Earlier this week, GTA Online introduced the classy Cadillac Escada Con—um, I mean, the Ubermacht Revolter to its Legendary Motorsport car dealerships for $1.61 million. I like the tagline: "Looks for the red carpet. Power for when the deal goes south." If my prior GTA Online misadventures are anything to go by, I'll be far more reliant on the latter scenario.  

And for when the inevitable screw ups roll in, upgrading my new ride with a forward-facing machine gun mount should come in handy—as should double GTA$ and RP, if I decide to wheel the Revolter around any of the game's Rockstar-created stunt and land races between now and Monday, January 29. 

Then again, with less in the way of squad cars, lampposts and, you know, brick walls, perhaps I'm better heading skyward. The same two-for-one bonus applies to GTA Online's newest Air Quota adversary mode during the same window. But if I can't be trusted behind the wheel, I am really the right person to be in control of an attack helicopter? I guess there's only one way to find out.  

After a flurry into some Grand Theft Auto roleplaying servers recently, I've allowed myself to be re-swallowed by GTA Online and it's been a real case of get rich or die trying. I'm always closer to the latter, but at least I can hope (who I am kidding, I can't afford this) to do so in style. Look, see: 

Two Point Hospital got a huge response when it was announced earlier this month. A modern spiritual successor to Theme Hospital is exactly what fans of the old Bullfrog games are looking for—and attendees of the PC Gamer Weekender on February 17 and 18 will be the first to see more of the game. Two Point Studios will take to the Developer Stage on the Saturday at 11AM to show off loads of previously unseen footage of the game, including a world exclusive gameplay reveal of a new in-game illness. 

Just in case that sounds serious, it's worth pointing out that existing illnesses in the game include having a lightbulb for a head ('lightheadedness'), evoking the diseases of the Bullfrog classic. Two Point co-founders Mark Webley and Gary Carr will be hosted by community manager Lauran Carter at the Weekender, and they'll discuss the inception of the studio from just an idea to their eventual deal with Sega to make Two Point Hospital. Those at the show will learn much more about one of the year's most exciting games. 

You can get tickets for the show here. You'll be able to play some of the best new and upcoming games at the Weekender, plus attend talks presented by some of the biggest developers on PC and much more. Ticket prices start at £12.99, and you can save 20% with the discount code PCG.

Black Desert Online is a game I'm always on the cusp of buying. I'm told its expansive crafting systems and combo-based combat is a joy—yet I always wind up wasting my time building monstrously ugly characters who'll never see the light of day in its uber-comprehensive standalone customisation suite. Perhaps I'll break tradition this weekend, given Pearl Abyss' quirky MMO is free to try on Steam. 

And once its free trial expires—on Sunday at 1pm PT/9pm GMT—perhaps I'll even pick up BDO for half price, assuming I like my time with it. From now through Monday, January 29, you see, Black Desert Online boasts a 50 percent reduction. 

I could spend the next paragraph waffling about what I think Black Desert Online is about, but it's almost certainly better for everyone if I defer to my colleague and MMO aficionado, Steven Messner. Here's why BDO worth your time: 

[In Black Desert Online] you can be a merchant, a fisherman, or invest all your time into building a massive production empire of beer. This is all thanks to Black Desert Online's complex node system. Each region is divided up into nodes that provide various resources, while properties in cities can be purchased and converted into blacksmiths, fisheries, or storage depots. Instead of doing all the hard work yourself, you can hire automated workers who level up and have their own innate skills to do the heavy lifting. 

It's an intimidating system to learn when you're just starting out, but the freedom it provides is unparalleled. It can be just as rewarding to spend an evening tweaking your farms and leveling up your workers as it is taking down one of Black Desert Online's brutal world bosses. And if that doesn't suit your fancy, the node system is also the foundation for weekly guild wars, where guilds race to conquer various nodes for special bonuses—making BDO a great choice if you're into PVP as well.

So there you have it. Check out Black Desert Online for free on Steam till Sunday.

We have spent a lot of time with Far Cry 5 in the last year. I enjoyed finding ways to mess with the sandbox in my last hands-on session. James asked Ubisoft to put his dad in the game, and then seemingly got brutally owned by Ubisoft. Recently I had another session with the game, set in an expanded version of the zone James and I have played, and came away with some positives and negatives.

It's still total chaos

At the end of a mission I made my way to the front of a house I'd just cleared out, only to find the guy who gave me the mission lying incapacitated on the floor—must have taken a bullet on the way in. But as I approached to revive him I heard a boom. Then a flaming helicopter crashed just inches in front of me. 

I figure that having just cleared the outpost, one of my zealous NPC allies must have quickly moved in and downed the scouting enemy chopper. So far, so Far Cry. I ran around the chopper and ran over to my greasy mission-giving conspiracy theorist friend. But during the time it took for the protracted 'rescue friend' animation to play, the flames from the dead chopper had spread through the dry grass and set him on fire. As soon as I stood him up he fell to the ground and writhed around screaming in the burning grass. I retreated and patted the fire out on my own arms and could do nothing but watch and wait as the guy burned, too important to the game's continuity to actually die.

Eventually he stood up, still screaming. He stood still there for a few seconds, expressionless, lips slightly parted as the blood-curdling screams of a man being burned alive came out of his manikin-like face. Then suddenly, he smiled.

"Hello friend!"

This exciting nonsense happens all the time in Far Cry 5, as it so often does in all Far Cry games. It's still a mad action sandbox that creates impromptu moments of insanity. Unfortunately the footage I took of these moments had some capture problems, otherwise this article would be mostly gifs of those moments. Bears rampaging through camps; NPCs somersaulting through the air after a particularly vicious gas canister explosion; enemies veering off roads under fire and crashing cars into rivers; enemies going insane and driving their combine harvester at you in a murderous rage—Far Cry's AI and physics systems manage to collide in haphazard ways that create solid action entertainment. I've always liked that about the series, and it's definitely present in Far Cry 5.

Rolling with NPC teammates is fun

Co-op NPCs aren't totally new to Far Cry, but I especially enjoyed rolling with them in Far Cry 5. You can have special companions like your sniper pal or your awesome dog, but you can also walk up to randos in settlements you've cleared and recruit them to your squad. Some of them have machine guns. Some of them have bows. Sometimes, they have a rocket launcher, in which case their every attempt to help you becomes a gamble.

I chose to play with a shotgun for a lot of my session, because Far Cry 5's shotgun is surprisingly heavy and satisfying. Heaven help you if you close in on an enemy that your rocket launcher pal is also targeting. The famous Far Cry fire propagation system persists, so if you manage to avoid the blast as your mutual target is reduced to gooey particulate there's every chance the flames will get you (and any nearby enemies/pals) in the aftermath.

The system falters sometimes, but didn't break during my hours with the game. I spent a while waiting in my truck as rocket launcher guy got into an involved fight with some nearby animals. I think they were wolves, but some innocent deer were definitely caught in the explosive cross-fire. I eventually drove off to continue my mission, and he spawned nearby and rejoined the fight five minutes later. 

I like that the system works around your movements, so you're not constantly shepherding your companions. Plus they are very sensible about maintaining stealth when you're trying to sneak up on an outpost, and you can direct them to attack specific enemies from a stealthed position, which is extremely gratifying. 

Outposts are underwhelming

I started my hands-one session by driving northwest to clear out an outpost. These tend to be the best missions in recent Far Cry games, and the best ones are large compounds with clusters of guards you can sneak up on, or otherwise manipulate into traps. This was a small house with some cargo containers piled up in a back yard. It was funny to order my NPC pal to fire a rocket launcher at the enemy sniper on the roof of the building, but we cleared out the outpost from a nearby cliff edge quite easily. The noise of shooting brought everyone out of the building where they could be easily sniped from a ridge.

The outpost structure has been applied to more main mission quests in Far Cry 5. I like this trend in theory, but it wasn't terribly exciting in practice. In this demo the key mission-givers were mostly under siege in a stronghold that needed to be cleared to free them up to give missions. When you approach these fights there is an opportunity to pull your binoculars out, tag enemies and make a plan, but it's a brief opportunity compared to previous Far Cry games and my options felt limited. Far Cry games have always been shooters first really, but Far Cry 5 feels like it wants to be played as an all-out shooter all the time. I missed choking guards and stealing their knives to throw at other guards.

One mission involved rescuing a sniper from her perch in a church tower as waves of goons piled in on trucks to vandalise graves. Another involved fending off waves of goons in an airfield as, again, they pile in on trucks. These missions and the outpost all turned into samey shootouts with little opportunity for stealth or unusual approaches.

I'm not sure about the setting

Montana looks nice enough—the forest areas are particularly beautiful, and full of warring animals. However, as a play space I found it to be the least exciting of any Far Cry game since the very first game. The area shown off in both of the hands-on sessions I played is wide open and flat. Expect to be driving trucks around a lot of featureless farmland and navigating some gentle forested hills. 

Perhaps I've been spoiled by Kyrat and Far Cry Primal. I'm into the idea of a game set in contemporary America in a county beset by doomsday cults. Our Montana native James Davenport has touched on the way the game handles that setting and the political context around the story the game is trying to tell. I find that fascinating, but as a someone coming into the place cold, it strikes me as quite a bland, relatively unexciting game world to explore. 

In this limited demo at least there were no mountainsides to recklessly wingsuit off. Apart from one particularly hairy mission set on a sky-high broadcasting mast, there was no great vertical variation or sense of spectacle. I rarely felt the need to reach for the screenshot key. As I was moving through quests and unlocking new mission givers, I didn't feel like I was progressing much because the landscape was so similar. The demo was limited to a sizeable chunk of land in the corner of the map, so there's a chance we'll see more variation from the full game, but my time with Far Cry 5 made me want to install Far Cry 4, or Primal, to enjoy a more varied and colourful world.

Far Cry 5 is out on March 27.

It's been seven years since the "magic realist adventure game" Kentucky Route Zero successfully completed its $6500 Kickstarter campaign. Four acts have been released since then, the most recent in July 2016, and in September of last year developer Cardboard Computer said it was "totally focused" on finishing the game. It appears that the work might finally be approaching completion, as the studio dropped a tweet today that leads to a surreal trip inside a tiny independent television station somewhere deep in the Bluegrass State. 

The "station" is actually broadcasting, sort of, at wevp.tv, in parallel with the events of the mini-game interlude that can be found through the above link. If you don't care for Rita's broadcast, a selection of others can be found behind the "copy-it-right" message at the bottom of the page (or here). Selections include Junebug Teaser, Aunt Connie PSA #2, A Five Minute Romp Through the IP, and WEVP Technical Difficulties. 

It all comes off as very true to the spirit of public access television, leavened with Kentucky Route Zero's supernatural undertones. And the simulation runs pleasingly deep: I don't want to spoil too much but I will suggest that if you're intrigued, you might want to try that phone number. Also, the Bureau of Secret Tourism is real. Just putting that out there. 

There's no hard release date for Kentucky Route Zero Act 5 just yet, unless it's buried somewhere in WEVP video databank. (If so, I haven't found it yet.) But it's reasonably to say that it's probably coming soon—in the meantime, find out why Joe chose it as his "Staff Pick" for our 2016 Game of the Year Awards. 

Tired of the same crummy settlements that look a bit like they were cobbled together from rotting wood and rusted metal because they were? Yearning for an outpost that's not just a bunch of patched walls and grimy rooftops but hearkens back to a time when commerce and capitalism ruled the land? Wait no more: here's a mod for Fallout 4 that let's you build a big damn skyscraper, and a functioning one to boot.

You can't use this blueprint, called Elysium Tower, just anywhere: you'll have to build your skyscraper in Starlight Drive-in. But, wow. It's massive, with over 20 floors, including the upper two that comprise your home. The first five floors provide autonomous food production, and there's a trade center with shops, a synth production department, a science center, a swimming pool and gym, plus plenty of room to build and customize on your own.

Note: this isn't one of those mods that's a simple one-click install. If you want this big honkin' skyscraper looming over the Commonweath and reminding all that crane their necks up in wonder that you're a living god, you're doing to have to do some work. There are 24 different plugins (listed on its page at Nexus Mods) that you'll need to get your skyscraper running perfectly, including one from the Creation Club's interior decoration pack that you'll need to buy if you don't already own it. The modder also advises you not to turn on all the building's lights at once, because there are simply so many of them that your fps may suffer for it.

Still. Wow. It's certainly something to behold, and below you'll find some pictures to gawp at.

Earlier this week, over 6,100 pilots piled into the star system of 9-4RP2 to engage in the biggest battle in EVE Online's history. Outside of 9-4, another 6,000 pilots brawled for control of supply lines or dutifully waited for the call to reinforce their allies. Over ten thousand people were watching on Twitch, and even the mainstream media took notice. It was supposed to be the most destructive battle ever seen, dwarfing the losses incurred by the previous record-holder, the Bloodbath of B-R5RB. Players wanted a slaughter, but only a few hours later it was over. The total damages? About $10,000 USD. EVE's "million dollar battle" fell a little short. 

Great expectations 

As I already wrote, the Battle of 9-4RP2 was fought over a single Keepstar Citadel. This astronomically expensive space station is owned by Pandemic Horde, an alliance belonging to a group loosely referred to as The North. Traditionally, however, The North isn't Pandemic Horde's home. Back in 2016, a massive coalition (including Pandemic Horde) were rallied under the banner of the Moneybadger Coalition to unseat The Imperium, once considered EVE's most unassailable empire. After a crippling betrayal, The Imperium forfeited their northern empire and fled to the south-western corner of New Eden, EVE's virtual universe. It was a devastating defeat.

For over a year The Imperium and The North have been engaged in an arms race, stockpiling powerful Titan supercapital ships valued at over 100 billion ISK (around $1,300 USD when converted to EVE subscription time). When The Imperium began mobilizing its armies and heading toward their own homeland, players got excited: Two of the biggest factions in the game, each packing unimaginably large fleets of Titans and even bigger fleets of sub-capital ships, were about to meet. 

Over the course of weeks, The Imperium launched several successful skirmish fleets and managed to weaken the defenses of Pandemic Horde's 9-4RP2 Keepstar. This past Tuesday was their chance to deal the killing blow. In response, the entirety of The North rallied to aid Pandemic Horde and prevent The Imperium from securing a vital beachhead.

When they met on the field of battle two days ago, players weren't just expecting to see each side deploy the full might of their supercapital fleets, they wanted it. Being a sandbox MMO, players in EVE Online have to make their own fun. It's a burden carried by the leaders of these thousand-player alliances to continually keep their pilots entertained with new wars, fights, and reasons to play each day. And nothing gets EVE players (and the wider gaming community) more excited than a massive, galaxy-shaping battle. They could have gotten just that, if only EVE Online's servers could manage the overwhelming stress of 6,100 players shooting each other.

"It's always a learning experience," CCP Games community manager Paul 'CCP Falcon' Elsy tells me. He says that whenever EVE Online has a massive battle like this, it's all hands on deck for the developers.

EVE Online differs from your typical MMO in that it doesn't spread its playerbase across multiple servers like World of Warcraft. Instead, everyone shares one massive world and, from a server architecture standpoint, that creates some unique challenges. EVE Online is powered by a legitimate supercomputer boasting several Intel E5-2637v3 cores and 256GB of RAM. Elsy tells me that during the battle, they saw the CPU cores associated with that particular area of digital space reach 100 percent load, using almost 64GB of RAM to process each one of those 6,100 players' actions.

But managing that kind of load in real-time is impossible. That's why EVE Online uses Time Dilation ('TiDi') to slow things down during big conflicts to give the servers a chance to process all the action without going belly up. Under the full effect of TiDi, one second is actually ten seconds. But, as pilots from both sides of the conflict tell me, the result was less than ideal.

Fog of war 

Sort Dragon was one of the supporting defending generals on the field that day. He's the CEO of Darkness and leader of the Guardians of the Galaxy, one of two coalitions that make up The North. As he tells me, both sides were almost completely crippled by the sheer amount of server lag. "Players were useless and could not do anything at all except stare at a login screen or stare at their ships unable to do anything," he says.

Not only were CCP's servers being hammered, but client-side, players' computers struggled to render 6,100 individual ships all bundled up on screen. Early into the fight, players started complaining that the game was crashing or they were stuck in loading screens. Another pilot flying for Pandemic Legion, JakeMeister, tells me that ships were unresponsive and could take minutes to process a single command like firing a gun. Twitch streamers broadcasting the fight couldn't even move their camera without risking a crash. With the added effect of TiDi slowing things down, the action on screen played out at a crawl making it impossible to tell if the game was even responding. It was a nightmare. 

"As a leader, I felt helpless," Sort Dragon tells me. "It was commented on today that I didn't talk much on comms [during the fight] and the honest fact was I didn't because I couldn't give people much hope."

Speaking to Paul Elsy, he confirmed that EVE Online's servers weren't functioning as they should. Each time a player takes an action, like firing a cannon, a call is sent to the server to be processed so that action can be carried out. Under load, these calls should ideally form a queue and the server will work to complete them in chronological order—albeit very slowly. But, instead, the server was randomly prioritizing some calls over others. It was impossible for commanders to coordinate their fleets. It's something that CCP says they're investigating.

The likely culprit at this time is changes that were made to carrier and supercarrier ships. These behemoths field waves of fighter drones that the player controls, and recent changes were made to group these drones in 'flights' to help mitigate the processing power required to control them. But players found that they were malfunctioning and they often couldn't load a new set of drones in their launch tubes to replace destroyed ones. For the defenders, it was a major irritation, but for The Imperium, it was a disaster. Their entire strategy hinged on using these drones.

Earlier in the week, The Imperium installed a smaller Fortizar Citadel on the doorstep of Pandemic Horde's Keepstar. The backbone of their strategy was to keep their carriers and supercarriers protected within range of the Fortizar and use long-range bomber drones to deal damage to the Keepstar. But once the fighter drones stopped functioning correctly, the added stress of server lag and TiDi made it impossible to pivot and adapt to a new plan. "Our plan was to ferry out replacement [fighters] to our ships and replace the ones that were destroyed," Asher Elias, The Imperium's head fleet commander tells me. "Unfortunately the server broke in such a way that not only could we not replace our fighters, we couldn't even launch the second wave of fighters we had in our carriers. So we couldn't even use the full capacity inside our ships much less replace them."

"Unfortunately the game mechanics didn't work as intended and they didn't end up getting what they wanted to out of the fight," Elsy says.

That wasn't the only hurdle The Imperium had to tackle, either. To encourage fair fights and give time to prepare, Citadels have pre-determined vulnerability windows. The real battle started the moment Pandemic Horde's Keepstar entered its final 15-minute timer. It's complex system, but the gist of it is that as long as the attackers maintain a steady stream of damage to the Citadel, its timer will remain paused until it's destroyed. The defenders must repel the attackers to lower the damage done to the station long enough for the 15 minutes to lapse, at which point the Citadel automatically heals all damage dealt and becomes invulnerable for a time.

Here's the kicker: The timer isn't affected by the slowdown of TiDi. That means The Imperium had to deal effectively ten times as much damage as normal, since each of their actions was slowed by an order of ten. I asked Elsy if CCP felt the system was working as intended. "It's by design due to a few technical restrictions that we have, but we've been chatting a lot with our game design team just to roll over what we've learned from the fight and what we can change going forward. I can't say we're looking to address it immediately, but it is a point of discussion because it does give the attackers a significant disadvantage."

Doomsday delayed 

Before the fight began, the expectation was that both sides would escalate the conflict into a complete slaughterhouse. In EVE, all-powerful Titans are often played like a trump card. Each side commits more and more expensive fleets to the field, raising each others bets until they have no option but to either retreat or drop their Titans into the mess. That's when things will get expensive. With both sides reportedly having hundreds Titans ready to go, players were hoping the damages would reach a staggering $1 million USD.

But from The Imperium's perspective, there was never any reason to deploy Titans. With pilots struggling to even log in—not to mention fire their guns—there was no guarantee that deploying their Titan fleets would be effective. What's more, the northern defenders cast their bet early and deployed some of their Titans to the field. If The Imperium responded by unleashing theirs, there was a significant chance they would all be destroyed before their pilots could even load into the game. That kind of loss would be enough to end the war before it ever began.

"It was frustrating to a degree," Asher Elias says. "I've played the game a long time and I've been in plenty of giant fights. Some of them are slow but everything works and that gives you the kind of time to make tactical calls you couldn't in other games while others are slow and frustrating like this particular fight. There was a dawning realization that we were fighting the game itself more than our enemy and there was very little we could do to win."

Sort Dragon doesn't see it that way, though. "The fight was [The Imperium's] to lose," he says. Between the lag and technical difficulties, The North thought they wouldn't be able to mount a capable defense. "We couldn't believe we survived and we couldn't believe they didn't commit. When [The Imperium] went into the fight they knew it was going to be hard but they knew they wanted the challenge. Do I believe they got the short straw? Maybe. But I do know they went in knowing what to expect."

Asher Elias, on the other hand, doesn't think it's that simple. "Both sides had the opportunity to fight their enemy Titan fleet on their own respective Citadels, it's a pretty rare chance and both sides elected to pass on the opportunity to focus on attacking and defending the objective. EVE is all about the meta-game. If Sort Dragon thinks he can goad us into a foolhardy attack next time by calling us out in PC Gamer, it would be a big win for him. Don't expect us to make that kind of mistake."

After a few hours, it became clear that The Imperium was unable to do enough damage to keep the timer paused. Eventually the call went out across fleets to get out if you could and regroup. It was an anti-climatic ending to a battle tens of thousands of viewers and participants were hoping would spark the next great EVE war. And, understandably, many point to CCP Games as the culprit. "The thing is, if we prepare for 4,000 pilots, each side will bring 5,000," Elsy contests, adding that CCP has a unique challenge in trying to make fights like these workable. "There's just nothing like this happening in other games."

It's easy to sympathize with the technical challenges facing CCP during these moments, but the result is still disappointing. It's not often EVE Online makes headlines in mainstream media, and having that much attention drawn to a single battle only to have it deflate into nothing has the community pent up with unspent bloodlust. It's been four years since The Bloodbath of B-R5RB where 11 trillion ISK (an estimated $300,000 USD) went up in smoke. While the number of participants in conflicts has risen dramatically, players haven't seen that kind of destruction since. Veteran pilots like Asher Elias point the finger at CCP's game design, which he argues no longer favors these kinds of epic clashes. "The mechanics are a bit arcane here, but because of the way Citadels work the side [defending] a Citadel has an immense advantage," Asher says. 

The conflict isn't over, though. While the Keepstar was saved, The Imperium can attack it again in about a week's time. If it's serious about retaking the North from its enemies, another major fight is inevitable. Whether 6,100 pilots show up and Titans are dropped, finally giving everyone the fight they've been wanted for years, no one can say. Elsy is hopeful, though. "I was talking with a few guys from The Imperium yesterday before the fight kicked off," he says. "You don't march that amount of force north with the intention of going home if the first battle goes sour."

We'll have more on this conflict as it evolves over the coming weeks.

Ubisoft outlined a major change to the pricing structure of Rainbow Six Siege today, effectively raising the cost of the game by $20 for the average buyer after February 13, 2018. 

At that time the Standard Edition of Siege (currently $40 in most stores) will become the "Advanced Edition," and retail for $60. It's worth underlining that buyers will get slightly more out of this version of the game, but in the form of bonus cosmetic item packs and in-game currency, not operators, although that currency can be spent on operators.

"The Advanced Edition comes with all of the content that the Standard Edition had – access to all Rainbow Six Siege content: modes, maps, weapon options, level progression and the standard amount of time required to unlock the original 20 Operators," reads Ubisoft's blog post. "As an added benefit, the Advanced Edition comes with 600 Rainbow Six Credits, and 10 Outbreak Collection Packs." At this time, 600 Rainbow Six Credits retails for $5.

In kind, the "Gold" edition of the game, which includes the most recent year of DLC operators, will cost $90, rather than its present $70. The Gold Edition will also include 10 of the new Outbreak Collection Packs and in-game currency. And finally, the Complete Edition of Siege will run $130.

As these changes roll out next month, the $15 Starter Edition, which I do not recommend, will remain in tact at that price, and will offer the same benefits.

In summary, after February 13:

• Starter Edition - $15
• Advanced Edition (currently Standard Edition) - $60 (currently $40)
• Gold Edition - $90 (currently $70)
• Complete Edition - $130 (currently $90)

For more than a year, Rainbow Six Siege has been a complicated game to buy. Ubisoft split the game into four editions, with the lowest-tier Starter Edition of the game essentially operating on its own, slower economy, offering cheap entry but locking owners into paying as much as 10 times more non-cash currency (Renown) to unlock individual operators. Rainbow Six Siege has 32 characters, and plans to add eight more in 2018. 

I'll be updating our "How to buy Rainbow Six Siege" story with new recommendations soon.

As someone with lots of good things to say about it, I do believe Siege is worth $60, but the cost increase will make it harder to recommend to all PC gamers. Siege is now more than two years old, and while it's arguably in its prime in terms of balance, features, and popularity, a price increase feels slightly unprecedented. The only comparison I can think of is games like ARK: Survival Evolved that have gone up after leaving Early Access.

To that end: I'd encourage anyone with a strong interest in the game to buy the Standard Edition now while it's still available at $40. Or, even better, get it on the Humble Store now for $24 before the deal expires in a few days.

If you already own the Standard Edition, you won't experience any changes to your game or account, per this official tweet below:

I've been keeping a close eye on Kingdom Come: Deliverance ever since I got the chance to see its branching questlines, complex armor system, and AI-driven combat encounters for myself. While some folks are mourning the 'death of the immersive sim,' Deliverance is set to keep the genre kicking, albeit under a much more realistic guise than most. 

To keep things realistic without sacrificing the modern conveniences most games come with nowadays, Deliverance even gives the immersive sim staple of quicksaving a medieval touch. You can save by sleeping, and autosaves will keep you from losing hours of progress, but in order to save on the spot anywhere in the world, you'll need to stock up on Saviour Schnapps, an alcoholic drink that lets you reload from the moment you down the sucker. See for yourself in the latest dev video above (it starts around the 13-minute mark). 

I know most of us have come to rely on F5 like an old friend, and I'll miss the convenience of tapping a button whenever I want, however many times I want, as a safe way to experiment in a tricky situation. But I dig the weight that an expendable item places on how you approach challenging scenarios. Also, it gives you a damn buff to courage, which, as unhealthy as self-medicating yourself to bury anxiety is, is a clever way to express an age-old game system within the world. It also makes your character exhibit drunken characteristics over time because that's what alcohol did in medieval times and that's what it still does today. I get the impression that Henry, the low-born character you play as, would probably stop to knock back some liquid courage and catch his breath before charging headfirst into danger anyway. 

Let's just hope Saviour Schnapps aren't too expensive or hard to come by. We'll know soon enough though, because Kingdom Come: Deliverance releases in just a few weeks on February 13. And if the drinks aren't enough to compel you, Kingdom Come: Deliverance will also be playable at this year's PC Gamer Weekender in London. 

Utopia isn't all it's cracked up to be. Sure, it starts with miracle nanites and VR paradises and direct brain-to-computer interfaces, but before long you're trapped in the abandoned ruin of a disused hospital as it slowly leaks oxygen into the hostile vacuum surrounding a Jovian moon. 

In The Mind's Eclipse, doctor and scientist Jonathan Campbell finds himself in just that predicament, with huge gaps in both his memories and his eye sockets (which somehow, mysteriously, still function), with only an untrustworthy AI named L for guidance.

The Mind's Eclipse is a visual novel about exploring a sci-fi station called The CORE. Unlike most visual novels, there are few characters to interact with—other than L, some malfunctioning servant robots, and occasional intrusions from a enigmatic entity calling itself COSy, the entire city is apparently abandoned. Everyone you find is dead and answers come from rummaging through the debris and downloading fragmentary conversations from computers and corpses. It's the kind of thing we're used to seeing in immersive sims like System Shock 2 or Prey, reinterpreted in visual novel form.

Exploring an abandoned space to explore the life and values of the people who once occupied it has appeared elsewhere of course, in games ranging from Everybody's Gone to the Rapture and Gone Home to BioShock and Doom. They may have different amounts of exploded heads, but they all share a common thread of piecing together the lives of people who inhabited these spaces. 

"It’s an extension of our fascination with mortality, but projected onto locations," explains Donald Campbell (no relation to the game's protagonist Jonathan Campbell), director of The Mind's Eclipse. "Humans are so curious as a species and what better thing to be curious about than why something has died? We all want to go into that place and rip it apart, find its secrets, and hope to know how we ourselves can succeed by learning from those failures."

Your companion in this investigation is L, a snarky artificial intelligence installed on BOSy, a brain-computer interface implanted in your head. L offers running commentary, as well as insisting that you leave the CORE as quickly as possible for both of your sakes, but she also accidentally calls into question the truth of what you can actually see. The environments and Jonathan's memories are impressionistic, ink-and-pen sketches, but when you connect to the BOSy implant of a luckless CORE inhabitant, it brings up a digital window with the contents of their email inbox. Despite being obviously artificial projections, both L and these interface windows feel more real than the loosely-drawn reality.

The ink-sketch style is striking. Campbell recalls, "I suggested we try a stark black-and-white scene a few weeks into production. When Dianne [Yingst, one of the game’s illustrators] handed off that first piece, I knew we had found our unique look." 

The loose style fits the fuzziness of memory—but it's also applied to what's seen in the present, calling its reliability into question. "I only dream in black and white," Campbell says. The dream-like quality of the visuals adds to the ambiguity.

While Jonathan's hazy recollection of his past and fuzzy perception of his present drive the mystery of The Mind's Eclipse, its central drama revolves around understanding and coming to terms with what happened to his wife and daughter. Everything he did has something to do with his wife's death, while his daughter is one of the many missing inhabitants of the CORE. Jonathan's struggle, both in the past in response to his wife's death and in the present as he searches for his daughter, lead him to the Eclipse, a project to overcome death itself.

At times the desolate CORE feels like the aftermath of the rapture, albeit a technological singulatarian one rather than a Christian eschatological one, something Campbell says was deliberate. "We wanted to have more than a story about transcendence. We attempt to examine a family that is caught in a web of uncertainty with regard to this new frontier of existence. In a universe where we could live forever, what does this mean for the human? And is it worth the cost to get there?"

The Mind's Eclipse is available on itch.io and Steam.