I felt strongly about The Evil Within when it first came out. By “strongly” I mean I pretty much hated it.

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US President Donald Trump yesterday held a private meeting to discuss the issue of violence in video games, having suggested after February’s murders at a school in Parkland, Florida that it “is really shaping young people’s thoughts.” This would clearly amount to nothing productive, given mostly industry representatives and conservative pressure groups were attending, but it is a surprise that Trump showed attendees a short video montage of video game deaths. The White House have released this publicly, so we can all see a sloppy montage of deaths from Call of Duty: Modern Warfare 2, Fallout 4, and more. Somehow it isn’t a surprise that some clips are clearly ripped from YouTubers – watermarks and all. (more…)

You probably know what to expect when you load up a game called The Evil Within [official site]. There will be a bunch of logos before you get to the menu and at least one of them will involve barbed wire, splattered blood and sinister fonts. The logo for the first game turned some of the letters of the title into a nail that was variously plunging toward an eyeball or piercing a brain. Of course it did. That’s what horror games do>.

When the horror games in question are made by Tango Gameworks, though, there’s something else in between all that noisy violence. A cheeky cartoon snail…doing a poo?

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Last week I popped off to play Bethesda and Tango Gameworks’ upcoming survival horror sequel The Evil Within 2, which adds open world elements to its stomp through a town filled with science-gone-wrong monstrosities. You can read what I thought about it in my Evil Within 2 impressions here, or alternatively you can watch what I did and how many times I got killed by snickering things> in the hour-long video below. (more…)

Let’s all go on holiday! To a twisted horror-world that exists solely as the manifestation of a fractured and agonised mind. Sure, the walls will probably bleed and that clock over there is definitely screaming about the severed threads of temporal stability, but there’s so much to see and do. And let’s not forget all the wonderful people we’ll meet as we hike from one attraction to the next.

There’s Stefano Valentini, for instance. He used to be a photojournalist but now he’s an artist who likes nothing more than creating tableaux of peoples’ dying moments. And because it’s not every day you stumble across someone’s dying moment, he’s taken to creating some magical moments of his own. By murdering people. The Evil Within 2 [official site] looks as gruesomely and gloriously daft as the first, and I am totally on board with this nasty disciple of Sander Cohen.

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The Evil Within [official site] clicked for me the second time I played it, which makes me regret my slightly sniffy review when I read it back. It s a schlocky tour through all kinds of horrors, riffing on director Miyakami s own Resident Evil past as well as a host of other subgenres and tropes. Even though there s a central plot underneath all the reality shifts, it almost feels like an anthology.

Yesterday’s cgi-heavy reveal trailer didn’t tell me a whole lot about what to expect from the sequel, but today’s “gameplay trailer” gives a better idea despite using some of the same scenes. It looks gorgeous, in that grisly, grimy sort of way.

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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.

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The Advertising Standards Agency publishes rulings every Wednesday on everything from psychic hotlines to videogames. I’m incredibly fond of their rulings. I think it’s mostly because of the language the companies use to defend themselves, breaking videogame concepts down and presenting them in what’s intended to be a neutral manner.

The upheld complaints are generally less entertaining for obvious reasons the concerns have been, in some sense, valid. But the *not upheld* complaints often have an air of the ridiculous about them. Through the formal structure of the rulings you get a sense of raised eyebrows or rolled eyes, of overblown sincerity. I’ve also learned some unexpected things, like how many sugar puffs are in a portion…

Here are some of my favourites from the last few years:

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Below you will find the 25 best horror games ever released on PC. To ensure the list was as accurate as possible, the compiler was locked in a dark cellar with a copy of every game in existence and a computer capable of running them all. Two weeks later, the following article was found written on the walls in blood (the postscript was recorded on an audiolog). The writer was nowhere to be seen.

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What are the best Steam Summer Sale deals? Each day for the duration of the sale, we’ll be offering our picks – based on price, what we like, and what we think more people should play. Read on for the five best deals from day 3 of the sale.>

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