It’s also, probably, trying a bit hard to be Lynchian, but that doesn’t mean it isn’t enjoyable. You play as three different characters over the different acts of the Knee Deep, investigating the suspicious death of a past-his-prime actor, and your actions and dialogue choices change the possible outcome of the game. The cast of strange supporting characters, all called things like Chip and Lurlene, are as intriguing as they are known tropes....

Planet Zoo always seemed like an incredibly dense game, the kind that might take dozens or even hundreds of hours before you get a good handle on how to play it well. I was reluctant to give up that much of my free time to it, until I gave it a go and played through the tutorial. “I could always refund it if I don’t get into it”, I thought....

TCFACP is better because the aliens are not saviours. They do not come down to fight for us. They show us that the tools are already here. The people already need a better way. The old system is worse than beyond saving, it’s the source of the problem, and in order to create something better we must first destroy the old. The relief of tension when you’re finally able to let loose and hurl a molotov at the riot cops....

Looking back at my time as a season ticket holder, there’s been some unbelievable highs. When Mikele Leigertwood sent the Royals to promotion by bundling the ball in against Nottingham Forest, I was one of those kids who invaded the pitch afterwards. It’s the feeling that you’re part of something larger than yourself, surrounded by jubilant fans and family, while other fans look on in jealousy. It’s also because those moments are fleeting....

It’s a fairly challenging little strategy game that can be played out in the span of perhaps 10 minutes. And, strangely, it’s just about the only strategy game I routinely play where I haven’t the slightest desire to get any better at it. There’s a surprising amount of complexity in the systems of Plague Inc. In most cases, evolving your disease is a delicate balancing act. You’ll generally want to maximise your creation’s infectiousness first, before suddenly cranking up the lethality once you’ve passed the point of no return....

Broadly speaking, Ring Of Pain is nothing revolutionary. It’s a dungeon crawler where you collect loot, attempt to synergise it into something broken enough to get to the bottom, and get sent back to the start when you die trying. There is a twist, in that each level of the dungeon sees you moving around a ring of cards representing monsters, treasures, or portals to other rooms, but beyond that, the format is instantly familiar....

Strive’s launch trailer here gets into the story bits. There’s drama. There’s action. There’s either world peace or a world war and I’m sure the person who makes the decision is one of these two large lads with their even larger swords. When it comes to the actual fighting parts, which I imagine is what folks are really into at the end of the day, Strive promises some new moves to tickle the veterans and a warm welcome for fighting game newbies....

How did we go from a strange and potentially-murderous man trying to trap a nosy child, to being chased by a straight-up supernatural being? …I don’t like the way that it moves. The game is being developed by Eerie Guest Studios (formerly known as Dynamic Pixels), the same folks that did the first one. In it you play as a journalist, presumably trying to find out what on Earth is going on in this freaky town....

Each puzzle begins with a board of blank hexagons, with one pre-marked safe-to-click title. You mark tiles as safe by left-clicking them, which will reveal a number. As in Minesweeper, the number indicates the number of adjacent tiles that are “dangerous”. You mark a dangerous tile by right-clicking. A puzzle is solved when all tiles have been correctly identified. There’s a wonderful rhythm to this, even in its most basic puzzles....

The image was posted via the Kojima Productions website. It shows Kutsuna’s face in close-up, with “A Hideo Kojima Game” written along the side of the picture. Every few seconds, it switches to a black image with the words “How come?” in white. You can see both below: Kutsuna is best known for playing Yukio in Deadpool 2, although she’s also appeared in Adam Sandler’s Murder Mystery and in a main role in the Apple TV+ series Invasion....

I particularly like the various animations for wee ships deploying from larger ones. “Homeworld 3 is the realization of the vision of what we set out to create in the Homeworld series, with modern technology allowing us to push beyond our wildest dreams of large-scale dynamic space combat packed with emotional sci-fi storytelling,” said Blackbird Interactive CEO Rob Cunningham, who was art director on Homeworld 1 and 2. As before, Homeworld 3 is a real-time strategy game about leading a fleet of spaceships who persist across missions, carrying the scars (and absences) of past battles....

“Endure and escape three unforgettable nightmares,” Amanita explain. “Solve deeply disturbing puzzles in (not so) charming environments. Deal with suspicious smiley faces and pink bunnies. Creepy songs and screeches from the Czech freakfolk band DVA.” The new trailer is actually more unsettling than the description lets on. It sure is a sickly-sweet color palette for bloody smily faces and guillotines. Lots of messed up stuff in there, but for my money the angler fish like smiley monster is probably the worst, luring you in to its grabby hands and bloody mouth with the promise of a cuddly stuffed bunny....

“You have to bear in mind that Deliver Us The Moon was our debut into the games industry,” he tells me. “We’d envisioned multiple ways to make this the greatest game of all time, but to some extent you are bound by reality and what you can make within a budget and timeline, so some of these decisions were made out of necessity. That’s why the narrative and its scale has significantly risen with Deliver Us Mars – we’ve had the opportunity to give that side of the game a lot of more of our time and attention....

On this page, we’ll cover everything you need to know to unlock the FSS Hurricane, including how it works within that confusing weapon platform tree. How to unlock the FSS Hurricane in Modern Warfare 2 The FSS Hurricane is part of the M4 weapon unlock tree. You’ll have access to the M4 from the very start of the game; and, as with each individual gun in MW2, using it will cause your proficiency with that weapon to improve and level up....

If you want the stats, Amplitude say that Humankind has 60 cultures which can be made into over 1 million different combinations as you progress through the eras towards fame. There are 129 units and ten biomes and 122 costumes for your very customizable avatar. Boy howdy, they certainly do have the numbers. How does all that quantity stack up in quality though? Nate gave Humankind a go earlier this summer, after getting to try it out last year as well....

Thankfully, Cyber Monday is here with a deal that knocks a few quid off what was already an affordable chiller, making it even better for first-time builders and anyone looking to upgrade from stock coolers on a limited budget. Hardware ed James keeps a Hyper 212 Evo V2 among his testing arsenal, and it came within just a few degrees of some expensive liquid coolers on the Intel Core i5-12600K....

Unsurprisingly, then, when Avatar: Frontiers Of Pandora was announced at Ubisoft Forward last night, I shrugged. Weird flex, etc. But in the course of watching the trailer, I changed my mind. It told us nothing about what the actual game will be like, but it made me realise there’s at least a lot more potential here than I might have thought. Here’s why. Now, I don’t know whether it’s because games have a long history of being considered as lesser media to films, or because more of their overall entertainment value comes from the thrill of player agency, but when it comes to imagination, I’ve always held games to a lower standard than movies....

The preview was the tutorial stage for Maximilian, one of the evil geniuses you get to play as, but the tutorial took about six hours, because there is a lot of strategy to this strategy game. Your underground lair has to include living facilities for your minions, a science lab, a communications room, a training room, a vault for all your gold (because megalomaniacs obviously adhere to the gold standard), and so on and so forth....