Rats have gotten top billing in a lot of the preview footage of A Plague Tale: Innocence, but it’s human beings who are the game’s real monsters. That fact is highlighted in a new trailer, appropriately titled “Monsters.”

The new video provides a close-up look at Lord Nicholas, the fellow with the spiky boots and the cross-shaped opening in his face mask. He leads the army of the Inquisition, which is tasked with taking out anyone suspected of carrying the plague—in other words, our young heroine Amicia and her little brother Hugo.

Having seen the opening sequence of A Plague Tale: Innocence myself, I can assure you that Nicholas and his pals are some extremely unpleasant people, enough that they manage to stand out as particularly nasty in a world that is ravaged by plague and countless rats.

You’ll be able to meet these folks for yourself when A Plague Tale: Innocence comes out May 14.

Kerbal Space Program, one of the best space games on PC, is thankfully not yet done with its exploration of the cosmos. The team's been tinkering away on the second expansion, Breaking Ground, which will focus on the noble pursuit of scientific knowledge (and sticking robotic components to ships). And you won't need to wait long for launch; it's due out on May 30. 

With Breaking Ground, you'll be able to conduct a variety of scientific experiments on planets or the moon, building science bases with stations, power generators and other devices. These bases can collect data from your experiments and then transmit the results back home automatically. If you need a bit of excitement in your quest for knowledge, you can also crash stuff into planets to "gather seismic data" and definitely not just because it's fun. 

Among the things available to study are new surface features that can be discovered on planets. Craters, cryovolcanoes and meteors can be analysed, with small samples able to be snatched and sent back to base for further testing. Larger objects can't just be sent across space, however, which means you'll need to use your rover's robotic arms to scan them and drill for samples. These arms come with a variety of handy instruments, and the larger they are, the more functionality they possess. 

Your rover's arms aren't the only fancy bit of robotic kit that you'll be able to take advantage of. Robotic hinges, pistons, rotors and rotational servos can be stuck onto spaceships, each of them with simulated physics affected things like force, torque and power consumption. These components and other parts of your ship can also be controlled via the new robotic controller system, which lets you coordinate their behaviour. 

Breaking Ground will launch on May 30 for £13/$15, but it will also be accompanied by some free additions to the base game, including an expanded action group system and the ability to bring cargo items with a Kerbal in their inventory. These were features designed for Breaking Ground but which should still benefit all players and modders. Read more about the expansion in our interview with Squad and Private Division here.

Here are some exclusive screens of Breaking Ground to tide you over until then:

If there’s any tale as long and dramatic as that of the space programs, it’s the story of their funding. The budget of NASA has its own Wikipedia page, such is its capacity to stir strong feelings about our priorities as a species—not to mention impassioned speeches from Neil deGrasse Tyson.

The funding of Kerbal Space Program, too, has its own story. You might imagine that lead developer Felipe Falanghe left the marketing company he worked at to start work on his rocket simulator. And it might have happened that way, had his employer accepted his resignation, rather than suggesting he make the game for them instead. Yep: Kerbal studio Squad was that marketing company—for a long time balancing the development of a hardcore engineering sim with the construction of high-tech advertising installations for clients like Coca Cola.

It’s an unlikely origin story. But then again, it’s hard to imagine a likely path to Kerbal’s success. This was a literal pipedream, a game about firing volatile tubes of explosives into the sky, the way Falanghe did with modified fireworks growing up. But it caught the popular imagination, and Kerbal became a beloved fixture of PC gaming—joining Euro Truck Simulator and Arma in powering simulation out of its niche and into the mainstream.

The phenomenon was such that, when Take-Two announced its acquisition of Kerbal two years ago, the news wasn’t particularly surprising—even if Squad had released a statement clarifying that it "continue[d] to be an independent studio" just a week before. Like NASA in the ‘60s, the game had become a major economic concern in less than a decade—more than significant enough to justify the attention of a publisher that owns Rockstar Games. 

At the time, with a flag already planted in 1.0, Squad was hard at work planning its next landing, an expansion dedicated to recreating famous missions. "Take-Two were very useful," Squad lead producer Nestor Gomez remembers. "They provided a lot of feedback on the release for Making History."

A few months after the acquisition, Kerbal was officially folded into Take-Two’s new label dedicated to mid-sized projects, Private Division. That’s a name you’ll have started to see crop up more frequently since, alongside Obsidian’s The Outer Worlds, and Patrice Désilets’ belated follow-up to Assassin’s Creed: Brotherhood, Ancestors. These are projects with ambitious scopes beyond the financial means of indie publishers like Devolver or Versus Evil, and yet not large enough to become flagship titles like Call of Duty or Far Cry—in other words, the games that had previously fallen between the cracks for Take-Two.

Michael Cook, a "player and admirer" of Kerbal who joined Private Division to become the game’s executive producer, believes there’s no connecting factor between the label’s games beyond quality.

"We want to collaborate with premier developers who are working on great things," he says. That’s essentially what we’re doing with Kerbal and Squad—just working with great people with great ideas."

That said, the common link between the other announced games on Private Division’s roster is that they come from developers with prior experience in mega-franchises—Fallout, Diablo, and Battlefield. In that sense, Kerbal is still the outlier—a Mexican marketing company’s first foray into software that rocketed unexpectedly upwards. And Squad still operates in its own way.

"I would say that, for the most part, we’ve been able to continue in the same direction as before," Gomez says. "We are pretty much free to organise ourselves, and we have a lot of creative freedom. In those terms, not much has changed. But on the other side, we now have better support with Private Division behind us."

Squad’s independence has not always seemed like a blessing. In the years after Kerbal exploded, the studio’s bizarre omni-directional approach continued as its co-founders wrote a film script and started a record label. There were rumours of crunch and unpredictable firings.

"Squad was a small team that grew up very quickly," Gomez reflects. "There were some challenges managing that growth. I wasn’t there, so there’s not much I can say about that. But since I joined, and before Private Division came in, there was always the intention to get better at things. And we keep doing that so far. Right now, those kinds of things are not happening anymore. We’re trying to get better at having people happy in the team."

Cook says that Gomez is being humble. "The team loves Nestor," he says. "Every time I visit it’s great to see the way the team functions together. He’s done a great job building a culture there since he’s joined."

The small group that makes Kerbal has changed over the years. Some early staff now work at Valve, while the game’s originator, Falanghe, left in 2016. His statement at the time suggested that—to put it in the terms of physicists—where once the game was a liquid he was responsible for guiding, it was now a solid. He could turn his back on it without fear that it would lose its shape, knowing that the balance between its unique playfulness and hard sim core would be maintained. The sense of relief was palpable.

"It means that conceptually, the game is complete," he said.

It was a relief for fans, too, to know that the ship could be steered without its commander. But you have to ask whether a conceptually complete game should continue development. What rocks are there left for Squad to colonise?

"For me, it’s giving players a better tool to do what they want to do," Gomez says. "That’s driving me every day."

In Kerbal’s December update, Squad gave the gift of Delta-v read-outs. That might sound like frighteningly high level flight dynamics, and it is, but if you can get your head around those values you can measure the impulse needed to perform a landing manoeuvre long before you attempt it. It could mean the difference between a stranded Kerbal or a triumphant journey home.

Just last month, a new manoeuvre mode exposed yet more information to players—with the aim of smoothing interplanetary transfers. Post-Falanghe Kerbal appears to have found purpose in making the deepest parts of its simulation visible, and accessible with pliers. "It’s about making what you can already do in the game a lot better," Gomez says. "We’re focusing on that."

Breaking Ground

That goal has led to more than mere tweaks. Kerbal’s second ever expansion, May 30’s Breaking Ground, is so called because it’s about cracking open the surface of planets—giving the destinations of your missions a little extra depth. Once landed, you’ll be hopping in your rover to search for different elements, buried in rocks and volcanoes, to "do science with them". In the parts of the landscape you’re not digging into, you can perform experiments loosely based on those NASA conducted during the Apollo missions, deploying weather stations and—here’s where the loosely comes in—tools to detect impacts. 

"You will have to impact something into the ground to get some readings, so we expect people to have a little fun with that one," Gomez says. "We always want to keep the humour of the Kerbals."

In fact, much of the new expansion is designed to aim the camera at the game’s goofy stars, to give you more reasons to take silly screenshots in celebration of your achievements. But, knowing the Kerbal community, fans will be more excited to share bold contraptions made possible by the new robotic parts coming in Breaking Ground.

"They’ll allow players more control over their constructions," Gomez says. You might want to rotate your engines for vertical take-off or, more ambitiously, create robotic arms for use in docking. Squad expects players to exploit the new tools for quality-of-life improvements, too—a deployed rover currently tends to go the same way as a dropped piece of buttered toast, but a specialised device could keep the vehicles upright. Like all of Kerbal’s best tools, the new robotics are intended to work as an open-ended system.

"We are always listening and looking at what people are building, and most of the time we get inspiration from them," Gomez says. "People already use the existing parts, or other parts created by modders, to build super interesting things like mechanical spiders."

At the time of Making History, Squad was criticised for being deaf to its modders, centering the expansion around classic real-world craft that the community had long since tackled itself. Gomez acknowledges that it’s tricky, sometimes, for the team to know where to focus its efforts. But he’s confident in the feature set of Breaking Ground, and I think he’s right to be. It’s an expansion focused on what comes after—after landing, after players have exhausted all the pre-built equipment available to them—rather than what came before. For all its open admiration for vintage NASA and the cosmonauts, that’s what keeps Kerbal exciting: the allure of new possibilities. That’s what attracted Private Division, after all.

"We definitely see a strong future to the franchise and have lots of things planned," Cook says. "It’s great to see something that’s been so popular for so long, and I hope that with Private Division as part of the equation, we can introduce it to people who haven’t been reached yet, and support Squad to be able to do bigger and better things."

As ever, Squad is looking upward—but also forward. Devotion to space history only makes so much sense when your pilots are gawping green mascots, anyway. "NASA never did an experiment to crash something," Gomez admits. "But it’s a perfect example of having fun with science, no?"

Hitman fans may have different preferred approaches to the business of unobtrusive assassination, but they all agree on one thing: more people should play Hitman 2. IO Interactive has a new entry-level Hitman 2 package that may help entice more players into Hitman 2’s “world of assassinations.” 

The Miami Package, which is available on Steam for $11.99 USD (or your regional equivalent), includes the Miami location and The Finish Line mission, which has Agent 47 tracking down Kronstadt Industries CEO Robert Knox and his daughter Sierra Knox. It’s a sprawling location that features crowds, an underground parking garage, and a high-performance motor race.

The pack also lets you in on the Undying Returns Elusive Contract, which gives you a single chance to assassinate a character played by a very arch Sean Bean. That contract, incidentally, is currently available to all Hitman 2 players, and runs until June 3—so if you missed it the first time around, here’s your second chance.

With the Miami Pack, you’ll also get the introductory Hawke’s Bay location and the tutorial Nightcall mission which are included in the free Starter Pack introduced earlier this year, Ghost mode for Miami, the Himmelstein Sniper Assassin mode, plus all the current and future contracts for both Hawke’s Bay and Miami. Not bad!

Miami is an excellent entry point into the modern Hitman franchise, and at this price it’s a steal.

The universe of EVE: Online is set to get a major shake-up this month. EVE Online: Invasion launches May 28, bringing the hostile race known as the Triglavians into New Eden. 

Developer CCP says it’s a literal invasion, and on a scale never before seen in the game. The Triglavians can currently be encountered in Abyssal Deadspace, the instanced PvE environment that was introduced with the Into the Abyss expansion last year. It seems they’ve gotten tired of waiting for daring pilots to wander into their front yards and are taking the fight to EVE’s more familiar systems, where CCP says they’ll be moving to the “forefront of the game.”

And because of how EVE is set up as a persistent world, the arrival of the Triglavian Collective means gameworld-altering events are sure to cascade out from this invasion.

“The Invasion expansion will provide a new presence and dimension to gameplay in New Eden that will bring players back time and again, inspiring them to be a part of history unfolding, the effects of which promise to change the EVE universe forever,” CCP says in a press release.

Speaking perhaps a bit more practically, Invasion will also be adding three new Tech II-category Triglavian ships to the game: a frigate, a destroyer, and a cruiser. The Abyssal Deadspace will be getting new mutaplasmids, which players can find and then use on ship modules to alter stats in unpredictable (and sometimes unfortunate) ways.

The best part is that the expansion will be free for all players. You can find out more at the official site.

What I like about Forager is that it has survival and crafting but the hunger meter's not an annoyance. There are always berry bushes nearby, and you only get hungry when you're actively mining or digging or whatever. I can alt-tab out, leaving my forge and banks running, without worrying I'll come back to find I've wasted away. It's not so much Don't Starve as Don't Worry About Starving, It's Fine Actually.

In Forager you're a little wisp of a character who hits trees and rocks and slime monsters with a pick to gather ingredients, then combines those ingredients into new stuff (buildings, wallets, a better pick that is covered in slime for some reason). If that stuff is money you can use it to buy new islands, though it's not explained who is selling them or why they only appear in the middle of the blank ocean if you hand over some coins. It's not worth thinking too hard about the backstory of Forager—the explanation for everything is "because it's a videogame".

It's like if you took the village and most of the farming out of Stardew Valley. I'm usually either on a quest—maybe collecting demon horns to help a ghost look more scary or trying to craft enough potions to fill a display in the museum—or just gathering whatever I need to buy the next upgrade or island. I run a loop of the land digging up sand and coal while keeping an eye out for rare flowers before checking my fish traps again.

When you die in Forager, maybe to a surprise slime or a spike trap, you can reload an autosave from seconds before that moment. There's no cost to death, which makes it easy to play without paying much attention. There's also no cost to waiting around for things to respawn or finish being manufactured in one of your buildings, which means the easiest way to gather the rare ingredients which become vital as you work your way up the skill tree is to just kick back for a while.

Forager is the kind of game I play without focusing on it. I don't often listen to podcasts while I play games because I like to keep my attention on one thing at a time, but Forager isn't engaging enough on its own. I've made it through a bunch of episodes of a podcast about old-school RPG modules thanks to Forager giving me something to do with my hands but not much to do with my brain.

Occasionally there's a puzzle or a dungeon with a boss in it, but the combat's very superficial. Now that I've got a bow that freezes enemies and 100 cooked meat in my inventory I'm unstoppable, and even if I die that just means a reload. The biggest challenge in Forager is conquering the feeling that I'm wasting my time playing it, that I've become hooked on another game that spits out rewards and achievements and makes numbers go up, and that I'll regretfully uninstall in another day or two.

On the other hand, I really have made a serious dent in my podcast backlog.

Great moments in PC gaming are short, bite-sized celebrations of some of our favorite gaming memories.  

People remember Doom for being groundbreaking, but it's easy to forget how ahead of the curve it really was. Just look at the secret level of Episode 3, which was getting meta on the FPS genre before it even really existed. It's called Warrens, and it's a great big joke on you, the player, of a kind that might not seem that big of a deal now, but was a huge shock back in 1993.

The gimmick is that when you reach it, you get a real sense of déjà vu. It's exactly the same as the first level of Episode 3, Hell Keep, with the exception of the name. The trick is that when you hit the exit the walls promptly fall down, you get mugged by a rocket-shooting Cyberdemon, and have to backtrack through the whole map again with newer, tougher enemies all the way down your route. A genius moment of level design, made all the more effective by the fact that this was pre-internet and so the moment was unlikely to have been spoiled in advance.

This is only one of many such moments in the original Doom, part of what made it a design milestone as well as a technical one. Probably the subtlest is how the second chapter, The Shores of Hell, finishes on a map called Tower of Babel, which is slowly built over the course of the chapter as you complete the earlier levels. Then of course there are sequences like tripping a trap and having an army of demons teleport in out of nowhere, discovering enemy in-fighting for the first time, or, in the sequel, suddenly finding yourself in id Software's previous game, Wolfenstein 3D. But despite all that cleverness, the reveal in the Warrens remains one of the best early gotchas in shooter history, and well worth the jump.

If you thought the problem with Fallout 4 was that its characters didn't have big enough eyes and small enough noses then here's the mod for you. It's called Animerace Nanakochan and it transforms Fallout 4's women into winsome anime ladies. (The modder has no plans to do the same for the Commonwealth's men.)

The mod works both on the player-character and NPCs and you can see how character creation works in the video below. It seems like there are some issues with longer hairstyles clipping through clothes, but that's a common problem in any game that allows extensive character creation.

You can download Animerace Nanakochan from Nexusmods. It's been downloaded over 7,600 times so far.

Here's our list of the best Fallout 4 mods.

While it's May 4th and everybody's celebrating a certain sci-fi franchise, EVE Online is also celebrating. From now until May 20, 2019, you'll find a host of in-game goodies—one available for every day of the 16-day celebration—in honour of the game's sixteenth anniversary.

"We’re super happy to announce that from May 2nd through to May 20th, all pilots can join in the festivities and celebrate EVE Online’s sixteenth birthday, regardless of their clone status!" says an update on the official website. "Log in over the course of the celebration between these dates and collect your free gifts as you go. There’s a total of sixteen days of gifts, celebrating more than a decade and a half of amazing player stories."

Both Alpha and Omega pilots can claim rewards on a daily basis, although the Omega rewards will be "a bit more valuable". If you’re an Alpha pilot and you like the look of the rewards that Omegas have up for grabs, don't panic—if you can upgrade after the celebrations start you be able to receive all the omega rewards you missed retroactively.

"There’s all manner of gifts and rewards up for grabs including celebratory trinkets, faction ammunition, exclusive XVI anniversary SKINs, apparel and even a monocle, as well as Society of Conscious Thought hulls, celebratory Permaband SKINs and clothing, along with fireworks and abyssal filaments," the update reveals.

Log in every one of the sixteen days and you could also win a share of over a million skillpoints, too.

EVE Online's developer CCP Games caused quite a stir a few weeks ago when it permanently banned Brian Schoeneman, a real-life lobbyist who leveraged his real-world political experience to get elected into EVE's own council of in-game politicians. 

At the time, CCP accused Schoeneman, known in-game as Brisc Rubal, and two others of using confidential information protected under a non-disclosure agreement to gain a financial edge in-game—EVE Online's own version of insider trading. But after conducting a full investigation, CCP Games has announced they got it all wrong and the affected parties have been unbanned.

The first thing you’ll notice upon playing Rise of Industry is that it’s absolutely gorgeous. The boxy shapes and flat colours of the low-poly style are a perfect fit for the city/factory builder genre. This, combined with bright colours and sticker-like icons, makes the game looks less like a real city and more like a child’s play set. Unfortunately that’s also how the game plays: it's a fun toy, but it could use a little more direction. 

Rise of Industry is fundamentally about supply and demand. There are a handful of towns of various sizes spread across the map, each of which has two to four stores which will buy a certain good. Your job is to fulfil that demand. This can be as simple as mining some coal and shipping it directly to the hardware store, or as complicated as the pizza, a fiendish puzzle of a product that requires mills producing flour, vegetable farms and a dairy producing cheese (itself a multistep product requiring both cows and the wheat to feed them).

A great deal of thought has gone into refining all of these interactions, buildings thunk down satisfyingly, trucks chug along adorably and even the menu buttons click pleasingly. Clearly a lot of effort has been put into ensuring that the game feels fundamentally pleasing to play.

All this is remarkably easy to pick up as well. Earlier I said the game looks gorgeous, and this extends to a simple but elegant UI. I was particularly a fan of the little bubbles that pop up to show what product a building is producing and how far along it is. This, along with other icons make it easy to diagnose problems like disconnected roads or too many products in storage.

In addition to this helpful UI, the game pushes you toward useful outside sources of information, with links to both the wiki and a helpful YouTube tutorial right there on the start menu. I must admit this last addition left me with an interesting decision as to whether these external tools should be considered part of the game for the review, but eventually I decided they should. Let’s face it, this is how most of us learn how to play complex games nowadays. Dapper Penguin has simply made it part of the experience. 

Eventually things get a little bit more complicated, with the player getting access to heavier trucks, trains, boats and even zeppelins to haul products and set up long distance supply chains across the map. The only problem here is I didn’t feel enormous pressure to use them. You see, resources are spread so evenly across the map it seems just as easy to build a new manufacturing facility near your destination as it is to set up a railway line. 

Perhaps someone better at capitalism than me can point out how much I’d be shaving off my margins delivering my mutton by zeppelin, but at the moment I’m mostly doing it because mutton zeppelins are cool, not because I think they’re helping. Perhaps if all the iron ore on the map was clustered in one corner and all the trees in another a cross country train line would make sense, but this is rarely the case.

It doesn’t help that the “campaign” is what I would usually consider a sandbox mode, while the actual “sandbox” is just the same thing but with infinite money and everything unlocked. There are AI competitors, but they don’t seem to add much beyond being a nuisance when they buy exclusive rights to build in an area I was targeting. There’s no real ability to undercut your competition by offering a cheaper product or better marketing, instead the different corporations mostly stay out of each other’s way so that everyone can keep making money, in exactly the way capitalism isn’t supposed to work, but does.

How much you’ll enjoy Rise of Industry is largely going to depend on how capable you are of making your own fun. The fundamental interactions are very strong, but the only goal the developers offer is creating an endgame product (a car, a computer or a ready meal). There’s no real capacity for expression and creativity either, one supply chain looks much like another, and the player is chasing efficiency, not aesthetics. I got a good few hours of fun out of Rise of Industry, but ultimately once that time had passed I found I simply wasn’t interested in creating a slightly more profitable brick factory than my last one, perhaps I’m simply not enough of a capitalist.