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I never get the most out of sandbox games, because I’m always looking for the ‘right’ way to do something. If a game like Deus Ex has optional stealth, I will do everything I can to ghost that sucker, while if a game suggests a way of completing an open objective, I will follow that method to the bitter end. Nowhere have I struggled with this more than IO Interactive’s recent Hitman games. Their sandboxes are bigger and more choice abundant than most, yet I cannot bring myself to mess around with any of it. 

In a bid to make myself think creatively, I had an idea. I bought a cheap bingo set that includes a spinning lotto machine. My plan is to look up every weapon on every Hitman level, assigning each a number corresponding to the numbers in my lotto machine. At the outset of a mission, I’ll spin the machine once for every target on the level. Whatever number falls out, that’s the weapon I must use to eliminate that particular target, no matter how noisy, conspicuous or absurd it may be. 

For the purposes of this escapade, I’m playing Hitman 2 with the legacy pack installed, mainly because it’s tidier. I’m playing the vanilla Hitman campaign in sequence with the exception of the tutorial mission. I’ll start each mission with the same equipment, a silenced pistol, fibre wire, some coins, and whatever the default disguise is for the mission. I’m also adding a sniper-rifle as a smuggled item, as they tend not to appear in the game. 

While I can only kill targets with the specified weapon, for non-targets I can use whatever the situation requires. I’m also only allowed to reload a save if I die. As for the weapon list, it includes anything that can be picked up and used as a weapon in a Hitman level. 

I’ve also added ‘Falling’ and ‘Drowning’ to the list, as both of those can be performed on most targets. I’m going to get out of my bad habits if it kills me. Or at least, if it kills a lot of other people.

Sharp fashion

It’s Paris Fashion Week and my targets are Viktor Novikov and Dalia Margolis, who are using the show as a front for auctioning terrorist strikes. I’m here to put an end to the bidding, permanently. Time to spin the wheel. 

The first ball to roll out of my machine is number eight. According to my list that’s a kitchen knife, a long-standing Hitman staple that I’ll soon be using to staple Viktor Novikov to a wall. 

The second ball is 15, a wrench. Hardly the most exciting weapon in Hitman’s list, but it will mean getting up close and personal to Margolis, which I remember from my previous playthrough to be tricky. 

Novikov first. He’s wandering around the show floor with a bodyguard in tow, so I’ll need to separate the two. I also need to acquire the knife, so naturally I start looking for the kitchen. I head into the bar, where I notice event staff wandering around. I’ll need a uniform to get into the kitchen, so I continue out into the garden finding a flight of stairs leading to the basement. Two event workers are having a smoke break at the bottom. I overhear them chatting about how Novikov’s preferred cocktail is something called a Bareknuckle Boxer. I file this for later. 

One of the workers returns upstairs. The other walks through the door leading into the basement. I follow him and quietly knock him out, stealing his uniform and dumping his unconscious body in a crate. I wander through the underground vaults before stumbling into the kitchen. After a minute of poking around I find a kitchen knife. I also find a wrench in a storage area adjacent to the kitchen, which is nice stroke of luck. 

I head back upstairs, a plan forming in my mind. Behind the bar is a food-prep area. In the far corner is a box of rat poison. I pick one up and head to the bar, making up a Bareknuckle Boxer with one extra special mixer. Then I wait until Novikov arrives for his drink, and dash to the nearby men’s room, hiding in a cupboard. It isn’t long before Novikov stumbles through the door and deposits several ounces of featherweight champion into the toilet. The rest is easy. Knife. Throat. Dead. I stuff the body in the cupboard and leave. A clean job. But if I’m honest, that’s roughly how I offed Novikov the first time I played, only that time I drowned him in his own sick.

In truth, I’d forgotten about the bodyguard, and trying to navigate that problem threw me back into my old patterns. Hopefully Margolis will spur me into being more creative. She’s upstairs at the auction.

I found an invite to the auction earlier, so I get my tuxedo back and pass through the security to get upstairs where there’s another checkpoint frisking people.

I don’t want to lose my wrench, so I carefully knock out a patrolling guard and steal his uniform. I also pick up his pistol, a Bartoli 75-R.

I head upstairs and find Margolis. Like Novikov, she’s being trailed by another bodyguard, and she’s constantly surrounded by other people. I spend ages following them around, looking for an opportunity where I can, ahem, wrench her out of existence. Eventually I decide to just try my luck, but as I’m selecting the wrench I notice three words beneath its icon “Non-lethal melee”.

Ach! I’d forgotten you can’t kill people with blunt weapons in Hitman. I consider how to resolve this, concluding the only fair way is to spin the lotto machine again. The number that rolls out is one, which turns out is a Bartoli 75-R.

At least I don’t have to go scouting for the new weapon. But this is an unsilenced pistol, so not exactly a subtle weapon.

I follow Margolis around a bit more, thinking things over, when I notice that one of the rooms she goes in—overlooking the fashion stage—only has one other guard in it. I decide to knock out the guard and make my kill there. I’ll have to kill the bodyguard as well, but so be it.

Margolis leaves with her shadow, and I quickly deal with the bodyguard, hiding him in yet another cupboard. After a while Margolis returns with her lapdog. I’m about to pop the two of them when something unexpected happens. Margolis walks toward the windows, where I’ve mistakenly left the security guard’s rifle on the floor. “Isn’t it your job to look out for these things?” she sneers to her bodyguard. He walks up to the rifle, picks it up, and leaves the room with it. I silently thank the god of murder and raise the pistol. One loud bang later and Margolis is dead. I rush out the door and escape via a nearby window, sliding down the drainpipe and exiting the level via a helicopter at the back of the building.

Getting medieval

Sapienza, Italy. This medieval coastal village is the jewel in Hitman’s locational crown. I’m here to kill local crime lord Silvio Caruso, as well as a rogue scientist named Francesca De Santis. She’s developing a virus for Caruso that I also need to destroy. 

After what happened in Paris, I’ve altered the rules slightly, leaving out the non-lethal weapons on my deadly bingo card. I spin the wheel while 47 reads the local newspaper. The numbers that come out are 15 for De Santis, which is a sabre, and six for Caruso, which is a medieval battle axe. Two of the most conspicuous weapons in the game. This’ll be interesting. 

I’ll worry about the weapons later. First I need a disguise, and a good one—one of Caruso’s henchmen to be precise. I know I can get into the mansion via a crumbling tower of Sapienza’s medieval wall. There are two henchmen patrolling it, one of whom proves easy to grab for a new disguise. 

Suitably threaded, I now need to find the weapons. But Sapienza is a massive level, and I don’t have hours to spend scouting every corner. In the end I look up the weapon locations, and I’m glad I did, because both are hidden away. The sabre is located inside the town hall, while the battle axe is embedded into the ceiling of another old tower behind Caruso’s mansion. 

I grab the sabre first. The town hall is locked up tight, but I shimmy up a drainpipe and enter through a second-floor window. The sabre is above the door, and I have to shoot it down with my silenced pistol. I’m concerned about how I’m going to get the sabre out of the town hall, but it turns out nobody seems to mind a bald gangster wandering around town with a sword.

The obliviousness continues as I stroll through the mansion gate. This piques my curiosity, and I decide to grab the battle axe before moving against either target, which I do without too much fuss. I’m now walking around a heavily guarded crime-lords’ mansion with a sword on my back and an axe clutched in my right hand. Nobody bats an eye.

I can only assume the pattern of my Italian shirt makes me invisible to mafiosos. One guard holding a shotgun even waves to me and says, “What up, bro?” as I saunter past him armed like Robert the fucking Bruce.

Killing my targets still isn’t going to be easy. Caruso is flanked at all times by three bodyguards, all of whom have the dreaded white circle of suspicion hovering over their heads. Da Santis only has one lackey, but the room she spends most of her time in is absolutely swarming with guards.

I spend ages trying to figure out a way to get them alone. I could follow the mission stories, but the whole point of this exercise is to avoid the trodden path. I walk around for so long I get sloppy, and almost blow my cover by walking right into Caruso, arousing his suspicion. I run off and hide until the heat cools off.

I’m about to start exploring the mission stories, when suddenly Caruso walks alone into the ground floor lounge. I’m not sure what’s happened, but I can only assume that my bumping into him upset the AI’s routine, somehow shedding him of his protection. Without hesitating, I cob the battle axe straight at his head. Caruso goes down like, well, like he’s been poleaxed. A nearby maid I didn’t notice screams. I walk over and punch her in the face, then leg it as guards start to pour in from all sides.

I run up the stairs, somehow undetected, astonished I got away with such spur-of-the-moment madness. There’s an unconscious witness to deal with, but I’ll do that soon enough. Emboldened by my success, I set my sights on De Santis, gliding straight through the guard hive to the balcony on the far side. Now I notice that De Santis’s actual office has no guards in it.

I wait outside on the terrace for her to come around, toss a coin to bring her and her bodyguard out of the room, then slip into the office and stick the sabre through her back. I’m dust before the body is found.

Job done, mostly. I head downstairs, quietly drag the unconscious maid into a nearby bathroom, and put a bullet in her head with my silenced pistol. Then I head down into the laboratory underneath the mansion and deal with the virus. I escape in a flying-boat moored outside the laboratory.

I did it. I took a ludicrous chance with a ludicrous weapon and it paid off. This is the most free I’ve felt in a sandbox since it was actually filled with sand. There are three targets in my next destination, Marrakesh. It’s going to be quite the rollover.

Check back tomorrow for the second part.

Of all the PC games I played in 2019, only Amid Evil has a staff that hurls shrunken planets as grenades. I got to casually blow up the Earth by lobbing it at an evil space wizard, and earned an achievement for my trouble. So, yeah, Amid Evil is pretty freakin' cool. 

Along with Ion Fury and 2018's Dusk, Amid Evil is part of a thrilling '90s FPS revival that prioritizes speed and madness. I had a lot of fun with the reboot of Doom back in 2016, which tossed out a lot of modern touches (like, say, reloading) to get back to that '90s spirit. These games go further, though, and are either built on the bones of those old game engines or at least dialing back the graphics and technology to feel completely authentic to the era. 

I don't want to sell Amid Evil short, here. I don't think it's great simply because I'm nostalgic for games of that era. I've never even played Heretic or Hexen, the shooters Amid Evil draws inspiration from. The rudimentary 3D graphics and grungy textures, the towering environments you skate through at high speeds, the mish-mash of medieval and gothic and cosmic all set a hell of a mood. This game has a vibe that just wouldn't be the same with more realistic graphics and movement. Some of today's game developers may make games like these out of nostalgia, but the good ones, like Amid Evil, prove how much life there still is in designing with those '90s limitations.

That's all getting a little heady. It's why I find Amid Evil so entrancing, but the shooting is always there to give me something satisfying to do with my mouse every few seconds. This game has a fun arsenal of weapons, like a sword that flings slices of green energy slicing through the air and an axe that you can twirl like a propeller through enemy flesh. They grow progressively more ludicrous, like the planet-launching staff and an arcane spiral of a gun that sends bolds of purple lightning crackling through anyone nearby.

Or, when you're in powered up "soul mode," it simply creates a black hole that decimates everything it can gobble up. 

I love how powerful most of the weapons in Amid Evil feel to use, even when enemies also hit me hard enough to quickly tear me to pieces if I sit still. I'm constantly gliding around the room to dodge their attacks, picking whatever weapon seems best in the moment. Amid Evil follows in the grand tradition of having a weapon that flings baddies backwards and pins them to walls. This one is called the Star of Torment. It's like a mace, but actually cool.

Amid Evil is gleefully unconcerned with having a cohesive aesthetic, instead making each world a set of completely distinct levels with their own enemies ripped from a different cheesy metal album cover.

There are astral warriors who look like variants of Lord Zedd from Power Rangers. There are snakemen and floating space wizards. There are disgusting Cthulhu-esque blobs and geometric horrors with hook hands. Even if they're all simple to fight, the variety shows that if you're going to design a Doom-style shooter in 2019, you'd best account for modern attention spans. None of these enemies stick around long enough to get boring.

The same goes for the worlds you're running through. As Tyler mentioned in his review, platforming in a game where you move this fast can become tedious and annoying. That happens on occasion, when you're navigating some unnecessarily narrow steps or savescumming to make a perilous jump for the seventh time. But I rarely minded because the environments were so striking.

In one level I jumped across the pistons of an enormous machine and spiraled my way up obsidian towers impossibly suspended in the sky. In another I ran across bridges that intertwined like DNA, connecting parts of a cathedral floating in the cosmos. There's some weird Aztec shit. Amid Evil is the kind of game that results from creative people saying, "What's the wildest idea I can come up with? Okay, let's make that."

It relies a bit too much on finding the silver key for the silver door and pressing a button to open the next hallway, but Amid Evil's next hallway is always guaranteed to be a stunner.

Creative Assembly's Total War: Three Kingdoms captures out Best Strategy award for 2019. We'll be updating our GOTY 2019 hub with new awards and personal picks throughout December.

Wes: I'm 30 hours into a Three Kingdoms co-op campaign where I'm conquering all of southern China as Sun Jian. Meanwhile, my friend and neighbor Yuan Shu has had to become a vassal, then join an alliance, just to stop Cao Cao from trampling him. I keep giving him food out of pity. It's been illuminating to see how dramatically differently Three Kingdoms can play out depending on your starting faction. That's not completely new to Total War, but Three Kingdoms is by far the most character-focused game in the series, and the personality it injects into each faction is its greatest strength.

I won a nearly impossible battle against an army double my size by sending Sun Jian himself onto the field to duel another faction leader, Yuan Shao, and killing him at the very beginning of the fight. His army never recovered from the morale hit. I also infiltrated a spy into Yuan Shao's army, but was so determined to win that battle I inadvertently killed my spy in combat, too. So, that's a thing that can happen.

Like all Total War games, Three Kingdoms can be a bit messy. There's so much UI to keep track of when you're outside of the stellar combat. Managing the economy or sussing out how to properly arrange my faction's government or bargain with other leaders is never as intuitive or focused as it is in some other 4X games. But Three Kingdoms has made some big strides, and it's refreshing to experience the little narratives that come out of these personality clashes, without the crud of old Total War (spies were the worst) slowing things down. Every faction that asks to marry my warrior daughter, making her a member of their house, in exchange for a lousy pile of gold: she'll see you on the battlefield.

Fraser: Shogun 2, formerly the best historical Total War game, has been deposed. I put the 'historical' caveat there because my heart still belongs to Warhammer, but so much of that is down to setting and character. Three Kingdoms has everything else, and it’s still blessed with a great setting and an abundance of personality. The campaign, battles, diplomacy—they’re all the best they’ve ever been. The last one in particular seemed like a lost cause, but no, Three Kingdoms finally made interacting with other factions outside of combat engaging. It’s a miracle. 

When diplomacy fails and fights kick off, they straddle the line between historical and fantasy Total War brawls. You’ve got grounded, historical units with swords and spears and not a magical weapon among them, but then you’ve got heroes, who do get special weapons, along with flashy abilities and superhuman strength. They can change the course of a battle just on their lonesome, as long as they don’t get defeated by another hero in a duel. They’re even more powerful, arguably, than their Warhammer counterparts, and make battles more dynamic and even more entertaining to watch.

Tom: The heroes are a big new addition to CA's historical Total War series, especially on the battlefield. I'm glad that the rest of the combat has remained quite straightforward. The interplay of swordsmen, spearmen, and cavalry is such an integral part of Total War combat for me, it's satisfying to slip back into old Total War habits without having to learn a bunch of new unit types. The RTS element of Total War has always excelled at delivering the spectacle of a vast, important battle, but that doesn't mean that combat has to be especially complicated. Spears beat horses; swords beat spears; flaming arrows are great; heavy cavalry beats almost everything. That's the law of Total War, and that forms the core of Three Kingdoms' magnificent real time scraps. I don't even need campaign mode, I'll happily boot up the game for a massive skirmish to enjoy the splendid unit design and animation work.

Last time we checked in on definitively superb, free Doom mod Brutal Doom, it was releasing a definitive Gold version that was pretty much expected to be the end of the thing. 

But mod developer Sergeant_Mark_IV obviously couldn’t keep away from it, because they’ve released a cooperatively oriented mod called Meatgrinder Co-op. Meatgrinder Co-op is designed to be used with “slaughterfest” style maps, the kind of games that throw a small number of players against literally hundreds of enemies in vicious combat arenas. I’d suggest Slaughterfest 2012, though the Meatgrinder developer also suggests Speed of Doom as an alternative. You’ll also need a free Doom engine like GZDoom or Zandronum to run it.

The mod brings some of Brutal Doom’s enhancements—specifically the visuals and wonderful gun explosions—while focusing on improvements that make the game more playable on even the worst rigs and control schemes. It drops other enhancements, like hit locations and advanced enemy AI, for that exact same reason. It's aiming to be beautiful co-op Doom that works on a toaster and/or smartphone.

You can check out Brutal Doom on ModDB, and download Meatgrinder Co-Op mod on that same page. 

Speaking of Doom, the 2016 version which is very good is also very cheap right now.

If you somehow haven't played the fast-paced first-person masterpiece that is the 2016 Doom reboot, now is a pretty great time to give it a shot. The game was already discounted to $6 for the Steam Winter Sale, but now it's 50 cents cheaper from Newegg.

Newegg delivers the game as a Steam product key, so it's functionally identical to buying the title from Steam, execept you save $0.50 in the process. That's a whole 50 cents you could put towards other games! Think of the possibilities.

Just like the regular Steam version, all DLC is included: Unto the Evil, Hell Followed, and Bloodfall. That should be enough to hold you over until Doom Eternal comes out in a few months.

There's a fun holiday surprise over on the Garry's Mod website called the 12 Days of Garry's Mod. The page displays some amazing Garry's Mod creations, like "Half-Life: Full Life Consequences"—a charmingly awful story written by a Fanfiction.net author named squirrelking and turned into a hilarious and unforgettable short film by YouTuber Djy1991.

You'll also see Ross Scott's comedy series Civil Protection, moody sci-fi drama Shelf-Life Part 1 and Part 2, the gorgeously atmospheric 40-minute long film Haven, and several other notable machinima highlights, all made with Garry's Mod, the physics sandbox created by Garry Newman and Facepunch Studios way back in 2004.

It must have been difficult narrowing the selection down to just a dozen features, considering Garry's Mod has been around for 15 years now. Along the way from free sandbox mod for Half-Life 2 to standalone game on Steam, it's sold millions of copies, it's been used to make thousands of videos and webcomics, and has hundreds of popular mods and gamemodes created by users, like Prop Hunt, Jailbreak, Trouble in Terrorist Town, and more.

The 15 year anniversary is the perfect time to chat about the strange legacy of Garry's Mod, so I fired over some questions via email both to Garry's Mod creator Garry Newman and Valve's Erik Johnson. Here's what they had to say.

Origin stories

PC Gamer: How did you come up with the name?

Garry Newman: You know, I think I kind of actually stole the name, it wasn’t my idea to name stuff after myself. At the time there was another mod called JBMod, made by a guy that went by "jb55." So it made sense that my take on that mod would be called Garry’s Mod—because I went by the name "garry". I probably wouldn’t have named it called Garry’s Mod if I knew where it would end up.

Garry's Mod has been in the top 10-20 games on Steam for as long as I can remember. Tens of thousands still play it every day, but how are sales nowadays?

GN: It sells about 1.5m copies a year, and it’s sold just over 15m copies total. Which is kind of pleasing since it’s also 15 years old. Plus you know, money.

Do you recall when Valve first became aware of Garry's Mod? What were your first thoughts about it?

Erik Johnson: The specific point in time is a little tricky to pin down. I do remember there being a pretty significant, and somewhat underground, mod community that was working off of the Half-Life 2 source code leak from 2003. While having the code for Half-Life 2 out in the wild before the game was finished wasn’t a super positive experience for the team finishing the game, it's pretty cool to see what the mod community could get working with that unfinished codebase. It felt like Garry’s Mod grew right out of that community after Half-Life 2 shipped.

Did anyone at Valve have any idea the Source engine could be used the way it is in Garry's Mod? Are there any tools in GMod that surprised you to see?

EJ: A lot of the identity of the gameplay of Half-Life 2 centered around physics. Even in the early days of development, most of the experiments that people were running had the physics engine at its core. So, on one hand, it wasn’t surprising that Garry started in a similar place that we did. That said, it would have been pretty hard to predict the Garry’s Mod of 2019 back in 2004.

We’ve always been impressed by Garry’s ability to iterate on the game and roll feedback from his community into the game so well. It’s a more difficult process than it sounds, because it really comes down to navigating a constant stream of feedback, but being limited in the amount of time to get everything done. Garry has always been about as good as it gets at picking the right direction to take his game.

What's it like to see the beloved characters from Half-Life and other Valve games being used with Garry's Mod for machinima and comics and videos?

EJ: It’s pretty cool. Part of the process for us in shipping any of our games, but especially the single player ones, is letting go of them once they are released, and letting the community take bits and pieces of them in whatever direction they want to. It will be fun to watch what people build with the editor we’re releasing along with Half-Life: Alyx next year.

Pay to play

Paid mods are (still) a great source of ire among (some) players. When did the idea to start selling GMod on Steam come along? Was it Valve's idea or Garry's?

EJ: It was the early days of getting Steam built, and it was pretty clear that Garry’s Mod had a big (and growing) audience. Our philosophy back then was the same as it is today, which is that we wanted a platform that connected the people who created valuable content with the people that consumed it. It was clear that it was a perfect example of a product that would benefit from this, and so we reached out and asked him if he was interested.

Garry being able starting at building a product that he thought people would like, to where he is today, is the kind of story we’re always trying to make happen. Reducing the friction between the creator of interesting content and the consumer of it has a number of really positive side effects. It’s been cool to see it happen over the past 15 years for Garry and his team.

GN: It was about a year before we started selling it. I was emailing [Valve] to ask about something else and they mentioned that they think it’d sell well. I was like, yeah right, what a dumb idea, it’s already free—why would anyone pay for it? 

As time went by and it kept getting more popular, I thought about things I’d like to reprogram, stuff I’d like to improve and innovate on. I couldn’t justify spending a decent amount of time doing this stuff. Then it clicked that if we were going to sell the new version it could justify spending more time on it and justify people buying it rather than sticking with the free version. So then I had to get on my hands and knees and send an email to Valve where I explained that it wasn’t a dumb idea and can we do it please.

Was the negative reaction [to selling Garry's Mod] worse than you thought it might be, or not as bad?

GN: I can’t remember much of it—it was actually one of the most embarrassing things that has ever happened to me. We’d been working on it in secret for a few months and the community were getting quite worried. They had got used to weekly updates before that. So we decided to announce that we were going to be on Steam and everything was going to be okay. This wasn’t like announcing that you’re gonna be on Steam nowadays, this was when there were about 3 games on Steam. This was a big deal and blew up everywhere.

Then the next morning I woke up to an email from Valve, saying something like "It’s customary to wait until the agreements are signed before announcing." So I’m thinking, fuck, I’ve announced it’s going to be on Steam and now I’ve pissed off Valve—so it’s not going to be on Steam. It took me a couple of weeks to recover from that. I couldn’t enjoy any of the community happiness, I felt like a right knob head. 

How did you settle on the $10 price? After 15 years (sales aside) why is it still $10?

GN: I don’t think I ever contemplated charging more. It was free and now it’s not, the price had to be low enough to people that they’d just be like... yeah sure why not. It’s important to remember that before Steam pretty much no-one bought games on the PC. Everything was pirated. And while Garry’s Mod was a multiplayer game—which offered some protection from piracy—it could be played single player too. It had to be cheap and easy enough to stop people pirating it.

Apart from having money from sales, how did selling GMod change its development?

GN: I think Garry’s Mod would have died 15 years ago if we didn’t sell it. It gave us a reason to continue development. Besides that Steam obviously allowed us to update the game much easier. Previously when it was free you’d download a zip file from my website with the new version in. This would limit the frequency of the updates.

Back then, because Steam was in its infancy, they didn’t have an automated update system. I had to upload the new builds to an FTP and email Valve to make them live. Because of the time difference this could mean that a patch could go out at 4 am my time, while I was in bed. If there was a bug in it I’d be in a lot of trouble when I woke up. But again because of the time difference I wouldn’t be able to get a patch out until Valve were back at their desks the next day.

Strike a pose

What do most players do in Garry's Mod these days? Do you know what the most popular mode or mod for it is? When is the last time you played it yourself?

GN: The roleplay gamemodes are still a huge thing, but that in itself can encompass a thousand other sub gamemodes. Between Facepunch, Rust, two kids and trying to watch 10 hours of TV every day—I don’t have much time to play nowadays. I used to feel bad about that, like a great chair maker that doesn’t like to sit on chairs. But I think it’s just that I enjoy making them a whole lot more than playing them.

Being able to pose ragdolls made Garry's mod a great tool for comics, videos, and machinima. How did that function first come about?  

GN: A total accident. I was trying to pose ragdolls, but not by freezing their joints. I was trying to make it so they would move like the atmosphere was really thick, so they’d stay in place. The physics in Source back then weren’t as stable as they are now. You could really easily cause a crash by giving it numbers that it wasn’t expecting. I used the wrong values and it locked one of their bones in place. I made a quick pose—I think it was Kleiner giving birth. I was really excited—I immediately knew the fun everyone was going to have with this.

What's the biggest requested feature you get from Garry's Mod players?

GN: The biggest thing, by about a million miles is the "Played with Garry" achievement. It’s one of the hardest achievements to get on Steam—for obvious reasons.

Valve has hired a number of people who mod their games. Am I remembering correctly that you tried to get a job with Valve at one point?

GN: Yeah I applied for a job, I think it was before Garry’s Mod went on sale. Or might have been just after. Around that time anyway. I had a phone interview and I don’t think it took them long to realise that I didn’t know shit. I didn’t get offered a position. In retrospect it’s a good thing. Helk (Rust lead) had an interview with them too, he made it all the way to an in-office interview. They had him writing out code on a whiteboard. I can’t even code without Google—so I wouldn’t stand a chance at that.

Have you hired any people at Facepunch based on mods they've made in Garry's Mod?

GN: No, it wasn’t something we were prepared for, as a company, back then. It’s something we should have been doing. I see the stuff the Tower Unite guys have managed to do after their Gmod Tower gamemodes and kick myself. It’s a great thing for them, to go out and make their own game but in an ideal world we could have made it good for all of us.

Future tense

Garry's Mod is still being updated, but how often do you personally still work on Garry's Mod?

GN: I haven’t personally worked on it for about three years. Rubat and Willox have done a really good job of taking it off my plate. I found that it got to a place where anything I tried to change I got yelled at by the community for breaking something else. So I felt like it’s better to just maintain it, to keep it ticking over so the modders can do their thing. Or risk breaking 15 years worth of content.

What's the Garry's mod mod that hasn't happened yet, but you really wanted to happen?

GN: There’s actually a ton of things I want to do, but I don’t like to talk about it too much. If you talk about stuff you want to do you don’t end up doing it, because you feel like you already did it. You get all the positive feedback from it. Plus I don’t want to pull a Peter Molyneux and talk about a bunch of stuff that gets people excited, but let them all down when the idea eventually has to collide with reality.

What's the status of S&box, which sounds like a Garry's Mod for Unreal Engine 4. The last devblog was in 2018.

GN: We did a lot of experimentation with s&box on UE4. It’s actually quite far along but we decided to pause it for now. We’re hoping you’ll hear more about it next year—if not it’s probably dead forever.

Will Garry's Mod still be around in another 15 years? What will it look like then?

GN: In 15 years I’ll be 52. An old man. We’ll have the iPhone 35, Steam’s friend list will be its own operating system and my son will be the age I was when I first made GMod. It’s possible it might be renamed Alex’s Mod and is primarily used to watch exploited/spoilt american kids play with toys in their massive Youtube house. But who knows. We’ll keep updating as long as people keep playing. Maybe we’ll do a sequel.

The calendar has ticked over onto another day, and that means it's time for another free game on the Epic Games Store. The selection for December 24 is Celeste, "an engaging, vibrant and challenging platformer," as we said in our 80/100 review, that skillfully weaves difficulty with an engaging narrative about a young girl's struggle to make peace with herself as she journeys to the top of Celeste Mountain.

You might already have Celeste on Epic, as it was one of the weekly freebies back in August. But if you missed out, now's your chance to swoop in and pick it up. And it's worth grabbing, because not only is it quite good, it's also got more than 700 screens of "hardcore platforming" plus unlockable "brutal B-side chapters," so it should keep you going for a good long time too—handy if, say, you happen to have an excess of time on your hands that you need to fill, for some reason.

(Plus, you know, it's free.)

Celeste is available until 11 am ET on December 25, at which point a new game will move in to take its place. Epic is giving away a new game every day until the end of the year—follow along with the freebies at epicgames.com.

Even games that don't fall into the live service category can change dramatically before and after launch, cutting old features and tweaking mechanics, and then those old versions are gone for good. But not in the case of Dead Cells, thanks to the recent Legacy update. 

Dead Cells players can now return to earlier versions of the game, with every "major iteration" since the Early Access launch available. To access them, you'll need to go to the game's properties menu on Steam, select the betas tab and then pick which version you want to play through.

If you miss an earlier version, now you can return to the good old days. Or maybe you just want to have a nosey around and see how the game transformed over the course of its development. Motion Twin suggests it might also be handy for new developers to see the the game's journey.

Everything from the beta of the Christmas update has also been added for everyone with the Legacy update. It includes a Steam Cloud hack that creates save backups that it can't delete, a weapon rework, new weapons, new mutations and a Christmas skin. Check out the patch notes here. 

Crowbar Collective has put out a Black Mesa: Xen update today, as well as releasing the Half-Life remake's expansion on Steam, where it was previously only available on the public beta branch. Now you can access it normally and play through every level. Though still technically in Early Access, the full game is available. 

"If you have been holding out for Xen," says the developer, "this is what you have been waiting for." So it seems like it's treating this like a soft launch. And if you've not picked it up, it's also on sale for 20 percent off. 

Black Mesa: Xen is a greatly expanded reimagining of the terrible Xen section of the original Half-Life. After remaking Gordon Freeman's first adventure, Crowbar Collective set itself the ambitious task of making, essentially, entirely new Half-Life levels from scratch. The result seems to be a vast improvement over its predecessor. 

The next update will take Xen out of Early Access, so Crowbar Collective will be keeping an eye on things to see what needs polishing and fixing, as well adding achievements. It also plans to return to Earth, to Black Mesa, improving it using what the team has learned through Xen's development. 

Check out the patch notes for the latest update here.

Normally this is where I'd make some snarky remark about this being the closest thing we'll get to a new Half-Life, but that's no longer true now that Half-Life: Alyx is coming in March. If you're not into VR, though, then you'll need to stick with Xen for the time being.

Shortly after the long-lost Destiny 2 guardian Saint-14 turned up in the tower, players noticed something very amusing: He'd take notice of anyone who approached him while wearing his helmet, a Titan exotic that was added in the Curse of Osiris expansion. He doesn't seem to mind sharing, though—in fact, he suggests using it to prank Zavala, the stoic, famously humorless command of the Vanguard.

It's a clever line and a cute interaction (although you can't actually go confuse Zavala, which is a shame), but it almost didn't come to be. As Destiny 2 technical dialog desinger Kareem Shuman explained on Twitter (via Polygon), narrative designer Nikko Stevens first came up with the line, after which it was recorded, imported, and processed. But because of required reworks, it was marked to be cut, which is where Shuman got involved.

"Quietly I decided to try extra hard to make it work, since I thought it was such a cool idea," he explained. "I was having lunch with my friends and I brought it up, asking if anyone could help. @btwoodrow [senior designer Brenton Woodrow] volunteered and knew exactly what I needed in order to make the new dialogue filter that checks 'Does the player currently have the Helm of Saint-14 equipped'. At this point all design work on Season 9 had to be tracked via bugs, so I wrote a bug for him, and he sent it back resolved in under an hour! What a hero!"

That wasn't the end of it, though. Further tuning was required to ensure the line popped when it was supposed to, rather than ending up buried under a pile of other random dialog. 

"It was the last day of audio mix and we were all trying to put the final polish on things. My friend on audio test found me in the afternoon to say he'd approached Saint-14 with the helmet on and IT HAD WORKED," Shuman wrote.

To hear the line yourself, put on the Helm of Saint-14 and then go pay him a visit. You can find him hanging around in the hangar, behind an ornate rug hinting at the return of Trials.