Many of you are by now bathing in twinkling neon ravelights and swooning into the metal arms of Cyberpunk 2077‘s humourless unhunks, who stalk the streets of Night City like animatronic pizza restaurant mascots gone feral. That is fine. There are worse places to find oneself in the labyrinthine hell of video games. Places such as these. Here are 9 neighbourhoods you wouldn’t want to bring up your children in.

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It’s no longer the most urgent gold rush in PC games, but survival games continue to be regularly released, and older games continue to be regularly updated. It’s only natural then that we’ve taken some time out from foraging for edible berries to update our list of the best survival games for 2020.

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“Nikolay, right now, what do you think about Pathologic 2? Was it a successful experiment?”

“Oh yes, of course! Certainly it was! Moreover, due to the conditions in which we constructed this game, it was a miracle that we released it. But I wouldn’t say it’s the game we wanted to release.”

Even now, over a year after Pathologic 2’s release, Nikolay Dybowski and Ivan Slovtsov have differing opinions about the surrealistic survival game they played leading roles in making. In fact, they’re still unpacking their thoughts about what they created, particularly in light of the changes they made after launch to its difficulty setting, a system which lies at the centre of a game which sets out to express the struggle in death and life.

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When the historians of the future cast their cyber-eyes over the deluge of stupidity we encrusted upon the primitive internet, they will see that our fables, our moral storytelling, was mostly conducted with flashing colours and double-jumps. Yes, videogames have adopted the moralistic finger-wagging of fairytales and Victorian novels, for better or for worse. They have taught us a lot about ourselves and our place in the world. Here are 13 of the “best” moral lessons from PC games. Yes, you may take notes.

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Children, life s great copy-paste. Adorable, drooling idiots with no self-control and a habit of yelling embarrassing facts to the entire supermarket. In our everyday lives, human children are a snotty emblem of hope, vulnerability, and aspiration. In videogames, they are a cursed harbinger of escort missions, narrative roadblocks, cutesy voice acting, and precocious dialogue. They are annoying. But hold on, that s the point. Many of them are meant to be that way. So here is a list of the 10 most annoying children in PC games. And perhaps, the best annoying?

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Plagued village Pathologic 2 is expanding, with a DLC called The Marble Nest opening its doors before the end of the month. It s its own story, putting you in the shoes of a new doctor, this time of the PhD variety. Scientist Dr. Daniil Dankovsky will only be on town for one day, so you d better make the most of it.

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There s a woman wailing in that house. I keep walking. I walk until her screams are out of earshot, then I look at my map. I can see the noisy house drawn here, a square box with a little circle around it. I look closer. You can hear wailing, it reads. I close the map. I keep walking. I need a cog – a rusty cog, a clean cog, any cog. All the water pumps in town are broken, I only need a cog to fix one of them. You can hear wailing.> I need the water to make medicine. It s getting late. The thugs will be out soon. You can hear wailing.> I need a cog. I haven t met anybody with a cog in days. Where are the godforsaken workmen? You can hear wailing.>

Shut up, no I can t. Shut up. There s nobody in that house. And even if there was, they can take care of themselves. I need a cog. Shut up, Pathologic 2. I need a cog.

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This is the shipping forecast; the synopsis at 5pm. Solid Snake just west of cloak room, expected to move towards Sam Fisher on dance floor before midnight. Wrecking Ball from Overwatch, mild at 1am, becoming rabid with lust at 3am. Agent 47 from Hitman: confused, occasional peeping, becoming horny later. Red Prince: cyclonic, mainly drinking alone, peering at Steve from Minecraft with questionable motives, occasionally licking lips.

(Yes. We did a podcast about romantically matchmaking game characters.)

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It is canny to conceal that one is uncanny , Pathologic 2 s Mark Immortel offers in the game s introduction, promising artifice and detachment before you ve had a chance to ground yourself. At first, I take this as the game warning me about the duplicitous world I’m about to enter, but then I think it’s something else. You re the misfit here, it s telling me. It s smart not to let on exactly how weird you are. How unsuited you are – with your expectations of a clear divide between real and imaginary, tangible and intangible, audience and performance — to navigate this place you now find yourself in.

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If you’re interested in the making of your gamesausage, do have a look at Gamedev.world this weekend. Starting today at noon, it’s a new free game developer-focused conference with 35 talks over three days in multiple languages, all streamed online. Subjects on the schedule include Pathologic 2‘s questlog, designing multiplayer games to avoid awfulness, the making of Gris, tools, the faux-2D art of La-Mulana 2, free-to-play monetisation, collaboration in audio design, local independent development scenes, how to set up a games studio… a whole lot. For free. By professionals. That’s neat.

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