In early 2016, Andy wrote about how record label Ghost Ramp is embracing games. It's since brought Darkest Dungeon, Crypt of the Necrodancer, Nuclear Throne and Hollow Knight's soundtracks to life—each with its own gorgeous sleeve art. 

In the wake of yesterday's Gods & Glory announcement, Hollow Knight's next expansion is getting the game-to-vinyl treatment too. 

And it looks awesome:

Composed by Christopher Larkin, the above boasts 15 tracks from the DLC on a limited edition, 1000-unit single-pressed LP run. It comes with an art print insert, a 'Grimmchild' enamel pin, embossed lettering on its jacket, and a Gods & Glory expansion download card. 

In his review, Tom Marks billed Hollow Knight's soundtrack as "sullen but energetic" and "exceptional, pairing each area with an orchestral soundtrack that perfectly sets the mood." I can't argue with that, and can't wait to hear what the latest DLC has in store. 

"Venture to the farthest reaches of Hallownest with an all new collection of 15 epic tracks," so reads its blurb on the Ghost Ramp site. "Meet fallen kings, gallant knights and ancient gods in this powerful, orchestral collection that brings together all the additional tracks from Hollow Knight and features an entirely new arrangement, Pale Court."

At $30.00, Ghost Ramp's Gods & Glory vinyl OST is "expected to ship November 2018." If pre-ordering is your thing, head this way for more details.    

The final Hollow Knight expansion, Gods & Glory, finally has a firm release date. As the trailer above reveals, the last chapter in the Hollow Knight saga will release for PC on August 23, and according to studio Team Cherry it'll be the largest one they've issued.

According to the studio's blogpost, the expansion will add new bosses, new music and new NPCs, as well as new quests. To coincide with the release, a new album of Hollow Knight music will release, compiling all of the new music featured in the four expansions. 

"It’s not been said before, but Chris [Larkin] created all of the extra Hollow Knight music for free! If you love the music (and sound) of Hollow Knight, buy the album and support this incredibly talented composer!" It'll be available on Bandcamp, iTunes an Spotify on August 9, but there will also be a super limited vinyl edition, which you'd better pre-order here if you must have it.

First-person battle royale shooter Islands of Nyne has been around for a while: its development actually began before PUBG was even announced. I had a beta key but I never managed to get into one of the testing periods to try it out, which I now deeply regret. lslands of Nyne entered Steam Early Access last week, and everyone playing seems to be extremely good at it already. Everyone but me.

The setting is an arena assembled by aliens, a sort of hodgepodge of glowing futuristic stuff and a bunch of old-timey looking castles and huts. Fifty players spawn in the air over the arena and then plummet to the ground. There's no plane ride and no parachutes, and you reach the ground in a 'hero landing' pose: on one knee, fist to the ground. You know the deal. It doesn't always come off as super dramatic, though, when you happen to skid off a tower and go sliding into the grass and then have to beat cheeks back to the castle you were aiming for.

The arena is a pretty small one, and with fewer players than most BR games plus a quickly closing series of death circles, the matches move along fast. There are loads of weapons—every table, chair, crate, and barrel seems to be covered with guns and ammo, armor, attachments, healing items, and grenades. It's not unusual to land a few seconds after someone else and find them already half-geared and emptying a magazine into you. 

It honestly feels like too much gear to me. I'll run into a house and find a gun and ammo for it, turn and spot another gun, then look in the other direction to find, yes, another gun. Before I get out of the house I've already dropped a few new guns and replaced them with a few newer guns and have all sorts of attachments already. It's nice to not have to scrounge for long minutes to find a pistol and helmet, but it also feels a bit like overkill.

Once you have a bunch of gear it's time to get shot to death by someone with far better aim, as happened to me repeatedly. I'm not blaming anything other than my poor marksmanship and inexperience with Nyne, but in most BR games I feel like I've got a bit more time to run around, try out a few guns, and do some exploring before I'm completely shredded.

Again, it's a small and crowded arena. I've never had to look far to find a fight, and it's never more than a minute or two before I'm back in another full match.

Dying immediately is just really throwing me off my normal routine: playing a bunch of rounds and then selectively posting gifs of me killing people as if I'm really good at battle royale. I have no gifs of me killing anyone!

Islands of Nyne is hard. You have to be incredibly precise with your aim and don't get second chances. I think that's pretty cool: I'm not sure how much more I'll be playing, but I can definitely imagine watching more skilled players on Twitch.

This isn't a particularly great looking game. The foliage isn't especially lush, and the buildings look like they've been imported from an unmodded save of The Elder Scrolls IV: Oblivion. The architecture isn't well thought out, either: I tried to jump out a window at one point, sort of a normal, battle royale thing to do, especially in a game where slick and slippery movement seems pretty important. I couldn't fit through the window.

Hey, but I did kill one guy! Finally. He didn't even have a gun but I got him, eventually, while hopping backwards like a huge scaredy cat. Here's the evidence. Note how I'm killed a moment later.

I'll see how Islands of Nyne continues to develop in Early Access. I like that it's first-person only, and if you're looking for something fast-paced—almost rushed—where you need to have your head on a swivel the moment your boots (and fist) hit the ground, this is one to check out.

You may have already heard Earthfall called “Left 4 Dead with aliens,” and there really is no better way to quickly describe it. Almost everything—from the enemy design and behavior, the pacing of the missions, to the gunplay—so closely mirrors Valve’s zombie shooter that you could be forgiven for thinking it was a mod. For the most part, that’s not a bad thing.

Stepping into the mud-caked sneakers of one of four quippy, ragtag, unmemorable survivors, Earthfall’s 10 story-driven missions task you with blasting through waves of creepy-looking aliens to complete a variety of objectives. One level has you infiltrating a claustrophobic underground facility to recover data needed by the human resistance. Another involves activating a hydroelectric dam to draw attention away from an off-map cell of allies launching a surgical strike against the extraterrestrial hive. The narrative thread running through the post-apocalyptic fight for survival is entertaining and tense, though a lot of the connective tissue that explains how you get from the end of one mission to the start of the next is, disappointingly, only explained in text dossiers you’re expected to read on your own time. And it's not exactly up to spec graphically with most modern shooters, featuring a lot of muddy and flat-looking textures.

Video: Earthfall gameplay.

As with similar co-op shooters, it’s a lot more fun and less frustrating if you have a friend or three on voice chat to coordinate who’s covering you when you need to reload or who’s in charge of keeping baddies off of the person holstering their AK to activate a forklift. The bots that take over for your teammates in solo mode are fairly competent, but tend to get flustered by boss aliens and don’t do particularly well navigating enclosed spaces, even if you crank up the allied AI skill level—an option independent of enemy difficulty that seems to mostly boost their accuracy and target selection abilities. 

The aliens are visually distinct and eerie, but remind me constantly of how much Earthfall feels like a Left 4 Dead reskin. There are almost direct analogues to every special enemy type, including a sneaky alien that pins you to the ground and mauls you until a friend blasts them off, a lanky opportunist who ensnares you and tries to drag you away from your team for an easy kill, a bulbous green thing that explodes and leaves behind a toxic cloud, and a towering brute who eats bullets for breakfast and forces everyone to stay on the move. The basic cannon fodder nasties behave pretty much like your standard zombies, attacking in huge mobs and trying to melee you death with paper cuts.

Gun play

The one exception is the Blackout, a boss-tier psychic squid thing that looks like it emerged from XCOM. With the ability to teleport, launch rapid-fire energy barrages, and summon rotating deflector shields, this guy was the only enemy Earthfall threw at me that I needed to invent new tactics to deal with rather than falling back on my horde shooter muscle memory. That was a nice touch, but I wish there had been more surprises like it, especially when it's competing for my time with more inventive genre mates like Deep Rock Galactic and Vermintide 2.

The guns I scavenged to mow down extraplanetary, invaders leaned a bit too far to the arcadey, hitscan side of the spectrum for my tastes, whether I was clearing corridors with a chunky shotgun or thinning the horde from a church balcony with a highly accurate battle rifle. The kickback and sound effects are satisfying enough, but the flinch and death animations for the aliens didn’t sell the power of the weapons all that well. It never gets old watching a drone’s head explode from a perfect shot between the… whatever their sensory organs are, but the fairly tame slump they do even when hit by something potent like a high-caliber sniper rifle was underwhelming a lot of the time. I wished for some truly exaggerated, ragdoll-laden bloodbaths.

Despite not always feeling empowered by the heat I was packing, the running and gunning is plenty of fun—especially when you get temporary access to a special heavy weapon like the Harbinger chain gun. Obliterating dozens of oncoming ETs while your friend tries desperately to get the power back on is a satisfying rush. The ability to 3D print specific guns at special stations helps ensure that you can usually have your pick of a firearm that suits your playstyle even if you’re not able to loot it on the map normally. At the same time, ammo is sparse enough that most missions will force you to conserve your heavier-hitting boomsticks and rely on melee attacks or the bottomless basic pistol in lower-intensity situations, which adds to the tension and pacing in a positive way.

Tactical turrets

The inclusion of deployable, stationary barricades and automated turrets create a fun and challenging tactical layer on a lot of maps. Certain areas that seemed frustratingly difficult, like an abandoned church with a lot of entry points, became rewarding puzzles when my multiplayer group got the hang of using barricades to funnel the horde into a more manageable set of kill zones. Across all 10 chapters, the level design is admirable. Progression between objectives has a good flow, there’s a nice balance of defensible choke points without any area being so linear that you don’t have to worry about being flanked at all, and much like Left 4 Dead, there are plenty of tense holdouts that involve activating an objective or getting to an evac zone while being bombarded by absolutely withering levels of opposition. The rush of making it to the chopper with five percent health and two dozen bloodthirsty space beasts trying to claw your remaining vertebrae out is enough to keep me coming back.

While calling Earthfall derivative of Left 4 Dead might even be an understatement, it's an entertaining variation on that theme with a great extra layer of map control added by the barricade system. I wish it had pushed harder to differentiate itself, especially in the design of special enemies. But if you’re looking to satisfy your co-op horde shooter craving with Left 4 Dead 3 still nowhere on the immediate horizon, you could certainly do a lot worse.

Not much has changed since the great war. Peasants tend fields, the Great Powers of Europa chase glory, and giant mechanized walkers crunch o’er the ashes. A game of expansion and harvest, Scythe Digital Edition steams the 4X down to its base appetites, turns you loose in its efficiency sandbox and lets you play two-thirds of a game in the time it takes to set up the tabletop version. 

After a slick tutorial, Scythe tucks you into a corner of its strategy map, presses a couple of coins in your hand and shouts 'Go!' Depending on which faction and player board you’ve been assigned, the strategy starts to set in: Do you build? Expand? Pillage? 

Unlike other 4Xes, there is only one victory in Scythe: Have the most money at the end. But money is analogous to points, with massive bonuses doled out at the end for completing various objectives. Deploy a squadron of mechs to stomp about the countryside? Points. Turn inward and focus on economic and technological development? Points. Become a beloved folk hero? Mongering warlord? Pointy pointy points. The challenge lies entirely in getting there faster than your opponents.

A turn in Scythe, whether you’re playing as migratory Polania or adaptable Crimea, goes only one way: Select one of four basic actions—move, trade, bolster power, or harvest—then pay an additional cost to perform a linked secondary action. It’s the latter that leads to victory, letting you upgrade your faction’s production lines or field new mechs, but doing so is costly and cumbersome, requiring you to delicately balance order of operations as you put off harvesting ‘til next round and trade for lumber instead, thus giving you a new armory in two moves rather than three.

It’s this calculus that lies at the heart of Scythe; for all its hex-based aesthetics, quirky encounters with the locals, and grand designs of mechanized glory, winning requires you to come to grips with the efficiency engine you’ve been lashed to, balance it against a few randomized point-scoring goals, then vault over the finish line before those bastards over there do.

For that reason, Scythe pushes refinement over creative adaptation, expertise over exploration—but just as in the board game, the achievements gently nudge players towards self-imposed unorthodoxy. Can you win with no structures? No mechs? The preset map size and layout means player count greatly affects the experience—two powers on opposite corners can play points chicken, revving their respective engines closer and closer to redline—while a five player game bestows the intimate tension of a knife fight in a phone booth.

But once you understand its mechanisms, Scythe will reward you with a feeling of deep cleverness. Your brain begins to intuit the harmonic interplay of its four twin-linked actions, how one flows into the next, and if you can just keep all the plates spinning for three more turns you can land a moonshot of an action sequence and feel like a 4X god. You’ll regularly have to map out ambitious plans; trade for wood to construct a mine to access the western oilfields before the Rusviets do, recruit some workers and get a mech in position to transport them over there… and have enough combat cards ready for when the bloody Saxons inevitably charge a pair of fifty ton walkers through the works.

Scythe’s roots as a board game mean this adaptation is light on things you might expect from a PC civ game: there are no combat animations or 3D terrain, your workers do not saunter ant-like from hex to hex. It does, however, retain all the charm and heart; from frolicking with bear cavalry in a random encounter to the little regionally-dressed workers. The soundtrack is stunning, in particular the hypnotic Crimean percussion and the fervent drums and chanting of the Nordic theme as the track slowly yields into plaintive strings and the squawking of distant crows. This is the first board game soundtrack I’ve found myself humming late into the night.

The AI is no slouch either: Even after two dozen games under my belt the intermediate bots are still a rough beat, meaning there’s plenty of longevity for you to stretch your strategic legs—but I found myself missing the tactility of slotting upgrade cubes into cut-out player boards, or being able to cajole and chat with my fellow players. Like most digital implementations, Scythe’s strength is in asynchronous multiplayer (coming next month, complete with ELO matchmaking), but a full replacement for the board game this isn’t, unless one foresees mainly solo outings.

Currently chugging through its Early Access period, Scythe’s future patch notes are a sunny shopping list of niceties: a Mac version, spectator mode, camera customisation. A major update which released mid-way through this review has made the learning curve less opaque, leading to fewer 'how the heck did I lose' moments, and plans are afoot for the first expansion, adding on the Albion and Togawa factions. (While yet unannounced, hopes are they’ll also implement the airship and narrative campaign.) 

Scythe Digital Edition is available now on Steam Early Access, with a full release and first expansion due in August. The host of usability tweaks put in since we last looked at it in May have transformed it, and everything they’ve posted on their Roadmap seems gravy. Evocative, clever, and rewarding, Scythe Digital Edition is starting to look like one of the finest board games on PC. 

The first quarter of Ubisoft's 2018-19 fiscal year was a very good one for the company—a record-setter, in fact. Ubi reported sales of €400 million ($466 million) for the quarter, driven primarily by continued growth of digital sales and "player recurring investment" [PRI] in "digital items, DLC, season passes, subscriptions, and advertising."

"We had a record first quarter, which exceeded our expectations. This performance was fueled by steady growth for our back-catalog and an excellent momentum for PRI, once again confirming the increasingly recurring profile of our business and the ever-greater success of our digital transformation," Ubisoft CEO Yves Guillemot said. Back-catalog net bookings reached €333 million ($388 million) over the quarter, an increase of nearly 75 percent that represents 87.2 percent of total net bookings. 

Ubi's future is looking pretty bright too: "Our teams are continuing to deliver on our strategic plan of ramping up our franchises. Assassin’s Creed Odyssey and The Division 2 were very well received at E3, confirming their full potential in a highly competitive environment. Our new creation, Skull & Bones, also made a very good impression due to its innovative gameplay combining naval battles with a multi-player experience." 

And of course we don't want to overlook the PC's role in all of this: PC sales accounted for 24 percent of Ubisoft's total for the quarter, up from 21 percent of the first-quarter total in 2017-18 and behind only the PlayStation 4, which accounted for 38 percent of sales (down from 44 percent in Q1 2017-18). The Xbox One, which barely edged out the PC last year, came in third this time around, accounting for 22 percent of sales by platform.

It's not the first time that PC sales have surpassed Xbox One—in the first quarter of Ubi's 2016-17 fiscal, the PC notched 26 percent of sales versus 23 percent on the Xbox One—but the Xbox 360 was more of a factor then, too, claiming 3 percent of sales by platform. This time out, the 360, PlayStation 3, Nintendo Wii, and Wii U collectively accounted for just one percent of by-platform sales.

Aliens: Colonial Marines suffered from a lot of issues, including wonky enemy AI that resulted in erratic and confused Xenomorph behavior. More than five years after it came out, someone discovered that the bad behavior could have been the result of a simple typo in the code—a theory that we put to the test and found to be at least partially correct.

Launching without that typo probably wouldn't have been enough to "save" the game but it sure would've helped, and so to ensure that something like this doesn't happen again, Gearbox has posted a job listing for a Programming Copy Editor. Copy editing, as defined by Wikipedia, "is the process of reviewing and correcting written material to improve accuracy, readability, and fitness for its purpose, and to ensure that it is free of error, omission, inconsistency, and repetition." 

"Gearbox Software is looking for a capable and driven full-time engineer to review all code for typos," the listing states. For those interested in applying, the details: 

• Responsibilities: Review all code for typos. Just that.
• Desired Skills and Experience: Enjoys finding typos.
• Required Skills and Experience: Click apply and pass the rigorous questionnaire located on the application [interactive on the site, viewable below].    

The job listing is "real," in that it's on the Gearbox Job Openings site (between Online Programmer and Senior Systems Programmer), but I'm pretty confident that it's not serious—that it is in fact Gearbox rolling with a bit of self-deprecating, and well-played, good humor. ("Teather" was the misspelling of "tether" that caused xeno AI to go off the rails in the first place.)

(But I applied, just in case. I'll let you know how it goes.)

PlayerUnknown's Battlegrounds has promised custom matches for some time. Today, they arrive on test servers via an open beta—and while they come free-of-charge at present, developer PUBG Corp may eventually put them behind a paywall so the system "remains sustainable long-term".

As outlined in this Steam Community update, PUBG Corp says custom matches allow players to "play PUBG your way" by customising various aspects of the game, hosting private matches, or tailoring pre-existing War and Zombie Mode game types, among other things. 

"Throughout the open beta, custom games creation will be limited to 10,000 concurrent running games to ensure a stable service," explains the dev. "Creating custom matches won't have an associated cost during this phase. However, due to the extremely large amount of resources required to allow custom games to be available to all players, we may change this in the future to ensure everything runs smoothly and the system remains sustainable long-term. 

"We're open to your feedback on this system and we'll have more details on this aspect of the system later."

The remainder of the post talks would-be matchmakers through the process of setting up the mode's myriad prerequisites—"map, team sizes, perspective, current player count etc."—while showcasing its new UI too. Check that out in full this-a-way.

No Man's Sky's NEXT update is its "largest update so far", so reckoned developer Hello Games earlier this year. It's due next week—Tuesday, July 24—and has a new trailer. Feast your eyes on that above first, and we'll discuss what's new below. 

NEXT brings with it NMS' long-requested multiplayer support, unlimited base building and, as you can see above, improved graphics. The space explore-'em-up is now fully playable in first or third person—both on foot and inside your ship.

"Team up with a small team of friends and explore the universe together, or be joined by random travellers," says Hello Games on the game's much-anticipated multiplayer. "You can help friends to stay alive, or prey on others to survive. You can build tiny shelters or complex colonies that are shared for all players. 

"Fight as a pirate or a wingman in epic space battles with friends and enemies. Race exocraft across weird alien terrains, creating race tracks and trails to share online. The character customisation allows you to personalise your appearance." 

The developer explains curious adventurers can now assemble and upgrade fleets of frigates, which can be commanded from the bridge of their freighter. You can then send your fleet out into the vast expanse, or use them to explore specific systems. You can invite pals on missions too, says the dev—all of which allows for a "truly custom capital ship." 

Hello Games describes its NEXT update as an incredibly important one, but also "just another step in a longer journey". If you fancy taking the next step with them, No Man's Sky's NEXT is due July 24. 

Head this way for the best Prime Day PC Gaming deals from Amazon, Newegg, and more. Head this way for details on PUBG's limited time Prime Day crossover with EDM DJ Deadmau5. 

Available now through 11.59pm PST today—and exclusive to PC-playing Twitch Prime subscribers—PUBG's Prime Day Deadmau5 crate nets players "special Deadmau5 in-game skins". Those look like this:

As part of its PC 1.0 Update #18, PUBG has also added a Sanhok map-exclusive weapon and vehicle to its test servers. The QBU is a DMR that takes ten rounds of 5.56mm ammo. It comes with a bipod, and is thus most effective when engaged in the prone position. It replaces the Mini 14 on the tropical 4x4km arena, and looks like this:

The Rony, on the other hand, is Sanhok's newest vehicle—a pickup truck "from the automaker that brought you the Mirado," says developer PUBG Corp. It continues: "This truck holds up to 4 passengers and excels at moving across Sanhok's hilly landscapes. The Rony is one of the larger vehicles on Sanhok, so it can be used for cover as well as transportation."

The Rony looks like this:

As always, once both the Rony and the QBU are successfully tested, they'll be applied to live servers. More information on both, as well as Update #18's haul of bug fixes, can be read here. 

If you're a Twitch Prime subscriber and fancy picking up the Deadmau5 Prime Day crate, remember to do so before midnight PST-time / 8am BST tomorrow.