Pack your bags, wrap the presents, put your scarf around your neck. And then sit down because, I’m sorry, you’re going nowhere. It’s bad, yeah. Even yours truly, a respected list goblin of note, could not make it back to his family in time for the holidays due to the ongoing vengeance of mother nature. But listen. What if I told you: “video games”? They have always had something for us in the past. What wonderful surrogate families can we join in this time of loneliness and separation to ease our troubled minds? Here are the 10 most wholesome families in PC games you may look to in this hour of need.

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You all remember Her Story, right? The video-clip detective game that launched a thousand FMVs, none of which were quite as good as Her Story? Developer Sam Barlow followed up with Telling Lies, which is another video-clip detective game that is probably not quite> as good as Her Story – though it is much more polished.

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At the beginning of December, the developers of Prison Architect started a “Fail Masterclass”. It’s a monthly video series in which Introversion’s Chris Delay and Mark Morris show a game they tried to make and explain the reasons why that project was cancelled. You can then donate money to the charity War Child in order to play all the abandoned prototypes for yourself.

Last month’s game was Order Of Magnitude, a space game about building a interplanetary colony. This month’s game is Spacebots, a, uh, space game about building things – only this time you do it using programmable robots.

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Earlier today, we got a glimpse inside Ian Hitman’s head with a trailer for Hitman 3‘s new VR support. Except we> didn’t, really, because support has thus far only been confirmed for the PSVR and not for our superior PC-based virtual reality headsets.

So it’s got me thinking. Is there anything to be excited about in VR gaming in 2021?

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Omori

seems like it’s riffing a bunch of games I’ve never played. It’s a topdown RPG about a group of friends, living in a small town and tumbling into a strange fantasy world that alternates between colourful and creepy. You, a learned reader, might look at it and reference EarthBound or Undertale or Yume Nikki. I, an idiot who has not played those games, have simply been looking at its ‘overwhelmingly positive’ Steam reviews and watching Twitch streams while slowly realising that this is something we should all be paying attention to.

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I listen to podcasts while washing dishes, making food, walking places, running places, falling asleep, showering, bathing, playing games, and parenting. My goal is to never have to hear my own thoughts ever again by 2022, and the several hours over the Christmas break during which my inner monologue had Matthew’s voice suggests I’m making progress. If you too crave self-annihilation, I’ve got a recommendation: Axe Of The Blood God, an RPG podcast, which launched a Patreon earlier this week. It’s one of the best videogame podcasts I listen to.

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Path Of Exile

‘s next expansion is called Echoes Of The Atlas, as announced earlier this evening in a Twitch livestream. It’s adding the usual mixture of new features to the free-to-play hack-and-slasher, including new maps, endgame content, and a new challenge league. You’ll be able to play it on January 15th, but you can step below right now to watch the announcement and read a few more details.

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When I first built a blocky version of my house in Quake level editor Worldcraft, I couldn’t have imagined what would be possible two decades years later. With multimillion-pound technology and libraries of professional assets, modern level editors can turn your dreams into stunning worlds. So I’m delighted when people use all that to recreate mundane places, especially when they’re close to home. Case in point, today I saw someone has used Far Cry 5‘s level editor to recreate some Edinburgh flats that were demolished years back. Wonderful.

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“Steampunk” used to mean something quite specific. But the term has been more and more broadly applied over the years, to the point where it’s now commonly accepted as a shorthand for “sci-fi stuff done with old technology”. A broad premise, you’d think. It should be. But in practice, it almost always boils down to brass and top hats and twee Victoriana, with all the grim colonial baggage of the era swept under the steam-carpet, using a broom with cogs on it. The whole subgenre is stuffed with British – or at least European – cultural cues.

Sometimes, it really works. See the sexy-ugly, heraldry-daubed WWI mechs of Iron Harvest, for example (this is technically Dieselpunk but… c’mon), or the hellish, in-steam-we-trust desperation of Frostpunk. Grand stuff. But for every masterstroke there’s a dozen lazy also-rans, where goggles, corsetry and pith helmets have been applied with abandon, like a sauce that somehow makes a meal taste more bland. In this desert of waxed moustaches, then, coming across a game like Airborne Kingdom, in which the whole concept has been approached with fresh eyes, feels like stumbling upon an oasis.

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This week, Apex Legends started its Fight Night event, plonking a great big boxing ring onto the Olympus map. Challenging players to cheeky boxing matches has always been a fun part of Apex, so I was pretty excited to jump into an official ring right in the middle of Respawn’s battle royale. Unfortunately, a mere two days after the boxing ring appeared, no one seems to bother dropping there anymore.

I’m very upset. Why? Why will none of you meet me in the ring?

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