Right, disclaimers up front for this one. I’ve known Tom Francis, developer of Gunpoint, for at least fifteen years. I remember when he was hired as Disc Editor (“What’s a ‘disc’, grandpa?”) for PC Gamer, I’ve eaten homemade pizza round his house, and felt cool because I already knew him when he was all super-famous at GDC in 2014. I can in no sensible way be expected to be objective about his creations. Fortunately I’ve never tried to be objective about anything in my life, and Tom’s now so successful he probably can’t even perceive the atoms I’m made of [exemplified in the further disclaimer that he used to write a column for us – ed.]>. So I thought I’d have another play of Gunpoint.

It’s awful, isn’t it?

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Reading, England. A town that’s big enough to be a city, but somehow is not. It was where Gunpoint entered my life. Of all the hard drives in the world, it had to be installed on mine.

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I’m not sure if Heat Signature [official site] will be labelled as a comedy game when it goes on sale, but I haven’y played a funnier game in recent years. Your role in each brief life that you lead is to earn money by completing missions that involve kidnapping, assassination and theft, so that you can use the money to buy information regarding an end-game mission that is personal to your character. Get that job done and your character can retire happy. Fail and you’re most likely a popsicle drifting through the void.

Here’s how it all works, and how my most recent character died.

… [visit site to read more]

It has been many moons since we last looked at the sneaky, top-down spaceship invading of Heat Signature [official site] but work has not ceased. A new trailer shows some new looks for the different factions you ll be encountering, as well as explaining how a few of your hero s teleporter skills work. In the process, creator Tom Francis fails to sneak through a high-difficulty level, proving that the game will fit neatly into the genre of Stealth But Things Go Badly Wrong. … [visit site to read more]

Below you will find the 25 best stealth games ever released on PC. There are sneaking missions, grand thefts, assassinations, escapes and infiltrations. Stay low, keep quiet and we’ll make it to the end.

… [visit site to read more]

Three weeks ago the UK telecoms provider TalkTalk was hacked, allegedly by a band of teenagers, compromising some 157,000 users details. This week hacktivist group Anonymous released personal details of hundreds of members of the Ku Klux Klan. And now the UK government wants a record of all the websites you’ve visited to be stored for 12 months, to be accessed at the discretion of police and security services. Clearly, we already live in a constantly evolving cyberpunk dystopia. But if this Gibsonist world is just too REAL for you, we have put together the ten best videogames about hacking, programming and computing so you can escape into meta-dystopia. Which I’m sure is a much better place.

… [visit site to read more]

The latest series of The Great British Bake Off has come to an end, causing those of us hooked by its cream-filled buns, end-of-the-pier puns, and oddly sincere celebration of the human spirit, to feel as empty inside as an incompletely prepared batch of jam donuts. After a few days spent facing a future free from sugar, gluten, and the strange tension between Paul Hollywood and hosts Mel & Sue, I decided to do something about it. I emailed some game designers and asked them a question: if you were charged with making a computer game of The Great British Bake Off, how would you do it?

The answers are below.

… [visit site to read more]

Heat Signature [official site] is an action/stealth game in which you can go inside the spaceships, from the team behind Gunpoint. I played a recent build last week and spoke to its lead designer Tom Francis about how how it’s grown into a game of factional war, if it can ever be finished, comedy wrench KOs and the awkwardness of journalists covering ex-journalists’ games. By which I mean: disclaimer – I used to work at the same magazine company as Tom, and we socialised on occasion.>

Heat Signature’s pratfalls-in-space concepts were a giggle already, but the scope has expanded dramatically since the first time I saw it, less than a year ago. It’s becoming Galactic Civilizations as well as this sort of high-speed, outer space heist game. Gunpoint’s use of physics as both freeform puzzle and source of Three Stooges comedy ethos is very clearly in there, as is a shared determination to ensure the player is doing their own thing in any given second of the game, but as well as stealing procedurally-generated spaceships you now get to play galactic factions against each other in a persistent universe. This wasn’t the original plan.

… [visit site to read more]

The world’s most accurate ranking of the 25 best puzzle games ever to reach a computer. Plucking the peak of PC puzzling, we break down what makes them so special, and put them in the correct order. Read on for more time travel, rearranged tiles, hidden objects and hexed cells than you could ever want.

… [visit site to read more]

The turn-based sneaking, leaping, climbing, stabbing, swinging, and sword-flinging of Ronin caught our eye last August with a free prototype, and my it’s come a long way since then! A new trailer shows slick sequences of its cyberninja scaling buildings, smashing through windows, dodging bullets, and stabbing the heck out of cybermen. Tomasz Waclawek’s game caught the keen eye of publishers Devolver Digital too, as they’ve announced they’re helping bring Ronin to release later this year, fleshed-out and fancied-up. Really, come see how cool this murder looks:

… [visit site to read more]