Table of contents for February 2022 in PC Gamer (US Edition)

Sometimes, the best thing ever is taking a trip to somewhere horrible. In games, at least. Whether it’s a barren wasteland, scorched post-apocalypse, or literal Hell, we love a grim digital world. The irradiated wilderness that is the Zone is one of our favorites. So it’s a thrill that not only is STALKER making its way back to our screens, its new entry is a true open world—bigger, bleaker, and more dangerous than ever before. Read on, and discover a place where even the deer can kill you… robin.valentine@futurenet.com ROBIN VALENTINE Twitter @robinlvalentine This month Stared deep into the Orb. The Orb is light! The Orb is life! All hail the Orb! TALK TO PC GAMER Have your say! Email us at letters@pcgamer.com…

FABLE LEGENDS Lionhead’s last big project installed one player as the Dungeon Master, working against four heroes as they embarked on high fantasy quests. But it died with the developer. SHADOW REALMS Built by the Bioware studio behind Star Wars: The Old Republic. The Shadowlord would have controlled creatures and set traps—if it hadn’t been scrapped. DEAD BY DAYLIGHT The exception to the curse: a playable slasher flick in which one player becomes the killer. So successful that it’s hosted monsters from Halloween and Stranger Things.…

Morgan Park: In a world of multiplayer games that are either ultra competitive or glorified checklists, Chivalry 2 is a rare game that just wants you to hop into a match and go effin wild. Objectives are little more than set dressing for the game’s impressively massive 64-player battles. You can push the battering ram toward the castle with your team, but no one will begrudge you for ignoring it and going on kicking spree instead. One time I decided I’m allergic to swords, and was only allowed to kill people with dismembered arms and heads (it went surprisingly well). Evan Lahti: If you’ve ever practiced a martial art, you know how crucial it is to manage and manipulate distance to beat an opponent. Chivalry 2 manages to contain this…

Fraser Brown, online editor: My love for Guardians of the Galaxy makes me feel very basic—a big Marvel action game with quips, how novel!—but I can’t help myself. It’s an incredibly entertaining jaunt through colorful alien planets, cop-infested spaceships, and a city chilling out inside the skull of cosmic god, elevated beyond a popcorn-munching diversion by the Guardians themselves. Star-Lord is a man-child leading a bickering team of semi-reformed criminals who don’t respect him. He’s the only member of the Guardians you’ll directly control, and starting out you’re a bit of a punching bag. But over the course of the 15-hour adventure, the team becomes a support system, helping each other work through trauma in genuinely heartwarming and heartbreaking moments. And when things threaten to get sickeningly sentimental, there’s guaranteed…

Fraser Brown: For the site, I wrote a far-too-revealing feature about really wanting a game where Agent 47 chases me. Then I tried to get Andy Kelly to ask Agent 47 voice actor David Bateson to record himself saying, “I’m coming to get you, Fraser”. He chickened out, and now he is dead (to me). You could say I really got into Hitman 3. It’s weird to think of it as a stealth game. In one of the most out-there missions, I spent my first attempt in-character as a detective in an Agatha Christie knock-off, right up until the point where I killed my target. There are more traditionally sneaky routes through every map, of course, but Hitman’s all about that social stealth, and 3 has some of the strongest…

Nat Clayton: The hero of this desert adventure doesn’t save the world. There’s no existential threat, no looming war or ancient MacGuffin to recover. In fact, Sable doesn’t really have much of a plot at all—and yet, within an hour of firing up the game, a passing conversation brought me to the brink of tears. Sable is a coming-of-age story. A rite of passage that sees you leaving your family behind to explore the world and figure out who, exactly, you want to be. Every quest, every conversation, every mask and piece of clothing is there in service of finding an identity for the titular glider. Throughout the game you’ll be choosing conversation options and outfitting your bike not because you need to optimize stats or grind reputations, but because…

CYCLE TOWN CENTERS (H) Jumping straight to town centers lets you easily navigate to nearby buildings. SELECT IDLE VILLAGERS (Ctrl+V) Never let your villagers rest with this handy shortcut. GROUP UNITS (Ctrl+1-9) Select a group of units by dragging your mouse or double-clicking. SELECT IDLE MILITARY (Ctrl+C) Military units get scattered, so gather them up. FAST-BUILD (Q-R, A-F, Z-V) To activate these, you’ll need to press two hotkeys in a row (tricky, we know).…

1 DRAX Sure, he doesn’t get jokes, and he’s animated only by grief, but he’ll never let you down. 2 GROOT It’s a giant tree with restorative powers and super-strength. Great in a scrap, if bad at conversation. 3 GAMORA A powerful ally, but perhaps a little quick to threaten our lives over every single perceived slight. 4 ROCKET RACCOON Look man, I get that you’ve had a hard life, but do you always need to be a dick? 5 STAR-LORD This game would be ten percent better if Star-Lord was eaten by the Dune worm in the first act.…

OPEN RACING Weirdness rating: Low It’s a race, just with real people. Pretty simple, really, but there’s plenty of variety between the different cars, classes and terrain types. PLAYGROUND GAMES Weirdness rating: Slightly higher FPS standards like capture the flag and king of the hill, but with cars. In my experience, these are often wildly unbalanced. HORIZON TOUR Weirdness rating: Still low Team up to take on an AI team in a series of races. The better each racer on your team places, the more points you earn. ELIMINATOR Weirdness rating: Off the charts It’s battle royale, but with cars. It’s got loot drops that give you better cars, a slowly closing ring and eliminations. Extremely bizarre.…

Time is tight—we’ve only got one ‘rotation’ (however long that is) to explore this graveyard of derelict spaceships. Rocket points out the best way forward, and warns against a dead end path. Of course, ignoring all dramatic tension and logic, I go down the dead end first, seeking collectibles. But then, a surprise—Rocket actually calls me out, directly reacting to my time-wasting with a bitter wisecrack. Ha ha, ho ho, see how my gaming habits have been delightfully skewered. Guardians of the Galaxy has been widely praised for this reactivity, with loads of dialogue triggered by the player’s actions—but my experience has been that it’s almost all been along these lines. I go off to explore, and some grumpy aliens call me a jackass for doing so. Maybe I’m the…

Last season notwithstanding, Apex Legends has had one hell of a year. So, to celebrate, Respawn has sent our gang of delightful murderbuds off on an unseasonably sunny holiday to close out the year. Welcome to Storm Point, Apex Legends’ largest map to date. With a landmass roughly 15% larger than World’s Edge, Storm Point is truly massive. But it’s also both denser and taller than any Apex arena yet, laid out as a sprawling jungle wrapped around a mountain that extends higher than any previous map, dusty peaks descending into thick foliage before leveling out into white sandy beaches. It’s gorgeous, but it’s also a jarring shift from the tight, clustered maps we’ve seen so far. Without obvious hotspots like Kings Canyon’s Skulltown (RIP), or World’s Edge’s Fragment, matches…

BARNEY CALHOUN He was in Half-Life 1 & 2, Blue Shift, and Half-Life 2: Episode 1. He wasn’t seen or even mentioned in Episode 2. RUSSELL The guy was indispensable in Half-Life: Alyx, which takes place before Half-Life 2—in which he’s never seen or mentioned. ODESSA CUBBAGE Cubbage was in Half-Life 2 and is mentioned in Episodes. But after teaching you to use an RPG, he’s gone. ADRIAN SHEPARD G-Man stuffed him in an interdimensional closet at the end of Half-Life: Opposing Force. He deserves to be let out. GORDON FREEMAN We get a glimpse of him in Half-Life: Alyx, but he’s been in limbo since 2007. Will we ever swing his crowbar again?…

I’m a Hitman purist. The ideal playthrough involves a few people getting food poisoning and passing out, before there’s a terrible accident where someone nasty dies in an ironic way. Less a murder-simulator, than a death-by-misadventure-simulator. I think it’s why the two movie adaptations leave me cold. If I was directing, it’d be all choking on vol-au-vents and you wouldn’t see Agent 47 at all. But when my daughter plays, she embraces the film aesthetic. She goes in shooting… become death, destroyer of worlds. While the body count is impressive, it’s not what you’d call efficient. There’s a real ammo issue, and often the target flees once the big guns come out. However, while I usually restart after the automatic weapons kick-in, I wondered if it was possible to hit…

UNREAL MAY 22 Wake up on a wrecked prison space ship, meet Skarj, shoot Skarj, look incredulously at nice water. Pretty shallow, but Unreal made a leap forwards visually from incumbent FPS king Quake II. TOM CLANCY’S RAINBOW SIX AUGUST 21 Guns, yes, but also: Tactics. A revolutionary idea only diminished by the clumsy planning stage which worked a bit like giving RTS-style orders then executing them. SHOGO M.A.D. SEPTEMBER 30 Mechs, yes, but also: Guns. Will the revolutionary shooter ideas never cease this year? Monolith’s take on the FPS stood apart from the Quake clones. Also about 20 feet taller. SIN NOVEMBER 9 As Quake and Unreal dialled back exposition and dialogue, SiN wanted to take FPS gaming in a more cinematic direction. Characters, plot, set-pieces… it was a…

These days all-in-one liquid coolers seem to get all the attention. I get it, they look awesome and really add some personality to your rig. But let’s say you don’t have the budget for a liquid cooling solution but still need to cool your CPU. Here’s where the best CPU air coolers come in. Even the most expensive air cooler is nowhere near the cost of an AIO liquid cooler, and they offer simplicity and reliability. Following the bigger is better mantra is a good start towards finding your ideal air cooler, but you need to make sure it fits in your case. Noctua’s NH-D15 is a mighty beast, to say the least. There’s also some leeway on style here. While maybe not as flashy as some liquid coolers, some air…

MOTHERBOARD MPG X570 Gaming Pro Carbon WiFi MSI $280 The MSI Gaming Pro Carbon isn’t the most lavish X570 going, but it’s pretty darn close without the ludicrous price tag. PROCESSOR Ryzen 9 5900X AMD $549 AMD’s latest Zen 3 architecture cruises through the newest games, and hands you plenty of cores for CPU-intensive workloads. GRAPHICS CARD GeForce RTX 3080 Ti Founders Ed Nvidia $1,199 The RTX 3080 Ti is the latest flagship graphics card from Nvidia, but savvy builders may prefer the RTX 3080. COOLER Kraken X63 NZXT $150 One of the most stunning AIO coolers rebuilt with an updated pump and, of course, RGB lighting for more pizzazz. MEMORY Vengeance RGB Pro 32GB DDR4 (2x16GB) @ 3,600 Corsair $170 If you truly want to show off, even your…

TYLER COLP Twitter Twitter @tylercolp This month Can a team really include two Tylers? Thanks to our latest addition, we’re about to find out. Exciting. FRASER BROWN Twitter @FraserIBrown This month Fought through agonising tooth pain to bring you yet another historical strategy game article. CHRIS LIVINGSTON Twitter @screencuisine This month Had a blast writing our STALKER 2 feature. He was practically glowing. NAT CLAYTON Twitter @its_natclayton This month Visited a real-life Witcher bar, and drank enough ‘potions’ to suffer some serious debuffs.…

MEAT BOY There are dozens of Flash projects in Ed McMillen’s back catalogue, many of them disgustingly gory, but only this one spawned the defining precision platformer of the’00s. VVVVVV From previous column guest Terry Cavanagh, this gravity-flipping adventure paints with simple colors—both in its garish maps and emotive characters—to quite extraordinary effect. CELESTE Now known as Celeste Classic, this journey up a mountain with a girl who can only jump and dash became the basis for a superb meditation on anxiety. Sounds unlikely, I know.…

COUNTER-STRIKE Turtle Rock’s Chris Ashton made textures for de_dust, don’t you know. COUNTER-STRIKE: CONDITION ZERO Turtle Rock helped finish this one. COUNTER-STRIKE: SOURCE The predecessor to Global Offensive. HALF-LIFE 2 Seminal first-person shooter. PORTAL Demonstrated Chet Faliszek’s way with words. LEFT 4 DEAD You can still find a match at any time of day on Steam. LEFT 4 DEAD 2 A quick sequel from Valve’s internal team. BACK 4 BLOOD Turtle Rock reclaims its bloody crown. EVOLVE An admirable but overambitious failure.…

Nat Clayton, features producer: Apex Legends has always been good. But for those first few years it felt like Respawn was still figuring out how to run an ongoing battle royale. But in 2021 the studio nailed it. Season 9 is the clear standout, bringing us not only a strong new character in Valkyrie, but a new Arenas game mode—a distinctly Respawn take on Counter-Strike that lets you immediately get into a fair fight. Arenas proved that Apex has legs beyond battle royale, cementing the game as not just a good BR, but one of the best team shooters around. But it also feels like Apex is just so much more confident this year, both as a game and as a world. Respawn’s storytelling has gone into overdrive, bringing in community…

Robin Valentine, print editor: I don’t think any videogame has ever more successfully evoked the feel of a tabletop RPG. A few hours in Wildermyth is like a supercut of a fantastic year-long Dungeons & Dragons campaign. With the procedural systems as your dungeon master, you follow the lives and adventures of entire parties of heroes, each organically growing and developing in all sorts of unexpected directions. And they really are unexpected—while it’s perfectly possible for a warrior to just find a magic sword and kill a dragon with it, it’s equally likely they’ll be cursed to slowly transform into living crystal, or make a pact with an ancient tree, or upset a witch who turns their head into a raven’s. They even age, and fall in love, and have…

Fraser Brown: I’ve dreamed of splicing all my favorite games with Crusader Kings at some point or another, but few more so than Civilization. Firaxis’ series has spawned some genuine masterpieces, but it’s also starting to feel a bit familiar and unadventurous, especially compared to Paradox’s wildly ambitious and proudly weird grand strategy RPG. Could the best parts of both coexist in a single game? Old World proved they could, while also being a fantastic historical 4X in its own right. Old World is a game of building empires and expanding cities, but with heaps of human drama and complications, and both aspects interact with each other in interesting ways. When you found a city, for instance, you have to make a single family its ruler. Each comes with unique…

Jacob Ridley: Resident Evil Village is a much more fast-paced game than you might expect off the back of Resident Evil 7: Biohazard. For that, it’s the Resident Evil game I’d recommend to those who haven’t tried a Resi game before, as in between all the body horror there’s a whole lot of running and gunning. It also blends so many excellent horror game staples into a single, fluent game. Each primary ‘area’ of the map feels like a discrete experience, some more action focused and others more downright haunting. And each one home to a well-written, and well-acted, paranormal mob boss figure. Resident Evil Village feels like a horror game built to cater to most horror fans, and while usually that might appear overreaching, Capcom manages to thread the needle…

Lauren Morton, associate editor: The week Valheim launched, I scoffed, “Do we really need another Early Access crafting survival game?” Whether or not we needed one, the appetite I and all of my friends developed for scarfing down over 100 hours within a month suggested we very much wanted one. On paper, Valheim is like any other crafting survival game. You begin by picking up rocks and sticks, slapping together a crude stone axe, and chopping down every tree in sight. In practice, it’s full of twists. The building system with supports and structural integrity challenged me to finally think about base building as a technical puzzle instead of just an aesthetic one. The food system that required me to think about boosting my health and stamina convinced me that…

HAZARD ZONE Collect cookbook-sized data drives from US and Russian spy satellites as they fall out of low orbit. Verdict: 3/10 “The Cold War if everyone were stupider” HUNT: SHOWDOWN Track supernatural monsters across big, creepy bayous, and banish them back to Hell… if you’re lucky. Verdict: 9/10 “There’s a character named John Hunter” ESCAPE FROM TARKOV Private military companies and gangs of scavengers clash in a blockaded Eastern European city. Verdict: 7/10 “I’ve been reading the wiki for three hours”…

This is a card game with a villain. This shadowy figure, all staring eyes and long fingers, waits at the table for our game to start. I’m trapped in a cabin and have to play, under pain of death, though I can get up and stretch my legs. There are shelves of trinkets on the walls: a skull, a safe, a clock. They present puzzles to solve as part of the larger puzzle: How do I get out? The game at the table is a deckbuilder, less Slay the Spire and more like the singleplayer mode of a CCG—a Hearthstone solo adventure with a wilderness Americana theme, all rattlesnakes and yeehaw. I collect a deck of animal friends, bullfrogs, and wolf cubs with familiar stats and thematic abilities. The skunk…

With the new Arcane animated TV series out on Netflix, and big events launched all across Riot’s different games, November might as well have been called Lolvember. But aside from sinking a few hours into League of Legends: Wild Rift, the one Riot game I’ve been obsessed with lately is Legends of Runeterra, its unparalleled card battler that’s secretly the best game in the whole League of Legends universe It’s not just that Legends of Runeterra is filled with innovative ideas and fun new mechanics, but that it slots into my life in a way no other free-to-play game really has. Unlike Hearthstone or Magic: The Gathering, Legends of Runeterra is generous enough with its currency that even casual players can eventually collect every card available. That also means that…

1 Dr Ashleigh Reid, scientist and dear friend, punts Dr Mary ‘Horizon’ Somers into a black hole. This will have consequences in 87 years’ time. 2 Reid then dies, stabbed in the back while attempting to murder the rest of Somers’ colleagues to steal their unobtanium crystals. 3 Reid’s mind is salvaged and turned into a Simulacrum, a cyborg built from the fleshy brain of a human being, and shortens her name to ‘Ash’. 4 Ash then dies, crushed into a pulp by Titanfall 2’s best metal boy BT-7274, as kind of a footnote during that game’s stellar singleplayer campaign. 5 The shattered pieces of Ash’s skull are retrieved in Apex Legends’ Season 5 quest. A few months later, she gets a cushy job running the game’s Arenas mode. 6…

WORST NIGHTMARE 1 Back 4 Blood is not an easy game, especially not on the two higher difficulty levels. To compete with the many zombies (sorry, ‘Ridden’) and special enemy types in your way, you’re going to need a balanced deck and team. So let us show you how. SHORT SUPPLY 2 When you start, you’ll be given several basic cards. You can get more, and expand your choice of buffs and improvements, by progressing Supply Lines in the Fort Hope hub. For that you’ll need Supply Points, which you get by completing campaign missions. TOP OF THE PILE 3 Drawn cards persist for an entire run in Back 4 Blood, and the first card in your deck activates automatically. That means you should make this your most powerful card…

Remember the first time you brought a house down in Red Faction: Guerrilla? It felt like the start of something new. The beginning of an era of games that would be more tangible, more physical, and more breakable than ever before. Of course, that didn’t happen. Games largely focused on making static scenes look even shinier with sharper textures and ray-traced lighting. But thanks to a small Swedish developer, we have a window into that delightfully destructive alternate world—and believe me when I say Teardown’s window shatters very nicely indeed. At its core, Teardown is a game of heists. Each new mission gives you a series of computers and safes to steal, or cars to plunge into the ocean, challenging you to use a limited toolset to carve out a…

MOTHERBOARD A320M-A Pro MSI $69 Everything you need and nothing else. This MSI motherboard is simple, but it works. And that’s all we can ask for at this price. PROCESSOR Ryzen 5 3400G AMD $150 Capable budget CPU and GPU in one tiny package, and it also comes with its very own CPU cooler. GRAPHICS CARD None This build is tailored to today’s GPU shortage. But don’t fret, once cards are back in stock, you could slot one in to this PC for an upgrade. COOLER Wraith Spire AMD Free with CPU The Wraith Stealth is a great cooler made even better by the fact it comes free with our choice of chip. Budget heaven. MEMORY Vegeance LPX 8GB (2x 4GB) DDR4-3000 Corsair $65 For gaming we only really need…

2004 The map of the Raccoon City Streets in Resident Evil 2 uses annotations and some basic colors as direction. 2007 The Cave of Bahamut in Final Fantasy IV includes pseudo 3D and some complementary colors for clarity. 2013 By 2013, this map of Chrono Trigger’s Ocean Palace uses more complex shapes, pseudo 3D, and pattern effects. 2020 Another Link’s Awakening map from 2020, the Eagle’s Tower, shows an eye for detail and consistency.…

ONE TEAM HAS RETAINED NOT ONLY ITS DISTINCT IDENTITY BUT A DEGREE OF WIDER RECOGNITION One commonly accepted piece of games industry wisdom is that ideas are cheap; everybody has them. It’s the execution that’s difficult and expensive. But it’s evidently not a philosophy shared by Valve, which has long bought its best ideas. Counter-Strike, Portal, Team Fortress, Dota—all were first dreamed up outside Valve by modders or students. Again and again, the studio has acted as a kind of incubator—hiring on creators and giving them resources and expertise, so that they can take those magic ideas to their big-budget conclusion. Often, in time, those creators fade into the grey anonymity of Valve—contributing to the studio’s brain trust in ways both crucial and imperceptible to the general public. But one…

METRO 2033 It’s linear, not open world, but Metro 2033 captures the same dread and horror as the STALKER series. SURVARIUM Deadly anomalies and FPS combat in a postapocalyptic landscape. Like STALKER, but multiplayer only. ESCAPE FROM TARKOV Brutal combat and survival elements fill this shooter as players try to escape with valuable loot. CHERNOBYLITE Hell, it’s a non-linear survival shooter that takes place in the Chernobyl Exclusion Zone, and features Stalkers.…

Evan Lahti, global editor-in-chief: Before it released, we were concerned that adding aim-down-sights to the Left 4 Dead formula would slow it down too much. But Back 4 Blood’s guns are silky in your hands, containing nuance that exceeds their appearance. As an FPS fan I love the attention to detail: The hip fire animation changes when you drop to a crouch, communicating clearly that you’re more accurate than standing, but less accurate than if you were in ironsights. Range matters. You can kit out a horde killer by grabbing attachments and card bonuses that increase bullet penetration. The high volume of enemies and the fact that so many guns are one-hit kills against basic undead feels great. Lately, I’m lugging around the .50 caliber sniper rifle as an anti-‘big…

Phil Savage, UK editor-in-chief: Once again, Playground Games has stitched together a massive patchwork representation of a place, and filled it full of theme park delights. There’s the Baja Desert, where you can smash into cacti to build up a massive skill combo. There’s La Gran Caldera, an active volcano with twisting dirt roads and a mountainside that’s just begging to be used for offroad stunts. There’s jungle and farmland and a big airstrip for drag races. In short, Forza Horizon 5’s Mexico makes for a varied car playground. In terms of construction, it’s much the same as Australia and the UK before it: Different biomes that prioritize fun over realism, and that are filled with enough races, challenges and collectibles to keep you exploring for hundreds of hours. Yes,…

Phil Savage: Finally, an Arkane game that dares you to let your hair down. Where Dishonored wagged its finger at high-chaos murder and mayhem, Deathloop positively revels in it. Sure, your overall objective is to break the very timeloop that lets you fight and kill without consequence, but along the way it’s constantly asking: Do you really want this to end? Are you not having fun? I am having fun. It’s easy to miss how good Arkane’s combat usually is, because there’s a sense that being quiet and nonlethal is the right way to play. In Deathloop, the lack of a quickload key means that, if you’re spotted, you’re unable to correct your mistake. And eventually you start to ask if being noticed is even a mistake at all. You’ve…

Evan Lahti: This mighty little RPG got 50 hours out of me over the course of reviewing it. It’s remarkably distilled. If Diablo is a ten-gallon tank of pleasant ARPG liquid, Loop Hero is a thimble of hyperconcentrated essence. The loop: Build the level. Fight enemies (automatically). Equip loot they drop. Repeat. How does combat feel this engaging when you have essentially zero control over it? The retro sound design has a lot to do with it, steeping the whole game in a Halloween-y vibe and making weapon impacts, harpy claws, and shattered shields feel sharp. Like the sprawling deckbuilder genre that Slay the Spire spawned, I hope we’ll see more of this sort of thing across different themes. I can easily imagine a multiplayer version of this where you’re…

CASEBOOK This contains all the clues, testimony, and observations you’ve gathered, and helpfully directs you towards the next step in the investigation. MIND PALACE Here you’ll try to find connections between clues so you can form deductions, of which you’ll once again be given multiple interpretations. REENACTMENTS You’ll need to explore crime scenes for clues, after which you construct a mental recreation of the events. Watch out for multiple red herrings though. ACCUSATIONS When you’ve settled on a deduction, you can accuse one of your suspects. This is where you get to bask in glory or find out you got it terribly, terribly wrong.…

MESO AMERICA It’s got to be the Aztecs. Before the Spanish came and cocked everything up, there was a rich history of conquest and politics between the Aztec city-states, leading to the Aztec Triple Alliance. SOUTH EUROPE A vast region with plenty of intriguing powers like Castillan, Venice and Genoa, though Byzantium is probably a favorite, with its influence and gloriously turbulent history during the medieval era NORTH EUROPE Everyone loves the Vikings, but the Viking era ended by the period covered in AoE IV, and the 12th-14th centuries were a time of Christianization, unity, and relative peace in the land. EASTERN EUROPE Given that the Rus already feature, the next logical jump would be Poland, which began life as an nation in the tenth century. Sadly, this era predates…

SENTINELS OF THE MULTIVERSE Superhero brawls where every card is a comic book panel. Adapted from a tabletop game. DANGEROUS HIGH SCHOOL GIRLS IN TROUBLE Lead your own girl gang in a 1920s boarding school. HAND OF FATE A Fighting Fantasy book with paragraphs of text replaced by cards, and combat right out of Arkham Asylum. FAERIE SOLITAIRE Fantasy solitaire with so many whimsical additions that it practically becomes a PopCap game.…

Like millions of other Game Pass members eager for something pretty to play, I’ve been sinking my teeth into Forza Horizon 5. It’s only my second Forza game since I played Horizon 4 earlier this year, and I’ve already had a blast on the new map. It’s bright, cosy, and extremely fast. While Horizon 5 overall feels extremely familiar to the last game, I figured this would be a great opportunity to shake things up a bit: Instead of downloading all 100GB of Horizon 5 to my poor, chronically packed SSD, I decided to look to the cloud. That’s right, I’ve done all of my Mexico racing so far using Microsoft’s Xcloud streaming on PC, and I’m a little amazed at how well it works. Just click the Cloud Gaming…

Gordon Freeman and Nick Farell have a lot in common. Both work in the field of secret government science: Freeman is a theoretical physicist at Black Mesa, and Farell is a generator technician at Delta Base. Both of their companies are working on teleportation technology in huge, sprawling underground labs in New Mexico. Both are men of few words (no words, to be precise) and despite their nerdy leanings, are just as capable with rocket launchers and shotguns as they are with scientific equipment. And both are about to have an extremely bad day. Half-Life: Delta is a full conversion mod for the original Half-Life, and it takes place at the exact same time. Farrell has come to Delta Base to do his job as a generator technician, while over…

On November 19, 1998, Sierra released Half-Life. In the time it took to install 300MB of exquisitely poised shooter off its CD-ROM, everything from the genre prior became part of a bygone era. And perhaps the unluckiest of the lot was Ritual’s SiN, which released just ten days before it. Here was a game that, like Half-Life, wanted to bring a bit more storytelling back to the genre after a long period of dominance from dialogue-averse id Software and similarly laconic newcomers Epic Games. It had a spectacularly named hero in John Blade, and in its antagonist Elexis Sinclaire a typically salacious depiction of a woman—though to give Ritual some credit, both black player-characters and female CEOs were wildly progressive ideas for the era. It had voice actors. It was…

QUAKE (ENHANCED) bethesda.net/game/quake A remaster of the inspiration for all the filthy-looking, hard-angle-having shooters people over 35 keep making for each other. Make sure to rebind the mouse and keyboard controls to some ridiculous pre-WASD configuration for the old school experience. PLEASE, DON’T TOUCH ANYTHING bit.ly/3jFOj1a Before the great Loop Hero, developer Four Quarters made this $5 game in which you aren’t meant to touch anything. But if you do press the big red button on the control panel you’re meant to leave alone, something might happen. And isn’t LORDS OF THE FALLEN bit.ly/2Zjg8oF Instead of staring at the Elden Ring subreddit waiting for new details, play a game that probably isn’t as good as Elden Ring will be, but will sate your thirst for dodging giant swords anyway. LotF…

MOTHERBOARD B450 Tomahawk Max MSI $115 A reliable platform for your build, the Tomahawk Max also comes in black to complement any style. PROCESSOR Ryzen 5 3600X AMD $210 This CPU is one of the greats, and uses the Zen 2 architecture to dominate in gaming and productivity. GRAPHICS CARD GeForce RTX 3060 Ti Founders Ed. Nvidia $399 The RTX 3060 Ti is a little overkill, but we’re willing to make sacrifices elsewhere to make it work. COOLER Wraith Spire AMD Free with the CPU We love a freebie, especially one as capable as the cooler included with the 3600X. This’ll keep your machine running smoothly. MEMORY Ballistix 16GB DDR4 (2x8GB) Crucial $80 With plenty of capacity at 16GB, this unembellished memory has everything you need for gaming and more.…