Steam returns with actual hundreds of free demos for its Autumn Festival. I am but one woman, so I could never get through them all, but I have played what I would characterise as a lot> over the past two days. My own personal labour of Hercules was undertaken so that I could bring you, the reader, a list of my favourite demos to provide, if not an exhaustive list, then at least a jumping off point.

I’ve got something for all of yez, gentle pals. Puzzle games? RPGs? Action? Strategy? Why yes, even that. I’ve got an EDM murder rave, dressing up in pre-revolutionary Paris, ripping up legal documents as a cute turnip, and rodents you should live in fear of. So many games! Your favourite is sure to be among them.

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Yesterday, AMD gave us our first glimpse of what their upcoming RX 6000 [cms-block] graphics cards will be able achieve at 4K. While the bulk of their Zen 3 event was centred around their Ryzen 5000 CPUs, we also got a first look at their first Big Navi GPU in action, running Borderlands 3 on its top Badass quality settings at an average of 61fps. AMD also shared some figures for Gears 5 and Call Of Duty: Modern Warfare, but how do these benchmark figures actually stack up against Nvidia’s new [cms-block]? Let’s find out.

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Frictional Games have published another trailer for upcoming horror adventure Amnesia: Rebirth. It lets on a bit about the story and showcases quite a lot of the game’s environments as well. One thing does jump out: the latter are all quite different. Unlike the horror romps Frictional have done before, they explain, Rebirth will put an emphasis on touring you through locations that are quite different from one another.

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Yesterday, Microsoft posted a list of their “10 app store principles”, in what reads like one big passive aggressive jab at Apple. They say these principles are designed to “promote choice and ensure fairness” on their Windows Stores (both mobile and desktop), and they include rules about just generally treating app developers fairly.

These are nice and good principles to stick to, yes. But the entire post doesn’t seem as though it’s really to assure devs, so much as it is to make very clear whose side they’re on in the whole Apple vs Epic debacle.

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Tis the season for online games to get all haunted for a few weeks. Borderlands 3‘s Bloody Harvest is back with more skins to earn and spooks to shoot. It’s on from now until November 5th, so you’ve got some time to check it out alongside all the other in-game events on your schedule.

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For those that don’t know, The PC Gaming Weekspot is a live, weekly video podcast that myself and my former VidBud Matthew Castle do every Monday evening over on the Rock Paper Shotgun YouTube channel. It’s a recap of the last seven days in PC gaming, with chat on the latest news, as well as some reviews on the latest games. But there’s one segment we do during The Weekspot that’s grown into a monster. A monster that I think you’d like, which is why I want to share it with you.

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Cloud Imperium’s space-em-up MMO, Star Citizen, has got a new alpha build for players to muck around in, with changes that’ll let you do more PvP. The Alpha 3.11 High Impact update is doing away with a load of the game’s safe Armistice Zones, and is adding new spaceships, as well as a Halloween event running throughout October. It doesn’t end there though, because on top of all that they’ve released a little teaser trailer for the upcoming singleplayer story game, Squadron 42, as well.

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While Destiny 2 welcomed a whole lot of new players when it went free-to-play last October, it didn’t do much more than open the door and gesture broadly in the direction of a 100-person party raging across every room of the house. New players are dropped in at the deep end, and it’s not fun. So it’s good to hear more of Bungie’s plans for a friendlier new player experience in the zone where Destiny began, the Cosmodrome.

Bungie have (mostly) good news for veteran players too, revealing plans to overhaul armour mod slots to be less of a faffy mess.

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The 25 pictures in a cluster foxer are arranged in 5 discretely/discreetly themed clusters. Pictures in a particular cluster must be cardinally contiguous to be valid. For example, a1, b1, c1, d1, d2 is a possible cluster, unlike a2, b2, c2, d2, e3. To fully defox today’s enlargeable puzzle identify the themes and constituent images of all five clusters. (more…)

I wanted to burn the following appetisers onto a CD then sellotape the disc to the front cover of today’s column but Graham said that was “technically impossible” so links and enticing descriptions will have to suffice. Be aware that most of the demos detailed below will self-destruct when the ongoing Steam Game Festival ends next Tuesday, and that the line-up is the result of careful curation not haphazard Googling. Not all of the trials I played this week passed my fussy quality control criteria. (more…)