A few things: I have no idea what they mean, but the portals and weird computer bits look nice. 2) Some are those ghosts are great! I particularly like the little one with the whistle. A good variety of ghosts on display. 3) I am well up for punching ghosts with my magic fists. Bethesda explain: “Tokyo is overrun by deadly supernatural forces after 99% of the city’s population vanished....

Naturally, there’s quite a lot of overlap between the two retailers, and some of you will no doubt want to stick to one or the other depending on whether you prefer to play games through Steam or GOG’s Galaxy client. However, as your ever-faithful deals herald, I’ve sifted through as many of GOG and GMG’s deals as I possibly can to bring you all the best prices and the biggest discounts....

Here’s the announcement trailer: I did not know that I wanted this, but I do. I like the calm of bouncing a ball around a 2D level, I like a bit of environment storytelling, and I love the idea of chipping a golf ball through a ruined building and into a toilet. Golf Club Wasteland takes place in a future where humanity has been wiped out, except for a rich 1% who have decamped to Mars....

Port town New Baltia is available now, and will be followed in about a month by New Texas (they’d planned to release it on launch day, but that didn’t happen). Neo Tokyo and Moscow will eventually be added to round out the game. Each city has its own stories to play through, with specific gangs to deal with in each one. It seems quite a handy set-up for early access, with new content being slotted in every time the map expands....

Update: It might now be live? Surprise! t0st wrote a lengthy blog post detailing their reverse-engineering investigations, and how they found loading stalled for ages while the CPU parsed a JSON data file. They thought the method use for this was wildly inefficient, so they wrote their own patch which hooked into the game with a faster method. That made GTAO load 70% faster for them, a number so wild I was a little sceptical....

Anniversary is the remastered edition which launched on Xbox One in 2014. Now it’ll hit PC with extra technological bells and whistles including support for 60fps, 4k resolution, ultrawide resolutions, an FoV option, and such. Halo 2: Anniversary is coming May 12th to Steam and the Microsoft Store. I assume it’ll cost £6 if you buy it desperately, like Halo and Halo: Reach before it. It’s also part of the £30 Halo: The Master Chief Collection, which will grow to have most the series so far - minus Halo 5....

By this measure, I should absolutely adore indie puzzler Carto, which is all about rearranging squares on your map to forge new paths and discover lost lands so you can make your way back to your gran. It’s a lovely chill game that’s very relaxing and gentle to play, but I have big beef with it, too. Firstly, I firmly believe that maps are sacred and they should not be cut up and stuck back together again in whatever order you fancy....

In recent years we’ve had a revival of free roaming spaceflight games with… sigh. Okay, fine, Elite-likes. I still wish we got a modern version of Hardwar. A remake that captured its novel feel, and expanded on its ideas. And not another bloody MMO. Hardwar still holds up really well, although good luck finding a copy since it vanished from Dotemu several years ago. It’s the future, and lots of people are stuck living in a series of craters on one of Saturn’s moons....

I really like jigsaws (I am in the middle of doing a real life one that is a big copy of the London Underground map) but, even though I have one of those special mats to do puzzles on so you can fold them away, they’re quite inconvenient. At the same time, though, there are very few digi-jigsaws that capture the kind of tactile experience of sifting and sorting through pieces....

Or more the concept, I guess? The story is grand, sure, but the central hook is phenomenal. You see, in Katana Zero play as a samurai. Or rather, a guy cosplaying as a samurai who calls himself “The Dragon”. Or rather, a very dangerous and capable killer who just so happens to like wearing a kamishimo as he’s slicing open the stomachs of goons in a nightclub. Every morning, he’s given a contract by his therapist (normal behaviour)....

Set in a post-apocalypse with no women, you play as Brad who one day finds an abandoned baby girl, names her Buddy, and raises her in secret. Years later, Buddy is kidnapped by a militia group and Brad sets off to rescue her. When you put it like that, the story is pretty basic, but it’s so much more than it seems. The absurdist comical world together with the awful decisions forced upon you make this a special kind of bleak RPG....

Created by animated film maker Atsushi Wada and developers New Deer and Playables (the latter behind the folks behind the terribly unnerving Kids), My Exercise is a surreal, comic gem. All you have to do is tap and hold space bar to make chubby boy go up and down, but it’s what plays out in front of you that makes My Exercise such a moreish experience. It starts off relatively mundane....

It may be a spiritual successor to games like Maniac Mansion or Day Of The Tentacle, but Thimbleweed Park has a definite X-Files, or even Twin Peaksian vibe. Two FBI agents turn up to investigate a murder. A young woman investigates the dark secrets of her family. Her dead father navigates the afterlife as a sad ghost. A very sweary clown tries to get his life back together. All the things you look at, pick up, use with your nine-verb menu are rendered in gorgeous pixelart - still somehow very expressive....

The sequel to the very similar and equally stunning Alto’s Adventure, Alto’s Odyssey is a simple endless runner (or, to be more accurate, an endless snowboarder) game available on Google Play and iOS. The only thing that sets it apart from other endless runners is that it is just about the most relaxing game on the planet. Unbelievably gorgeous landscapes, a marvellous soundtrack that walks a constant tightrope between tranquil and vitalizing, and simple-but-solid controls that never demand too much of you....

There I am just wandering around collecting my loot on one of Sea Of Thieves beautiful tropical islands when the sun begins to set. I like taking a step back and admiring the vistas in Sea Of Thieves sometimes, so I stop what I’m doing and find a nice high point on the island to watch it go down. Right as it’s about to disappear, I see it. A little green warble over the edges of the sun....

Illidan’s extremely complicated backstory is borrowed, as ever in Hearthstone, from the wider Warcraft lore. I’ll be honest in saying I was initially confused as to whether he was meant to be a Demon Hunter as in “he hunts demons”, or a Demon Hunter as in “a demon who hunts stuff”. But after much research, the short answer is: both. Illidan’s… sort of a goodie, but he uses an awful lot of demons to get his work done....

Here’s a handy navigation tool to walk you through all the Priest changes: Priest cards rotated to the Hall of Fame New Priest cards added to the Classic and Basic sets Priest card changes (Buffs and Nerfs) Hearthstone’s Priest class revamped - 6 cards replaced by brand new ones Some of the most iconic cards from the Priest class are being replaced. Here’s who and why. All Priest cards rotated to the Hearthstone Hall of Fame Northshire Cleric Northshire Cleric is finally heading out of Standard format....

About a week into November, we realised that we didn’t have a very good way of flagging which of those articles Standard subscribers could actually read (our bad), and due to a combination of holidays, illness and general busy-ness, we completely failed to come up with a solution. Apologies! To remedy that, I’ve now listed all of them below. Enjoy! To reiterate, every article listed below can be read by both Standard and Premium supporters....

I don’t know where to start, so I’ll go alphabetically. Carrier Command 2 is like being on the bridge of the Avenger’s Helicarrier, but in the 80s. The basic idea is you have control of the carrier and all its systems from the cockpit, while fighting for control of an archipelago. Each island has a lot of defenses. You decide which one to attack, and how you go about securing the whole area....

So, yes, let’s post about the 14 minutes of new Horizon Forbidden West footage. It’s very pretty. This must be the fabled “next-gen” I’ve been hearing so much about. It does look better than most other games around, particularly when large objects are falling apart into lots of smaller objects. The footage shows new additions to the Horizon series, like substantial underwater exploration, mounted combat, and a new glider. There’s a lot that’s familiar from Zero Dawn, too....