One of 2025’s surprise hits was Peak, a co-op climbing game that was created in a mere four months by studios Aggro Crab and Landfall. It caught fire on Twitch and in every friend group hooked on so-called “friendslop” since 2023’s Lethal Company. Even though there has been a strong trend of co-op games in…
The Commodore 64 had an exceptionally long life. Introduced in 1982 and not officially discontinued until 1994, the intervening 12 years saw the release of upwards of 10,000 entertainment titles. While European C64 users saw releases right up to the very end, the North American market cooled off a bit sooner, with new releases tapering…
Balatro was PC Gamer’s 2024 game of the year. But that was in a more innocent age before we had to endure wave after wave of imitators. Seemingly every casino classic has been plundered at this point, with Balatro-fied spins on blackjack, roulette, and even those coin-pusher machines that haunt crap arcades (to be fair,…
“We resolved to move forward with our original vision”. As you’ll know if you’ve read our review, we adored Metroid Prime 4: Beyond, and consider it to be one of the highlights of the Switch 2’s library. However, with a Metacritic rating of 79 at the time of writing, it’s clear that Samus’ latest adventure…
Pasokon Retro is our look back at the early years of Japanese PC gaming, encompassing everything from specialist ’80s computers to the happy days of Windows XP. (Image credit: Compile) The exhausting whirl of festive treats, family visits, and the lie I keep telling myself about having just one more chocolate tends to put me…
Tormented souls. Switch owners already have access to Layers of Fear: Legacy and its sequel, but Bloober Team is back with a new port for Switch 2. Utilising Unreal Engine 5 to achieve some truly impressive visuals, Layers of Fear: The Final Masterpiece Edition is neither a sequel nor a remake, but rather the definitive…
The Subway Slammer is the first baddie in gacha spinoff Persona 5: The Phantom X. He is also a total clown show—at least in the Western world, anyway. Despite representing Japan’s very serious butsukari otoko problem—an ongoing violence against women that usually involves men intentionally bodychecking women in crowded spaces like train stations—his English localised…
Occasionally, on one of my rare jaunts out into the real world, someone will ask me what I do for a living. “I write for PC Gamer,” I invariably respond. “Oh that’s cool,” comes the reply. “I’d like to buy a gaming PC, but I looked at the prices recently and…” You get the idea….
Persona is a series defined by its calendar system. Everything revolves around it: the school schedule, dungeon deadlines, and social events. So what happens when you try and stuff that core gameplay system-shaped peg into a gacha-shaped hole? Well, you don’t. Instead, you remove it. Persona 5: The Phantom X still retains some kind of…
Persona 5: The Phantom X has just kicked off its half-anniversary celebration marking a whole six months since the release of the gacha spin-off (at least in Japan and the Western world, anyway). It’s not been an easy journey, to say the least. The game’s launch was criticised for stark differences between reward distribution in…