Cute games: they’re cute. Sometimes they’re extremely cute. Once in a while they even have the word “cute” in their title, like Gemporium: A Cute Mining Sim. With a name like that, I thought, it’s probably just a breezy little game where you dig up gems. And it is. At first. As an industrious little…
In Pacific Drive you develop a relationship with your car like the classic bad relationship you have with a person in your 20s: “I can fix them.” Only you’re right, because it’s a car and not an unemployed stoner who is sort of in a band sometimes. At the end of every trip into the…
I found myself in need of new speakers for my PC a while back, and on the advice of PC Gamer I went out and picked up a set of Logitech Z407s. And they’re good! Except for one minor thing that occasionally makes me want to smash them into small pieces with a hammer. See,…
For my money, Metal Gear Solid 5 remains the watermark for open world action games thanks to its excellent espionage toybox, its mercenary company management systems, and the timeless satisfaction of abducting enemy combatants with a little balloon. 10 years after its launch, it just got even better thanks to Dynamite, a functioning two-player MGS5…
Indie horror game Vile: Exhumed launched today as a free donationware game under a Creative Commons license, following the cancellation of its planned release on Steam in July, reportedly over the presence of “sexual content with depictions of real people.” Vile: Exhumed had been listed on Steam, and was slated for release on July 22—the…
Phasmophobia’s haunted dwellings are undergoing a few renovations as developer Kinetic Games continues to overhaul the horror game’s oldest maps. Grafton Farmhouse is the next in line for a makeover on August 12, and a new small map, Nell’s Diner, launches later this year. It’s all part of Phasmophobia’s 2025 and beyond roadmap—which kicked off…
Nate Wells, Epic Games art director and former artist on Looking Glass Studios classics like Thief: The Dark Project and System Shock 2, said in this week’s episode of the Nightdive Studios Deep Dive podcast that the ecosystem of games artists where he started his career is extinct. In its place is a landscape of…
A release date is coming “Soon”. Playtonic Games’ Yooka-Replaylee, a remaster of the 2017 3D collectathon platformer Yooka-Laylee, is “content complete” and a release date announcement is “coming…SoonTM”. This comes from PM Studios, the physical game publisher who is handling Yooka-Replaylee’s release. The company shared a video on Bluesky giving us a very short explanation…
Tyler Wilde, US EIC (Image credit: Future) This week: Had an infuriating audio driver troubleshooting experience, but was soothed by goofy dance music. I have more digital stuff than ever before. My work email account is nearly 20 years old. My personal email is even older. I have gigs and gigs of old photos and…
In a recent interview with Swedish site Dagens industri (via The Guardian), Ulf Kristersson, the Prime Minister of Sweden, said he regularly consults with AI chatbots including ChatGPT and the French service Le Chat to get a “second opinion” on decisions. Unsurprisingly, that turned out to be an admission he probably should have kept to…