Along with helping out spirits and drinking lashings of tea, Spirittea lets you live out your time as a writer seeking quietude in an East Asian village. There’ll be villagers to make friends with and hobbies to take up. It’s inspired by Stardew Valley, natch, but also supernatural anime and manga. You’ll be helped in your spirit-bothering efforts by a cat ghost called Wonyan. Get good enough at attracting spirits to your bathhouse and Lord Spirits will rock up, which take up a whole room each....

The news shared by head of PlayStation Studios Hermen Hulst via Twitter: Hulst points out in a followup tweet that Nixxes have worked with Sony before, helping Guerrilla Software to launch Killzone Shadowfall on PS4 back in 2013. We’ve primarily written about Nixxes over the past ten years, however, when covering Square Enix games, as Nixxes were responsible for the PC ports of Deus Ex: Human Revolution, every recent Tomb Raider game, and Marvel’s Avengers....

Using the Camera Obscura weapon, you’ll have to travel up a haunted mountain, tackling the spirits that haunt the area’s streams. As the withering spooks launch themselves at you, you have to frame photos that’ll damage the spirits. The closer you get, the higher the damage. It sounds an awful lot like trying to take a photo of my mum, tbh. Swapping the camera’s lenses and film will let you fight stronger ghouls, or help you to investigate clues....

Over the weekend, the Star Citizen devs, Cloud Imperium, held a Q&A over on their forums as part of its birthday celebrations. Despite rules on the thread saying fans weren’t allowed to ask about “timelines or schedules”, that is exactly what they did. As it turns out, the story game set in its universe, Squadron 42, is still a long ways off. “Squadron 42 will be done when it is done, and will not be released just to make a date but instead once all the tech and content is finished, polished and it plays great,” says director Chris Roberts....

The thing to remind me this time: an extremely brief video showing the creation of some key art, alongside a quote from lead artist Istvan Pely, who describes Starfield’s aesthetic as “NASA-Punk”. Here’s the video, which is admittedly of a nice piece of key art: “Early on in this project when we were trying to establish the overall aesthetic of this game, we sort of coined the term ‘NASA-Punk’ to describe a sci-fi universe that’s a little more grounded and relatable,” Pely told the official Xbox site....

The Steam Awards are always slightly odd, because they’re user-voted and they often favour games with large online playerbases. The clearest example of that this year is maybe Forza Horizon 5 winning “outstanding visual style.” It’s a very pretty game, for sure, but is its style outstanding? The runners up included Subnautica Below Zero, Little Nightmares 2, Bright Memory: Infinite, and Psychonauts 2 which honestly probably should have won. Resident Evil Village took Game Of The Year, but perhaps most interesting is that Cyberpunk 2077 won “outstanding story-rich game”....

“We’ve renamed the Steam Game Festival to more directly communicate its focus,” Valve say on their new event page. “Announcing Steam Next Fest, a multi-day celebration of upcoming games.” Next Fest rolls off the tongue nicer anyhow, and now it doesn’t have such a tragically similar name to Geoff Keighley’s Summer Game Fest shebang. Yup, no complaints here. Ta, Valve. Aside from the name change, it sounds like we can exect about the same from Next Fest as we did from their previous demo weeks....

Of course, it’s no good laying out your plans for conquest if loading times kill you first. Fortunately, the Necroids arrive alongside a free update that’s set to dramatically improve Stellaris’s load times. Obviously inspired by Vin Diesel classic The Chronicles Of Riddick, the Necromongers Necroids are a new species archetype, complete with their own portraits, backdrops, names and ship designs. A nice batch of visuals and themes to help you lean into the role of the most ghoulish rascals in the galaxy, sure, but evil requires more than just a scary face....

Love looks simple enough to fiddle with in short bursts until you’ve shaken all the secrets out of its turning tumbler tenements. Each floor has something going on between the characters and rotating those floors can change whether those things happened in the past or present. You’ll move these bits around to solve puzzles and “help your friends resolve their pasts and live their best lives,” Rocketship Park say. “Love is a game that explores the many kinds of relationships we have in our lives and the heartfelt pangs that come with their absence,” says Rocketship Park’s co-founder Shane McCafferty in their press release....

Stray doesn’t have that many graphics settings, so this’ll be a relatively quick guide to tuning performance. In fact, if you’ve got one of the best graphics cards – or any fairly recent, mid-range or above rig – you may not need to lower any settings at all at 1080p and 1440p. High framerates at 4K and ultrawide resolutions are doable too, and while developers BlueTwelve Studio tell me Stray uses a “subset” of ray tracing, you don’t need specific, RT-capable GPUs get the best lighting and reflections....

As a bit of setup, Fraser Brown tried it out all the way back in 2018 and didn’t have the best time of it. In his World War 3 premature evaluation he did compliment the feel of its various guns and the distinctions between them, but everything else needed quite a bit of work. “These maps don’t tell a story, and the battles that play out in them aren’t very coherent....

Team Ninja also detailed the game’s Season Pass, which includes three DLC packs (also available for purchase separately) and an exclusive Qinglong Armour cosmetic. The DLC packs promise to add “new officers, new demons, new scenarios, new stages, new weapon types and more.” Wo Long will have two separate editions for PC players, the Standard version and the Digital Deluxe Edition, the latter of which will include the Season Pass, cosmetics, and digital versions of the art book and soundtrack....

“For 12 years, the teams at Tequila Works have passionately crafted high-quality titles that radiated our personal sensibilities”, said Rubio. “But there’s a limit to how much you can grow by yourself. “This partnership will allow us to focus on taking the original IPs we are known for to greater heights and create the best experiences we can dream of,” Rubio said. We’ve liked a lot of Tequila Works’ games....

Hey - this also means that Tetris Effect is going to come to the newly announced Steam Deck, the first time it’s appeared on a handheld machine. A friend recently pointed out how good the original Tetris Effect trailer is, and heck, they’re not wrong: If Tetris Effect were a person, it might be one of the most irritating people you’ve ever met. Imagine a person in a dolphin t-shirt, stoned, alternately talking about the interconnectedness of everything and trying to convince you that they’re a super-taster....

“Retro enthusiasts, casual and hardcore gamers, content creators, and esports professionals will consider Atari Hotels as a unique place to call their home away from home,” Atari Hotels said upon unveiling the new designs on Wednesday. God help us. Atari Hotels will have retro arcades! A nightclub! A speakeasy! Themed restaurants and bars! VR and AR doodads! An Atari Hotels merch store! The designs look straight out of a sci-fi film, and seem quite unlikely:...

It has, admittedly, been £30 before – this isn’t a new low for Logitech’s headset – but there’s no arguing that it’s a steal at such a price. It sounds fantastic, not just by budget peripheral standards but in general, with a sense of sonic clarity that other cheap headsets simply haven’t matched. Microphone quality is exceptionally high as well, and while it grants the ability to listen with (surprisingly effective) virtual 7....

This is one of our chunkier hardware guides, as it’s not just geared towards getting the most out of high-end graphics cards. There are some great monitors that will do just that, of course, and we’re maintaining a separate list of the best 4K gaming monitors – but right here, we’ve also included our favourite cheap 1080p monitors, as well as 1440p monitors that strike a comfortable balance between pixel richness and FPS performance....

The makers of The Sims 4 are well aware of the importance of modding in their game’s community, to the point that they actively provide a degree of in-game support for mods on PC and Mac. Below we’ve put together an easy-to-follow set of instructions on how to install and run mods in The Sims 4, as well as our selection of the 15 best mods (from tune-ups to total tear-downs) to enhance your game right now....

The (creatively named) Markarth DLC is the gripping conclusion to the Dark Heart Of Skyrim, ESO’s year-long event that’s placed players in the midst of a war between vampires and werewolves. The devs say the expansion will let players explore a new zone in the Reach (where the city of Markarth is situated), and is introducing a new solo arena, too. Players with ESO Plus will automatically get the DLC with their membership when it releases, the rest of you will need to buy the expansion from the in-game Crown Store....

Matthew continues the Wolfe Carlton saga, Nate is making a crayfish into a mini-model, and I have a cold. A regular cold! No funny business. Matthew also does a very hard Cavern Of Lies this week that honestly nearly has us. Links Hard to do links this week, because we talk about broad sort of themes rather than pointing to named examples in games. BUT! Matthew likens his ideal inventory shuffling system to Resident Evil 4, and specifically wants life to operate like Tetris (i....