Author: [email protected] (Tyler Wilde)

May’s a pretty stacked month for PC gaming: We just ended April with some exciting new early access games in Rotwood, Manor Lords, and Gray Zone Warfare, and the trend continues this month with games like Abiotic Factor, The Rogue Prince of Persia, and Hades 2. (The latter doesn’t have a confirmed release date yet,…

The Lego games developed by Traveller’s Tales—Lego Star Wars, Lego Marvel, all of those—are held up as some of the best examples of family-friendly licensed games. Now the former heads of that studio are trying to repeat those years of Lego success, but with a toy that isn’t quite as universally beloved: the big-headed, vacant-eyed…

If we keep bugging Todd Howard about Fallout: New Vegas, I wonder if he’ll get so irritated that he eventually turns against the game for real? For now, at least, the Bethesda Game Studios director has reiterated that he likes New Vegas, the 2010 Fallout spin-off developed by Obsidian, and also likes Obsidian, and also…

A free Vampire Survivors update called “Laborratory” released by surprise this week, adding a new challenge stage, bonus stage, weapon, and “holiday-themed” character. A trailer shown at today’s ID@Xbox Showcase (embedded above) also promises “immersive door opening action,” “world premiere train mechanics,” “genre-defining cart racing,” and “fully rendered running animations.”  Update 1.10 is Vampire Survivor’s…

Few videogame marketing terms are more aggravatingly ambiguous than “early access.” Most painfully, it can refer to two very different scenarios: Sometimes it means putting an in-development game on sale before it’s done, and other times it means offering access to a finished game early, typically as a deluxe edition preorder bonus. Starfield offered several…

I like a game that chucks me into the thick of it with minimal preamble: Just beat me up! I’ll learn! Klei’s new co-op brawler is one of those: You can handwave the NPC welcoming committee who tries to explain the controls and just start swinging a hammer at forest monsters within seconds. My kind…

Last year, we were slightly surprised to learn that not only does the German government sponsor a videogame award ceremony, it gives serious cash prizes to most of the winners. At the 2023 German Computer Game Awards—aka the Deutscher Computerspielpreis (DCP)—retro RPG Chained Echoes won Best German Game and a €100,000 endowment, and at this…

While watching the Fallout show, I wondered whose job it had been to dress up all the Environmental Storytelling Skeletons—is that a props thing or a costumes thing? In an interview with PC Gamer last week, costume designer Amy Westcott affirmed that Fallout’s costume department “dressed skeletons right and left.” “We put together all sorts…

When I started watching the Fallout show, I worried that the parade of direct references to the Fallout games might make it feel like a very long “what if videogames were real life? (crazy!!!)” skit on YouTube. It didn’t end up feeling that way, mainly because the storytelling is good enough that the videogame references…