Early Access tactical pirate game Abandon Ship—think of it as a seaworthy FTL—has added three new regions in its latest update, none of which sound very welcoming.

The largest new region is the Shattered Empire, a once prosperous collection of islands that's now haunted by ghost ships. It has more than one mini story to pick up—you can try to lift the ghostly curse, save a plague-ridden colony, and rebuild (or destroy) a monument to the Empire.

In the Forsaken Seas, the second new region, the air is heavy with poisonous gas, which will slowly eat away at the health bars of both your and your enemy's crew, changing how you approach combat. The last new zone, the Howling Seas, will see your ship battered by blizzards. During combat, those blizzards can stun your crew, and even knock them overboard.

All of the new regions have a unique island to discover and a unique side quest, which developer Fireblade Software says will be the case for all areas of the game in future.

As well as the new regions, the update makes navigation easier by adding lighthouses in every zone which, when visited, will dispel the fog of war. You'll know where the lighthouse is from the start, so you can make a beeline for it if you want. Your ship also now has a compass that will point you towards the nearest undiscovered point of interest, which should make your travels feel less random.

Lastly, the update lets you make both friends and enemies out at sea, depending on whether you help or hinder strangers you come across, and there's a chance you'll see them later in your playthrough. Your actions will have consequences, so be careful who you wrong.

The full patch notes are here, if you're interested.

Battle Brothers was quietly one of 2017's best RPGs: Evan described it as "turn-based Mount & Blade meets XCOM", and Ian confirmed that's as brilliant as it sounds in his review. Developer Overhype Studios released the game's first expansion, Beasts & Exploration, late last year, and now it's announced a second, Nordic-themed expansion called Warriors of the North.

The paid DLC, which should be finished "within the next few months", will add a new human faction with a love of raiding and human sacrifice to the northern portion of the map, Overhype said in a blog post. The expansion will be "smaller in scope" than Beasts & Exploration, but it will still add lots of new units to make the north of the map more challenging, new armours and banners, a new legendary location and fresh events to experience on your travels.

You'll also get to pick a number of new origins for your company, each of which has "different starting characters, equipment and circumstances, as well as special rules that impact your campaign from beginning to end". That sounds like a reason to start a new playthrough if ever I heard one.

Overhype said it will reveal more information about the expansion in a dev blog next week, so stay tuned.

The Resident Evil 2 Remake ditched the original's fixed camera angles for an over-the-shoulder view, which helps makes it feel like a completely different game. But some fans are pining for the claustrophobia and added tension that comes from fixed cameras, and one player has even begun work modding them into the remake. The results looks fantastic—the modder says it'll be difficult to create a version for the full game, but I hope they stick with it.

You can see it in action above. Impressively, there's no dead spots anywhere, and having an broader view of each room is a chance to see just how well-crafted the remake's world is. As modder Enveloping Sounds says in another one of their videos, creating a fixed camera angle mod for the whole game will be tricky, mainly because of how dark the remake is. "The near pitch black lighting in certain areas of the police station was designed with the over-the-shoulder view and flashlight in mind. Much of the environmental detail simply isn't visible [with fixed cameras], so you'd have to add tons of light sources around all the blacked-out areas."

They also reckon you'd have to revamp the control scheme to make aiming easier: there's a reason early Resident Evil games had tank controls, after all. It's not clear whether they plan to turn it into a full project, but the positive comments on their videos suggest it'd find an audience.

You can check out another clip below, or head over to Enveloping Sounds' YouTube channel to watch all five videos.

Free Dad Videos is a YouTube channel devoted to the movies Matt Silverman makes with his five-year-old daughter Amelia. Their latest, Nomad Squadron, is a space adventure set in the universe of No Man's Sky, in which recordings of Amelia—and guest YouTubers Austin Creed, aka wrestler Xavier Woods, and Greg Miller from Kinda Funny—are superimposed on footage captured in-game.

In an interview with Kotaku, Silverman explained the process behind this, which involves using photomode to get rid of the HUD but doing so in multiplayer so as not to pause the game. It's a clever bit of work, and obviously a lot of effort went into making this 10-minute short film about a trio of pilots on a data-pickup run gone wrong. There's some nice little in-jokes in there No Man's Sky players will appreciate as well.

YouTuber DP023 makes videos that mess with games and particularly their cutscenes—I'm partial to this video of what LA Noire looks like, broken by mods—and the latest game to enjoy this treatment is the remake of Resident Evil 2. Normally its characters have relatively subdued reactions to the horrors going on around them, but with their facial animations turned up by 500% they're transformed into gurning creeps as you'll see in the video above, in which Leon Kennedy's eyes spin around his head while his face goes full chipmunk. Beware spoilers, obviously. 

In the freshly uploaded sequel below, Leon's extra surprised by what happens to Ben in the prison cell. Hell, he's just extra in general. Enjoy the special guest appearance by Ada, too.

Thanks, PCGamesN.

Remember Mjoll the Lioness? If you spent much time in Riften, you'll have heard her railing against the Thieves Guild and the corrupt Black-Briar family, and you might have found out she lost a magic sword called Grimsever, leading to a sidequest to recover it from a dwemer ruin.

Kirie Cosplay, who estimates she spent two months of her spare time working on the armor, wig, and makeup for her impressive Mjoll the Lioness outfit, didn't have a convenient Dragonborn around to search for Grimsever and had to craft that herself as well. 

"My Grimsever is all made from EVA foam," she explains. "I drew out all the detailing and used a Dremel tool to create the curves and ridges, and placing layers of foam where larger details were needed. The blade has been coated in a gloss and even with a glow in the dark coat!" As cool as the finished result looks, there's one downside to owning a glow-in-the-dark sword. "I keep it in a wardrobe so it doesn’t spook me too much at night," she says.

In a game where NPCs can sometimes blur together, Mjoll's a memorable standout, which explains why Kirie's still cosplaying her years after Skyrim's release. "Mjoll the Lioness is a unique character," she says. "She has strong features, while also having face markings which makes her appearance very appealing to me as I love to play with makeup."

Mjoll's practical armor, complete with fur lining, turned out to be a challenge not just to make but to hold together. "I think the hardest part of this costume was to create attachments for the armor pieces," Kirie says. "A few of them sit fine with just some strapping but I had to come up with ways for the hips and shoulders. The leather straps are slid up under the shoulder armour to meet the velcro pieces inside them. The curve along the top of the shoulder also has velcro to have it sitting just right."

Like the sword, the armor is mostly made from EVA foam, with some foam clay from Lumins Workshop. "I used contact adhesive for the foam pieces and super glue for all the tiny fiddly bits. It was fun to make the foam pieces look metal and rusted! Other pieces used fabric and fake fur. I dirtied up the fur as well to make it look not so shiny new."

That's a big part of the appeal of making a Skyrim-themed cosplay for Kirie. Being a Nord means getting to look like you've been through the wars, or at least knocked down by dwemer automatons a few times. "Making Skyrim cosplays is exciting because of how creative you can be," she says. "Almost every piece will need weathering or dirtying. How will you make this fabric look like it survives running through caves, snowstorms, even dragon fire? I would say never do a costume from this kind of environment and have it look like it's just come off the shop rack!"

You can find @KirieCos on Instagram, where she's uploaded a story showing the process of creating this cosplay step by step.

Kinodom Productions, the movie makers behind the excellent Papers, Please short film, have released their next project: an official film for Beholder, the bleak surveillance game about betraying your neighbours to please the all-powerful Ministry.

You can watch the film in full above. It's black and white and depressing as hell, and follows the story of one landlord asked to spy on his tenants to make sure they aren't doing anything illegal (spoiler: they are), all the while trying to help his sick daughter.

You'll either love or hate the art style, in which whites are eye-burningly bright, making the landlord's tie and set of keys shine like beacons (I'm a fan, personally). It has almost no sound other than the haunting music—a single track that ebbs and flows to match what's happening on screen for the full eight minutes.

If you played Beholder you'll immediately draw parallels between the game and the film, and even if you didn't play, it's worth a watch. 

To find out more about the game, read Andy's take here. A sequel came out in December.

Thanks, RPS.

The latest Humble Monthly Bundle has three excellent early unlocks if you stump up $12: narrative card game Cultist Simulator (one of our favourite games of last year), co-op monster slayer Warhammer: Vermintide 2 (one of the 100 best games on PC) and giant ant killing sim Earth Defense Force 4.1, described by Phil in his review as "very videogames".

Pay $12 now and you'll be able to play them all straight away, plus you'll get a handful of mystery games in March. Technically, you're subscribing to the bundle on a rolling basis when you sign up, but you can cancel (or pause) after one month. 

I'm tempted to buy it for Cultist Simulator alone—according to deal site IsThereAnyDeal, the lowest it's been on sale for is $14. As Chris wrote in his review, it's a deep and challenging card game with excellent writing, and half the fun of it is figuring out how it all works.

Vermintide 2 is another that you should add to your library if you haven't yet, especially if you have friends who can play it with you. You can check out Stephen's review here: it's basically Left 4 Dead meets apocalyptic fantasy Warhammer, but with loot.

Think of Earth Defense Force 4.1 as the extra stocking stuffer. "No polish or refinement, just lots of giant ants and plenty of ways to kill them. Ridiculously fun at its best, which it frequently is," said Phil in his review.

Grab the bundle here.

"How many Warhammer games are enough?" is the sort of angels-on-a-pin question that can tie philosophers into knots for days at a time. There are a lot of them, we declared a few years ago, but also not enough of them. We played eight of the best, and nine of the worst, and there's still room in between for plenty more. We also imagined a bunch that don't actually exist but should, and probably someday will, given the way things are going. 

That great, long list is now one game longer, thanks to the arrival of Warhammer Quest 2: The End Times on Steam. It is not, as I briefly suspected when I first saw the announcement, a dollar-store knockoff of Warhammer: End Times – Vermintide, but rather a turn-based strategy game based on the Warhammer Quest board game that sets players off against the forces of Chaos that are working to bring about the end of the world. It features three distinct regions, each with their own enemies, objectives, and campaign quests, 12 unique hero classes and more than 40 types of enemies, 27 settlements to explore, and special events and opportunities between dungeons.    

By all appearances, Warhammer Quest 2 is very much like the first game, but more: More heroes, more enemies, more stuff to see and do, better graphics, and all that sort of thing. We don't have any coverage of the original game to tell you what it was like, but it was neither good enough for inclusion in our "best games" list, nor bad enough for the worst-of listing; we did note in our imaginary games list, though, that in one Warhammer Quest mission, "you go to great lengths to rescue a miller’s donkey from a grotesque spider lair, only to learn he wanted Old Nell back so the village would have something to eat. Your reward for that quest is one of Old Nell’s roasted haunches." So that's tonally appropriate, at least. 

Warhammer Quest 2: The End Times (which, believe it or not, is the second Warhammer game we've talked about this week, in case you think I'm exaggerating about how many of these things there are) was originally released in April 2018 for mobile devices, and all the content released for those versions is included with the PC edition. It's currently ten percent off its $20/£18 regular price on Steam. 

Resident Evil 2 looks so, so good. The Raccoon City setting isn't massive, but makes excellent use of such a small, dense space by plastering every inch with detail. Some lovely texture and lighting work across the environments and characters tie it all together and make RE2 a game worth staring at uninterrupted—it's just that the constant threat of Mr. X and his zombie buds don't give you much time to smell the flowers. 

No worries. A Cheat Engine camera tool created and shared by expert screenshotter Jim2point0  (who you may remember from his Pixel Boost days) makes taking nice pictures in Resident Evil 2 easy and stress free. The script allows you to detach the camera from the primary character and move it around freely using the numpad to change position, height, and FOV. You can even pause time to set up the perfect shot and resume once you've snapped it. 

It's a great way to contribute a personal meme to the Mr. X craze Twitter is all about lately. Personally, I just want to get as many shots of Leon crying out in pain. That grimace is too perfect. 

You might encounter a few issues with the script enabled that get in the way of your artistry, though. When in a dark area that the player character lights up with a flashlight, the light source seems to be attached to the camera rather than the character. I also recommend turning off the HUD in the settings menu. If you pause with a weapon drawn, the reticle and ammo count will remain visible. 

One more thing: if you install Cheat Engine, you're using it at your own risk. Resident Evil 2 isn't a multiplayer game, but if you leave a script running on accident and load up CS:GO or something similar, it could be detected and perceived as cheating. I mean, "cheat" is right there in the name. Be sure to read over usage rights for any game you use Cheat Engine with, just in case. 

A few quick shots I took within five minutes of using the tool: