I’m enjoying how all the headlines around Artifact‘s upcoming comeback are about what it won’t do. It won’t sell you cards, and it won’t make you play on one lane at a time. ‘It won’t die in a fire like it did before’, promise.

We now know a lot more about how the revamped game will actually work. Random deployment is gone, with creeps spawning in predictable positions while Heroes can be plopped wherever you like. The infinite board is gone, too, as each of the three lanes can now only fit five units. This seems… promising?

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Artifact‘s developers have given up on selling people cards. When the closed beta for Artifact 2.0 kicks off, you’ll have to earn every single card through playing – no market, no packs. Stingy pricing was just about the only thing holding the game back for me, so, hurray!

It’s part of a big relaunch. Valve have also mentioned some changes they’re making to the game itself, including allowing “players to access all three lanes at once”. That’s pretty wild, too.

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Valve are on something of a roll right now. Half-Life: Alyx is looking absolutely stunning ahead of next week’s release. While Dota Underlords (and auto-battlers generally) might be on a bit of a downturn, it’s hard to say it hasn’t done well for itself. Now that they’re back in full swing, it might be time for Valve to bring their dustiest skeleton out of the closet. Gabe Newell reckons it might be time for another shot at Artifact.

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Unless you’re in one of those international versions of Big Brother that are still going on, you’ve probably noticed that we’re in the midst of a pandemic of something called the Covid-19 virus. I can tell it’s serious because my dad’s American girlfriend isn’t allowed to visit him, which means he’s bored and phoning me in the middle of the day. Haha, I joke. But he is 70, and has a weak heart, plus he’s immunocompromised on account of catching Lyme disease from a tick once (which is exactly the sort of ridiculous thing that only happens to country dads).

If you’re anything like us, you’re now at home, staring at the walls of your living room because of this social distancing thing. But it’s not just you. In fact, all of RPS is now working from home for the foreseeable future, too. So in the spirit of camaraderie, I’ve pooled some suggestions for video games to play while we’re self-quarantining. We’ve got some multiplayer ones, some board-gamey ones, and, of course, a healthy dollop of free ones.

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Dota 2‘s latest update has given everyone’s favourite lizard-riding grandma the ability to swallow her friends and spit them at her enemies. If you thought being tossed by Tiny was annoying, wait until you’re in the belly of Snapfire’s salamander.

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When you’re looking for the best free games on PC, what are you looking for? We think we’ve got you covered with our selection below, whether it’s browser games you can start playing instantly, free-to-play games to rival anything you’d spend money on, or downloadable games that you can play for a lifetime.

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“They’re like monkey business men”, says Team Liquid member Kuroky, “they will GO”. Liquid are gathered around for a quick smoke before the Dota 2 International 2019 finale, about to face Team OG. They’re visibly nervous, despite Kuroky’s repeated insistence that they should “feel free”, and treat this like a scrim. Another team member insists that it IS a scrim, and Kuroky immediately reneges on his own words. “In a way”, he says. “It’s a costly scrim though.”

The first five minutes of Valve’s True Sight documentary have sucked me right in. It’s a feature length film showing drama from inside the player booths, between match pep talks, and the matches themselves. They’re all so sweet.

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Below you’ll find the list of the best PC games we recommend you play right now. These are games that are new, that are being freshly updated, or that are stone cold classics of their respective genres. This is a living list, which means we’ll be updating it throughout 2020 as we fall in love with new games.

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The last ten years have brought us many joys. We’ve already celebrated the best games of the past decade, but with such scattergun nomination comes neglect. Only three of the fifty games we picked had grappling hooks, so clearly the entire endeavour was pointless and you will need an alternative resource.

Here’s my definitive guide to the swinging tenties. I haven’t mentioned Worms, because they get everywhere and I don’t want to spend my whole day talking about helminths.

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It’s been an eventful decade for PC games, and it would be hard for you to summarise everything that’s happened in the medium across the past ten years. Hard for you>, but a day’s work for us. Below you’ll find our picks for the 50 best games released on PC across the past decade.

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