PC Gamer (US Edition) June 2022

ROBIN VALENTINE Twitter @robinlvalentine This month Told anyone who’d listen how good the 2007 TMNT film is. Patrick Stewart plays the villain! It’s not often you get to put the Ninja Turtles and Gabe Newell on the cover. You can consider this an issue of two halves—a colorful trip back to the past in our TMNT feature, but also a look at the future in our hardware section, where we not only talk to the big man himself, but give our scored verdict on the Steam Deck. Well, two halves plus a ton of other features, previews, reviews, and more. It all adds up to four whole magazines worth of great content, if you ask me. robin.valentine@futurenet.com…

As the magazine was going to press, Valve published its Steam statistics for 2021: Yes, most companies do this at the start of the year, but it’s good to experience a bit of Valve time again, don’t you think? What is astonishing is the scale Steam is operating at, and how quickly users have stacked. The platform now boasts 69 million daily active players, and 132 million unique monthly users. The first number is higher than the population of the United Kingdom (67.89 million), while the second is more people than live in Mexico (128.9 million), and would make Steam the tenth biggest country on Earth. Er, if it was a country, that is. Valve’s preferred metric for measuring Steam’s success has always been highest concurrent player count: In 2015 the peak…

HIGHS Genshin energy Genshin developer MiHoYo invested $63 million into building a tokamek. Dream of Californication? 23 years after the Red Hot Chili Peppers did a video featuring a fake open world game for Californication… a modder went and made all seven stages of it. GPU what? Availability of graphics cards is finally increasing. Serious Hacks A hacker group called Lapsus$ compromised Nvidia and Samsung. Titanfail After thousands in funding indie MMO TitanReach is dead, with an insider alleging the lead developer used the cash to gamble on crypto. eSnoop Dogg Snoop Dogg is now a member of Faze Clan and, yes, he’s going to be called Faze Snoop. LOWS…

Finding the Eye of Horus and placing it on an altar in Trismegistus is an unforgettable event. The entire world fades away before returning as a warped version of itself, cloaked in ominous purple hues. It feels like the kind of trick Trismegistus just shouldn’t be able to pull off, considering how it was made: As an original adventure built with the 22-year-old Sword of Moonlight: King’s Field Making Tool, a dungeon crawler construction set released on PC by FromSoftware long before Dark Souls or Elden Ring. Building a game with FromSoftware’s ancient tools took creator Thomas Eversole “multiple hours out of each day” over six months of toil. The effort shows. Strange monsters await your move on a chess-like floor. Serene pools are replaced with fiery lava. The playable duality…

Look at Abermore, the new heist RPG from Four Circle Interactive, and you’re likely to see the Thief in it—the dumb waiters, and waiters knocked dumb with blunt instruments. But the inspiration came via an intermediary—The Elder Scrolls IV: Oblivion. Its notorious Dark Brotherhood questline was designed by Emil Pagliarulo, a veteran of the Thief games who secreted stealth missions into Bethesda’s open world. “The lack of staging and matter-of-factness of the objectives let the player be very broad in their approach, and there was something about that which we really liked,” say Dan Pearce and Daniel Scales of Four Circle. “It’s a feeling that Tom Francis’ excellent Heat Signature gave us, too. Obviously we had an awareness and some familiarity, but Thief is actually an influence we landed on sort…

UBI TORONTO WORKED ON FIVE DIFFERENT GAMES—BUT MOST NEVER MATERIALIZED It is the blessing and the curse of the younger sibling. On the one hand, the benefit of walking on ground already broken by the elder child, pre-flattened for ease of passage. On the other, the identity-smothering disappointment of the hand-me-down. Ubisoft Toronto was built in the shadow of the publisher’s flagship studio in Montreal—an enormous ideas factory responsible for Splinter Cell, Prince of Persia, and Assassin’s Creed, the very foundations of the Ubi empire. Montreal’s brightest lights were sent to Ontario’s capital to establish the new outpost: Producer extraordinaire Jade Raymond, who has since specialized in manifesting AAA studios, and the creative director Maxime Béland. The latter brought with him a blueprint for what was, back in 2010, a shockingly modern take…