Absolum’s first update dares you to unravel the threads of fate, introducing rule modifiers, corrupted biomes and improved mounts into 2025’s best beat ’em up

It’s a testament to the quality and inventiveness of Absolum that it stood out as strongly as it did when it released in October last year, a month that also brought us Battlefield 6, Bloodlines 2, and a little game called Arc Raiders. Absolum’s roguelite twist on a classic beat ’em up format was exactly…

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Hellscreen, the FPS with a rear-view mirror, has left Steam early access two episodes short of its original plan: ‘This is a bittersweet experience for me’

Adding a rearview mirror to a first-person shooter might sound like a daft gimmick, but as PC Gamer’s Ted Litchfield discovered three years ago, the defining mechanic of Hellscreen is anything but: “You have a mini, lower-res screen in the upper quadrant of your view at all times, and can blow it up and shrink…

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Seafaring survival sim The Last Caretaker gets a big update that adds a speedy jet ski and lets you customise your base-boat

Who cares for The Last Caretaker? Channel 37, that’s who! The Finnish developer— cofounded by the creators of the Trials series—has been diligently maintaining its oddball survival sim since it splashed into Steam early access last year. The game, which sees you play as a robot tasked with saving the human race by artificially growing…

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Unreal Tournament 2004 is now available for free thanks to its fan community, and they’ve even updated the game for modern PCs: ‘This is the first public patch for Unreal Tournament 2004 in over 20 years’

Epic Games may have since left the BSP-carved valleys of Unreal in favour of the cartoonish hills of Fortnite, but at least it hasn’t locked the series that put the company on the map deep in a digital vault somewhere. In the last few years, it has given permission for the Internet Archive to assume…

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Divinity: Original Sin 2 easter eggs hinting Baldur’s Gate 3 would be Larian’s next game had to be toned down: ‘Originally the reference to BG3 was very explicit’

Larian recently streamed Divinity: Original Sin 2, the studio’s last RPG in the Divinity series before it made Baldur’s Gate 3. During the stream, communications developer Aoife Wilson brought up the topic of hints in D:OS2 about what Larian was working on next. “Originally the reference to BG3 was very explicit,” Larian CEO Swen Vincke…

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‘We lost things such as physics in games:’ The dev behind my most anticipated RPG thinks players are craving more interactive games, not just ‘moving around in a static 3D environment’

Csaba “ForestWare” Székely’s Sword Hero is one of the most exciting upcoming games: An ambitious, open-ended RPG with complex NPC behaviors, physics interactions, and emergent gameplay⁠—the Hungarian developer affectionately referred to it as a “eurojank” game, a label applied to ambitious, but often flawed attempts by European developers to replicate or advance ’90s PC design…

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‘They can never kill emulation’: Players vexed as Nintendo continues its siege on Switch emulation, handing DMCAs to various emulators on GitHub

Nintendo Switch emulation has had a rough go of it. The first big Switch emulator, Yuzu, got targeted by a lawsuit in 2024 that its creators settled out of for $2.4 million, which PC Gamer senior editor Wes Fenlon called “an enormous blow to console emulation.” Similarly, Ryujinx was subsequently discontinued after its creators were…

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The dev behind my top upcoming RPG is a Hungarian chef who thought ‘if not now, then when?’ and learned coding from scratch to make his dream ‘eurojank’ masterpiece

Sword Hero is the type of game I was put on this Earth to play: A hyper-ambitious, systems-driven RPG set in a bracingly weird fantasy world and, until now, largely made by a single guy. An open world, complex physics interactions, deep character building with multiple viable play styles, and⁠—apologies to stone cold classics like…

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That new Metal Gear Solid collection won’t include Metal Gear Online, but it will have Peace Walker’s essential online co-op

During last week’s PlayStation State of Play, a new Metal Gear Solid collection including MGS 4 and the PS3 HD version of Peace Walker was announced. It’s great news if you’ve been holding out for PC ports of these games all these years, but it doesn’t mean you can expect the full experience people originally…

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