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.
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.
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.
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.
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 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.
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.
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.
Gosh, haven’t done one of these in a while, have we? Or possibly one of these. Or these?! The silly amount of tags for this semi-regular format are surely proof of its enduring appeal, so we’re back in Hivemind form to talk about Obsidian’s latest RPG Avowed. We’ve all played it, and we all have mildly different opinions on it – the stuff that thrilling conversations are made of. Onward!
Nic: James did you work out how to freeze things yet?
James: I’ll explain this quickly so Nic can get on to complaining about Avowed having the wrong kinds of boxes. But yes, I did get stuck on an early main quest that required me to use ice magic to create frozen platforms for crossing water, an otherwise neat little systems thingy that had not been communicated or hinted at before that point, but was communicated and hinted at during the following main quest.
Otherwise, I’m having an okayish time? It doesn’t have the Skyrim-tier expansiveness I always hope for with these kinds of games, but its world is a pretty one, and it’s got some quality close-quarters mageing.
Nic: Look. I feel passionately about those crates. There are two types of crates. You can only smash the crates that have the special ‘smash me’ icon on them. I don’t want a crate to “come hither” me. Takes all the fun out of the petty vandalism.
Gosh, haven’t done one