Workers & Resources: Soviet Republic is a fascinating, unique take on the city-building and management game that puts you in control of a tiny Soviet-era republic and its entire economy. That’s a command economy, too: No internal currency for you to manage, just goods moving from place to place. If you want something built, you get the resources and manage your workforce to build it yourself, or you pay foreigners to come build it for you. It turns the normally zoning-and-placement focused genre on its head by removing the element of private business. Nothing gets done if you don’t command it to get done. Your people and your country come first. This is a game that emphasizes the value of infrastructure in a way that no city builder I’ve ever played does. It forces you to consider how long it takes to build a highway through the mountains, or whether a new rail network is going to work for increased traffic in the future.

I’m honestly surprised to find out that PC Gamer hasn’t written about this game before. But it’s the end of the year and since I’m the only one posting on here I’m going to write about it: This game would be a contender for my Game of the Year if it wasn’t in Early Access, warts and bugs and broken things included. I’ve been playing it since its Early Access launch earlier this year and it has captured my attention in a detail-focused way that a game hasn’t since I first started Dwarf Fortress. Steam users seem to agree with me, and the game currently sits at a 91% approval rating.

Workers & Resources: Soviet Republic is made by a little studio called 3Division, based in Kosice, Slovakia. The game has the tenor and tone of people who actually have lived, worked, and experienced Eastern Europe both during and after the Soviet era. There’s a granular texture of realism to the buildings and detailed models of historical cars, trains, even construction equipment. The kind of lived fidelity that made HBO's Chernobyl miniseries so good. W&R has some humor to it, and a bit of tongue-in-cheek irony, but it’s overall a relatively serious take on the subject matter. The game is expected to be in Early Access for as long as another year and a half, though updates and feature additions have come at a steady clip. The latest update adds Trolleybuses, and I absolutely love them, as well as Steam Workshop support.

You can get Workers & Resources: Soviet Republic on Steam for $24.99, or 30% for $17.49 for the last couple days of the winter sale. You can check out the official Workers & Resources: Soviet Republic website as well. 

For the first time in 12 years, voice actor Mike Shapiro has taken on the voice of the G-Man in yet another teaser ahead of the release of Half-Life: Alyx. Shapiro posted a short video on Twitter with a monologue as the character, complete with stilted tone, odd speech pattern, and all the other mannerisms that haunted the Half-Life series over the years. 

Here’s what he says:“Should old acquaintances be forgot, then, after so much… time. Some things can prove difficult to remember. See you in the new year. And, do prepare for… consequences, hrm? Mhm.”

Half-Life: Alyx is coming in 2020, and the G-Man will return with it—he features prominently at the end of the Half-Life: Alyx trailer. Perhaps he'll elaborate on his and Alyx's relationship, since we know they met at least once in Half-Life 2. If you’re not all caught up on Alyx, she has a new voice actor and it had to be a VR game. Here’s everything we know about Half-Life: Alyx. Also, PC Gamer staff can’t agree on whether or not Alyx should or should not have arms (in the game).

Disco Elysium is PC Gamer's Game of the Year for 2019! To see all of the winners, head to our GOTY 2019 hub.

Jody: The drama skill would like to explain that what makes Disco Elysium great is how it coherently draws together influences from outside of videogames, that it combines 1970s cop dramas with David Fincher deconstructions of detective stories and China Mieville city-building. The encyclopedia skill feels obliged to mention that it's also synthesizing the politics of post-Soviet Estonia and, in its glib moments, the hellsite called Twitter. Conceptualization would like to add the importance of its impressionist art style and equally impressionist music, both moody and yet not without color or incident. My electrochemistry skill really needs a drink if I'm going to carry on with this.

Disco Elysium's skill system, which transforms each of your character's abilities into NPC companions who pipe up with their own opinions and commentary more often as you put more points into them, is a revolutionary addition to roleplaying games. It forces you to see even trivial choices as coming to define who you are, and because of that it gets away with only occasionally throwing in a Big Moral Choice while still ensuring you finish it with a strong conception of who you've become.

Just as significant is what it leaves out. I took part in one fight and skipped an optional one and that's all the combat I saw in 30 hours. RPGs use combat as a pacing mechanism (and often as a padding one), so for Disco Elysium to throw that away and not be any lesser for it is huge. It's like someone kicking away a crutch and then running a marathon.

Wes: I was so excited when I started doing some real detective work, finding the notebook I'd lost during one hell of a drunken bender. Within it were clues to my forgotten identity, the backstory I needed to understand who I was. Like any other game, Disco Elysium prodded me to open it and investigate, to solve the riddle. And then, unlike any other game, it made me question whether I really wanted to know my past. Was that really who I was? Or could I be someone new? What a thrill, to deliberately throw away a plotline. What catharsis! And I know my particular makeup of skills changed which inner voices chimed in at that moment, yanking my mind in different directions, making me really choose what I thought. So many RPGs are defined by what you do, but Disco Elysium is truly defined by what you think. I've never played anything like it.

Fraser: Disco Elysium is challenging. Not in the way Dark Souls is challenging, but in its presentation of ideologies, addiction, racism, morality. It's a lot to digest. Your amnesiac detective is built out of personality traits, obsessions and beliefs, so you’re always encouraged to explore who you are and what you make of the society you’re stuck in. I became a communist for the funny dialogue options, but by the end I’d had serious discussions about its merits and flaws and found it informing loads of other choices I made. I’ve never played another RPG that gives so many opportunities to define my character beyond stat bumps, aside from maybe Planescape: Torment.

Andy K: I spend most of my time in Infinity Engine-style RPGs trying to avoid combat and find a smarter way to deal with any given situation, which makes Disco Elysium particularly enjoyable. The sheer number of ways to charm, smarm, or bullshit your way out of trouble makes for an incredibly satisfying RPG, and is proof that you don’t need traditional combat to make a game like this compelling over tens of hours. Disco’s protagonist is one of the most joyously malleable characters in RPG history, from the clothes he wears to the intricacies of his personality. You can truly make your mark on this world through the things you say and do, even if those things are terrible and offensive. It’s your choice.

Indie dungeon crawler Tower of Time is free on GOG for the next couple days. If you aren't familiar, it's a dungeon crawler set in a sort of magic-punk, advanced technology world. Despite its real-time combat, it’s very much a game for those who enjoyed Divinity, with highly customizable characters and a lot of story to read.

Battles are handled with an RTS-like system, though you can slow and pause time to give orders, and has you coming up against large groups of enemies that take some tactical juggling to defeat.

Tower of Time was released just last year, so it's a pretty fresh game to be on offer for free. You can grab it on GOG until 9 am ET on Wednesday, January 1st. That’s 14:00 UTC. 

If you’re looking for other games to pick up during the last of the holiday promotions, we put together a list of 25 great games that are $1 or less right now.

Mark Essen has a simple justification for initially leaving out an online multiplayer mode in Nidhogg. The tech was difficult to build, and expensive to deploy. He did not have an army of netcode experts ready to squash bugs, reduce latency, and seamlessly connect to servers. It was far more important to make sure the bow felt right.  

"You'd need two computers, or you could possibly set it up on one computer on multiple windows," says Essen, as he reflects on his halcyon days wheeling the Nidhogg prototype to every indie showcase in the world. "Just practically, it's harder to make an online-only multiplayer game."

After years of work, Nidhogg arrived on Steam in the beginning of 2014. By then it did have network play, but that wasn't, it turned out, the main draw. Nidhogg immediately sparked a flashbulb moment in gaming. Here was a 2D, one-versus-one swordfighting simulator, with simple mechanics, a Luddite Atari 2600 art style, and a distinct focus on couch multiplayer, that seemed entirely out of step with the rest of the video game industry.

Didn't matter. It still sold like crazy.

Five years later, Nidhogg remains one of the most thrilling experiences of the decade: Living proof that the world is still capable of falling in love with local multiplayer. Innovation, through limited means. It's almost horrifying to imagine what would've happened if Nidhogg had a real budget.

The couchpocalypse

The story of video games in the 2010s is the story of us slowly conceding our brains to the internet, all for the promise of more purple guns in Destiny. Despite our protests, and despite the fact that deep down, we probably know better, nearly everyone gaming on PCs is clinically attached to some sort of always-online robber baron. What's your vice? Hearthstone, Fortnite, League of Legends, Dota 2? They are all great games, but they're also all devious machines built to levy our paychecks with the power of new skins, new maps, and bimonthly updates.

The idea of buying a game so you can play it in its native state, offline, without patching or installing, with friends and family, is a rapidly crumbling memory. Call of Duty 4: Modern Warfare is one of the great couch games of all time. Its 2019 rebirth, of course, shipped without local competitive multiplayer. 

This isn't necessarily a bad thing, or a good thing. It is, simply, the state of things. Triple-A publishers, in the megagame era, are betting on the interminable contraptions that keep the service model viable. Thankfully, indie studios stepped up to the plate throughout the decade to remind us of a time when multiplayer didn't require an account password and a wi-fi connection.

Duck Game, Stick Fight, Gang Beasts. These were all modern games built on the archaic bones of Goldeneye and Halo—a time before placement matches, when superiority was only ranked on a dorm-room floor. And like Nidhogg's origin story, most were constructed that way in order to cut costs.

Beau Blythe tells me he was living in his parents' garage when he began work on the essential Samurai Gunn. Any added features on top of the core gameplay were out of the question.

"Local multiplayer is more accessible to small studios and independent developers since you don’t have to provide online infrastructure, community management, and marketing to build a player base," says Blythe, who's currently hard at work on Samurai Gunn 2. "I imagine large studios view local multiplayer as a feature that will be seldom used, so it’s not worth implementing. You would have to design for it from the start, and there are limited technical resources when you consider the graphical fidelity that these games are trying to reach. To require two-player support, you would have to render everything twice. It’s a lot to think about and it doesn’t ensure any more sales."

Anti-market research

Daniel Sterger, the designer of the hilarious, outstandingly pornographic Mount Your Friends, believes that as a rule, indie developers tend to exploit inefficiencies in the triple-A market.

"We have to push against mainstream trends to an extent," he says. "We don't have the ability to compete head-to-head so we turn to niches we believe have an audience that isn't being approached by the industry." Sterger continues by noting that his presence outside a major studio allows him to not be stymied by "market research" or a massive, micromanaged design team, which allowed him to experiment with, say, a video game about ascending a mountain made of jiggling flesh.

Another, more specific reason? Mount Your Friends was first conceived in a game jam, and built in a weekend. So many indie games first make a name for themselves on the tour of PAXes, Cons, and other industry bacchanals, and local multiplayer became the ideal way to demonstrate a project seeking publisher support in 15 minute intervals on a hectic show floor.

"[It gives] developers easy access to people unfamiliar with their game to test their designs, [compared to] an idea built around level design, complex AI, or worldbuilding," says Sterger.  

Nostalgia, ultra

Most importantly though, each of the developers I spoke to harbored a deep, fundamental passion for local multiplayer, and some expressed dismay about the direction the gaming hobby is going. It often feels like triple-A publishers expect us to sink thousands of hours into their new hub world, and its new systems and endlessly refreshing suite of seasonal events and corresponding thresholds of loot. Sometimes, when I miss a new game in its first week of release, it feels like I'll never be able to catch up.

Landon Podbielski, designer of Duck Game, says his aesthetic true north is the euphoria he felt as a kid playing ToeJam & Earl, TimeSplitters, and Halo: Combat Evolved—three games that arrived before the living-game singularity.

"I wanted something new to play with my friends," he remembers, on his time toying around with GameMaker in 2013. "I showed him a platformer game I was working on starring a duck. He told me I should make it so we could fight each other. I added a second duck and a shotgun, and Duck Game was born."

Podbielski tells me he will never forgive Halo 5, which added a clumsy MOBA-like veneer on top of Microsoft's stainless formula, leading to widespread fan revolt and a trip back to the drawing board for 343 Studios. It's the sort of game that represented an unseemly tipping point, where a thirsty emphasis on commodification superseded the legacy of a classic franchise.

Obviously it's impossible to match the unlimited resources bequeathed to Master Chief, but thankfully indie developers have picked up the slack, and have spent this decade constructing a decent facsimile of the reasons they fell in love with video games. Call of Duty isn't returning to its split-screen roots any time soon. But surprisingly, the past 10 years has taught us that a duck with a shotgun does a decent job of summoning the same feeling.

"Someone will always be pumping out that delicious bubble gum pop, but there will always be people who've chewed too much gum and want a new thing," finishes Podbielski. "As long as we make what we love it'll make us happy above all else, and when culture wraps around again in a decade or so, our weird shit will be relevant again." 

Naming your game after the genre of fiction it’s set in is a funny thing. Imagine if BioWare had spent the last decades peddling its two big RPG series, Space Opera and High Fantasy, before floundering a bit with the release of Mecha-Science-Fantasy. It’s especially bold when the genre in question is cyberpunk—a subcategory of sci-fi that has always been kind of nebulous, its edges as fuzzy as if you’d just swallowed a palmful of Dex octagons. 

There’s a bulletpoint list of markers you can run through, sure. Cybernetic limbs. Mega-corporations. Hackers. Neon billboards and Japanese kanji. Ethernet cables that go straight into your skull. Neologisms that sounded cool and futuristic in 1984 but now seem a little silly and dated... and, yep, Cyberpunk 2077 has them all. 

Ultimately, though, these are empty signifiers. You could cobble together a generic golem out of these things and accurately call it cyberpunk—I’m looking at you, Netflix’s Altered Carbon—but that doesn’t get at what made these stories exciting in the first place: the sense of a terrifyingly plausible future. Not in that hard sci-fi way, of future tech so detailed you could probably request a spec sheet for it, but more the way technology warps the society that creates and uses it. And CD Projekt Red seems to agree. 

“It is deeply fascinating to us to explore the relationship of humanity and technology and how it shapes life in 2077,” says 2077 level designer Miles Tost. “What does this level of technology mean in a world where ‘rich’ and ‘poor’ have basically taken on entirely new meanings in terms of their dimensions?”

Company town

The open-world RPG is actually a remarkably good fit for cyberpunk. Like the noir detective stories it originally drew inspiration from, cyberpunk is fundamentally a genre of the city—places where the population clusters, and subcultures can grow quickest around new technologies. And so it feels natural that most of what we’ve seen of 2077 hasn’t really been about player character V. For now, at least, they’re something of a cipher, and Night City is the undisputed star of the game. Well, except for Keanu, maybe. 

It’s the promise of Night City that gets you, isn’t it? The promise of an open world as crowded with details and vignettes as it is with cybernetically-enhanced bodies. In the gameplay demos we’ve seen so far, stepping out onto the street means being nearly overwhelmed with chunks of world-building and background dialogue picked out in surtitles that hover over the speaker’s head. 

Side quests, an area in which CD Projekt has pretty thoroughly proved its chops in the past, also provide a great chance to squeeze in a few extra perspectives on how this future is shaping its people. And they’re a great way of pulling you through the world, the same way a lot of cyberpunk fiction uses the thread of a detective story. 

Even the first-person perspective you’re roaming the city in feels like the right choice. Those soaring, spinner’s-eye shots of Blade Runner’s cityscape might be the one image pretty much everyone points to when talking about the genre, but for my money, cyberpunk futures are best viewed from the pavement.

Castles in the sky

Those stacks of skyscrapers are a way of literalising the rich/poor divide that’s so vital to cyberpunk’s vision of the world. The 1% (or, more accurately, the 0.001%) live clear of the grime, in upper orbit or mega-suburbs or gleaming penthouses. The megacorporations aren’t just a stock genre element—they’re a way of showing how access to technology is mediated by our capitalist overlords. What does an obsolescence cycle look like for an ability-boosting implant? What if your bionic eye came as a mandatory part of your job? And what would happen when you left? 

If you wanted to sum up cyberpunk in a single handy soundbite, it’d be the one that Neuromancer author William Gibson has wheeled out in countless interviews: “The future is already here—it’s just not very evenly distributed.” 

So if you’re not one of the people craning their necks from down on the street, then you most likely deserve the guillotine, or whatever the cyberpunk equivalent is. Probably just a guillotine with a few cables and neon lights stuck on the side, to be honest. Whether all this matching of genre features and game tropes is happy coincidence or careful design, it’s hard to tell. But CD Projekt certainly seems to understand what has traditionally made cyberpunk interesting. 

“To us, cyberpunk explores a dystopian world of low life and high tech in which we focus on street-level stories. Our protagonist is not the kind that is out to save the world,” Tost says. It’s an absolutely textbook definition of the genre, one that takes in the wisdom of cyberpunk scholars like Bruce Sterling, Lawrence Person and especially Mike Pondsmith, creator of the Cyberpunk pen-and-paper RPG, now consulting on 2077. 

Everything that’s been shown so far promises a faithful adaptation, a game worthy of the label it has stuck on itself. But I said at the outset that cyberpunk’s main thrill is catching an ugly little glimpse of our own future, and that future surely looks very different now to the way it did two or three decades ago. So, given that CD Projekt clearly knows its cyber-onions, how is the developer intending to spin its own vision out of all those influences?

“It’s funny because we’re trying to re-envision how people from the ’80s and ’90s envisioned the future, and then lace that future with modern nuance,” Tost says. It’s an issue that’s particularly noticeable with the outdated technology that comes packaged with the genre—there’s nothing less cyberpunk than Wi-Fi, for example—but it goes deeper than that.

“I think there’s a degree of truth in assuming that cyberpunk was born out of the fears of people in the ’80s and these fears were consciously exaggerated enough to form a separate genre,” he says. “The image of megacorporations you know from 2020 [the second edition of Pondsmith’s Cyberpunk RPG] was born out of fears of privatising the state and asking: ‘What would you do if democracy was a capitalist-controlled farce?’

“And we’re adding some contemporary scares to that as well. How has social media, for example, evolved in 2077? What power does it hold?”

The game’s main way of addressing this topic seems to be through ‘Braindances’. As Tost explains it, these are, “a way of experiencing someone else’s past experiences, including their emotions, what they felt,” in a virtual reality representation—a localised dose of cyberspace. It’s an idea with its roots in the tabletop RPG’s sourcebooks, which predate the likes of Twitter or Facebook, but it’s easy to see how it could be extrapolated out into something with more timely social media parallels.

Braindances are presented as a form of escapism from the grim realities of life in Night City, with people using them to play tourist inside celebrities’ heads and live out staged fantasies that appear to be real. It’s Instagram for your frontal lobes, or Twitch by way of the holodeck.

Among the modern fears shaping 2077’s world, Tost also namechecks the specter of climate change—a fairly inescapable part of our current future. In the game, global warming is apparently the reason for Night City’s large Haitian population, presumably because the island nation is now underwater.

Whether CD Projekt actually has anything interesting to say on either of these topics remains to be seen—but hey, that’s what playing the game is for.

Augmented reality

There is one aspect of 2077’s future that has already raised a few red flags, though: its treatment of body augmentation. Whether in the form of prosthetic limbs or brain mods, this has always been a big theme of cyberpunk stories, and one that can be harmful if not dealt with properly. And all the way back to the original RPG, Cyberpunk’s handling has always been a little clumsy. 

In the original tabletop game, adding modifications to your character’s body caused a literal ‘humanity’ stat to drop (though the most recent edition takes a more nuanced approach). That doesn’t seem to be present in 2077, but Tost outlines one of the consequences which has carried over: “A mental illness, that in 2077 is still very poorly understood, called Cyberpsychosis can cause people to run amok when they implant themselves with too much cyberware and in the process lose their humanity.” 

There are no mechanical implications to cyberpsychosis—this can’t happen to the player, Tost says, because it’d be an instant game over—but it’s still integral to the game’s fiction, and the presence of a ‘mental illness’ that’s self-inflicted by too much technology sets alarm bells ringing. It’s like CD Projekt talking about the idea of the natural body being ‘sacred’, and augmentations ‘profane’. This stuff might sound OK, until you apply its logic back to the real-life present and realise the things it says about, for example, disabled and trans people are potentially offensive. 

One of the benefits of reconstructing a genre three decades on from its initial peak should be the chance it offers consider, with modern sensitivity, what aspects weren’t treated well the first time round and address them. Maybe this will play out in the full game—there might well be a side quest dedicated to exploring the topic more thoughtfully and sensitively—but the early signs are a little troubling.

'Punk's not dead

But there’s no question that 2077 gets the genre, whatever your fuzzy definition. All the cool surface bits are there, presented more lavishly than we’ve ever seen before: the chrome-and-black style, the nostalgic-meets-futuristic tech, the grime illuminated by bursts of neon. CD Projekt knows the right references to drop, and the studio has demonstrated that its understanding runs a little deeper than that. 

For better or worse, the game will likely overwrite the public understanding of what ‘cyberpunk’ means. This is a genre whose boundaries are defined by precious few texts—the undisputed cyberpunk canon consists of roughly one book—and no straight-up cyberpunk work has reached the audience CD Projekt is going to. 

So yes, Cyberpunk 2077 is cyberpunk. Duh, it’s right there in the title. The important question now is exactly how the developer chooses to define and explore that.

Our Best Adventure of 2019 takes us on a mysterious tour through the solar system, 22 minutes at a time. We'll be updating our GOTY 2019 hub with new awards and personal picks throughout December.

Rachel: I've put my space ship through thick and thin in the Outer Wilds. Crashing into planets, plummeting into black holes, botching up my landings, and spinning wildly through the endless solar system is all part of the exploration. I've lost count of the number of times I've busted up my spacecraft, and with Outer Wilds' time limit, sometimes there's just no time for a pinpoint perfect landing, you've just got to crash and dash. 

My ship is a slice of home, quite literally. It's made from the materials and tools found on the home planet, Timber Hearth, one of a handful of worlds in the Outer Wild's small but dense solar system. Solving a mystery that spans civilizations is quite the hefty task—one that will pull you in several different directions—but I know that my trusty wooden spacecraft will help me navigate through it all. I can retreat to my cubby hole of a ship and take a moment to think about the puzzles of ancient civilisations and plan out my next destination.

My spacecraft has been with me through it all, and solving a mystery that encompasses the outer reaches of the solar system in that broken, janky craft was the highlight of my adventure.

Tom: The Outer Wilds gives me a sense of wonder. Space phenomena like black holes feel mysterious and dangerous, and the looping time cycle allows you to die in lots of horrible different ways, sometimes crushed by an asteroid, sometimes lost in the infinite darkness of space as the universe explodes (again). As you explore each weird planetary body you come to understand an ancient lost civilisation through their writings and strange machinery. That's not a new premise, but it's executed beautifully in The Outer Wilds.

It looks lovely too. I came to love my rickety spaceship, assembled from detritus on my twee home planet. The planets and space stations you visit feel so different and alien. At times I felt so small—a tiny warm spec of life in a solar system full of weather patterns and storms that could obliterate me in a moment. It's a puzzle game, ultimately, but expressed through marvellous exploration systems that make you feel like an intrepid astronaut trying to unlock the deepest mysteries of the universe.

Phil: The solar system you explore is actually pretty small. It's just five planets (and a few moons), most of which you can easily walk the circumference of. Crucially, though, each is still dense with intrigue. You have just 22 minutes in which to explore before the sun blows up and you're reset back to the start. Thanks to that structure, The Outer Wilds' currency isn't things, it's thoughts, and that makes for a fascinating adventure. You pick at the frayed edges of mysteries in an attempt to unravel some deeper understanding, uncovering new leads and new questions that you file away for further investigation on the next loop. Sometimes you drop one thread for a bit and go and investigate something else. Sometimes you return to a planet earlier in the time loop and find it looks vastly different. Sometimes you just blast away to the very edge of the solar system and watch mournfully as your home meets its violent end. Outer Wilds is beautiful and sad and filled with stories that are worth discovering.

You've got to suspend friendships to play certain games. Street Fighter can generate lasting resentments when players fail to temporarily turn off friend-mode, fume about whatever cheap-ass bullshit their momentary non-friend has put up, and then reactivate friendly relations once their scrub rage has passed. As a teenager, I stormed out of a friend's house over such a case of Street Fighter 2 bullshit.

Project Winter is much more insidious. It isn't cheesy move spamming that hurts you, it's the lies. Among your group of eight survivors—and I highly recommend playing with people you know—two are traitors. As a survivor, not only do you have to avoid being killed or set back by the traitors, you have to survive a frigid, moose and bear-infested wilderness, which is hard enough without liars among you.

It's another attempt at bringing the basic concept of party game Werewolf—you may know it by its Mafia variant—into a multiplayer videogame. It's a tough thing to do. For one, everyone has to play along. It's no fun if the secret traitors just say "haha, I'm a traitor" at the start. And two, the full experience of sitting in a circle trying to suss out liars among your friends can't be replicated in a game, at least until mainstream VR accurately reproduces facial expressions and body language.

Project Winter's adaption succeeds by replacing face-to-face communication with lots of subtle ways for the traitors to hinder the survivors, which also gives the survivors lots of subtle hints as to who the traitors are. The top-down view means that, if you can't see someone on your screen, they can't see you, giving traitors privacy when they want to open special, traitor-only crates that contain weapons, traps, and poisons. But if a survivor stumbles upon an open traitor crate, they may remember who it was that wandered up that way "looking for berries." 

Or not. There's a lot to keep track of outside of sussing out rats. The survivors have to first get a power station up and running, which means looting or crafting materials to drop into it. The traitors usually help during this stage to avoid being found out. Meanwhile, hunger and cold are eating at everybody, and there's not much time to dedicate to interrogating your temporary non-friends about their whereabouts and intentions. And when players are cut off from each other—the area voice chat only carries so far—stories begin to conflict.

In one game, as a traitor, I was called out by a survivor who noticed that I'd left valuable resources sitting in a crate instead of shepherding them to the power station. Rather than protest, I simply walked away and found two other survivors who'd gone on an expedition to find the next objective. 

When I returned with the two of them, who'd seen or heard none of this, this nosy survivor was still on about how I was probably a traitor. I claimed not to have any idea what he was talking about, and accused him of being a traitor, since clearly I'd been helping these other two while he threw accusations around.

To my surprise, my party backed me up. It worked for a little bit, but I tend to crack under pressure given long enough. I'd make a terrible spy.

More often than not I'm the one being fooled. In one game, while warming up inside the starting cabin with two other players, we heard an argument outside. Two players were shouting toward the cabin that the other was the traitor. One had tried to kill the other. No, it was actually an accident. One had said he was the traitor. No, he was joking. Naturally, the three of us in the cabin figured we were witnessing two traitors trying to throw us off by feigning discord. We banished them, and let them kill each other in the cold.

Of course, I'd been warming up with the two real traitors the whole time. Bastards.

Traitors can sabotage access panels to loot bunkers, drop traps, play sneaky games with walkie-talkies—the only way to communicate over distances—encourage risky treks and then run back to the cabin claiming to have gotten 'lost,' and all sorts of other devious things. The best games see a combination of tricks. The worst see the traitors play it too safe at first, so that they have no choice but to pull out guns late in the game and chase the survivors around. That's still fun, though.

Project Winter is one of the few games where I don't mind spectating if I die early. As a ghost, I can teleport around the map to watch everyone else struggle—sometimes overhearing them wonder if I'm still out there, or if I died, or if I was a traitor. Sometimes I know who one of the traitors is—because she killed me—but can't tell them directly. I can only provide ghostly healing, heat, or damage according to what I think I know, and hope they observe my indirect communication. Watching the remaining survivors struggle while having more information than them makes for excellent drama.

I'm sure there's fun to be had with the right group of strangers, but so far I've only played Project Winter with people I know. The post-game chats ("Oh, that's what happened to you!") are one of the best parts of it—just so long as you're able to reinstate friendship-mode after being poisoned to death by a filthy liar.

The Epic Store's free holiday games just keep on coming, and today's is philosophical sci-fi puzzler The Talos Principle. This was one of the better games to come in the wake of Portal 2, and while its puzzles and narrative aren't anything particularly unique, it does engage with interesting philosophy. Plus, even if the puzzles aren't unique in execution, the way it constructs them is masterful—and the challenge puzzles are some of the biggest brain-burners I've ever encountered in a 3D puzzle game.

Our reviewer quite liked The Talos Principle on release, calling it "An adept and satisfying puzzle game with a narrative that requires a bit of player investment to yield its biggest rewards."

You can get The Talos Principle for free on the Epic Store until December 30th, 11am ET. Then there will be another free game, which some predict to be Hello Neighbor.

Last year, when we discovered the Star Wars Empire at War Remake mod, Fraser Brown requested to be frozen in carbonite until it was done. I guess we can thaw him out because I just checked the mod page and hot damn. Not only does this mod update the game to cutting-edge visual standards with new models and effects, it adds new units and deepens the game mechanics. The most recent release, the 3.0 update, brought a whole host of new stuff and graphical improvements to the mod. Empire at War is a strategy game released in 2006, and we still consider it to be one of the best space games on PC.

I’m a particular fan of this mod because of its philosophy: It doesn’t really muck with the core game experience or add too much new material, but it does rework what it needs to and adds (optional) much-needed difficulty. Empire at War Remake has also been given the Mod of the Year award by the ModDB community, surprising literally no-one. It won the same in 2018 as well. Here’s a bunch of pretty pictures of the mod in action:

You can get Star Wars Empire at War and its expansion, which you’ll need for the mod, pretty cheaply on Steam or GOG, just $6.99 for the winter sale. You can check out Empire at War Remake: Galactic Civil War on ModDB, or go straight to the 3.0 update. The mod community also has a Discord server.

Oh, I was going to thaw Fraser out. Maybe I will after a few hours of Empire at War...