The Finals update finally takes aim at its most dominant class

Another Steam Next Fest is over, meaning another collection of indie game demos have vanished into the ether. As ever, with so many options at your fingertips, it can be hard to know what to play, but now that the dust has settled, we've collated our Steam Next Fest coverage to point you towards the games we loved that deserve a spot on your wishlist.

Former Mass Effect and Dragon Age director and BioWare general manager Aaryn Flynn says he "wouldn't go back" to the RPG studio.

Embark Studios dropped a mid-season update for The Finals this week, adding a new limited time event alongside the usual bug fixes and balance tweaks.

Suicide Squad: Kill the Justice League is out now - as long as you opted into its early access release and you live in New Zealand where it's now January 30 - but it's already been pulled offline due to a huge bug with story progression.

Early access survival game Enshrouded lets up to 16 players take part in a dedicated server at the same time, but those players are now discovering that if even a single one of them completes a quest objective, it completes for everyone - even if they're not actually online.

Palworld developer Pocketpair says it's aware that some players are cheating on official servers, but says it's "difficult to completely prevent all cheating."

Microsoft has announced that it will be laying off 1,900 members of its 22,000-person gaming division. 

Following Update 1.5.0 for THE FINALS and the limited-time addition of Solo Bank It!, Embark Studios has released Update 1.5.5. It adds new items to the store while also provide balance changes to several gadgets and weapons. The invulnerability period after reviving has also gone from 1.5 seconds to 0.75 seconds. The same also applies to revives with the Defibrillators.

Enshrouded, the other notable survival game to be launching into early access this week, puts a soulslike spin on its combat. But while that might imply Fromsoft-style difficulty, players are already saying that it's too easy to live up to that comparison.

Dune: Awakening, the upcoming survival MMO based on Frank Herbert's sci-fi masterpiece, has shown off its base-building systems for the first time.

The Pokemon Company seems to plan to "investigate" Palworld over the possibility of copyright infringement.

Palworld is the second-biggest Steam game by concurrent players in the platform's history, an out-of-nowhere smash hit that's risen above the likes of Elden Ring, Baldur's Gate 3, and Hogwarts Legacy to settle between Counter-Strike 2 and PUBG. It's an unlikely trifecta, but one that's united by one unlikely morsel: cooked chicken.