DELTARUNE

BASICALLY, Deltarune goes like this. You are a lonely kid in a small town. Your name is Kris. You have a sweet but slightly overbearing mother, a high-achieving older brother away at college, and a dad who no longer sleeps in your house. You turn up late to school one morning and find that everybody else is already partnered up for the big project. One by one you go around the room trying to persuade your fellow students to take you on. Then... Suzie kicks down the door.

Everybody is scared of Suzie, including your hapless teacher, who pairs you up as a way to mollify this hulking, mean-spirited lizard girl (everyone is a monster in this story, except for you). The teacher sends you and Suzie out on some half-assed errand to get the troublemaker out of the classroom. Out in the corridor Suzie briefly considers eating your face, but decides against it. Then two of you head on into the store room and through a wormhole into another reality.

There's a kingdom in mortal danger down here. A kingdom awaiting destined heroes who, wouldn't you know it, look just like you and Susie. Capes and weapons appear in a burst of light. A slamming overworld theme kicks in. The adventure is on!

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Moncage

On the face of it, the conceit that lies at the heart of Moncage isn't a particularly novel one. It's a puzzle game that's all about perspective, where changing your view or shifting your position can make the scene in front of you morph into something very different. It's about reframing - your opinions every bit as much as your view - until, with a little imagination and a touch of trial and error, you realise that you can take those shadows and stony dead-ends and turn them into something else. Something more hopeful.

It's a magical thing, really. Truly brilliant. That said, sometimes it feels like there's too much going on. Sometimes the scenes in front of you switch so unexpectedly - you'll know when it happens by a gentle audio cue and a golden glow from the window that's been updated - that you'll struggle to keep track of what's going on no matter how hard you keep on top of it. It's an on-the-nose metaphor for real life, I guess.

Other times, though, things seem unbearably dark. Bleak. You look for ways to improve it - perhaps force a little sunshine into your world - and that's a fitting enough analogy, too, especially when you find yourself too close to something to see the bigger picture, or too distant to examine the delicate detail. Or are you looking at everything through the distorted lens of alcohol, and maybe seeing things that aren't really there at all?

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Eurogamer

We may be coming to the end of the Black Friday weekend but the deals aren't over yet. Cyber Monday is here with a fresh new wave of deals. In Newegg's case, it's decided to jump the gun and bring out its Cyber Monday deals already before the weekend is even over. With that in mind, we've gone in to highlight all the best tech and gaming deals for you.

For starters, one great deal is the Black Xbox Elite Wireless Series 2 Controller for $149.99- $30 off its regular price. As one of the best controllers for the Xbox, which provides more button mapping options to increase accessibility and competitiveness, we haven't seen any reductions on this expensive controller over Black Friday so this is a deal you won't want to miss.

A word of warning that there's a bit of inconsistency over how Newegg has listed some of these deals. We've seen a few products with a note that their sale ends at midnight US Pacific Time, when Cyber Monday should technically begin. Others require you to enter a promo code at checkout before the discount shows up, and some even offer the opportunity for a further rebate, but we'll do our best to point out where this is the case.

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Eurogamer

If you've been lucky to snag a new upgrade for your PC or changed your rig altogether, you'll need the right games to accompany it. Thankfully, the folks at GOG have an excellent sale this Black Friday, with many titles being reduced significantly for the first time.

This includes Horizon Zero Dawn, a port of the hit PlayStation title on PC, for just £20.04, a half price reduction! Psychonauts 2 is also reduced by nearly a third to £38.49 and the gold edition of Metro Exodus is nearly two thirds off to just £13.99!

The benefits of GOG are always there, such as having the option to use its Galaxy library app to see your purchases or just downloading directly from the site, and having the games be DRM free forever. Here are some of the best deals right now on PC games at GOG:

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Eurogamer

If you've been looking for a new FPS or MMO gaming mouse that's fully versatile then the wired Razer Naga Trinity is an excellent option. All you really need to know is that it's reduced by a whopping £50 in this year's Black Friday sale. That's less than half price. Perfect to snap up as a replacement mouse or upgrade for yourself. Or even to pop in a Christmas stocking.

It is a right-handed mouse, and along with the 19 programmable buttons (which is what most MMO players will be after), you also get the benefit of the highly precise 16,000 DPI 5G Optical Sensor. As a wired mouse there's virtually no latency either. Bargain!

The three-in-one design of the quite sturdy Naga Trinity means it can be customised to suit anyone's gameplay. It has four swappable side plates for 2, 7 and 12-button configurations that are super easy to flip out, but also hold well in place. This is ideal because, let's face it, we all develop our own preferred styles. Plus you don't really want to be learning new formats. It's much faster if you can simply rely on the muscle memory you've already spent years of game-playing to develop.

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Eurogamer

The era of the high-end PC exclusive may well be a thing of the past, but every once in a while a game comes along that is rather special, that can't be played anywhere else and in the case of Sword and Fairy 7, by Softstar Technology in Beijing, we have an excellent role-playing game that piles on the high-end visual features, including ray tracing support - all courtesy of Unreal Engine 4. It's a quality game and looking into it, I've unwittingly stumbled upon a sleeping giant of a games franchise. Sword and Fairy has spawned many games and live action adaptations, and this latest series entry is a high quality production that, curiously, has received very little editorial coverage. That changes today!

The story begins in 1995 when The Legend of Sword and Fairy was first released for MS-DOS, telling the tale of a luckless orphan in provincial China who sets off on an adventure to save his ailing aunt. Hailed as a pioneering game for Chinese development, its tragic story, mazes and turn-based battles struck gold, selling many millions of copies. So why didn't it receive the same kind of profile as, say, Ultima or Final Fantasy? The reasons are legion, but importantly, The Legend of Sword and Fairy was never officially released with an English translation - and I've only managed to sample it via a translation patch released many years later.

Thankfully, Sword and Fairy 7 comes with English text out of the box, but even so, barriers of entry are still there to a degree: the game's menus and interface are translated - yet all the audio and signage in the game is in Chinese. Personally, I love subtitles and prefer local audio to often inaccurate dubbing, but for a release with so many cutscenes and NPC interactions, I can understand how the sheer volume of reading may be too much for many. Still, there's much to commend this RPG. Far removed now from its origins, combat is all in real-time now with differing move sets and special attacks - and the ability to change characters on the fly to others in your party who specialise at different techniques.

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Eurogamer

It's a tough time getting gaming hardware this Black Friday season. GPUs remain few and far between, meaning gaming desktop deals aren't as prevalent as they usually are. Gaming laptops, however, are an easier find and there's still decent deals to be had at the tail-end of the sales.

Lenovo is stepping up by reducing their IdeaPad 3 gaming laptop to just £679.99 after you punch in the voucher code BLACKFRIDAY at checkout. This is a massive reduction from its usual price of £799.99!

You might be wondering how a gaming laptop could be this cheap? Well, you might not be getting the highest specs on the market but they're respectable with some excellent bright spots. First thing up: it has an NVIDIA GeForce RTX 3050 chip with 4GB of video ram. This is a capable GPU of 1080p gaming.

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Eurogamer

Nobody else is doing quite what Rob Dwiar is doing. Dwiar, who works at GamesRadar as a commissioning editor, has spent much of his life as a games writer thinking about gardens. Or maybe he's spent much of his life as a gardening writer thinking about games. Eurogamer readers might be familiar with his work from his lovely articles for Eurogamer. But that's only a part of it. Now, Dwiar has written a book about the intersection of games and landscape. It's called Genius Loci, and it's currently running a campaign on Unbound.

Genius Loci promises "a grand tour of video game landscapes and gardens." It's a richly illustrated thing, a lovely chunky hardback, by the looks of it, covering everything from Assassin's Creed to Dragon Age as it takes in the best of video game landscapes, making sense of the design choices, picking through the flora and fauna, and providing a wonderful sense of context.

I caught up with Dwiar recently over Zoom. Amongst other things, I wanted to know what came first for him - gardens and landscapes, or games?

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FIFA 22

A Liverpool player had to quit a FIFA 22 tournament early to play a real-life match this afternoon - and performed a gamer celebration after scoring after just 97 seconds.

Liverpool front man Diogo Jota spent the morning playing in a FIFA 22 international qualifier event before rushing off to make the 3pm kick-off of his club's Premier League match against Southampton at Anfield.

It's a good job Jota made it, too - he scored after just 97 seconds - and celebrated by sitting down and pretending to play FIFA.

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Eurogamer

Babylon's Fall contains gear and emote assets "borrowed" from Final Fantasy 14, developer PlatinumGames has confirmed.

Players of the Babylon's Fall phase three closed beta test had expressed concern about the visual appearance of gear in the long-awaited Square Enix-published online co-op 3D action game, with some accusing Platinum of "ripping off" the much-loved MMO.

Babylon's Fall producer Yosuke Saito penned a blog post addressing the concern, confirming the game uses gear assets from Final Fantasy 14.

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