2025 should have been the year where the maw that is Grand Theft Auto's cultural cachet consumed all. It only took five months for Rockstar to release a little oxygen into the room, the studio pushing GTA 6 into 2026 – a small act of mercy that allowed a very different conversation to shape.

We've had AAA behemoths clashing with AA trendsetters. The long-awaited emergence of Hollow Knight: Silksong after years spent in shadow. The launch of the Switch 2, powering a new generation of first-party Nintendo games. Xbox Game Studios' acquisition strategy blossomed as PlayStation took steps to reaffirm its market-leading position. Legacy franchise revivals and genre-redefining indie games, and titles which found strength in fostering connection and collaboration.

I have been covering the video game industry for almost two decades in one form or another, and I've long believed that you can learn a lot about the current state of play by examining the games which define any given year. That's certainly true of the best games of 2025 which, when taken together, tell a pretty compelling story about where interactive entertainment is today and where it may be heading in the future.

Below you'll find the GamesRadar+ ranking of the 25 best games of the year, culminating in our pick for Game of the Year 2025. And before you go, we would love for you to share what your GOTY 2025 pick is in the comments below. – Josh West
Editor-in-Chief, GamesRadar+

Games of the Year 2025

25. Mario Kart World

Developer: Nintendo EPD | Platform(s): Nintendo Switch 2

The decade-long reign of Mario Kart 8 finally drew to a close in 2025. Considered to be the pinnacle of kart-racing games, MK8 registered as the most popular title on the Wii U (8.4 million sales) and Nintendo Switch, with the Deluxe release finding its way into 69.5 million homes. So it came as no surprise when Nintendo engineered a sequel to help propel the Switch 2 launch into the stratosphere on day one.

Mario Kart World advances the core foundational design of its predecessor, expanding its scope with an interconnected open world and larger races than ever before. Innovative modes like Knockout Tour demonstrate that Nintendo is still capable of iterating in a genre it conquered long ago, while vibrant visuals and punchy performance ensure that Mario Kart World is undoubtedly an early system showcase. Fun for all ages and designed to thrive in multiplayer scenarios, Mario Kart World is a true delight.

Read Rollin Bishop's full review of Mario Kart World to learn more.

24. Two Point Museum

Developer: Two Point Studios | Platform(s): PC, PS5, Xbox Series X, Switch, Switch 2

Two Point Studios came into this world with a single purpose: to channel the spirit of Theme Hospital into a new vessel. The success of Two Point Hospital fuelled the creation of Two Point Campus, an entertaining expansion that nonetheless made us question whether the same trick could be pulled indefinitely. If Two Point Museum proves anything, it's that this foundational formula can work for as long as Two Point Studios can locate the appropriate settings.

The simulation is wider and more rewarding here, with Two Point Museum settling into compulsive cycles far faster than its predecessors once the depth of its underlying curation concept reveals itself over time. Establishing a popular exhibit, furnishing it with all manner of oddities and curiosities, feels more like an act of artistic expression than the workings of a demanding role in project management. It's rare to find a business simulation game that feels so full of life.

Read Heather Wald's review of Two Point Museum to learn more.

23. Dying Light: The Beast

Developer: Techland | Platform(s): PC, PS5, Xbox Series X

After completing development of Dying Light 2, Techland faced a fork in the road. It could have followed in the footsteps of other independent studios like CDPR, leveraging measures of success to push for increasingly ambitious, risky horizons. Or it could head into the wilderness, taking time to interrogate why Dying Light attracted over 20 million players while its sequel seemed to only sow division. Techland decided to take the second path, and so Dying Light: The Beast was found.

It's remarkable, really, that an act of creative self-restraint led to such strong results. A shift away from a narrative-Legos approach to storytelling and world-building afforded Techland the space to deliver a far narrower, more confident vision. The sprawling playspace is densely detailed; daytime action freedom personified, the night a ballet of tension; combat, visceral and hard-hitting. The Beast is a careful iteration of the Dying Light concept rather than a grand revolution, and is all the better for it.

Read Jasmine Gould-Wilson's full review of Dying Light: The Beast to learn more.

22. Monster Hunter Wilds

Developer: Capcom | Platform(s): PC, PS5, Xbox Series X

Monster Hunter World became one of the most important video games in Capcom history when it released in 2018, a revelatory action-RPG that transformed a niche series into a global phenomenon. A long-awaited sequel to the best-selling Capcom title was always going to draw attention and scrutiny in equal measure, which is part of what makes Monster Hunter Wilds feel like such a wild success story.

Questions remain as to whether Wilds has the longevity of its predecessor, although few would debate that this is pure Monster Hunter – the concept distilled and refined to its finest. There's something obviously compelling about the idea of journeying with friends to fell creatures, crafting increasingly audacious weapons from the remains, and then rampaging into combat against even more audacious monsters. Wilds perfects this by stripping out busywork and distraction, and by greatly increasing the depth of buildcrafting and customization. Whether you're solo or with friends, Monster Hunter Wilds is a riot.

Read Austin Wood's full review of Monster Hunter Wilds to learn more.

21. Ninja Gaiden 4

Developer: Team Ninja, PlatinumGames | Platform(s): PC, PS5, Xbox Series X

In an era where difficulty has become almost synonymous with the Soulslike genre, what space remains for the traditional character-action game? That was the challenge development partners Team Ninja and PlatinumGames faced as they sought to revive the Ninja Gaiden franchise, some 13 years after Ryu Hayabusa's last 3D outing. Ninja Gaiden 4 is by just about every measure an unabashed success – a blistering combat experience which seems to revel in its balanced, bloodsoaked brutality.

PlatinumGames is perhaps best known for Metal Gear Rising: Revengeance and the Bayonetta trilogy, a collection of pristine character-action games that match dizzying spectacle with intricate underlying designs packed with punch and personality. That much is true of Ninja Gaiden 4 too, which quickly settles into a thunderous rhythm and never lets up across its runtime. It's frantic, demanding, and comically bloody at times, but we would have accepted nothing less from this franchise. All hail the ultra-violence.

Read Oscar Taylor-Kent's full review of Ninja Gaiden 4 to learn more.

20. Assassin's Creed Shadows

Developer: Ubisoft Quebec | Platform(s): PC, PS5, Xbox Series X, Switch 2

It may have taken Ubisoft 18 years to appropriately calibrate the Animus, but Assassin's Creed finally centered its attention on Japan. The setting had been long requested, and is thankfully well delivered. Assassin's Creed Shadows captures the majesty and beauty of feudal Japan, an expansive space that's densely populated with detail and distraction in equal measure. It's a staggering achievement; the sort of landscape that you'll gladly sacrifice hundreds of hours to exploring and uncovering.

In a sense, Shadows is a culmination of the journey Ubisoft has been on through the development of Origins, Odyssey, and Valhalla to redefine what Assassin's Creed can be. Dual protagonists in shinobi Naoe and samurai Yasuke mean there's greater harmony between the series' stealthy spine and its action-RPG impulses than ever before; there's a degree of freedom here that is wondrous. So too are improvements to combat, movement, and progression. Assassin's Creed Shadows is an adventure worth taking.

Read Andrew Brown's full review of Assassin's Creed Shadows to learn more.

19. Pokemon Legends Z-A

Developer: Game Freak | Platform(s): Nintendo Switch, Nintendo Switch 2

It is somewhat ironic that a franchise so entirely centered around the concept of evolution is so incapable of doing so for itself. It's almost as if developer Game Freak has spent the better part of 30 years clutching an Everstone, afraid that letting this peculiar item slip through its fingers could inadvertently alter the appeal of a true titan of popular culture. Perhaps that's why Pokemon Legends Z-A feels so refreshing.

While Legends Z-A is hardly a true shock to the system, Game Freak introduces just enough iteration to revitalize Pokemon in a way that 2022's Scarlet and Violet failed to do. The battle system is the biggest draw with real-time combat that brings a dynamism to encounters in a way the tired turn-based framework never could. If you've been an aspiring trainer for a couple of decades, having routine battle strategies upended is thrilling – as is returning to Lumiose City so many years after Pokemon X and Y.

Read Catherine Lewis' full review of Pokemon Legends Z-A to learn more.

18. Split Fiction

Developer: Hazelight Studios | Platform(s): PC, PS5, Xbox Series X, Switch 2

Game director Josef Fares is such a chaos agent that it can be all too easy to forget that Hazelight has been quietly developing some of the best co-op games of the modern era. A Way Out was a sharp declaration of intent, It Takes Two a revelation – so what then of Split Fiction? Calling it a masterwork seems too overt of a suggestion, though there's little doubt that Split Fiction has raised the bar to new heights.

Designed to be played entirely in split screen (either local or online, mercifully), Split Fiction uses its strict two-player setup to deliver a staggering, consistently brilliant stream of unique scenarios and challenges – each conquered through the power of collaboration. The way Hazelight is able to wield its storybook frame to constantly rewrite the rules of engagement is truly brilliant, as is Split Fiction's ability to constantly subvert expectations with big ideas and bolder executions.

Read Sam Loveridge's full review of Split Fiction to learn more.

17. Lost Records: Bloom & Rage

Developer: Don't Nod | Platform(s): PC, PS5, Xbox Series X

When Don't Nod deployed Life is Strange in 2015, it was a true turning point for a model of adventure game best epitomized by studios like LucasArts Games and Telltale Games. It also cast an exceptionally long shadow, setting a benchmark for quality and execution that's been virtually unreachable. Until the release of Lost Records: Bloom & Rage that is. Having spent five years experimenting outside of the genre it once redefined, Don't Nod returned with plenty to say.

While it's true that nostalgia is wielded as a weapon for self-reflection for those of the Gen X and Y persuasion, the way Lost Records is able to playfully reckon with its '90s setting is brilliant. The ability to seamlessly record anything and everything around you, piecing together little home movies, makes the personal playable – fostering real connection with the world and those who inhibit it before Bloom & Rage veers into strange, unfamiliar, inescapable territories.

Read Rachel Watts' full review of Lost Records: Bloom and Rage – Tape 1 to learn more.

16. Battlefield 6

Developer: Battlefield Studios | Platform(s): PC, PS5, Xbox Series X

The reports of Battlefield's death were greatly exaggerated. It's astonishing that developer DICE was able to rally after the cataclysmic launch of Battlefield 2042, where a toxic combination of trend watching and over indulgence left an iconic FPS franchise fighting for relevance in a fast-moving market. And so DICE joined forces with three other studios at EA to plot a new offensive. Battlefield 6 is a resounding success.

While it's undoubtedly a love letter to the Battlefield 3 and 4 eras of all-out-warfare, the latest installment has plenty of new ideas to bring to the table. The grand-scale multiplayer experience is effectively unrivaled – particularly at a time where the genre's frontline has been drawn between battle royale and extraction shooters. Cooperation is key, bravery and bold action is rewarded, while the push and pull of its battle rhythms always makes it feel as if you're just inches away from victory or defeat.

Read Joel Franey's full review of Battlefield 6 to learn more.

15. Death Stranding 2: On the Beach

Developer: Kojima Productions | Platform(s): PS5

There's an almost paradoxical tension at the heart of Death Stranding 2: On the Beach. It wasn't the labyrinthine storytelling that defined the original adventure, but rather the friction that was generated through its interlocking systems and mechanics. Yet, Kojima Productions so clearly worked to sand down as many rough edges as it could for its Australia-set sequel – did the studio, helmed by iconic writer and director Hideo Kojima, not risk dispelling some of the magic?

That Death Stranding 2 is able to so resolutely succeed, even as it shifted focus away from long, solitary hikes across hostile, barren territories, speaks to its absolute quality. Movement and inventory management is slick, careful refinement making even the smallest action feel gratifying. Combat is greatly improved, making On the Beach feel like an expansive, Metal Gear Solid 5-inspired sandbox. And the social connective tissue tying everything together is better implemented, fueling a more well-rounded, albeit still utterly bizarre experience that's a must-play for all PS5 owners.

Read Oscar Taylor-Kent's full review of Death Stranding 2 for more.

14. Peak

Developer: Aggro Crab | Platform(s): PC

It's been a pretty torrid year for the video game industry. Mass layoffs, studio closures, consolidations, and increasingly widespread use of generative AI (automating work which could have otherwise been done by people working behind the polygons) all point to a core unsustainability in the market. But then something like Peak comes along, shifting no fewer than 10 million copies in just two months.

Peak is proof that a small, creative group of developers with a smart, central idea can still cut through the noise and find monstrous success. It's you plus three friends communicating over proximity chat, facing a massive mountain to climb together. A simple concept that belies the utter carnage that's created as players clumsily grasp at outreached hands, battle diminishing stamina bars, and manage fraying relationships as teamwork crumbles across increasingly hostile terrain. Peak is an essential co-op game, and undoubtedly some of the most fun you can have online with your buddies this year.

Read Ali Jones' review of Peak to learn more.

13. Dispatch

Developer: AdHoc Studio | Platform(s): PC, PS5

It's difficult to pinpoint the exact reason the episodic model Telltale Games pioneered fell out of favor, eventually leading to the studio shuttering in 2018. You could point to a lack of real forward momentum in design principles, or uneven release schedules which led to long delays between instalments, and plenty more besides. AdHoc Studio, staffed by former Telltale developers, has reckoned with these realities and delivered something that is truly definitive in Dispatch.

An interactive animated TV show as much as it is anything else, Dispatch saw its eight episode run deploy over three weeks like clockwork – a scheduling miracle that helped make this feel like a prestige release from Netflix or Prime Video. It certainly didn't hurt that every batch of episodes arrived with exceptional production values, and enough points of interaction to put you in control of the narrative. Factor in an all-star cast and Dispatch is a definitive superhero workplace comedy.

Read Oscar Taylor-Kent's all episodes review of Dispatch to learn more.

12. Avowed

Developer: Obsidian Entertainment | Platform(s): PC, Xbox Series X

2025 is the year Obsidian Entertainment emerged as one of Microsoft Gaming's shrewdest acquisitions. The studio launched two RPGs and a survival game into early access; what's staggering is how high the quality is for all three titles. Avowed launched early into this year and was undoubtedly the biggest risk of the group, a fully fledged role-playing game set in the wider Pillars of Eternity universe. This project could quite easily have gotten caught between two worlds.

Instead, Obsidian delivered one of the best fantasy RPGs of the year. Rather than act as an anchor, the lore of Eora was carefully woven into the fabric of the Living Lands – achieving balance between depth and approachability. The decision to focus on larger explorable zones rather than a seamless space paid dividends, allowing Obsidian to pack more detail and warped beauty into its landscapes, while a variety of combat setups ensure encounters never lose their magic.

Read Anna Koselke's full review of Avowed to learn more.

11. Blue Prince

Developer: Dogubomb | Platform(s): PC, PS5, Xbox Series X

Blue Prince is special. It's also difficult to accurately describe, pushing anyone trying to explain this puzzle-adventure game into a series of 'what ifs'. What if Myst was reimagined as a roguelike? What if Mark Z. Danielewski's inimitable novel House of Leaves was adapted into a video game? What if an experience ostensibly about architectural drafting was one of the most engrossing games of the year?

Blue Prince is all of these things and none of them at all; a true curiosity. Each day you are tasked with exploring a mansion with an ever-shifting layout, your footsteps the key expendable resource determining when the 45-room space resets to zero. Randomized cards help you plot new routes around the mansion, with rooms leading to everywhere or nowhere at all – circuitous loops develop, only hastening a desire to solve the puzzle. The roguelike genre is saturated with smart video games, but Blue Prince shows there's still plenty of room for creative developers to innovate.

Read Oscar Taylor-Kent's full review of Blue Prince to learn more.

GOTY 2025: The Top 10

10. Kingdom Come: Deliverance 2

Developer: Warhorse Studios | Platform(s): PC, PS5, Xbox Series X

When this console generation draws to a close, it's likely that we'll view it as an era defined by the strength of its RPGs. From Baldur's Gate 3 to Elden Ring and beyond, we've been absolutely spoiled for choice. Kingdom Come: Deliverance 2 will undoubtedly be a part of that conversation, which is shocking when you consider just how purposefully hostile this realistic medieval RPG can be at times.

Warhorse Studios has delivered a massive, sprawling adventure that refuses to compromise on its core creative vision – a video game where friction and frustration are treated as features, rather than bugs. Kingdom Come: Deliverance 2 builds an exceptional experience around the hardships of existing in 1403, effortlessly immersing you into the period with rich storytelling, system-heavy progression and combat, and a lush visual design. Kingdom Come: Deliverance 2 is an ambitious video game that succeeds on its unwavering commitment to kicking players down a few pegs.

Read Alan Wen's full review of Kingdom Come: Deliverance 2 to learn more.

9. The Outer Worlds 2

Developer: Obsidian Entertainment | Platform(s): PC, PS5, Xbox Series X

The Outer Worlds 2 is a really interesting example of what a bigger budget can unlock for a fantastic development team. When the original The Outer Worlds released in 2019 from Obsidian Entertainment and publisher Private Division, it was clear that a great concept was being throttled by a restricted scope. What then of its sequel, built in partnership between Obsidian and Xbox Game Studios? Well, it's undoubtedly one of the best RPGs of the year.

The Outer Worlds 2 is a clear love letter to Fallout: New Vegas, with Obsidian inspired by the depth and flexibility of its legendary 2010 RPG. But that isn't to say that this venture across the Arcadia colony system is some sort of throwback. The Outer Worlds 2 is a rich RPG with an expansive creative vision, with deep character building, nuanced storytelling, and exceptionally slick combat propelling the series to new heights. Whisper it, but The Outer Worlds 2 may just be Obsidian's best game to date.

Read Heather Wald's full review of The Outer Worlds 2.

8. Elden Ring Nightreign

Developer: FromSoftware | Platform(s): PC, PS5, Xbox Series X

Elden Ring was our Game of the Year for 2022, our staff captivated by the billowing scale and complexity of FromSoftware's opus. The promise of more was unsurprisingly well received, even if Nightreign did threaten to take a somewhat unfamiliar shape. The honed, measured design of Elden Ring's first area, Limgrave, replaced by a procedurally generated Limveld – home now to three-player cooperative action. A big gamble, but FromSoftware is always up for a challenge.

Elden Ring Nightreign takes the underlying combat principles which defined the original adventure and hastens them, shoving your group into increasingly difficult encounters across a three-day cycle to prepare for battle with a final boss. It's frantic and frenetic, the threat of a shrinking gameplay circle and risk of sacrificing all of your progress in death a compelling wrinkle to the Soulslike standard FromSoftware established long ago. Nightreign is a big change of pace, and a fun new challenge for genre veterans.

Read Will Sawyer's full review of Elden Ring Nightreign to learn more.

7. Ghost of Yotei

Developer: Sucker Punch | Platform(s): PS5

It's funny to think there was a time where many believed that 2025 would be a slow year for the PS5. It's an exceptionally silly observation in hindsight, although few could have predicted that Sucker Punch would deliver a defining system showcase in Ghost of Yotei. The platform recently celebrated its fifth anniversary and here we are with an open-world adventure that feels truly boundary-pushing.

Whether you're coming in for the striking vibrance of its environments or the sheer violence of its expertly crafted samurai combat, Ghost of Yotei is a wonderfully smart sequel. Sucker Punch shifted the action a few hundred years beyond the events of Ghost of Tsushima, a decision which allows the studio to take some bigger swings with its revenge thriller story, open-ended approach to exploration, and meditative progression systems. If you're after an open world game where beauty and brutality is in equal measure, don't delay your dive into the wilds of Ghost of Yotei.

Read Andrew Brown's full review of Ghost of Yotei to learn more.

6. Silent Hill f

Developer: NeoBards Entertainment | Platform(s): PC, PS5, Xbox Series X

It's been three years since Konami embarked on its Silent Hill redemption tour. A salvo of new video games were announced all at once, an effort designed to return some relevance to a franchise that's been on life support ever since the great Silent Hills debacle of 2015. The Message hardly set the world alight, although Bloober's remake of Silent Hill 2 demonstrated that the series still holds some power.

And so all eyes turned to Silent Hill f, a standalone spinoff that shifted perspective away from misty, rural American to the fictional Japanese town of Ebisugaoka. An inspired decision, with developer NeoBards Entertainment engineering one of the series' most oppressive atmospheres to date. Unsettling storytelling and a more robust approach to combat encounters makes this one of the strongest original Silent Hill adventures in decades, and a sharp declaration that Silent Hill still has plenty to offer the horror genre.

Read Oscar Taylor-Kent's full review of Silent Hill f to learn more.

5. Indiana Jones and the Great Circle

Developer: MachineGames | Platform(s): PC, PS5, Xbox Series X

You may be wondering why a video game that was released in 2024 is on our list of the best games of 2025 to begin with, let alone ranked so highly. Well, that's easy: Indiana Jones and the Great Circle landed on PC and Xbox Series X after our voting cutoff, making it eligible for this year's showing. As for why it's a top contender: MachineGames overdelivered with this original Indy adventure.

Anchored by an exceptional performance from Troy Baker, expertly capturing the gravitas and mannerisms of Harrison Ford, Indiana Jones and the Great Circle is an exceptional globetrotting journey that may as well have been unearthed from some hidden Steven Spielberg archive. The blend of first and third-person perspectives sells the idea that you are embodying one of the most iconic characters of all time with ease, while the grandiose puzzle solving and slapstick combat only adds to the authenticity of this adventure.

Read Josh West's full review of Indiana Jones and the Great Circle to learn more.

4. Hollow Knight: Silksong

Developer: Team Cherry | Platform(s): PC, PS5, Switch, Switch 2, Xbox Series X

The weight of expectation should have been crushing for Team Cherry. Hollow Knight was a slow burn success story that effectively redefined what a modern Metroidvania could be, making its sequel one of the most anticipated video games on the planet. Team Cherry worked for six years in relative silence, the internet filling the void with an exhaustive flood of memes, rumors, and speculation. Could Silksong ever truly live up to the hype that had been thrust upon it?

Within minutes of its release, Hollow Knight: Silksong brought the world to a standstill. It literally crashed Steam. And what did millions of payers find when they were finally able to step into the unfamiliar land of Pharloom? A mesmerizing, utterly uncompromising sequel that wields its blunt edges as a mark of honor. The challenge dramatically increased, combat imbued with fluidity, platforming sections far more unforgiving; and yet, at its heart, Silksong is brilliance personified.

Read Oscar Taylor-Kent's review of Hollow Knight Silksong to learn more.

3. Donkey Kong Bananza

Developer: Nintendo EPD | Platform(s): Switch 2

The Nintendo Switch 2 was always going to be a hit on day one. Its predecessor is on track to outstrip the Nintendo DS as the best-selling Nintendo console of all time, so it's no surprise that millions were ready to leap onto a more technically proficient system. The question mark here was always what Nintendo would align within the launch window to keep players hooked into the ecosystem. Who'd have thought Donkey Kong would be entrusted to carry that great burden?

For his first starring role in a 3D adventure in over two decades, Donkey Kong absolutely smashed it out of the park. Donkey Kong Bananza has echoes of Super Mario Odyssey in its underlying DNA, though Nintendo has gone out of its way to imbue this experience with dazzling personality and transformational gameplay hooks. Destruction shines bright in Bananza, and the opportunity to really dig into the depths of some iconic Nintendo level designs should not be missed.

Read Dustin Bailey's full review for Donkey Kong Bananza.

2. Hades 2

Developer: Supergiant Games | Platform(s): PC, Switch, Switch 2

Supergiant Games develops brilliant video games with outrageous consistency. What it doesn't do is develop sequels. There are legions of players who were left wanting more from the worlds Bastion, Transistor, and Pyre inhabited, but it was Hades' labyrinthine underworld that the studio couldn't resist returning to. A cynic may point to the success of Hades as the sole reason for Hades 2's existence, but it's quite clear that Supergiant had more that it wanted to say.

Hades 2 is a phenomenal roguelite dungeon crawler. A best-in-class addition to the genre, setting new standards for combat, characterization, and progression. Supergiant routes many of its freshest ideas through Melinoë, a new protagonist who shines in expanded, vibrant playspaces. Refined combat allows for more skillful expression, while buildcrafting finds new depth through a wider selection of tools and divine boons. Hades 2 is a more than worthy successor to the game that redefined the roguelite forever.

Read Ali Jones' final review of Hades 2 to learn more.

GOTY 2025

1. Clair Obscur: Expedition 33

Developer: Sandfall Interactive | Platform(s): PC, PS5, Xbox Series X

The rise of Clair Obscur: Expedition 33 has been meteoric. The debut from Sandfall Interactive started the year in relative obscurity, on the radar of few beyond true genre enthusiasts. By the year's end, this stunning RPG is clearly the defining video game experience of 2025. Clair Obscur: Expedition 33 cleaned house at our reader-voted Golden Joystick Awards, and was the clear GOTY 2025 choice from the GamesRadar+ team by a considerable margin. Let's dig into why.

At its heart, Clair Obscur: Expedition 33 is a love letter to the Hironobu Sakaguchi games of old. The father of the Final Fantasy series clearly left a lasting mark on the relatively small group of developers who make up Sandfall Interactive, inspiring the studio to deliver a high-fidelity, turn-based RPG the likes of which are so rarely seen in the modern era. In many ways, Expedition 33 picks up where legendary Xbox 360 exclusive Lost Odyssey left this style of game back in 2007.

There's a similar commitment to storytelling excellence, with Clair Obscur: Expedition 33 quickly establishing an exceptionally vast, layered world to tumble into with ease. Lost Odyssey also had this perverse obsession with trying to make players cry, another aspect which shines in Expedition 33 through its expressive character development and wonderful performances. And then there's the combat, another modern interpretation of classic turn-based battle systems that gradually reveals its tactical depth through streams of challenging encounters.

I say all this not to accuse Clair Obscur: Expedition 33 with being some sort of throwback, succeeding off of pure nostalgia alone. But rather because it's worth highlighting just how long the wait has been for a studio to pick up this particular baton and run with it. Expedition 33 pushes the genre forward with its flexible and expressive systems, with real-time actions helping to heighten the tension of every turn-based encounter. Progression is nuanced, the world-building precious; the story and soundtrack work in perfect harmony to create this gripping, heartbreaking atmosphere that you can't turn away from.

Clair Obscur: Expedition 33 is a transformative RPG that should be experienced by everyone.

Dive deeper into why Clair Obscur: Expedition 33 is our Game of the Year for 2025 with our interview with the team at Sandfall Interactive.

Celebrate the best of 2025 with GamesRadar+

When I played Moonlighter 2: The Endless Vault during Steam Next Fest in June, I came away very impressed at the way the three main pillars of its gameplay loop overlapped. Alongside its more traditional dungeoneering gameplay were inventory management and shop keeping systems that worked beautifully, encouraging you to manipulate every aspect of the game to chase your goal. But while the core ideas are all still present, the five months since I last played have brought changes to this early access build that have left me a little cold.

Moonlighter 2 picks up the story of the original Moonlighter a few months down the line. Forced to flee their home at the end of that game, the cast end up in the village of Tresna, where protagonist Will has pushed the patience of his landlord a little too far. She's desperate for cash, so she sends you back to your adventuring life - dungeon-crawling to gather relics that you can sell in your store. It's a repeat of the original game's excellent elevator pitch, though Moonlighter 2 has replaced top-down pixel art with an isometric 3D presentation that offers a little more tactical breadth to some fights.

Early on, combat is a modest affair, Will armed with nothing more than his trusty broom. But soon he's packing a shortsword, and even has a Blob Gun to bring down aerial foes, staggering them so he can smash them out of the arena with his pack. On each run, while you can focus purely on finding the best loot, certain encounters will offer combat bonuses - damage over time or burst effects that let you change up your playstyle a little depending on what you find. Along with the risk/reward system of your locket, which allows you to teleport home in a pinch if you need to keep your gear safe, these help keep fights interesting, and are often key to succeeding against the bosses that lurk at the end of each run.

You'll have limited pack space at the start of the game, so making sure that you make the most of your loot is crucial. Most relics can interact with each other in myriad ways, often meaning you'll get a substantial breather between encounters as you attempt to optimize the contents of your bag. Some relics might burn away their neighbors, but others might be made more valuable each time a piece of loot is reduced to ash. As you venture into new realms in search of even more expensive gear to sell, those interactions become more complex, but potentially more lucrative if you can get them right, turning Moonlighter 2's inventory management system into one of the game's most compelling features.

What's in his pockets?

Much of the core formula of Moonlighter 2 remains unchanged since that Next Fest demo, but the biggest change appears when Will returns to his store, where two systems have changed significantly. The first is the shopping minigame itself. Previously a system that required you to choose how to upsell each individual transaction as much as possible, it's now a perk-based system that only triggers every few sales, with no guarantee it relates to what's left in your bag. That ties to the second issue, which is how much money you're tasked with making.

In the demo, you had to make 5,000 gold in a single day of sales. Exactly how you chose to do that was up to you, but if you wanted to maximize your revenue, you needed to make use of each of Moonlighter 2's major pillars; a successful dungeon crawl, optimized inventory, and plenty of sales charm were all crucial to meeting that target. In this new early access build, however, your first revenue breakpoint is a cumulative 10,000 gold. That might sound like a lot more, but what it really means is that instead of having one excellent day, you can get by with a series of entirely average ones instead. Even as your target amount increases, your own upgrades and increased skill means that you're rarely tasked with grinding away for days on end. Progression is no longer gated by your mastery of Moonlighter 2's most interesting ideas, but simply slowed down.

Side hustle

That's a problem, because it doesn't sync up with how the combat system works. The most expensive loot can be found after you defeat the bosses, but some of those fights are agonizingly slow, often because they don't work with whatever combat build you might have focused on. Each zone has its own combat augment - spike-spewing plants, projectile-firing Genies, or time-altering tasers - that can be further upgraded through your run, but don't spawn in the boss room. That means you have to decide what the purpose of an adventure is before it starts - are you just trying to beat the boss, or are you hoping to make loads of money?

The answer is almost certainly the former, because you don't actually need to make that money to ensure you advance. That'll happen over time no matter what you do, but you'll definitely need to acquire the unique resources dropped by each boss in order to move the story forward. Yet focusing on combat upgrades means you're not filling up your pack, removing the impact of the inventory system that still manages to be the most engaging part of the game.

Eventually, as the combat stakes and gold amounts grow ever larger, Moonlighter 2 starts to settle into a more comfortable rhythm, but I never quite shook off my disappointment at the changes to the shop system. Even if the bones of the game were totally solid - I came across a number of bugs in this early access build that weren't present in the demo - it feels like the heart's been taken out of the overall experience.

The gutting of what was a smart, well-gated progression system that made excellent use of the game's core ideas is a real disappointment, and while there's plenty of early access ahead in which those ideas might be given a little more time to shine, Moonlighter 2 feels as though it's tripped at the start of the home stretch. For a game about making big sales, Moonlighter 2 enters early access unsure of the value of its own mechanical pillars. Now, it's up to community feedback to give ol' Will a steer, but I'm not quite sure they know what they have for now.

Moonlighter 2: The Endless Vault was reviewed on PC in early access, with a code provided by the publisher.

Check out our best roguelikes ranking for more loops!

Grounded 2 has launched into Steam early access and Xbox Game Preview, and it almost immediately broke the all-time concurrent player record that the first game set on Steam.

We don't have exact figures for the Xbox player base – who does seem to like the game, which has strong reviews on the Xbox store – but SteamDB shows that, within one hour of its July 29 launch, Grounded 2 cracked 48,880 concurrent players on Steam. That's almost exactly 50% higher than the 32,012 concurrent Steam peak that Grounded hit four years ago.

At the time of writing, the player count is only going up, currently sitting at 49,836. Early Steam user reviews for Grounded 2 have been more unstable, however. I don't know how you confidently review a game like this after mere hours, but it seems only 64% of early buyers are happy with their experience so far. As expected, performance issues and crashes have stonewalled some players.

That said, 412 (current) reviews is a very small sample size, and several in-depth early access reviews from critics have a lot of good things to say about the game. Our own Grounded 2 review calls it a promising sequel with a wealth of new creatures, even if it is a decidedly safe iteration.

Developer Obsidian released an updated early access roadmap during the launch rush, promising more recipes, armor, weapons, furniture, creatures, and quality-of-life improvements coming in the fall update. You know, stuff. Early access stuff. Japanese and Brazilian Portuguese language support (text) is coming in the fall as well.

Looking further ahead, the winter update will bring new "Tier III" equipment, more Buggy options, Steam Deck support, as well as major features like PlayGrounds and – I'm just double-checking here – "Coziness." Well, you can't forget that. (Also, Obsidian really is setting itself up for smarmy bug complaint posts by calling a core feature the "Buggy," isn't it?)

More vague and ambitious "future plans" include additional Mutations, yet more Buggy features, building materials, language options, base customization, and still more gear and creatures. This is the part where I'd normally unpack whatever details the devs wrote in the "Early Access Game" blurb on the Steam page, but the "what the developers have to say" section for Grounded 2 is currently, hilariously, blank. Finally, community management my quiet personality can get behind.

A lot of people seem to be struggling with this one, so here's that Grounded 2 Grass Seeds location you're looking for.

The ongoing back-and-forth over Subnautica 2's leadership gutting, subsequent delay to 2026, and an adjacent $250 million payout apparently tied to developer Unknown Worlds' 2025 revenue targets has only intensified following a scathing statement from publisher Krafton, which acquired the studio in 2021 and has now, in so many words, claimed that the old studio leaders had to go because they weren't doing their job.

In the margins of all this, a smaller but interesting narrative has emerged: the studio's previous game, which was nothing like Subnautica and was the first thing it released after Krafton acquired it, was an utter failure.

Krafton's newest statement argues that the ousted leaders "abandoned the responsibilities entrusted to them," and at one point calls out co-founder Charlie Cleveland specifically.

"In particular, following the failure of Moonbreaker, KRAFTON asked Charlie to devote himself to the development of Subnautica 2," the publisher said. "However, instead of participating in the game development, he chose to focus on a personal film project."

Moonbreaker, you may remember – or not remember, because apparently nobody actually played it – was fully released in 2024 after a stay in early access that began in September 2022. It's a turn-based strategy game with PvP that doubles as a digital miniatures collector, letting you granularly paint and customize your units before sending them into battle in a world sculpted, in part, by fantasy author Brandon Sanderson.

This was inherently risky since strategy games have a relatively small audience with no real crossover with Subnautica's survival game demographic, but on Steam, Moonbreaker reviewed pretty well with a score of 84% positive after 1,262 reviews. A lot of game devs would kill for that kind of reception. But Unknown Worlds was coming off of Subnautica, which has 285,739 reviews with a 97% positive score on Steam. It's one of the best-reviewed games on the entire platform, which sets quite the bar.

I never got the impression that Unknown Worlds was banking on Moonbreaker being a Subnautica-sized hit, but whatever its expectations were, clearly the game drastically underperformed. And yeah, looking at its SteamDB history, which shows a peak player count of just 882 people nearly three years ago, it never got off the ground.

So, let's explore these abandoned ruins a bit. A look through Moonbreaker's patch history shows a classic sign of trouble: "Business Model Changes" shortly after launch. From the outside looking in, it certainly seems like the devs were making drastic adjustments to monetization in hopes of wooing players who clearly didn't bite at the time and ultimately never did.

Compared to the talk around the reveal for Moonbreaker, this monetization patch sounds like pretty scorched earth stuff, removing one key currency from purchase and deleting booster boxes entirely. Moonbreaker was $30, but old reviews show some confusion and pushback around its original free-to-play-like monetization. Clearly it was enough of a problem to warrant a dev response.

The real killer seems like a tale as old as time: a multiplayer game with no players. Today's vicious market is one thing, but even in 2022, a potential snowballing death for anything with multiplayer was a very real hazard. A lot of the recent Steam reviews for Moonbreaker praise the painter sandbox and core gameplay, but lament that there's almost nothing to do since there is – at the time of writing, quite literally – nobody playing it.

All of that being said, it wasn't until this increasingly public Subnautica 2 spat that the full depth of Moonbreaker's cratering really came into focus. Krafton has branded it a failure, and in a recent post of his own, which called the leadership changes a "shock," Cleveland described Moonbreaker as quite a sore spot.

"I tell you all this because I want to tell you that game development is in my blood," he said in a post that described the leadership changes as a shock. "So is iteration and early access. Our games have thrived because of it, and one of our games failed because we thought we knew better.

"I was most passionate about that game, and it fell flat. We worked on it 5 years before our early access, thinking that this time we were experts and we knew better. But fewer people played that game than even that humble Half-Life mod," he added, referring to the Natural Selection mod that launched the studio back in 2001. Natural Selection 2, a standalone shooter, came out in 2012. It currently has 102 more players than Moonbreaker.

"Even though our studio had financial success in that period, and even though many fans fell in love with the game, it really wounded me and I needed time to heal. Sometimes it feels like I’ll never get over that one."

As Cleveland says, Moonbreaker's failure obviously wasn't enough to derail the studio – Subnautica sold a lot of copies, and its followup Below Zero did well too – but it seems to have had a noticeable impact on some people and perhaps relationships at the studio. Krafton was undoubtedly disappointed when the first game from the studio it just paid $500 million for, which had been riding high after two big hits, was an incomparable flop. Meanwhile, folks like Cleveland had whiplash from the severe contrast in performance. Now it's a question of whether Subnautica 2 the game, not Subnautica 2 the contentious and unreleased project, can overcome its own hurdles.

"No subscriptions. No loot boxes. No battle pass": Subnautica 2 devs address concerns following major leadership changes, insist "it will remain a single-player first experience."

Unknown Worlds co-founder and original Subnautica director Charlie Cleveland is opening up about the unceremonious removal of the studio's co-founders last week, calling the shakeup a "shock" despite the sequel's Early Access readiness.

Last week, Unknown Worlds parent company Krafton announced that Cleveland, along with Unknown Worlds CEO Ted Gill and co-founder Max McGuire, are no longer with the studio and won't be involved in the making of Subnautica 2 going forward. The sequel is still due to launch into Early Access this year.

Meanwhile, Steve Papoutsis, who heads up The Callisto Protocol studio Striking Distance, has been named CEO of Unknown Worlds.

The move sent shockwaves throughout the Subnautica community, and several days later, we still don't have an official explanation for the departures. The studio has formally addressed the situation, insisting the sequel "will remain a single-player first experience" free of subscriptions, loot boxes, battle passes, and all of that junk, but still, there's a noteworthy lack of transparency about what actually went down behind the scenes.

But over the weekend, Cleveland shared his personal history of Subnautica's creation, the formation of Unknown Worlds, and his feelings in the wake of what increasingly sounds like several forced removals from the studio and project.

"We know (and love) that the expectations for this sequel are high. But the team has poured their hearts into the game and their dedication really shows," said Cleveland. "We helped pioneer early access and our community seems to love it just as much as we do. It's the best way to develop a game like this.

"So you can see why for Max, Ted, myself, the Unknown Worlds team, and for our community, the events of this week have been quite a shock. We know that the game is ready for early access release and we know you’re ready to play it. And while we thought this was going to be our decision to make, at least for now, that decision is in Krafton's hands. And after all these years, to find that I'm no longer able to work at the company I started stings."

Krafton bought Unknown Worlds back in October 2021, putting the Subnautica devs under the same umbrella as PUBG Studios, Striking Distance, and inZOI Studio.

"I want you to know that whatever happens to the founders, to the team and to the game, our priority is, and has always been, to make the best damned game we can for the best community in the world," he said. "With your Gorge plushies and your hand-drawn fish fan-art, and yes, your hard-earned dollars, you've supported us in every way, in every season, cold and warm, since Half-Life modding was even a thing."

I don't want to infer too much from someone who's now seemingly uninvolved from Subnautica 2's development, but it's interesting to me that Cleveland uses the present tense "is" when explaining the Unknown Worlds' founders' priorities. Again, I'm not sure there's any significance to be extracted there, but it's clear Cleveland is still intimately invested in the sequel's vision.

While he didn't provide the answers Subnautica fans are looking for, Cleveland ended his message to fans on a somewhat cryptic note

"And I also want you to know that this is not where the story ends."

In the meantime, here are some games like Subnautica to dive into.

Following this week's big Subnautica 2 leadership shakeup, Unknown Worlds has released a statement aimed at assuring fans that the original vision for the sequel is still intact.

On the official Unknown Worlds website, the developer addresses recent "leadership changes" announced by parent company Krafton on Tuesday. Namely, Steve Papoutsis, CEO of The Callisto Protocol developer Striking Distance, is now CEO of Unknown Worlds. Original Subnautica designer and director Charlie Cleveland, previous Unknown Worlds CEO Ted Gill, and co-founder Max McGuire are all out without an official explanation.

The Subnautica community has been reeling from the abrupt changes at Unknown Worlds, with some going as far as to declare the upcoming sequel "dead before arrival." And it seems Unknown Worlds took notice.

"First, we want to take a moment to reflect on the vision and core values of exploration and discovery that have defined Subnautica from the very beginning," reads the message. "They have not only shaped the identity of the entire series, but they continue to guide how we think, build, and create every day. We believe strongly in those values and are dedicated to upholding them in Subnautica 2."

The Subnautica 2 developers say that Papoutsis has "already expressed his excitement to check out everything we've been working on and is diving into supporting our ongoing vision and journey to releasing Subnautica 2 Early Access."

Notably, Unknown Worlds, surely speaking through a Krafton-approved filter, still hasn't given an explanation for Cleveland, Gill, and McGuire's exit from the project — not even a watered down, PR-friendly one you'd expect from such a high-profile departure. It only assures fans that "the team that has been working on the game day-to-day over the last few years remains completely unchanged.

"That team includes veterans of the Subnautica series, dating back to the earliest days of the original Subnautica, to the many incredible and talented developers who came aboard to help us bring our vision for Subnautica 2 to life."

Going off this statement, it does seem Subnautica 2 is still scheduled to release in Early Access at some point in 2025, although there's no update on the specific timing.

Elsewhere in the letter, Unknown Worlds stresses that Krafton still supports the original vision for Subnautica 2, that "our commitment to Open Development and crafting Subnautica 2 alongside our community during Early Access hasn't changed," and that both the studio and publisher want to make sure "that Subnautica 2 meets the highest quality standards and delivers on your expectations."

By far the most substantive part of the letter is at the very end, where Unknown Worlds makes an explicit commitment: "Nothing has changed with how the game is structured. It will remain a single-player first experience, with optional co-operative multiplayer. No subscriptions. No loot boxes. No battle pass."

It's a sorry reflection on the state of the industry that the developer has to promise fans of a beloved survival game series that the new entry won't randomly be a live-service game, but I suppose it's good to have that assurance after a major reorganization. Although, the cynic in me does make note of the absence of the word "microtransactions" in that commitment.

Regardless, here are the best survival games to test your will to live.

Subnautica 2 developer Unknown Worlds is undergoing a massive leadership change, the company's parent company, Krafton, has announced.

In a press release, Krafton revealed that Steve Papoutsis is the new CEO of Unknown Worlds "effective immediately," replacing original Subnautica designer and director Charlie Cleveland, as well as Unknown Worlds CEO Ted Gill and co-founder Max McGuire.

It's unclear if the departures were voluntary, but I've reached out to Krafton for comment and will update this article if I hear back. Either way, it sounds like Cleveland, Gill, and McGuire won't have any involvement in Subnautica going forward.

"While Krafton sought to keep the Unknown Worlds' co-founders and original creators of the Subnautica series involved in the game's development, the company wishes them well on their next endeavors," Krafton said.

"Importantly, Krafton is confident that Papoutsis, with decades of experience behind the planning, development, and production of some of the highest-rated game franchises, will bring renewed energy and momentum to delivering the long-anticipated Subnautica 2 experience to fans."

At Visceral Games, Papoutsis was producer on Dead Space 2 and served as director on Dead Space 3, later joining The Callisto Protocol studio Striking Distance as CEO. It seems he will now lead the creative direction at both Striking Distance and Unknown Worlds.

"There is nothing more important than the gamer experience. Given the anticipation around Subnautica 2, we owe our players nothing less than the best possible game, as soon as possible," said Krafton CEO CH Kim. "We are thrilled Steve is joining us in our shared commitment at Krafton and Unknown Worlds to deliver Subnautica 2 as a more complete and satisfying entry in the series—one that truly lives up to player expectations."

Added Papoutsis, "I am thrilled to be taking on this new role within the Krafton family and to be working alongside the immensely talented team at Unknown Worlds. Player experience is our North Star, and the team is laser-focused on delivering the best possible game for the Subnautica community.

"We appreciate Ted, Charlie and Max for their past roles in having built this beloved world, and thank the fans for your devotion and patience."

As recently as April, Subnautica 2 design lead Anthony Gallego re-committed to the game's 2025 early access launch, although a specific date has yet to be revealed. Such a severe leadership shakeup this late into a game's development is unusual and could potentially signal issues and conflicts around its creative direction.

"Krafton puts players at the heart of every decision because they deserve the absolute best," Kim said. "We understand how eager our community is to dive into the underwater world of Subnautica 2, and we are working diligently to deliver an experience that meets those expectations—while maintaining our unwavering commitment to quality and player experience. We deeply appreciate the patience and trust of our Subnauts, and we are doing everything possible to ensure the final result is worth the wait."

Here are the best survival games to test your will to live.

When you think of the top-rated action RPGs on Steam – Elden Ring, Monster Hunter World, Path of Exile, God of War, and so on – you may not think of Atlyss, a single player RPG (with available multiplayer) that entered early access in November 2024. But since launch, the furry-coded game has amassed over 14,000 97% positive Steam reviews, putting it comfortably in the upper echelon of Steam's genre rankings. That rating was very briefly dinged last month following an amusing controversy over perceived nerfs to the game's famously curvy character models, which has ultimately come to nothing – or, really, better character models.

This being an intersection of things I find journalistically irresistible – paradoxically huge niches and absurd non-troversies – I obviously had to find out what happened. This all started in late May when Atlyss creator Kiseff rolled out a test change to the game's beta branch. As an admin in the Atlyss Discord server recounted, this was "an experimental procedure" introducing a "slight reduction of the max sliders" on some character creation settings, most notably capping some body width sliders.

In other words, you suddenly couldn't make your characters quite as round or endowed. As a reminder, Atlyss is not an "adult" game. Its Steam content warning reads: "The game contains sexualized clothing and character designs (however, nothing explicit), blood and cartoon violence. Dialog may contain occasional swearing and mild sexual innuendo. In-game chat is included in online play, which can provide varied experiences."

Nevertheless, in a demonstration of some of the appeal here, one of the top-rated Atlyss Steam user reviews reads: "My player model is cute and my ass is fat. You should be playing right now."

There are, in fairness, a lot of other reviews saying the gameplay is genuinely great even if you're not into furry characters, and frankly, you don't get Steam traction like this without reason. Steam user Bucky Seifert, a real scholar of our time, said it best, I think: "You'll come for the thicc furry shortstacks but stay for the combat and cracked movement."

But as you can probably imagine, for a certain crowd this slider change was an anvil suddenly heaped upon the (previously unburdened) camel's back. Some of the reviews from this time of slider unrest reckon "character creation was significantly and intently hamstrung by a recent update."

Another player argues "the dev has made the really unfortunate decision to strip away the thing so many of us had bought the game for: The ability to make your characters the kinds of body shapes you can't in any other game." And you know what? I can kind of understand that disappointment.

Based on social media posts collected in the Atlyss subreddit, the whole thing was blown out of proportion in some circles, which, I know, you really wouldn't expect from the internet. (And for goodness' sake, if you're going to browse the Atlyss subreddit, do so cautiously). Unrest ensued, "resulting in a large influx of back-and-forth of the Atlyss community, positive and negative review dynamite sticks alike," as that Discord post rather democratically put it.

Kiseff released a statement "regarding all this" pretty quickly, assuring players that "I am still working on the models. They are not final. That's it. I won't write a manifesto about that. I will fix this."

The whole thing was a communication issue, they said, not a design decision. "I made bad choices in the midst of all this and I did share a private build for a moment on my support discord to sort some things out," Kiseff added. "I removed all the test branches for the time being."

Fast forward to this month, Atlyss' latest update, between new skills and environments and subclass developments, has not only preserved the character models some players had fallen in love with, it's added a new environment to the character creation screen and "all of the player models have been refined to look more rounder / softer and less jagged." I do love a happy ending.

"I will stay by my word and be committed to continue providing communication and transparency at the best of my ability here each month," Kiseff says in the latest update. "Again, I do apologize for taking as long as I am. There is a silver lining to all of this and I'm certain things will turn in a good direction soon."

Here are our picks for the 25 best RPGs you can play right now.

Lethal Company is about to get one of its most powerful creatures ever as creator Zeekerss once again teases the co-op horror hit's first update in months.

After Lethal Company's most recent patch dropped in December 2024, Zeekerss took a little break from developing the game and spent a lot of time playing its most direct competitor on Steam, REPO, which coincidentally inspired them to get back to work on Lethal Company. Now we're hearing a little bit more about what sort of actual stuff we can expect from the next update.

"The new creature is technically maybe the most powerful creature in the game, and the power easily goes to its head," Zeekerss wrote on Twitter. "Sometimes it does things that make absolutely no sense, just because it can."

We still don't know a whole lot else about the next Lethal Company update, and Zeekerss has been shy to talk about anything publicly, but they did suggest on Twitter in April that it'll "add a creature or two." We now know that it's getting at least one new creature, and it sounds like a doozy.

Lethal Company became an instant hit when it released in 2023, and last year Zeekerss admitted to feeling burnt out by the game's massive success. Although that obviously hasn't stopped them from making new Lethal Company content, they did take a pretty long break during which they teased their open-world text-based horror game, Welcome to the Dark Place, which is scheduled to hit Steam this October.

"Let's just fail quickly": REPO devs pivoted to co-op horror after running out of money since their last game "hadn't been successful enough"

Fresh-faced after a break and "inspired" by fellow co-op horror hit REPO, Lethal Company creator Zeekerss is nearly ready to release the game's first update in months, teasing interior changes and new monsters.

There's a world where this update is actually already out. In a recent tweet, Zeekerss explained: "I'm at a moment where I'm deciding whether to release a low-key interiors update for Lethal right now, or give it another couple weeks and add a creature or two, and I think I'll do the latter."

The majority of replies from Lethal Company fans seem to support Zeekerss plan. What's another few weeks when it's already been several months since the previous update, December's version 69?

The important thing is that Lethal Company V70 – or whatever it ends up being, as two updates back we got V65 – is very real, coming in May if we're lucky, and bringing interior changes as well as more monsters.

If the current version of the update was looking "low-key," then we can reasonably assume the final version will deliver new room layouts, mechanics, loot, or other iterative shake-ups within the existing maps. It sounds like a nice little refresh after a few quiet months.

I'll tell you what V70 won't have: rooms made of meat, an increasingly common horror game staple. Zeekerss rather amusingly unloaded on the trope earlier this month, lamenting "too many beef environments--just making everything be made of meat for no reason. I didn't look into that Mouthwashing game at all JUST because I feel like it'll have beef."

The irony, of course, is that this means Zeekerss has beef with beef.

After several popular mods, REPO devs are thinking of a Lethal Company-inspired mimic monster of their own but "it needs to be really interesting."

Erenshor, the newly released single-player MMORPG heavily styled after classic games like Everquest, is largely defined by its NPCs. Solo developer Brian "Burgee" cooked up over 100 "simulated players" with their own arcs, items, and behaviors to sell the feeling and atmosphere of this paradoxical offline MMO.

Burgee plans to add many more NPCs to Erenshor as it progresses in Steam early access, and hopefully without repeating an issue that's come up in player testing in a stroke of unbelievable irony.

GamesRadar+ spoke to Burgee about how he's acting on feedback post-launch, and it turns out he accidentally made his own version of Leeroy Jenkins, a World of Warcraft player whose gungho battle cry and ill-fated aggro pull has been heard around the world and immortalized in countless videos and references.

He's, uh, acting on it.

"The simulated players are definitely a big focus for a lot of the players now, getting them to behave a little bit more predictably," Burgee says. "We've had players report that they're staging up for a boss in a dungeon, and then one lone simulated player, wearing no gear, will engage the boss instead and then train it on top of them.

"[I'm] trying to minimize those events a little bit more, and then just the quality-of-life. The UI needs a lot of work. Getting that to be a smoother experience for people have been the two main focuses this week."

It's hard to unpack the irony of a solo developer, who hasn't actually been a big MMO gamer himself post-Everquest, stumbling into a recreation of arguably the biggest MMO's most memorable player. It's nearly shot-for-shot perfection, right down to third-partying your own teammates. All we need now is a pre-pull number crunch.

I'm reminded of Bethesda veteran Joel Burgess' theory that "good things often happen by accident." Even in offline MMOs, Leeroy Jenkins lives on.

I'm not sure if I'd call Simulated Leeroy a bug or a feature, but Burgee says it's happened "a couple of times." To that end, "the latest patch notes I just pushed said simulated players will always wear pants now. I saw a lot of streams where they, for whatever reason, weren't. The logic wasn't quite there but it should be fixed."

This is almost as ironic as a developer making a solo experience emulating a multiplayer one and players suggesting that he add actual multiplayer.

In the competitive arena of early access roguelikes, Hades 2 and Windblown have been my champions this year, but only because Hyper Light Breaker struck me as a game I'd enjoy a lot more after a few patches. Now, developer Heart Machine may have cooked up just the patch to get me properly stuck in: a game-changing pass to resources and difficulty said to make the open-world roguelike "easier to get into, but harder to master."

The "Buried Below" update, Hyper Light Breaker's first major content update, is due April 29, Heart Machine announced today. It folds in months of player feedback to smooth down a few pain points and expand some of the game's best ideas.

The headliner is a rework to how Hyper Light Breaker – previously billed as a pseudo-extraction game – handles runs. Instead of the old energy-based system that let you die and retry a map a few times before it was wiped, Breaker will now wipe your inventory and reset the Overgrowth world map if you die a single time.

"We know this is a big change," says lead producer Michael Clark. "We've made this change to balance the game around a more traditional roguelite experience, turning each run into a more consistent zero-to-hero journey.

"This allows us to better adjust difficulty and make the game easier to get into, but harder to master, and addresses much of the feedback we've received from players since early access launch."

To offset this change, you can now extract out of the Overgrowth from any shrine without needing to fight through waves of enemies at the teleporter. This makes it easier to get in and get out while slowly accumulating power in the build-up to boss fights.

"This change will make it so players can extract more often, making the game easier as a result, which was one of the main requests from players to change the game's difficulty," a press release reads.

It's a fascinating design concession that seems to target conflict between the game's extraction DNA and the classic roguelike vehicle.

When you die, you'll now lose everything in your inventory and Vault apart from Golden Rations, which are Breaker's main meta-progression system. Vendors have also been adjusted to account for this, with Bright Blood now spent at Overgrowth vendors or containers and shrines, and materials used at the Cursed Outpost to modify gear.

The Buried Below update will also introduce a new Crown boss, a dragon queen named Maw, as well as cave areas for players to explore. There's a new enemy type, two new weapons, and fresh Sycom gadgets that are now more class-like with assigned Breakers, but multiple available specs that support different play styles. One of those Breakers is the new fighter Rondo, who can lean into dodging or parrying.

Another big pain point addressed in Buried Below is the "lack of proper onboarding in the game," which was something we discussed with Heart Machine earlier this year when the studio was busily correcting the game's wobbly launch. This update adds a proper tutorial which will play the first time you launch the game after the patch.

Hyper Light Breaker enraptured me at reveal and eviscerated me at launch, but it's always had a kernel of something that's kept me coming back. Here's hoping this patch makes that something shine brighter.

The new roguelike from the Dead Cells team was already great, and it's bringing me right back with a big update adding new bosses, weapons, and a lot more.

Subnautica 2 is officially on its way to early access, with developer Unknown Worlds Entertainment promising the biggest and most ambitious entry in the series yet.

In Subnautica 2's first dev vlog, design lead Anthony Gallego re-confirms that the sequel is still on track to hit early access sometime later this year. We still don't know a whole lot about it, but we have known for a while now that it'll let players dive to the sunken depths of its mysterious alien world with up to three friends in four-player co-op complete with crossplay across Xbox Series X and PC.

"The whole team believes that Subnautica 2 is shaping up to be our biggest and most ambitious Subnautica game ever, and we can't wait until you dive in," Gallego says. "We've taken everything that we've learned from our experience on the previous games, and we've poured it into Subnautica 2."

To make this game, Gallego says Unknown Worlds has retained "veterans of the Subnautica series" and also brought in "some new faces."

Gallego says the early access launch will let players test out the game while it's still in development and adding "new vehicles, craftables, biomes, and leviathans."

Probably the most genuinely newsy tidbit from the dev vlog is Gallego opening up Subnautica 2's social channels to input from players about what they want to see in the sequel.

Gallego asks all players, whether they're planning on diving into early access or not, "What do you want to see in Subnautica 2?" He points them to the game's official Discord and other social channels. And since he asked, I'll throw out my one singular request: more pet fish, please.

Correction: An earlier version of this article implied Subnautica 2 is coming to PS5. The game has only been confirmed for Xbox and PC, and the article has been updated to reflect that. We regret the error.

In the meantime, here are the best survival games to test your endurance with today.

Windblown, the latest action roguelike from Dead Cells studio Motion Twin, has just gotten a big update packed with more of everything that makes the game tick: weapons, areas, biomes, and much more. The game was already in great shape when it hit early access in October, and now it looks like I'm gonna spend a couple dozen hours tinkering around Sanctuary.

Sanctuary is the first new biome to come to Windblown since launch. It's unlocked via a new quest attached to an NPC named Carlos, who's found at the end of the factory biome. Once you reach Sanctuary, you'll find a new boss guarded by a range of new enemies.

As you explore, four fresh weapons will liven up your builds: the Sharp Sisters dual blades, the hefty Elder Sword, the laser beam Sentinel Wings, and a Fishing Rod that can yoink enemies off stages Super Smash Bros-style.

Auxiliary progression is what keeps me coming back to this style of roguelike, as was the case with Dead Cells, so while new content is always exciting, I'm especially intrigued by the new Remains System. With it, "players can retrieve the valuable Cogs, Memonites and Encrypted Memories lost in their previous Expedition, saving resources to unlock permanent upgrades to assist future runs into the Vortex," Motion Twin says. "Failure to retrieve these resources makes them lost... forever."

If you've ever reclaimed lost XP in a Soulslike, the implementation of this system will sound familiar. Start a new run and reach the point where you died, then look for an indicator that will "appear at the edge of your screen when you get close to your remains."

This is obviously a comfy change that should help speed up progression and soften the blow of death, but it's also an interesting design concession for what's still a hard-as-nails action roguelike. What is lost run over run, and how those runs are distinguished in-universe, are ever-evolving questions in the malleable roguelike space.

Windblown has had a rock-solid early access run so far, and this update looks like more of that. Between this and Hades 2, we're spoiled for premium action roguelikes these days. (I find myself coming back to Windblown more because it's less story-driven, whereas with Hades 2 my instinct is to wait for the story to fall into place.) I can't wait for both of them to hit 1.0.

"How can we do better than Dead Cells?": Motion Twin follows a roguelike icon with a co-op game under huge but "good" pressure with "millions" waiting.

As the development team behind co-op horror hit REPO plays catch-up amid runaway success rivaling its distant relative Lethal Company, they're also working on a big update that will improve the game's lobby situation, content variety, and social features.

In a recent Q&A video, developer Semiwork addresses a few community queries and pulls the curtain back just a bit on its first big update. The headliner is "long-awaited matchmaking," complete with server passwords, lists, and region pickers, as well as a kick feature for those uncooperative randos.

With new weapons and balancing, not to mention the new Overcharge mechanic, Semiwork is also promising a "more interesting late-game experience." Old maps, not just the new one, will receive these updates as well.

Games like REPO reach the heights they do not just because of their gameplay, but for how they enable funny and memorable social situations. To that end, new expressions are coming in the update, too, so you can adequately display your excitement or despair as needed.

The Q&A also confirms a few things that aren't currently in development, even if they also aren't necessarily off the table. Semiwork isn't working on additional mechanics similar to Overcharge, for example, and there's currently no plan for a traditional finale for the story. Instead, the devs want players to unpack the environmental storytelling at their own pace.

Likewise, there have been discussions about harder variants of monsters that appear in later levels, but the team isn't actively working on them. Potential collaborations – perhaps with Lethal Company, whose creator has been inspired by REPO to tinker with his own game again – are in a similar spot: Semiwork is open to game collabs, but is too swamped to pursue them right now.

Looking at the server features coming in this big update, Semiwork notes that it has considered the possibility of a 'late join' function that lets people jump into in-progress matches, but "the game is not built for this, so it would be a big rework." The current lobby setup doubles as a good hacker filter, too, which complicates things further.

If players want to make changes of their own in the form of mods, Semiwork is all for it. "We encourage mods," one dev says, but "please optimize the amount of server traffic they send to avoid any skyrocketing server costs."

Finally, a fun fact for the folks who haven't heard it: before it was named REPO (Retrieve Extract Profit Operation), the game was called Taxnight and Repossession internally at various points.

For a crash course and some useful tips, here's how to play REPO.

Predecessor Hyper Light Drifter garnered a cult classic reputation for its feeling of isolation, environmental storytelling, and tight 2D gameplay full of secrets. Which makes Hyper Light Breaker a big surprise, a 3D prequel that focuses on straight, loot-based, third-person melee action mixing melee and gunplay in the vein of Destiny and Borderlands – right the way down to embracing multiplayer. Whether solo or co-op, however, it isn't winning many fans so far in early access, and it's easy to see why.

A singular loop comprises the entire game at present. You spawn back at the Cursed Outpost, a small hub area where you can unlock nodes on your skill tree, find other players to team up with, and also fix up shops by spending in-game currency to then buy guns, blades, armor, and Holobytes – extra perks that buff stats, or add the likes rot or fire damage to enemies (you can mix and match five). All of these come with the now-standard color scheme of item rarity making it feel very much like any other loot based shooter. You then use a Telepad to travel to The Overgrowth to play the game proper.

The Overgrowth is a randomly-generated map set in the Hyper Light Drifter universe, full of remnants of civilization overgrown and overrun by mobs of monsters. You shoot them with Rails, slash them with different styles of melee weapons, or chuck grenades if you've got some in your loadout. Your task is to collect five guarded artifacts called Prisms to unlock a Crown, which is a boss fight. Beat three bosses and you take on the Abyss King. After that, you need to head to an extraction point to get the hell out of Dodge. Fail at any stage and you lose one of your four lives. Lose all four lives or beat the loop and the game generates a new world… and you start again.

Hyper Loot Breaker

And this is where the problems begin. All gear and Holobytes have pips – between one and two at present – removed on death. So, if you die twice in one run without looting more gear, you've lost all your gear. The game is incredibly challenging, especially when played solo, so the game is a frequent series of disappointments as you find something you like and lose it all too quickly. A patch on Day 3 added more default health because it was just too easy to die, but even going from 85 to 100 hit points hasn't changed things much. It remains mega punishing.

Even Hyper Light Drifter gives you the ability to refill your health bar with medkits right from the get-go, but here you'll likely play for several hours before you work out how to even acquire and unlock them. The difficulty is compounded by the game not really explaining that the Abyss King is making the world more dangerous as you play, filling up a yellow bar under the minimap, elevating the danger level over time. Linger too long in the Overgrowth and you'll end up facing miniboss after miniboss as they drop from the sky. So just staying alive increases your chance of death. Pretty harsh, especially when you don't understand why.

What the game also doesn't make clear is that you can extract at any time without penalty. The extraction point is always shown on the minimap, which is your biggest clue, but you can head there any time, fight off a few waves of enemies while you wait for it to kick in, and then emerge with refilled health at the Cursed Outpost. When you go back in, the danger meter is reset and you can start again, only with everything still collected.

Developer Heart Machine has thankfully acknowledged it hasn't done enough "onboarding" to get players up to speed, leaving many confused and bewildered. But complaints on Day 1 also mentioned dodgy performance on lower-spec machines, which has already – very impressively – been patched after those first couple of days, leaving the game running much better on an NVIDIA RTX 2070-enabled laptop. It still has chuggy moments, but overall it's much improved. It's also already playable on Steam Deck, but looks noticeably rougher and runs worse, though that's also being worked on. Other problems like mouse sensitivity have been fixed in that first patch, which is great.

Hyper Light Breaker does attempt to reveal its story without using any dialogue, not only through environmental storytelling, but through unlockable, hand-drawn pictures that tell what happened between the Breakers and the Crowns. Whether you'll care enough to unlock it all remains to be seen. There are some moments of haunting beauty, with the wind rippling through grass and light filtering through trees, but it doesn't come close to capturing that aching sense of sadness of the first game.

Right now, Hyper Light Breaker feels like a mash-up of ideas from disparate console generations, very PS2-feeling combat coming up against modern live service sensibilities, with flashes of visual stylings from everything in between. Mobs and environmental features repeat way too quickly, and the loot and perks aren't as interesting as they could be.

The important thing to remember is that this is Early Access, which means the game literally isn't finished, but based on this first week with it, there's a long way to go before Version 1.0. As it stands right now, due to difficulty, complexity, unoriginality and repetition, our advice is to wait and see how further updates fare – at this stage, it's simply not worth getting burned. Fingers crossed that changes soon.

Hyper Light Breaker was reviewed on PC and Steam Deck, with a code provided by the publisher.

Looking to play something else with friends? Take a look at our best co-op games list for some suggestions!

If you looked at The Legend of Zelda: Breath of the Wild and thought it would be cool if it was a bit more realistic and grim, then Towers of Aghasba will very likely interest you. The plot sees a traveling people called the Shimu returning to their titular homeland after some kind of cataclysm, only to find it overrun by The Withered – an evil energy that's spawning corrupted versions of the creatures that lived there.

However, rather than gaming's usual solution of killing everything that moves to restore peace to the land, there's a rather neat eco-friendly slant that sees you rebuilding damaged biomes, planting seeds, growing trees, and helping the animals that start to re-inhabit your new Eden-like gardens. Don't worry, you still get to kill scuttling monstrosities too. Win-win.

It plays out as a third-person adventure, as you control a young, mute human, handily the only one who can use and transfer the power of "Amity". Think of this like The Force from Star Wars, only without the levitation. Amity runs through everything, so if you kill an innocent creature – which is necessary sometimes for hunting – you lose Amity. Conversely, destroy a Withered Nest, feed animals, or heal injured ones, and you gain Amity. It's spent on leveling up trees, shrines, and fast travel portals, so you'll need lots of it.

Rock Aghasba

To begin with, you're not even armed, allowing you to just wander off and explore the more gentle island you start on, perhaps throwing stones at Withered spiders. Towers of Aghasba's prologue area is still impressively large and you'll soon discover some rather beautiful architectural elements, remnants of the lost civilisation that came before. The naturalistic graphics are particularly great when drawing stonework, which is lucky because there's a lot of that. The dynamic lighting moves from day to night, with gorgeous shadows and some pretty phenomenal close-up detail. It's a visual feast.

However, after the first couple of hours spent swimming in crystalline waters and climbing mountains in order to jump off and seamlessly glide down with your parachute or glider, things start to get fetch quest-y and much darker, and the experience becomes all about crafting with occasional town building as a reward. Now, it really must be stressed, the game is not really like its trailers for at least tens of hours – that's all very late game stuff they're showing off. The huge animals, glistening citadel, and flying beasts you can jump on are way, way into the game, and must be earned. And that really does mean hard work.

The crafting system feels artificially tight-fisted, almost as if it's deliberately padding out the run-time by making you scavenge for hours. If all you're walking on are broken branches, you should be able to pick up a stick, yet supposedly common items are sometimes scarce when you really need them. You end up in a vicious cycle of crafting items that you need to craft items that you need to craft items, so sourcing the materials for the bridge fix alone – a fairly early yet vital task – can take four hours. It doesn't matter how pretty it is or how organic the game world, eventually that's just not fun.

Sadly this isn't an isolated occurrence, with some ingredients even locked away behind citadel upgrades that require yet more items you haven't got easy access to, so it can get rather frustrating. And so you start to industrialize, which is surely counter-productive given the game's eco stance and, either way, all takes so much time.

Teleporting over troubled water

There are also some bugs, which is expected given the game's Early Access state as well as its ambitious complexity and scale, but we accidentally warped to the middle of the mainland before we'd built the bridge because we tested the "warp to Multiplayer Gate" option on the pause menu. Oops. It autosaved there too, but drowning off the broken bridge eventually fixed things. Aside from that, items falling on the floor instead of going into storage, traders not delivering gold nuggets you've paid for, and occasional clipping issues while climbing make for a slightly messy experience at times.

Even so, Towers of Aghasba is an impressive and involved adventure, even in this unfinished state. The ability to change and develop its vast world is enjoyable, crossplay is due to be added soon for multiplayer co-op if that's your thing (and it doesn't need to be), and the larger creatures and enemies you see as you progress do look superb. The magical realism of the environment and its bizarre cast of characters means you're never quite sure what you'll bump into next, which is great – the family "with the fingers" is a standout.

That said, considering Breath of the Wild has crafting and breakable weapons yet never feels like a chore (and arguably has more memorable sights to see too), this still has some work to do. Still, you can't play Zelda on PS5 or PC, so that will make this attractive for many. Just clear your diary if you plan to go big with this one, it's very long and doesn't give you anything for free.

Towers of Aghasba was reviewed on PC, with a code provided by the publisher.

Looking for some chiller vibes? Check out our games like Animal Crossing list for something a little similar. Or want simmier? Our guide to the best city building games has you covered!

Come to Stalker: Shadow Of Chernobyl fresh from a younger open-world series and it may appear deliberately unfinished – an early access build that never made it to version 1.0. Set in a radioactive psychic hinterland based on the 1989 Chornobyl nuclear disaster, it's a work of unvarnished post-Soviet miserabilism, a resolutely fun-averse shooter consisting of dreary geography full of loveless mercenaries, ethereal deathtraps and malfunctioning guns. While badged as a horror game, it's more depressing than horrifying. And how much more miserable it seems in the context of games such as Horizon: Forbidden West, with their bright, exotic landscapes of smooth-swallow quests and conveniences, their magnetic mission loops, crunchy ability combos and syrupy insistence that the post-apocalypse is a place of possibility. 

Stalker shares fixtures with these later games: it's both their ancestor and their baleful adversary. It has trading outposts, enemy camps, and replenishing loot caches, the rudiments of a Ubisoft worldbuilding playbook. It has maps and mini-maps, even a magic compass that points to your next objective. Its story carries you through curated mission spaces as you hunt down the mysterious Strelok, who apparently lurks somewhere at the heart of the Chornobyl exclusion zone. You'll prowl the corridors of sunken silos, eyes peeled for the glimmer of a flashlight on a wall, and on the streets of Pripyat, the wretched city of Oz at the end of this radioactive-yellow brick road. But Stalker doesn't link these elements together as fluidly and gratifyingly as the Far Cry series would. And while its landscape teems with NPCs and mutant animals, all swirling about and raiding each other at the behest of the much-trumpeted A-Life system, it doesn't offer a "living, breathing world" as much as one that refuses to die.

Back in time

BGSC Game World's command of architectural detail is magnificent, given a morbid tolerance for shades of brown. Pripyat is an astonishing creation, a place of squares and rectangles that repeat from the soiled tiles and bricks of individual doorways to the corrugated skyline. The power station beyond is a masterful exercise in finding the balance between authentic recreation and tailored playspace, with girders and wire fences along its flank that provide thrillingly sparse cover against snipers and campers. But the majority of Stalker's landmarks are low and unpromising: artless chunks of concrete and rust, many already picked clean by rival Stalkers. You learn to avoid the buildings, which are often swamped in radiation that can only be fumbled around or powered through with a generous helping of anti-rads. 

The world of Stalker never lures you towards its perimeter like the misty horizons of Fallout 3 – that vastly more optimistic and playful, even triumphal vision of nuclear disaster, which launched the year after. It mires you instead, bogging you down in the rubble and threatening you with the possibility of surprise attack from any angle. The surviving roads leave you visible for miles, and funnel you towards ambushers. The offroad stretches are awash with flickering spacetime disturbances that crush or electrify or incinerate anybody daring to travel as the crow flies. 

The countryside, meanwhile, has no glamour to it, nothing like the neo-barbarian or Gothic sublimity we're trained to expect of post-apocalyptic settings. At its least inspiring, Stalker drops you into openly video gamey jumbles of hills, crates and unconvincing trees under skies of raw sewage, fringed by impassable fences. On your first runthrough, you'll often navigate by fumbling along these boundaries, secure in the knowledge that you won't be attacked from at least one direction. The settlements, if you can call them that, offer scant intimacy. They're checkpoints and resupply areas for lone wolves, each with his (there are no women in the Zone) heart set on the rewards that await in the power plant. 

There's a certain bonhomie to your conversations with other Stalkers at campfires, for whom you can do favours such as chasing off packs of mutant boars. You can also hire some of them as allies, but these are working partnerships at best, with few named faces to give the game a sense of society. The idea of building communities in a radioactive wasteland is, after all, a farce. 

The active threats are at once murky and diffuse and grubbily mundane. There are mutant humans and animals, who are rarely scary but always a handful, especially the invisible ghouls who corner you underground, anticipating the water walkers of Amnesia: The Dark Descent. But the game's nastiest antagonists are just rival dudes in masks and fatigues – malevolent smudges on the geography, shooting you through gaps in gutted train cars and ripped piping. They flank, advance and retreat in a leaden, undramatic way. Unlike, say, the cackling Locusts of Stalker's contemporary Gears Of War, they don't feel like they exist to entertain you, and they reserve no special regard for you next to rival factions and the wildlife. The weapons, meanwhile, aren't vintage long irons or kooky atompunk improvisations. They are by and large ordinary guns of recent manufacture, rapidly aged by overuse and the Zone's supernatural weather, passed around within a small population of warring pillagers.

Novel ideas 

If you're reading this and asking why you'd play Stalker today, the answer begins with how it teaches you to think about exploration. Today's open worlds are often far larger than Stalker's cluster of open-ended levels, but they feel smaller for how they draw and direct your attention, their objectives, cues, routes and landmarks arranged so that even the longest journey becomes a series of distractions. They are designed to reel you between waypoints. Stalker makes you stop and consider the earth underfoot, and is all the vaster for it. The absence of fast travel means you'll trek back and forth through areas, experiencing their layouts from several angles, at different times of day, and with different enemy configurations, thanks to the A-Life system. The abundance of half-visible or invisible terrain hazards obliges a meandering approach, navigating by feel rather than sight: you learn to strafe around anything halfway intriguing, listening for the crackle and whine of your various detectors. 

This circuitousness breeds a forlorn quietude that couldn't be further from the hungry manner in which we move through many better-known video game environments. It's the part of Stalker that feels most like Andrei Tarkovsky's 1979 film Stalker (both film and game are based on Arkady & Boris Strugatsky's novel Roadside Picnic). The film transports you to a dreamy purgatory of localised occult hazards which feel more like subversions of dramatic structure and cinematography than minefields. Characters travel cautiously across and around the perspective, rather than proceeding toward the vanishing point, dragging out each scene and so layering up the fear and wonder of the wilderness backdrop. In Stalker this idea is handled more reductively. Its anomalies are more akin to explosive oil drums, and a source of supernatural relics that are used to enhance your stats. But weaving in among them takes the same patience, cultivating a similar appreciation. 

Though undersung in comparison to Assassin's Creed or Skyrim, Stalker's influence on other games is considerable. You see it most obviously in the parade of Stalker-likes, some developed by other eastern European teams, from The Farm 51's Chernobylite to Big Robot's The Signal From Tölva. The standout imitators are 4A's Metro games, though these are just as much a departure for how they rig Half Life-style levels to Moscow's railways. You can glimpse Stalker, too, in blighted multiplayer survival games such as Hunt: Showdown and in the battle royale genre, which tasks players with gunning to the heart of a hostile environment. Other teams have discarded Stalker's gunplay, the better to savour its geography and architecture – there are flashes of that wasteland ambience in many so-called walking sims, especially those set in abandoned spaces, such as The Town Of Light. 

But perhaps Stalker's greatest legacy is the rediscovery of the real-life Chornobyl exclusion zone as a 'dark tourism' hotspot. GSC Game World's creation isn't the first or only contributor to popular interest in the site of the 1989 reactor explosion, but Stalker veterans are prominent alongside the Fallout players and fans of the 2019 HBO TV series who have visited Chornobyl – sometimes as part of guided package tours, sometimes by sneaking under the fence and hiking through the wilds, dosimeter in hand. Prior to Russia's 2022 invasion, the Ukrainian government had planned to redevelop the zone into an official attraction. While long contained, this calamity has the potential to spread, not least thanks to unwary visitors. Russian troops kicked up radioactive dust during their assault on the facility, and according to the Ukrainian state some have taken irradiated souvenirs to flog online. 

All of which justifies Stalker's grim view of humanity. We wouldn't be surprised to meet in-game fans of the game touring the Chornobyl of GSC's forthcoming Stalker 2: Heart Of Chornobyl. This isn't really a 'post-apocalyptic' story at all. The disaster it's based on is unfinished and unfolding, in part because people refuse to let it lie. Its wasteland is a portrayal not of aftermath but of a catastrophe that threatens to expand outward into the pre-apocalyptic world, a deathly pocket universe kept active by that most fatal of compulsions: curiosity.

This feature originally appeared in Edge magazine issue 387. For more fantastic features, you can subscribe to Edge right here or pick up a single issue today. 

Baldur's Gate 3 is a phenomenon. After almost three years of community-driven in-progress development, the RPG burst from the confines of Early Access in August of this year, and has dominated the conversation ever since. With so much to offer in the way of branching narratives, whimsical characters, D&D-inspired mechanics, and much more, players far and wide have hailed the scope with which developer Larian has told its Sword Coast-set saga. 

The notion of playing and replaying games – be that via New Game Plus, or simply by starting again from scratch – is nothing new in 2023. But I'd suggest that exploring any given video game beyond a first playthrough has always felt optional, even in games where multiple playthroughs are such a big part of community discourse. I'm a big Soulsborne and Elden Ring fan, for example, but while I've always re-specced my characters in NG+ eventually, I've personally always done so after taking a break, playing other things, and then returning with renewed vigor as if approaching an entirely new game. 

Multiple playthroughs are of course optional in Baldur's Gate 3, but whereas the likes of Skyrim, Dragon Age, and anything from FromSoftware's back catalog have always had their fair share of NG+ devotees, I don't think these players have ever reflected the majority of these games' player bases. With Baldur's Gate 3, however, it feels like every player is jumping straight back in after the credits roll. And, more interesting still, this majority of players are happy and willing to do so. The question for me, then, is: why? 

Is choice everything? 

Full disclaimer to kick things off: I've loved my time with Baldur's Gate 3 so far, but I've still not finished my first playthrough, and I'm still intimidated by its scope. I've got two young children, meaning I'm often required to be extra shrewd with my time playing video games. To be fair to Baldur's Gate 3, its structure definitely allows for bite-sized in-and-out sessions, but it's equally capable of swallowing hours at a time. That's great (no complaints from me, I'm simply outlining my own circumstances), but it means I personally haven't thought much about subsequent playthroughs at all at this point.

I love that BG3 offers so much value for money to this end, but equally I'm perhaps more used to games that are able to tell their stories in their entirety in one sitting. Choice is something so tightly bound to any discussion about Baldur's Gate 3, and I think Larian has done an exceptional job of projecting the illusion of it. 

It's no coincidence, for example, that when you've gained the ability to talk to animals, the game puts loads of cool animals with interesting pre-loaded dialogue options in your path. If you choose to cast 'Speak With Animals' when down among the sewer rats, on the other hand, the conversation is far less exciting. The game is constantly performing this meticulous sleight-of-hand – even in what I've played so far – and is always aware of what's likely to be just over the horizon for you, and what tools you have to make the most out of it.

Is that enough to justify such a prominent, perceivable shift in player expectations regarding instant-multiple playthroughs, in order to uncover new experiences, new perspectives, and new story threads? I mean, clearly it is because we wouldn't be having this discussion if it wasn't. But, even with all of the above, I'm still unsure that I fully understand why players are jumping straight back in en masse unlike any other game in recent memory. Which is exactly why I now defer to my Baldur's Gate 3-playing colleagues who are now several runs deep in the Sword Coast each.

Yes, choice is everything

Baldur's Gate 3 is an experience that demands to be replayed by virtue of just how much choice it offers up. There are so many options in the character creator alone that feed into how the world reacts to you and how you can interact with it. Classes, for example, not only affect your skills in combat, but also introduce unique dialogue options and actions. So just from your class pick, you'll have conversations or instances that are unique to your abilities. 

Seeing how my first run as a bard presented me with unique options from the get-go already had my mind reeling at what might be on offer if I choose to be something different the next time around. And that's the crucial point: there are so many possibilities when it comes to what character you play that there's no way to experience and do everything in The Sword Coast in a single run.

Along with different races and backgrounds to choose from as a customizable character, the option to play as one of the premade Origin party members, or The Dark Urge, adds yet more possibilities to the fold. Essentially, you can experience the same story multiple times, but it will never be exactly the same because of how tailored it is to the different choices you make. There's so much scope to discover something new that you can't help but be compelled to want to play it over and over again. 

Other RPGs certainly have a replayability factor, but I've never started planning out subsequent runs as early on as I did in Baldur's Gate 3. It's D&D-infused DNA feels like it's built to be revisited time and again, since it's so densely packed with things that only a small margin might see depending on various factors and choices. And not unlike the way players were still discovering neat tricks in Legend of Zelda Breath of the Wild years on, the community is constantly finding new interactions or instances in the world that make you want to dive back in and see what you might have missed. Perhaps this also contributes to why so many want to return over and over. 

Of course, the downside to so much tailorability and an impressive amount of content to uncover is that you're looking at quite the time sink if you really do want to try out all possible avenues. Personally, I find it hard to tear myself away because there are so many things I want to try out in The Sword Coast. There's almost too much to explore. And you can't help but wonder what the future holds for RPGs going forward after this. I don't expect every single one will follow Baldur's Gate 3's lead, or be able to emulate the same kind of hold it has on players right now, but Larian's RPG is certainly going to be one we'll be talking about for a long time to come.  

Replayability is multi-faceted 

Replayability in Baldur's Gate 3, in my mind, boils down to three things: community, reach, and financial viability. Not only is BG3 one of the most in-depth RPGs ever made, it's also the definitive Dungeons & Dragons video game, a high-stakes fantasy adventure, and many have joked that it could almost count as a dating sim. The breadth of its appeal is so wide that it changes how and why we play the game – and how many times we might do so.

One of the first things I see people ask on Reddit and Twitter is whether Baldur's Gate 3 is worth the hefty US$60 price tag. The answers are (almost) all a resounding "yes," by the sheer principle that you're getting hundreds of hours of content for the price of a handful. The main campaign alone takes about 75 hours, and that's if you're trimming the fat. Some players might try to see every inch and side quest in one single 500-hour playthrough, while others lean into the roleplaying aspect and see where their character leads them. The feeling of never quite being "finished" with the game is what drives many to replay it, and with video games being on the pricier side these days, BG3 proves incredible value for money.

The thriving online community is another catalytic force in its replayability, with members inspiring one another's future playthroughs by feeding in their own experiences. Reddit is full of class build suggestions, as well as hilariously circumstantial ways to cheese your way through boss battles. BG3 champions ingenuity by letting you do pretty much anything, dice rolls permitting, and that sense of untethered potential is what makes D&D such a highly-replayable format to work with.

The cast itself plays a unique role in sustaining that community. Actors Neil Newbon, Devora Wilde, and Jennifer English stream their Baldur's Gate sessions live on Twitch, meaning fans can interact with the game and its world without even playing it. The sheer popularity of the BG3 cast playing D&D together is a testament to how important this interpersonal connection is, creating not just a community but a loyal fanbase that will keep coming back.

Baldur's Gate 3 doesn't need NG+ to keep players interested – its format and community does that by itself. But what does this mean for the future of the genre? Personally, I don't want or need to see any more RPGs like Baldur's Gate 3, at least not for the sake of it. It's unfair to expect most studios would be able to pour in the necessary time, effort, and personal funds that Larian did in order to pull it off just once. Even if it were possible, the bar has now been set staggeringly high. I know I have plenty more to explore in BG3 even after 300 hours – and frankly, I'm not sure I'd have the bandwidth to do this with another game anytime soon.

Here are some of the best RPGs that'll swallow your free time

Roguelike platformer 30XX finally had its 1.0 release earlier this week, after two and a half years in early access, and it's one of the best Mega Man experiences you can play that isn't actually from Capcom's iconic series.

30XX is a sequel to 2016's 20XX, and both games are heavily inspired by the Mega Man games. 30XX has two playable characters to choose from, Ace and Nina, and they each have their own gameplay style.

30XX retains the twist which 20XX added to the Mega Man formula - procedurally generated levels and permadeath, with upgrades that carry over onto your next run. However, 30XX has a new mode if you'd like a more classic Mega Man experience, with no permadeath and a fixed map.

20XX was well-received as a tribute to Mega Man by fans, and 30XX is no exception. Plenty of the Steam reviews (which are 92% positive at time of writing) praise 30XX for capturing the spirit of Mega Man X and Mega Man Zero.

30XX is available on Steam right now, and it should be out on Switch soon.

Here's our list of upcoming indie games you should be looking out for.

Life by You, an upcoming life sim which we once hailed as the pro-nudity competitor to The Sims 4, has had its early access launch delayed until March 5, 2024 - six months later than its original release date.

"On behalf of the team here at Paradox Tectonic, I want to express our gratitude for all of your comments and feedback over the past few months. It's really meant the world for us," said studio general manager Rod Humble in a video update. "We love making this game. We love this community, and we're very, very grateful that we are in the position to take extra time to polish and provide a smoother experience for you."

Humble explained that, in the four months since the game was announced, the developers have received feedback from both regular folks watching trailers and whatnot, as well as modding partners with access to early builds. Paradox is moving the release date out a few months to implement changes based on this feedback.

Among those changes are visual improvements, including enhancements to animations, character models, and assets, as well as new gameplay features, a UI style overhaul, bug fixes, and new mod tools. There will also be Italian and Portuguese language options in addition to French, German, English, and Spanish. 

As a 'thank you' to people who pre-ordered the game, Paradox is giving away a "Night Club Vibe Pack," which is a bundle that comes with a bunch of furniture that, you guessed it, belongs in a night club.

Paradox is releasing a blog with further details on the delay and the new content sometime this week.

In the meantime, here are some more games like The Sims to chill out to.

When studios make deals with Microsoft to bring their games to Xbox Game Pass, it also benefits fans on PlayStation consoles, according to Michael Schade, CEO and co-founder of Rockfish Games.

Schade makes the comment in an interview with YouTube channel Xbox Expansion Pass to discuss Everspace 2, developed and published by Rockfish Games, ahead of its release on console.

Everspace 2 was in Steam early access from 2021 until April 2023 when it fully released on PC. In the meantime, the studio has been working on console versions of the game and Schade says the deal with Xbox Game Pass added "nine to twelve months of more production time".

"We could have [made Everspace 2 without a deal with Xbox Game Pass] but it would have been a smaller game," he says, explaining that the extra funding provided by the Game Pass deal allowed the team to add more content to Everspace 2 and polish the game.

This, in turn, benefits players who'll be getting the game on PS5, Schade says. "It's maximum flexibility, extra funding, you just make a better game, and everybody's happy," he states, "even the PlayStation fans get a better game on PS5 because of the deal with Game Pass."

Schade is also asked whether putting Everspace 2 on PC Game Pass hurt Steam sales of the game. "To be frank, I couldn't see any dip," he says, confirming that Steam figures weren't affected by PC Game Pass. He calls the deal with Game Pass "one of the best, if not the best" in the industry, as it allowed Rockfish to remain independent whilst getting the studio more visibility and extra funding.

So no, Game Pass doesn't cannibalise sales and developers aren't going to put worse versions of their game on PS5 compared to Xbox Series X|S. In the case of Everspace 2, at least.

Here's the best space games which let you explore the unknown that you can currently play.  

If Ghost of Tsushima was a turn-based roguelike with card battling elements, one can only imagine it would look something like Shogun Showdown, which just launched in Steam Early Access.

Admittedly, the only thing about Shogun Showdown resembling Ghost of Tsushima is the feudal Japan setting. Sucker Punch's take is a modern touchstone for games, and that setting is beautifully realized here with SNES-style pixel art and dynamic lighting. Shogun Showdown's gameplay shares DNA with some of the most popular turn-based strategy games and roguelikes from recent years, specifically Into the Breach, Darkest Dungeon, Crypt of the Necrodancer, and Slay the Spire.

The combat looks like an amalgam of the above listed influences, featuring strategic, timing-based movement, upgradable "tiles" that you can string together for punishing combos, and deckbuilding elements you can use to gain new skills. Judging from the 94% positive reviews on Steam, the system is easy to pick up but challenging to master.

A large share of the reviews describe the combat as intuitive and rewarding, with one describing it as "a dance [where] you weave your way through and around the web of enemy attacks, finding the right time to prepare and the right time to strike." In an abstract way, you could probably say the same of Ghost of Tsushima's stance-based sword fights. 

As mentioned earlier, Shogun Showdown just launched in Early Access with three playable characters, 28 attack tiles, 17 skills, 24 quests, and nine combat locations - which sounds like a reasonable amount of content for the $10 asking price, especially considering it's yet to get a full launch which will presumably include even more. There's also a free demo you can download if you want to give it a try before shelling out for the full – well, Early Access – game.

For more, here's our guide to upcoming indie games of 2023 and beyond.

Another year, another Madden to invest hundreds of hours into. Madden NFL 24 was officially revealed by EA in June 2023 with Buffalo Bills quarterback Josh Allen confirmed as the cover athlete the very same day. Better yet, pre-orders are now live meaning you can secure a copy in time for its release date.

Madden NFL 24 will be available in three different versions: Standard, Deluxe and EA Play Pro. It will also be available across PlayStation 5, Xbox Series X/S, PlayStation 4, Xbox One and PC, so there's a lot to break down here. Additionally, each version has different bonuses with Deluxe and EA Play Pro even giving you early access to the game.

The good news is that anyone who picks up the game on a last-gen console – PS4 or Xbox One – will be able to upgrade to next-gen at no extra cost. Considering that the price of Madden NFL 24 is now $69.99/£59.99 across all platforms for the standard version, this is a little something. Pre-orders for Madden NFL 24 can be found at Amazon US now if you are after a quick reference.

For everything else, we are rounding up all the latest Madden NFL 24 pre-order deals that the web has to offer below. These will be regularly updated right up until its August 18th launch date, so keep checking back in for the best offers.  

• Madden NFL 24 Standard Edition - $69.99 / £59.99
• Madden NFL 24 Deluxe Edition - $99.99 / £89.99
• Madden NFL 24 EA Play - $14.99/£14.99 monthly or $99.99/£89.99 annual 

Where to pre-order Madden NFL

Where to pre-order Madden NFL 24 in the US

Where to pre-order Madden NFL 24 in the UK

Where to pre-order Madden NFL 24 Deluxe Edition

Where to pre-order Madden NFL 24 Deluxe Edition in the US

Where to pre-order Madden NFL 24 Deluxe Edition in the UK

How to get Madden NFL 24 via EA Play Pro

An EA Play Pro membership (via the EA app) gives you unlimited access to EA titles as soon as they release with lots of extra benefits and rewards for subscribing. There is also a library of deluxe edition games ready for playing, the chance to try out selected new-release games before launch for up to 10 hours of playtime which will then carry over if you purchase the game, alongside a 10% member discount on EA digital purchases. 

The membership cost for EA Play Pro is $14.99/£14.99 a month or $99.99/£89.99 a year. Anyone that is signed up will be able to access Madden NFL 24 Deluxe Edition on launch day. 

Madden NFL 24 Official Reveal Trailer

Today's best gaming deals

Tempted to make the upgrade to next-gen in time for Madden NFL 24? Here's where to find the best PS5 price and bundles as well as the latest Xbox Series X restock updates, so you can start playing games in no time. Alternatively, we've also rounded up the best cheap Nintendo Switch bundle deals that the web has to offer.

Less than a week since launch, I've seen Zelda: Tears of the Kingdom builds I could never have imagined; from functional aircraft to space rockets to Korok torture devices to towering mechs (only some of which are equipped with giant, flaming genitals). I'm yet to jump back into Hyrule myself, and part of my reasoning for that is something bitter experience has taught me - that I'll never replicate anything half so impressive or imaginative as what I've seen the community create.

Many years ago, I lost countless hours to the early access version of Besiege. A physics-based puzzle game, Besiege gave you a collection of parts that looked like they might have been at home in the workshop of the 14th-century's most unhinged siege engine creator, and gave you a series of tasks to complete; destroy a castle, kill some soldiers, hit this target.

I had fun committing bizarre war crimes against the unfortunate cannon fodder pitted against me for quite some time. Two things eventually put a damper on that fun, however; the first was an update that introduced aerial siege engines, something I could never wrap my head around. Firmly grounded, I also struggled as the complexity of my flatmate's builds far outstripped my own. Confronted by my own incompetence, I turned to the Besiege subreddit for inspiration, but was met by people who had built working in-game Transformers, or an infamous sheep-destroying machine. Humbled and unable to progress, I moved on to something new.

Sheep Squasher 2.0 from r/Besiege

A few years later, I turned to Scrap Mechanic. At the height of pandemic lockdowns, the crafting game had added a survival mode, in which you could build your own creations to grow food and gather resources. I spent hours tinkering with a little car that eventually functioned as a successful transporter for some of the wooden logs required for crafting other materials. In the same amount of time, one of my friends, playing on the same server, crafted a towering juggernaut of a creation - an industrial beast capable of tackling pretty much anything the game could throw at us. Once again, I turned to the subreddit, and found machines capable of reducing an entire tree to matchsticks in a matter of seconds, or creating an entire farm-to-table ensemble with the touch of a single button.

Tears of the creator

This time though, the initial step on my journey to creative disappointment has been skipped over. Normally I might spend hours trying and failing to create my own simple contraption before being confronted with the towering genius of the rest of the community. With Tears of the Kingdom, however, I've had no such luck. The creative force of an entire community has been truly unleashed, poured across social media in a way that ensures I know exactly what can be achieved, all while knowing from my time with Besiege and Scrap Mechanic that I'll probably never manage it myself.

The Tears of the Kingdom FOMO is a major factor, and it won't be long before I succumb to the constant barrage of builds on Reddit and Twitter and attempt to make my own. But it's not often that you approach a game knowing outright that you'll probably never be able to make the best of it. While Besiege and Scrap Mechanic might have been significant knocks to my ego, at least they should help soften the blow when it comes to Tears of the Kingdom. 

Check out our Zelda: Tears of the Kingdom review for more about the building system I'll never master.

Mortal Kombat 1 is finally here. After a long four year wait, developer NetherRealm has unleashed one of the best fighting games of the modern era. While it's easy to get lost in all the blood and guts strewn across its stages, beneath the gore is an exceptional, confident fighting game that shouldn't be ignored. 

Below you'll find everything you need to know about Mortal Kombat 1. Including details on the Mortal Kombat 1 release date, full character roster, platform availability, and the DLC that we expect to see land in the future. 

MK 1 Review

Mortal Kombat 1 release date

The Mortal Kombat 1 is out now. The game released on September 19, 2023 following a period of Mortal Kombat 1 early access which began on September 14 for players who purchased the Premium or Kollector's Edition.

Mortal Kombat 1 platforms

Mortal Kombat 1 is available on PC, PS5, Xbox Series X, and Nintendo Switch, with a Mortal Kombat 1 PS4 release that's sadly absent. NetherRealm has confirmed that it is handling the new-gen versions of the game in-house, while it will be collaborating with external developers for the other editions. Shiver Entertainment and Saber Interactive are collaborating with the Mortal Kombat creators on the Switch version, while QLOC is handling the Epic Games Store and Steam versions of the game. 

Mortal Kombat 1 price and editions

There are three Mortal Kombat 1 editions available, some of which will allow access to Shang Tsung as an in-game playable character. The Mortal Kombat 1 price and editions are as follows: 

• Mortal Kombat 1 Standard Edition ($69.99) pre-order will give you access to the August beta and make Shang Tsung a part of the in-game roster. 
• Mortal Kombat 1 Premium Edition ($109.99) contains everything in the Standard Edition, and will give you early access to the entire game beginning September 14. The Premium Edition also contains 1,250 Dragon Krystals and the Kombat Pack, which will give you a Johnny Cage skin modeled on Jean-Claude Van Damme and eventual early access to six new playable characters and five new Kameo Fighters. 
• Mortal Kombat 1 Kollector's Edition ($249.99) is only available on PS5 and Xbox Series X. The limited physical collection includes everything available in the Premium Edition, along with a 16.5-inch Liu Kang sculpture, a unique Liu Kang in-game character skin, three exclusive art prints, a steel case, and an additional 1,450 Dragon Krystals. 

Mortal Kombat 1 roster

NetherRealm has revealed the Mortal Kombat 1 characters list, although this will expand over time through DLC. Below you'll find the full MK1 roster that is available in the game at launch:

• Ashrah
• Baraka
• Ermac (Kombat Pack 1)
• General Shao
• Geras
• Homelander (Kombat Pack 1, available 2024)
• Havik
• Johnny Cage
• Kenshi
• Kitana
• Kung Lao
• Li Mei
• Liu Kang
• Mileena
• Nitara
• Omni-Man (Kombat Pack 1)
• Peacemaker (Kombat Pack 1)
• Quan Chi (Kombat Pack 1)
• Raiden
• Rain
• Reptile
• Scorpion
• Shang Tsung (pre-order exclusive)
• Sindel
• Smoke
• Sub-Zero
• Tanya
• Takeda Takahashi (Kombat Pack 1)

Mortal Kombat 1 Kameo Fighter System

NetherRealm is introducing a brand new way to play Mortal Kombat, through the introduction of the Kameo Fighter system. This is designed to bring "a unique roster of partner characters into the mix," as series creator Ed Boon explains it. What this essentially means is that you'll be able to team characters from the main roster up with a selection from a special secondary roster – based on a klassic versions of the characters pulled from over 30 years of Mortal Kombat history – and call them into battles to fight along side you.

You could team up two Sub Zero variants, or Scorpion with Goro (whatever combination you want), and then make use of special offensive and support-based moves. You'll use one button actions to activate attacks from your Kameo fighter, all of which can be used pretty much anytime you want to create new and unique combos – including devastating Fatal Blows, brutal Fatalities, and defensive Breakers. Oh, and don't worry about imbalance or attack spam, there's a meter governing usage of Kameo fighters. 

Mortal Kombat 1 Kameo Fighters roster 

• Cyrax
• Darrius
• Frost
• Ferra (Kombat Pack 1)
• Goro
• Khameleon (Kombat Pack 1)
• Johnny Cage (Kombat Pack 1)
• Jackson "Jax" Briggs
• Kano
• Kung Lao
• Motaro
• Mavado (Kombat Pack 1)
• Sareena
• Sektor
• Scorpion
• Shujinko
• Sonya Blade
• Stryker
• Sub-Zero
• Tremor (Kombat Pack 1)

Mortal Kombat 1 DLC

NetherRealm is yet to detail the shape of Mortal Kombat 1 DLC, although it has been confirmed that Kombat Packs will be launching in the future. Included in the Premium and Kollector's Edition versions of the game is early access to six new playable characters and five new Kameo Fighters, so expect this to be just the beginning. This DLC rollout follows a similar trajectory to MK1's 2019 predecessor, with Mortal Kombat 11 gaining six additional characters as part of the first Kombat Pack release shortly after launch, which was later followed with the Aftermath story expansion and a second Kombat Pack. 

Mortal Kombat 1 system requirements

NetherRealm has confirmed that Mortal Kombat 1 system requirements, and you might want to spend the next couple of months improving your rig to get the most out of this fighting game. Particular attention will need to be paid to your hard-drive, as it would appear that the Mortal Kombat 1 install size runs 100GB. 

Minimum specs: 

• OS: Windows 10 64-bit
• Processor: Intel Core i5-6600 / AMD Ryzen 3 3100 or Ryzen 5 2600
• Memory: 8 GB RAM
• Graphics: Nvidia GeForce GTX 980 / AMD Radeon RX 470 / Intel Arc A750
• DirectX: Version 12
• Storage: 100 GB available space

Recommended specs: 

• OS: Windows 10 / Windows 11 64-bit
• Processor: Intel Core i5-8400 / AMD Ryzen 5 3600X
• Memory: 8 GB RAM
• Graphics: Nvidia GeForce GTX 1080 Ti / AMD Radeon RX 5700 XT / Intel Arc A770
• DirectX: Version 12
• Storage: 100 GB available space

Five years since its servers were taken offline, the free-to-play mech FPS series Hawken is back with a new entry, but it's getting a lot of hate for adding what seems like a fairly predatory pay-to-win cash shop.

That's far from the only complaint about Hawken Reborn I'm hearing while scanning the web for reviews. Both critics and Steam users seem generally unpleased with the revival, with some of the most frequent complaints being the myriad bugs and performance issues, repetitive gameplay, and of course, that darned cash shop.

People hate cash shops, and for good reason. At best, they're places where you can go to spend real-life money on useless cosmetics, and at worst, and what appears to be the case with Hawken Reborn, they're designed to encourage you to get through the game simply by throwing your wallet at it. Reviewers also note that the price of a single bundle of premium currency is just under what it costs to buy a mech, meaning you would need to buy two bundles and then have a bunch left over that you can only use to buy more stuff.

As it stands, of the 995 reviews on Steam, a whopping 777 are negative. "They killed hawken and then they use its corpse to make a new game, which really isnt hawken," reads one particularly scathing comment.

Another big problem folks seem to be having with Hawken Reborn is that, at least in its current state in Early Access, it's a single-player PvE game only, whereas the series is really better known for PvP. That fact compounds the microtransaction issue, as cash shops and microtransactions are usually only found in multiplayer games. As PC Gamer points out, the cash shop was up and running before developer and publisher 505 Games even managed to add customizable controls, which is undoubtedly not a good look.

"This is Hawken in mech models and name only," reads another negative Steam review. "The art style is completely different (and worse), the gunplay and movement is completely different (and worse), and it's already planning to lean extremely hard on monetization! It's shallower than a kiddie pool in the middle of the desert." Oof.

To be completely fair, Hawken Reborn is still an Early Access title, and one fresh out of the oven at that. There's still plenty of time before launch to sort out the cash shop and address other community feedback, but this certainly makes for a rough start for the mech series' long-awaited return.

Looking for something good to play? Don't miss our roundup of the best games of 2023 so far.

An incredible mod for CS:GO has turned Steam's biggest game into a roguelike, but it's only 80% done and unlikely to ever be finished due to the impending changes coming with Counter-Strike 2.

As the name implies, Rogue adds a roguelike - or roguelite, if you're pedantic - game mode to Counter-Strike: Global Offensive. Developer Orel says it's an early access version, but it's already extremely impressive, with procedurally generated levels, three-player co-op, a card-based ability system, unique enemy types, and eight playable characters.

Orel published a video earlier this month breaking down the three years of development that went into the Rogue mod, and more recently worked with content creator 3kliksphilip to create an English version of the video translated from the original Russian, which you can see below.

The video is full of anecdotes about clever development tricks used to get the very non-standard mode up and running in CS:GO. For example, since this is a roguelike with upgradable stats, weapon damage has to be modified from the straight values weapons have in the normal game. That initially seemed impossible because weapons like sniper rifles can just one-shot kill a player with a headshot. The solution? Set the player's health value above 32,769, which for whatever reason resets the HP counter to display as 1, and gives the headroom for advanced damage calculations.

Orel says that Counter-Strike 2 "acts as this project's main villain." He says "the fact is that some features of the Source engine, on which key mechanics of this game mode are based, simply do not work in Source 2." That includes essential development tricks like the aforementioned HP calculation. CS2 also switches the scripting language from Squirrel to Lua - a massive obstacle to porting a mod containing 50,000 lines of code.

With all that in mind, Orel has launched the mod at only 80% completion in order to get it into players' hands before CS2 kills the project entirely. He concludes the video by asking Valve to consider supporting the old Source engine features that allowed this mod to exist, but isn't particularly hopeful about the possibility. "I am distraught that this idea, which has been my dream for three years, will now most likely sink into oblivion."

The best roguelikes and best FPS games should get together more often.

Blizzard has revealed a list of changes coming to Diablo 4 ahead of launch, following feedback from its two recent beta weekends.

The Diablo 4 devs have been clear that the two betas were primarily designed to gather feedback from players about what could be changed to make for a better experience overall. And, well, it sounds like players had plenty to say, as Blizzard's list of changes is fairly extensive and includes major updates to each of the classes, a bunch of dungeons, encounters, the UI, and more.

"After the Early Access and Open Beta weekends concluded, the development team read through all your feedback and reviewed gameplay data," reads an update on Blizzard's website. "Using this information, we have made a variety of fixes and updates to various systems in Diablo 4, all of which will be present in the version of the game that launches on June 6."

Blizzard says a lot of feedback around the dungeons suggested there was too much backtracking required, and so the following dungeons have been tweaked to reduce this burden:

• Caldera Gate
• Defiled Catacombs
• Derelict Lodge
• Forbidden City
• Hoarfrost Demise
• Immortal Emanation
• Kor Dragan Barracks
• Maulwood
• Rimescar Caverns

Dungeons have also been adjusted so that events are more common – the odds of one have been boosted from 10% to 60% – and there are a number of gameplay updates designed to "streamline and vary the experience of completing objectives."

Classes are getting balanced ahead of launch, too. "Many" Legendary powers have been made more effective, all classes are confirmed to "have access to sufficient skills that remove control impairing effects," and it'll take twice as long for effects like Stun and Freeze to make Elite Monsters Unstoppable.

Barbarians are decidedly less barbaric, with a 10% nerf to passive damage and another nerf to some damage reduction effects. The Whirlwind skill now deals more damage and takes more Fury, and the Double Swing skill enhancement refunds its full Fury cost when used on stunned or knocked down enemies.

Druids have had their companions' skill damage "heavily increased," and "all Ultimate skills" are getting reduced cooldowns. Furthermore, "usability improvements have been made to Maul and Pulverize," while "using a non-shapeshifting skill will now transform a Druid back into their human form."

The Necromancer class has been largely nerfed, as summoned minions will now die more easily and Corpse Explosion has had its damage reduced. However, "many" Book of the Dead bonuses have been buffed, and for the sake of your eyeballs, the brightness of the Skeletal Warriors and Mages has been reduced.

Rogues rejoice, as the post-beta update spells largely good news for you sneaky stabbers. Upgrades for Subterfuge Skills have had their bonuses increased, as have several passives. The single Rogue nerf is to Imbuement Skills, all of which now have bigger cooldowns.

Updates to the Sorcerer class are a bit of a mixed bag. Charged Bolt deals more damage and takes less mana, but Chain Lightning's damage has been reduced, as has its effectiveness against bosses. Incinerate's Enchantment bonus has had its cooldown reduced, while Firewalls have been tweaked to spawn underneath enemies more frequently. Meanwhile, Meteor's Enchantment bonus is more likely to score a Lucky Hit.

This pre-launch update is wide-ranging and impactful, with a laundry list of additional changes to UI, encounters, and quality of life. However, most of these changes are bug fixes and have less to do with actual gameplay feedback. Some exceptions include changes to Cellars to increase the chance to earn a chest upon completion.

Interestingly, the Butcher boss "has been re-evaluated for difficulty" and will be even harder to beat in World Tiers 3 and 4. Likewise, bosses including T'chort, Malnok, and Vhenard have had changes to attacks and fight mechanics, although it's not clear if those changes will lead to easier or tougher battles.

Blizzard also announced a new developer livestream that'll "uncover details about Diablo IV’s endgame offerings and elaborate on the post-Open-Beta changes made to Classes and dungeons." That's coming on Thursday, April 20 at 11am PDT / 2pm EDT on Twitch and YouTube.

One thing we know won't change before launch are Diablo 4's "expensive" respec costs.

Alas, Life by You has indeed been canceled. Paradox announced on June 17 that the would-be Sims 4 rival is officially no longer in development, sad news for all who had been waiting patiently through a litany of delays over the past 12 months. The game had been deleyed again just weeks before its cancelation, but despite all of the warning signs that all was not well at Paradox Tectonic, it's still a bitter pill to swallow.

Wondering what went wrong? Here's everything we know about Life by You's unfortunate cancelation, from the official announcement to its fraught history of postponements.

Life by You delays

Before its cancelation, Life By You had been delayed three times. The last announcement was made on the publisher's website by Paradox Interactive CEO Mattias Lilja, who expressed thanks for the continued support from the community. "This was not an easy decision, especially since we understand the anticipation and excitement that many players have for the game. However, we believe that additional development time is needed," Lilja wrote.

Unlike with past delays, a new Life By You target release window was not  given by Paradox at this time. "While we would have preferred to commit to a new release window, we believe it is more prudent to hold off while we plan ahead, rather than committing to a new date that we cannot be certain to meet."

This delay came off the back of one earlier this year that saw Life by You pushed from a March 5 to June 4 release date. The game was intended to launch into Early Access last year on September 12, 2023, but it was delayed so that the development team could focus on new features and visual improvements.

Life by You trailer  

The first Life by You announcement trailer (which you can watch above) that dropped during the showcase gave us our first proper look at the open-world setting and how we can control anyone at any time. It also shows off some of the interactions controllable humans can have along with insight into customization, character creation, and much more. A lot of the features do share similarities with The Sims; the more open feel and use of vehicles to get around (hello skateboards!) brings to mind The Sims 3. 

Dark and Darker has been removed from Steam.

Visit the game's Steam storefront – or follow the link from developer Ironmace's website – and you'll be redirected to Steam's front page, intimating that all traces of the game have been scrubbed from Steam. At the time of writing, however, Ironmace's website is still live.

According to the game's Reddit community, it started off with movies and trailers being pulled, then screenshots, categories, online PvP, online co-op, early access, and then finally, the legal small print and store description. The last to go was the store name, apparently.

Rumor has it, the team was allegedly served with a cease and desist request from publisher Nexon, which alleges that some of Dark and Darker's development code – which was created by members of Ironmace's team whilst they still worked at the publisher – originates from Nexon's own dungeon crawler, codenamed P3.

"To all our fans, we have recently been served a cease and desist letter and DMCA takedown by Nexon regarding Dark and Darker based on distorted claims," Ironmace explained in a statement posted to the game's Discord community (via Reddit). 

Dark and Darker has been removed from Steam from r/Games

"We are currently working with our legal team to remedy this issue in the best manner possible. Due to the sensitive legal nature of this issue we must be careful with our statements so as to not jeopardize our position. 

"We ask for your understanding as we work to get the game back up as quickly as possible. Please know that we will do all that is possible for our fans. Thanks!"

The game's removal from Steam comes just weeks after we learned that Dark and Darker devs could face legal action following allegations that they stole assets from their previous employer, Nexon. 

The developer was forced to reassure fans via Discord that whilst the police did pay the studio a visit, "it was a quick process, and nothing was found", adding that the visit would have "no delay in development, and there is nothing to worry about".

We also recently learned that a Dark and Darker player had reportedly been asked to join a cheat server via Discord which offers a cheat package for the game in exchange for $10 in real-world currency. According to the message, the package will give the player Chams, Noclip cheats, and the ability to disconnect other players.

Thinking about getting started with the fantasy FPS if/when it returns? Take a look at our Dark and Darker class guide. 

Planet survival and settlement sim Stranded: Alien Dawn now has a full release date of April 25, 2023.

Having taken its first strides into Steam's Early Access initiative back on October 12, 2022, Haemimont Games and Frontier Foundry's interstellar colony builder has spent the last several months fine-tuning its systems and mechanics while gearing up for launch. As revealed at the Future Games Show Spring Showcase Powered by the Turtle Beach Stealth Pro, Stranded: Alien Dawn is also now available for pre-order for PS5, PS4, Xbox Series X and S, and Xbox One.

• Play Stranded: Alien Dawn on Steam now

After going hands-on with an early build last year, I described Stranded: Alien Dawn as a survival sim rooted in spectacular storytelling – wherein my entire crew was ravaged by giant bugs and bloodthirsty dinosaurs while simultaneously wrestling with starvation, malnutrition and deteriorating mental health. 

Needless to say, it didn't end well for me and my poor space-flung civilians, but I was nevertheless impressed by the game's narrative scope and impressive suite of survival sim features that give you the tools to either thrive on foreign soil, or, you know, die a horrible and cruel death. Good luck either way!

If you fancy putting your survival skills to the test in a galaxy far, far away, you can do so when Stranded: Alien Dawn launches in full on April 25, 2023. More information lives on the game's Steam page, where its Early Access iteration on PC currently boasts 'Very Positive' reviews; and its official website, where you can pre-order on console.   

If you’re looking for more excellent games from today's Future Games Show, have a look at our official Steam page.

Fast-paced cooperative action roguelite Ember Knights confirmed its full release window during the Future Games Show Spring Showcase Powered by the Turtle Beach Stealth Pro.

In a new trailer, developer Doom Turtle and publisher Twin Sails Interactive confirmed that a full 1.0 release is on its way this summer, and while we don't yet have a fully-confirmed release date that does mean that the acclaimed title should be ending its early access journey in the next few months.

• Play Ember Knights on Steam now

One to four players can take on the role of the titular Ember Knights in their attempt to save the world from the mad sorcerer Praxis. Wielding a variety of spells and abilities, you can combo your powers together over the course of each run - or combine your skills with those of your co-op partners to create powerful synergies between each playstyle.

As you cut your way through Praxis' minions in your attempt to protect the Ember Tree, you'll face increasingly powerful enemies, leading up to epic bosses. For even more replay value, those bosses can be 'corrupted', with new forms trying even harder to hinder your progress.

Launched into early access last year, Ember Knights boasts 'Overwhelmingly Positive' reviews on Steam, and even as it approaches its full launch is still receiving updates, with last month's aptly-named February update bringing in a handful of new and improved relics to battle with. Doom Turtle says it's committed to working alongside the community to bring player feedback into the game, helping shape it ahead of its full release. 

If you’re looking for more excellent games from today's Future Games Show, have a look at our official Steam page.

Knowing how to download the Diablo 4 beta is essential if you want a hands-on preview of this much-anticipated hack and slasher, as well as earning some rewards that will carry over to the full game of Diablo 4 if you progress far enough. If you have any concerns about how to access the Diablo 4 beta and whether you qualify to take part then don't worry about it, because the Open Beta weekend is available to everyone with no restrictions for trying it out. Now that the Diablo 4 beta preload times have been reached, you're able to install it to be prepped and ready for launch, so if you have any questions regarding the process then here's everything you need to know about how to download the Diablo 4 beta on PC, PlayStation, and Xbox.

How to download the Diablo 4 beta on PC

If you qualified for the Early Access beta, then you'll have already been sent instructions for how to download the Diablo 4 beta on PC along with your access code. However, if you're looking for the Open Beta then this is where you get it:

• Open your Battle.net client
• Find Diablo 4 at the top of the list on the All Games page
• Open the Diablo 4 Game Page
• Open the 'Game Version' dropdown and select 'Diablo 4 - Beta'
• Click the blue Install button

You can then click Play to launch the Diablo 4 beta once it's available. Note that if you've already installed the Early Access beta then you can also use that for the Open Beta, so no further download is required. Don't forget that Diablo 4 crossplay is available during the beta as well as in the full game, so you can team up with any console owning friends.

How to download the Diablo 4 beta on PlayStation and Xbox

As with PC, if you were part of the Early Access beta then you'll already have received a code to redeem on your console store, along with instructions for how to download the Diablo 4 beta on PlayStation or Xbox. If you don't have that access, then here's how to find the Open Beta:

• Open the PlayStation or Xbox Store
• Search for 'Diablo 4 Open Beta'
• Select the beta from the results
• Hit the Download button

Once you've downloaded the Diablo 4 beta on PlayStation or Xbox, you may see a countdown against it confirming when is the Diablo 4 beta start time, and you may not be able to launch it – or receive an error message if you try to access it before the Open Beta period. Again, if you previously installed the Early Access beta then that will also run the Open Beta, so no further download is needed.

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Sons of the Forest release time and date are soon, with the game launching globally at February 23, 9AM PST on Steam and PC. The game offers an expanded version of the bleak survival experience provided by the original game, with new features, horrors and more besides for players to encounter. For those who want to make sure they're ready to go at the starter's pistol, we've laid out the full Sons of the Forest release time and date below, for all different timezones so you know when you specifically can be ready to suffer.

When is Sons of the Forest out? Release times and dates explained

The Sons of the Forest release sees it unlock at the following times:

• PST/PT: 9:00 AM, February 23rd
• EST/ET: 12.00 PM (midday), February 23rd
• GMT: 5.00 PM, February 23rd
• CET: 6.00 PM, February 23rd

The game can be preordered on Steam, and will specifically enter early access, rather than a full release (which the developers estimate will be roughly 6-8 months). However, it'll still be playable, and by all accounts even this early access version is still a pretty comprehensive version of the game, though it's not clear yet exactly what remains to be added or how different its final form is going to be.

Of course, the game itself is only releasing on PC at the dates mentioned above. For more info about its presence on console platforms, check out our page on ports for Sons of the Forest on PS4, PS5 and Xbox.

The hotly-anticipated horror survival game, Sons of the Forest, has been delayed - sort of. The devs are holding to the February 23 launch date, but now the game's coming out in early access.

"There is still so much more we want to add; items, new mechanics, gameplay balance and more," the devs at Endnight say in a new Steam blog. "We didn’t want to delay again so have instead decided to involve the community in the continued development of this project and keep our February 23rd release date but instead release in Early Access."

Sons of the Forest has been delayed multiple times since its announcement back in 2019. Alternate realities would've had us playing it in May 2022 and October 2022. The devs announced the delay to the current February 23 date as "one last" push back, and it seems they're keeping to that launch promise even while asking fans to lower their expectations for the final release.

The original game spent nearly four years in early access, and the devs attribute the game's success "mostly to the awesome community and the suggestions, feedback, and bug reports the players shared with us." Here's hoping Sons of the Forest's stay in early access produces similarly worthwhile results.

Endnight previously announced that the game would launch at a price of $29.99 USD, though it's unclear whether that'll remain the price in light of the early access switch. Sons of the Forest is currently only set to come to PC, though the devs have noted that they'd "love to come to console in the future."

Find out a whole lot more about Sons of the Forest in our preview.

After 7 years without a discount, the beloved building game Factorio is getting a price increase to help keep up with inflation.

"Next week, on Thursday, January 26 2023, we will increase the base price of Factorio from $30 to $35," the devs said in a tweet. "This is an adjustment to account for the level of inflation since the Steam release in 2016."

Factorio is unusual among modern video games in that it has never once gone on sale. It launched into Steam Early Access at $20 in 2016, the devs raised the price to $30 in 2018 in anticipation of the 1.0 launch, and the game has remained $30 ever since.  Steam sales come and go, but Factorio's price remains a rock, and the game's store page eternally notes that the devs "don't have any plans to take part in a sale or to reduce the price for the foreseeable future."

The devs have explained the reasoning behind their 'no sale' policy numerous times over the years, perhaps most succinctly in a 2016 forum post: "It isn't about visibility or sales, it's about respecting the players who have already purchased the game. We don't want to reward the people who hold off on buying the game, the game is a price we find reasonable, and this is the deal. If you think it is priced too high, then it is your choice to not purchase, and we hope that with enough time, and extra development, we will be able to convince you of its value."

Inflation has already been affecting game prices, albeit in less direct ways. Steam recently refreshed its regional price guidelines, which many devs use to set their prices in worldwide markets. US prices remained largely the same, but European and Chinese pricing increased by around 20% - and those price changes went as high as 485% for regions heavily affected by economic upheaval.

Factorio recently hit Switch, bringing the PC hit to a whole new audience. At least Nintendo fans are used to games never going on sale.

Be constructive in the best crafting games out there.

After years of speculation and controversy, The Day Before launched into Early Access on December 7. The zombie survival MMO has been subjected to multiple delays over the years and many were excited to finally jump in and see what all the hype was about – it's easy to forget now, but there was a time where it was the most wishlisted game on Steam. It's easy to forget that now because the launch has been an unmitigated disaster, with developer Fntastic forced to cease development on the game and shutter its doors just four days after the game released to the public. You'll find more information on that, and The Day Before's development journey, below.

The Day Before canceled 

Just four days after its launch into Early Access, developer Fntastic confirmed that the game "has failed financially" after a disastrous release (Steam reviews are 'Overwhelmingly Negative') and that the studio is subsequently having to close its doors. The studio has indicated that the servers will remain active for the time being, and The Day Before is still listed as a purchasable title. There's been no word yet on whether refunds will be issued for anybody who took the plunge on day one. 

The Day Before release date  

The Day Before launched into Early Access on December 7, 2023. The open world survival game was originally due to launch on March 1, 2023, although a delay pushed one of the most anticipated upcoming PC games back by 10 months to November 10, before being delayed another month to December 7. The first delay occurred last year, with Fntastic originally missing a June 2022 window to shift development to Unreal Engine 5.

The Day Before delay

Fntastic was forced to announce the initial The Day Before delay on January 25, following a trademark dispute. The studio says that "at the time of the announcement, The Day Before game trademark was available" but that in the months since its announcement "a private individual filled out an application before us to register the game trademark The Day Before in the United States." Fntastic said at the time it was only recently made aware of claims against the studio's use of the trademarked name, and is now working to "solve everything" – citing this as the principal reason for a delay of the both the game and any new footage. 

A further delay came later, with a expected release date set for November 10 that was then pushed back to the slightly later date of December 7. 

The Day Before Steam page

While a new The Day Before gameplay trailer was expected to land in January 2023, fans were instead surprised to find that The Day Before Steam page was delisted. At the time, the studio believed that a "minor technical difficulty" had caused the page to go offline, and that one of the most wishlisted pages on the platform would return shortly. We now know that the Steam page for The Day Before went offline because of a copyright claim against the game from a private individual. 

The Day Before's Steam page is now live again.

The Day Before platforms 

The upcoming MMO is currently set to land on PC at launch, with Fntastic also confirming that it is looking at the possibility of The Day Before Xbox Series X/S and PS5 releases. While a console is still planned, the developer has confirmed it won't be coming until the game releases in full, with an indefinite delay. 

The Day Before Unreal Engine 5 

The delayed release of The Day Before came as a result of the decision to move the development of the project onto Unreal Engine 5. In a statement to IGN, Fntastic stated that the move to the "more advanced and adapted open worlds engine will make the gameplay of The Day Before even more fantastic". As we've seen from other upcoming Unreal Engine 5 games, the latest engine from Epic is able to deliver an incredibly realistic level of detail that really makes the most of new-gen technology. The environments we've seen glimpses of so far already look impressive, but The Day Before's world will undoubtedly benefit from the move – here's hoping it adds to the level of immersion as we scavenge locations. 

The Day Before Trailer

The first initial reveal trailer for The Day Before dropped back in 2021, giving us our first look at a gameplay demo of the MMO. With a guided tour of some locations complete with narration, we got to see some scavenging – including looting a cowboy hat – some gunfights against the infected, and some PvP action for good measure, it instantly gave us Last of Us meets The Division vibes at first glance. The script of the trailer certainly made it a memorable one to say the least. Following on from the debut showcase of the game, a more recent trailer also landed that showed off some of the environments of the post-pandemic setting with ray-tracing.

The Day Before gameplay  

While we've gotten to see glimpses of the game in trailers, our first look at gameplay footage came in a video from IGN back in 2021. The footage shows two players scavenging around for supplies in a gas station and taking out infected foes nearby with their guns. The footage offers some insight into the inventory and how we'll be able to loot - which does bring to mind State of Decay in some respects. In the lead up to the original launch date, we'd still not seen all that much of the game in action, especially since the move to Unreal Engine 5. 

But after revealing that we could expect to see gameplay sometime in January prior to the news of the delay, Fntastic released 10 minutes of footage on February 2. The video begins with two player characters running through the street of an abandoned residential area, before looting from a house. We're then taken through empty city streets, with a few zombie encounters. Unfortunately, the reception to the gameplay reveal so far has been largely that of disappointment. 

While we've yet to see any more gameplay in action, Fntastic touched on the fact that The Day Before will feature jobs, houses, and saunas in the apocalypse in an interview with Well Played. In the same interview, the developer also spoke about the enemies, with  "various types of infected" that have been designed to "add to the complexity and thrill of the game". 

"However, it’s essential to note that the core focus of the game isn’t solely on zombies," Fntastic continue, "Instead, the heart of our game lies within the interactions and experiences of the players themselves as they navigate and inhabit this post-apocalyptic world." 

The Day Before dev vlog

Following The Day Before's delay and setbacks surrounding a trademark dispute, the studio confirmed that we could expect to see a developer update. Released as part of the "Life at Fntastic" video series, the vlog details how the game has changed over since development first began back in 2019, but didn't show us anything new in terms of footage. There's still a lot of questions surrounding the project, with the video only serving to raise more among the community since it released. 

The Day Before controversy  

With a growing sense of anticipation surrounding the MMO since its reveal in 2021, there has been some scepticism and controversy surfacing about The Day Before. Some controversy surfaced shortly after the news of a delay, when the studio appeared to be looking for "volunteers" to help with its upcoming projects (although it's clear as to whether this was related to The Day Before, specifically). The biggest sticking point was the website's description of part-time volunteers "ranging from translating to community moderating" who receive non-monetary rewards such as "participation certificates and free codes". 

The scepticism on the other hand, is largely due to the fact that we haven't really seen all that much gameplay or had substantial information about the game, which has only intensified as we draw closer to the release date. A video released in January 2023 showed off ray-tracing didn't show any gameplay footage, and fans appeared to remain quite skeptical on whether The Day Before can deliver on its promises. 

A fan of MMOs? Check out our pick of the best MMORPGs and MMOs. 

Early access doesn't usually work the way Larian does it. By the time Baldur's Gate 3's full launch arrives in August, it will have been in early access for just under three years. For many games, that could be a death sentence – plenty of developers have kept an audience waiting too long and seen the tide of public opinion turn against them. But for Larian, the opposite has been true. According to Sven Vincke, much of the success of his studio's approach to early access comes from "players realising the scope and ambition of what we're trying to do."

It's certainly an ambitious project. Baldur's Gate is one of the biggest and most enduring names in Western RPGs, and for some, the idea of picking up decades after BioWare – of all places – left off, would have been a daunting task. But that never seems to have been the case for Larian. Since the studio's efforts on Divinity: Original Sin and its sequel, there's been a sense that this could be a near-perfect marriage of game and developer – the leading RPG studio and the leading RPG system. And from its very first trailer, Larian has thrown itself headlong into the world of D&D.

That's not to say that it's been smooth sailing. Vincke says that "in the beginning we thought adapting D&D into a video game format would be more straightforward, but we've learned a whole lot along the way about what makes sense in a tabletop RPG versus a video game." Even a (relatively) straightforward spell has the potential to cause problems. Vincke points to 'Speak With Dead', an ability that allows you to converse with the animating spirit of the recently departed. In most games, there might only be a few corpses that the developers would deem worth speaking to, but in a game of D&D, every single dead body has the potential to be an excellent conversation partner.

"Plenty of NPCs you speak to can also be spoken to while dead, and for each of those conversations there's a cinematic. The same applies to Speak with Animals or Animal Handling. That's an incredible amount of work. And we've taken the same approach for every mechanic we've plugged into the game. That's been a lot of work but we wanted to make a game that rewarded the players' creativity and experimentation, just like any good dungeon master would do."

Roll for initiative

Baldur's Gate has changed a lot since that first Early Access launch. Even the patch notes for its most recent update are far too long to even summarise effectively here, but 2022 introduced playable gnomes, the Bard and Paladin classes, and the ability to fly. But as Bladur's Gate 3 has changed, so has its source material, creating a unique obstacle for Larian to overcome. As Dungeons & Dragons prepares for its next major overhaul, its developer confirmed that it would be sunsetting the term 'race', replacing it with 'species'. 

According to Vincke, Larian is in a position to pick and choose when it comes to some of those changes: "we're keeping up with the changes being made to D&D. Baldur's Gate 3 doesn't necessarily adhere to all of the current rules – we make changes along the way as it makes sense for a video game, or based on feedback from our players. Since we're still in production, we’re likely to pick up some of the recent changes to D&D rules, too."

While new rulesets can be adapted to, the real world still poses some unique challenges for Larian. Asked what he'd like to see added to Baldur's Gate 3 that isn't currently possible, Vincke said: "That's a tough one because many things are already possible – we have cows that can climb ladders, but they can’t roll on their backs, so that’d be good to see. Actually, can cows roll on their backs?"

Here's what we thought of Baldur's Gate 3 back in our original early access preview.

Sons of the Forest is not currently available on PS5, PS4 or Xbox, but there could be changes in the future, as developer Endnight Games has suggested when it comes to available ports. 

Sons of the Forest is, of course a sequel to The Forest from 2018, a game that was only ported to PlayStation consoles, and never came out on Xbox with Endgame explaining they could only really focus on one platform. So while Sons of the Forest is likely to arrive on console eventually, it might not hit both and there's prior for a PlayStation release. 

Like the last game, Sons of the Forest sees you as the survivor of a plane crash, stranded on a wooded island, gathering resources, crafting, and defending against mutated cannibals. It's on PC as an Early Access release after a few delays and a downgrade from a full release. So here’s what we know about Sons of the Forest on PS4, PS5, Xbox Series X.

The lack of any official Sons of the Forest PS4, PS5 or Xbox release doesn't mean the studio isn't interested. Developer Endnight Games have said in a developer interview that “we would love to come to console in the future, but are currently focused on delivering the best experience possible to PC players.”

Sons of the Forest has been delayed several times. Initially planned for a 2021 release that slipped to May 2022 and then October 2022, and finally February 2023 (we have the full Son of the Forest release time details if you need them). That also saw the game move from a full release to Early Access so it's probably best to expect a console release later, rather than sooner. 

While Son of the Forest is promising a maximum of eight months in Early Access, the previous Forest game launched in 2014, then fully on PC in April 2018 with the PS4 version following in November of the same year. So the end of Early Access will more than likely be the deciding factor on when it arrives on PlayStation or Xbox. 

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There is now only one way to access the Diablo 4 beta, as other methods including the previous Early Access period have since expired. However, if you're still waiting for your chance to try out Diablo 4 for yourself then there's good news, as the final option provides guaranteed access to everyone. The Open Beta weekend is almost here – you can see exactly when is the Diablo 4 beta in our separate guide – which means players on PC, PS5, Xbox Series X, PS4, and Xbox One can all be involved, and now the Diablo 4 beta preload times have begun you can get it installed and ready to go. If you want to know how to do that, then here are all of the details on how to access the Diablo 4 beta.

How to play the Diablo 4 beta

Previously it was possible to sign up to access the Diablo 4 beta via the official website, at least according to a Blizzard support post regarding the Alpha and Beta testing phases of the game published in 2022, but that option is now no longer available. It was also possible to access the Diablo 4 beta by pre-ordering the game, with various different versions available including the Standard, Deluxe, and Ultimate Editions, and each provides a variety of rewards within Diablo 3 and 4 including the Early Access Beta. However, that ran from March 17-20 which has now passed.

The only way to access the Diablo 4 beta now is to wait until May 12-14, when the next (and likely final) Open Beta will be available for everyone who knows how to download the Diablo 4 beta. There are no access requirements, so simply keep an eye on the relevant digital storefront for your platform and download the client when it becomes available. This final beta will run for a little over three days, so make sure you're installed and set up in advance to get the most time possible from it, while using Diablo 4 crossplay to team up with friends on different platforms.

© GamesRadar+. Not to be reproduced without permission.

If death is a business, Death is the CEO. 

That's the concept behind Have a Nice Death, a hand-drawn 2D action roguelike video game that was released early access on Steam earlier this year. Next spring, the full game will be released on both Steam and Nintendo Switch, as announced at the November Nintendo Indie World Showcase.

And in the lead-up to the game's March release, developer Magic Design Studios has teamed up with children's book and comic book artist Anthony Wheeler to produce a weekly webcomic exploring the world of Have a Nice Death.

In the video game, players will control Death Incorporated CEO, Death - because who else would be in charge? The skeletal character wears a black robe and carries a scythe for his business duties, but his off time is vastly different - as seen in the first webcomic in the series, "Life's a Beach," which is available today. The strip shows how Death gets away from his employees' myriad requests by taking a beach vacation.

Check out the first chapter of the Have a Nice Death webcomic below.

Next week, Magic Design Studios will release another chapter entitled "Chaos At Work." Individual chapters in the Have a Nice Death webcomic seem to be loosely connected in that they all take place in the world of the video game, but otherwise don't have to be read in order.

Have a Nice Death Day launches on Nintendo Switch and Steam on March 22, 2023. The webcomic will update every Wednesday leading up to release day on the Have a Nice Death Day website.

You can also check out the best video game comics of all time.

Mega-hit PC survival game Raft is making its way to consoles.

Developer Redbeet Interactive announced the console port for Raft earlier this month. "We can finally announce that we are actively working on getting Raft onto consoles!" a blog post on Steam from the development team reads of the news. 

Redbeet goes on to write that it's striving to launch Raft on "as many platforms as possible." However, due to the development team having the goal of making Raft's consoles ports on par with the PC version, it's going to take a bit of time yet before a release window can be announced.

If you're unfamiliar with Raft, the survival game spent a whole four years in early access on PC, before finally launching in full earlier this year in June. The game was an immediate hit, going on to sail over 100,000 concurrent players around the world later that same month. 

Things have actually been pretty quiet for Raft since full launch in June. The development team at Redbeet hasn't made any significant announcements, until now, forgoing adding any major new content to the game since 1.0 launch. Raft's last update came all the way back in early July, and simply provided a few small fixes for ongoing bugs. 

Considering Redbeet is clearly going all-in on bringing Raft to as many platforms as possible, perhaps it shouldn't' be a surprise that things have been quite on the development side for months now. 

Check out our full Raft cheats guide if you're looking to get a head start early on in the survival game. 

Baldur's Gate 3 full release is still on track to release in 2023 with the "next major update" slated to land around the holidays.

We already knew that the hotly-anticipated sequel - which was released as an early access game back in October 2020 - was scheduled to release next year, but confirmation that the game is "on track" for a 2023 release is good news, especially for those holding off on playing the early access build.

There's also a chance we'll get a specific release date next month, too. 

"The good news is that we’re on track for release in 2023 – and we’ll have more on that in December," teased developer Larian Studios. 

"Acts 2 and 3 of the story are being actively playtested to ensure they’re up to the same level of polish and you’ll soon discover that there’s much more in the works (or already complete) than what you’ll encounter in an Early Access playthrough. Our goal is for even the players who have repeated Act 1 over and over again for hundreds of hours to feel like there’s a whole new experience in store for them at launch.

"It takes time to tell a great story, implement feedback, and iterate on such a large game, so we want to thank you for your patience as we get closer to Patch 9."

We also found out a little more about Larian's motion capture process, with the team inviting your comments on what to call this new snazzy "dance move":

As for why the team decided to release it as an early access title in the first place?

“Through releasing Divinity: Original Sin and Divinity: Original Sin 2, we’ve learned that working directly with our players during development makes our games better," Larian explains on the Steam storefront. "RPGs this large, with so many avenues for player choice and exploration, thrive from feedback as new features and fixes are incrementally added to the game.

Early Access gives players a chance to participate in development, and it gives us an opportunity to explore different game ideas with a live community to find what works best. We want to learn how you play the game and use that to make it a better experience for everyone."

If you're tempted to pick up the game ahead of its release, Larian says approximately a third of the game is available in the early access build, and "is a relatively stable experience with many hours of content". 

While you wait, here's our list of the best RPG games.

Subnautica developer Unknown World's has removed all microtransactions from its latest title, Moonbreaker.

The changes come after fans hit back at the game's monetization strategy, prompting the studio to "completely overhaul" its "business model" and remove microtransactions "to focus on making the best game that we can".

"It is important to us, especially during Early Access, to build an amazing game alongside our community and focus on making Moonbreaker as fun as possible," the team said (thanks, PC Gamer). 

"Early Access is a time for us to experiment and improve the game, and the monetization in its current form was affecting that goal. So we're removing it to focus on making the best game that we can, before we leave Early Access."

Consequently, Moonbreaker's in-game store is being "disabled" and all Pulsar purchases made thus far will be automatically refunded into players' Steam wallets. Blanks and unopened Boosters will be converted into Sparks (previously known as Merits), too - expect everything to hit your wallet in the next couple of days. 

Even the previously non-refundable Founder's Pack can be refunded now, too, should you wish; you have until December 6, 2022, to lodge your request.

That said, rewards for any tiers you've already earned and are affected by this change will be "awarded automatically" when you log in. 

"A major part of the Early Access process is taking community feedback on board and making some big and exciting changes," the studio said. 

"We’ve been reading and evaluating everything you’ve suggested on our Discord and Nolt board – which already helped to guide our decision to remove Cargo Run Contracts from Moonbreaker – and have been diligently reviewing every area of the game. 

"We really believe that Moonbreaker is something truly special, and that it will only improve in quality with community input. Your passion and love for the game has already inspired several major changes, and we're only one month into Early Access."

Here are all the new games of 2022 (and beyond).

Soulstone Survivors is the latest "horde survival game" to riff on Vampire Survivors' winning formula, and it's also taken pages from Diablo and Hades to assemble a promising roguelike.

Developer Game Smithing Limited outlined the game as part of Steam Next Fest, which includes a free demo of Soulstone Survivors available until October 10. This will give everyone a free chance to sample Soulstone Survivors' ambitious pitch through a limited selection of characters, abilities, maps, and bosses. The proper game will launch in Steam Early Access on November 7, and the devs expect the full version to be out in less than a year with post-launch updates to follow. 

Soulstone Survivors is an isometric bullet hell roguelike where you unlock and upgrade new characters, weapons, and abilities as you start and inevitably die in run after run of screen-clearing chaos. Its Steam summary is a feast of numbers: nearly 150 unique skills, 14 playable characters, hundreds of skills and runes, dozens of weapons, all with many more to come in Early Access. 

The influence of Vampire Survivors is obvious, and not just from the name; this is a familiar loop of annihilating mobs, hoovering up money, and taking it to the upgrade shops ahead of your next run. Meanwhile, Supergiant's Hades looks to have shaped the way you select new abilities and tailor your playable demigod, though Hades' impeccable character writing doesn't seem to be a focus for Game Smithing. Standing on the shoulder of Diablo also appears to have shaped some of Soulstone Survivors' classes, upgrade trees, and abilities. It's a mixed salad of action-RPG greats, and it looks like a promising combo at first blush. 

Vampire Survivors fan game HoloCure was so popular that the devs had to turn off its leaderboards to keep things from crashing. 

The much anticipated Valheim console release has finally happened, so if you're on Xbox Series X or Xbox One then the wait for the Viking afterlife is over, and you can play it for free if you have Xbox Game Pass. This joins the existing release of Valheim on PC Game Pass, and adding more platforms to this survival adventure naturally leads to questions about Valheim crossplay, and whether the game will extend further to reach PS5, PS4, or even Nintendo Switch at some time in the future. To catch you up on that, here's everything we know so far about the current situation and future Valheim console release plans.

Valheim PC and Xbox Game Pass release

Valheim was initially only available on PC Game Pass as a game preview, as when developer Iron Gate announced their plans to bring the game to Game Pass, they stated the PC and Xbox releases would be separate, with PC access arriving first. The Valheim console release date was then confirmed for March 14, 2023 on Xbox Series X, Xbox One, and Xbox Game Pass. The console port was handled by two external teams, not by Iron Gate itself, so it didn't impact on the development of other content such as the Valheim Ashlands update.

Is Valheim coming to PlayStation or Nintendo Switch?

Let’s start with the bad news for PS5, PS4, and Nintendo owners: since the initial Valheim console release is on Xbox Game Pass, it will likely remain exclusive to that platform for quite some time. On the bright side though, Valheim may still be ported to other consoles in the future. 

Although this wouldn’t be such an issue for Valheim on the PlayStation, a Switch version would likely need a lot of optimization in order to run. Also, don’t forget that the Switch is over five years old, so a potential Valheim Switch port would be far more interesting to its successor.

And that’s all we know about the Valheim console release on Xbox and other formats. Time to sharpen your axe, Game Pass players!

Slime Rancher 2 just launched into Early Access today and it's already racked up nearly 1,000 "overwhelmingly positive" Steam reviews and smashed the studio's previous sales day record.

Monomi Park CEO and Slime Rancher series director Nick Popovich told GamesRadar+ earlier in the year that the sequel "feels just like Slime Rancher, only smoother, more expansive, more rich in details, and with a lot of tweaks and quality of life changes," and it seems new and long-time fans are enjoying the heck out of the result.

Steam's review section is "overwhelmingly positive" overall, and there are 896 reviews that fall under that category at the time of writing. For a casual indie game on its first day in Early Access, that's a staggering amount of positivity in user reviews. Popovich also took to Twitter to announce that Slime Rancher 2 had topped the studio's previous best sales day "by a literal order of magnitude."

I reached out to Popovich to congratulate him and Monomi Park on the sequel's successful launch, and we were told everyone at the studio is "totally blown away" by the reaction. He also revealed to me that his "pie in the sky" dream for the game's first day sales was topped in just a few hours.

"The level of support we've received from our community and partners is beyond anything we could have imagined," Popovich said. "I had in my head a kind of crazy pipe dream for launch that maybe we could sell 100k copies in the first 24 hours and we've eclipsed that in less than 6 hours, with Overwhelmingly Positive reviews on Steam on top of it all (something we've personally cherished about the original for years now).

We have delighted in watching players explore the prismatic world we've created and especially all the reactions people have shared of their kids seeing the game for the first time. So if I can say anything it would be an enormous, gordo-sized thank you to everyone who have began their adventures on Rainbow Island and that we can't wait to show you what we have in store for this world in all the updates that will follow."

Slime Rancher 2 is out now on PC and Xbox Series X/S. It's also available on Game Pass.

For everything on the horizon, check out our extensive guide to new games of 2022.

Slime Rancher 2 is set to release today, so if you can't wait a single second to play, here's what time it's expected to release.

It's been a long time coming for fans of Monomi Park's adorable shooter, but it's nearly time for the warmly anticipated sequel. The Slime Rancher 2 release time is 6pm BST/ 10am PT/ 1pm ET on Xbox Series X/S and PC (via Steam and the Epic Game Store). 

While you can see a countdown on the game's Steam page, the developer confirms on its official Discord that the timings are the same for Xbox and Epic. As ever, that could change if something unforeseen arises, but you can plan around those times for now.

If you're wondering what to expect from Slime Rancher 2 whilst in Early Access, series director Nick Popovich put out a Reddit post a couple of months back explaining what fans will experience when the game releases this month. 

According to Popovich, players will get to explore a big world with many different slimes to collect and combine. The Early Access version will also introduce the game's story and the mystery behind Rainbow Island. 

"While launching into Early Access/Game Preview means that some features may be incomplete, or things may not work as intended, it is our intention that Slime Rancher 2 works as a player would expect as much as possible," Popvich said at the time. 

"We have no intention of delivering updates in a knowingly unstable state, or treating our players as QA testers instead of customers. Those that have experience with our Early Access/Game Preview development for Slime Rancher have seen this first hand, and we intend to do the same for Slime Rancher 2."

Wondering what else we have to look forward to this year? Take a look at our new games 2022 list. 

Call of Duty Modern Warfare 2 pre-orders are available across the US and UK, with both the Cross-Gen and Vault Edition bundles on the shelves. That means you can get your name down for a copy of MW2 well ahead of time, and if you go digital you can get some excellent early access too. Call of Duty: Modern Warfare 2 will release on PS5, PS4, Xbox Series X, Xbox One, and PC on October 28, 2022.

However, a very timely reminder is that with us being in the week of Beta Access (week commencing Sept 12), now is a great time to pre-order Modern Warfare 2. With all pre-orderers getting some kind of access or even early access to the beta, today (Sept 15) is a perfect time - and last full day - to commit and get in. The Beta access opens on September 16 for PlayStation pre-orders, and September 22 for Xbox and PC pre-orders (both two days early then non-pre-orderers) so getting your copy sorted now is ideal if you want to slip into that Beta - and enjoy some other pre-order bonuses as the below details highlight.

Getting to pre-order details, unlike other games opting for a cheaper PS4 / Xbox One release, Call of Duty: MW2 pre-orders are the same price whether you're buying for the current or previous generation. That's because the Cross-Gen bundle packages both versions of the game onto one $69.99 / £69.99 purchase, so you're covered whichever side of the line you fall on. That's a little disappointing for those who kept their previous generation console for a shot at some cheaper games. 

While Steam has already launched Call of Duty MW2 pre-orders for PC players, you'll be heading to either Amazon or Microsoft to secure your game in the US, and Game in the UK. More retailers are bound to jump into the mix soon, though, so we'll be keeping this page stocked with all the latest launches.

Call of Duty: Modern Warfare II comes in either the Cross-Gen Bundle or the Vault Edition, a $99.99 / £99.99 pre-order offering up plenty of digital goodies to give you a head start. You'll find all the latest MW2 pre-order offerings just below.

Call of Duty MW2 pre-order - Cross Gen Bundle

The Call of Duty: Modern Warfare 2 Cross-Gen Bundle is the go-to for a standard pre-order. You're getting the base game here, but PlayStation fans will also spot a little extra to sweeten the deal. Sony players will also be able to log on to MW2 a few days earlier, with access to the Open Beta due to run shortly before the October release date. 

Call of Duty MW2 pre-order - Vault Edition

The Modern Warfare 2 Vault Edition includes a whole host of bonuses  that will be attractive to fans, from early access to skins to double XP.

Full bundle includes:

• Ghost Legacy Pack
• Red Team 141 Operator Pack
• FJX Cinder Weapon Vault 
• Season One Battle Pass + 50 Tier Skips

When pre-ordered digitally, the Vault Edition also gets you:

• Open Beta & campaign early access
• Haled Al-Asad bundle
• Final judgement bundle
• Ghost legacy pack

We're also rounding up all the latest Elden Ring prices if you're looking for something to play in the meantime, or check out the best PS5 accessories and best Xbox Series X accessories to get kitted out for the new release.