After needing seven years and several failed starts to successfully launch a game of their own, Amazon Game Studios are perhaps cautiously turning to other developers for their next. Today they announced a release date of February 11th for Lost Ark, the Diablo-y action-RPG first released by Smilegate in South Korea in 2019, which Amazon will publish in Europe and the Americas. Might be alright? It'll free-to-play, anyway. Check out the new trailer from The Game Awards below.

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After yonks of leaving us aching for even a mention of a PC release for Final Fantasy VII Remake, Square Enix casually announced at The Game Awards tonight, oh hey, it's coming next week. Just like that. Next Thursday, the 16th of December, FF7 Remake will hit PC in its expanded Intergrade form. Like many other recent Square Enix RPG ports (and as expected), it will be exclusive to the Epic Games Store.

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The follow-up to Hellblade: Senua's Sacrifice, Senua's Saga: Hellblade 2, was first announced at The Game Awards back in 2019, and we haven't heard much about it since then. But it was back at The Game Awards again this year, showing some brand new footage of Senua leading a group of fighters through a rather wet cave to face a giant. It looks fantastic, and incredibly eerie.

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At tonight's Game Awards, Falcon Age developers Outerloop Games announced Thirsty Suitors, a story-driven RPG about fending off suitors and exes while trying not to disappoint your family. Published by Annapurna Interactive, it looks eccentric and colourful, with battles involve throwing ghostly cars and calling in giant family members to swat your opponents. It also features cooking, skateboarding, and possibly dancing (though I can't quite tell from the trailer if the dancing is separate from the battling).

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Maybe games just look like this now? S.T.A.L.K.E.R. 2 is an Unreal Engine 5 game, so it's bound to be pretty. Yet I look at the new screenshots its developers posted to Twitter, and they look to me less like screenshots than the painted-over bullshots of yore. See them below and make up your own mind.

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This Is The President is a game that, partway through, had me worried it wouldn't really qualify as a strategy game. As you'd expect, it's about being the US President, and making lots of decisions about running the country and trying not to become too unpopular. But it's far closer to interactive fiction than a simulation, with a main plot whose demands, if failed, will instantly end the game.

It has, however, got me considering what exactly "political strategy game" means.

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Halo Infinite is now out and playable in its entirety, following a weirdly chopped-up release process that culminated in me having to run three different downloads just to play the campaign. But anyway! Now seems like a good time to take a closer look at Infinite’s PC system requirements, and which graphics settings you should tweak to get the best performance.

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I'm not normally a fan of children in games because, as noted in this episode of the Electronic Wireless Show podcast, they get into the uncanny valley pretty quickly. But it's the season to be jolly, so we're talking about the times we thing kids in games are actually really good.

We do end up going on quite a lot of tangents, notably one on which Warhammer faction Matthew would play, and of course we ask Matthew for his thoughts on Mr. Beast's Squid Game. This week's Cavern Of Lies is in Nate's control, which means he takes us to Dwarf Fortress, with predictable results.

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Arachnophobes may be hesitant to open this door on the Advent Calendar, but we promise it'll be safe, and there's even an arachnophobe mode. You know who could do whatever a spider could better than Spider-Man? An actual spider, that's who.

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We've added a few new entries to our selection of the best free PC games for 2021, and you'll find them all at the top of this (unordered) list. But don't worry, you'll still find plenty of older free games that are worth just as much of your time as they new-uns.

Our picks below include both free and free-to-play games. Anything with a mandatory cost is excluded, as are mods or anything dependent on another purchase. The result is a list of games that run the gamut, from ARPGs to management, 2D platformers to co-op first-person shooters.

If you'd prefer to consume a version of this list via the magic of moving pictures, you can do so with this handy video we've put together:

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