Isn’t it funny that we don’t have a definitive reason as to why we dream? We have ideas, theories, like that they’re the brain moving memories from short-term to long-term storage. But why the hell can they get so weird? And worse, scary. This feels like the central question at the heart of Mama’s...

   It feels quite fitting that a game like Big Hops released today, the day after Awesome Games Done Quick wrapped up, because this thing feels like it has a guaranteed spot in Summer Games Done Quick already. You’re a frog Who hops around What’s not to love? It helps that the platformer feels so good...

   There is a strange deliciousness in experiencing a game from a perspective that it does not otherwise allow. Sure, things don’t always look right, there’s just this opportunity to rethink how you view a particular world. Recently, it appears that someone playing Arc Raiders got to do just that, by...

   What’s the genre called for games that recreate a desktop PC interface? There’s gotta be a name right, there’s enough games to justify it, but PC game is kind of already taken as a term. In any case, while we ponder over that question, let’s look at an upcoming addition to that genre, Imprinted, a...

   Lighting up my fifteenth cigarette of the hour and adjusting my fedora, I slipped the mysterious code into the box. A collection of numbers and letters designed to provide early access to the demo of a detective game. It was a hot tip from a public relations person on behalf of developers Lost...

   You cannot pet the dog in Dunderbeck, but you can assuredly eat the unicorn. Just drag its corpse over the puckering mouth on the righthand side. Alternatively, you can chuck the dead unicorn into the mincers on the left and combine the resulting horny horsemeat with other sources of... nutrition,...

   Once again it appears that Pocketpair appears to be going after a bit of Pokemon’s pie, this time of the card game variety. Where the latter’s started life as a physical medium, the former’s attempt at such a thing, literally just called Palworld Official Card Game, announced today, looks to be of...

   Peter Molyneux and 22cans will release their new god sim Masters of Albion on Wednesday 22nd April via Steam. They’ve also pumped out a new trailer, rich in accents, exploding barrels and stone circles. If it were a game from any other developer, I’d be modestly anticipating it. But it’s a Molyneux...

   Just before the calendar ticked over to 2026, Witcher and Cyberpunk makers CD Projekt revealed that they’d sold off their PC storefront - GOG. In a deal worth 90.7 million Polish zloty (about 18.6 million 25 million), original CD Projekt and GOG co-founder Michał Kiciński bought the...

   A poster advertising a definitive edition of Tom Clancy’s The Division appears to have been spotted by folks attending a Ubisoft-run eSports event in Japan. At least, that’s assuming this isn’t some elaborate ruse designed to draw in spies from other game studios, while only Jack Ryan can see what...

   On Friday, while on the phone to friend of this parish Jeremy Peel, I knocked an entire mug of tea over my laptop. I won’t immortalise in text what I said in that moment; it’s for the best that those curses are lost to the aether. I immediately shut down the PC, mopped it clean with a kitchen towel...

   Happy Mawday all This week, I’m thinking about how we can expand our bestiary of Maw manifestations. When describing the beast, we often resort to stock Lovecraftian imagery of a kaleidoscopic kerfuffle of teeth and tentacles, but the Maw’s appearances aren’t always so pulpy and cinematic....

   Well, it was inevitable really. Here I sit, a day before Hytale’s early access release, to tell you that a modder has already managed to get a blocky version of classic Doom running in it. Add it to the list of weird places to play the shooter, which already included (inhales) human test, lawnmower...

   As we stumble into what increasingly looks like a hardware-unfriendly 2026, RAMnarök shows no signs of petering out. As tech giants continue hoarding memory chips to build their AI farms, and suppliers gleefully jack up their prices in turn, consumer-grade RAM is still laughably expensive - and...

   Ubisoft’s Assassin’s Creed Unity almost had a ’character creator’ system that would have seen you choosing an ancestor from a database of millions of people, rather than being thrust into the riding boots of Scarlet Pimple-esque nobleman Arno Dorian. The idea was broadly to give each player a...

   It’s Hytale early access release week, with the recently resurrected via purchase from Riot blocky sandbox set to ruck up tomorrow, January 13th. Ahead of the big day the Hypixel co-founder who’s currently spearheading the game has asked prospective players to download and log into its launcher...

   Sundays are for trying to work out what the hell we’re supposed to do when every videogame company above a certain scale has business links to some kind of fearful death machine. And also, for rediscovering the joys of small fan heaters. My fan heater is called Phil. He hunkers by my feet and phils...

   Every once in a while, a game rocks up that so quickly finds itself in my Steam wishlist I don’t even remember clicking the button. Today, that game is Rakshasa, Vampire the Masquerade: Bloodlines and Baldur’s Gate inspired first-person RPG set in modern India where you must face off against demi...

   Wizard Pool It is, probably, exactly what you think it is. You are a wizard, and you play pool. Well, admittedly there is a smidge more to it than that, alongside a healthy amount of charm. Styled in a way that looks like an N64 game in the kind of way you remember that era looking rather than how...

   I think as long as you make a new year’s update post before the incredibly arbitrary date of January 13th, you’re still able to do so without me thinking come on, it’s almost February , which is exactly what EA did with their new years Sims update post. Perhaps reassuringly, after word came last...

   Hear ye, hear ye, another extraction shooter is almost upon us, this time the smaller but still quite bold in scope Sand: Raiders of Sophie. Last time I personally heard of this game it was just called Sand, which doesn’t sound great for that whole search engine thing, though I’m not entirely...

   Last year, after a bit of a wait, Silent Hill was released, and with it came some changes to the series. The combat was a lot more actiony, the format for multiple endings was drastically different, but the most obvious change was its setting. We’re not in Silent Hill anymore, Toto We’re in...

   Saturdays are for putting your hand in a bucket of ice, swallowing a mouthful of honey and lemon, and breathing a sigh of relief. All that practice you put into your welcome handshake and ’Here comes trouble ’ paid off. Almost every member of the treehouse has been successfully greeted home. All...

   With Baldur’s Gate 3 and its gang of rowdy adventuring mates in the rear view mirror, Larian are hoping to improve a couple of aspects of how they handle companions going forwards - a process that’ll likely kick off in Divinity. In particular, the development of deeper relationships between party...

   This is proving to be one of the worst weeks of my life, for various reasons (no, not because Jason Schreier is mad at me). In my time of need, I open the magic portal of escapism and find Pathologic 3 looking back at me like a poison toad. Read more

   Larian CEO Swen Vincke has provided an update as to how the studio are planning to go about handling the use of generative AI in the making of Divinity. In an effort to alleviate concerns, the newly decided plan is to avoid using it in any capacity as part of the concept art development process. In...

   Manor Lords and Terra Invicta publishers Hooded Horse are imposing a strict ban on generative AI assets in their games, with company co-founder Tim Bender describing it as an ethics issue and a very frustrating thing to have to worry about . Read more

   The regular modpocalypses which tend to erupt when a fresh update for a game comes down the pipeline - an especially terrifying prospect if it’s an older game and the tweaks additions aren’t something you’re happy to temporarily switch back to vanilladom in order to enjoy - may now be less of a...

   What did you do while recovering from your big medical thing, Sin? Well. Loath as I am to talk about myself ( lol. lmao. - Combative New Ed), I... don’t know? There was some Ultima Underworld, some workers, some resources, some Pagonians pioneered. But in the dimensionless vortex of first-time-off...

   Following the parliamentary debate of the Stop Killing Games campaign’s petition to the UK government last year, a group of Green Party members have announced plans to propose an amendment to the party’s policy which would compel its MPs to support the campaign. Read more

   The self-explanatory Don’t Stare is both a gamejam creation I enjoy for itself and also, an idea I’d love to be incorporated into any number of first-person RPGs. Here is how the latter possibility might work: you are bandying insults with the Demon King ahead of the final battle. You’ve got some...

   CES 2026 doesn’t technically end until tomorrow, but then if it were a football match, it’d be the kind where the home side gets battered 4-0 and the cameras keep cutting to a stream of season ticket holders slumping towards the doors with 20 minutes left. An all-timer in the history of Consumer...

   Gerry from the River rides up to a noticeboard for the second time this week. Between contracts, he scans the pinned scraps for a fresh job to take on, only for his eyes to rest on another particularly peculiar bit of prose. ’There’s a mysterious extra DLC for The Witcher 3 in the works’, this bit...

   Microlandia deserves a much longer article, preferably written by our resident virtual metropolis judger Sin Vega. For the moment, I will only say that it’s a work-in-progress city-builder fuelled by a poetical mixture of admiration and terror for cities. Read more

   Minecraft’s getting marginally cuter with its next update, as it continues to pretend it isn’t designed for the express purpose of teaching innocent children that in order to survive, you’ve sometimes got to beat some pigs and trees to death with your bare hands. Baby farm animal mobs, long just...

   Was your new year resolution to rebuild an evil temple on behalf of a baleful god? I bring wonderful news, then. The former Epic and Valve developers of Dead Money LLC have signed a wicked pact with the strategy game illuminati of Hooded Horse to release Architect of Ruin - a completely hand drawn...

   Right, so, Starcraft. A new shooter in the series is reportedly set to be revealed this year, possibly as the big headline act of Blizzcon in September. The existence of such a secret shootery thing in the works at Blizzard was first reported by Jason Schreier last year, being one of the...

   Last January, our reviewer Brendan Shitty Shitty Wham Bam Caldwell called My Summer Car a sordid sim of piss and pistons that won’t hold your disgusting little hand , proceeding to warn that it will either scare you off with its complexity or induce Stockholm syndrome with its mesmerisingly...

   PUBG: Blindspot, the PUBG spin-off previously dubbed Project Arc, is set to take the early access plunge on February 5th, 2026. In case you’ve understadably started wondering if this is the extraction shooter which prompted my last bit of newsing about a PUBG spin-off, it isn’t. That’s PUBG: Black...

   The world could certainly do with another game about slapping up Swastika-wearers right now. Thankfully, having finished off Indiana Jones And The Great Circle, Machine Games are reportedly working on the previously teased Wolfenstein 3. Read more

   A preliminary employment tribunal hearing has seen the Independent Workers’ Union of Great Britain (IWGB) request that a judge grant interim relief to the 31 UK-based GTA 6 developers fired by Rockstar, reportedly following discussion of changes to Rockstar’s company Slack policies by staff on...

   Update 8th January 2026: Posting on Bluesky, Jason Schreier has called this article a complete misunderstanding of what I said, which is that I wouldn’t be shocked if GTA6 does come out this fall, following the same delay pattern as RDR2 . I think this is a fair criticism of the introductory...

   You know what South Park feels like to me? It feels like randomly waking up in the middle of the night, looking around your bedroom as you think cripes, it’s still not morning yet? A feeling of waiting for the inevitable, the end, or the beginning. Not so much the contents of the show, none of that...

   If there were ever a dead horse that didn’t need so much flogging, it might be the Life is Strange series. Undeniably beloved by many, it has fallen victim to that whole franchising thing, having received an entry only in 2024 via Life is Strange: Double Exposure, a sequel game that was perhaps a...

   Back in September, studio game director Rich Lambert told GamesIndustry.biz that the Elder Scrolls Online team were exploring a move from big expansions to smaller, more frequent updates. Jump ahead four months and, well, that’s exactly what they’re doing. Wait, stop running away from me, I’m not...

   You know what I might have most about games? There’s no universal way to play them. You buy a DVD, you buy a DVD player, and aside from maybe a region lock issue you’re as good as gold. If I buy Snowboard Kids for the N64, and I don’t have one of those, well, I’m up a particular creek. That has...

   We’ve all been there. You’re at the end of a game, you’ve done all of the side quests, you’re strong as hell, finally read to take on the final boss, confident you can finish this quest you started 30-100 hours ago. Only to find that the fight is a piece of piss because, whoops You overlevelled...

   Ubisoft are closing Ubisoft Halifax, the Canadian developers of mobile games Rainbow Six Mobile and Assassin’s Creed Rebellion. This is strictly speaking outside our mandate as a PC gaming site, of course - I fear smartphones like Hell itself, and only ever communicate over long distances using...

   A few years ago, it would have been pretty easy to imagine Helldivers 2 releasing as a free-to-play game. It is a live service game after all, most of those are free-to-play because studios want to reduce the barrier to entry. Instead, it launched as a paid-for, 40 game, a far cry from free, but...

   I’m jogging around. Has the gauge filled up to one bar yet? No. Well, back to jogging around it is. Time to politely salute the horrific mutant trying to attack me as I double back past it for the third time. Ooh, we have a bar. Right, time to whip out my pistol and - BANG, BANG. Shit, I forgot to...