And that’s a bit of a shame, because I remember A Way Out as one of the first times I had proper fun playing a co-op game. It wasn’t the gritty story about two very similar men running away from bullets (and bulletting other similar men) – even though I think it’s a perfectly serviceable narrative that gets a bit of an unfair doing – it was the quieter moments where I could just interact with my pal that stood out to me....

Designed by Tim Follin and starring Rupert Booth as Detective Inspector Frederick Jenks, you’re tasked with getting to the bottom of the mystery behind Laura Palm- I mean Kate Vine’s death. She’s a student who has drowned in the local lake in an apparent suicide, but the small village of Edenton is a weird old place where all kinds of bizarre activities come to light. This game is brilliantly headed up by Booth’s performance, his elastic face depicting everything you could possibly want from a British Poirot....

It becomes mostly a game about clever terraforming. Your little flock of believers need to get to different places, and you can facilitate that. You can move the earth in a very literal sense, by picking it up and dumping it somewhere else. It feels more like you’re doing small miracles than in e.g. Black & White, where you can throw people onto your flaming prayer altar. From dust is also quite hard, because of how limited your miracle workings are....

Whenever you meet someone new during a playthrough of Griftlands, Klei Entertainment’s masterful deckbuilder, the first thing you get is a short box of flavour text that often summarises their demeanour, their line of work, and their attitude towards you all at once, and rarely ever resorts to actually stating those things outright. It’s so much easier said than done to write one of these sentences, and yet Klei makes it look effortless....

In many ways, Penko Park predicted many of the new features in Nintendo’s New Pokemon Snap. In your album there are spaces for multiple shots of its weird and wonderful critters, and capturing them in various emotional states such as being happy, angry, flying, asleep or even doing a little dance is key to advancing through the photography ranks. Your photos also receive a star rating from one to three, depending on how good it is and how much of the creature’s in the frame, which will be familiar to any New Poke Snap players....

I was pretty much sold on it already when I realised it was a thing, because who wouldn’t want to control their own kingdom? And no, games like Civilization or Crusader Kings never provided what I wanted, before you start in the comments. Can you decorate your throne room? Can you give your leader green hair? Exactly. The Sims Medieval was one of the only versions of The Sims I could really get my history and castle-loving dad to look at....

And yet you have to congratulate Coffee Stain on what they’ve accomplished against these odds. They’ve put together a surprisingly robust and extremely fun factory-builder in a 3D environment, which in itself is enough to prove wrong my predictions when I first heard about the game. But more than that: they’ve given us a factory-builder where the overwhelming feeling is one of possibility and hope, rather than - in Factorio’s case - bleak and uninviting....

The bulk of the DLC level is set in a heavily guarded research facility, where gun-wielding scientists and armoured security forces patrol the hallways. As in the original game, you’ll need to clear each room of its respective goons without taking a single hit before you can move on to the next one. If your zippy urban samurai does get nicked, though, time rewinds so you can instantly take another pop at it and try something new....

I’m not gonna lie, I was properly blown away by yesterday’s new trailer for CD Projekt Red’s upcoming RPG, and I’m pretty sure that footage didn’t even have any ray tracing effects turned on (and if you don’t want to take my word for it, our friends at Digital Foundry didn’t think so either). I’m almost half dreading what kind of power it’s going to take to run the game with all of its swish-looking ray tracing effects at full whack, but the good news is that Cyberpunk 2077 will be taking full advantage of all the benefits brought on by Microsoft’s DirectX 12 Ultimate tech, as well as Nvidia’s own DLSS 2....

As part of the announcement, EA introduced Dominique and Camille, two sims featured in the new expansion. “The ability to tell stories - any story - is at the core of what we do at The Sims. Holding back Cam and Dom’s story meant compromising the values we live by. We are committed to the freedom to be who you are, to love who you love and tell the stories you want to tell,” said a post on The Sims 4 website....

I do have a wild dream that Sony’s PlayStation 5 showcase stream tonight will also talk about bringing more games to PC. It won’t, but I want to believe. God, I yearn for Yharnam. “This patch addresses additional crashes, as well as a couple of community-reported bugs such as Aloy’s hair not displaying correctly when playing with the game running above 30 FPS, controller rumble toggle and adds the option to display black side bars in cinematics when playing in ultrawide resolutions,” developers Guerrilla Games explain in the Patch 1....

Whatever the tools, though, please do clean your keyboard now and again. If we didn’t already know they’d been designed for inputting symbols into a computer, they could quite easily be mistaken for purpose-build detritus traps. Between the tiny gaps everywhere, constant hand contact, and their natural habitat of ‘right below your mouth’, keyboards positively attract dust, skin, and crumbs. Pet hair gets in there too, in keeping with how pet hair gets bloody everywhere....

All you need to do to watch the Nvidia Ampere launch is go to Nvidia’s GeForce event homepage and wait until the timer counts down to 5pm BST in the UK, or 9am PDT for those of you across the pond. Alternatively, you can sit on Nvidia’s Twitch page, which I’ve embedded below. Truth be told, Nvidia haven’t actually said what they’re going to be talking about in their GeForce event today, so it could all be a load of cobblers about nothing in particular....

Fuck me, that’s some good trumpet. Hunt has had weather conditions for ages, smothering the map in fog whenever I choose a Sparks sniper rifle, but huge firestorms are new. Developers Crytek haven’t made it clear if you’ll load in to see the map engulfed in flame or whether it’ll happen mid-match, and I hope it’s the latter while expecting the former. It’s a treat either way, with familiar routes blocked off by infernos and the whole scene basking in burnt orange....

Devs Sorath say Hyper Demon’s about aiming to reach the end as quickly as possible. That’s different from Devil Daggers, which you had to survive in for as long as you could. However, slaying baddies in Hyper Demon makes them spawn faster, which naturally ups the difficult somewhat. You’re free to blow them away more slowly, of course, but that won’t net you many points now, will it? Wonderfully, there’s a par scoring system telling you how many monsters you should be slaying, so I fully intend to don my Pringle jumper while dodging ethereal tentacles....

I was prepared for lots of nice cars and lovely Scottish scenery, but no-one told me that I’d fight back heart palpitations and tears in the first few minutes?! Forza Horizon 4’s intro sequence might be the best welcome to a game I’ve ever played. It positively transformed my car game fix into a full-blown round-house kick; a kick that rocketed me up into the realm of the drum and bass gods who burn donuts into tarmac and dance among the smoke....

Yes, you read that correctly. Thanks to the magic of VRidge, an app that streams VR games on your PC to your phone screen, you can now enjoy all of today’s best VR games for a fraction of the price. Well, sort of. Getting Half-Life: Alyx to run on my Cardboard wasn’t a problem. After downloading the VRidge app on my phone and its accompanying RiftCat app on my PC, the two linked together almost instantly over Wi-Fi (you can also do it by USB if you prefer) and I was right there, staring at the horrifying Valve man within minutes....

Fortunately, a few of the little turn based tactics games I’d had on the backburner for a while was Immortal Tactics Colon War of the Eternals, an excellent little fantasy combat game set on miniature hex grids. On paper, it’s a stock fantasy game with a himbo, edgelord, and nerd fighting to kill monsters and unlock new characters. But what does paper know?

I left those questions to my brain while I had a go at something I’d had my eye on already anyway. It’s called Shadow Empire. It is a grand strategy 4X wargame. I have been playing it almost every day since. It is as strategy as strategy gets, and it is so excellent it has ruined everything. It’s the premise, first. Shadow Empire is set in the space future, after a great galactic dark age following the collapse of a big ol’ interplanetary republic....

“A collective of amazing game studios and publishers have come together to create a digital multi-day press conference from June 6th-8th,” Guerrilla Collective announced today. “Teams will share new games, debut trailers while celebrating the gaming culture.” They say that game host man Greg Miller will be hosting the shebang. On the big list of participants, there will be debuts and trailers and wot not from the likes of Humble Bundle, Paradox Interactive, 11 Bit Studios, Coffee Stain, and plenty of other folks indie aficionados will be familiar with....