He then admitted last year that maybe he went a little overboard with chucking them in every single game, though of course there was still one in Shadow of the Erdtree. One upcoming FromSoft game that notably doesn't include a poison swamp, however, is Elden Ring's roguelike spinoff Nightreign.

That's probably because, as Kitao Taidai joked, Miyazaki isn't the one rubbing his purple-tinged hands all over the game. As reported by Famitsu, Taidai approached the subject of Nightreign's poison swamps, or lack thereof, during a livestream of the game over on YouTube. "There aren't any," Taidai told viewers (via a machine translation). "This time, the director is not Miyazaki, but [Junya] Ishizaki, who has been the battle director of Elden Ring, so maybe no one wanted to include it."

Ouch, a devastating blow to Miyazaki's neverending love for bubbling, venomous marshlands. It does make a lot of sense that if any Souls game was going to be missing one, it'd be Nightreign. The game's focus seems to be leaning a lot more heavily towards being a fast-paced slashfest—hell, our Morgan Park surmised it was closer to Fortnite than it was to Elden Ring when he had a hands-on with the game earlier this month—and I can imagine forcing players to trudge through toxic sludge isn't the kind of thing you need when trying to pull that off.

It does feel like a tiny bit of a shame though, but I'm sure Miyazaki's DNA will be running through Nightreign even without him at the helm. I would love to tell you myself, but, uh, I haven't had much luck trying to get into the (unfortunately non-PC) network test that's currently running this weekend. Either way, I'm sure Miyazaki will make up for Nightreign's missing poison swamps with plenty of dastardly creations in whatever creation he'll be cooking up next.

Yeah, so first of all, Nightreign's network test is kinda weird. Instead of running for a set period of time—you know, like how most games'll run their tests or betas for 48 hours or so—instead it's choosing a sprinkling of three-hour pockets from now until February 17. That first session wrapped up at 6am PST / 9am EST / 2pm GMT today… not that it really matters, since it seems like barely anyone was able to get in anyway.

Happy Valentine day from r/Eldenring

The Elden Ring subreddit is full of folk laughing through the pain as Nightreign's servers appear to have crapped out less than an hour into the session. I gave things a try myself at around 11:30am UK time, only to be repeatedly met with login errors at the title screen. The FromSoftware player support Twitter notes that the "game server is experiencing high traffic, making it difficult to match" before shortly following it up with acknowledgement that the whole thing was borked.

"Currently, there is a malfunction on the Elden Ring Nightreign game server," the account posted. "We will restart the server to restore service." Well that happened, around 40 minutes later. Not that it seemed to make much difference, mind.

I continued to try myself between 12:30pm and 1:30pm UK time, and the furthest I was able to get was into the hub. The game never actually managed to throw me into a match, forcing me back to the title screen to start the whole thing all over again. I finally gave up shortly before 2pm, resigning myself to a session lost before crawling back to my beloved desktop.

The whole sub rn from r/Eldenring

That doesn't mean everyone was unable to play, though. There are a scattering of Reddit posts of folk who managed to successfully get through the matchmaking and take on the network test's bosses within.

But, unfortunately, for the most part, it seems like would-be Nightreigners missed out. The FromSoftware Twitter page posted one final apology as the first session concluded, added that it may rerun the test to make up for things. "We sincerely apologise for the inconvenience caused to all players due to the game server issues," the post read. "Today's network test will end at 23:00 [Japan time] as scheduled, and we will proceed with improvement work. We are considering holding an additional test for today's session. Your understanding and cooperation would be greatly appreciated."

Ultimately, it's a frustrating situation for both sides. Of course it would've been rad to try and dive in, but I'm sure FromSoftware was having an equally bad time at trying to put out the fires as I was getting hard stuck in a log-in-disconnect loop. Unfortunately for me, the next session runs at, uh, 3am in the UK, so I'll have to wait until tomorrow's 7pm session to give things another go. Hopefully FromSoftware manages to get things a little more stable before then, and I'll be over here hoping that PlayStation and Xbox users get to be the guinea pigs so that when the network test inevitably comes to PC, we won't suffer the same issues. Hopefully, anyway.

What other bosses from its older games is FromSoftware sticking into Nightreign? What does it all mean for the lore? Well, on the first point, FromSoftware's not talking. But on the latter, it's given a pretty straight answer: Don't worry too much about it.

"The primary reason for these existing bosses in Nightreign is from a gameplay perspective," Nighteign director Junya Ishizaki told Gamespot in a recent interview. "Of course, with this new structure and with this new style of game, we needed a lot of different bosses… so we wanted to leverage what we deemed appropriate from our previous titles. We obviously understand that our players have a lot of affection for these characters and they have a lot of fond memories of battling them in these games, so we didn't want to encroach too much on that lore aspect. We wanted them to make sense within the atmosphere and vibe of Elden Ring Nightreign."

Reading between the lines, I think Ishizaki's point about not encroaching "too much" means we won't be seeing a ton of Dark Souls bosses pop up in Nightreign; Elden Ring already gave them more than 100 to pull from. But if the developers already put two in the reveal trailer (in addition to The Nameless King, Dark Souls' Centipede Demon popped up), I think we can expect a few more to show up, too. I wouldn't mind another crack at the Dancer of the Boreal Valley.

PC Gamer's Morgan Park recently went hands-on with Nightreign and came away with the same appraisal that I did—the game feels an awful lot like a mod, which isn't an insult. It's FromSoftware in looser form than usual, more experimental than it's been in the last decade. But the studio has a history of this approach from its pre-Souls days, particularly with its Armored Core spin-offs.

With the news that Nightreign will have post-release DLC including more characters and bosses, I'm looking forward to seeing just how wacky this thing can get.

LocalThunk worked in IT before making Balatro, and was apparently a bit of a hobbyist developer, never releasing anything commercially or even publicly, but sharing games with friends and family to the tune of that devastatingly polite disinterest artists, writers, and other creative types are so familiar with; "Oh that's really nice, say whatever happened to going back to school?"

LocalThunk once again cited the Cantonese card game Big Two and the roguelike Luck Be a Landlord as major influences on Balatro, with development having begun at the end of 2021. Unlike LocalThunk's prior projects, his Balatro prototypes garnered a different response among playtesters. “I had a friend play, and he said, ‘Yeah, I really liked that game you sent over. I played it for 20, 30, or 40’—I can’t remember the number, but a lot of hours,” LocalThunk told Bloomberg. “I was thinking, ‘What on earth?’ There must be something here if he was playing it for that long.”

The rest, as they say, is history. LocalThunk continued to develop and iterate on Balatro while connecting with UK-based publisher, Playstack. The roguelite Poker-like is now a genuine phenomenon, and snagged both a 91% review score and 2024's overall game of the year award from us here at PC Gamer. In addition to maintaining his privacy, LocalThunk doesn't seem to have let the success change his life much, just quitting his IT job to work on gamedev full time and buying a house with his partner. As for what's next, LocalThunk continues to work on Balatro's big 1.1 update, and hasn't ruled out continuing to tinker on the game after that.

The famously secretive and anonymous LocalThunk was reluctant to reveal too much of what's coming in update 1.1. "I'm not going to get into exactly what's going to be in it, because that also means I can't pivot if something new doesn't work," he told Bloomberg. "I think it's healthier if I keep my cards close to my chest, then give you the best version of whatever this new content update is."

LocalThunk was still willing to spill some of the beans, though: In addition to adding new Jokers to the game, the update will see an overhaul to at least one pre-existing card, Matador. As it stands, Matador gives a cash boost whenever your hand triggers a boss blind ability, but the Balatro Wiki notes that it "doesn't work with all boss blinds, and can occasionally give results inconsistent with what one might expect." The other confirmed change is coming to the blue stake, a difficulty modifier that lowers your number of discards by one.

"I play a lot too, and notice flaws all the time," LocalThunk said, and it sounds like he's still considering whether he wants to keep tweaking the game after 1.1. "I don't have any imminent game ideas I want to make," he said. "I have thought of other game ideas in the past, but every time my mind goes down that road, I immediately think, 'You can't do that right now, you're in the middle of something else,' which I think has served me very well."

We certainly agreed, so much that Balatro clinched our overall game of the year award for 2024, beating out the likes of Shadow of the Erdtree, Helldivers 2, and Metaphor: ReFantazio.

But what should we do in the handful of hours before Kingdom Come 2: Deliverance actually releases on Steam this Tuesday? Just sit around waiting? Nah. How about another game about a kingdom, only in this one you're the king? As an added bonus, the demo is free, and it's also seriously fun.

In the demo of The King Is Watching, you've got a kingdom to run: wheat to harvest, gold to mine, soldiers to train. And it's all possible thanks to your hardworking peasants—not that you would ever literally thank the peasants, naturally, 'cuz you're a king—who toil in the fields, labor in the mines, and do battle with swarms of goblins trying to breach your walls.

There's a catch, though. Your peasants are only working hard when you're looking directly at them. Move your kingly gaze to another part of your kingdom, and it's breaktime until you glance back.

So, if you don't look at the wheat field, the wheat doesn't get harvested. If you don't stare at the army barracks, it won't produce soldiers. You know when your boss leaves the office early and everyone kicks back and opens TikTok for the rest of the day? This is That: The Game.

As the watchful king, you must place your buildings on a grid, making sure to group them for peak optimization, then focus your attention on the part of the grid you need to work the most. It's tricky: if goblins are approaching (and they almost always are) it makes sense to focus on the barracks, but the barracks need resources like wheat, so you can't simply ignore your farm. As you add more buildings to mine ore or research blueprints or train archers, things get more complicated, leaving you wishing you had another set of eyes in your kingly head to keep everything up and running.

It's tricky and fun, easy to get into yet hard to survive for long. The King Is Watching doesn't have a release date yet, a few quick rounds of the demo are just the ticket for spending a few enjoyable hours while waiting for Kingdom Come: Deliverance 2 to launch.

Unfortunately, its best is scrappy, messy and sadly scuffed up, despite making some good early impressions. Set in Vertheim—Valhalla for skater dorks—you play as Anton Falcon (get it?), a recently deceased pro skater stuck in an endless loop, skating his way to the top time and time again to challenge disaffected skate god Garland for his freedom, piecing together his backstory over dozens of runs. Basically Hades on skateboards, and with about the same number of magic swords. And really, who amongst us hasn't thought that pro skating couldn't be improved with a little magical violence?

Feeling younger in my mind

If you've ever played a Tony Hawk's Pro Skater game before, you already know how to play 80% of Helskate. That classic arcade formula—more platformer than simulation—is mimicked impressively well, with the cobwebs falling off my brain after just a few minutes. That familiar rhythm of grind to flip trick to Manual to keep that combo chain going until the next obstacle. Much of Helskate's difficulty comes from the addition of combat layered on top of that core, adding a basic semi-homing attack button, a heavy attack (on a lengthy cooldown) and a dodge with generous invincibility frames to the mix. Not too much on paper, but it does crowd the controller a little.

The maps aren't randomly generated, but the order you tackle them changes a bit each run. Enemies spawn in with increasing strength and regularity the longer you spend on a given run, very similar to how Risk of Rain handles it, and once you clear the score target for a given area, you also have to throw down with a mini-boss, usually a larger, tankier version of the regular roster of skate-themed monsters.

There's skater-hating mall cop goblins, giant stomping shoes that send out shockwaves that have to be jumped over, rude skater ogres that barrel through you, and giant serpents that can be ridden like grind rails. And mercifully, hitting enemies grants you a few seconds of combo protection, giving you a brief grace period between fighting and skating—one of Helskate's smarter design decisions.

Pretending I'm a superman

The monsters are a cute and creative bunch, but I never found a sweet-spot for combat difficulty. Either my build was a dud and enemies were barely taking damage, or I got a synergy going quickly and everything died in a hit or two, bosses included. And that's the tragedy of Helskate: Where the disparate ideas meet, the game creaks.

Adding Risk of Rain's endlessly stacking perks onto a skating game sounds like it could be a laugh, but I quickly found that once I had any halfway capable build going (surprisingly easy once you identify what's really busted), I could win every fight and maintain a stunt combo just by mashing buttons wildly, and this was before unlocking permanent Hades-inspired perks that made it even easier on future runs.

A lot of the fundamentals feel under-tested, too. The scoring system (a key part of the game, as you need to clear a score target to unlock the next area) can be hideously abused, and once you're able to chain a couple of Manual tricks it's possible to rack up scores in the hundreds of thousands easily (or even millions) when the game is only asking you for a few thousand. And because those tricks can be done on any flat surface, it's all too easy to clear a level's score target in under 30 seconds before even leaving the room you spawned in.

Being able to break a game's mechanics isn't the worst issue that a roguelite can have. It can be pretty satisfying, even. Anyone that has played The Binding of Isaac can tell you the joy of getting an unstoppable character build going that threatens to melt their CPU while deleting every enemy on-screen. Less forgivable is the game just breaking. Which I found Helskate does if you so much as look at it funny.

Growing older all the time

In the first hour, I clipped through ledges and into the void outside six times. On several runs, the UI completely freaked out, drowning the screen in overlapping, repeated messages, half of them being an ominous demand to 'FIND THE EXIT'. Sometimes my character's skills just would just stop working, and I'd drop from instantly one-shotting bosses to tickling them to death. Sometimes an attempt to wall-ride would send me sliding in entirely the wrong direction. Sometimes moves would just fail to register or arbitrarily break combos, or post-combat slow-mo would stay on well past its due.

In just a handful of hours I experienced so many bugs, it would take half this article just to document them all. While it's just speculation, judging by Helskate's total user review count on Steam (barely over 200 at the time of writing), I'd hazard a guess that money and resources dried up quickly. The game's time in early access gave them a chance to wrap up the main story and rework some structural stuff, but this does not feel like a game that has had nearly enough time in the oven or user feedback. And that's tragic, because I love the idea of Tony Hawk's Risk of Hades.

Don't get me wrong, I had fun with Helskate, but was never able to shake the sense that it's an audacious and chaotic blend of ideas that could have resulted in something magic. Instead, it's a bit of a mess, with flashes of brilliance. The music is great. The character designs are fun. The level designs are impressive, offering criss-crossing non-linear webs of grind rails, rideable power-lines and bonus-packed rooftops accessible through multi-jumps or abusing wall-rides worthy of a true Tony Hawk.

There are all the parts here for a potentially excellent game. But sadly, Helskate needed a lot more testing, and more time in early access. I'm hoping for some big patches further down the line, but not expecting them at this point. But I'm still glad that Phantom Coast tried to make this weird genre mash-up work at all. That takes the kind of energy normally reserved for folks willing to hurl themselves down a flight of stairs on little more than a sheet of plywood with some wheels on.

One of my favourite surprises of 2024 was Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles: Splintered Fate, a pretty unassuming licensed roguelike that turned out to be really good fun. It's basically Hades with turtles and four-player co-op, but as I said in my review, it's "a clever take on the formula with lots of ideas and personality of its own".

Before the PC launch, developer Super Evil Megacorp promised plenty of ongoing support, and it's staying true to its word with a new DLC expansion, due February 5th. Casey Jones & The Junkyard Jam introduces everyone's favourite hockey-themed vigilante as a playable character, with a fighting style that, uniquely for the roster, features ranged attacks (that is, whacking hockey pucks at people).

It also adds a new zone to the base game's four: the Junkyard. This area acts as an alternative to the Streets—after the Docks, you'll be able to divert into the Junkyard to beat up new frog enemies, giant mutant mini-bosses, punk variants of existing foes, and what looks like a towering mech final boss.

A bit of extra variety is always very welcome in a game like this—a new character and zone is enough added spice to get me coming back for another few runs. That should make February a great time for new players to jump in, too, because this is just going to add more options to every run rather than artificially extending them or being some kind of hardcore endgame challenge.

Of course, the most important thing is that it's given me another excuse to bang on about this overlooked gem of 2024. It won't be the last time, dudes.

Every so often I'll be sitting on my couch playing Balatro on Steam Deck and have an unwanted thought: I should really play something other than Balatro once in a while. So, I take a look through Steam to see what other games aren't Balatro but are still pretty much Balatro so I don't have to stop playing Balatro even when I'm not playing Balatro.

And there are quite a few! Balatro introduced us all to the magic of a poker roguelike last year, and since then we've seen a bunch of other efforts to combine a traditional game with the deckbuilder formula. There's Balatro but it's blackjack, Balatro but it's pachinko, Balatro but it's solitaire, even Balatro but it's Scrabble.

And arriving on Steam this week in early access, it's Balatro but it's Mahjong—and it has an actual name, too: Aotenjo: Infinite Hands. Of the various Balatro-likes I've played so far, I think I like it best. It's not trying to be Balatro in the most obvious ways: it's not slick or flashy, there's not a ton of animation, and visually it looks like it'd be right at home next to Solitaire on Windows 95. But I'm into that low-key vibe, free of exploding booster packs and flying tiles.

I should point out here that I'm not much of a Mahjong guy: I know I've learned to play it multiple times in my life, and I've had to do that because once I learn it I don't play it again until I've forgotten how to play it. But there's a nice tutorial in Aotenjo that reacquainted me with the basics, and it wasn't long before I was playing comfortably and diving into the Balatro-ness of it all.

Once again you're building hands against an ever-rising point total, and taking on intermittent bosses who do tricksy things like disabling certain suits. Between rounds you spend the coins earned from wins to enchant your tiles. There are all sorts of clever ways to change your hands, like swapping their numbers using a little set of tweezers, or even hiding a dot on a tile by using a grain of rice to change its value. You can also apply various buffs, increase your multipliers, and make the ever satisfying number-go-up happen. It doesn't give me quite the casino-like high Balatro does, but there's still an understated pleasure in putting together an enchanted hand that racks up megapoints.

Is it going to replace Balatro on my Deck most evenings? I doubt it. But Aotenjo has been a quiet pleasure so far and I think it'll only get better as I get a bit better at understanding the ins and outs of mahjong in general. You'll find it right here on Steam in early access, where it's 12% off until February 2.

Still, even newly released into Steam Early Access, Jotunnslayer already feels like more than just the sum of its influences. This is yet another clever and creative take on the rapidly evolving auto-shooter genre that's followed in Vampire Survivors' wake.

The Diablo 4-esque looks are more than just cinematic sheen (though the visuals are lovely)—there's a similar feel to the action, with basic attacks in addition to your auto-casting abilities, a handy dodge, and an ultimate spell activated manually that's ready to save your bottom from the fire when you need it. Character-building too strikes a balance of more action-RPG-style depth, but at the same time keeping things at a simpler level than something like Halls of Torment—rather than carefully adjusting a huge suite of numbers into your perfect build, you're simply grabbing cool active and passive abilities and jamming them together for straightforward synergies. Less to dig into, perhaps, but also less intimidating.

Abilities are grouped under a roster of gods, each with their own themes. If Loki's offering you a boon, it's probably going to be related to debuffing the enemy, setting things on fire, or risky random effects. Whereas Freya's all about close-range attacks, survivability, and boosting your XP gains. There's your dash of Hades, but it fits neatly, collapsing a whole load of possible build archetypes into easily understood buckets of options.

The best influence the game takes from action-RPGs, however, is in turning the usual wave-based survival into a proper adventure. Each map has an end goal—summon the local jotunn (your end boss, basically) and slay it. But you can't just skip straight to that. You've got to wine and dine these monsters first, in the form of a series of different quests. Every few minutes, you're given a choice of two—usually varying in difficulty, with harder ones rewarding more resources. They can be short fetch quests, mini-boss fights, objective capturing, or brutal combat challenges—like surviving for a minute with your movement speed hacked down, or destroying a totem that turns off all your mojo except basic attacks for as long as it's still standing.

The activities themselves provide welcome variety, but importantly they also get you moving around the map with purpose. Rarely are you ever simply fighting in circles in Jotunnslayer—there's always some quest or treasure to battle your way towards, dodging enemies and overcoming obstacles as you go. Though the genre's always had secrets to seek out, this feels far more active than usual—more like clearing a dungeon, levelling up as you go, rather than simply staying alive and watching your numbers rise.

I'm really enjoying myself so far, but I will say all the hallmarks of a just-launched Early Access game are here. Of the five maps in the menu, only two are currently playable, with just four classes and four gods—that doesn't feel like quite enough variety yet to give the game the replayability it's aiming for.

But that's the nature of the beast—this is still an in-development game. At its very low price (currently £7.64 / $8.99) there's a good chunk of fun to be had here, and the developer is estimating only a half a year wait for the full 1.0 release, so we should see a pretty rapid cadence of updates in the coming months. It's a good way of getting some practice in before you die and get sent to the warrior's heaven of Valhalla to fight for Odin for all eternity, too. We're all doing that, right?

Heart Machine, however, has wasted no time in addressing the less-than-stellar reception. In fact, in tweets posted shortly after the early access launch, Heart Machine called the feedback "encouraging."

"Part of releasing the game in early access means we do take on the risk of negative early reviews and feedback," Heart Machine said. For Hyper Light Breaker, much of that feedback has been centered on the lack of customization options for keybinding and sensitivity controls, both for general comfort and as accessibility concerns, as well as performance frustrations like stuttering and FPS drops—all of which Heart Machine called "extremely reasonable."

"Receiving large quantities of the same actionable requests actually helps us determine how to prioritize future updates," Heart Machine said. "It's encouraging that these are the issues folks are pointing to as a) it's stuff we were already planning to add in, b) accessibility advocacy is important and good to see in the industry, and c) they are straightforward fixes!"

It's refreshing to see such an immediate and direct response to player concerns—especially when it reads as more earnest than a standard corporate response—but it's an illustration of the fine line that developers walk when releasing a game in early access. Despite knowing that it's an early version of a game, players will only temper their expectations so much if they're paying to play it, and recovering from an early review plunge is a heavy lift when there are dozens of competing games releasing on Steam each day.

"We're working right now, immediately, on these fixes and will be pushing out performance / accessibility improvements ASAP," Heart Machine said, and from the looks of it, they're keeping to that commitment.

Last night, the studio posted a screenshot showing an updated settings menu, announcing that they'd shortly be deploying a hotfix "performance improvements, critical bug fixes, and expanded options." According to Heart Machine, the first patch will arrive sometime today.

Hyper Light Breaker is available in early access on Steam.

In this strange and fascinating roguelike, depravity is survival. Chosen by the cruel and decadent Sultan to be his proxy in a mystical card game, you race to stay your own execution by indulging in dreadful excess.

Each round, you draw a "Sultan Card" representing a particular sin: Carnality, Bloodshed, Conquest, or Extravagance. It will have a tier, too, representing what quality of action will fulfill it—a Silver Bloodshed card, for example, can only be satisfied by murdering a person of Silver tier or higher. But where the Sultan himself, with his infinite resources, can easily complete any card he draws, you as a lesser noble of the court must scrabble and scheme to accomplish them.

The result is a game not just about doing bad things to excess, but having to work really hard at it. Success requires sustained manipulation, scheming, murder, and… well, a pretty in-depth knowledge of the local brothel. You're essentially being forced to be a monstrous, decadent sociopath against your will and beyond your means.

And like a sociopath, you see everyone around you as objects. In play, Sultan's Game is essentially a strange card game—one in which your hand consists of people, as well as items, money, and even abstract concepts like secrets and omens. Every day, you and each of the people in your inner circle can be assigned to one activity on the city map, in order to generate some kind of resource or event, or complete your current card objective—with the results usually dependent on a skill roll against one of the character's stats.

A typical day might consist of sending your wife to manage your estate in order to generate some money, your slave to the bookshop to buy you a stat-improving book and listen in on gossip, and your best friend to court to ensure your rivals don't sway the Sultan against you, while you meet with an old enemy you might be able to lure into some sinful scenario.

But the more you play, the more elaborate the options before you become. Finding enough opportunities to indulge yourself requires frantically exploring the city, buddying up to people you meet, and pursuing strange engagements. You always feel out of your depth, and depending on the luck of the draw it can be difficult to figure out how to complete even just your first Sultan Card when you're starting out. How, for example, does a man without any territory to capture, or indeed any army to capture it with, fulfil a Gold Conquest card?

The answers are rarely obvious, and with only seven days to complete each one, there's little time to dawdle. You soon find yourself leaping at any glimmer of opportunity, like a desperate sin addict scrabbling for their next fix. A feeling particularly amplified by the fact that a Sultan Card can never be completed by simply doing something you've done before—once you've exhausted the brothel, for example, you must turn elsewhere for your Carnality (or Bloodshed…). You're forced to endlessly chase new highs, leaving a trail of bodies and burned bridges behind you.

One day you're hunting a white rhino for its hide, the next adopting a mysterious orphan, and by the end of the week you've performed a black magic ritual, assassinated a widow to usurp her estate, and ingratiated yourself with a young heir by teaching him your favourite sexual techniques. New lovers, new enemies, new sensations, new locations—you have no choice but to go after them all in a frenzy.

The result is a dark, challenging, and utterly fascinating puzzle. There's a hint of Crusader Kings to the scheming and political machinations, and a touch of Sunless Sea to its branching, text-driven narrative and resource management, but altogether it's something unique. And while it plumbs the depths of depravity, it doesn't feel gratuitous, or like it's aiming to shock. The clever framing—that you are someone who doesn't want to do these evil things, but must to survive—ensures it never feels like some sick fantasy. And the sharp writing sticks the landing on its satire of the way those with power come to abuse it.

What I've been playing is supposedly just a demo (with the full game due for launch in the first quarter of this year), but after three hours of play I'm yet to notice any kind of limitations or stopping point. Outside of some missing art assets (a few of the characters you meet are simply silhouettes, rather than the gorgeous portraits found on most cards), this seems to already be a substantial portion of the final product.

Is it ironic that a game all about how everything has its price is offering up such a generous free demo? Either way, you shouldn't hesitate to indulge. I've played a lot of roguelike card games but I've never had an experience quite like this—and it's left me with a dark craving for more...

Breaker's basic combat and traversal really haven't been in question for me since I first tried a preview build of the game early last year. It feels great in the hand: Fun, engaging combat with a Souls-y emphasis on precise dodging or countering, but a character action game's sense of speed. Moving around the world via hoverboard or Zelda paraglider is similarly great, and also shows off the procedural generation system Heart Machine has been cooking up.

If I hadn't been told the seed I was exploring had been procedurally generated, I could have believed it was handmade the old-fashioned way. Ravines, cliffs, and mountains chop up the map and require thoughtful navigation to get around⁠—apparently Heart Machine specifically wanted to avoid Skyrim "jump up the mountain" behavior, so every natural obstacle has an attendant ramp, pass, or other way around you're expected to find. During my session, we encountered an underground lab, an apparently rarer map feature with desirable rewards, and I'm excited to see if there are other surprises like that in store.

What I'm really curious about is just how much the map will change between runs, how much a new version of the map will be able to replicate the surprise and excitement of first stepping into an open world, and if the proc gen seams will become more apparent over the course of many runs. There are multiple potential biomes to keep things fresh, though, with more promised as early access progresses.

Hyper Light: Showdown

One of my biggest questions about Breaker was how it would encourage or even allow for thoughtful exploration if it had a time crunch like Risk of Rain 2, and thankfully Breaker addresses this in two ways I really like. First, your exploration isn't limited by time, but by productive actions you take out in the world⁠—I was reminded of how the clock in Disco Elysium only advances when you engage in dialogue. Hyper Light Breaker's danger meter will tick up as you acquire loot and keys to boss rooms or defeat enemies and bosses, increasing the volume and strength of enemies out in the open world.

The second design move is that Breaker is pretty much an extraction game: Rather than the world getting reset on your death, you essentially have a few lives to burn for a given iteration of the world. Progress like keys, looted points of interest, and most importantly defeated bosses are maintained between expeditions of a given run, while extracting early will reset the danger level without expending one of your lives. Sustained between wider runs/map resets, Breaker has the usual sort of roguelike meta progression: There are vendors at your home base to upgrade and support, character build configurations to acquire and upgrade, and alternate characters to unlock⁠—three at early access launch, with more on the way. Each character seems able to use every weapon, and I was told that their equippable, build-defining stat loadouts are what will really differentiate them, but I haven't seen how that works in practice.

That's pretty much where I'm at writ large going into Breaker's early access launch: Everything I've seen, experienced, or been told is exciting and encouraging, but it's going to take some time with the game in the wild to see if its long game has what it takes to offer the "infinite replayability" Heart Machine is going for.

Endless Dark is "an existential horror game in which you are tasked with keeping a sleeper colony ship intact. No enemies or NPCs share the ship with you - only creaking metal echoes and endless dark."

In it you're a robot intelligence called The Custodian, a fully self-aware machine whose job is to keep a travelling colony ship full of sleeping/frozen passengers going to a new planet. You're also the only thing awake, totally alone, cursed to live for decades of absolute loneliness and isolation.

Keep your passengers alive the whole time and you win, slip into depressed, incapable "robo-dementia" and you lose. It's a simple game with a lot of writing—some 350,000 words of events and crises and damage to fix or fail at. It's made so that while you might fail a few times you'll tease out new threads of the story each time—or even find new angles after you've beaten the game.

There are of course other things for your little robot to do. Like tweak its chassis with personal touches, and, you know, gaze in to the endless dark of space.

Endless Dark is fully playable with mouse and keyboard, keyboard only, or gamepad.

You can find Endless Dark on Steam for $8.

Imagine being a kid in the 1980s and slotting your first ever coin into Donkey Kong or Asteroids or Missile Command, hovering your fingers over the controls with no idea of what's to come, no frame of reference for how this machine works. Gaming is so neatly categorised now, so heavily formalised in its genres and mechanics, that I find it difficult to imagine what that must have been like.

At least, that's how I felt until I encountered Wormhole, a virtual arcade simulacrum which has quickly become one of my favourite games of 2024. Developed by Canadian outfit Pocket Moon Games, Wormhole effectively captures that sense of frantic on-the-spot learning of first arcade encounters. More remarkably still, it achieves this while using one of the most familiar games in existence as its basis—Snake.

The fundamentals of Wormhole are Basically Just Snake. You control a segmented line of pixels as it darts automatically across the screen, devouring dots that add more segments to your serpentine juggernaut as they are consumed. If your snake bumps into its own tail, the game ends. Wormhole drapes a fancier theme over these rules—you're a giant space worm and the dots you devour are planets—but otherwise it'll be instantly recognisable to anyone who owned a Nokia phone in the early 2000s.

Familiar, that is, except for all the things Wormhole adds. The most important is an energy bar that depletes as your worm moves, which will trigger a game over if it's empty for too long. Consuming planets refills the bar, but planets appear and disappear at random, meaning you can miss one and run out of energy before reaching the next. Fortunately for your monstrous devourer of worlds, space is dotted with handy wormholes that you can take a shortcut through.

This space warping element is one of the key ways in how Wormhole resets your comprehension of Snake, as you have to wrap your mind around Portal-style movement in an arcade environment. Moreover, these wormholes also tend to shift around the level, while many levels have more than two wormholes in them, and you have to figure out which of them connect.

On top of this, Wormhole also throws random curveballs into levels with no warning or explanation. An Asteroids-style UFO that hovers around and runs away from you when you get near, what's that about? A giant floating skull—what's his deal? A big line of stars that cause the word "SUPERNOVA" to appear on screen if you collect them all. It sure looks rad, but what does it do?

To be clear, Wormhole isn't some ingenious, cryptic masterpiece. It won't take you too long to figure out the various effects each of these things have on the game. But the way they are introduced, combined with the speed that Wormhole plays at (levels often last less than thirty seconds) combine to provoke that sensory overload you want from a great arcade game. It's like accidentally turning onto the wrong side of the motorway on your first driving lesson—there's all this shit flying at you while you're still trying to figure out how to shift through gears.

Crucially, though, Wormhole's novelty doesn't just last as long as it takes for you to understand it. While not an enormously difficult game, it has a high skill ceiling, mainly facilitated by your worm's special abilities. The default ability is a dash which propels your worm forward at a much higher pace than normal. This can be upgraded to let you smash right through planets without having to nibble on them first. Using this, you can pinball your worm around the level at terrifying speed, clinging on to your keyboard at the edge of control, like Paul Atreides atop one of Arrakis' enormous annelids.

Wormhole conveys that feeling of being one wrong move away from losing another coin from your wallet. Further complementing this is the fact that Wormhole's retro credentials are impeccable. The crunchy, 1-bit pixel graphics. The artificially curved central display designed to resemble a CRT screen. The flattened chiptune soundtrack. The way the game's digitised announcer says "Wormhole" with all the vowels removed. One element that arguably runs counter to this is the swirling spiral backdrop, which probably would have melted any real '80s arcade cabinet with all its moving curves. However, the hypnotic whirling of the spiral lends Wormhole a forbidden feeling, like it's a cabinet somewhere in the dark recesses of the arcade, partially covered by a dust sheet, seemingly unnoticed by anyone except you.

Wormhole does make a few concessions to modernity. The arcade-style points you score aren't entirely arbitrary, accruing to unlock new special abilities for your worm, such as Yeehaw, which lets you shoot projectiles at planets from a distance. Levelling up also unlocks a bunch of different themes for the game, such as an Apple II green, a bubblegum pink or that fuzzy tan colour you see on TVs in Fallout. Don't expect the same layers to the upgrade system as you'd get in, say, Hades or Balatro, however. Indeed, one of the few complaints I have about Wormhole is that there are only three different worm abilities, and I think there's a lot of potential left untapped by allowing players to really mix things up.

Nonetheless, with 100 levels to chomp through, which gradually add new wrinkles like bumpers you need to avoid, or a barrier that splits the level in two, Wormhole will keep you occupied for a good few hours. It's a smart, accomplished game that, like Balatro or Derek Yu's NES-inspired mixtape UFO 50, takes a familiar archetype and reinvents it to feel new and surprising.

Alongside a press release revealing the launch price and deal, Heart Machine has also put out a trailer showing off the playable characters and bosses that will be present at the start of early access. The starting guy who looks a helluva lot like the Drifter from the original game is named Vermillion, and he'll be joined by the more feminine, yellow jacketed Drifter-alike Lapis, as well as the pleasantly plump tanuki-looking fellow, Goro. As for the bosses or "crowns," we'll be getting the beatdown from Dro, the Artorias-coded wolf knight who gave PCG news writer Joshua Wolens and I so much trouble in Breaker's demo. We'll also have to contend with the heavy-fisted gladiator, Exus.

I've been enjoying Breaker's demos ahead of release⁠—it's reminiscent of Risk of Rain 2, but with more precise, Soulsborne/character action-inspired combat and a stronger emphasis on exploration. Breaker will feature procedurally generated open world maps, though Heart Machine is promising all the secrets and complexity you'd expect from a bespoke experience, with the hope being that this will buttress Breaker's replayability in the long haul.

Meanwhile, Hyper Light Drifter is the reason for the season, an influential riff on top-down Zelda with more intense, complex combat and a killer atmosphere that's been handily translated into full 3D with Breaker. If, like me, you already own Drifter, the free copy with Breaker could make for a nice digital gift to a friend.

Hyper Light Breaker has been delayed a few times, but its early access launch on January 14 is well-timed: With Elden Ring Nightreign coming sometime later this year, there's about to be way more competition in this 3D open world roguelike space, and we'll see how Breaker's proc gen approach stacks up against Nightreign's presumably more static map.

Bio Prototype's core twist on the Vampire Survivors formula is that, instead of simply choosing a weapon from a set list, you instead build your own custom weapons out of looted components. It's essentially a simple programming system—you make chains of if/then statements which output as your attacks. Weirdly it's reminiscent of a production line in something like Factorio, just producing storms of projectiles instead of refined steel ingots.

Rather weirder is what you're actually making chains out of. Rather than a gothic vampire hunter, in Bio Prototype you're… well, the clue is in the name. As a gloopy little science experiment, you bounce around sterile test chambers blasting hordes of other freaks. As such, your weapons aren't guns, but are instead disgusting webs of organs and other body parts.

Each weapon starts with a brain. A brain can connect to a spine, which is like your engine—it automatically activates whatever nodes are immediately to its right at a regular interval and level of "efficiency" (a power multiplier). We can connect that to something that generates an attack, like a tentacle (for shooting) or a limb (for melee swipes). That part will itself have specific other parts it can connect to, often nerve clusters or eyeballs—these bring in your if/then statements, like "If the node to the left performs a critical hit, the node to the right will trigger". Stick another offensive part on after that, and the layers are starting to build.

The result is brilliantly chaotic, even in the relatively simple early stages. You might have a swordfish tentacle (hmm), powered and buffed up by a chimpanzee spine, that fires a rapid stream of bullets, each of which causes an explosion if it kills an enemy because it's connected to a "germ rat" limb (which looks like a mushroom, of course). If that explosion hits any uninjured enemies, then your clown nerve (???) activates and triggers your giant bone protrusion to smash any remaining stragglers.

And that's before you even get into branching chains (rare spine and nerve drops can support multiple node paths) and, of course, multiple brains—you can buy extra grey matter over the course of a run, naturally, allowing you to build out multiple complimentary weapons.

Try to stack too many effects on the same bit of brain and the message "insufficient brain capacity" will flash up, which is sometimes how I feel playing it. Juggling all this cause-and-effect in your head and optimising your fleshy weapons can be a little disorienting, and definitely asks for a bit more thought than even other examples in the genre that focus on layered character-building, like Halls of Torment or Deep Rock Galactic: Survivor.

But it's an intriguing level of depth for a game that could have coasted just on pure gory novelty. I was probably always going to like a game where one of the key steps of progression is unlocking the ability to have a bladder—that there's a cool and complex system underneath the goopiness is a bonus.

In fact, what's frustrating about the demo is that it cuts you off just as you're starting to explore the possibilities. You can only play with one character at the lowest difficulty, and the pool of possible organs is strictly limited—and even though I've apparently unlocked more types, I'm yet to see them ever appear in a run. It's a tantalising tease, and I'd love to get a slightly better sense of how it develops from here.

But hey, better to leave us wanting more than already having had our fill (of spines and bladders), right? There's not too long to wait for the full version, at least—release is planned for January 20th. In the meantime, you can check out the demo yourself for free on Steam, and see what scientific abominations you can cook up yourself in the name of pushing your damage numbers ever higher.

It's tense and unpredictable. Learning how to improvise is a necessity, especially as I can't guarantee when, where, or even if vital equipment will turn up. Spells rarely do something as simple as hurt the enemy ahead, and deadly traps could be hiding under any and every inch of the floor. Any mistake or careless slip could (will) quickly spiral into an unrecoverable disaster, and that would mean I'd lose everything, every item, weapon, and even my stats, and have to start over from the first floor. Again.

The odd thing is Shiren doesn't feel merciless in practice. It's more like trying to juggle chainsaws on horseback. If—if—everything goes my way and I don't blink, or sneeze, or breathe at the wrong time, then I'll have pulled off the greatest trick ever.

Labbing the labyrinth

The first few floors cover simple concepts like attacking and diagonal movement in concise popups, keywords can be clicked on at any time (making it easy to find the answer to questions like "What the heck is the 'empathetic' status and do I want it?"), and the Monster Dojo back in the first village is a training ground and safe experimental sandbox all rolled into one. I love being able to pop in there and use the premade puzzles to not just read about but play through the fundamentals of successful Shiren-ing, or customise an empty room to test out some status effect or just observe an enemy's behaviour. How long, exactly, can I send a room full of monsters to sleep for? Just how much damage is reflected back at my opponent when I've got a Counter Shield equipped?

Everything I learn here I can apply to my exploration of the island, giving me a sneakier, smarter option when faced with a battle I'd definitely lose if I faced it head-on—like the sudden appearance of a buff muscular tiger, a monster that had tossed me around like a basketball on a previous run. This time was different. I'd taken a minute to experiment with magical staves back in the dojo, and remembered I had one on me now that could paralyse anything its magical bullets touched. In one move that tiger became about as dangerous as a fluffy kitten, literally unable to get its paws on me while I chipped away at its health from a safe distance.

It was the perfect reminder of Shiren's most important lesson. Everything from simple bracelets to shining swords are stuffed with conditional effects and unique properties (and can often be enhanced with even more), and I really do need to use them all. Mindlessly rushing up to a monster to hit it in the face—even if I can hit it really hard—is rarely the right answer unless I'm after a quick, inglorious death.

I can't be certain what will show up and try to kill me while I'm making the long trek from sandy beach to rocky summit, but as Serpentcoil draws monsters from predetermined pools I can get a sixth sense for when archers and samurai grasshoppers could start appearing, and with some time and practice I can at least prepare myself for them.

I was eventually so well prepared—in personal experience, not shiny items laden with special effects—that I decided to test my skills against the game's epic cold open, where I'm plunged into a do-or-die battle against the final boss with nothing more than a few semi-randomised pieces of standard equipment to help. The game expects me to lose here. I'm supposed to watch Shiren pass out and then wake up on the beach, ready to start his first full dungeon run. Instead, I won. No, I did more than just win: I comfortably cleared the entire adventure on a fresh save in less than five minutes.

To put that in modern roguelike terms: it's like I rode an elevator directly to Hades and beat him without a single upgrade or godly boon.

Break everything

After spending hours and hours learning and trying and failing and trying and failing again just so I could hope I'd reach the final battle, it felt like I'd reached a new stage of enlightenment. This game is so eager to accommodate absolutely any wild idea I have, to run with whatever crackers strategy I can imagine, it'll even let me win unwinnable battles. It makes all the hardship along the way feel collaborative—every enemy attack is a fresh clue, every sneaky trick something I can use myself. Shiren wants me to learn the rules so I can not just break them, but throw every last one of them back at it. Strategy and knowledge beat everything, even a backpack full of really sharp swords and shiny shields.

And the best part? When it's confident I've mastered the basics, Serpentcoil explodes into a wildly creative version of itself. As in Hades, beating it once is essentially just the beginning.

Clearing the story at any speed unlocks an avalanche of further tales. Challenges and new features await anyone brave enough to continue the adventure. The new labyrinths are often based on a particular concept or special item, such as clearing a dungeon in the shortest number of steps or stuffing Shiren so full of delicious onigiri he temporarily becomes a sumo-sized whirlwind of destruction. I'm tested in a dozen new ways I hadn't even imagined, encouraged to not just use everything I already know, but invent brand new strategies to counter problems that didn't exist an hour or two earlier.

This is an incredible roguelike. Newcomers will find it has all the information they need to learn the basics at their own pace, and a charming, well-paced story filled with memorable characters, from food-loving samurai to awkward pirates. Longtime wanderers can use their skills to break through to the NG+ features in mere minutes, and the game is happy to instantly raise its own bar to match.

At any and every level, this is a flexible and layered adventure packed with rewards, happy to give players a toolbox filled with absurd abilities and let them invent their own path through the game.

I'm always on the lookout for an odd little roguelike, so imagine my surprise when I see one that's years old and I'd never spotted before, and it's the oft-ignored space roguelike to boot? Well, that's Approaching Infinity, a sci-fi dungeon crawler that's looking pretty interesting after a few years of solo developer toil in early access release. (Though they've been working on it, on and off, since 2013.)

The easiest way to describe it is as a space exploration roguelike where the star sectors you navigate with your ship are the regions you explore with your ship and the wrecks and planets you land on with your away team are sub-levels mini-dungeons you find in the larger environment.

Add a silly sense of humor on top of that and a healthy dose of sci-fi stereotype weirdos to meet and/or pirate and you've got a nice little setup for a classic roguelike—though as is often the case these days you can just turn off the permadeath if that's not your bag.

But there are enough captain archetypes, starting spaceships, and equipment loadouts to claim for your journey that I expect you'll be fine each time you die. The half-dozen things to try out in the demo were pretty exciting. In a pair of runs I was a military corsair who fought other ships for loot. In another I was a planet-focused explorer and selling my valuable data for a profit.

The developer says you can "fight or make peace, mine asteroids, buy and sell commodities, survey planets, extort freighters, smuggle illegal goods, engage in diplomacy, collect powerful artifacts, choose a side in the galactic conflict, craft, become famous (or infamous), harvest rare plants, grok creatures, destroy the universe, become a god, salvage shipwrecks, avenge humanity." Among other things to do.

Approaching Infinity has a pretty generous demo to try out, though I'm not sure how much it differs from the full game.

You can find Approaching Infinity on Steam for $18, though it's on winter sale for $13.50. You can also find it on the Approaching Infinity website.

Robin Valentine, Senior Editor: Balatro might be the most unassuming game we've ever given this high honour. At a glance, it looks more like a game that would've come pre-installed with Windows 98 than the best release of 2024. Even in motion, it doesn't look much—just playing cards floating around. Where are the wizards and laserguns?

But you only have to dip one toe into Balatro's murky waters for it to suddenly grab you and yank you down into its bottomless depths. The moment you win your first round, fumbling for whatever poker hands you can put together, you're hooked—and as you explore all the possibilities of its bizarre deck-building, you're drawn in further and further, until you're having inexplicable conversations with people about "ante 0" and "high card runs" and "planet X".

The result is a roguelike that feels like just as much of a tense and thrilling fantasy adventure as Slay the Spire does, despite that modest appearance. And I don't invoke that genre-mate lightly—I think Balatro is the first deckbuilder to really trouble Slay the Spire's crown, and the legion of imitators it's already spawned are testament to its rightful place in the PC gaming canon. The fact that something so rich and compelling comes to us from a solo developer, relying on slow-build word-of-mouth rather than a huge marketing budget, is yet another reminder that our beloved platform is still the home of indie innovation, not just blockbuster thrills.

Joshua Wolens, News Writer: People talk a lot about Balatro's big numbers, and rightly so, but it's the vibe of the thing that got its hooks into me long before I'd achieved a score high enough to write home about. The swimmy CRT effects, the otherworldly Dorf on Golf soundtrack, the faintly sinister figure of Jimbo the joker and the weird bits of unreality creeping in at the edges in the form of tarot and planet cards: the whole thing feels like a game someone found in a Goosebumps episode. It's a cursed and strange relic from another dimension, and the best game that came out this year.

Harvey Randall, Staff Writer: If that freaking jester laughs at me on more time after beefing it in the early game, I swear I'll start my own personal war on clowns. In other words, I've been feeling exactly the kind of way a good roguelike aims for.

Jacob Ridley, Managing Editor, Hardware: This game has taken over any free time I thought I had. About to go to bed? No, two hours of Balatro on a flush run that's oh-so-close to greatness, only to be scuppered by a mega-big blind at the final hour. I'm yet to crack the ceiling for high scores like some on the team but I'm having a wail of a time nonetheless.

This is the perfect game for a handheld gaming PC—that's how I'm getting my hours in. I can turn my handheld down to power saving mode and get nearly three hours of Balatro in—I'll never be bored on a long trip ever again.

The best bit is the balance. There's an opportunity for a winning strategy whatever cards you're dealt. Sure, some might feel doomed from the start, but doubling down on a single high card can return big numbers. Big Numbers!

Phil Savage, Global Editor-in-Chief: Balatro is also as wide as it is deep, letting you easily set your own definition of what success actually looks like. For some, the pleasure is in mastering the escalating difficulty of a high-stakes run. Successfully completing Gold Stake on each deck is a monumental challenge of game knowledge and build flexibility—truly demonstrating your mastery of Balatro's jokers and their many effects.

That's… fine, if you're into that sort of thing. For me, the joy of Balatro is in the Big Number play. You're most likely to find me on Ghost Deck, on the easiest difficulty, aggressively thinning my deck in order to engineer some absurd build designed to multiply my multiplier as many times as possible. My best unseeded score to date is 4.681e30, or four nonillion, six hundred eighty-one octillion. The sheer beauty as a stacked lineup of retrigger jokers causes a flush five full of red sealed, glass polychrome kings to proc again and again and again and again—Balatro's sophisticated audio design spiking the sense of triumph to feverish levels. It's an endorphin rush that few other games can match. A buzz that I'll keep chasing, continually looking to refine and improve in search of the ultimate, perfect run. Maybe next time I'll finally land the legendary joker Triboulet. Then things will really kick off.

Even if you're not experimenting at the very limits of Balatro science, there's something here for you. It's a game that's spread quite organically across the PC Gamer team—our excited discussions of builds and fun interactions prompting others to try it. More than a few times this year, someone has messaged me to say, "OK, I tried it, I get it." And that's the beauty. You can spend hundreds of hours mastering this thing. But it'll only take a few hands to get it.

Well, as proven and viewed widely by streamer Nandre, you can in fact hit Ante 39 and just straight up explode the videogame to win because 1.8e308, the highest number it will track on your machine in the game's code, isn't high enough to win the score requirement of that ante. Which is... also higher than the highest number your machine will track, so it just displays as "nan"—programmer speak for "not a number."

Nandre reached the goal to celebrate everyone's favorite Roguelike winning at The Game Awards 2024.

This puts Balatro in the distinguished company of other arcade-style games you can't actually hit the "end" of when playing an endless mode because the score just keeps going on. Tetris, perhaps most famously, is a case of this kind of highest-possible-scoring via breaking the game. The Classic Tetris World Championship keeps an archive of winners for the NES version.

Could you go higher still? Yes, actually you can, because—just like with Tetris ROM hacks—you could mod the game to handle ever-absurdly-higher integers with what I can only assume would be ever-more-absurdly-game-breaking consequences.

Gotta say, though, this makes me want a Balatro championship along the same lines with every play using a fixed seed. Are we doing that yet? Can we do that? We should all do that.

Anyway, if you're here you probably love Balatro as much as I do and should definitely see these rather unhinged outtakes from the live action Balatro trailer.

Supergiant is known for pushing the boat out with its games—Bastion, Pyre, Transistor, and Hades all do something slightly different, making it a point to experiment and tinker, provide something new. Which is why, when Hades 2 was announced in 2022, my first reaction was: Huh?

This isn't a studio known for sequels, or even lingering much in its fresh IPs. If anything, Supergiant's willingness to move on is one of its strengths. I felt a quiver of fear in my indie-loving heart that I was beginning to see a franchise take over one of my favourite studios, where the same roguelike drum would be struck forevermore. And, look, if we get a Hades 3 before Supergiant does something new, I might start fretting again. As it stands, though? Hades 2 justifies its existence in spades.

There's the fact that, in terms of raw content, it came out the gate swinging with more to do than the first game had in its final form. A less complete story, sure, but Hades 2's launch state still gave us not one, but two routes to brawl through: The underworld, and two layers of the surface. Plus a nearly full roster of weapons, boons, and oodles of characters to meet, fawn over, and have a nice platonic dip in the bath with.

Supergiant clearly had a story it wanted to tell, too. You can sort of smell the stank of a sequel that's just there to be a safe bet, but the core concept for Hades 2 is interesting as all, well, hell. The idyllic getalong t-shirt Zagreus spends so long building in the last game is under threat, your father's in chains, your mother's nowhere to be seen, and you're now getting to plunder the depths of Greek mythology even further.

Chronos' inclusion, in particular, is pretty inspired. While Hades the first hinted at the generational trauma of its titular god at the mercy of his father, much of which fell on Zagreus' shoulders, Chronos being here shines a spotlight on it. I'm about to get into stuff that could be considered spoilers for patches yet-to-come, but I'm just talking Greek mythology that's already in existence, and Supergiant might put its own spin on things.

Basically, as the story goes, Chronos' papa, Uranus, wasn't the greatest of chaps. He threw a couple of his kids in Tartarus for reasons like 'having too many hands' and 'only having one eye' (you just can't please some people). This irked their mum enough that she handed Chronos a scythe and said hey, bud, why don't you slice off your old man's bits. Chronos did this, accidentally creating Aphrodite in the process. Greek mythology is just like this sometimes, but don't worry, it gets weirder.

When it came time for him to reckon with having his own children, Chronos realised—oi, I screwed over my own pops, maybe my kids will do the same to me. So he decided to do the normal thing and eat them. Poseidon, Hera, and—crucially—Hades were among those to go down the chute, until Zeus came along, avoiding the same fate by being swapped out with a rock at the last minute, raised in secret until he could strike Chronos down.

Point being, generational trauma is a theme with Greek mythology. And while Zagreus manages to build bridges that weren't there before, the family legacy isn't really something that's fully delved into with the detail it warrants. Chronos showing up again, whether Supergiant's keeping his hankering for babies or not, is a perfect way to loop those themes back in and develop them. Let alone Melinoe's relationship with her adoptive mum, Hecate. Sometimes family are the witches who raised you along the way.

Mechanically-speaking, Hades 2 does enough new stuff that I don't mind its existence, either. The introduction of Omega attacks adds a whole 'nother layer to the tasty roguelike dish, and the combat's just as tight and well-conceived as ever, pushing the boat out even further with its bosses—Chronos himself is a riot. I especially like how you have to unlock an upgrade just to pause the game while fighting him because, no duh, the titan of time isn't just gonna let you freeze it. 

And the music, oh man. Darren Korb is on something else this go around. The saxophone solo in Sightless Shepard, courtesy of guest artist Sam Gendel, still shoots dopamine through my system even now. The diegetic siren band in the underworld is also a treat, with not one, but two songs to beat your butt to (they also have dialogue if you fight them with your music turned off, which is nuts). 

This is, without a doubt, Supergiant flexing the hardest it's ever flexed in terms of scale, ambition, and production quality—and it's not even done making the thing yet. I was worried about Hades 2, but it's thoroughly and utterly earned its spot among the roguelike pantheon, even in an unfinished state, and it's been one of my favourite ways to kill time in 2024.

Lincoln Carpenter, News Writer: There is too much to say about Caves of Qud, but it never quite feels like I've said enough.

It's a roguelike's roguelike: A science-fantasy wasteland populated by a rich gnarl of combat systems and procedural world-state simulations that have no qualms about leveraging their brutality against you. Qud has an absurd breadth of possibility to offer: I've started games as two-hearted barbarians and ended them as winged, railgun-toting scorpion-men. I've entered Qud as a cyborg gunslinger, and within a few levels and chance augmentation procedures in Becoming Nooks I no longer needed my pistols, because I was throwing force knives that I could 3D print with my mind. I've started as many new playthroughs just to try a new idea for a centaur rifleman or steel-plated pugilist as I have because my last character met a grisly end after getting their head erupted by a psychic duelist in a subterranean ruin.

As exciting as my newest character build might be, it's Qud's setting that makes that next playthrough so appealing. Qud's history is unknowably long, and each run generates its own inscrutable variation on those countless centuries of crumbling civilizations and shambling, paradimensional horrors. Those histories are gradually excavated as you explore; by inspecting statues, paintings, and inscriptions, you'll learn about sultans assassinated with knives made of sand, prophesied children born with mouths full of circuitry, villages founded by bird-worshipping robot cults.

Qud's real treasure is its writing. Its NPCs have their own dialects, tics, and idioms reflecting their own histories in Qud's surreal world, granting a sense of humanity even to those that—to us—seem the most inhuman. Every item and creature, meanwhile, has a unique description in gorgeously arcane, purposefully excessive prose. Mutants are "vessels of the metamorphic numen"; old statues are "erosion-smoothed abstractions." In Qud, a chair isn't a chair. It's a "wharf for the ass."

Sure, it's self-indulgent, but those excesses are deliberate. It's a game seeking to feel like an artifact impossibly out of time, and it succeeds. Once you've made it past your introductory dozen-or-so deaths at the hands of hyenafolk and gyre-wights, playing Caves of Qud feels like reading a history book written on the other side of an unfathomably distant future, in a language you only understand just well enough to be enthralled.

Wes Fenlon, Senior Editor: The world is richer for having Qud in it. As with Dwarf Fortress, you can benefit from afar: The stories its players tell about sentient furniture and unplanned limb growth are their own small treasures. It's a rare feat for a game to have writing that is by itself powerfully evocative while also leaving room, in between its simple graphics and bogglingly vast possibility space, for people to fill in the vivid details of their own adventures. There's so much comedic and emotional potential in games that dare to go as systems-heavy as Qud does. Like, say, slipping on a slime and falling for so long that you pass a holy place on the way down, or being prompted to name the weapon you've just used to slaughter endless baboons, or crushing yourself with a spacetime vortex, as happened to PC Gamer contributor Len Hafer.

Even when I'm not playing Qud, I love reading about the experiences other players are having in it. Outside Dwarf Fortress, EVE Online, and perhaps Kenshi, I don't think any game has prompted better ones.

Evan Lahti, Strategic Director: I'm determined to get better at Caves of Qud, and play it more over the holiday break if only because it is such a resounding conduit for those indulgent, Mad Libs-arranged proper nouns that Lincoln mentions.

We live in the golden age of roguelikes. Even as I celebrate Balatro as my favourite game this year, I'm deep into new obsessions with Ballionaire and Dungeon Clawler, with Caves of Qud 1.0 on the to-play list. Fans of the genre are so spoiled that it's easy to overlook even truly excellent releases—but make sure you don't let Shogun Showdown pass you by.

I made sure to make time to review this one even when I was still in the grip of Balatro earlier this year. After following its Early Access journey, it was a pleasure to see it hit full release in 2024 with a confident and polished 1.0 version. It was always great, but now it's truly excellent—one of the tightest, smartest, and most satisfying roguelikes around.

Like genre classic Into the Breach, Shogun Showdown mines huge strategic depth out of small and seemingly straightforward fights. The premise is simple: as a ronin warrior, you must fight your way across a series of islands to reach, and defeat, a demonic warlord. Each of its side-on, turn-based battles takes place in a confined room, with your enemies following simple, predictable behaviours. You respond by hopping back and forth, and queuing up and executing your own attack strings from a small deck of actions. 

Every move you make—whether taking one step forward, turning around, or launching your strike—is a turn, giving every enemy the chance to make one move of their own. Every moment of the fight is its own fiendish little puzzle. How can I both slay this warrior and avoid getting hit by that arrow in one move, and what do I do in the three steps after that? 

What makes that truly sing is how the game pushes you to be perfect. Most roguelikes thrive in chaos—they're about trying to snatch something that can work out of a storm of randomness, and succeeding just enough at each step to survive. Shogun Showdown is different—it's always gently judging you on how long your run is taking, how many turns each fight requires, and, most of all, how many hits you've suffered. 

You can scrape by, but the game will always let you know that's what you're doing, ending each fight with a screen-filling "Survived" if you took hits, "Cleared" if you took only one, and the wonderful "Obliterated" if you came out spotless. The most interesting unlocks, too, are gated behind ever better performance. The goal is always right there—to become the director of your own perfect samurai action sequences, combining different attacks into a flawless strategy that sees you ducking every slash, weaving around hapless foes, and taking out whole crowds with one three-hit combo. 

In a deckbuilder, your approach to each turn is based around what cards reach your hand. In Shogun Showdown, your comparatively much smaller set of attacks—starting with two, and growing to six over the course of a run—is always available. The onus is entirely on you to choose and use them effectively, balancing their unique properties, and planning for what you'll be doing during their lengthy cooldowns.

Despite the simple graphics, a perfectly executed turn can feel truly spectacular. Click to let loose a queued-up combo, and your character might stab backwards to kill the enemy behind them, smash the enemy in front of them back to collide with another foe, and then swap places with another so they're suddenly in the way of one of their allies' arrows. Or any of countless other clever combinations, tailored each time to the specific position you find yourself in and the threats coming your way. 

All of this depth, in a game still simple enough to be played just with left click, right click, and middle mouse, and approachable enough to draw you in as quickly and effectively as any greats of the genre. 

It was bad luck for Shogun Showdown to launch into 1.0 in the same year as the all-consuming Balatro, but it's just as deserving of a place in the roguelike hall of fame. Even if you're still honing your high card build, you should still make some time to study the blade. 

Unfortunately, the organisation is still adamant that its choices are in accordance with its guidelines, as LocalThunk writes on Bluesky: "[I] talked with PEGI and they do not see anything wrong Balatro being rated 18+, nor with EA sports FC (and similar games) having a 3+ rating." He goes on to say that the ratings board was "blaming EU laws, blaming storefronts, waiting for the future. Sitting on their hands. I thought some good might come of this, this sucks."

For context: PEGI's attitude towards gambling, which you can see laid out on its website, is based on whether a game has allusions to (or could conceivably teach people how to play) games that are used to gamble in the real world: "These simulations of gambling refer to games of chance that are normally carried out in casinos or gambling halls."

In other words, PEGI's decision here is technically consistent with its stated guidelines, even if those guidelines are, on the face of it, quite silly. Balatro teaches you how to form certain poker hands, and poker is a game of chance that's "normally carried out in casinos or gambling halls". Meanwhile, EA Sports FC 25, a game that lets you buy card packs with real money, does not teach you how to play a game of chance that you could find out in the real world.

As for why some older games with gambling seem exempt, such as 51 Worldwide Games, which is rated 12+ by the organisation? They squeezed themselves in under the wire before the law was changed: "Some older titles can be found with PEGI 12 or PEGI 16, but PEGI changed the criteria for this classification in 2020, which made that new games with this sort of content are always PEGI 18."

This, according to a statement given to Game Informer at the time, was a "conscious decision not to apply the change retroactively … We wanted to avoid that the exact same game can be found in a shop for two different consoles with two different age ratings."

I've gone ahead and contacted PEGI directly for its opinions on Localthunk's statement that it was "blaming" EU laws and storefronts, and I'll update this article if I receive a response. Personally, I think Balatro's 18+ rating is very silly—and the age rating of games like EA Sports FC is archaic, and potentially irresponsible because as some studies claim, these games can press the same neurological buttons in problem gamblers that real-world casinos do.

However, I do think PEGI has a more complicated task balancing the laws and regulations of 35 countries in its age ratings, especially when compared to something like the ESRB, which handles three (the US, Canada, and Mexico). That's not to wipe it of all responsibility, but I wouldn't be shocked if there was some degree of wider politics that led to this baffling state of affairs, especially given some EU countries have flip-flopped on the subject of loot boxes being rated 18+ in recent years. The law, as it tends to do, moves slowly and clumsily to catch up with the modern day.

• Environments have to be grid-based
• Everything must be scavenged from monster-filled dungeons.
• And above all else, a true Shiren game (and thus a true old school roguelike) must be challenging, and its players must suffer

That means everything carried is lost upon death, and all of Shiren's experience must go down the drain with it. Every single floor must be navigated in full again—no shortcuts—and their randomised layout and loot means they're exactly as dangerous and unpredictable as they were the first time.

The latest entry in the 30-year-old series, The Mystery Dungeon of Serpentcoil Island, is no exception to these harsh rules. Its freeform nature, heaps of weird items, and expansive ruleset make it an intimidating and often deadly experience at the best of times, and its minimalistic approach to Shiren himself, a silent avatar-hero of the classic Dragon Quest variety with few real opinions or even expressions of his own, leaves enough room for my imagination to get to work. I get to decide if he's bravely facing down a horde of monsters, panicking at the sight of them, or reaching into his pack for some table-turning item.

Every game is as unique as a fingerprint. A new run is a chance to do something different and surprising, to build a very personal story out of lucky finds, near misses, and brilliantly stupid ideas.

Like that time I got cornered by a powerful behemoth in a dead-end room. I didn't have the hit points or items to take it on, and there was nowhere to run. Things were looking grim… until I remembered I had a wall-destroying scroll in my pack. Every wall and corridor on the floor vanished the instant I unfurled it, and all I had to do afterwards was walk in a straight line to the exit. I have never felt so smug in my life. So smug I forgot that as soon as there were no barriers to stop them, every single monster on the floor could rush straight towards me.

I honestly didn't mind watching Shiren crumple in a heap a minute later. I'd invented the problem myself, after all, and for one whole second felt really clever about it too. Besides, Shiren the Wanderer knows it's tough—it expects me to fail. Many, many, times. And just like everyone's favourite Grecian roguelike, Hades, many of the game's engaging plot threads only move forwards when I hit the dirt. But unlike Supergiant's god-bothering dungeon loop, the flexibility and wilful absurdity of Chunsoft's game (thieving seals, anyone?) allows me to invent new stories of my own, something fun and meaningful that happens between the bouts of dialogue boxes.

Nothing is more confidence-boosting than a great start after a hard fall. I was only a few floors in and already carrying around armfuls of great equipment, meaning everything from cute critters to colour-coded ninjas fell without a fuss. It was almost relaxing.

So when I came across a courier—someone prepared to take one item (or magical pot filled with items) back to town so I can use it on a later run—I cheerfully handed over the shiny sword that had carried me this far. No problem, I'd just fall back on one of my many more ordinary spares for a short while and, thinking with my current luck I'd find something even better than what I'd given up. I had plenty of scrolls and items and so many tasty restorative onigiri stuffed in my inventory I'd had to munch down a few just to free up some space.

It was around this point the game started to introduce Hoppin' Hitters—samurai grasshoppers wielding bamboo baseball bats—and without that powerful sword I wasn't quite as tough as I should have been. And those things hit hard. Hard enough that one hit was unpleasant, and two could be fatal.

But this was my story, and Shiren had supplied all the tools I needed to shape it to my liking. A Windblade scroll could do enough damage to kill these menaces before they got too close, and Jittery scrolls forced any that came within hitting distance to waste their turns attacking the space to their rear, as if they were afraid someone was sneaking up behind them.

When those ran out I switched to staves, magical items capable of paralysing enemies on the spot, amongst other things. I just had to point and shoot the right thing at the right monster. It was more than just another way of staying alive—it felt like I'd reached the second stage of Shiren-ing. I'd gone from simply dealing damage to anything that got in my way to outsmarting them with an almost bewildering selection of interesting status effects. I was learning how to hold my own in a relentlessly unforgiving game, and do it creatively too.

The feeling didn't last long. The Hoppin' Hitters' baseball bat wasn't just a funny weapon, it actually functioned as a bat. I'm not sure why I expected anything less of a game so mechanically dense it differentiates between tapping the side of a pot, putting something in it, throwing it against a wall, or placing it gently on the ground, but it still surprised me when they casually batted away everything I tried to hurl at them.

Magical shots included. I even tried to throw a rotten onigiri at one just because I was that desperate to keep it away, and all it did was neatly smash it straight back in my face. The damage and status effects that came with that blow didn't really matter, because I was too busy having an improvised food fight with a violent grasshopper to care.

By some miracle (and the sort of panicked mad dashing I normally save for survival horror games) I eventually ended up in the next safe village. Objectively it was just the next stopping point in a long adventure, but thanks to the unscripted and partially self-inflicted trials I'd experienced on the way there, it felt like I'd reached heaven itself.

With renewed confidence and a shiny katana in hand, I bravely set forth on the next leg of my epic adventure.

And died to the first enemy I ran into.

Same again next run? Shiren wouldn't let me even if I tried.

In 2007, a game called Peggle was released. In 2008, the world suffered a global economic crisis. To this day I refuse to believe these two facts were unrelated. Peggle was as all-consumingly moreish as it was simple—it was essentially just a pachinko machine, where you fired a ball into a screen full of ‘pegs’ and tried to hit ten orange ones on the way down. The thing is, the only agency you had was the direction you fired the ball in. After that, all you could do is sit back and watch, making it almost entirely luck-based.

Once you finally accepted that, the spell would hopefully break, and you could finally uninstall the bloody thing. But now developer newobject has come up with Ballionaire, a twist on pachinko that adds roguelike deckbuilding elements. Essentially Peggle has gone to college, smartened up, and gotten itself a masters degree in compelling strategy gameplay. Oh no. Oh God no.

The goal is to make enough money to pay a tribute that has to be cleared every seven balls or it’s game over. The starter tribute is 500 dollars, which is worrying, because the board is initially a complete tightwad. Hitting these pegs pays out a pathetic 1 dollar apiece, the kind of financial reward that would embarrass even a games journalist. Luckily, after every ball you get a choice of three obstacles (also, a little confusingly, called balls) that you can add to the table. A trampoline will pay out $200 if you hit it, and bounce the ball upwards. A smiling tree will also pay out $200, but only if you hit it from the bottom up. Ah, but as an apology for that irritating caveat, the tree also gains a small multiplier bonus after every single ball played, meaning it can become a substantial payout in the late game.

Oooh, hang on! If I place the trampoline ball under the tree, I’m far more likely to get that lovely multiplier money. And naturally this kind of synchronicity is what you’re aiming for with every ball you place on the table. Some balls are ‘droppers’ which means they’ll drop another ball when you hit them. These pair well with ‘holders’ that will hold onto any balls that hit them and give some lovely bonus in return (but naturally now the ball is ‘held’, it’s out of play and can’t hit anything else). Crucially, some balls automatically activate at the start of each go, like a fantastic butterfly ball that flies up the screen - only obtainable if you keep a caterpillar ball from being hit for five rounds, naturally.

It means a game that at first feels as random as flipping a coin can be manipulated into one that actually rewards strategy. Sure, sometimes God decides they hate you and nothing tumbles down the screen in the direction you want. But the trick here is to put together a Rube Goldberg machine so sophisticated that such randomness doesn’t stand a chance. There’s a Piggy Bonk ball that pays out $800 for every coin ball it’s holding, and I’ve become obsessed with molding my entire strategy around stuffing coin balls into it, regardless of what tools the game is offering me (this, in roguelike deckbuilding parlance, is known as ‘being an idiot’). Whatever, the runs where my beloved pig stratagem has worked have given me gloriously satisfying payouts.

Once you’ve won a run on the initial pyramid stage, you unlock four more, each nicely varied. One sees the ball being lowered in on a fishing line that’s then reeled back to the top when it hits the bottom. Great for making you try out stuff that relies more on being hit from below. The pinball table, with its two limited-use flippers, is my personal highlight, and I assure you that the Deathwheel stage has been named with no hyperbole whatsoever.

But let's get back to the balls for a moment, in what I’m fast worrying is becoming my most innuendo-laden review ever. Balls are divided into subcategories, such as Agers, Movers, and the aforementioned Droppers and Holders. I had fun slowly working out what all these different terms met. And that’s good news because the game did a pretty lousy job of explaining them to me. There’s a "Ballipedia" tucked away in the pause screen that gives you details on every ball, but it’s one of those irritating tutorial screens that often only gives you half the information you want. "Adjacent triggers to this ball have a +0.1 multi for each coin ball held". OK, cool, and a "trigger" is…? It’s incredibly irritating to mess up a run because you had to just make a guess at how something worked.

It’s not the only place where Ballionaire feels a little incomplete. Win a run and you’ll be rewarded with a currency that you can use on a vending machine to get more ball options for future runs. It won’t take you long to unlock everything (in fact it’ll only take a few seconds if you choose ‘unlock all’ in the pause menu, which is a nice touch). That’s all well and good, but it’s the limited difficulty options that have left me struggling for a reason to come back.

There are five difficulties, which throw predictable challenge increases at you like demanding heftier tribute amounts (yawn). Far more entertaining are the malicious curveballs which force you to place horrible annoyances on your lovely table. One has to be hit 500 times before the end of the game, or you lose. Another will sap all the payout money from the surrounding balls, and can require at least $250,000 before finally pissing off. I love these. Worrying about them while also still trying to hit those required tributes is a great, tricky balancing act.

I just wish it went further. After you’ve cleared the five difficulties, that’s your lot, and it feels like the game could easily keep escalating—look at all the horrible debuffs on offer in the create your own table mode! The lack of an endless mode is disappointing too—it'd be a perfect addition.

But maybe it’s greedy to complain about longevity when I got 20 fun hours out of Ballionaire. I’d rather pick on its irritating repetitive music, or its obnoxious dancing mascot. These are the ridiculously minor moans of someone who had to constantly slap themselves to stop alt-tabbing into Steam and playing more instead of writing this review. It’s a marvelous bookend to a year that opened with the almighty Balatro, and with a few updates, Ballionaire could easily become my new podcast game of choice. For now, it’s the elevator pitch of a Peggle deckbuilder, ball-illiantly executed.

Balatro's developer, LocalThunk, took to X late last week to tear into the decision, writing: "Since PEGI gave us an 18+ rating for having evil playing cards, maybe I should add microtransactions/loot boxes/real gambling to lower that rating to 3+ like EA sports FC."

For context, the PEGI rating for Balatro very directly cites the game's use of poker mechanics as a problem—stating that it "teaches—by way of images, information and gameplay—skills and knowledge that are used in poker … this knowledge and skill could be transferred to a real-life game of poker."

The hypocrisy that LocalThunk decryeth is the fact that EA Sports FC 25, a game with microtransactions in the form of "random card packs and other game items", is apparently suitable for 3 year olds. Looking into it, the game does at least appear to outright tell you the odds of getting players in its various packs—but the point still stands that one of these games has you actually 'gambling' with real money, the other does not.

"Just to clear it up," LocalThunk adds, "I'm way more irked at the 3+ for these games with actual gambling mechanics for children than I am about Balatro having an 18+ rating. If these other games were rated properly, I'd happily accept the weirdo 18+. The red logo looks kinda dope."

Now, to play devil's advocate, here, PEGI's rating is at least internally consistent. As per the rating system's site, as of 2020, a game that could be considered to "encourage or teach gambling" is an automatic 18+. Balatro does, technically, teach you some of the basic rules of poker—even if it has precious little to do with the actual game itself—whereas you can't get your lootbox fix outside of the game you're playing. It's not like real-life casinos are offering pulls on D.Va skins.

Whether that rating's fair or effective, though, is another thing entirely. Back in 2019, a researcher from York St. John University linked videogame loot boxes to problem gambling, stating that "the more money people spend on loot boxes, the more severe their problem gambling is. This isn't just my research. This is an effect that has been replicated numerous times across the world by multiple independent labs." For context, "problem gambling" refers to the actual behavioural disorder related to gambling. In other words, problem gamblers will sink money into gacha games just as they do real-life slot machines; anime girls or hard cash, it makes no difference.

I think you could make a very strong argument that PEGI's rating system is a little antiquated, here, especially if loot boxes have strong links to real-world gambling conditions—what's more dangerous, a game that teaches you some rules for a real-world gambling card game without the gambling element, or a game that has you paying real-world money for footie gacha? Or actual gacha. Genshin Impact has a rating of 12+.

I especially feel for LocalThunk here, considering the guy's so anti-gambling he's got it in his will that casinos can't make copies of his game. He doesn't even like poker all that much—me either, for the record, though I adore Balatro, even if I am cursed with incredibly bad luck. I just needed a four, man. I had, like, three in my deck. This is why I don't go to Vegas.

"The original suggestion to become a director came from Miyazaki-san," Ishizaki said via an interpreter in an interview with PC Gamer last week. He recalled Miyazaki telling him "It's about time you try yourself," and Ishizaki "had some ideas he'd been cooking," which he presented to Miyazaki and "got the green light."

I asked Ishizaki if he'd gotten any key advice from Miyazaki for directing his first game. "The one thing that sticks out is that he basically said 'do it as you please,' for this project," Ishizaki said. Was that clear show of trust a big confidence boost? "Yes, absolutely," he said.

I told Ishizaki that as encouraging as that vote of confidence must've been, the idea of directing a whole game—particularly one connected to Elden Ring—sounded terrifying, but I acknowledged that maybe I was just projecting. "Of course, no projection necessary—that's entirely true," he responded.

Jokes aside, while Japanese developers often refrain from talking in detail about the inner workings of their studios, I have no doubt Miyazaki was there to give more detailed feedback and guidance whenever it was needed. After all, if he can so effectively weigh in on the aesthetics of undead dragons, I have a feeling he's more than capable of helping a fellow director out with any design conundrums that stem from building a roguelike spin-off of Elden Ring. You can read much more about how FromSoftware is going about that challenge in my hands-on preview here.

I love the bloodstains in Souls games. They're one of FromSoft's subtle-but-brilliant online features, even if you're not engaging with the multiplayer systems directly. They've also been essentially the same for 15 years now, from Demon's Souls up through Elden Ring: Shadow of the Erdtree. That's fine, but I'm psyched to see new spin-off Elden Ring: Nightreign doing something new with them. Or, rather, something very, very old.

Nightreign is a fully co-op roguelike, with none of the usual online features that define From's RPGs: no PvP multiplayer, no invasions, no temporarily summoning other players for a single boss encounter. You're in a three-person squad for each roguelike session, and as I wrote about in my hands-on feature, you're moving fast, without the time to linger and appreciate the ghostly deaths of other players. But you know what you can appreciate about other players in a fast-paced roguelike? Their loot.

Bloodstains are still a thing in Nightreign, but now they serve a more directly beneficial gameplay role. When you come across the site of another player's death in Nightreign, you can interact with their ghostly remnant to see what gear they had on them at the time—and grab it for yourself.

In the preview build of Nightreign I recently played at FromSoftware's offices, this feature was obviously somewhat staged, just like the soapstone messages the developers themselves place around the levels in Dark Souls so that you'll see something even if you're offline. But in the live game, the bloodstains you encounter will be pulling from the online playerbase, giving you an opportunity to find a high-tier weapon another player was carrying when they died—like maybe a boss loot drop—without having to face that enemy yourself. The most exciting thing in roguelikes, to me, is finding something that totally upends the expected flow of a run—catapulting you way up the power curve or completely upending your intended playstyle with a weapon that's too good to pass up.

"We wanted this to add into this idea of loose connections and loose alliances that don't rely on a great deal of effort from players," Nightreign director Junya Ishizaki said in an interview with PC Gamer. "We also wanted them to feel like even if they don't succeed, there's some influence, some mark they can leave on the world."

I only got to experience this mechanic in its most basic form in my preview of Nightreign, but I love that it's there, because it's a fresh implementation of a 37-year-old idea from one of my favorite games. Let me tell you about bones levels.

NetHack is a classic roguelike from 1987 and is still in development today, with its latest update, 3.6.7, released in 2023. It's "classic" in the sense that first in 1980 there was Rogue, and then in 1984 there was an evolution of Rogue called Hack, which was forked into NetHack shortly after. NetHack added many, many things to the basic dungeon crawling of Rogue and Hack—the variety of interactions you can have with an ordinary sink in NetHack is, I believe, a meta joke about the game's "kitchen sink" approach to game design. But my favorite of all NetHack's added features is a bones level or manually loaded bones file. If you play NetHack on a shared online server like NetHack.alt.org, there's a chance when you descend to a new floor in the dungeon that it will actually be an exact copy of a floor randomly generated for someone else's dungeon. Specifically, the floor they died on.

The bad thing about a bones level is that whatever turned that player into a pile of bones, likely a trap or a monster, will still be there when you encounter the floor. The good thing about a bones level is you can find that player's corpse with all of their stuff still on them. That might merely mean some useful food and a bunch of now-cursed low-level gear, but it could potentially mean some mind-blowingly rare or high-level kit that gives you a massive leg up. NetHack runs can take dozens of hours, so a lucky bones find can be a biiiig deal. Probably a much bigger deal than it will ever be in Elden Ring: Nightreign, but I love the roguelike heritage there anyway.

I don't know much about the history of how folks played NetHack in the '80s and '90s, but I love the idea that players were swapping bones files over old university file sharing networks and Usenet boards before simple online server play was an option. FromSoftware didn't directly take this feature from NetHack—I brought it up in my interview, and they weren't familiar with the game—but I think all of the Souls games are directly and indirectly pulling on ideas going back to much older RPGs.

Apparently that legacy is continuing with its first roguelike, too.

As detailed in my breakdown of everything I learned going hands-on with Elden Ring: Nightreign, there will be eight predefined playable characters in the new action game—no character creator this time around! One of the characters, which I spent a good two hours with, is Duchess, whose movement style is more than a little Bloodborney. Instead of the usual Souls dodge roll, her dodge button performs a dashing quickstep, while a backwards dodge will trigger a stylish backflip. She's fragile, with low health compared to the armored knight characters, but also moves more quickly, which in my mind makes her the Bloodborne stand-in (unfortunately she's equipped with a dagger and not a sick transforming cane sword).

Only four of Nightreign's eight total characters were playable in my preview build, so I did not get to play as one with a sick Sekiro parry—but in an interview, director Junya Ishizaki told me to expect one.

"One you might've seen in the trailer who will be in the final game is an archer archetype, with ranged-based attacks with a bow and arrow. They have an expanded targeting system for players who are into that more shooter, TPS-style gameplay," he said. "One more we can speak to takes inspiration from the deflect mechanic that appeared in the Elden Ring DLC. We hope players who enjoy that more intense, one-on-one style deflect-based battle will get a kick out of that [character]."

That leaves two more character archetypes unaccounted for. In an interview with IGN, Ishizaki described another one as a kind of summoner who "uses a Spirit Ash sort of spiritual buddy as a gameplay mechanic."

What about the last one? Well, one character I didn't see in my build who appears in the trailer is this burly axe-wielder, who sure doesn't look like a Spirit Ash user to me. Perhaps they're our number eight.

If FromSoftware is looking to represent playstyles from all its past games in Nightreign, though realistically I think a secret ninth character is essential: They must put an Armored Core in Elden Ring.

Dear reader, I have some sorry news to report—Balatro is taking over all of gaming. No RPG, no strategy game, no charming indie hit is safe. If you have a videogame, you are getting absorbed into Balatro, until all is rendered poker, praise be to the Almighty Blind. This is the part where you imagine me sacrificing a goat.

In all seriousness, Balatro is on a well-deserved victory lap. Aside from being the PC Gamer staff's predominant mind goblin this year, it's also a superbly-designed roguelike that feels as eponymous to the genre as Slay the Spire was back in 2017. Recently, it's sold over 3,500,000 units across platforms (a number no doubt increased by its mobile release), though it's also taken best mobile and indie game at The Game Awards 2024.

In celebration of its undeniable conquest of our conscious and subconscious lives, Balatro has released its third free cosmetic update, Friends of Jimbo: Pack 3, which adds 8 more games to its already-swelling, Lovecraftian mass of crossovers, for 16 crossovers total as of the time of writing.

As with prior packs, these updates are cosmetic-only skins you can slap on your deck to make you feel a little better when the boss blind inevitably tanks your entire run because you forgot to check what it actually was in a points-addled haze. Or does that only happen to me? Anyway, here are the following games added:

• Divinity: Original Sin 2
• Shovel Knight
• Potion Craft: Alchemist Simulator
• Enter The Gungeon
• Cult of the Lamb
• Don't Starve
• 1000xRESIST
• Warframe

I've also gone ahead and taken screenshots of each of them, because Christmas has me in a festive spirit. Don't say I never gave you nothing.

As always, the card sleeves are free and, after a quick update, will be in your game already. Now if you'll excuse me, I need to go and wash my brain of the psychic hazard that was opening the game again to take those screenshots, I can feel the hankerings arriving again.

You can read my thoughts in-depth in my hands-on preview, but there's a lot to say about this game, so here I've broken down all the key details I know so far into a digestible form.

When can we play Elden Ring: Nightreign?

When is the Elden Ring: Nightreign release date?

Elden Ring: Nightreign releases on May 30, 2025, which is about as early as I'd predicted it could possibly arrive. We won't be waiting until fall after all.

Nightreign will have a Network Test before release

• Like Elden Ring and most of the Souls games, FromSoft will hold a free online beta test for players ahead of release. It will run from February 14-17 2025.
• You can sign up for the Nightreign Network Test (which is only for consoles, not PC 😟) on the official website.

Elden Ring: Nightreign gameplay basics

Elden Ring: Nightreign is a 3-player co-op roguelike

• Nightreign is a multiplayer game, but it's purely PvE, meant to be played in relatively short sessions of about half an hour each.
• You play as a member of a three-player co-op team exploring a familiar-but-different version of Limgrave, Elden Ring's starting zone. The map has a static overall layout (with cliffs, caves, castles, and so on always in the same place) but randomized placements of encounters. You'll run into different bosses, different configurations of ruins, and some other randomized surprises.
• Before each run you'll choose one of eight final bosses to battle. Before you fight them, you have to survive two "days" of exploration and combat, with each day ending in a big boss fight of its own. On day three, you'll warp to a magical battlefield called the Spirit Shelter to battle the big boss of the run on a wide-open battlefield that resembles the site of the battle against Radahn.
• As in Elden Ring, you can be matched with random players, or use a multiplayer password to party up with friends.

Seriously? Multiplayer passwords in 2025?

• Yep. I didn't talk to FromSoftware about the minutia of its online play and matchmaking in Nightreign, but playing with friends looks like it'll work pretty much the same way that it does in Elden Ring.
• From what I saw, you won't even be in multiplayer lobbies with other players—you'll be kicking it solo in an alternate version of the Roundtable Hold hub until you launch into a session, at which point you'll connect with two other players, choose characters, and start playing.

Elden Ring: Nightreign character overview

Can I create my own character? Who do I play as?

• No character creator! Unlike FromSoft's RPGs, Nightreign doesn't let you create a custom character, though you will unlock alternate skins for the cast of eight preset characters.
• That's right, Nightreign is going the "hero" route with predefined characters. I got to play with four, but there will be eight in the final game.

Wylder

• An armored knight who resembles the canonical box art character for most Souls games, equipped with a hefty longsword by default. Wylder is more mobile than you'd expect due to the very short cooldown on their primary ability.
• Ability: Claw Shot - Wylder's grappling hook can be used roughly every 10 seconds, and is a versatile mobility tool. You can pull yourself towards enemies or latch onto the ground to dodge an incoming attack. It also deals damage and effectively interrupts lighter attacks to buy you some breathing room.
• Ult: Wedge of Invasion - Wylder charges up an explosive attack and then unleashes it at very close range (think melee distance) for big damage. Holding down the attack longer increases its potency.

Duchess

• A speedy scout-like character in off-brand Nier Automata cosplay equipped with a magic dagger. Duchess dodges with an elegant sidestep rather than a roll.
• Ability: Restage - Re-deals the last few seconds of damage from both you and allies to a nearby enemy all over again. Extremely effective with team coordination.
• Ult: Finale - Cloaks you and nearby teammates, turning you briefly invisible and dropping enemy aggro.

Guardian

• The tankiest of the characters I played, with a mechanic that lets them hold up their shield for improved damage reduction. Still deals significant damage with their Ult, and is clutch for holding boss aggro and reviving teammates.
• Ability: Whirlwind - A ranged AOE swirl of air that damages and interrupts enemies within it.
• Ult: Wings of Salvation - Guardian flies up into the air before performing a divebomb attack back to the ground, dealing damage in a wide area and raising the defense of nearby allies. Hold the button after landing to stay moored in place and tank incoming attacks.

Recluse

• A frail mage whose getup reminds me of Elden Ring's popular NPC Ranni, with a passive ability that lets them absorb magic casting FP from enemies. The most complex character of the bunch who I spent the least of my time with as a result—but will doubtless be very powerful in the hands of skilled players.
• Ability: Magic Cocktail - Whenever enemies are hit with any kind of attribute (poison, fire, ice, etc.), your attacks on them will "collect" that attribute; once you've stored up three, this ability unleashes a unique attack that varies depending on what you've absorbed.
• Ult: Song of the Blood Soul - This attack marks all nearby enemies to allow your team to heal while attacking them (and I believe deal extra damage)

Archer (name unknown)

• The archer character seen in the trailer will have some kind of "expanded targeting system" that lets them wield bows a bit more like you would in a third-person shooter. Could be a welcome improvement to FromSoftware's historically clunky bow combat.

Parryer (name unknown)

• FromSoftware told me one character will have a moveset based around the Deflecting Hard Tear parry mechanic in Elden Ring: Shadow of the Erdtree, which essentially recreated Sekiro-style parrying in the expansion. Who wants to bet they'll have a katana?

??

There's a seventh character we currently know nothing about.

??

There's an eighth character we currently know nothing about.

Characters have preset skills, but you can still customize your 'build' with relics and loot

• The relics you equip to your character before a run can potentially help enhance a particular playstyle, but until you've accrued a collection of them that let you focus in a particular direction, you're mostly going to have to develop a build on the fly in each Nightreign match.
• Elden Ring's old inventory system is gone—you can now only hold a total of six weapons (and shields), three in the right hand slot and three in the left hand slot. The passive skills on weapons you pick up will remain active as long as they're in your inventory. That means you could pick up a greatsword you don't want to use, but keep it in your pocket because it happens to offer a nice buff to your poise stat.
• Weapons do have level requirements, so you might find a rare drop that you can't equip right away and want to keep until you can equip it. Again, any passives on that weapon will still pay benefits.
• You can drop items or replace them with new loot when your inventory's full, and you'll probably want to—it makes sense to grab everything you find at the start for the passive buffs, then refine your 'build' with weapons that complement each other over time.

How Nightreign differs from Elden Ring

Is this Elden Ring 2?

• Definitely not. While Nightreign does include new unique characters, bosses, and systems not present in Elden Ring, it's a spin-off—essentially a standalone expansion.
• There's no singleplayer adventure in Nightreign, and there are no 'legacy dungeons' that define FromSoftware's RPGs. By letting us play the game before it was even announced, I think From was aiming to avoid overhyping Nightreign as the successor to Elden Ring.
• This is the studio trying something different while Miyazaki presumably works on a big new project that's at least a couple years away.

Is Nightreign connected to the story of Elden Ring?

• No, at least not directly. FromSoftware said this is an "alternate reality" to the Limgrave we explored in Elden Ring.
• Then again, it's FromSoftware—I wouldn't be shocked if Nightreign actually hints, somewhere, that this all takes place in Miquella's dreams or Rennala created a whole magical alternate reality or something.

It sure looks like Elden Ring, but does it play like it?

• Yes and no. In many ways Nightreign plays exactly like Elden Ring. Weapons and basic enemies have the exact movesets they do in the base game. The controls are the same, with a few additions. All Elden Ring's battle mechanics are there: backstabs, shield parries, two-handing weapons, etc.
• In other ways Nightreign feels extremely different. Movement speed and sprinting are greatly sped up. Even without the Spectral Steed mount you're far more mobile in this game: You can now mantle up most cliffs and vault up ledges.
• There is no fall damage.
• Because each run has a fairly strict time limit, you're encouraged to play at a breakneck pace, running from place to place to get more loot and defeat as many enemies as possible to level up.
• With three players and greatly increased power scaling, most basic enemies quickly become trash mobs—the feel of combat is very different than it is in Souls games, where every new room is likely to present some new threat that keeps you in constant trepidation.
• Elden Ring's RPG systems and long-term character building take a back seat to weapons and the unique character abilities defining your playstyle.

Nightreign isn't F2P or live service

FromSoftware doesn't consider it a "live service" game

• In my interview with game director Junya Ishizaki, he told me that FromSoftware doesn't have live service plans for Nightreign.
• There are no plans for seasons or battle passes
• Ishizaki said post-release content updates are still TBD (my guess is that FromSoftware doesn't want to commit to anything until it sees how well the game sells), there will be balance updates, bugfixes etc. as with past games.

Nightreign will be premium (not F2P) and standalone

• You're going to have to pay up front for Nightreign: it will not be a free-to-play game.
• Unlike Shadow of the Erdtree, however, this expansion does not require owning Elden Ring. It'll be fully standalone.
• PC gaming has a rich history of standalone expansions, though they're less common in recent years. Dishonored: Death of the Outsider and XCOM: Chimera Squad are a couple modern examples.

Nightreign will be priced comparably to Shadow of the Erdtree

• Bandai Namco told me to expect a price similar to Shadow of the Erdtree, not a full $60/$70.
• The Erdtree expansion is $40 on Steam. I could see Nightreign being a bit cheaper or a bit more expensive, but $40 does feel about right.

Nightreign is not a battle royale—in fact, there's no PvP at all

• Nightreign borrows the popular battle royale mechanic of a 'danger zone' ring shrinking to a focal point on the map, so at first it resembles a PvP game. But nope! It's even less a PvP game than Elden Ring or Dark Souls. There's no invasion mechanic in Nightreign. You can't fight against other players at all.
• The 'battle royale' ring instead is there to limit the amount of time you can spend leveling up by fighting enemies and pushes you towards a boss fight confrontation at the end of each day (roughly 10 minutes from sunup to sundown). Survive day one's boss fight and the circle disappears, before slowly closing again at the end of day two.

How Nightreign's map works

Is the map randomly generated? How much does it change?

• The layout of Nightreign's map is static… kind of. It looks like a jumbled up remix of Limgrave, with familiar caves, forts, wizard towers, ruins, and gaols all in different places than they were in the original game, and FromSoftware says the general topography and location of structures will stay the same. But the developers are being cagey about the extent to which it can change on different runs.
• From says that sometimes an environmental modifier will appear on the map, such as a swamp or a lava-spewing volcano. I didn't encounter these, so I can't say how big they are, how significantly they'll affect the overall layout and feel of the map, or how many varieties of these environmental surprises there will be in the randomization pool.
• In my interview FromSoftware also hinted that some environmental changes might be tied to the stories for the different characters, so there's a lot we don't know here yet.
• The enemies and bosses you encounter at each place of interest will vary by session, which is clearly what FromSoft hopes will keep the combat fresh and unpredictable across many runs. I think there's a risk of the map feeling like a bit of a drag to explore in a PvE game if it remains too static, even if you encounter a different boss at the ruins you've run around 30 times before, but one day with an early build of the game really wasn't enough to see how this will all fit together.
• There will definitely be some randomized surprises—for example, Margit the Fell Omen was one of the potential "night two" bosses, but he also sometimes "invaded" our play sessions unexpectedly in the middle of the day and started chasing us across the map.

Only Limgrave? What about the rest of Elden Ring's map?

• FromSoftware only referenced Limgrave during our demo session, with no indication that there are remixed versions of Liurnia, Caelid, and so on in Nightreign as well. The plan seems to be for the randomness and those environmental surprises to keep the map interesting enough for repeat play.
• But this is the same FromSoftware that hides entire zones behind secret walls in some of its games. Could there be some major element of Nightreign it's keeping secret right now? Certainly.

Leveling and progression

How does leveling up work?

• Leveling is fast in Nightreign. You still level up via runes spent at a site of grace, like in Elden Ring, but you'll accrue them very quickly.
• Instead of leveling up an individual stat, every chunk of runes you spend will grant you one overall level and boost your stats across the board.
• Stat growth is different for each character. The Duchess and Recluse are always going to have less health than Guardian, for example.
• If you're downed by an enemy, your teammates have a short window of time to revive you before you die. If you do bleed out, you'll respawn nearby but lose all the runes you were carrying and delevel by one level. As in Elden Ring, you can reclaim your runes by returning to the scene of your death.
• Your character doesn't have a meta level, so you're back to level one at the start of each run. But there are some meta progression elements.

There will be meta progression in the form of character stories and permanent loot from each run

• In between runs you'll return to the alternate version of Elden Ring's Roundtable Hold, where you can chat with all of the characters (except the one you're currently embodying), practice their abilities in a training ground, and make use of some kind of upgrade system that wasn't accessible in the build we played.
• Each character in Nightreign has a set of color-coded relic slots that you can equip random end-of-run rewards to. These offer a range of substantial benefits. Here are some examples I encountered:
  • One relic gave me +2 vigor, made my flask heal allies in addition to myself, and also made my critical hits earn extra runes
  • Another marked treasure for me on the map, boosted magic attacks, and enhanced one of the Duchess's abilities specifically
• Each character had only three of these slots on the build we played, but based on the UI I'm going to speculate that you'll actually unlock more of these slots to further improve your character as you play more Nightreign. And that's because…
• FromSoftware told me that there will be some degree of narrative progression for Nightreign's eight preset characters, and it also sounded like moving through those stories will influence the map or random encounters you experience in a run, too. I didn't get to see any of that long-term stuff.

So there's random loot now? How does that work?

• Yes, there's loot! Turns out Path of Exile 2 isn't the Dark Souls of dungeon crawlers—Elden Ring: Nightreign is! (Just kidding—the games obviously play very differently).
• Judging by wikis, there are more than 300 weapons in Elden Ring. I only ever used a handful of them in a given playthrough, but by removing the RPG-style leveling curve and weapon scaling based on specific stats, Nightreign makes it so that just about every character can use every weapon, and you can assemble a viable build on the fly every run.
• Regular enemies and bosses around the map will drop randomized loot; as in other action RPGs, loot can include passive skills like stat buffs, active effects, and affinities like poison, bleed, ice, fire, etc.
• Loot is abundant; there are also tons of chests and breakable objects in the environment that house weapons and consumable items like oils to coat your sword for extra damage, daggers to throw for ranged damage, etc.
• When you kill a boss, you usually get to choose from three loot options, with one being a character upgrade rather than a weapon (a 15% bonus to damage reduction for the rest of the run, for example).
• Regular drops are all shared between players, so you could open a chest and someone could grab the item from right under your nose. But the more valuable boss drops are individualized.
• Loot is tiered with color-coded rarity, so if you've played Diablo or an MMO you'll know what to expect.

Get ready to be confused about the night rain and Nightreign

• The game is called Nightreign, but the shrinking blue battle royale circle that will kill you if you linger in it? That's the night rain. Surely this won't cause any Melina/Malenia-style confusion!

Elden Ring: Nightreign, a co-op roguelike spin-off of the hit RPG, is due sometime in 2025. During a preview event last week, I went hands-on with a build that will likely be similar or identical to what to expect from a Nightreign beta, and FromSoftware confirmed that ahead of launch it will conduct a Network Test to see how the game servers hold up to thousands of simultaneous players. And, presumably, to gather lots of player data and feedback to make final adjustments before release.

Based on past Network Tests, I'd expect Nightreign's to be held somewhere between two and six months before launch. FromSoftware usually opens a sign-up period a couple weeks before the test will be held, then sends out invitations to a number of players, granting them access to a custom build of the game. Elden Ring's Network Test only allowed access to a portion of the starting zone Limgrave, and also packed the map with a number of powerful gear pick-ups that were far more spread out in the final game, many not accessible until dozens of hours later. That approach makes much more sense for a "network test" than a "beta" focused more on assessing balance or gathering player feedback.

Nightreign's Network Test will inevitably work a bit differently, because it's such a different sort of game than the RPGs we're accustomed to from FromSoftware. As I explain in my hands-on preview, this co-op roguelike is focused on throwing you into repeated, randomized action in the same map rather than progressing across a sprawling game world.

If the Network Test is similar to the preview build of the game I played, the whole map will be accessible, but major elements of the game—including meta progression and upgrades for the characters you can play as, dynamic map changes, and the full "pool" of enemies and bosses—either won't be finalized yet or just won't be included in the build.

We can also likely count on dataminers to use the Network Test to uncover some juicy details about the final game—though given that Nightreign is a combat-focused spin-off rather than an RPG with tons of opaque story tendrils to analyze, there might not be as much to dig into. But maybe we'll get a hint about the two characters that FromSoftware is currently keeping secret.

"With Nightreign, we wanted to have a game that felt like a complete package out of the box on the day of purchase, so everything is unlockable, everything is contained with that purchase. It's not what we'd consider a 'live service' game," director Junya Ishizaki said in an interview with PC Gamer after we spent a full day playing the game.

Publisher Bandai Namco elaborated that Nightreign will be an independent spin-off—no need to own Elden Ring to play it—and will be priced along the lines of this year's Shadow of the Erdtree expansion, rather than a full $60/$70.

Despite not being free-to-play, Nightreign's roguelike structure seems ideal for updates and expansions slotting in new characters, gear, and bosses to fight. I asked Ishizaki if he could speak to FromSoftware's plans for Nightreign post release.

"Of course we're concentrating on the release of Nightreign, first and foremost," he said. "But we will make considerations after the game's release. Especially in the form of post-release updates—balance updates, things like this that we've done with previous games—this will definitely be a priority going forward. For anything else, we're still in the process of thinking about the possibilities."

If you have more questions about Nightreign, check out my detailed breakdown of everything I learned about the game from a full day playing it at FromSoftware's offices.

Modders delight in remixing FromSoftware's RPGs into games that are easier (or harder), sillier (or scarier). The Seamless Co-Op mod for Elden Ring has been downloaded by more than 2.5 million PC gamers. Randomizers that shuffle Souls games' items and enemy locations are mainstays of speedrunning events. So who says FromSoftware can't get in on the fun by modding its own game? Well, crank the speed up to 150%, ditch fall damage, throw in a ton of random loot and some other roguelikey variables, and you've pretty much got Elden Ring: Nightreign.

I'll admit I didn't take to it right away. But about four hours into an all-day playtest in a conference room in Tokyo, blinds drawn against the sun until it dropped below the nearby office towers, I started to feel it: that raw animal thrill of a great roguelike build. The chest-thumping glory of slicing a six-foot katana through the guts of Margit the Fell Omen, proccing a bleed that chunked off 10% of his health bar, and then mashing my character's special ability to double all the damage I just dealt. Glorious.

Nightreign is simultaneously part Elden Ring, and part totally new ground for a studio that's gotten very comfortable making a certain type of RPG over the last decade.

Speed Gracer

This spin-off makes a perplexing first impression, treating Elden Ring's weapons, enemy types, and starting zone Limgrave as an all-you-can-reuse asset store. The vibes get even stranger when you see a battle royale-style wall of deadly rain encircling the map, and characters dashing around on foot like they're set to permanent fast-forward, now nimbly mantling cliffs and walls. It seems almost sacrilegious to take the pieces of a game that was so microscopically assembled and go hog wild with them. If Da Vinci wanted to repaint the Mona Lisa doing a Gene Simmons tongue thing, well, sure, he earned it. But it'd be an adjustment, you know?

Playing Nightreign reminded me that in the '90s Capcom balked at the sudden popularity of bootleg, hacked versions of Street Fighter 2 arcade machines that sped up the combat and added wild special moves like mid-air fireballs… until they went out and played them. Then they knew there was clearly no going back. Precision game balance be damned, the speed was just too much fun. Their resulting official upgrade kit Street Fighter 2 Turbo: Hyper Fighting—literally a mod!—set the pace for every iteration of Street Fighter that followed.

Nightreign is Elden Ring Turbo, a condensed three-player roguelike with a lil' dash of Monster Hunter to it, as you choose a final boss to face at the end of each 30-ish minute run. That's assuming you survive two "days" of the circle shrinking to a focal point somewhere in alt-Limgrave, each night culminating in its own tough boss battle. When I started my first session by dropping onto the map from a spectral bird, the entrance was so Fortnite-coded I wondered if FromSoftware was joining the live service party with a battle pass, seasonal events and $20 epic skins.

But that's not Nightreign, despite all appearances.

FromSoft's still FromSoft

"We wanted to have a game that felt like a complete package out of the box on the day of purchase, so everything is unlockable... it's not what we'd consider a 'live service' game," says director Junya Ishizaki, who served as the battle director on Elden Ring and has been with FromSoftware since the original Dark Souls. Nightreign will get some post-release balance updates, as Elden Ring itself did, but beyond that? "We're still in the process of thinking about the possibilities," he says.

Nightreign is Ishizaki's baby: via an interpreter he told me that he'd been brewing game ideas when president Hidetaka Miyazaki suggested he try directing. He put together the pitch and got a green light. "The one [bit of guidance] that sticks out is that he basically said, 'do it as you please' for this project," Ishizaki says.

It's a lean and unusually straightforward game for FromSoftware—no PvP elements at all, no invasions, no esoteric multiplayer covenants a la Dark Souls. "We wanted to have a sense of accomplishment from each defeat and each success, and we wanted this to be different from Elden Ring and past titles," Ishizaki says.

Win or lose, you'll end a run with relics you can equip in future sessions, offering a range of buffs to HP, or magic attacks, or even your basic actions. I found one relic that made my healing flask also heal my allies, a huge benefit when we each only had four to quaff before running dry.

Preset "heroes" with unique attributes replace the character creator. The lithe Duchess, for example, has a tiny HP pool but dodges attacks with a Bloodborne-style quick step instead of the usual roll. The characters are cool, and so are their abilities—empowering additions to a combat system that's always been more deliberate than razzle-dazzle. Still, there's something odd about this mashup that plucks bits and pieces from roguelikes and battle royales and even hero shooters and uses them for seasoning in a boiled down pot o' Elden Ring. I ask Ishizaki what he'd say to players who view the changes as FromSoftware simply copying what's popular in other games.

"The focus was condensing this experience down—the RPG elements, the exploration, the character building and leveling. We wanted that to feel like it was all coming together and culminating in a boss fight but in a more concentrated form," he says. "For this new sense of accomplishment that you wouldn't quite find with Elden Ring or our previous titles, we felt like we needed some new mechanics and some new elements to add into that mix. We've never really held the stance 'let's absolutely not do anything that other companies are doing or not follow any trends.' So we didn't really see this as chasing a trend, but we saw these as interesting elements that could work well within our multiplayer-focused session-based gameplay."

This is the run

My favorite thing about Nightreign, almost immediately, is the addition of two unique abilities per character that totally change how I play. The characters themselves aren't quite classes, but the Duchess is a clear glass cannon DPS, able to double the damage she and her allies have just dished with her Restage ability. By the end of the day I was yelling "Run it back!" to my co-op squadmate playing Duchess when I used the knight character Wylder's grappling hook to zip towards a boss, then drop his ult, a fiery charged explosion that deals immense damage at close range.

As with Street Fighter 2 Turbo, the bombastic new moves are thrilling, even if they feel slightly bolted on to an existing combat system. (Does Wylder only have a grappling hook because FromSoftware already had the physics code for that exact mechanic ready to go from Sekiro?) The default controls, at least currently, are a bit awkward—instead of getting their own dedicated buttons, the abilities require first hitting Y/Triangle on a gamepad at the same time as one of the triggers. This mostly worked fine but the occasional mispress had me swapping to a two-handed sword grip instead of using my ult at a key moment.

As the all-rounder knight archetype, Wylder is emblematic of how different Nightreign feels from the usual singleplayer Souls game; the quick cooldown on his grappling hook gives him a huge agility boost over the usual "default" plodding sword-and-board playstyle.There's also a mage, a tanky heavy knight, and four other characters I didn't set eyes on, but broadly speaking any character can use almost any weapon, from a staff to a colossal greatsword. Weapons come with random buffs attached, including passives that are in effect as long as you keep them in your limited inventory. I've always lamented how rarely I end up changing builds in a Souls campaign, so being forced to make do with what I find on the field—while also benefitting from what I choose to keep in my pocket—is a delightful change.

When I first drop onto Nightreign's map, I don't know how to decide where to go, so I dash towards the nearest fort and immediately get in over my head. At level 1 you're extremely squishy, but there's always a low-level camp not far away that serves as an easy source of runes to farm for 1-2 levels and a couple weapon pickups. Sites of grace dot the map to refill your flasks and let you level up all your stats in one go—no RPG picking and choosing—but they no longer provide a completely safe haven. After a few minutes of free exploration, the circle starts closing, pushing me towards the eventual first night's boss fight. We die to the Demihuman swordsman and queen, a pair of Elden Ring bosses we'll be absolutely curb stomping within a few hours.

As with most roguelikes, knowledge and familiarity will take you a long way in Nightreign. Four hours after starting, my co-op squad had our strategy down to a science. Land, hit the nearest outpost just to grab a couple levels and any weapons with useful passive skills, then beeline for the nearest church, which will present us with an extra healing flask each. Stop along the way only for easy fights. Stay grouped up if anyone encounters a field boss we think we can take, like the weak sauce perfumer who dies in a few hits as long as you avoid his one lazy fire attack. If we have time, we rush to a second church before the end of day one; our goal is to get at least three of the four that are spaced around the edges of the map by the end of day two.

Calling out targets and abilities is key. Against night one's boss we gang up on the fast-but-weak demihuman swordsman while ignoring the lumbering queen. Our Guardian uses his ult, an AOE divebomb, to revive one of us when we go down—you heal your allies in Nightreign by simply attacking them. By the time we fight Margit the Fell Omen on night two we're arguably overleveled, having cleared out a fortress, deleted a dragon thanks to a massive bleed hit doubled by Duchess's Restage, and even stopped by an item vendor to grab some smithing stones to upgrade our weapons one tier. We're nearly at what we think is the game's level cap of 15 when we fight the final boss for our run, a cerberus stand-in with some fiery bad breath.

The first time we face it we're nervous, but it proves easier than one of the potential night two bosses, a Tree Sentinel flanked by two other heavily armored riders. The second time we barely break a sweat dodging a familiar set of FromSoft boss stomps, divebombs, and fire blasts. After some discouraging defeats at the hands of bosses who seemingly had overly-tuned health pools, those back-to-back wins felt good. Real good—in that way that roguelikes make you want to start all over again and experience the same rush with a new build, or see if you can recreate that exact combination of items that just made you feel invincible.

Like my favorite roguelikes, Nighreign seems eager to pepper gear with stats that compound in ways that range from 'ooh this will change my build' to 'I am now more powerful than god,' but it was hard to judge those combinations in this preview. Much of the game's English text was not yet inserted, with often unhelpful fragments of item descriptions. This ultimately left me uncertain about the thing Nightreign has to get just right: its map.

Unmapped

Nightreign's map is peppered with familiar outposts, ruins and forts full of enemies, caves and gaols (which weren't functioning in the build we played) and churches. While the bosses and enemies you encounter in these locations vary from run to run, I am a bit worried that retracing my steps across the mostly unchanging topography dozens of times will get old even with that peppering of change. But Ishizaki says the map will sometimes see "large-scale changes to terrain in the form of procedurally appearing volcanos or swamps or forests," and hinted at some degree of meta progression that will apply to the storylines of the hero characters and the map evolving in some way as you play more of the game.

"We wanted the map itself to be a giant dungeon, so players have the chance to traverse and explore a different way every time they play," he says. "You have to choose the boss you want to face at the end of the third day. Once you've made that choice, maybe you have an idea of how you want to strategize against that boss, and this might change how you approach the map. We wanted to offer players that agency to decide 'okay, I need to go after a poison weapon this time to face this boss. Maybe that will take me to an area I don't usually go, or an enemy I don't usually want to fight.' Hopefully this gives a little more variation between runs as well."

Without complete item descriptions or tooltips to help me interpret the map's many tiny icons, I can't say I developed any strategies more sophisticated than "get more healing flasks." And that worked so well, it makes me a little uneasy about how much Nightreign will really demand more thought from me. The wizard towers, for example, seem painfully simple, with the "puzzles" to enter them never varying from a couple possible locations for a well-telegraphed hidden object to be waiting for a sword swipe. I was already sick of reenacting the same rote solution and the same climb to the top of the tower for a treasure chest after a couple hours. These simply need to be more complex, and more varied, to stay interesting for more than a couple hours of play, which is worrying in a game meant to be played over and over again.

I hope those sorts of issues are merely a symptom of this early build, and not indicative of what will hopefully be a richer, more varied strategic playspace in the final game, which will be out sometime in 2025.

The thrill of the higher pace will only work for so long, and when it wears off, Nightreign needs something to fill the void left by the lack of FromSoft's famously intricate level design. Or it simply needs more maps—FromSoft has indicated this is the map, with nothing beyond the confines of this reimagined Limgrave. Discovering there's actually a remixed Caelid, and remixed Liurnia, and so on and so forth would certainly assuage my worry that the terrain itself will prove a weak link. But as drastically different as Nightreign is from Elden Ring itself, I did get the sense that one thing is the same as it ever was: FromSoftware's still holding tight to plenty of secrets. One day with Nightreign wasn't nearly enough.

For even more detail than I've gone into here, check out my big explainer on all things Elden Ring: Nightreign.

Thursday's Game Awards promised to be a night full of surprises, but one of the very biggest dropped near the beginning of the broadcast: FromSoftware isn't done with Elden Ring yet, and its next game will be out in 2025. Elden Ring: Nightreign is not Elden Ring 2: it's a standalone spin-off coming next year.

There's a lot to absorb from the trailer: it features a group of unique characters sprinting and climbing across a familiar-but-different interpretation of Elden Ring's starting zone of Limgrave. When a fiery blue circle engulfs the land, Nightreign looks an awful lot like a battle royale—but all the combat we see is a trio of players facing off against Elden Ring bosses, with no PvP in sight.

Nightreign's trailer prompts more questions than it gives answers, but I've got those for you. I went to Tokyo last week to play an early build of Nightreign and talk to FromSoftware about its new roguelike spin-off. Check these stories for more:

• Elden Ring: Nightreign hands-on: 6 hours with FromSoftware's wild new co-op roguelike action RPG remix
• What the heck is Elden Ring: Nightreign? Our big explainer covering new characters, loot, roguelike mechanics and more
• Elden Ring: Nightreign 'is not what we consider a live service game,' says FromSoftware: 'We wanted to have a game that felt like a complete package'
• If you want to play Elden Ring: Nightreign as soon as possible, good news: It'll have a Network Test next year

You ever feel like time has stood still? Like a first kiss, or holding your newborn child, or when four multicoloured space cowboys gun you down in the street, or everyone leaps out for a surprise party?

Me too, especially that third one. Entirely that third one, actually, because I've been playing a bunch of the demo for Enter the Chronosphere, which just aired a splashy, timey-wimey new trailer at The PC Gaming Show: Most Wanted, announcing an open beta and showing off its tactico-turn-based gameplay.

It looks and feels great, I have to say. If you've played Arco, imagine a fast-paced, roguelike version of the combat in that. If you've not played Arco, then imagine a turn-based combat system where all turns happen simultaneously. Time only moves when you move. Until you decide on what you're doing next, bullets hang in the air, enemies stand in place, bombs hang on their timers. But once you've decided to move, or shoot, or reload, or any other action, the whole world takes a step forward.

It's very good fun, and creates a sense of movement and action that's frenetic and strategic all at the same time as you shift from pondering your next move to setting the whole world into mad, chaotic action.

That only gets sharper as you pack upgrade after upgrade onto your character (one of several, each with their own abilities). By the end of my most recent run through the demo, I had a ferocious super shotgun upgraded to spit out tens of pellets that ricocheted and exploded, and which I insta-reloaded whenever I moved. Naturally, I ended up killing myself before any enemies could even wing me.

It's immensely good fun, on top of being very nice to look at, with its multi-hued, cartoony cowboys and weird alien landscapes. I highly recommend checking it out if you're a sicko for roguelikes, strategy, or killing yourself ignominously. Lucky for you, the open beta's available now over on Steam.

Permadeath, limited character upgrades, and a growing battalion sure sound like the perfect combination to evoke the intensity of an army charging into battle with one "last hurrah." It's the strategy hack-and-slash roguelike Tears of Metal showed off during today's PC Gaming Show: Most Wanted with its new gameplay trailer signaling a plan to deploy in 2025.

Fire Emblem Warriors: Three Hopes may have tinkered with the one-vs-one-thousand hack-and-slash formula, but Tears of Metal seems to go all-in on a truly perma-punishing Dynasty Warriors-like action game. Developer Paper Cult is no stranger to dabbling in the hardcore, either, as its first game was a violently silly brawl with all of the spirit and attitude of Samurai Jack. Take one look at the fast-paced shredding in the new footage and it's pretty easy to see how the progression from the studio's 2020 "murderballet," Bloodroots, leads to a chord like Tears of Metal.

You can't name a game "Tears of Metal" and not go Devil May Cry-style hard on the soundtrack. There is no reality in which I actually beat Dante Must Die mode, but the music makes me feel like I can, and that's what's important. Fortunately the same applies here if the trailer track is anything to go off of. Ashamed to admit I didn't know bagpipe metal was a thing, but now I do, and I'm better for it.

All of that attitude aside, Tears of Metal is a neat one for me to see cued up after being on a bit of a co-op roguelike/lite kick. Typically the more committed to that recipe a game gets, the more inclined I am to fly solo, but I've been playing a ton of Ravenswatch, Don't Starve Together, and The Outlast Trials' Escalation mode lately. The risk and reward of individual, permanent choices mixed with RNG is a good time with the right group, and I can't say I have anything quite like Paper Cult's hack-and-slash in my library.

Tears of Metal is out next year, though you can keep an eye on it now by wishlisting the roguelike on Steam. And while you're at it, end 2024 on a good note by tuning into today's PC Gaming Show: Most Wanted for a top 25 list of even more games to look forward to in 2025 (hopefully).

Action roguelite Wizard of Legend 2 has only been in early access on Steam for a hair over two months, but it's evolving quickly. As revealed in a trailer at today's PC Gaming Show: Most Wanted, next week developer Dead Mage is dropping the Sky Citadel update, adding a new biome, a new magical ability set built around dashing, new enemies, more character customization options, and new run-shaping relics.

I'm not sure if calling the original Wizard of Legend a sleeper hit is quite right, but it definitely took me by surprise. A friend grabbed the 2018 roguelite on the Nintendo Switch when it came out, and we ended up spending most of a weekend co-oping our way through its vicious boss fights. It was one of those punchy, fast-paced combat games that just felt great in the hand, and the option to play co-op was my favorite thing about it, so I was happy to see this year's sequel lean further in that direction when it launched in early access in October.

Wizard of Legend's developer is seemingly walking a similar path to Motion Twin, which made a strong debut with 2D roguelike Dead Cells before going 3D (and early access) with its follow-up Windblown. Wizard of Legend 2 is structurally much like the first game, but now in quite spiffy 3D.

I loved the first game's pixel art, but I imagine the switch to 3D will pay off in the long run and make it easier for Dead Mage to expand on the variety of levels and elemntal abilities at your mage's disposal. This is definitely your game if you want to see how many different spins on earth, fire, water, and lightning attacks one developer can cook up.

Alternately, you could play Captain Planet and the Planeteers for the Nintendo Entertainment System. But I'm pretty sure you'll have more fun with Wizard of Legend 2.

The Sky Citadel update lands on December 11. Further down the road in early access, Dead Mage is planning to add four-player co-op (two's the current limit), adjustable difficulty levels, and as needed in every roguelike, more stuff.

Across the great salt desert there is a jungled plateau encircled by mountains and speckled with the ruins of an advanced, ancient civilization. At its center lies the Spindle, a towering cable that stretches into and through the heavens. This is where your stranger arrives, the protagonist in an epic science-fantasy RPG full of engrossing stories and elegantly-designed, deep world simulation. It's the best one I've ever played.

Caves of Qud is a traditional roguelike RPG in form, a top-down, turn-based game that relies on text and simple-yet-evocative graphics to convey its world. It doesn't stick hard and fast to permanent death, though, instead letting you choose whether you want save points and even tweak how much fighting you'll have to do. Nor does Qud stick hard and fast to the traditional roguelike rules of having an opaque, frustrating user interface and arcane, entirely keyboard-driven control scheme—it even plays very well on a mobile PC like the Steam Deck.

You make your character from a variety of archetypes that describe normal humans or the far more numerous mutant inhabitants of Qud. You then build in a relatively freeform way, choosing new skills, upgrading your abilities, and gathering equipment for a dizzying and thrilling array of possibilities. From there you set off across Qud from your starting village in true RPG sandbox fashion, choosing to follow or not follow the many quests and whimsical distractions you may come across. A lot of that will involve carefully delving into the ruins of the ancient civilization of the Eaters of Earth, fighting the strange and deadly creatures you find there, and pilfering their treasures.

Each playthrough has the same world map but randomizes nearly every local area according to a complex system of generated histories chronicling the sultans who ruled Qud in ages past. What they did then influences what you find now, where you go, and what you can expect to find there—and it integrates that generated history into the main story quest's fixed objectives in clever and subtle ways that you might otherwise think had the hand of a designer behind them. Though it may take you a hundred hours to really get to grips with and master Qud, a seasoned player can burn through the main story in 15 hours.

Layer qake

The big-idea, high weirdness science-fantasy world of Qud's far future is of an old genre (think Dune) with its own tropes, such as influence from ancient mideast cultures and mythology, but one that's so underutilized in videogames that the setting comes off as refreshing. The spires of humanity's utterly ruined past sit below and on top of Qud, forming a layer cake of dungeons filled with objects from a civilization so outrageously advanced that they invented teleportation and mined the neutron-degenerate matter at the heart of dead stars. The Eaters' civilization was once so advanced that its fall was just as spectacular as its rise, leaving Qud a vast ruin cut off from the universe and scoured by terrible plagues—fresh water is so precious, for example, that a dram of water is the only true currency on Qud.

Pure-blooded "normal" people have become one of many different successor species and ancient genetic engineering combined with reality-altering phenomena have unleashed a tidal wave of strange creatures onto this world—the many talking plants, for example, barely register as exciting compared to a Twinning Lamprey, which exists in a strange quantum state where only when both its bodies are killed simultaneously will it die. Qud is a world where you start off fighting Hyena-people in a swamp with a bronze dagger and end it clad in zetachrome armor made of forgotten matter from the start of the universe, fighting mecha and cosmic terrors while wielding an eigenrifle that fires a subatomic particle beam capable of piercing through every single thing on the screen, friend or foe.

Rich storytelling

The main quest takes you on a journey well-suited to pit stops, dotted with odd characters like a deaf-mute albino bear-porcupine gunsmith and a very rude talking fungus you have to bring with you by letting it grow on your skin. It also stays varied: You'll delve ancient ruins for lost technology, yes, but also manage diplomacy among factions, make friends, solve riddles, and unpick that generated history. All of this is written in a prose so flowery and rich that it passes beyond purple and arrives in the same place as something like Lewis Carroll's Alice's Adventures in Wonderland, utterly unafraid to pillage the depths of the English language for the right words and then invent its own words when those don't quite cut it. I could fill this review with phrases cut from item descriptions. ("It's a large piece of rock, older than every idea" reads the description for a boulder. "Its shelled torso is downside up and sprouts a bouquet of crumpled legs," I'm told about the corpse of a giant crab.)

The world and writing and story are so appealing in part because Qud draws from a diverse set of sources that aren't just other videogames and obvious, obligate nerd pop culture stuff. Its cultural borders extend well outside the limits of so many games. It's rare we get the pleasure of playing a videogame influenced by Dune or The Book of the New Sun or Gamma World that also freely quotes Lord Byron and A.E. Housman while drawing elaborate allusions to the Hebrew Bible.

Get weird

Your character's traits and background will be just as rich as the world's. You might play a True Kin, one of the last unmutated remnants of old humanity close enough to their biology and genome that the Eaters' technology, robots, cybernetic implants, and miracle medicines still recognize and work for you, enhancing yourself with cyberware like extra-large hands and firearm hardpoints to wield four two-handed chainguns at once. You might instead be a mutant with a beak, wings, night vision, and talons whose mutations grow in power so that they can sunder steel. Your mutant might have psychic powers like cryokinesis and telepathy and disintegration. You might even play as a purely physical chimera that grows twelve arms, or a purely psychic esper who becomes so powerful that their Glimmer attracts extradimensional hunters and predators from beyond our own universe.

It's not just variety that makes Qud so fun, it's the depth of simulation in the world you explore. Aside from your health value or the rare damage calculation that can go to the hundreds, you rarely have to deal with numbers larger than 30 when considering statistics and attributes. But Qud's world is powered by a physics simulation that lets you drill through walls with a jackhammer or melt rock into lava or spread clouds of corrosive gas that shift in the wind. The characters you meet all have a faction and a base attitude and an allegiance to it that plays out in hilarious ways: You might be beloved by apes, causing the shaggy white monsters that roam the canyons to leap to your defense, or hated by insects, causing typically chill giant dragonflies to come after you with a vengeance. Manipulating other factions' attitudes toward you is key to enjoying Qud, causing you to form alliances with groups like the machine-worshipping Mechanimists or become self-appointed protector of the villagers of a randomly generated town. I defended one with my life because I thought it was hilarious that its mayor was a talking pig that was hated by other swine for "defiling their holy places."

Stay weird

Random generation can of course make or break a game like Qud. Sometimes it's against you in the most hilarious ways, sometimes it's just frustrating as you plumb some deep stratum praying that the next chest has some upgrade—please, any upgrade—for your gun or armor. Sometimes it's for you as it spits out a unique relic that feels purpose-made to fit just the character you wanted to play—as a sword-wielding knight I once found a shield that could reflect enemy lasers back at them.

Your tolerance for unpleasant, run-ending (or save-reloading) surprises has to be pretty high as you first discover things like which robot is armed with missile racks and how to kill a Twinning Lamprey and how when you see a biblically accurate angel you should just run away. You can contract infections or lose a limb, but to enjoy yourself those must be interesting problems to solve or situations to exploit, part of your overall story rather than frustrations. The fun to find in Qud is about learning—reading the flavor text for hints, figuring out which randomly-generated named creature to befriend, and carrying a variety of tools for different situations. Always have an EMP grenade on hand, for example, to deal with wayward robots. You have to be willing to try and fail and to learn when it's better to run away, consolidate your gains, and try again tomorrow. Every challenge in Qud was not hand-made to be beaten. Quite the opposite, in fact.

That is no surprise to fans of the traditional roguelike's deep details and convoluted systems and surprising random events. For others it will be unpleasant at first. Caves of Qud has what is likely the best, most modern interface and controls in a game of its kind, but the experience is still at times frustrating as you try to unravel just what happened in the last combat round that caused you to die. For some who have not played games like this before, simply the act of learning to control and maneuver your character will be frustrating. Despite this I cannot recommend Caves of Qud enough for its innovations in mechanics and storytelling, however anachronistic it may look.

Besides, on top of it all? You can easily mod this game.

'You can't always get what you want' is great life advice—it is also what I have been repeating to myself, through gritted teeth, while playing Dungeon Clawler this afternoon. Objectively, the concept of "what if Slay the Spire, but you barely control the hand you play" shouldn't be working as well as it is for this early access roguelike, but thanks to some savvy game design, it super does.

I actually played a bit of this game back when its demo was out. At the time, I thought it was pretty neat and novel, though the limited scope had me wondering if developer Stray Fawn Studio would be able to layer on enough sauce to make it work. Even just having tinkered with it for a short while, I can confirm it's done so.

In case you're unfamiliar, Dungeon Clawler is a roguelike dungeon crawler with a clever twist—which is a turn of phrase I hate, but the twist really is significant, and it is genuinely quite clever. Instead of playing cards from a deck, your moves are all dunked into a claw machine, where you get (typically) two tries to adjust your claw and pull out a good turn.

If that sounds infuriating, it is, but that's part of the fun. Claw machines in real life are designed to sap your willpower and money both. In Dungeon Clawler, though, they're engineered to tickle your dopamine receptors. While you will absolutely have your plans ruined by the laws of physics, there are enough ways to tip the odds in your favour to keep things feeling fair.

For example, in one of my most recent runs, I played Scrappy, whose second claw is a big magnet that pulls metal-typed items from my basket of goods towards itself, and gives him a Strength buff if he pulls in at least five.

I combo'd this with an item that turns fluff (a spam item all decks are afflicted with) into gold coins, then stacked metal-typed items like paperclips, bombs, and warhammers into my deck. Suddenly, I'm mowing over my foes with 10-attack turns spurred on by my godly magnet powers.

These laws of physics can quickly turn against you, though. In another run, I grabbed an item that sticks other items to it, which should've, in theory, made it easier for my claw to snag some big turns. I hubristically chucked quite a few of these into my deck, thinking it'd have a similar impact to that magnet build, then wept as my basket turned into a lovecraftian mass of swords and shields my claw couldn't get a handle on.

I'm genuinely quite impressed with the amount of stuff this game has to offer right now, as well. Dungeon Clawler's entering early access with about 30 floors to gamble through, and 11 characters to unlock and play. That's none too shabby for a game at its price point, that being $9.99 (£8.50). Assuming Stray Fawn Studio doesn't fumble the nugget of gold it's got on its hands, things are only likely to get better from here. Now if you'll excuse me, I'm off to curse the claw some more.

Okay, so you won't quite be able to play actual Balatro with them, but they'll certainly give your next poker night or solitaire session the edge. It's a bit disappointing that the pictures on the order page seem to be just renders rather than actual product photos, but they sound like they should be good quality—they're 300gsm white core card stock (pretty normal for poker decks, I think) but with a glossy linen finish which should make them durable with a pretty premium feel.

"This took us a while but we wanted to make sure we got it right," says LocalThunk on social media. "I love playing cards (clearly) and wanted to make sure that these cards were actually playable and not just a collector's item." In addition to the standard suits in the recognisable Balatro art style, there's also a Joker (the generic +4 mult one), a Juggler, a Blueprint, and a Gros Michel.

The bad news is, you can immediately banish any thoughts of this being the perfect Christmas present for the Balatroholic in your life. While you can preorder now, the packs aren't expected to be sent out until March next year, which I believe is officially past the period of even late gift giving. Still, that's long enough that if you preorder one now you'll have probably forgotten about it by March, and it'll be a surprise gift to yourself.

It's not the first time LocalThunk's made official merch available—on the Balatro website you can also preorder a Jimbo plushie, and there's a selection of clothing and other items too. I can speak to the quality of the t-shirts at least—I grabbed a Jimbo shirt a while back and it's super comfy, in addition to letting everyone I meet know what a cool dude I am.

"It shouldn't be this hard to play the best version of one of Japan's great roguelikes today," PC Gamer contributor Kerry Brunskill wrote earlier this year in a retelling of her long fight to get her hands on a PC copy of 2002's Shiren the Wanderer: Monster of Moonlight Village. She also expressed hope that the latest game in the series, the Nintendo Switch-exclusive Mystery Dungeon of Serpentcoil Island, would eventually make its way to PC. Good news for Kerry—it's on the way, and you won't have to get someone in Japan to mail it to you.

Shiren the Wanderer: The Mystery Dungeon of Serpentcoil Island is now listed as "coming soon" to Steam, with all four of the free feature updates included. The Plus Pack, with 10 new dungeons and other content, will also be available as DLC, as will the Serpentcoil Island soundtrack.

The Mystery Dungeon of Serpentcoil Island sees Shiren the Wandered and his partner Koppa—a talking ferret—in pursuit of gold, treasure, and a mysterious woman in distress. "In the Mystery Dungeon, the layout of its many floors, the tools you obtain within, and the presence of both friends and foes are different every time you enter," the Steam page says. "The situation changes each time, so it's up to you to prepare and adapt to unexpected challenges as they appear. Arm yourself with knowledge of the dungeon's threats, collect useful resources, and gather allies to make it through. Strive to reach the dungeon's deepest depths and highest summits!"

The Shiren the Wanderer series has been around literally for decades: The first, Mystery Dungeon: Shiren the Wanderer, came out in 1995 for the Super NES and much later on the Nintendo DS. (Shiren the Wanderer is a spinoff of the even older Mystery Dungeon series—there's a reason Kerry wrote that the original "launched a thousand roguelikes" and that "even the likes of Hades owe this series at least a respectful nod.") Numerous Shiren sequels have been released since, but almost none have made it to PC. The one exception, aside from Serpentcoil Island, is Shiren the Wanderer: The Tower of Fortune and the Dice of Fate, which arrived on Steam in 2020.

A release date for Shiren the Wanderer: The Mystery Dungeon of Serpentcoil Island on Steam hasn't been announced, but Spike Chunsoft said it will be out sometime in winter 2025.

The Rogue Prince of Persia has an updated early access build coming next week that'll overhaul its art style and shovel loads of new stuff into the roguelike platformer. Most notable for many people is that the team at Evil Empire has decided to change its art direction, swapping the color palette for one that means the prince is losing the distinctive purple tone that once characterized his skin.

"We've changed the colour palettes, had much more detail added and just generally "improved". You'll also notice that the Prince is no longer purple - this change was made as the purple tone just didn't fit with the new direction," said Evil Empire. "We find that the art direction is now a much better fit with the game's genre, setting/story and the Prince of Persia series as a whole."

The Second Act update is looking to be a big capstone for the release year of development on The Rogue Prince of Persia from Evil Empire, who previously made wildly successful roguelike Dead Cells.

The brief notes for the big release also include more biomes, more bosses, a new story act and "tons of narrative polish for Act 1," new enemies, and "many quality of life additions like multiple save slots."

"This update will mark a point where we've effectively doubled the game's content from launch. All the roguelite markers are present - gameplay loop, metaprogression, builds, difficulty modifiers and more - and we're not finishing here with development continuing into 2025!," said Evil Empire.

You can find The Rogue Prince of Persia on its website and on Steam.

I've been enjoying Webfishing a great deal, recently—a chill, tidy little multiplayer fishing game where you can customise your pixelated cat (or dog). But I couldn't help but wonder, as I had insightful conversations with strangers by the river, whether the experience would be improved if the catches could shoot bullets at me out of their eyeballs. The answer is: Sorta.

Lake of Creatures is a new roguelike from solo developer Antenna Games, and having messed around for a bit, I can safely say it's a solid romp. Like a can of tuna, it does what it says on the tin—you swoop around a set of lakes filled with mutant fish and alternate between gunning them down and trying to catch them.

It's a neat enough concept that plays nicely in execution, too. While the gunplay's pretty standard, the fishing mechanic is a novel layer on top of your standard top-down run 'n' gunning. In order to extend your casting line, you have to swing it around a bit, then click to stop the bobber mid-swing to land it in the water. This operates a little like having a flail with a button that freezes its head in midair. So a fish can bite it. I've lost control of this metaphor.

Fish will appear after you've cleared a room of combatants, and sometimes there'll be multiple—which turns fishing into a cute combat challenge of its own, as the remaining fish'll often try to mercilessly gun you down. Actually catching them involves a timing-based minigame where you need to click at the right moment to deal critical damage, though a whiffed reel still hurts them slightly.

Otherwise, you have a gun, an armoury of weapons you can pick up, and a bunch of Binding of Isaac-style upgrades that'll give you stuff like boosts to your boat speed, poison bullets, and a floating trident to stab your enemies. There's also a melee attack, which unfortunately highlights the rough spots in Lake of Creatures.

It's entirely possible that this is a skill issue on my part, but the game is appropriately, well, floaty. While your boat can get faster with upgrades and the like, it also steers like it's going through molasses, which can be pretty frustrating in a bullet hell. While this gives it the game charm, it doesn't quite click with the roguelike elements, wherein taking even a single heart of damage puts you in trouble. Often I'd cut a fish down with my machete (as you do) and send my boat careening right into a bullet, fired by my opponent nanoseconds before.

I also noticed some weird framerate slowdowns which, considering this is a pixel-art game and I don't have an awful PC, is concerning. I went into the options to check if I simply hadn't uncapped the framerate (I once nearly melted a new PC without doing this on Moonlighter, as it proceeded to try and run it at 400 frames per second) but I couldn't find a setting.

Given this is the solo dev's first commercial venture, though, I'm happy to chalk it up to something that'll be fixed down the line. If you're itching for a bit of cheap roguelike fun with a novel concept strapped to the side, you could do far worse than Lake of Creatures. Now if you'll excuse me, I've got mutant tuna to slay.

We're taking a look at some of the esoteric delights found in the PC Game Pass catalogue. This week, it's the turn of Terry Cavanagh's quirky roguelike battler Dicey Dungeons.

Sure, Balatro might be the breakout roguelike hit of 2024, but before the cards came the roll of the dice. In Dicey Dungeons, you've been transformed into a six-sided die at the hands of Lady Luck—forced to participate in her twisted game show. Navigate the dungeons for the entertainment of a heartless crowd, using dice rolls to activate skills that damage your enemies or buff your skills.

There's plenty of depth to each run, with multiple classes that each present different combat mechanics. And as you play, you'll unlock new ways to buff your attacks and skills—creating powerful tactical synergies that will have the monsters falling at your six-sided feet. In the video above, we show exactly what it is that makes Dicey Dungeons a roguelike classic that's well worth your time.

Where would your expectations usually lie for a licensed Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtle game? How about if I told you it's an obvious Hades clone? Right, here's the kicker—what if it was a port of a mobile game, from a developer that's never put a game on Steam before? Now your hopes are at rock bottom, here's the big reveal: Splintered Fate is actually really fun!

To call it a pleasant surprise would be an understatement. Splintered Fate has its rough edges, and certainly doesn't surpass its inspirations. But it's a clever take on the formula with lots of ideas and personality of its own, and despite its origins, it looks and feels great on PC.

For those for whom "it's basically Hades" isn't a meaningful description: Splintered Fate is a top-down action roguelike. Each run sees you progressing through four biomes one room at a time, each ending in a boss fight. Clearing a room earns you rewards to enhance your character—particularly powers drawn from one of a variety of elemental types, which add new passive effects to your arsenal of attacks and abilities.

The further you progress, the more elaborate the combinations and synergies you're able to build up, until you hit the final boss and get to test just how strong you've managed to get. At the end of each run, successful or not, you keep some resources you've earned, which you can then spend on permanent bonuses to carry with you into subsequent runs.

Immediately this familiar set-up is given a bit of new life just through the change in setting. After countless fantasy roguelikes, it's refreshing to battle through modern city streets and across New York rooftops, fighting Mousers and the Foot Clan and unlocking powers with elements like "Ninja", "Utrom", and "Ooze". As ever, the TMNT concept is endlessly flexible—just as the movies, cartoons, and comics flit easily between tones and art styles, so the setting feels just as natural for this genre of game as it did for side-scrolling brawling in Shredder's Revenge.

It's more than just a cosmetic choice—Splintered Fate plays up to the elements that make the setting so enduring. Each run, you can choose which turtle to play as, and of course each has their own distinct playstyle via their passive abilities, special attack, and starting Tool (a ninja weapon or gadget, like a smoke bomb or a force field generator). As you progress, you can gain a handful of that turtle's unique Masteries—upgrades that lean into their approach and favoured elements.

But you can also gain a small number of Inspirations—Masteries borrowed from other turtles that let you swing in unexpected directions, reflecting how the brothers lean on each other to prevail. Raphael, for example, is the master of critical hits, with a passive bonus to crit chance and crit damage. Grab one of his Inspirations on Mikey, however, and you can combine some of that crit power with the much wider sweep of Mikey's nunchuk attacks, for a crowd-clearing hybrid of the two.

The game is generous with its powers, and unafraid to get weird with their effects. Builds quickly become a blend of chaos and precision, rewarding good play but also evoking the wackiness of a world where a talking rat is the straight man. Whether you're hurling shurikens in every direction that ricochet among enemies, electrocuting them as they go, spreading contagious toxic goop while you dash around reflecting projectiles back into people's faces, or causing fire explosions with every sweeping, 100% crit chance attack (that also inflicts water damage, an ice debuff, and a dark magic curse), there's no sense of restraint here. Some roguelikes seem to snarl at you and say "Come at me, if you think you're hard enough". Splintered Fate feels like it's saying "Radical build, dude!" every time you clear a room.

Remember your training

Importantly, though, while your builds can get very ridiculous, they're never allowed to get boring. In so many roguelikes, combat gets less interesting the better your build, as you increasingly focus on spamming one overpowered attack or ability and ignore the rest of your arsenal. Splintered Fate neatly dodges this problem by mostly ditching cooldowns. Instead of being on timers, your special attack and Tool are charged up only by hitting with your normal attacks.

Add to that various powers that trigger only on the third hit of your attack string, and the result is that the fundamentals of combat stay relevant throughout a run. You always have to be looking for your opportunities to dash in, weaving past AOE attacks and projectiles to unleash a quick strike, and those precious moments where you can risk a full combo of hits before retreating to relative safety. You're never resting on your laurels.

That balance of control and chaos is heightened further in co-op. Of course a TMNT game had to let you get all four turtles on screen at once, but multiplayer also gives the game a unique selling point over its genre rivals. You can play both locally and online, and it's agreeably easy to jump into a random lobby if you don't have anyone to play with.

With enemy numbers and stats ramped up, and four ridiculous builds popping off at once, co-op is mayhem—but there's also a real sense of the turtles' brotherly camaraderie as you play off each other. As long as one of you survives to clear a room, anyone who died is resurrected—I've already had more than a few moments of sweatily cheering on some online stranger while my turtle lies in a heap, and celebrating as they pull off the seemingly impossible.

While runs start off pretty approachable—it won't take genre veterans long to reach and defeat the final boss—you're soon able to ramp up the challenge with Portals (jump through them to increase both the difficulty and the reward) and Gauntlets (intimidatingly beefed up versions of boss and miniboss fights). In solo play, it's a lovely bit of risk/reward, pushing you to see exactly how tough a run you can beat, and tempting you to put a particularly gnarly build through its paces. In multiplayer, it's an opportunity for bravado, egging each other on to ever more ridiculous levels until you crash and burn—or incredulously beat the odds.

There are certainly rough edges here, however. Those used to the slick presentation of Hades will find Splintered Fate's menus a bit lacking—both in ease of use, and information. There's nowhere to view a summary of your character stats during a run—such as your current dodge chance or total damage bonus—leading to far too much guesswork and estimating in what should be a precise process. Similarly there's no record of powers and their prerequisites to allow you to plan out a build in advance, which proves particularly frustrating in the case of the very useful hybrid powers unlocked by combining elemental types. I've found many during my runs, but never had any idea which specific combinations of powers allow them to appear, and there's no way to check which I've seen and which I haven't.

As in Hades, bosses have different variants to keep them fresh over multiple runs (on top of the scary Gauntlet versions), but it's oddly inconsistent. Why are there four versions of the first boss, but only one of the third? Some variants also feel wildly harder than others, which can feel unfair given the seeming randomness of which you'll get. And the final boss's six different forms are so functionally identical to each other that I've wondered if they're actually bugged and not enacting their full range of attacks.

While Splintered Fate certainly gets the turtles, with a charming version of the setting clearly inspired by the slightly less goofy and more violent IDW comics (they're great, give 'em a read), constant quipping among the characters and over-explaining of the fairly simple plot can get exhausting. The personalities of the core cast shine through brightly, but too often in the form of tortured puns or repetitive banter that wasn't funny the first time.

Beyond that, there are simply a lot of little flaws. Visual bugs, a confusing array of meta-currencies, slightly unclear power descriptions… nothing that will ruin a run, but enough to give the sense of a much less polished product than the game that it cannot possibly escape comparison to.

It doesn't fully transcend its slightly suspect origins, then—but I've still had substantially more fun with Splintered Fate than I expected to. It certainly earns a place in the stable of action roguelikes—perhaps more a goofy Mikey to Hades' disciplined Leonardo, but a member of the clan none the less. I already beat it on Switch before starting afresh on PC for this review, and after I finish writing I'll be back in once again, so clearly, despite my criticisms, there's a compelling core experience here. And with the developer promising further updates, including new playable characters, levels, bosses, and more, it seems to have a bright future ahead of it too. Radical game, dude!

If you have no idea what that means, then you are my brother and comrade, but I've spent a solid several minutes looking at a Wikipedia page and a bit longer actually playing Yawnoc, and I think I've just about figured it out.

Basically, imagine a big old grid of squares, then colour as many of those squares in as you like. Start the clock, and the squares adjacent to the ones you colour in will fill, then the ones adjacent to those, then the ones adjacent to those, while older ones die off.

Some starting positions will produce stability—a set of squares moving according to a predictable pattern that neither grows nor shrinks. Some will grow infinitely. Some might disappear? Maybe? Not actually sure about that one. You can see a few examples of the principle in action here and in a gif I've embedded below.

Regardless, you've basically got the idea in your head now, and it's the same principle that enemies in Yawnoc's very much limited, wave-based combat zones live by. You run around blasting them with upgradeable abilities and guns but, should you blast the wrong square out of a pattern, you change the entire logic of the enemy's overall growth, potentially sending them into hyperdrive.

Which is a great way to generate untold chaos and to punish me, specifically, for not actually thinking about how I blast away foes. Even in my limited time with the game—I'm yet to surmount the first boss—I've had a couple of instances where an enemy has suddenly gotten absurdly big because I'm a big dumb idiot who should not be trusted with firearms or responsibility. Or responsibility for firearms.

If that sounds like your kind of weird jam, Yawnoc is out today, and is currently running a 10% launch discount that brings it down to a trifling $4.50 (£3.86). You can find it on Steam, and its free demo-ish "jam version" on Itch.io.

A horde battling roguelite inspired by 80s action movies recently released: Karate Survivor throws you up against hordes of mooks and tough elite bosses as you customize and combine your very own combo sequence of attacks into a punchy arrangement all your own. The fast runs at the game's five levels are pretty intense, encouraging you to use not just your attacks but the environment to take down foes.

And you really can use the world around you. Which I love. I've seen chairs, microwaves, scaffolds, water towers, mops, a tuna, cement mixers, and more used as weapons in Karate Survivor. That's on top of the various attacks you earn and slot into your custom combo while you level up in runs at each level.

Developers Alawar have also announced that—though it's not officially approved by Valve yet—Karate Survivor is also working on Steam Deck.

"From the start, we’ve been optimizing Karate Survivor to ensure a smooth experience when playing on the Steam Deck," said Alawar. It noted that all UI elements, menus, and icons should scale correctly, that the performance should be good, and that Karate Survivor was designed top-down with gamepad compatibility in mind.

You can find Karate Survivor on Steam for $5.