Roguelite clone-stabber (and upsettingly effective paranoia generator) It Has My Face is skulking out of early access this month, a Steam news update confirming its 1.0 release for April 3rd 2026. Hooray, and also, arrrrrrgh. I’ve been following IHMF since its impressive first demo under the name DoubleWe, and its short, highly-strung bursts of deduction and one-hit-kill violence are as cleverly staged as they are stressful.
Having reached the point of making their case to the European parliament, the Stop Killing Games's organisers are having to think about keeping their campaign going in the long-term. For example, they're setting up set up NGOs to advocate on the issue of server shutdowns rendering online-only games impossible to play.
Ironically, though, one of the factors the group see as helping ensure their efforts don't end up fading into background noise is the depressing regularity with which games like Highguard are dying in a fashion that's difficult to ignore.
If you read our verdict over the weekend, you’ll know that Mark and I found the anime-flavoured Screamer reboot to be a delightfully exaggerated bit of slidey arcade racing – albeit one that, in the story-based Tournament mode, sometimes becomes randomly, viciously hard for no readily apparent reason.
Judging by Screamer’s first update, which launched yesterday alongside game access for Digital Deluxe pre-orderers, those difficult spikes were an oopsie on the part of developers Milestone. Rather than send themselves on a Driving Awareness Course, though, they’ve "tweaked AI behaviors in various events to bring them closer to the intended difficulty," while announcing a future balance pass for the game’s difficulty settings. That’s good news for controller-chuckers and desk-smashers, though obviously as someone who progressed through Screamer before this update, I claim entitlement to the same Smug Bellend rights as those Elden Ring players who beat Pre-Patch Radahn.
Nvidia CEO Jensen Huang has decided to try something a bit different in his latest defense of the company's recently revealed DLSS 5 neural rendering tech. No longer does he throw cold coffee in the faces of critics and bellow 'you're dead wrong, and you better give me something on this guy or you're toast'. Instead, he sits on the desk like a teacher playing it casual - saying that he understands where critics are coming from, but still insisting that the tech's benign.
Urgh! What's happening? The air feels dreadfully recycled all of a sudden. Food dissatisfies, music grates, punchlines flop like stunned seagulls - everything seems somehow overfamiliar. We have entered a Lull. There are few Big Games out this week - little in the way of Big Sequels or New IPs From Triple-A Veterans or other projects that make you say "oh! That one" - and the Maw is making up the shortfall by siphoning novelty from the building blocks of reality itself.
To the pumps, colleagues, before we become so jaded that our wrists and elbows lose all elasticity! There must be a meatier morsel down there. There must be a new PC game gargantuan enough to appease the creature.
Huggghh-puuuhhhhh. Hughhhhh-puhhhh. If you've decided to try pedalling away in attempt to master Crimson Desert's bike-like controls, Pearl Abyss' latest patch - which also brings the likes of camp storage quicker tree felling - is good news. The developers have also acknowledged the fact they forgot to mention prior to release that the game wouldn't run on Intel Arc GPUs, with support for those cards now in the works.
Final Vanguard is a real-time sci-fi 4X grand strategy game that puts an unusually big emphasis on migration. We've seen migration mechanics in many 4X games – pops can shuffle about in Stellaris as you slop your colonies across the map, populating the periphery and slowing the development of your homeworld – but Final Vanguard's creators Heavy Pepper Inc want the feature to be central.
It's part of an ambition "to model a civilization made up of interconnected systems that influence one another over time", with everything from fleet manoeuvres to industry forming part of "a network of dependencies", rather than treating planets as isolated upgradeable nodes.
