One of video gaming’s great urban fabulists, Half-Life 2 art director and Dishonored visual designer Viktor Antonov, has died at the young age of 52.
Viktor Antonov, the key mind behind Half-Life 2’s City 17, has died
Category: Rock, Paper, Shotgun
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Out today: Afterlove EP, the visual novel about grief and rock music from the creator of Coffee Talk
Afterlove EP is the new visual novel and/or broken hearts album from Indonesian developers Pikselnesia. It’s the sad, sleepy tale of a musician, Rama, who is trying to put his life back together and reconnect with his old bandmates in Jakarta a year after the death of his girlfriend, Cinta. The complicating factor is that Cinta isn’t entirely gone: she is a voice in Rama’s head, chatting to him throughout the game’s 28-day storyline as though sitting next to the player on the other side of the screen.
Ten PC games I could have played, in full, during the time I spent failing to connect to Elden Ring: Nightreign on PS5
In an ultimately failed attempt at cobbling some Elden Ring: Nightreign impressions together, I spent a little over three hours of my Valentine’s Day fruitlessly trying to get a match going in the roguelike spinoff’s doomed PS5 network test. I hope said test provided FromSoft with some helpful data, considering Nightreign releases in May, though it would have been a lot easier for everyone if I could’ve just sent Hidetaka Miyazaki an email saying “Sir, your server infrastructure is made of biscuits.”
In the interests of a more productive outcome, here are some lovely/interesting/terrifying little PC games that I could have started and finished while waiting for the closed beta to sort itself out, and that you might enjoy regardless of whether you’ve just spaffed away a perfectly good afternoon.
Tomb Raider IV – VI Remastered review
There’s something uncanny about dipping “classic” games in a tub of HD paint for the purposes of a remaster. A reboot can completely reinvent an old character, intriguing players in the same way an adaptation of Macbeth might excite a theatre dweeb. But remasters often feel like someone has plainly yet painstakingly rolled over every inch of the original with linoleum. The worst remasters bring to mind the Spanish pensioner who butchered a fresco of Jesus Christ. As acts of restoration go, Aspyr’s work on Tomb Raider (and Soul Reaver) isn’t quite that egregious. Hard work has gone into updating the scenery and textures. Basic vine sprites become handsome twirls of plantlife. Egyptian reliefs are given form. But there’s a limit to this unfurling of digital lino. The results ultimately evoke the look common in mobile games when smartphones were becoming ever more powerful. This is Lara Croft if she were designed by Gameloft in 2011.
Dell has slashed the price on this excellent Alienware 27-inch gaming monitor, now down to just $200
Dell is currently offering an excellent 27-inch Alienware gaming monitor for just $200 in its latest round of discounts ready for Presidents Day.
Elden Ring Nightreign network test starts this weekend; you can save 12% on PC if you pre-order the full game today
Elden Ring Nightreign will officially arrive on May 30, 2025, across PlayStation, Xbox, and PC. But for those eager to get an early taste, Bandai Namco is running a network test this weekend—offering a first look at what’s to come.
Most Civilization players don’t finish a single game, going by Civ 6 data, and perhaps that’s the best way to play
If your time with foundational PC strategy 4X game series Sid Meier’s Civilization consists of exactly one save file that ended somewhere in the Middle Ages, don’t beat yourself up, for you have plenty of company. When they got hold of detailed audience data for Civilization 6, Firaxis creative director Ed Beach and executive producer Dennis Shirk were dismayed to discover that fewer than 40% of their players ever finish a single game. Hence, to some degree, Sid Meier’s Civilization VII‘s new Age system, which is designed to counter feelings of exhaustion by smashing the chronology up into more digestible chunks, with something of a Civ power level reset between Ages to stop you feeling like you’re either hopelessly behind or so far ahead that ultimate victory is guaranteed.
Elden Ring Nightreign to get DLC bosses and characters in yet more evidence that it’s a From Extended Universe game
Elden Ring Nightreign will get “additional playable characters and bosses” via DLC, according to an entry on the game’s Steam page. This isn’t massively surprising, given that Nightreign is a multiplayer-focussed spin-off featuring preset Nightfarer heroes rather than custom RPG characters, as in vanilla Elden Ring. It also supports the idea that Nightreign is the foundation for a From Software Connected Universe of sorts, with characters and antagonists from the original Elden Ring, Dark Souls trilogy, Sekiro and Bloodborne reappearing in Nightreign via the Mystic Nexus of Monetisation.
The Horror At Highrook demo is a dangerously enticing marriage of Darkest Dungeon and Cluedo
It’s easy to lose moments watching the ambience of the gameboard change in the demo for haunted house boardgame RPG The Horror At Highrook. The colours alter from daytime greyness through winey shades of sunset into pale lavender moonlight. There are little details to notice and zoom on: a fleeting embroidery of rain, the seep of flames in the kitchen and guest rooms, a fidgeting of moths in the archives. Ah, nice. The last time I felt so beguiled by a view of a house was while looking out from the hamlet of Darkest Dungeon.
Performance quirks, both good and bad, make Avowed a real trickster on PC hardware
Avowed has more The Outer Worlds DNA in it than just the Obsidian link, and from a technical perspective, that might be worrisome – the latter RPG’s Spacer’s Choice Edition was one of the most wretchedly broken releases of 2023.
Happily, Avowed does at least launch in much better shape, and with some genuinely fetching fantasy visuals that may even justify flicking on ray tracing. The PC version does, however, still seem to have a few loose wires, which are worth watching out for even if you can tidy some up with the right settings.