They’re doing it! By god, they’re doing it! Apex Legends is gearing up for its big Halloween monster mash – and this time, the demons are crawling all over the goddamn walls. This year’s Fight or Fright event is bringing wallrunning back from Titanfall 2, but only for those Legends unfortunate enough to succumb to undeath.
is a bloody gorgeous game. There’s no arguing that. But did you know that the enigmatic Nyx started life as one of the Fury sisters? Crafting a god is a strange process for mortal hands – but such is the job of the artists at Supergiant games, one of whom has this week gone in-depth on how the studio models, rigs, textures and animates a Cthonic diety.
In my expert opinion, the best thing a horror game about amnesia and half-glimpsed horrors can do upon launching is disappear. Was it ever there? Am I crazy in the coconut? So it’s thematically splendid (if practically inconvenient) that today’s Amnesia: Rebirth launch went spooky on Steam. At first some owners found it didn’t have an executable so they couldn’t play, which is a solid jumpscare after paying £24, then the game promptly vanished from the store. An excellent series of chills. But it’s okay now! Come relax with the launch trailer.
Ray tracing is the big buzz word of 2020 in PC gaming, and Nvidia have just announced another fresh batch of ray tracing and DLSS games, including a couple of old ones that will be getting support in future updates. To help you keep track of them all, I’ve created this list of all the confirmed ray tracing games you can play on PC right now, as well which of this year’s [cms-block] will get ray tracing and support in the future. And because ray tracing tends to go hand in hand with Nvidia’s performance-boosting DLSS tech these days, I’ve also listed all the current and upcoming games that support DLSS, too.
In letting us pillage jolly old England, Assassin’s Creed: Valhalla has already promised a tempting power fantasy. But Ubisoft’s upcoming historical stab ’em up isn’t stopping with just one country. Revealed in a new trailer outlining Valhalla’s post-launch plans, it looks like Eivor will be setting sail for the Emerald Isle before taking an axe to Ubisoft’s own Parisian front door in two major expansions, Wrath Of The Druids and The Siege Of Paris, set to arrive next year.
It’s not Halloween until you’re knee-deep in the dead, so here comes Doom Eternal with the start of its two-part story expansion. The Ancient Gods sends the angry fella back into the Maykr’s dimension to resume ripping and tearing, this time with some new enemies in the mix too. Curiously, the expansion is also a standalone game, not requiring you to own Doom Eternal to buy and play.
We are now but a month out from the release of Cyberpunk 2077. The massive action RPG finally landed on a November 19th launch date after a couple of delays (any further chance of a date push having apparently been, itself, pushed by developers CD Projekt rolling back their “no mandatory crunch” policy).
Not that we’ve been bereft of Cyberpunk content in the meantime. In fact, companies have been falling over themselves to bring us high quality neon products as official tie-ins to the game. Which is, in a way, extremely cyberpunk. But are the products> cyberpunk? That’s the question. We have put them to the test by using sophisticated digital techniques to simulate what these merch tie-ins would look like in the game, and if, therefore they are actually cyberpunk (lower case c).
The year is 1937, and you’ve just woken up in a crashed plane in the middle of a desert. You’re not some sort of Indiana Jones-esque film though, I’m afraid, you’re in a horror game – Amnesia: Rebirth, to be exact. It’s the new survival horror from Frictional Games, the team behind Amnesia: The Dark Descent and Soma, and it’s out today.
How can the horror of a traditionally dark and dingy series hold up under the bright desert sun? I talked with game director Thomas Grip and creative lead Fredrik Olsson to find out. We also discussed monsters and things they’ve learned from their old games, as well as how player choice can make horror that much more horrifying.
If I remember correctly, one of the bigger complaints against Fallout 4 on release was that it wasn’t Fallout: New Vegas. Obsidian’s spin-off is seen by many as the series’ last stab at proper, old-school RPG’ing before Bethesda turned the post-apocalypse into a playful sandbox. Naturally, a group of modders have been hard at work bringing New Vegas’ guns ‘n’ graphics up to date with a total recreation inside Fallout 4, showing off their spit-shined spurs in a new progress trailer this week.
As the nights draw ever closer, and the windows of the local Tesco grow ever more pumpkiny, I have been burrowing into blankets, putting a hot water bottle on my feetsies (because we don’t want to turn on the heating yet) and wallowing in some classic scares. But I have found this harder to do with games. Most games are, obviously, a very interactive experience, and when the scares are happening to you, rather than someone you are watching, it is less conducive to comfortable toasty-toe Octobering.
At the same time, I have been pootling around in The Sims 4, restlessly starting and canning new builds in a fit of pique. But then I realised that my two interests can be combined: I can indulge in some classic horror, play a game at the same time, and I don’t even have to do any work because other Sims builders have already done it! That’s my favourite kind of work! And lo and behold, there are loads of recreations of famous scary buildings knocking about on The Sims 4 Gallery. I’ve linked a few of my favourites that I found below. Sure, you could search the gallery for them yourselves, but the gallery UI is the worst thing in the entire world, so this will save you time.
