Watch out! An unruly gang of animals have been accosting Marathon right as its season 2 update has gone live! Developers Bungie have been hard at work getting the creatures under control, and have promised to dish out some free gear to affected players as a make good.
Here's the thing. When Konami announced that Silent Hill was making a comeback with not only a remake of its most beloved entry, but two new games from different studios, I felt quite curmudgeonly about it. I still do about that Silent Hill 2 remake, to be honest. Unfortunately, I thought that Silent Hill f was actually quite good, so good that here I am almost a year later still thinking about it. All of this is to say that hearing Silent Hill: Townfall, the slightly Scottish take on the series, now has a release date is just that little bit tantalising.
I want you to look me dead in the eyes and tell me you've never copied the way an animal moves in your life. Just try to, I'll know you're lying. I know you've hopped like a frog, flapped your arms like a bird, ran on all fours like a dog. It's fun! How about a video game where you sort of do the same thing? Well, I've got one in my pouch called Mimic Meadows, a puzzle game in which you copy the movement of animals to transform into them.
Intel have had a bit of a wild ride as of late. In many ways, the past two years have been some of the roughest in the company's history: a massive, multi-billion dollar quarterly loss back in 2024 was enough to cost then-Intel CEO Pat Gelsinger his job, and their flagship Core Ultra 200S desktop chips have fallen flat in games, ceding even more ground to archrival AMD.
There are still some bright spots, however. After the relative success of Intel's Lunar Lake laptop processors in 2024, their successor family of Panther Lake CPUs - or to use the official name, Core Ultra Series 3 - is being heaped with praise from nearly all quarters. Not least thanks to the integrated Arc B390 GPU, which on paper, promises the same gaming power as a discrete Nvidia RTX 4050. Having a few of these laptops on hand, I decided to test Panther Lake's chops for myself by spending a full week with them as my everyday games machines.
Maverick Games, the studio helmed by Forza Horizon 5 creative director Mike Brown, have revealed the story-led open-world driving game they've had in the works for a few years now and that's no longer being published by Amazon. It's called Clutch, and blends traditional Horizon-style road and street racing with a story that works in some action movie-esque chases with the police.
Last week, Subnautica 2 developers Unknown Worlds held their hands up and said that players seeking a means to kill dangerous fish was down to the survival game's tools for avoiding and outfoxing such creatures not feeling as effective as they should. Cue tweaks to creatures and their behaviour aimed at addressing the issue, which have started to arrive with Sub 2's latest hotfix.
After years of whispers around Nvidia maybe, possibly, perhaps getting into CPU-making, they’re making it official with RTX Spark: a fully integrated laptop SoC (System on a Chip), coming to thin 'n' lights in Autumn this year.
Unsurprisingly, given the source of Nvidia’s trillions, RTX Spark has a big focus on agentic AI work, the official descriptions of which are so inducive of malaise that I can’t even bring myself to copy them in from the press release. But there is plenty of note for those who’d use their lightweight laptop to play games, as the SoC’s graphics processor is based on the same Blackwell architecture as Nvidia’s GeForce RTX 50 series of standalone graphics cards. That means it’ll support DLSS 4.5 upscaling, Multi-Frame Generation, ray tracing, Reflex, and G-Sync, all hitherto unseen (or at least extremely rare) on what is essentially integrated graphics. Unless you count the Nintendo Switch 2. And round 'ere, we don’t.
Last week, I blithely commented that the Maw was "taking a break", because we had too much else to do besides feeding our resident cosmic newsbeast. We have now paid a grievous price for my negligence. Friends, I am horrified to report that the Maw has broken containment and eaten Geoff Keighley, the face of Summer Games Fest. In the process, it may also have devoured the very concept of the future.
Time has lost its gradient, and the harvest may never come. Without Geoff, there will be no barrage of hundred-thousand-dollar game trailers and announcements on June 5th, to spin us through the shambles of another year. There can be no Highguard 2. There will be no surprise celebrity cameos, for surprise requires change. In vain shall the children of Gamers ask, "what precise ratio of smart-casual is Mads Mikkelsen favouring right now?" I offer the below list of new PC game releases largely in memoriam for a "this week" that may never truly unfold.
Ah, the Fable reboot isn't coming out in 2026 after all, then. Rumours had suggested the wind was blowing in that direction and Xbox exec Matt Booty chose to interrupt last Friday's chill vibes to confirm that a delay to February 2027's now been set in stone, ripping the plaster off ahead of the impending Summer Geoff Fest. While almost certainly a shrewd move on Playground Games' part, Fable's slip from the autumn slate still sucks if you're, say, on the platform this November's flashiest arrival isn't hitting yet.
Sundays are for stumbling upon a ruined church, squirrelled away among the hawthorns behind a currently active church in the neighbourhood. I was flabbergasted – I've walked past that churchyard a thousand times without noticing. In this case, I just happened to take a different route around the cemetery. The old church is roofless and barred, but I managed to thrust my phone through a grill and take pictures of a peaked mausoleum, squat in the middle of the transept crossing, together with the coruscating beehive thumbed into the arch of one window. Magic. Anyway, here are some articles about mostly videogames.
007 First Light is built on the bones of IO Interactive’s Hitman, and makes no effort to hide that fact. But it’s far from just Agent 47 in a wig and doing his best posh English boarding school accent. The section that properly convinced me of this, ironically, is when First Light gets closest to resembling one of Hitman’s murder sandboxes.
This weekend, I’m going to a not particularly good football stadium to watch assorted famous people play not particularly good football. No, not the average [team you don’t like] match, but Soccer Aid. Why isn’t there a Games Aid, huh? Oh, there is. And they do great work, from the looks of it. Maybe one day we’ll use our own games-playing powers for good, but for now, it's just the following:
The Witcher 4 is the work of over twice as many CD Projekt developers as The Witcher 3: Wild Hunt, the company's executives have revealed. That's approximately as many people as worked on Cyberpunk 2077, although naturally, the figure excludes a lot of external or infrequent contributors, such as voice actors.
Before I tell you about the Heroes of Might and Magic: Olden Era early access roadmap, I fear I must finally have a tantrum about the terrible word, "roadmap". Videogame developers, I cannot think of a more flattening, soul-sapping way to describe the process of tinkering with the clockwork of make-believe.
In this case, Unfrozen are planning to add a persistent netherworld to their strategy RPG, stretching beneath every mountain and valley. They are also even now convening a Thieves Guild for surveillance purposes, and breeding unspecified monsters as powerful as lich dragons. If I were going to summarise all that, I would toy with words like Cornucopia or Manifestation or Eruption or Blight. I would go rooting around in the Epic of Gilgamesh for a line that sounds vaguely like a hotfix. Roadmap? You are cultivating a fantasy, Unfrozen, not paving one over. From now on, the only game developers who are allowed to use the word "roadmap" are people who are making games about actual infrastructure. Anyway, let's dig into the Heroes of Might and Magic: Olden Era early access cornucopia.
Last year, more than 30 Rockstar Games staff members were fired in an act of alleged union busting by the GTA 6 developer. Rockstar claimed that this firing was because said devs were leaking features from upcoming games. Following this, the UK's IWGB filed legal claims against the studio due to them supposedly refusing to negotiate over firings, a case which continues on to this day. Now, Rockstar devs have gone public with their union, calling themselves the Rockstar IWGB Game Workers Union.
I hear that some of you aren't playing Marathon yet. Maybe extraction shooters aren't your jam, or there's not enough about Bungie's game to draw you away from your shooter of choice, or maybe you're just sick and tired of a certain portion of the internet yammering on about Marathon like it's the bee's-freaking-knees of multiplayer games. Now, if you fall into that latter camp, I have particularly good news for you. For one week only, you will be able to drop into Tau Ceti and wipe the smile of those yammerers' faces without buying the game.
Bungie are kicking off Marathon Season 2 with a free week. Importantly, that free week coincides with an account wipe for all players, so even though you will be going up against people who have had a couple of months in Marathon already, they won't be packing any of their best loot or top level skills.
(It's also a great chance to try a really very good shooter that you might have been interested in.)
Yesterday, May 27th, CD Projekt finally held their hands up and revealed that the extra DLC long-rumoured to be coming to The Witcher 3 is indeed a thing. It's called Songs of the Past and will arrive in 2027, they said, also lobbing out some promo art of Gerry from the River holding a sword in front of a spooky tree bloke. Cue a Witcher 3 modder cracking their knuckles and immediately getting to work re-creating the sword from the artwork and adding it to the RPG as a way for folks to celebrate the news.
As Rockstar gear up to release GTA 6 (at least on consoles), spare a thought for Red Dead Online. The multiplayer element of Red Dead Redemption 2 had its steady flow of major update-carrying stagecoaches stopped all the way back in 2022, with its makers explicitly citing a desire to shift those development resources over to that next entry in the stealy wheels series.
There've been a few moments in the years since when Red Dead Online has looked a bit like it might bounce back to prominence, but nothing substantial in that vein has materialised. It essentially had a solid three year run, but failed to come close to grasping the reins from its older inspiration, GTA Online. In the eyes of Take-Two CEO Strauss Zelnick, however, that doesn't make it a missed opportunity.
Attention unidentified spacecraft, this is the USS Asteroid Paper Railgun. Please maintain your current heading and velocity. I am about to rotate 34 degrees and jettison a new early access space strategy game from my cargo hold. If my calculations are correct, the package should arrive in your airlock in precisely 14.7 seconds. If my calculations are incorrect – well, I'm not sure if Starminer simulates damage from loose storage modules, but it's probably better avoided.
Marathon is a horror game. Well, it should be, anyway (or I suppose in some ways it already is). The ever under-respected genre is not where Bungie's take on an extraction shooter currently sits, even if there are still qualities to be found in the likes of jump scares, a clingy, sticky tension, hints of something that went catastrophically wrong. I want more of these elements of horror, and oh lucky me, the first trailer for the game's second season looks like it will deliver on that front.
The problem with Portal is that Valve only made two of them. Those are some dang good puzzle games! And they're not very long. I don't necessarily need more Portal exactly per se, I just want more of that style of puzzle platforming that's equal parts physical as it is clever. Hopefully, Yerba Buena, a puzzle platformer where you can copy and paste the physics and movement of one object to another, can deliver on that front.
For people who don't play city builders, it may be easy to look at them as something mechanical and bureaucratic. Grids of streets, well-ordered manufacturing production lines, and carefully tailored catchment areas to ensure residential zones will efficiently staff nearby businesses, don't scream the stuff of life. Though, play enough of them and you will often see there can be a good deal of living going on at street level. Zoom in close on Cities: Skylines and you can follow people as they travel to work, hover over your town in Anno 1800 and you watch the carts take goods from the harbours to factories to markets to the doors of your townspeople.
Life Below may not be about constructing a city exactly, but this underwatcher cosy city builder still captures that sense of bustling life.
One of the bits of Oblivion remake mod Skyblivion I'm most keen to explore is all sorted and ready to go. The modders have announced that they've finished making and QA testing their revamped versions of The Elder Scrolls 4's Ayleid ruins, marking another key step forward in their journey, even if the mod's still without a final release date following its delay last year.
My intolerable efforts to become Rock Paper Shotgun's new Erotica Uncle proceed apace with Step 'n Smush, a free WIP browser game in which you play some extremely large women sexily stepping all over bustling 2D cities. You've got 70 seconds to squash as many buildings as you can, gaining size for every pedestrian you amorously flatten. It could be a mod for the original Grand Theft Auto; given a larger butt budget, it should be a mod for GTA 6.
Last week, Bungie made a half surprising, half the writing was on the wall decision to end active development on Destiny 2. The long running live service shooter's final update has been set for June, with responses to the news generally oscillating between genuine upset and baffled disappointment. Worse still, a report suggested that the studio is facing "significant" layoffs as a result of this choice. Except the choice didn't come last week, but earlier in the year, a choice that another report now claims that many at Bungie weren't privy to until it was made public.
There is no abundance of train sims in this world, that's for sure. But I am a person that likes two cakes, so you won't find me complaining when a new one rocks up. Today, that new one is Running Train, a quite lush looking train sim that places a big emphasis on looking as realistic as possible, set in tourist's and gaming's current favourite destination, Japan.
As is the case with most big name games that people are desperate to get their hands on, over the weekend the opening mission of 007 First Light leaked online due to someone seemingly acquiring a disc copy a touch early. That video has since been taken down, to no one's surprise, but IO Interactive clearly decided to fight fire with fire, as they've shared the first 13 minutes of said opening mission themselves. Spoilers ahead obviously for those who want to go in knowing nothing!
Epic Games have made no secret of the next release of Unreal Engine; they first shared some details about the follow-up back in 2024, namely that it's being built around the idea of "interoperable content" that can be switched between any game that uses the engine. Now, Unreal Engine 6 has been somewhat formally revealed through the lens of a "new era" of Rocket League during the game's Paris Majors semi-finals.
Sundays are for setting up a fan fiction writing group with your fellow RPG dungeon masters. You gather in a nice living room that often reminds visitors of the beloved previous tenants, and you write something. It's of indeterminate quality, at least until it's fully formed, mainly because you let it go where it wants as you go, rather than planning out a path ahead of time. It's a wild horse, and sometimes it bucks you off by, for example, having you roll into a metaphor you're unlikely to be able to maintain unless you suddenly write cowboy hats into existence for your gang of would-be masters. The words spill forth, occasionally dripping onto the carpet or being flung towards a metal spitoon in the corner, where they land with a satisfying ftannnggg sound. Sometimes you do just about manage to keep the metaphors going.
Another day, another Crimson Desert patch. The devs behind the everything but the kitchen sink RPG, Pearl Abyss, seem deadset on somehow eventually including the sink too, as while this update is a small one, it continues to add yet more features, things to discover, a pet to own, and a good bit more besides.
While I've never really played all that much of The Sims (does maybe four hours of My Sims Kingdom from when I was 11 count?), my partner certainly has, expositing all of the surprisingly deep lore to me from time to time. Yet nothing shocks me more than hearing both the cost of expansions and the contents therewithin. What do you mean you have to hand over legal tender for bloody seasons? I'm supposed to pretend that this simulation of life exists in a post-weather world right up to the point of handing over 40 bucks? All of this to say, Paralives continues to sound convincing for the expansion fatigued Simmers thanks to its first roadmap.
Birds, as we all know, are dinosaurs. Yet there exists a higher being above birds that answer the question "what if dinosaurs really were birds?": dragons. I can only assume the exact same logic I've laid out here was used during the design process for the board game Wyrmspan, the dragon-oriented follow-up to the bird-focused strategy card game Wingspan. And now, much like Wingspan before it, Wyrmspan too is getting its own video game adaptation.
All roads lead to, and sometimes return to, XCOM. In this case, it's more of a return, as a sequel to Warhammer 40,000: Chaos Gate - Daemonhunters was announced this week, replacing its demonic subtitle with an equally gloriously edgy "Deathwatch." This one's apparently a direct sequel to Daemonhunters, now putting you in charge of the Imperium's "most elite alien-hunters," once again taking the form of a turn-based tactical RPG.
Ah, it's a Saturday and the start of a heat wave. What to do? What to do? Pull out the plastic storage box and fill it with cold water and ice cubes for a nice chilling foot bath. Get some damp flannels in the freezer to become an ice pack ready to be deployed at a moment's notice. And get a nice hot cup of tea on, because tea doesn't stop for a poxy heat wave.
(Though maybe I'll get a nice buttery chardonnay in the fridge for afters)
I’ve been a super sorry spy again. THAT’S AGAINST YOUR AGREEMENT, Mr Wang shouts in text form, subsequently yanking away the bonuses afforded to me by my decision to adopt the Wang way. I didn’t think working the Wang into my thang would be this stressful, to be honest.
Bullet heaven games can already be fairly chaotic. Starting with Vampire Survivors, it's a genre that joyously fills your screen with thousands of enemies and tasks you with somehow killing them all before they reach your character in the centre. While Warhammer Survivors treads much of the same ground of Poncle's original, there is a small mechanical twist at its centre that adds a meaningful extra drip of chaos to the action.
Rather than control a single character, as you pick up weapons, you assemble a small squad, all of whom act independently of you.
If you watch the Dawn of War 4 trailer showing off the Adeptus Mechanicus faction, you might have spotted a mech that's practically dancing on the spot. The excitable little thing looks to be itching to get into the fight. It turns out, it's not channeling the spirit of a warmongering puppy, it's got to keep moving for very serious lore reasons.
"They can never stop," Dawn of War 4's creative director Jan Theysen tells me. "They're always moving and always walking because the Adeptus Mechanicus fear that if they turn off, they might not be able to turn them on again. So they just keep them moving all the time."
Today, May 21st, marks the release of ZA/UM's Zero Parades, the studio's Disco Elysium follow-up arriving following years of drama and turmoil surrounding the original game and the people who made it. So, naturally, one of numerous Disco-like games which have sprung up over the past few years has chosen that day to put out a new trailer, while also shouting about having recruited another former Disco Elysium developer.
Many fantasy games deal in the prospect of sacrificing things to gods, but few dramatise the associated exciting logistical pressures. Say you want to chuck a bunch of virgins into a volcano at regular intervals, to stop the regional Vulcan pulling a Pompei. Well, how are you going to procure an adequate supply of vestals, if you keep incinerating the very means of production?
Perhaps you can obtain some from the nearby villages, in return for some steel wire from your furnaces. Ah, but the nearby villages don't want any wire; they're desperate for fish. Fine: sell the steel wire to the villages on the coast, that they may haul in a big catch and sell it to the inlanders, so they can flog their spare virgins to you. What happens when the other villagers run out of virgins? That's their problem. As Valve like to say, we cannot be held responsible for the business decisions of third parties.
While in the midst of not great financial times at the moment, Ubisoft have revealed plans to have new Assassin’s Creed, Far Cry, and Ghost Recon games out at some point between now and early 2029. Boss Yves Guillemot is touting this to investors as signifying an incoming turnaround following "one of the most ambitious transformations in the company’s history", which is corpospeak for taking a bunch of money from Tencent to rearrange some corporate chairs, delaying or cancelling a bunch of games, and laying off staff.
The biggest videogames are taking longer to make, according to Diablo 4 lead engine engineer Marcin Undak, and one consequence is that there are fewer junior openings at industry dreadnoughts like Blizzard and CD Projekt, because companies prefer to hire juniors right at the start of development. This isn't ideal, Undak suggested, because "the best teams" have a healthy mixture of crabby old wizards and sparky bantlings. OK, he did not call anybody either a wizard or a bantling. Maybe next time.
The day that all of you Civvers have been hoping for is here. Firaxis have been promising Civilization 7's Test of Time update for a while now, and as I write these words into existence, that very update is available for you to download, complete with the most requested feature, the ability to play as one civ for a whole campaign.
Arc Raiders devs Embark have announced that they're going to be rolling out Denuvo anti-cheat software as part of efforts to limit the amount of dodgy behaviour going on the shooter. The studio said they'll be working to minimise any impact this has on performance, as they also deliver a new trader and weapon as part of a small update teased when they revealed the game's switch to bi-annual major expansions.
Valve have revealed a round of changes to the tags which can be applied to games on the Steam store. The ones designed to give you a brief idea of the genres or themes you're in for if you opt to give any specific game a go, as well as grouping together similar works. 17 new tags have been added as a result of this rather substantial revamp, while 28 have been consigned to the scrapheap, and merging or updating several others.
The Witcher 4 and Cyberpunk 2 have gotten ample attention for their whizbang Unreal Engine features and potential major cast resurrections, but one of their key 'enhancements' may seem horribly dry: their creation will be much, much better documented than any Witcher or Cyberpunk game before. This also means that they will be a stronger foundation for Witcher and Cyberpunk games to come. Both games are following a new production process that obliges the devs to keep their internal development notes up to date, from milestone to milestone – whether it be a narrative bible, a tool guide or a folder of sketches.
As technical writer team lead Jarosław Ruciński and senior technical writer Adrian Fulneczek explained during a presentation at this year's Digital Dragons conference in Kraków, CD Projekt have learned the value of good internal documentation the hard way over the past 20 years, with company lorekeepers departing and crucial tools shelved to cut costs, sabotaging work on everything from Cyberpunk 2077's Phantom Liberty DLC to the forthcoming Witcher remake at Fool's Theory.
Subnautica 2 is deliberately designed to nudge you away from seeking violent solutions to your 'oh lordy there's a giant leviathan chasing me' problems, with devs Unknown Worlds having been clear that strong feelings have propelled them down that path. Yet, as they've also acknowledged, not every Sub 2 player will agree: cue a mod that makes creatures killable quickly springing up now the survival game's out in early access.
For many players, Zero Parades: For Dead Spies will never be anything other than a seedy clone of ZA/UM's reputation-making Disco Elysium – a soul-sucking forgery of a doomy leftist masterpiece, whose original lead writers and designers have been ousted by scheming executives. It's appropriate then, that, Zero Parades proves obsessed with clones, forgeries, bootlegs, and the ways in which these entities can be wielded for erasure and displacement. Its opening third is a comical squabble over notions of authenticity and (thereby) identity, an interrogation of connoisseurship and the notion of the 'genuine article' as vectors for assimilation.
It had to happen. After getting the original Fallout and Morrowind running as a holotape on Fallout 4's Pip-Boy and terminals, the same modder has now made Skyrim playable within the game about a frozen snack finding their son and being nagged about settlements. I can only assume Fallout 4 becoming playable in Fallout 4 is mere days away.
There’s something about prying open the door of your majestic Ferrari 250 California or Reliant Supervan as waves gently lap against the shore off to your right and a blazing sun beats down on you from above that you don’t truly appreciate until it’s gone. Or, at least, that’s what I’ve found playing Forza Horizon 6.
Sundays are for rooting out clothes moths. The wool-devouring bastards have started cropping up all over my flat. I've put traps down but that's only dealing with the ones which have already hatched and taken flight. I need to work out where they're coming from.
