GTA Online has added a new mode called Bomb Ball to its Arena War lineup, and it's basically an explosive, multi-ball version of Rocket League.
Rockstar calls it "the Los Santos spin on soccer": two teams take to the arena in souped-up cars and try to push enormous bombs into the opposition's goal. Make sure the ball isn't in your half when it explodes.
You can get the idea from the short clip below. It'll be available to play until January 14, and anyone that gets behind the wheel will receive double GTA$ & RP.
It's part of GTA Online's series of holiday updates, which will give players free gifts just for logging on. You'll get a gift every day between now and January 1—they're all listed here (scroll down to the "Festive Calendar" section), and they include sweaters, liveries and fireworks.
Additionally, you'll receive two free T-shirts if you play before January 7, which is also the cut-off point for double GTA$/RP for completing certain activities, including biker contract missions and gunrunning sales, and discounts on various items, such as hangars and aircraft. You can read about all them all in Rocktar's post.
Lastly, there's a new sleek car for purchase called the Grotti Itali GTO, pictured below. You can buy it from Legendary Motorsport.
The developers of pirate MMO Atlas have apologised for the game's "rocky start" to life in Early Access, and have promised to tackle its performance and stability problems with daily updates.
In a Steam post, the Grapeshot Games team said their "systems got crushed" under the weight of players wanting to climb aboard when Atlas launched. "Between the intensity of preparing for the release of a massively multiplayer title, and the needs to get all of the new infrastructure prepared to roll-out, we let the schedule and initial launch builds get away from us," they said. "It’s easy to lose sight of the big picture, which ought to start and end with communication to the players."
More than 70% of the game's user reviews on Steam are negative, with criticism ranging from performance problems to the repetitive grind for resources. The team said its "number one priority" is to tackle "the stability, connection, and data issues", and it will do that through regular updates, usually daily, sometimes multiple times a day.
"We truly appreciate everyone’s patience and support during this launch period and we intend to show our gratitude through frequent updates that resolve the issues which matter to you and improve Atlas in both the near-term and over the long term."
The team also revealed that the Atlas Dev Kit, which will allow players to create custom content for the game and upload it to the Steam Workshop, should be ready on January 7, "if not sooner".
Every single week we celebrate and commiserate in our Highs and Lows feature, spilling our guts about the best and worst bits of the week that was, or at least the parts we can remember. And now we’re trying to recall the whole year, rounding up the highs and lows of 2018. Below you’ll see all of our high points, but check back tomorrow for the gloomy lows.
Chris Livingston: Store Wars
After simmering for a while, I feel like the fuse has been properly lit. It's hard to envision a true competitor for Steam when it comes to selling PC games—and we're probably still years away from one—but more and more challengers popped up in 2018 and that's a good thing. Joining stores like GOG and Humble is the Discord Store and Epic Games Store, and while the offerings are pretty limited at the moment and there's a major lack of features when compared to Steam, they both still managed to score some exclusive deals, and that's an important first step—even if it doesn't feel like it.
I know the addition of new stores and desktop clients is a bit of a hassle for players. It can be hard to stop relying on Steam and we all feel a bit of reluctance to download a bunch of other clients, set up accounts, and especially to hand our credit card info—and as many as there are now, there will be even more next year and beyond. But competition is always a net good, and we're going to be seeing more exclusives in stores like Epic's and Discord's. I know exclusives can be annoying, too, especially if your Steam wallet is fat with trading card cash, and the game you want is only being sold somewhere else. But at least it's not like console exclusives. If a PC game has an exclusive agreement with a certain store, you can still play it on PC! It's not the end of the world and not as restrictive as it sounds.
The important thing for developers is that they're starting to see better deals than Valve offers when it comes to revenue splits, and stores with a carefully curated selection of games (instead of Steam's massive glut) can mean a better chance to be seen by customers. For PC gamers, all these stores competing with Steam, and each other, will eventually pay off in more discounts and sales. First these new stores will fight for developer loyalty, then they'll fight for customer loyalty. Let the great Store Wars begin.
Jarred Walton: Core Wars
The CPU is the main brain of your computer. It runs your OS and most of the logic in your games. A faster CPU can make everything on your PC run smoother, and competition for the crown of CPU champion has been fierce this year. This all started last year when AMD released its Ryzen processors, significantly closing the performance gap that existed between the old FX-series parts and Intel's Core i5/i7 offerings. The battle has raged on in 2018, and become perhaps even more heated—literally in some cases. But I like competition.
This year, AMD released its second generation Ryzen CPUs, headlined by the Ryzen 7 2700X. Not only is it faster than its predecessor, but it dropped the price to $329. Sure, if you have a top-tier GPU, Intel's CPUs might be a bit faster in games, but for reasonable builds (meaning, $500 or less on the GPU), AMD offers the better value by far. And in non-gaming scenarios, the 2700X typically beats the i7-8700K.
Of course Intel had to respond, bringing out its first 'mainstream' 8-core CPUs with the Core i9-9900K and Core i7-9700K. Both are faster than the Ryzen 7 2700X, in games and in general use. However, these 9th gen Intel CPUs likely wouldn't exist without AMD providing much needed competition. Also, the i9-9900K costs significantly more money.
It's not just the mainstream platform getting some love, however. The HEDT (High-End Desktop) enthusiast platforms also received updates. AMD's second generation Threadripper parts doubled core counts to 32-core/64-thread with the 2990WX. Intel responded… with a slightly faster Core i9-9980XE that's still an 18-core/36-thread part, just like the i9-7980XE. Of course the WX Threadripper parts aren't usually the best option, but I love seeing the boundaries move on what we can expect from modern PC hardware.
James Davenport: Book bath
The Witcher 3 is a few years old now. Yowsa. What I’d give to be able to play it for the first time! Not much, honestly. Not going to sell 10 years of my life to a witch or anything, but I found a wild lifehack that just might do the trick: reading. I’ve been tearing through the Witcher books and I’m impressed how perfectly The Witcher 3 manages to express these characters. I feel like I’m questing again, hanging with Gerry while he slashes bellies and says goofy, dry shit. It’s great. The books are also resetting my understanding of the world of the Witcher. There’s so much to Ciri and Geralt’s journey before the events of The Witcher 3, enough to compel me to play it again. There’s about four more books and the first two games before I manage that, but suddenly it’s become one of my most anticipated games of 2019. If you’ve been missing Geralt and pals, or just want something to do over the holiday break, go pick up The Witcher books. Start with The Last Wish, a series of shorts introducing Geralt and Ciri, or hop right into the novels with Blood of Elves. You’ll feel right at home, I promise.
Wes Fenlon: It's a hunter's world
The highlight of my year has been learning to hunt. Not real animals, lord no: I'm a soft city boy who doesn't want to harm a hair on a poor deer or bunny rabbit's head. But the monsters in Astera? Those I'll gleefully stab, shoot, and capture in electric shock traps (so I can then fight them again in a small arena). It's vicious and I love it. Monster Hunter is one of those series I've wanted to get into for years, because I tend to be drawn to complex, intimidating games that are deeply rewarding once you've gotten over a brutal learning curve. A Capcom action game with complex weapon movesets and dozens upon dozens of varied beasts to fight sounded awesome, but playing that kind of game on a 3DS, or a Wii U with a janky-at-best online system, just never felt worth the effort. When World was announced, I knew it was going to be my in.
And with now nearly 100 hours of hunting under my belt, it's easily the game I've played the most in 2018. I love it just as much as I thought I would, and it's actually the first game I've played that has me logging in regularly for special events so I can unlock a particular sword or armor set. Above all, though, it's been a great multiplayer experience for me: for a few months I was playing with friends almost every night, which was a great way for us to hang out. It's the most fun "social" game I've played in the last year. Few years, even. Special shout out to my friend Steven for showing me the ways of the insect glaive, and Nico for being our monster hunter sherpa. Bring on those arch-tempered monsters!
Tom Senior: Rat’s entertainment!
Damn, Wes took my high of the year. While I still love a good singleplayer RPG or strategy, game, I’ve had the most fun this year playing games co-operatively. Monster Hunter: World is a great example, and I’m so happy the series is on PC—I wonder if the massive expansion due next year will end up in our game of the year estimations once again.
Destiny 2 and Vermintide 2 have also delivered brilliant co-op experiences this year. It can still be hard to get five other people together to go raiding, or even three other people together on an evening to smash up big rats, but it’s totally worth the effort. Vermintide even has a structured campaign that lets you share an ongoing story, and the classes are so varied it’s easy to start again with a new class and a different group of people. While in Destiny I feel like I need to do some grinding to access the cool new stuff, Vermintide is just right there, ready for us to grab our hammers and swords and get chopping again. I can see myself playing a lot of it into 2019 and beyond.
Andy Kelly: With a vengeance
I’ve already written about the Shenmue re-release in my GOTY personal pick, but it’s easily my high of the year. My review and this article cover why I love the game so much in extensive detail, but what’s important is that the thing has finally been preserved in a form that’s easily playable. I no longer have to fire up the old Dreamcast sitting under my TV and hear that disc drive whirr and spin itself to death. I mean, there’s a charm to playing on original hardware, but I think I’ll stick to PC for future replays.
And, of course, next year there’s Shenmue III to look forward to. I’m wildly (but cautiously) excited about Ryo Hazuki’s quest for revenge continuing in a new game. His English voice actor, Corey Marshall, has been tweeting about the recording process, making this impossible sequel feel suddenly real. But even if it doesn’t live up to the hype, thanks to this re-release It’ll be easier than ever to return to Yokosuka and relive the magic all over again. Is there a better Christmas game than Shenmue? I don’t think so.
Fraser Brown: Tactics on top
It’s been an amazing year for tactics games. It’s only really dawned on me now, at the end of the year, how excellent it’s really been. Big, small, traditional and inventive—we’ve seen them all in 2018, and if your backlog is anywhere as bloated as mine, they’ll be keeping us busy well into next year, as well.
At the top of the pile sits Into the Breach, a game that seems simple and bite-sized but is actually a devil sent from the depths of Hell to swallow up your life and sanity as you try, over and over again, to avert disaster. It didn’t need to carry the genre alone, though, and was joined by the likes of BattleTech, Valkyria Chronicles 4, Frozen Synapse 2, Mutant Year Zero, Warhammer 40,000: Mechanicus and more. And none of them are alike.
Intro the Breach is a bastard of a puzzler, BattleTech’s a huge mech sandbox, Mutant Year Zero is an adventure-tactics hybrid with a focus on story and Mechanicus sends space archaeologists into dungeons to fight undead robots. These brief descriptions don’t really do the diversity justice, but the important thing is that there are a lot of people out there with a lot of cool ideas about what shape modern tactics games should take. It’s not just that there have been a lot of tactics games, it’s that they’re indicative of a genre that’s agile and experimental and going in more than one interesting direction. It’s exciting!
Samuel Roberts: Cyberpunk 2077 in 2018
Is it a little too easy to pick a game for 2018's high of the year? Honestly, though, Cyberpunk 2077 felt like the biggest deal when it came to reveals over the last 12 months, with Obsidian's The Outer Worlds getting close, too. The level of detail in the footage above is off the charts—to the point where I don't see how it's ever going to run on those five year-old consoles it's apparently destined for. If you were expecting CD Projekt Red to show you a glimpse of how RPGs could look in four or five years, they provided that. Cyberpunk 2077 felt like an event this year, even if it could be a long, long time before we play it.
I saw the demo in Gamescom days before the reveal was streamed online (glad I flew all the way to Germany for that!). I didn't love every part of the demo—the swear-y dialogue and overall tone might take some getting used to—but I can't argue with how nice that world looks, and the potential of those branching quests. As Bethesda's next singleplayer efforts seem years away, barely being shown through (admittedly exciting) teasers during E3, CD Projekt Red stole the year when it comes to the noisy, gigantic game reveals that I still find fun when I'm in the right mood.
As 2018 wraps up, it's time for a period of self-reflection: amid all the wacky adventures of the past 12 months, which games did we miss? There are always too many great things to play on PC these days. Below, the PC Gamer writers talk us through the games they wanted to play in 2018 but didn't, for one reason or another.
Let us know your suggestions in the comments below. Hopefully we'll conquer that pile of shame before more great games start releasing months from now. Oh wait, the Resident Evil 2 Remake is out in January. And a million other games are out in 2019. Oh well...
Tom Senior: Pillars of Eternity 2: Deadfire
Pillars of Eternity 2 is sitting in my Steam library completely untouched. Installing has felt like a daunting prospect all year. It's huge, I still haven't played Pillars 1, and I keep getting distracted by huge games like Assassin's Creed Odyssey. I like to think I'll crack into it this Christmas, but to be honest I'll probably just play Hitman to test myself against Phil and Samuel's best times. Failing that, I want to build an Artifact deck that doesn't fail 100 percent of the time.
Samuel Roberts: Monster Hunter: World
I was torn on whether to play the PS4 version of Monster Hunter or wait for the PC release, and it turns out I did neither. Now my colleagues have stopped playing the game, I might've left it too late to enjoy MH: World in co-op, but I do plan on booting it up at some point.
I want to see what these cat dudes are all about. That's a good enough reason to want to play the game, right? I didn't play Deadfire either, but then I haven't played the original Pillars of Eternity. Too many games. I blame the time-eating Into the Breach for these particular oversights.
Wes Fenlon: Yakuza 0
Yakuza 0 is one of many, many games released in 2018 I'd like to play, and will probably get around to before I die, maybe, hopefully. Okay, so Yakuza 0 has actually been around for a couple, but it came to PC in 2018, and I still haven't played a single game in this series. It's one of those cases where I just know I'll love it, and then I'll probably want to play all of them, and where will I find the time? I know that's no excuse. Someday I'll befriend a chicken and do whatever the hell serious gangsters do in their spare time.
James Davenport: The Witcher and The Witcher 2 (not from 2018, but I want to get through 'em)
It grows, the lumpy thing. I leave little tins of catfood near my pile of shame and they're gone in the morning. I don't know what to do. Maybe I could start by playing The Witcher and The Witcher 2. I think I'm on my way though. The Witcher 3 is a great game, but I don't love it nearly as much as most. That's probably going to change on my upcoming second playthrough, James busting the experiential door down with all The Witcher books spilling out of his ears. I'm doing the thing and reading the books. They're great. Nothing genre-busting, but some lovely character work in a horrific sociopolitical landscape. Also: monsters. Read 'em before the Netflix series so you can be the ultimate ass: 'The books and games are better than the show,' etc. Anyway, I'm going to break those Witcher games wide open with all this new context, just you wait and see.
Jarred Walton: Many games
I didn't finish many games this year, though I at least played most of the big names. And yet, after I just declared my love for D&D and RPGs growing up, I often can't find the time to delve into the modern releases. Pillars of Eternity 2 is also on my list, along with The Banner Saga 3, Kingdom Come Deliverance, Final Fantasy 15, and more. Truth is, I don't even want to try and start some of those.
Philippa Warr: Wandersong and Unavowed
I don't believe in the pile of shame, they're just options for the future and I refuse to feel bad. BUT, of the games which arrived in 2018 Wandersong and Unavowed are the ones I'd really like to carve out time to play soon. Wandersong because it sounds utterly delightful, and Unavowed because... well, I'm not sure I have a single reason I can point to. It's more that it keeps coming up in conversation—colleagues circle back to it, it pops up in list features, I see people mentioning it in comments or on Twitter. There's nothing specific that made me think "this game will suit me", it's just a gentle swell of appreciation that's piqued my curiosity.
The last game on my list is Pillars of the Earth, which is based on the novel of the same name by Ken Follett. I'm not eager to play it in the same way at Wandersong and Unavowed. That's because I played the first episode back in 2017 and I want to wait for the right mood to strike in order to sink into the remaining chapters. That's the pleasure of my backlog—it's stuffed with games which are awaiting their moment.
Fraser Brown: Yakuza 0, among others
All of them? If I didn’t review it, there’s a pretty good chance I didn’t finish it. But I’ve also been playing a lot of games that you don’t really finish, like Warframe, World of Warcraft and Overwatch, none of which are even 2018 games. I’m not as enlightened, but I think Pip’s got the right idea. It’s so silly to feel guilty about not having time for a game. A lot of them, I don’t really care that much about finishing, but there are a few I’d still love to spend more time with.
I really enjoyed Warhammer 40,000: Mechanicus and Mutant Year Zero: Road to Eden, so I’d like to finish them once I’m done with BattleTech’s expansion. I’ve always got time for more tactical romps. I went back to the start with Hitman when the sequel came out, so I’m very much looking forward to going through all the new levels. Those are just the recent ones, too. Oh yeah, and I only just started playing Yakuza 0. I’m going to be busy in 2019.
Joanna Nelius: Vampyr
Vampyr has been on my list of games to play since E3 2016. I've admired Dontnod and been into vampire lore for a long time, so I was instantly drawn to Vampyr's story and the gameplay when I first heard saw it, especially the entire concept of seemingly innocuous choices leading to disastrous consequences. Then its official release date came and went, and I've been resetting reminders on my calendar to buy it for the last six months. It went on sale a few weeks ago, and I finally bought it—and it's still sitting in my Steam account with zero minutes of play time, but I did install it. Maybe I can stop singing holidays songs long enough to let some darkness into my soul.
Phil Savage: Pillars 2 and Assassin's Creed Odyssey
Like Tom, it's Pillars of Eternity 2, which, like Tom, is because I still haven't played the first game. Still, I've been looking for something chunky to dig into over Christmas, and a Pillars of Eternity double bill sounds like the perfect distraction for those moments between eating too much cheese and drinking too much alcohol. At least it does until I get tired of being asked to read and make tactical decisions and decide the outcome of some moral dilemma, at which point I'll just turn off my brain and enjoy my other missed game of 2018: Assassin's Creed Odyssey.
Next up in our GOTY awards is The Red Strings Club, from developer Deconstructeam. Find the complete list of awards here.
Joanna: The Red Strings Club takes the grittiness of '80s cyberpunk and gives it a modern, corporate edge. But it does what every good cyberpunk story should do: make us question what it means to be human in a not too distant future. The Red Strings Club is all about the control of human emotion, whether that’s mixing drinks to make patrons more “loose” with information, or fulfilling the main quest of the story to stop Supercontinent’s Social Psyche Welfare program. As Donovan, all the detective work is done with old-school cunningness and charm, but with Brandeis’ it’s done through an implant that can precisely imitate voices. Arkasa-184 collects and synthesizes information about the bar patrons to quiz Donovan (aka you) on your listening skills. Your ability to discover key information about the high-level executives behind Social Psyche Welfare will determine your success in stopping the release of the program.
Fighting large-scale cybernetic manipulation with small-scale chemical manipulation really brings out your inner hypocrite. When it came to mixing drinks for patrons, I had no problem choosing the right cocktail to get the result I wanted, but when it came to putting a Short Span Memory Resetter in people’s drinks, I couldn’t bring myself to do it. Sure, it would give me another chance to ask the same questions again in case I missed something, but it felt like I was drugging them without their knowledge, and that made me feel gross. I couldn’t cross that line of consent, even if it meant failing the main quest.
Arkasa-184 fills the space between Q&A sessions with philosophical questions that confront you unexpectedly on your views of society and technology, morality, and free will. Prepared or not, you’ll learn something about your own views on transhumanism by (hopefully) putting some thought into these questions. Think about it: if you had the ability to get a cybernetic implant that suppressed every negative emotion you could possibly feel, would you? What broader implications would that have on not just your personal development but our society as a whole? The Red Strings Club asks you to grapple with these types of questions, and your answers to these questions that shape the future of this fictional world.
Jody: I love a philosophical cyberpunk story and The Red Strings Club is great one of those, reaching way beyond "what if robots had feelings" to take on much less abstract themes.
It's also a love story. The relationship between a bartender who can't leave his bar and a hacker who plays a mean piano is renegotiated and expanded on over the course of the game. It deals with that as maturely as it deals with the questions about free will and social responsibility and, yeah, what if a robot had feelings? What I'm saying is The Red Strings Club has a heart as well as a brain.
Log in to the Epic Games Store today and you'll find a new freebie: 2010's brutally challenging platformer Super Meat Boy. It's yours at no cost if you've got (or make) an account with Epic, and it'll remain that way until January 10. Download it before then and it's all yours.
Tyler reviewed Super Meat Boy when it was first released and called it "relentlessly difficult" and "the most fun you'll have by dying repeatedly." Developer Team Meat pointed out on Twitter that this is the first time Super Meat Boy has been completely free (without having to pay for a subscription that included it). If you've been dying to die repeatedly, now's your chance.
Hitman 2 brought one of our favorite series back to PC in arguably its best ever form. Find the rest of our GOTY awards here.
Samuel: It makes me happy that IO Interactive is still making murder puzzles on this scale, with this much detail, in 2018. Hitman 2's levels are best-in-class sandboxes that can take hours for their full potential to unlock—and while this game's selection of locations is a little conventional by the series' standards, they're still tons of fun. Plus you can download its predecessor's levels inside the new game. Warring with Phil over the leaderboards has been a highlight of 2018 for me. How the hell did he do Hawke's Bay in under two minutes? Unbelievable. At least I kicked his ass in Miami. As soon as I worked out how to kill one target with the other, the number one spot was mine.
Phil: The trick, Sam, is to attempt things that you're almost certain won't work, because sometimes you get lucky and look really clever. (Luckily the leaderboards don't track all the times it went very, very wrong.) Our assassination competition has done wonders for my appreciation of Hitman 2, though, and I already liked the game a lot. Many of the safest, most reliable ways to kill your target are also relatively slow, and so competing for high scores has forced me to reassess levels that I thought I knew incredibly well—finding new routes and opportunities, and seizing them as stealthily and efficiently as possible. And when I'm tired of shaving seconds off my times, I still enjoy just being in the environments, trying to figure out the many unique and often quite funny ways you can kill each target. It's Groundhog Day as a stealth puzzler, where one attempt you'll be sublime, and the next you'll be ridiculous—with no consequences beyond a great (or terrible) score at the end.
I'm glad that IO have brought back elusive targets, too. Having just one attempt to take down your target adds an extra level of tension that's missing from the missions proper. Even actions that I've performed hundreds of times before, on levels that I know incredibly well, feel risky and dangerous, because if I mess up, there's no going back.
Andy K: This isn’t much of a leap from the 2016 reboot, and I don’t care. All I wanted was some more great levels, and maybe a couple of tweaks, and that’s exactly what IO delivered. A few of these elaborate, detailed puzzle-boxes are among the best in the series, and finding ways to game the systems to kill your targets is as compelling as ever.
Fraser: I’ve only played a couple of Hitman 2’s new missions, technically, and it’s still my favourite stealth game of 2018. See, all of the previous Hitman levels have been remastered with the Hitman 2 bells and whistles, so I’ve been playing through the whole thing, 1 and 2, mixing up the old with the new. It’s been great, giving me a chance to take paths I’d ignored before, all with the benefit of these new additions. Now I’m delving into the new missions, and I’m not even remotely burned out.
Frostpunk from 11 bit studios claims our next GOTY award. Find the complete set of them throughout December in our GOTY hub.
Chris: At first it appears to be a beautiful steampunk building management game with survival elements. Construct a city around a massive coal-powered generator in a frozen crater, and keep your citizens warm, fed, and healthy. But it's the simulation of a desperate and fickle society, as well as your role as a leader, that makes Frostpunk such a challenging and unforgettable experience. You're periodically called on to pass laws, and each law comes with a compromise, the significance of which isn't entirely apparent until further down the line.
When hungry citizens begin stealing food from your storehouse, it feels perfectly natural to begin a neighborhood watch program to keep an eye on everyone. But with its first few decisions Frostpunk is just grooming you, testing your morals, seeing how far you'll go in the name of saving lives. Later laws can allow you to build guard towers, form a patrolling militia, and eventually you might be spreading propaganda, having people sign loyalty oaths, and even having your band of enforcers perform public executions, all in the name of keeping your city safe and orderly, or at least convincing your citizens that you are in control. The appearance of order gives them hope, and the more tightly you close your iron fist, the more hope they have. By the end of the game you may wind up feeling you've only done what was necessary to save lives, but at the same time you may feel more like a monster than a savior.
Fraser: All of the miserable, freezing people huddled around the city’s few heat sources thought that the perpetual winter was going to be the end of them, but actually it was me. I set aside empathy for a practical attitude, which is a nice way of saying that I made kids work in the mines. Frostpunk’s a strange survival management game in that surviving might not really be worth it, at least not for your poor citizens. Where other survival games use resource scarcity to push players to take risks and venture out further from the base, Frostpunk uses it to force players to make decisions about what kind of society they’re building at the end of the world. And mine was just awful. Survival still ultimately comes down to numbers—population, food stores, temperature—but the methods used to maintain those things are vastly more interesting than ‘build this thing’.
Jody: Each time you finish one of Frostpunk's campaigns you get to see a time lapse of your settlement's life, pushing back against the ice as it expands. While that happens you're reminded of all the sacrifices that were necessary to make it possible—the scouts who died in the snow, overworked miners who had limbs amputated, the people who suffered under the draconian laws you passed out of necessity—and the cost of survival hits you. After all those hours of howling wind and sheets of ice, that was when Frostpunk finally succeeded at making me feel cold.
In 2018, one of the best point-and-click adventure games was conjured into existence. Unavowed leaves you picking up the pieces after you were possessed by a demon for a year, kicking off the strongest story Dave Gilbert’s written, so far. And, as always, it's accompanied by striking art from Ben Chandler, who manages to capture New York while simultaneously transforming it into somewhere otherworldly and magical.
It’s urban fantasy with pulp noir undertones, but instead of devolving into gritty, detective cliches and hard-boiled cynicism, it’s an empathetic story full of complicated, believable characters who learn and forgive. There’s a lot of humanity in this game about stopping monsters.
The world they inhabit is just as fascinating and well realised. Instead of a tour of internationally famous landmarks, it’s a quieter, smaller vision of New York. I felt like a local in a city I’ve only visited once for a few days. And it feels old. The titular Unavowed, an ancient order determined to stop evil, have called it home for centuries and share some of its secret past. There’s always the juxtaposition of the magical and mundane, from djinn riding in subways to monsters lurking in the New York harbour.
Puzzles are elegantly woven into the story and avoid classic pixel hunting frustrations and faffing around in your inventory. They’re not especially tricky head-scratchers, but they’re usually inventive enough that solving them is just as satisfying. That's a tricky balance to find, and Unavowed rarely slips. And you're not solving them alone. The Unavowed are all about teamwork, and the one conundrum that really gave me pause was figuring out who to take with me on my adventures.
Companions can help, or at least offer guidance, acting like an unobtrusive hint system, as well as potential solution themselves. They otherwise function a lot like BioWare companions, grounding you in the world by giving you friendships to hold onto. Bringing specific buddies opens up new dialogue options and solutions, and the system fits as comfortably with an adventure game as it does an RPG. Better, perhaps, since their most important attributes aren't combat related (though one of them has a sword that comes in handy), it's their expertise and insight.
Another arguably RPG-like trait is the importance Unavowed places on the choices you make at key points throughout the game. Sometimes it can be a bit too obvious that you’re making a Meaningful Choice™, but I’m still thinking about them months later. I was agonising over the final moments of the game again yesterday, replaying my last decision and the closing seconds in my mind. It wasn’t really a decision, though. My choice was inevitable, based on my version of the protagonist, developed over 10 hours of supernatural crises. Despite starting out as an amnesiac—a tired trope that’s used surprisingly well here—I knew exactly who I was playing by the end.
Unavowed isn’t a love letter to traditional adventure games or trading in nostalgia—it’s an adventure game with forward momentum. Sure, at times it’s evocative of games like Gabriel Knight, but it also feels new and novel. When it plays with the familiar, it subverts it, dragging us along in an unexpected direction. And it knows when to end! How many games know that, these days? It clips along at a reasonable pace, ramps up towards the end and then boom, big finale and then it’s done, probably in a few sittings. I’m ravenous for more but don’t feel short-changed. A compelling yarn doesn’t need to take 60 hours.
Not that I wouldn’t happily play 60 hours of Unavowed.
Atlas's Early Access voyage is off to a rocky start. Since it launched last week, players have been complaining about lag and server instability in the Grapeshot Games pirate MMO, and its similarity to Ark: Survival Evolved has led to accusations that it's just a reskin. As of writing, 74% of the user reviews on Steam are negative.
It's hard to avoid comparisons to Ark, which was developed by Grapeshot's sister company Studio Wildcard. The UI and mechanics are, at times, unerringly similar—one of the top posts on the Atlas subreddit calls it "Ark with a little bit of pirates".
One streamer even found an Ark menu hidden within Atlas. You can watch mukkayo's discovery below:
Players have also criticised the game's food system, which requires you to balance your intake of vitamins A, B, C and D. It sounds fiddly and punishing: the top comment on this Reddit post, itself the top post on /r/games this week, described how you can "literally starve if you eat too much of" one vitamin.
PC Gamer's Joanna has been playing it since launch, and she too is far from impressed. She told me this morning that the UI is "terrible" and that lag had, at times, made it virtually unplayable.
"The first time I spawned I was in the middle of the ocean and I died trying to swim to shore because the lag was so bad", she said, adding that performance was choppy even on low graphics settings. She was also unable to connect to a server when she tried to launch the game this morning.
For what it's worth, Grapeshot is aware of Atlas's technical shortcomings, and is trying to improve it via patches, which you can read about here. Also, the plan is for it to be in Early Access for around two years, giving it plenty of time to evolve. But for now, I'd hold off, at least until performance improves. I'm looking forward to reading more fleshed-out thoughts from the team in the new year.
