Spiritfarer

is about death. You play as Stella, whose job is to take dying spirits through the Everdoor to their final death, when they’re ready. Except, I think it is actually about kindness. Helping a spirit become ready to go involves cooking for them, hugging them, and building them a home on your enormous houseboat. And for that you must care for sheep, play music to plants to help them grow, mine for coal and learn to smelt silver.

It is a cosy management game where you spend most of your time harvesting things to make other things. Like Stardew Valley, but where your thousand acts of labour are done entirely for, on the face of it, nothing. Or at least not for your own material gain. It’s all given away. It is excellent.

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Microsoft Flight Simulator

is finally ready for boarding on PC, but if you’re not sure whether your PC has the stomach for soaring through Asobo Studio’s gorgeous new flight sim and its many hundreds of photorealistic cities, then I’m here to help. I’ve been testing the game on its recommended PC requirements today, seeing exactly what kind of performance you can get from a relatively modest PC build.

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Microsoft Flight Simulator

promises an entire world. It’s a stunning feat, one the game largely succeeds at, but it’s understandably flubbed a few locations here and there. At least, that’s the most reasonable explanation for why the global flyover has replaced Buckingham Palace with a brutal grey apartment complex – assuming, of course, the folks at Asobo and Microsoft haven’t just let slip a peek at their anti-monarchist politics.

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Apex Legends

‘ sixth season started today, bringing with it big map changes and a brand new character who has a gun so big and special she gave it a name. Rampart (the Legend) and Sheila (the gun) arrived on the scene this morning, ready to drop into the new version of the World’s Edge map. Rather heartbreakingly, Respawn have done away with its excellent train. But they have added some other cool features to the battle royale shooter, like crafting, which is just about enough to make me stop pouting.

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If you’re installing Microsoft Flight Simulator, you will find yourself hearing the same short piece of music over and over while it downloads all 91GB. Sure you could just manually mute this in the Windows mixer, but you’d be wrong. Clearly the developers intend to evoke feelings of hours sat in an airport listening to muzak after your flight’s delayed, or the telephone hold music to get a refund on a holiday cancelled by the pandemic. Without installer music, you’re not truly experiencing MS Flight Sim. But if you do want a break from this particular loop, we have some alternative music ideas.

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Time might be on the side of Deathloop‘s groundhog-day killer Colt, but the same doesn’t ring quite as true for developers Arkane. Citing a shaky transition into remote working and a need for more time to polish up bloody vacation hotspot Blackreef, Arkane today announced that their time-looping stab ’em up will no longer arrive this winter, and will instead launch sometime next year.

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Microsoft Flight Simulator’s

accuracy is astounding. I was up far too early to get to the download gate on time, but now I’m just waiting at customs, sweating, while no-one has any idea when I’ll be able to get into the air. All because Microsoft doesn’t know how to pre-load a game.

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Look, comparisons to Dark Souls are trite, but Mortal Shell is understood most quickly through comparison to the games which so clearly inspired it. Off you go through a ruined fantasy world, parrying and riposting as you duff up baddies, piecing together history from snippets of stories, and so on. Our Mortal Shell review calls it “a fairly strong Soulslike”, which might be somewhat faint praise but it’s not damning. If you’re curious, hey, it’s out now, though only on the Epic Games Store at first.

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Following a string of smaller DLCs, Creative Assembly have announced the first full expansion for Total War: Three Kingdoms. Named The Furious Wild, it’s inviting you to delve into the jungles of Southern China to meet four new warlords. They each lead a new playable faction – I’m a big fan of the one who brings tigers to the battlefield, she definitely looks cooler than the dude with the elephants (you’ll see him in a minute). Launching on September 3rd, the expansion will also extend the game’s map into this region.

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Microsoft Flight Simulator 2020 is, in certain ways, the most technically impressive game we’ve ever seen. And its inclusion in the Xbox Game Pass for PC means that the skies over all the world’s cities will be filled up with digital planes and their gobsmacked pilots for quite some time.

But not all cities are built equal in Microsoft Flight Simulator 2020, with 341 cities in particular having been recreated in stunning photorealistic detail using photogrammetric data from Bing Maps. Read on to find out exactly where these 341 photorealistic cities can be found across the Earth.

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