Following the PC debut of Heavy Rain earlier this week, developers Quantic Dream are now offering a demo slice of their next former-PlayStation-exclusive, Beyond: Two Souls. This is the one where Ellen Page plays a teenager with a spooky ghostpal that gets her into all sorts of scrapes, not to mention a wacky government programme overseen by the Green Goblin himself, Willem Dafoe. The one where, after the relatively magic-free Heavy Rain, Quantic Dream went all-in on spirits and demons and Native Americans because of course Native Americans have to be involved thanks David Cage oh god the writing remains awful. But it is fun to wreck a teen’s birthday party as an angsty dickhead.

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Picture Cthulhu and his tentacled cohorts, dark and dreaming beneath the waves. H.P. Lovecraft s crooked astral vistas – wrought out of cosmic despair, fear of the unknown, and his racism – have saturated games for better and worse. As hypnotic as his nightmare visions are, the same tropes regurgitated at face value have become dry and tired. It s been done, and it s steeped in its author’s bigotry.

Which makes recently re-released text adventure Anchorhead a rare game: one that takes the mantle of Lovecraft and forms it into something more than the sum of its sticky, sprawling parts.

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It’s tempting to cut corners when buying a new gaming monitor, especially if you’ve already spent hundreds of pounds or dollars upgrading your PC or shelling out for one of today’s [cms-block]s. But your monitor is arguably one of the> most important parts of your entire setup. After all, there’s no point buying a fancy graphics card when your gaming display isn’t able to do it justice. You don’t even have to spend very much in order to get a really good one these days, either, as some of the best gaming monitor recommendations you’ll see below can be had for as little as two hundred quid. Whatever screen size or resolution you’re looking for, these are the best gaming monitors you can buy today.

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E3 2019 is finished! More importantly, we have almost recovered from E3 2019. To celebrate their convalescence, Alice B and Matt piled into the podcast studio for a 40-minute post-show chat about their favourite games from the show and thoughts on the many E3 press conferences.

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Technically launched a few days ago, Neocore only just now released their official video breakdown of Warhammer 40,000: Inquisitor – Martyr‘s v2.0 overhaul patch. While Martyr (I will use its full title no more than twice) nailed that Warhammer 40k look and sound, it fell short as a hack n’ slash lootfest. This mega-patch rewires the game’s guts to something a little more Diablo-like, with faster, more responsive combat, mid-mission looting and equipment switching and 2-4 player co-op through the main story. See the video breakdown and the key changes below.

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The Lovecraftian detective-o-horror RPG The Sinking City launched today, inviting us all to leave this glorious heatwave and venture into a half-drowned city where things lurk in the flooded streets and even on dry land people have a touch of that Innsmouth look. It’s, like, okay, according to Alice Bee’s The Sinking City review. Despite her hesitance to recommend it, I am still curious. Not many fancy 3D games let us wonder around cursed cities so I have a soft spot for the ones we have.

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“I… I wonder who the bad guys are in this game.” That’s Samuel Malone, game director at Vaulted Sky Games, now deep in thought about the moral message behind his upcoming 4v4 prop hunt ’em up Midnight Ghost Hunt. It’s about ghosts who have to hide from their would-be-busters, possessing household furniture in an attempt to survive till midnight. I’ve just asked him if the ghosts have actually done anything wrong, and he is equivocating.

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The Battlefield games have long been nests of Easter eggs, hiding everything from rare reload animations where you perform magic tricks on guns to giant prehistoric sharks who’ll leap up and git ya. Battlefield V still had a few to hide, it seems, and may yet have more. But what’s most got my attention is the horrible finger gun found this week, fired by having the soldier point their finger and shout PEW! POW! And the reload animation is… even as a habitual knuckle-cracker, I winced.

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Fold up your overalls, prisoner. We don t know much about the next game from Hazelight, the studio who made co-op jailbreak em up A Way Out. But we at least know it isn t a sequel. “What I can say is that it’s not A Way Out 2, said Josef Fares, studio head, when he spoke to me at Gamelab Barcelona. But it’s going to be something with story, and in many cases remind [players] of Brothers and A Way Out, but in a very different way.

So, another co-op game? Maybe. Fares wouldn t say for certain, but he did leave a few vague breadcrumbs, amid his usual exuberant outpourings. He swore a lot, is what I m saying.

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Today, a day which is not April 1st, multiplayer naval rumble World Of Warships launched a battle royale mode. With a kooky post-apocalyptic setting. In a game about historical warships. Unless someone has gone to great lengths to replace my calendar so I think it’s June and not April, this is happening. Alrighty then. As an observer, I am delighted by this wild tonal shift. The same game which recreated the battleship Yamato now has a ship with buzzsaws and a giant metal skull on the front. And why shouldn’t it?

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