Well, would you look at that. Someone’s invoked the Steam Summer Sale ritual and caused all game prices to come crashing down around our heads. Thanks, deals summoner, your deals herald is most pleased. It also means that putting together this week’s best PC gaming deals may include a teensy bit of overlap with those aforementioned Steam deals today, but I’ve done my best to hunt down the absolute cream of the crop to bring the biggest and best prices for today’s top games – including 40% off Control, almost half price on Resident Evil 3 and a nice little discount on Persona 4 Golden. Let’s get to it.

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We already know that Cyberpunk 2077 will one of the biggest ray tracing games of 2020, but Nvidia have now given us a closer look at exactly what ray tracing effects RTX owners can expect to see when the game comes out later this year. It’s not entirely clear whether ray tracing will be available on day one when Cyberpunk 2077 launches on November 19th just yet, but whenever it eventually pitches up, it sure looks like it’s going to be pretty darn stunning.

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Sea Of Thieves

is meant to be a dangerous sandbox full of threatening skeleton ships and dastardly fellow players nipping at your heels. It is that, and more, but as players do with sandboxes, many organise less lethal events on the high seas. In the past, pirate crews have hosted everything from fashion shows to ship races, but those events always exist with the threat of other interloping players. Now, Rare are planning to begin testing Custom Servers, private sessions to help facilitate special community-organised events.

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Steam’s Summer Sale

is well and truly underway. Running until July 9th, there are hundreds and thousands of great games on sale. Too many, if you ask us, but hey, everyone loves a good deal, right? To help you navigate this latest deluge of games going cheap, the RPS Treehouse has put their collective, socially distanced heads together to bring you our top Steam Summer Sale recommendations.

It’s by no means a comprehensive list – we’d be here until the end of time if we listed every good deal happening over the next two weeks – but hopefully it might jog your memory about that one game you’ve always been meaning to play but never got round to buying. To the deals!

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The Biomutant reveal feels like a lifetime ago. Announced at Gamescom in 2017, the kung fu… cat/panda/bear-thing captured the imagination of everyone with that first trailer. And, despite some delays, the excitement for Experiment 101’s open world RPG has been growing ever since. No wonder, I suppose. You are a kung fu cat/panda/bear-thing, after all.

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If you’re after a gaming monitor that’s got a big screen, lots of hertz and doesn’t cost the earth, have we got some great [cms-block] for you today. There are two monitors that caught my eye today – AOC’s 32in CQ32G1 and Gigabyte’s 165Hz Aorus CV27F-EK – and the best thing is that neither of them cost more than £300 at the moment.

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When Graham told me that Curious Expedition 2 was a lot like Curious Expedition 1, I immediately told him that was fine. Curious Expedition 1 was great! It’s a roguelike about managing parties of adventurers as they explore mysterious islands, making friends with the natives while desecrating their shrines and spreading calamity throughout their lands. (I think it was self-aware enough to get away with this, for the most part.) You wind up with stories about how your party nearly starved to death, but just about managed to tide themselves over by feasting on their donkey. I was psyched to see my people starve once more.

Playing the latest early access build has left me thoroughly de-psyched, because the new events are thin and far between and the combat I liked has been dumbed down. It’s a curious step back.

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I play Minecraft to build pleasing little houses, and so new block types are the most exciting things that can be added to the game, as far as I’m concerned. I’m pretty happy, then, as the new 1.16 “nether” update, which launched this week, has added loads>. What’s more, they’re almost all found in the titular nether – Minecraft’s weirdo hell dimension, which was pretty underwhelming for the first nine and a half years of its existence – so I can now build pleasing little houses IN HELL. The new nether is a grim and varied wonderland, containing everything you need to do the sort of wholesome homesteading you’d do in the regular world, only with eerie-looking materials, in an unsettling wasteland. It’s brilliant. And so, to show you everything you can do in Minecraft 1.16, I’ve built a special house using only blocks that can be found in the nether, and recorded a relaxing, mid-2000s-MTV-style video tour around it. Please, come and join me:

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Runeterra

‘s a weird one. The card game itself is solid yet unexciting (at least once you’ve played it for a dozen hours), but for me (and unusually for me) that’s made up for by charming presentation. More thoughts like that can be found in my Legends Of Runeterra review, but my less outdated thoughts are: yeah, I got bored. I just had a quick go with the new Gauntlet mode, though, and I can see how it might bring me back. Every week, you get to enter a special competition where you try to win seven games without losing two in a row, in which case you get knocked out. The twist is that the rules dramatically change every week. Right now it’s just a straight up ‘see how well you can do with your favourite constructed deck’, but future plans sound more interesting.

This is part of Patch 1.4, which also brings big changes to a whole bunch of cards and introduces the new ranked season. But I’m still thinking ’bout Gauntlets.

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The Call Of Duty: Warzone map is enormous. Larger even than the colossal locales of PUBG, Verdansk is home to many hundreds of unique buildings, thousands of loot drops, and up to 150 players at once. Our Warzone map guide will offer you an extremely detailed look at Verdansk and all its locations, even going so far as to rank the very best loot locations across the map.

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