Tyrant’s Realm is a grimy, spartan soulslike infused with Deathtrap Dungeon nostalgia

The baggiest thing about PS1-harkening soulslike Tyrant’s Realm is the ratty pair of prisoner pants you start out with. Everything else is pleasingly austere. It is, like Dark Souls, a game about equipment and stamina management, but it finds most success as a soulslike in the sensation that you are alone somewhere bad, not able to do very much except hit horrible things in the space between them trying to hit you. It also offers notable moments of lonely, loud footsteps rebounding off cold stone tiles in the seconds after felling some giant man-bastard - one of the subgenre’s greatest un-joys.

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The Maw: what's new in PC games this week?

As New Year's Day dawns, the bells ring out from the steeples of old London town. The peals of celebration travel outward through our atmosphere, exiting the realm of Earthly sound and resonating with interstellar plasma and detritus to form a delicate ripple of comet flakes and stray photons, expanding far beyond our solar system. Where the ripple encounters larger masses, such as planets, suns and... other things, it rebounds, riding the weft of stardust back down to Earth. As it returns home, the signal is modified. Tinkered with. It acquires unsettling harmonics and a guttural undertow. By the time it re-enters our atmosphere, it has condensed to three words, which descend and shrink and spiral into your ear like an octopus entering a crevice: FEED THE MAW.

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What's on your bookshelf?: ITU Copenhagen Games Professor Martin Pichlmair

Hello reader who is also a reader, and welcome back to Booked For The Week - our regular Sunday chat with a selection of cool industry folks about books! The longest novel ever written is generally agreed to be Proust’s Remembrance of Things Past - a coward’s pick, since it’s actually 13 different volumes. Don’t let Proust’s despicable lies sully the joy of literature for you, though. He did have a good quality moustache - a far more important literary trait than actually doing any writing, imo.

This week, it’s ITU Copenhagen Games Professor and Broken Rules co-founder, Martin Pichlmair! Cheers Martin! Mind if we have a nose at your bookshelf?

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What are we all playing this weekend?

Happy new year to you all! Let's make sure we collectively start off 2025 in the right way: that is, by playing games in our free time, and leaving no room for anything else. Here's what we're all clicking on this weekend!

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Marvel Rivals unbans Steam Deck and Mac players wrongly caught up in cheater purge

Steam Deck, Mac, and other Linux-based enjoyers of superhero shooter hit Marvel Rivals can once again play without fear of being pulped under an unlawfully swung banhammer. Developers NetEase had recently doled out bans of up to 100 years to players they suspected of cheating, but in their eagerness, failed to distinguish between legitimate compatibility layers – the software that non-Windows operating systems, like the Steam Deck’s SteamOS, use to run native Windows games – and actual hacks. Per IGN, NetEase have now apologised to the affected players, and lifted the bans.

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SpaceCraft is aiming for the gap between Starfield, Satisfactory and Eve Online

I'll be blunt: the only thing that really entices me about SpaceCraft is that it's from Shiro Games, creators of such robust RPG and strategy fare as Dune: Spice Wars, Evoland, Northgard and Wartales. As a concept, at least, SpaceCraft seems both flavourless and oddly inclined to overplay its own familiarity. I mean, look at that title. Consider its chilly blend of functionality and punmanship. Look at that capital "C", poking out of the middle like the bow on a present whose silhouette leaves nothing to the imagination. You already know broadly what this game involves, yes? Indeed, you do: it's a game about crafting spacecraft, so that you can travel to other planets and craft their resources into other, better spacecraft. This you may do eternally, for there are thousands of planets in store.

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Mechabellum Season 2 brings a square-jawed Sergeant specialist who’s definitely seen things no man should see

How would a younger me react to the concept of game seasons? "Leave me alone, please. I’m busy replaying The Suffering 2 for the sixth time to see a new 15 second cutscene that recognises which combination of morally aligned beginnings and endings I’ve picked. It reads your save from the first game and everything!". Say ‘memory card’ to a youthful, broccoli-maned Fortnite enjoyer nowadays. Go on, I dare you. You’ll be in a home before you know it.

Still, having new toys at regular intervals is one real upshot of our new live-service barrage of ephemeral novelty, perpetually flung at my dizzy eyeballs like gleaming carnival daggers at exhausted spinning wheels. Especially if they’re for the exquisite strategy of Mechabellum. Season 2 released yesterday alongside patch 1.2, bringing with it a new unit and specialist, some reworks, and lots of cosmetic bits I pretend not to care about but then get excited when I unlock a new one.

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