PC Gaming
Do you ever miss when multiplayer games had lots of stuff to do? I was pretty young in the 2000s, but I remember what it was like to fire up an FPS and not be absolutely certain which flavor of shooter I was gonna play. One of a handful of developer-made modes or dozen-plus maps,…
I’ve been playing and writing about videogames for an awfully long time now, and I’ve seen my share of controversies come and go. Hot Coffee, anyone? At some point long ago, I may have thought that such things would become increasingly rare as our medium matures. But it seems that the opposite has happened. As…
What if I told you that in-game pop-up achievements are hiding a dirty secret? A secret so obvious that we frequently forget or overlook it? The secret, hidden in plain sight: Games are tracking you. For a game to know when you’ve achieved X or Y, it must track at least some of what you…
Personal Pick (Image credit: Future) In addition to our main Game of the Year Awards 2023, each member of the PC Gamer team is shining a spotlight on a game they loved this year. We’ll post new personal picks, alongside our main awards, throughout the rest of the month. As an enjoyer of survival games, I…
You’d be forgiven for thinking it’s just adding new systems with reckless abandon, but somehow Dave the Diver all comes together to be the best designed game of 2023. For more awards, head to our Game of the Year 2023 page. Fraser Brown, Online Editor: There should be too much going on in Dave the…
Work for the Company, die for the Company. Rinse, repeat. Lethal Company is a game all about collecting scrap metal and trying not to die on the job. Sound fun? Sure it does, you just have to watch the gajillion clips on TikTok and other social media platforms to know that it’s the best set-up…
If there’s one thing it’s nigh impossible to predict in gaming, it’s the trajectory of the major and minor genres. New genres emerge or assert themselves every year (Vampire Survivors-alike, co-op horror), and dormant ones stage dramatic comebacks. We’re lucky to belong to a hobby that’s this unpredictable, frankly. As we stare down the end…
The wildcard award category is our way of covering all our bases without having to hand out 30 awards for every perceivable product category out there. With such a wide open category for an award, it was difficult to narrow down the nominations to only three products. We’ve reviewed many excellent products this year that…
As I see it there have been three epochs of PC handhelds. Firstly, the initial wave of prototype and underpowered devices testing the waters. I tried a good few of these early handhelds, and they all seemed fatally flawed in their own way. Not to worry, next came the big bang of the Steam Deck….
Epic Games remains steadfast in its quest to drive down game store fees and build its “metaverse” vision, but the might of its Fortnite, Unreal Engine, and Epic Games Store operation wavered this year. Epic laid off over 800 employees in September, and pawned off beloved music marketplace Bandcamp after acquiring it only a year…