the resources of Asus would develop a ROG themed NUC, and here we are.

Power supplies meeting new standards have made an appearance over at CES 2024, which hope to finally put an end to concerns over melted power connectors. 

Last year, after a game developer declared Steam wouldn't accept any game that used AI, Valve clarified that it was «working through how to integrate it into our already-existing review policies» and that «our review process is a reflection of current copyright law and policies, not an added layer of our opinion. As these laws and policies evolve over time, so will our process.»

Has SSD cooling gone too far? Are PCIe 5.0 speeds worth it? These are the questions to wrestle with as you stare down an SSD with its own dedicated liquid cooler.

Three years after it was first revealed, the Indiana Jones game in development at MachineGames is finally ready for the spotlight. Microsoft announced today that the upcoming game will take center stage at the next Developer Direct showcase, set to take place on January 18.

If there's one thing that divides opinion between PC hardware enthusiasts, it's RGB lighting. For some it's a tasteless display of gamer aesthetic and a glowing affront to the eyeballs, while to others it's a dazzling display of neon that sets off a gaming setup. If you fall into the latter category then you might want to check out Hyte's latest keyboard offering, as not only does it contain enough RGB lighting to divert low-flying planes, but Hyte has even gone and called it the Keeb TKL.

Amazon-owned streaming platform Twitch is set to lay off approximately 500 employees this week, or 35% of its total workforce, Bloomberg broke in a report on Tuesday.

One day after dropping a teaser that shone a pretty clear light on what was coming next, Behaviour Interactive has made it official: Alan Wake, the long-suffering writer and star of Remedy's Alan Wake games, is coming to Dead by Daylight as a new survivor.

Now that Final Fantasy 14: Dawntrail's full trailer has finally released, the game's first on-screen hrothgar lady has stepped into the spotlight. It turns out that her English voice actor has also been playing the game for years, as revealed in a tweet yesterday.

Last month at The Game Awards we finally got our first look at Sean Murray's followup to No Man's Sky—and it's a huge one. In its next game, Light No Fire, Hello Games is trading infinite procedural planets for a single world, but that one open world is going to be the size of an actual planet.

Palworld is the game that asks the disturbing yet fundamentally sensible question: What if Team Rocket had access to a large cache of HK416s and maybe some M72 LAW rockets? After all, pulling little monsters out of your pocket and making them fight might be cute but if you're serious about getting things done, hardware helps, right? 

A month ahead of launch, the developers of co-op shooter Helldivers 2 have dropped two pleasing bits of news on Steam. One, the PlayStation-published game will support crossplay at launch, meaning anyone on PC will be able to party up with pals on the PS5 to shoot bugs in cross platform harmony. Two, the PC specs are refreshingly modest, at least for playing at 60 fps. 

Warner Bros. Games has announced that the Harry Potter action-RPG Hogwarts Legacy sold over 22 million copies by the end of 2023, with roughly 2 million of those sales over the December festive period. «But it’s not just the units sold that I’m so proud of, it’s just that it delighted the fans so much,» Warner Bros. Interactive Entertainment president David Haddad told Variety.

Way before I sunk hundreds of hours into Final Fantasy 14, I watched it die and eventually return with A Realm Reborn in 2013. The major rework of FF14's entire world was a critical moment for the MMO that shaped the next 11 years of the game. The most recent expansion, Endwalker, was still tying up loose ends that originated in that rebuilt foundation.

The venerable online shooter Tribes made a surprise comeback in late 2023 as Tribes 3: Rivals, and with a launch set to happen later this year developer Prophecy Games has announced the first Rival Rumble tournament, an open-to-all competition that's set to get underway on January 27.