Table of contents for Issue 304 in PC Powerplay

Who reckons Elden Ring Shadow of the Erdtree is already sitting pretty as a dead-setcert for GOTY? Joab Gilroy does, because he's just been deep in the new world exploring and dying. A lot of exploring, and very, very many deaths… Erdtree brings some very welcome additions to the legendary base game, as Joab explains in his big hands-on starting on page 14. We do like the greater freedom to go where you want and do things in the order you prefer. It builds upon the already vast and free open world the original game established. FROM Software's kicked it out of the park, again. The depth in this incredible world will have us all determined to go everywhere and do everything. Will you? I get that this won't be…

PREVIEW KVLT NEED TO KNOW RELEASE TBA DEVELOPER Evil Guinea Pig PUBLISHER Evil Guinea Pig LINK evilguineapig.com Perhaps taking titular inspiration from Robert Eggars, KVLT has been kvltivated in a kvlture of grim first-person shooters filled with Nazis and cosmic horrors. In other words, PC gaming. It's a beautiful day in 1945, and you are a horrible occultist. Time to start shooting things like it's Wolfenstein all over again. It begins, as so many things do, in some tunnels. You're presented with some backstory involving crystals, and read some notes the bad guys have helpfully left laying around that refer to mysterious creatures and disappearing comrades. Then you press forward looking for something to shoot. When you eventually meet them, the Nazis are kind of hilarious. Not only are they…

PREVIEW Jump Ship NEED TO KNOW RELEASE 2024 (Early Access) DEVELOPER Keepsake Games PUBLISHER Keepsake Games LINK jumpshipgame.com Filip Coulianos’ first vision for Jump Ship was “the ultimate Han Solo and Chewbacca simulator”. The game has changed a lot since the first prototypes he made many years ago, but it still retains a lot of that core fantasy even in its very early current form. Let's find out more. Jump Ship is being built by a small team of 12 people at Keepsake Games, a studio founded by five university friends who just happen to have worked across Stockholm's biggest studios for the past ten or more years. With veterans who have made games at the likes of DICE, Mojang, Hazelight and Toca Boca this is as close to an…

FEATURE Asseto Corsa Competizione With over 20 kilometres of winding tarmac in the German mountains, the Nürburgring is the most loved, and feared, track in all of motorsport. However, digitally recreating this unique track has proven difficult for countless developers. Now, KUNOS Simulazioni thinks it has nailed it with the launch of the Nordschleife in Assetto Corsa Competizione. Since launching in 2018, the most requested addition to Assetto Corsa Competizione has been the iconic Nordschleife track. With the Nürburgring GP circuit, a shorter more traditional racetrack at the same location, already being in the game, many assumed that adding in the Nordschleife (‘north loop’) would be a natural next step. However, there was one sticking point; SRO, the real-life racing championship that ACC is a simulation of, didn't race on…

Eiyuden Chronicle: Hundred Heroes has a lot weighing on its shoulders. The new turn-based RPG has to deliver to crowdfunding backers, fulfil its promise of being an ode to ‘90s great Suikoden, and prove that its all-star creative team still have the stuff. That's enough pressure for anyone, but recently it's been further burdened by the death of its director Yoshitaka Murayama. It's amazing, then, that I couldn't feel an ounce of all that weight during my time playing, because Eiyuden Chronicle is as sturdy and vivacious an adventure as anyone could ever hope. Mainly following Nowa, a young man thrust into leadership of a rag-tag alliance fighting against the empire, the setup reads almost like parody. How clichéd can you get? It also probably gives anyone familiar with Murayama's…

I can think of few things worse than shuffling around in a cramped, pitch-black cave, which of course makes it the perfect setting for a horror game. Here you're crawling, literally crawling on your belly around a dark, spooky cave with only a map, camera and wind-up torch. That last bit is not strictly true, as there are also creatures that regard you as dinner, but you can fend them off by stunning them with your old-fashioned camera. Every tool is wonderfully cumbersome: to use anything you have to twist around and pick it up off your jacket, meaning you can no longer see in front of you. It only takes a few seconds to wind up your torch, when it eventually fails, or reload your camera with a new…

EXTRA + LIFE CONTINUED ADVENTURES IN GAMING I'm nothing if not a perfectionist: I travel for days in Minecraft to find the right spot to lay down foundations for a house, and figuring out where my base will stand in Subnautica is infinitely more stressful than dealing with the Ghost Leviathan. So when I crash-landed on the peninsula in Sons of the Forest with a few of my friends, I knew agreeing on somewhere to build our settlement would be tricky. There's a lot to think about before picking a prime real estate location in a survival game. Are you close to water? Is there enough protection from the harsh environment? Where are the boundaries between warring cannibal tribes? You know, the usual big questions for first-time buyers. After weighing…

Special Report PCPP INVESTIGATES Harold Halibut has been gestating for a long time. When the project began, art director Ole Tillmann wasn't married – indeed he wasn't even dating his future wife – and definitely didn't have a three-year-old daughter to bring to the office in Cologne as indie team Slow Bros put the finishing touches on their uniquely handmade game. “She recognises the models – she'll come to the office and be like, ‘Oh, Harold's here!’” Tillman says with a laugh. Across more than a decade of development Harold‘s team has gained and lost a publisher, done side jobs to stay afloat, moulded dozens of models out of clay and wire and tiny hand-sewn clothes, constructed elaborate sets for a sprawling underwater habitat, and learned how to bring them…

PREVIEW Blockbuster Inc NEED TO KNOW RELEASE June 6 DEVELOPER Super Sly Fox PUBLISHER Ancient Forge LINK blockbusterincgame.com Back in 2005 Lionhead Studios released The Movies, a game about running a movie studio that was pretty good. I mention it only because Blockbuster Inc (no relation to the venerable VHS rental chain) triggers a serious rush of nostalgia for Molyneux's game. A ‘Prologue’ version of Blockbuster Inc is available on Steam, and drops you into the comfortable shoes of a movie studio head, tasked with making films, nurturing talent, winning awards and making money. It's such a good fit for the tycoon/management game genre that it's surprising that there have been so few imitators since 2005. The prologue starts in 1920 and ends in 1922, giving you remarkably little time…

The Kalgoorlie Silvers have received a tip. Some rabble-rousers are plotting unrest in a nearby apartment, and the authorities have ordered a raid. The plan is to bust down the door and secure the suspects by force, and while they don't want to kill everyone, they expect two or three bodies at the least. Having been temporarily assigned to the squad, I propose a radical alternative. How about – and just hear me out on this – we try talking to them first? Squad leader Irma Wakefield arches an eyebrow, “Convince me,” she says. I start off by appealing to her humanity. As officers of the law, we have a duty to protect people if possible, and surely that includes the people on the other side of the door. This…

There's a simple, repetitive card game at the heart of Limb From Limb, but as the name suggests, with a grisly flourish that adds a layer of queasy tension. Every time you draw the wrong card, your character chops off a finger. Lose all five from your left hand and you lose the match. It's certainly an incentive not to draw the ‘death’ card – as you and your similarly chop-happy opponent take turns to flip over five cards from your decks – but in a game of random chance there isn't much you can do to mitigate it. Items bought from the shop allow you to X-ray unflipped cards, regrow fingers or force your rival's choices, but you still have to flip over every card until one of you…

NOW PLAYING THE GAMES WE LOVE RIGHT NOW Lanterns flicker in the throne room's now dark, gloomy and shadow-filled environs. Whatever former glory this grand reception room had is now long gone, with de'Arnise banners strewn across the dirty, blood-covered floors and a pungent smell of death emanating from a pile of burning troll corpses littered around its central throne. Slumped against it is former lord of the de'Arnise Hold, his corpse cold. Hero of the hour, Volin de Taranbrace, slowly draws her two-handed weapon, the lethal and magical Sword of Chaos, from the chest of the biggest troll of all, TorGal, who had died badly. There was never any place for troll filth within these walls, though, and Volin along with trusted companions Minsc, Jaheria, Yoshimo and now rightful heir…

EXTRA LIFE NOW PLAYING UPDATE WHY I LOVE Now that all of the Endwalker patches have finished and Dawntrail is approaching, Final Fantasy XIV has entered its quiet season. With no new raids to chase or story to complete, it's a time for catching up on things you might have missed or pausing and playing something else for a while. It may be quieter, but with that the game also feels more chill – there's no expectations to rush through anything any more. The boom season is over and now it's time to relax. And what better way to cure all the aches of a Warrior Of Light than to revisit your personal island and till the soil. Island Sanctuary is a casual content mode that first launched in patch 6.2…

IT'S ALL OVER… Right off the cuff, I didn't like the smell of the gig. After dark I was to head to Den-Den Town, the old electronics district, and meet a contact codenamed Jinx who had promised they could reveal why my client Elsa's ex-boyfriend, Billy, had been killed, strangled to death with the cord of his Razer Basilisk V3 gaming mouse. It was a dark and dismal night, and wetter than a PC gamer's pants just after Nvidia releases its new flagship GPU. Den-Den Town was a shadow of its former glory, now just a two-bit neon strip of a place selling retro PC gaming hardware at sky-high prices. I shook my head in disgust as I walked past Retro Ron's RGB Emporium and saw an Nvidia GeForce GT…

PREVIEW Crown Wars: The Black Prince NEED TO KNOW RELEASE May 2024 DEVELOPER Artefacts Studio PUBLISHER Nacon LINK s.team/a/1658920 XCOM, but make it medieval. This could be Xth-century COM, except it's set in the 1300s. Crown Wars takes tactical combat with a squad of distinctive characters, adds base-building in the form of an entire fortified village, and makes thoughtful additions to the formula that key in to its setting. A council meets, presumably in secret, but their security measures must be off as the castle is attacked and it's left to a curious group of warriors, one wearing antlers, to hold back the encroaching enemy while the councillors burn documents. Luckily, it's the tutorial, so heavily armoured lady knight Louise can make bloody one-hit kills with her warhammer while you…

PREVIEW Beautiful Light NEED TO KNOW RELEASE 2025 DEVELOPER Deep Worlds SA PUBLISHER Deep Worlds SA LINK deepworlds.studio It's not hard to see Beautiful Light‘s influences: the extraction shooter owes a debt to horror fan film SCP: Overlord, but in play the objective-based extraction shooter plays a little like Hunt: Showdown, as several teams compete to get their hands on an artefact and hoof it to extraction before you get mauled by the numerous mutants. This always starts with your team finding one of the laptops to generate your own keycard. Players can generate a keycard at any time, but it only works for them. Hacking is done in real-time on the actual computer screen and my teammates, devs from Beautiful Light creator Deep Worlds, tell me it's based on…

In early April, Bungie released a teaser video detailing some of the new features it had planned for Destiny 2‘s sixth expansion, The Final Shape. The reaction from the community was immediate: “We're so back!” Before that teaser, the mood around Destiny 2 was decidedly different. The game's last expansion, Lightfall, was poorly received. As the penultimate release of Destiny‘s first saga, its story felt like a sidequest – rushing through poorly explained plot threads that, outside of a couple of important cutscenes, felt inconsequential to the broader narrative. More damaging, arguably, was the way the sandbox had been changed. In an effort to bring challenge back to the game, Lightfall brought sweeping nerfs to weapon damage and ability uptime – players were being asked to put in more effort…

REVIEW Sand Land What year is it? Because this action RPG feels like a return to the bad old days of forgotten adver-games, the sort of thing that included a bit of everything. At times it'll force a platforming section on me, complete with bottomless pits to avoid. Or I'll have to hit buttons at the right time like QTE-ruined cutscenes never went out of fashion, or grit my teeth through multiple stealth sections. Multiple stealth sections. Which is a pity because when I'm not gaming like it's 1999 there's a definite charm to the game's imaginative selection of vehicles, encompassing everything from bulbous tanks to gigantic battleships. Bashed-up trucks might have a balancing pair of back legs that only set down when the vehicle comes to a stop. Tanks rear…

FREE GAMES REVIEWS COOL TITLES FOR NO CASH by Tom Sykes There's just something about playing with tokens – chunky, circular tokens – that makes any game better, whether it's Backgammon, Draughts or Connect 4. Pick & Poke, I'm pleased to report, is a game entirely about moving tokens around, as you drag them onto choices to make your way round a fantasy city. A singleplayer roguelite, it has the spirit of a tabletop RPG. It's even played on an actual (OK, a virtual) tabletop. Oh but what a table it is, enriched by those multicoloured tokens and the big cartoon arm you use to drop them onto dialogue boxes. It really feels like you're playing the game in a tavern somewhere – the decorations even wobble when you poke them.…

GROUP TEST HARDWARE Capturing great vocal audio from your PC used to be a bit of a teeth-clenching experience. Esoteric cables, strange terminology, and fiddly equipment once made the process a lot more difficult than it needed to be. Luckily, there are now many easy-to-use microphone solutions on the market at a range of price points, taking the stress out of capturing top-quality sound. Whether you're looking to break out as the next streaming sensation, finally start that podcast, or simply want to improve the audio in your daily meetings, a good microphone will take your audio to the next level. However, with a wealth of options to choose from, finding the right mic for you can still be a bit of a conundrum. Here are six microphones that might fit…

It's always fascinating when you get to watch a new game genre emerge and evolve – over my life in gaming I've gotten to see it with the MOBA, battle royale, tower defence and more. For the last few years, the defining example has been auto-shooters – a genre so new, in fact, that we've not even really settled on that name yet. What I'm talking about is Vampire Survivors-likes. The indie hit enjoyed huge success, and spawned countless imitators, thanks to the simple format, other developers have been able to put out their own spins on the genre in record time, giving it a kind of hyper-accelerated evolution. I could list great auto-shooters for days – favourites of mine include Renfield, and 20 Minutes Til Dawn – but for…