Gloomwood is, so far, a very good game, but it is also not much of a game - in the literal sense that it has launched into early access incomplete. There's currently just enough of it to play that it makes you feel both bereft and quite annoyed when it suddenly clangs its great iron doors shut in front of you. "Let me in!!" you scream, as you hammer on the silent portal. "I really like Thief! I get> you! I want to throw more decapitated heads as lures!"

If you are one of those people who bases their gaming personality on liking the original Thief series, Gloomwood will have been on your radar for a while. It's a grimy, steampunk-ish stealth immersive sim with a deliberate low-poly vibe, and it picks up the abandoned Thief football to absolutely run with it. But, though the current EA build is but short, it feels like Gloomwood is aiming to punt that ball into outer space. There's so much more room to be playful and experiment than I expected, and it's so much fun> that if you'd never played a stealth sim in your life I'd recommend Gloomwood. Except I wouldn't, because it feels like I'd be doing you a disservice to recommend it now, when the fun will be so quickly snatched away.

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It's a very odd feeling, building a catapult all on your lonesome while watching fiery death rain down on your enemy's castle in the valley below. I suspect it's probably a similar experience to watching the carnage of Chivalry II play out from the safety of a nearby bench. The newly announced Warlander from Nier Replicant devs Toylogic certainly has the medieval setting in common with Torn Banner Studio's first-person hack and slash, but this free-to-play multiplayer warfare game is an altogether different beast. You control your warriors in third-person, for starters, and its more cartoonish visuals allow for, well, daft cataclysmic events like a flaming meteor shower to hone in on a player's position without appearing completely over the top. As it prepares to enter its first open beta later today, September 12th, I went hands on with a brief demo build to see what it was all about.

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Despite Black Friday 2022’s roots as a Christmas shopping event, apparently people want to start keeping an eye on it in September?> It’s 23°c outside and folks are already thinking about PC gaming deals they might want in the damp, dark, dying days of November. Hey, I’m not knocking it, and I’ll even put together this guide that early Black Friday birds might find useful. I just don’t even think of what I want for dinner later.

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Every weekend, indie devs show off current work on Twitter's #screenshotsaturday tag. And every Monday, I bring you a selection of these snaps and clips. This weekend, my eye has been caught my beings growing strange and wonderful bodyparts for cool movement. Also, there's a photo of a cat.

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As was leaked, and then hurriedly confirmed by Ubisoft about a week ago, the next Assassin's Creed game to come out will be Mirage, in 2023. It's not going to be quite the massive open world adventure 'em up that the last few entries have been (don't worry; one of those is on the way as well), but a more classic AssCreed experience to mark the series' 15th anniversary. This milestone has made me realise that the Creedsperience has taken up almost half of my current lifespan. Or, to put it another way, I fear that playing Assassin's Creed Mirage may induce a pathetic but very real existential crisis in me.

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The Crucial P5 Plus is one of the most affordable 'second-gen' PCIe 4.0 SSDs, offering sequential read speeds up to a storming 6600MB/s while costing less than alternatives like the Samsung 980 Pro and WD Black SN850. As you may have guessed from the title of this post, it's also on sale at Amazon for a very reasonable price: £59 gets you a 500GB model compared to a UK RRP of £101.

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360mm AiOs seem to be becoming more of a necessity these days, with ever-hotted high-end processors from the likes of AMD and particularly Intel. Thankfully, they're also becoming increasingly inexpensive, with this post in particular spotlighting a deal on the EVGA CLC 360. This cooler normally costs £109, but today you can pick it up for £82 after a 25% discount.

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Summer is ebbing away, and I hate how it goes. I already miss long evenings, with sunset now before 8pm but sunrise still pointlessly at like 6:30? No thanks. I don't miss those 5am sunrises either. So we can surely all agree that the sensible course of action would be to lock sunrise to 7:30am and rotate the whole clock around that. Anyway! What are you playing this weekend? Here's what we're clicking on.

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You start out aiming to restore a princess to a throne, which naturally tempted me on her every turn to lunge onto the nearest spear for a punchline, but I will forgive Tyrant's Blessing for circumstances beyond its control.

Like everything, it's also a roguelike, but it's transparent and fair enough that I can reluctantly forgive that too, not least because I've found myself enjoying this one the more it went on. It's a lighter, cheerier sibling of Into The Breach that's half tactical fighter, half puzzler, and its default difficulty setting is close to perfect if you're looking for something less intense that will still catch you out now and then.

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Despite lamenting the other week that the rest of 2022's gaming calendar was looking a bit weak sauce after endless delay announcements, September is shaping up to be an absolutely monster month for indie releases right now. As Alice Bee noted earlier in the week, there are just too many cool, interesting games coming out for us to review effectively on the site at the moment (although rest assured, we will do our darnedest to cover as many of them as we can).

Part of the challenge is working out what's worth reviewing, and what we think is worth highlighting for you, our readers. The other part, though, is often entirely selfish on our part, just playing and writing about cool games we like. In fact, the decision to review many of the games we covered this week - Railbound, Jack Move and Roadwarden - were all down to having played and liked some form of demo, making events like the Steam Next Fest an increasingly invaluable tool in helping us cut through the noise when we inevitably enter mega months like September.

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