The opening of Baldur’s Gate 3 takes place aboard a tentacled ship called the Nautiloid. You’ll need to fight your way to the control room to initiate a warp, before the ship crashes into the fiery hellscape below. While exploring the gooey interior of the Nautiloid you’ll come across a number of characters that have been captured by the Mind-Flayers, including a woman trapped inside one of their pods. Let’s take a look at whether or not you can save them.

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Activision Blizzard, the mega publisher behind the likes of Overwatch and Call Of Duty, are reportedly shutting down their office near Versailles, France. According to Bloomberg, employees at the company will learn more about the closure next week, but at the moment it’s unclear when exactly it’ll happen, or how many people might lose their jobs in the process.

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I remember seeing the crowdfunding campaign for the Virtuix Omni years ago (seven, apparently) and thinking to myself, full of awe in my early 20s, “The future has arrived! Or, it will soon!” The Virtuix Omni was a cool concept, sure, but where the heck would I actually get to try the 360° ultra gamer virtual reality treadmill? Well Virtuix are unveiling a new consumer version that’s meant to fit in your home.

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Brendan Caldwell, formerly/currently-ish of this parish, has launched a new video games podcast of his own and it sounds: well good. It’s named Hey, Lesson! and uses video games as a way into talking about the real subject behind them, with actual experts rather than just, y’know, podcasters. He’s released the first three episodes in one blast, talking about Spelunky 2 and actual spelunking (and which animals get lost in caves), about The Last Of Us Part 2 and a post-humanity world, and about Death Stranding and our cravings for social media ‘likes’. It’s a solid podcasting premise, that, and Brendy is quite great.

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Quake

‘s a gritty fast-paced shooter where you dance around enemies and splatter them with beefy guns. Modder “Redfield” clearly thought, “But what if I inject some Bloodborne into it?”, and so Raven Keep was born. It’s a mod which throws players into a gothic castle where “Old Ones” (sound familiar?) have left some spooky chalices behind. To uncover their mystery, we’ll have to blast knights, ghosts, and even some bosses straight from Dark Souls and Bloodborne. Count me in.

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Support-class ships like the U-wing in Star Wars: Squadrons probably have the biggest role to play in any victory. Most players avoid these ships because they’re slow and weak and you won’t get many kills with them, but for players who don’t mind the life of a support character, you can absolutely carry your team to victory by following my best U-wing loadout guide below.

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Valve have added new options to filter obscenity and slurs from chat on Steam and in some games, letting you level up without getting cussed out. With the new Steam Chat Filtering enabled, words caught in the filters are replaced with “***” or “♥♥♥”. The new options are pretty deep, letting you upload and download your own lists of banned words, see foul language from your friends but no one else, and more. Or, if you want, you can just leave it off and see the same chat as ever.

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The nimble A-wing is one of the Republic’s deadliest ships in Star Wars: Squadrons, thanks to its agility and damage potential. Most Republic players I’ve come across tend to use A-wings in both Dogfight and Fleet Battles, but I rarely see anyone doing it right>. Below I’ll walk you through my best A-wing loadout for Squadrons, along with an explanation of how to play it and why exactly it works so well against pretty much any enemy in the Empire’s fleet.

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Supergiant’s games all have pretty wonderful soundtracks, and their new Ancient Greek roguelike Hades is no exception. We have composer Darren Korb to thank for that, and this weekend he released a video tutorial teaching how to play one of Hades’ delightful tunes. It’s not one of the heavy intense tracks from your battles in Tartarus, however. Instead it’s one of the soothing melodies you hear when you come across Eurydice in Asphodel.

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My opinion of Star Wars: Squadrons is all over the place. I was excited when it was announced, as I’d been yearning for a proper Star Wars flight sim for years. But then I reined in my expectations, because my bland triple-A release sense was tingling. I played a few hours of Squadrons as soon as it launched, and finished my session feeling a bit nonplussed.

But since then, it has become obvious that this game is very good indeed. The central experience – of being a pilot in a Star Wars – is masterfully crafted, and I can’t find much to fault with it. Squadrons is probably the most fun I’ve had with any piece of Star Wars media since my teens, in fact, and it frequently invokes a joy I haven’t felt since playing TIE Fighter in 1995. But that’s the problem. Because it’s good enough to make me think hard about how it could have been perfect>. And when you start doing that, you really start to see the holes in something.

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