Imagine you re on a quest for a powerful artefact in Divinity: Original Sin 2. Perhaps you conversed with a ghost who pointed you in the right direction. Now you see demons close by. You cast Chameleon Cloak to try to sneak by, but alas! you are spotted. The fight begins. You draw your weapons, inscribed with runes. You weave protective spells. You summon your cat familiar to enter the fray and confound your enemies. A fireball scroll sets a puddle of oil ablaze, but you misjudged and now you re on fire as well! But a potion you concocted earlier heals your wounds just in time.

It s a typical scenario for D:OS2 and similar fantasy RPGs. Magic is everywhere, and you could barely swing your cat familiar by the tail without hitting a fellow Sorcerer (don t do that though, it s cruel). But where do these spells, demons and artefacts come from? Games have so inundated us with magic that it s easy to forget that even the most outlandish, videogamey spectacles have their Source-drenched roots in historical beliefs and practices. (more…)

Roguelike card game Slay the Spire has swept through the RPS dungeons like a powerful disease, covering us in tiny, number-shaped pustules. In search of a cure, we spoke to its designers, Anthony Giovannetti and Casey Yano of Mega Crit Games. Read on to learn some of their methods and future plans. We’ve already told you they’ll almost certainly be adding more characters. But did you know they tested the game on expert Netrunner players? (more…)

When Intel and AMD said they were teaming up for a new kind of 8th Gen Core processor with onboard AMD Radeon RX Vega M graphics, many assumed (myself included) that this would be the start of a new, if slightly weird and wonderful relationship between the once bitter rivals.

However, it would appear that the future of Intel’s AMD Vega CPUs will rest very much on the success of its initial launch this spring, according to AMD CEO Lisa Su, suggesting the partnership may be a one-time-only deal if it doesn’t take off.

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What s it called in movies, I asked my collegues this evening, when a scientist sees a big alien or a monster, and all they can do is say how beautiful it is before they are eaten to bits?

That s admiring the abomination, explained Adam.

Well, you see this disgusting crimson abomination of bloody tendrils in monster videogame Carrion? I admire it. (more…)

If there are two things I love in life, it’s Final Fantasy and 21:9 monitors. It’s a select group of interests, I’ll admit, but when I heard that Final Fantasy XII was finally coming to PC (tomorrow, no less) with both 21:9 and multi-monitor support, I knew what I had to do. Yep, today marks the start of my 21:9 ultra-wide monitor group test to find the perfect display for playing Final Fantasy XII: The Zodiac Age on PC, and the first monitor on the gambit table is the Philips 349X7FJEW.

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You might think you’re made of stern stuff after beating Cuphead, but have you the bottle for Anchorhead? The Lovecraftian interactive fiction from 1998 “has been pretty consistently considered one of the greats of the noncommercial IF canon ever since”, Emily Short told us, and now it’s fancier than ever. Creator Michael Gentry has launched an ‘Illustrated Edition’ which, obviously, includes a whole load of illustrations to go along with the text parser action. This seems a fine time to visit a Massachusetts coastal town and get caught up in something terrible. (more…)

Note – this piece presumes familiarity with Wolfenstein 2’s entire plot, and as such contains some spoilers, though no specific character fates are discussed. >

Out this week is part two of ‘The Freedom Chronicles’, a triptych of story-led DLC for last year’s pretty decent singleplayer shooter Wolfenstein 2: The New Colossus, giving us a pretty clear sense of what’s on offer from the season pass. (You can buy the episodes separately, but it ends up being 30% more expensive if you end up getting all of ’em that way). To whit, is it worth forking out for? In short: ehhhhhhhh. (more…)

Back, back, back when we are all a lot clearer on what ‘indie game’ really meant, there was a series of roleplaying games from Jeff Vogel’s teeny-tiny studio Spiderweb Software. They were 2D, they were resolutely singleplayer, they offered massive freedom of movement and character development and… well, I keep using the past tense, but Spiderweb have kept on fighting their good fight since 1995. In fact, this week they’re capping up a spit’n’polished’n’ground-up redone remake of their early-noughties Avernum series. Which was itself a spit’n’polished’n’ground-up redone remake of their mid-90s Exile series.

Which might all sound horribly complicated, but they’re billing today’s quasi-new Avernum 3: Ruined World as a clean entry-point for anyone who’s never been down this particular rabbit hole before. (more…)

You can tell Blizzard are based in California because they see summer as something to escape from, a cruel and terrible season where people need something big to occupy themselves in the air-conditioned indoors. We can tell this because Blizzard have announced plans to release the next World of Warcraft expansion, Battle for Azeroth, sometime this summer. O dreaded summer, when temperatures in Irvine, California can reach temperatures of 29C and it does not rain a t a l l. A perilous season to avoid however possible. Best to retreat to cyberspace and wage virtuawar. (more…)

Subnautica is remarkable for a great many reasons, and one of them is a particular creature discovered at about 300m deep, stomping their way in long processions across a well worn path of the seabed. The Sea Treaders. These titanic crustaceans(?) are a herd of complete joy. (more…)