I’m going to do my absolute best to tell you about The Quarry with no spoilers, but it will be hard because a lot of what marks it out as better and cleverer and funner than comparable horrorventure romps is all tangled up in the plot. It’s an interactive story you control with split-second decisions and quick time events; it is mostly plot. Broadly, it is the story of a group of camp counselors, one night in a quarry-based summer camp, and how baffling organisational choice can lead to ruin....

It’s the grand tales of adventure from Wildermyth! Sin Vega: Seeing this succeed has been the highlight of my year. Not just for inflating my ego, because I’ve been championing Wildermyth for years, but thinking about the hundreds of thousands of hours it means people have enjoyed with this absolutely phenomenal game. We celebrate many games as “story generators”, a phrase that could be mistaken for synonymous with “sandbox” given how often they coincide....

First things first. The raw, beating production heart of The Settlers is very much intact. As in The Settlers games of yore, if you want your blooming township to eat, you’re going to have to build a farm to produce the wheat, a windmill to grind that wheat into flour, and then a bakery to pound said flour into delicious loaves of bread. You’ll need to do this while also making sure you’ve got dirt tracks or gravel pathways connecting these buildings to the central warehouse, and enough spare workers and residences to staff each place....

I’ve spent years modding PC games while fretting over the fact that mobile games and the Nintendo Switch are all locked down tight. As a picky player, I’d now much rather grab Stardew Valley on the Deck so I can download Lookup Anything (it even has direct Linux support) than have to play without that knowledge on the Nintendo Switch. It’s an open system, so the game won’t even need to be on Steam to work....

Well, sort of. Big video game news is coming in drips and drabs, so Headlines and Hot Takes isn’t packed with massive stories or anything, but we do have a few things to talk about. Deus Ex lead designer Harvey Smith is working on a new game, so we discuss whether that could be a new Dishonored or something entirely different. Also, it may be nothing, but there’s a rumour floating around that Ubisoft Plus is coming to Xbox Game Pass....

Funnily enough, the new global illumination setting works well, and even using basic ray tracing settings means you avoid the sudden performance drop that rasterised settings now endure. More on that in a bit, but when I benchmarked the non-RT Ultra and High presets, it became clear that something about this patch is seriously broken. Back on the 4.00 patch, and following December’s significant hotfix, my RTX 3070-based test PC averaged 105fps on Ultra quality at 1440p....

CD Projekt Red said The Witcher 3’s Complete Edition update will be free to anyone who owns “any release” of the game, but you’ll also be able to buy it as a standalone game as well. The Witcher 3: Wild Hunt - Complete Edition will include all free DLC released to date and the game’s two major expansions, Hearts Of Stone and Blood And Wine. The update was first announced back in September 2020, but it’s been delayed several times since....

IGN got to play the opening of the game at 2560x1440 and 60fps, which looks rather nice. And they did us all a favour by skipping the cut-scenes. Context, as we all know, is the refuge of cowards… Ok, I’ll be a bit cowardly. You are a husband looking for his wife in post-apocalyptic Oregon. Why can’t it be something else? If it was a game about finding a lost cat, I’d be all over it....

After playing a new UE5 tech demo from Japanese studio Historia, however, I am fully converted to the merits of Epic’s new game engine. At 20GB-odd, The Market Of Light is a hefty download for its 15-20 run-time, but this freeform exploration game is absolutely worth a look if your PC meets its surprisingly reasonable tech requirements - especially if you’re a fan of games that feature cooking. Seriously, Epic’s Tomb Raider lady can get stuffed....

As we explore the castle and its grounds we’ll find a bunch of new weapons to equip and enemies to slay. Just from the trailer, it all looks mightily impressive. There’s a real mixture of environments, and we’ve got everything from dingy crypts where ghost brides wail, to vast open courtyards lit by the glow of the moon. These new nasties look devious too. We catch a glimpse of an evil phantom which lurks in the shadows waiting to strike, and swarms of corrupted knights who try and overwhelm you with sheer numbers....

Get an RTX 3060 PC for £1150 The Ryzen 5 5600X and RTX 3060 are a great combination for 1080p or 1440p gaming, and the 16GB of RAM and 1TB SSD are exactly what we’d recommend for a mid-range system, so this Scan build is right on the money. To see just how good of a deal this is though, we put the parts into PCPartPicker. If you got every component here from the retailer selling it cheapest, you’d expect to pay around £700 for the CPU, motherboard, RAM, SSD, case, power supply and Windows 10....

Still… it’s good craic. We focus on a different year every week, and this week we’ve gone back to 2014. Teasing any of the games would be giving away the answers, so instead I’ll tell you that this edition of MSR has one of the worst usages of the Genre lifeline in this competition’s long and storied history. Something to look forward to before you hit play. While it may be tough to play along while we’re chatting, screaming and making general noise, I would love to know how many of the 10 answers you got....

TIE Fighter: Total Conversion is a mod for Star Wars: X-Wing Alliance, perfectly recreating one of the best space games and arguably best ever Star Wars game of all time, Star Wars: TIE Fighter. It once again has me plugging in my headset and dusting off my joystick. It’s such a simple fix alongside the luxurious lighting and superb modelling, but I love the galactic backdrops they’ve added. It really makes it all pop....

“We have been working on plans to bring the TimeSplitters franchise back to life, and are pleased to let you know that we are setting up a new Deep Silver development studio to do just that,” Deep Silver tweeted. “Free Radical Design is reforming and will be headed up by industry and TimeSplitters veterans, Steve Ellis and David Doak.” Development hasn’t started though, so they don’t have much else to say....

When Microsoft announced the resurrection of Perfect Dark in December 2020, they didn’t have much to say about it, simply saying it’s “a secret agent thriller set in a near-future world”. Apparently the world was mucked up by ecological disasters then megacorps stepped in to rebuild and it turns out megacorps are bad? I’d assume it’s a first-person shooter still, but who knows. It does have guns, at least. Look, you can see one in the picture for today’s team-up announcement: “The teams couldn’t pass up a chance to work together,” The Initiative added....

There will be a full set of patch notes for 2.0 along tomorrow, alongside all the new DLC, but for now here’s the video: The video begins by detailing some major new features. The Warriors Of Chaos are receiving a campaign rework with four new legendary lords, including new God-given “chaos gifts” to boost your faction, a vassal-based settlement structure, the ability to hire mercenaries to join your warband, a warband upgrade tree, and more....

I will click on any Trombone Champ video I come across online, however. Armed with some community-made modding tools, creative players have added custom songs to the game, with custom models and backgrounds. At their best, these videos turn a good joke into a complete comedy sketch. And the person making them at their best is Gloomhonk. This post is now just a series of briefly described YouTube embeds. To start with, here’s Gloomhonk’s take on Don’t Stop Believin’, starring a guitarist who grows increasingly enraged that his solos have been stolen by the trombonist: Here’s 2017 world peace anthem Big Enough, the chorus for which works on trombone at least as well as it does when screamed by an aging cowboy: Here’s Chariots Of Fire set inside a trombone-themed gym with motivational slogans encouraging you to “train like a champ” and “only settle for perfecto”: It’s not complicated but the intro to this Initial D homage is pitch perfect: Finally, here’s Liz Truss’s resignation speech: There’s more to watch over on Gloomhonk’s channel, although none are as fancy as those above....

The Wordle2Townscaper tool by Tarmo Annus offers several ways to feed in your grid: getting the info from your tweet, letting you paste that grid in directly, or manually by building it with buttons. Then it’ll generate that grid as a Townscaper building, offering you a code you can copy/paste into the full game to load or letting you see it in Townscaper’s browser-based demo. Impressive! Townscaper creator Oskar Stålberg celebrated by sharing his shame over today’s puzzle....

During an investor call, chief financial officer Frederick Duguet said the cancellations were the result of the “uncertain economic environment,” and that it would allow Ubisoft to “even more focus on our biggest development opportunities.” Ghost Recon Frontline was announced in October last year and was meant to enter a closed beta shortly thereafter. That beta was cancelled 24 hours before it was due to start, with the game’s Twitter account posting a message to say that they were “dedicated to creating the best experience possible....

Having dropped into Warzone 2, a lot since its launch, Hayden and I pick apart everything that sets it apart from the original, which - aside from the map - are lots of small details: the looting, the pacing, the buy stations, and more. It may seem like a similar experience to the first, but many of these little tweaks add up to create a very different battle royale feel....