Those Who Remain is a "psychological thriller" about life in a small town, the choices we make, and the sometimes-unwelcome consequences that result. Oh, and the small town is enshrouded in the perpetual darkness of a demonic curse that's trapped its citizens in the cold clutches of an endless supernatural night.   

In case that's not confusing enough, the town of Dormont is also peppered with strange portals that lead to a "mirrored version" of the world we know, and whatever happens on one side has an impact on the other. And it's up to you, ordinary-man-with-a-troubled-past Edward Turner, to survive this nightmare, discover the secret behind the demonic darkness, and travel through those portals to set things right. 

I think so, anyway, but it's all a bit vague at this point. There's kind of an Alan Wake ambiance to the whole thing, as you'll need to stay in the light to survive, but without the gunplay: It looks like dodge-and-run is the operative strategy here, with resolutions coming via "tough decisions" that will impact your final fate. Developer Camel 101 also promises an "emotional narrative that addresses sensitive subjects like bullying, infidelity and suicide." 

That's a tough row to hoe in a videogame, especially one that seems eager to make you scream and run and hide, but it's picked up a few indie awards in pre-release and I like the look of the trailer: It doesn't reveal anything about the promised "emotional narrative," but it does look creepy, and heaven knows I enjoy hiding behind small pieces of furniture in a desperate bid to avoid being spotted by shambling mutated horrors. Those Who Remain is expected to be out later this year. 

If you've never played the fantastic experience that is Borderlands 2, or the game that started the whole series, here's your chance. The Game Of The Year Editions of both Borderlands 1 and 2 together are just $13.99 on Newegg, and the games are delivered through Steam.

The GOTY Edition of Borderlands 1 includes the base game, as well as every piece of DLC—The Zombie Island of Dr. Ned, Mad Moxxi's Underdome Riot, The Secret Armory of General Knoxx, and Claptrap's Robot Revolution.

Borderlands 2 GOTY includes the base game, Captain Scarlett and her Pirate's Booty, Mr. Torgue's Campaign of Carnage, Sir Hammerlock's Big Game Hunt, Tiny Tina's Assault on Dragon Keep, two additional playable characters (Gaige and Krieg), and more.

If you're not interested at all in the first game, Borderlands 2 GOTY is $8.79 on its own. You can buy the combined pack from the link below.

Some online stores give us a small cut if you buy something through one of our links. Read our affiliate policy for more info.

After a decade in development—I previewed it five years ago!—Mage’s Initiation has finally launched. It’s a point and click adventure heavily inspired by Sierra classics like Kings Quest and Quest for Glory. Like the latter, it also dips into the realm of RPGs, complete with magical specialisations and optional combat. Watch the launch trailer above.

Reminding me a bit of Shannara, the modern world has been destroyed and a magical one has sprung up out of its ashes. Technology has been replaced by elemental magic, skyscrapers by wizard towers and I have no idea where goblins and bird-people fit in. They’re bad news, apparently, and just a couple of the obstacles getting in the way of protagonist D’arc becoming a full mage. 

No teen wizard adventure would be complete without big stakes, of course, so as well as passing his initiation test, D’arc will need to save the kingdom. That’s a lot of pressure for someone just trying to get their magic license. 

If you don’t fancy getting into fights and Quest for Glory has no nostalgic hold over you, it’s possible to play Mage’s Initiation more like a classic point and click, using spells to solve puzzles instead of burning people to death. Expect multiple story paths, too, with in-game choices pushing you in different directions. 

Mage’s Initiation is out now on Steam, GOG and the Humble Store for £10.25/$13.49.

Mafia, Werewolf, Kane and Lynch 2 multiplayer—deception and paranoia are great fodder for games, so I’m rather looking forward to Project Winter’s upcoming beta weekend. The game of co-op survival and backstabbing launches in Early Access next week, but first it’s hosting an open beta from tomorrow and ending on February 3. 

Stuck in a chilly wilderness, eight players will need to work together to fend off bears, gather supplies, make repairs and, if they’re lucky, escape with their limbs and lives in tact. Unfortunately, not everyone is in it together. Lurking among the survival buddies are two traitors with a single goal: stop the others from escaping. Check out the gameplay trailer released a couple of weeks ago.

This sounds very much like my kind of thing. Communication is key, says developer Other Ocean Interactive, so players will be able to use proximity chat, emotes and walkie-talkies to stay in contact even when they’re out chopping down trees alone. Expect arguments, accusations and murder. 

You can sign up for the open beta here, and Project Winter will hit Steam Early Access on February 7. The plan is for it to run for three to six months, adding polish, additional map layouts, new items and more.

I started my journey through the history of civilisation adrift on the ocean. Gathering Storm’s Maori don’t begin a game of Civilization 6 like the other civs. Instead of my settler and warrior appearing right next to a prospective city site, they were in boats, floating in between the map’s chilly southern pole and the tip of the continent to the north. For maybe the first time in over 20 years, I wasn’t rushing to found my first city. 

The Maori civilisation is one of several joining the game in Gathering Storm, but it piqued my interest the most because it promised to break my routine. Not only does it start on and have a general affinity with the ocean, it benefits from not settling too early. Every turn waited pays dividends, but also comes with some big risks, not least that your entire civilisation could be undone if a barbarian chooses to attack your sole settler. 

I wasn’t bold enough to wait for more than a handful of turns, but it was enough time to find a nice spot near a natural wonder and several exploitable resources, giving me benefits that most other capitals would have missed. Having the extra time to find the perfect home is an even bigger boon given the new threats facing humanity in the expansion.

Volcanic eruptions, rivers bursting their banks, rising sea levels—there are quite a few ways for Mother Nature to enact her revenge. Initially, these threats are unpredictable and unstoppable, but you can avoid them with a bit of common sense. Don’t build underneath a volcano, don’t make your home on a flood plain and don’t get a beachfront property. Simple! Except it isn’t. All these places are actually good places to settle near, giving you access to more resources and more fertile soil. The risk might be worth it. At least that's certainly what I thought as I merrily built next to rumbling mountains filled with scorching lava. 

Climate change, arguably the headline attraction, doesn’t start affecting the game until the Industrial era, when civs can start to exploit natural fossil fuels, but that doesn’t mean bad weather and natural disasters can’t kick off at any time. Even when they weren’t affecting me, messages about droughts and storms reached my civilisation, like an ancient Weather Channel. I could even see storm clouds in the fog of war, or at least little drawings of them, so I knew where they were even if I didn’t have cities or troops there at the time. 

Fully settled, the Maori function like most of the other civs, though there remain quirks thanks to some unique abilities, like additional benefits from rainforest tiles and immediately starting with shipbuilding tech. I was, I confess, hoping for something more like Civilization 5’s Venice, which plays unlike any other civ and never grows beyond a single city, but there is still a hint of that asymmetry.  

With my scouts sent out, I filled my rolodex with other civs and, eventually, the World Congress was established. Like Rise and Fall, Gathering Storm adds more features to the World Congress and diplomacy, offering up more opportunities for civs to work together and compete. 

Japan was in trouble. One of its cities was near a volcano that had erupted, creating an emergency that was brought before the World Congress. Like other emergencies, it set tasks for participating civs and then doled out rewards depending on how much effort you've put in. In this case, Japan needed gold to repair the damage, which could be offered as a gift or via a project that could be undertaken in one of my cities. I sympathised with Japan, having dealt with my own volcanic eruption a few turns before, so I was extremely helpful. As a credit to humanity, I was rewarded appropriately: with a big stack of diplomatic favour.  

Diplomatic favour is a common reward in such emergencies, but can be earned in other ways and traded with fellow civs. It's a new resource that lets you boost influence when voting in the World Congress and can lead to a new diplomatic victory. It's pretty handy. Say some resolutions have been put before the world’s civs, so you go through them and the pick the ones you want to vote on. Maybe there’s a resolution where the targeted civ gets another trade route, and everyone trading with them gets extra gold. You can pick the civ—maybe you really need the extra route, so you pick yourself—and then you can start spending favour, essentially giving yourself more votes. 

On its own, diplomatic favour seems like a clear way to understand how much international influence a civ has, and it adds some welcome structure and competition to the diplomatic game. Importantly, that competition can also be won without being completely adversarial. If you want to be a force for good in the world, making friends and helping people, you can absolutely do that and still earn lots of favour. Ultimately, it’s all about uniting the world, which is probably going to be a lot easier to do if you’ve not made a long list of enemies. 

When applied to a game that already has lots of systems, however, it loses some of its elegance. There are a lot of currencies and resources to keep track of, and of course weather and climate change, and Civilization 6 is starting to feel very, very busy. These systems aren’t all introduced at once, though, which does give you some time to get to grips with each individually.   

By the time industrialisation began and the world slowly started to react, I was already starting to get pretty used to thinking about how I could increase my hoard of favour or how I could use nature to my advantage. And it’s a good thing, too, as modernity brings with it a whole host of complexities, crises and solutions new to Civilization 6.

Modern buildings and units need fuel and resources to build and maintain, but doing so has a negative impact on the entire world, contributing to rising CO2 emissions and affecting the global temperature. This is all trackable, thankfully, in surprising detail, and not just in the later eras. The chart isn’t very scintillating before then, however, as it pretty much stays the same for most of human history. 

Right now, I’m trying to create plans for the future, protecting my vulnerable Maori cities from rising sea levels and off-setting pollution by exploring greener paths, such as solar or geothermal energy. Maybe I'll even be able to do something about those pesky volcanoes. You don’t need to care about the planet—you can just keep burning through resources and accept the risks—but trying to curtail impending disasters and make the world a little bit better seems more appropriate for Civilization, which has always been a fairly optimistic series, despite the nukes and wars. 

Keep an eye out for my review closer to the February 14 release date. 

Like pretty much everyone else, I presume, I have an abiding love for penguins, so I’m glad to see that the new Subnautica: Below Zero trailer—check it out above—contains an abundance of quality penguin antics. Alien penguins, too! The trailer announces the start of Early Access, so you can go for a swim in the standalone expansion right now.

Below Zero is set on the same ocean world as the original, one year later. Instead of a survivor from a spaceship disaster, you’re a scientist studying the alien world’s artefacts. Expect plenty of swimming as you explore the region, but there’s also quite a bit of surface exploration this time. You’ll be climbing mountains as well as rooting around in underwater canyons. 

Judging by the trailer, the surface can be just as dangerous as the depths of the ocean—I hope those penguins are OK—so it’s a good thing you’ll be able to escape giant beasties in fancy vehicles designed for the new environments. Supplies will be dropped off from the space station above, but you’ll still need to go out and find your own resources and crafting materials, so having a hoverbike should come in handy. 

Unknown Worlds expects the Early Access phase to last for about a year, and the current version contains 1-2 hours of story and multiple environments, but prospective players are warned of frequent bugs and poor performance.

Subnautica was the best survival game of 2018, so I’ve got high hopes for Below Zero. There are already a lot of games that task players with surviving in freezing wildernesses, such as the excellent The Long Dark, but I’ll happily throw on a scarf and warm coat again if it means I can pet some funky alien penguins. 

Subnautica: Below Zero is out now on Steam, Discord and the Epic Games Store for £15.49/$20. 

Steam became a home to PC gamers in part by absorbing all outside functionality. Why stuff your RAM with Fraps, GameSpy, TeamSpeak, GameFAQs, Metacritic, forums, or anything else? Leave your bags at home: it's all here. Stay a while.

By contrast, Epic's new store is a bare boutique. It's uncomplicated by old additions, nostalgia, and 'community.' I bought Hades there just now. The payment form is simple. The transaction processed immediately. The checkbox for developer emails is opt-in instead of opt-out now, so that's fixed. The download was quick and I was out the door.

The Epic Store is perfectly functional and easy-to-use, but given that Epic has made itself unavoidable, I want more from it (as I think most everyone does). Here's what I hope to see added to the Epic Store as soon as possible, what would be nice in the near future, and what I could take or leave:

Must-have features

Cloud saving: No modern game platform should be without the simple ability to store save files both locally and on a server. From what we've heard, this is coming soon.

News feeds: Epic Store games have FAQs, and may change their pages to reflect updates, but there isn't a simple reverse-chron feed of announcements. Instead, I'm sent elsewhere via social media links to hunt for the latest info. I don't mind getting dev updates in my email or on Twitter, but if I'm already on the platform I use to launch a game, I shouldn't have to leave to find out what's new.

Troubleshooting: Again, I don't want to have to join a Discord or find a developer's email address to ask a question about a bug or crash. If not built-in forums or something like them (which Epic director of publishing strategy Sergey Galyonkin suggests may be coming), I'd at least like to see a developer contact form, or a link to an offsite, troubleshooting-focused forum or subreddit.

Partying up: The friends list in Epic's launcher can only be used to chat with a friend who's online. If you want to form a party in Fortnite, for instance, you have to do it in-game. I've gotten used to accepting a party request through Steam chat and auto-launching Rocket League, and not replicating one of Steam's most convenient platform-game integrations feels silly. It's plainly useful.

Stuff that would be nice

User reviews: Ironically, some users are review bombing the Metro series on Steam to protest Epic, both hurting Steam and legitimizing Epic's concerns about user reviews. Epic is right to approach this with caution, but I do find value in seeing a snapshot of player opinions on a game. We're told user reviews will be opt-in by developers, whenever they arrive.

Account sharing: I've never used Steam's Family Sharing feature except to test it, but no one else in my household wants to play anything, so I'm not exactly the target audience for this. It certainly seems nice!

Version roll-backs: One nice thing about the Epic Store is that auto-updating can be turned off. I'd also like to be able to return to a previous version of a singleplayer game, though, which GOG Galaxy can do.

Mod hosting: While a lot of mods still have to be downloaded and installed manually, when Steam Workshop does have what I want it makes the process blissfully simple.

Store and library sorting: This isn't necessary right now, because there aren't enough games on the Epic Store to make it necessary. Eventually, though, the store and library sections will need to be more than grids of pretty images—and on the store, I'll at least want to see a list of new releases, or a few suggestions, though Epic has said that influencers are more important to it than in-store discovery.

Drive management: This is minor, but there's currently no way to move an existing install within the client.  

TV streaming: Valve went so far as to produce hardware for this purpose, though the Steam Link is now being phased out in favor of smart TV apps. This isn't vital in year one of the Epic Store, but I use it often enough. 

Take it or leave it

Screenshotting, livestreaming, and video recording: I use OBS for streaming, ShadowPlay or MSI Afterburner to take videos and screens, and I look to subreddits for other people's clips, not the Steam community. Many do use Steam for media sharing, but with so many other, better, ways to capture and share gameplay, I don't see these features as a vital part of a platform.

Profiles and groups: I've found some value in Steam's communities, but I prefer Discord these days, especially as the number of launchers I use has grown (not even including the Epic Store). I don't need yet another social network—just a useful friends list. 

Gameification: I'm quite alright with leaving profile badges and account levels to Steam.

A marketplace: Valve loves its economies, but I'm cool with just playing a game without monitoring hat prices.

Pick up any game released in the last ten years and you’ll more than likely come across a minigame or two in them. For the most part, I expect to see them in almost every game I play, especially games with long campaigns. They’re not always the greatest, as we have talked about in the past, but when minigames are done right, they create a interesting layer of interaction that can break up some of the monotony and maybe give you a relaxing break. When done wrong, they create confusion, frustration, sometimes to the point where you’ll never pick up the game again. (I’m looking at you, Fallout 4: Far Harbor with your DiMA’s “forgotten” memories minigame.)

With narrative adventures, the story is the driving force. They can function fine without minigames. Sure, in some cases it wouldn’t make sense to take them out, like the cannery mini game in What Remains of Edith Finch, but if the gameplay doesn’t meld with the story, the minigame will just slow down the pace. With narrative adventures, the story drives the game, not the gameplay. 

Playing the latest episode of Life is Strange 2 over last weekend showed me just that. In addition to bringing back its sketching minigame, episode two adds a dice game that Sean and Daniel play to pass the time and forget about their grueling travels. The rules of the minigame aren’t directly explained, but from what I gathered, rolling specific numbers allows you to outfit your pirate ship with a captain, crew, and supplies, which in turn gives you a specific number of points. The person with the most points wins.

This minigame is not fun. The characters repeat the same dialogue as you sit there clicking and clicking for both characters to roll the dice. Thankfully, you can end it early, let Daniel have his victory, and move on with the story that is already moving slowly. This isn’t the first time I’ve felt this way with a minigame from any of the Life is Strange games. I didn’t exactly enjoy scrounging around for car parts and décor as Chloe in Life is Strange: Before the Storm to fix up her truck. The first tabletop campaign was entertaining, but when the second one came around in the third episode, I wanted it to end as soon as possible so I could get back to the main storyline. I don’t recall there being any minigames in original Life is Strange, and that’s probably why I feel that game has the strongest story out of the three.

Narrative adventures—branching narrative, walking sims, text-based, point-and-click—occupy a still experimental space between traditional prose and film. The Life is Strange games excel at filling quiet moments with emotional monologues or dialogue. The moments where the character can sit alone and let their raw emotions flow as the camera pans around the scenery and bittersweet music swells are some of the most powerful types of scenes in the Life is Strange games. They’re powerful not just because we’re seeing the character in a vulnerable state, but because they are doing something to either advance the plot or develop the character further on their journey. The dice minigame is a missed opportunity to do just that. Every scene should have meaningful conflict.

But what can kill an otherwise good scene or free flowing plot is a minigame forced into the story to help “gamify” it. If it’s considered good game writing to meld the narrative with the gameplay, should these minigames not also explore conflict? Should they not also move the plot along or continue developing characters? Going back to the cannery scene in What Remains of Edith Finch, it’s not just about multitasking, cutting the heads off the fish while navigating the rivers of your kingdom in your daydream. You are living through the character’s last moments; the pace of that character’s story isn’t slowed down by the minigame, and neither is the game as a whole. If we look at The Vanishing of Ethan Carter, every one of Ethan’s stories you come across is a minigame, but they all work alongside solving his disappearance because they gradually build on his character until you realize what fiction writing really meant to Ethan. It’s freakin’ heartbreaking.

I’m not here to just pick on Life is Strange 2. There’s other narrative-adventure games with questionable minigames, even one of my favorites—The Red Strings Club. While the bartending minigames were integral to Donovan’s character, I didn’t like Arkasa-184’s pottery adventures. The material you shape is biomatter instead of clay, and what you’re doing is turning the biomatter into personality alternating implants. But why does the biomatter need to be thrown like clay? This is supposed to be a high-tech world, and yet the game is asking you to stick “pottery” into people like sponges. The more important point of this minigame was choosing the right implants to put into those individuals, not the biomatter throwing. Being forced to shape every single implant was the worst, time-consuming aspect of that game.

This is all just to say that narrative adventures don’t need to be “gamified.” Their form is completely different from a more traditional game, and that’s fine. No need to force in something in there that doesn’t need to be there. The “game” aspect comes in the form of branching dialogue or a well-incorporated mechanic that creates a more immersive story. I hope that the remaining episodes of Life is Strange 2 completely axe all minigames and replaces that downtime with meaningful story or character development. 

Civilization 6 will get eight new Civilizations and nine new Leaders in the upcoming Gathering Storm expansion, along with some big changes to its core systems and a major late-game challenge to deal with in the form of man-made climate change. A new trailer released today showcases how it will all come together, from early-game difficulties with the environment to randomized 21st-century Technology and Civics trees in the new "Future Era." 

Disasters aren't necessarily all bad. Volcanoes are inherently risky to build around for obvious reasons, but volcanic soil is extremely fertile; flooding rivers can wash away village improvements, but you may also see increased food yields when the floodwaters recede. Some of them, like grassland tornadoes, are bad news all around, while others will apparently have civ-specific benefits: Blizzards are tremendously destructive, but can also confer some "nice benefits" if you happen to be playing as Russia.

Strategic resources will be divided into Fuel, which will be of particular importance once you his the Industrial Era, and Material. Unpowered buildings in Industrial (and beyond) cities will produce less than half their normal yield, and military units lacking the requisite Fuel and Material will be weaker in the field. The flipside of that new feature is that using some fuel types will release carbon dioxide into the air, driving up global temperatures—climate change—and leading to "unique consequences including increased storms or flooding, and rising sea levels." 

Green technologies can help alleviate the impact of climate change (careful with those nukes, though), and if you can make it into the new Future Era you'll have the opportunity to make friends and influence people (and maybe save the world) through the World Congress, and advance through the randomized 21st-century Technology and Civics trees. 

Civilization 6: Gathering Storm comes out on February 14. If you haven't already met them yet, here's Corvinus, Laurier, Kristina, Suleiman, and Dido. 

It’s very hard not to focus entirely on Cesar, Wargroove’s best boy and commander of his own army of warpups. Yes, dogs in shiny armour are a playable unit in this game. There is no violence against the four-legged soldiers, either—instead of dying, they just run away. If you’re not sold already, one of the other 12 commanders might do the trick. Don’t be fooled by the light-hearted tone, however—Wargroove is filled with creative, demanding challenges.

An easy comparison to reach for is Into The Breach. Both feature direct, turn-based confrontation between two factions who often use the landscape to their advantage. But Wargroove is more in every way; more factions, more units, more map, more more. This could sound overwhelming but getting started is actually really easy. 

In the first few missions, as well as the arcade mode, your goal is generally to either defeat the opposing army’s commander or take their fortress. Capturing unallied buildings on the map or taking them from your opponent earns you money, which you can spend on new units or health. The campaign introduces the units one after another and gives you hints as to their use. The first time you’re up against airborne fiends, for example, you also gain ballistas and mages, both excellent against that particular type of enemy. These missions give you time to get to know units and their strengths and weaknesses without being overbearing. Knowing what type of soldier fares best against what enemy is crucial—a soldier with the distinct advantage can often win a battle in one strike. If they don’t, your opponent gets to counter.

Commanders are the most important characters, not only because they’re the strongest and look the coolest, but because each of them has a unique special ability, the so-called groove, which is charged by defeating enemies. Some grooves have defensive capabilities like extra health or defence, some are just good old fashioned special attacks.

While all armies share the same standard units, from small foot soldiers to massive golems and units for sea combat, they all have distinctly different looks that fit each commander and their lands. The people of the Japan-inspired Heavensong Empire build pagodas instead of stone castles, the golem of the Floran plant race looks like a giant tree. In terms of character design and animation, Wargroove is truly a standout.

Command & Conquer

The 30-plus missions of the single-player campaign follow a cute (if not particularly inventive) fantasy story. As well as standard conquering and destruction tasks, you’ll be rescuing prisoners from a fortress or helping refugees flee the site of a battle using wagons. If you prefer a quick challenge, there’s an arcade mode for each commander, and a puzzle mode in which you have to finish a mission within one round.

Wargroove’s weaknesses are its at times crushing difficulty and tendency to drag on. Positioning characters in the right spots for attacks and critical hits is already difficult enough. But Wargroove’s maps are huge, meaning you can spend round after round simply traveling to meet the enemy. It’s not always clear how damage is calculated, and I had to adjust it in the options to have a chance at more than one mission. Maps often have chokepoints such as bridges that can be difficult to circumvent, quickly leading to your soldiers literally queuing to get slaughtered. Flanking enemies is really important—but generating an army large enough to do so takes time. 

A unit’s health also acts as its strength, leading to the problem common to games such as The Banner Saga where some characters simply act as cannon fodder, waiting on your replacement unit to make the trek from your barracks over to the actual fight. I’ve restarted some missions because it’s easier to start over than to move your half-dead unit away, heal them and then have them travel somewhere else.

The multiplayer for up to 4 people comes with its own maps and is organised by passing in-game match codes around. In 2-player mode, I found small maps, evenly split in the middle by bridges. Both players pick a commander and start out on equal footing, with the same amount of buildings to conquer on each side, including multiple barracks. In this mode it’s vital to take buildings and retain them, as you’re going for direct confrontation with no way to skirt each other. 

Once you hold enough buildings, meaning money, and hold even just one barracks more than the other player, the game is all but decided. Victory is again achieved killing the commander or taking the fort, so real players are more likely than the CPU to aggressively bolster their forces to keep buildings surrounded. Whereas the campaign manages to switch things up, here the simple gameplay works to Wargroove’s detriment—I could have done with more variety to elevate this mode above its arcade counterpart.

Wargroove does invite you to try your own hand at level design as it comes with a brilliant set of highly intuitive tools you can use to create your own maps and even cutscenes. Chucklefish certainly wants you in for the long haul, but as I started skipping lengthy battle animations and came to dread any standard battle, I wondered whether less isn’t sometimes more.