I am not, and I hope I never will be described as a “TikTok kind of guy,” but the videos of creator Molly Moonn are one of the best things I’ve seen come out of the whole vertically oriented short video deal. These surreal, horror-infused videos present as ’90s point-and-click adventures with pre-rendered graphics derived from real photos, short little suburbia horror stories by way of Myst.

You’ll look at the comments of these things and see a lot of “damn, I wish I could play this game,” and now, finally, we can! As reported by Alpha Beta Gamer, Molly Moonn and collaborators Airdorf (Faith: The Unholy Trinity), Torple Dook (Hand of Doom), and Jesse Cox (Monster Prom) have produced a free demo for their upcoming horror point and click adventure, Excuse Me Sir.

The result ha…

Bethesda has noted that it will be including Nvidia DLSS support in a future update for Starfield, along with a selection of the “top community requested features” that have been reported since the game launched. The announcement has been included in the short patch notes for today’s hotfix update, which includes some stability and frame rate tweaks. 

In the notes it talks about Starfield being a game it will “be supporting for years and years to come,” but hopefully it won’t take that long to get DLSS added to the game. Especially considering you can already add DLSS to Starfield yourself.

Bethesda explains that its priority is to sort out stability and ensure “top blocker bugs” are ironed out first, and then it will start to look at the different requests that have al…

Watch On

Our friends at GamesRadar are back with another edition of the Future Games Show at Gamescom, a livestreamed showcase that’ll feature over 50 games and another look at Civilization 7, which was revealed with a gameplay trailer at Opening Night Live this week. (I also visited Firaxis earlier this month for a hands-on preview—it looks good!)

The show takes place Wednesday, August 21 at 1pm PT, 4pm ET and 10pm CEST, and will be hosted by actors Ned Luke (Michael De Santa from GTA 5) and Alex McKenna (Sadie Adler from Red Dead Redemption 2). 

You can watch the event on the Future Games Show YouTube channel (player embedded above) and on GamesRadar’s Twitch channel.

Along with over 50 games, including PVKK (one we’re especially intereste…

Steam’s latest hardware survey has been released. The key trends for December 2023 show that Windows 11 is inching towards parity with Windows 10, gamers are gradually shifting towards higher core count CPUs, and the share of systems with 8GB or less of RAM continues to shrink.

Although the wider market has not fallen in love with Windows 11, with just 26% of the desktop market share compared to the dominant Windows 10 at 67%, the picture is a little different for gamers.

In December’s Steam survey, Windows 11 made up ground, with 44% of surveyed users on Windows 11 compared to 51% on Windows 10. That’s a 4% swing compared to the previous month. With Windows 12 reportedly set to launch later in the year, Windows 10’s dominance should continue to erode over the c…

Before releasing Saturday morning cartoon roguelike Mythforce, developer Beamdog made its name remastering BioWare and Black Isle RPGs like the OG Baldur’s Gates. But there was always one that got away: Icewind Dale 2. Though an official remaster remains impossible for reasons I’ll get to, modding group Red Chimera has produced their own take on an Icewind Dale 2 Enhanced Edition.

Back in 2014, Beamdog CEO Trent Oster (formerly of BioWare) claimed that “nightmares abound ” in remastering Icewind Dale 2 on the company’s Infinity Plus engine, and in 2017 he ruled it out entirely. 

Somewhere along the line, in the great morass of Interplay shuttering and the rights shuffling between Atari and Wizards of the Coast, Icewind Dale 2’s source code just slipped away. Maybe it’s …

As promised earlier this month—and commemorated for all time by news writer Joshua Wolens, who saw fit to mark the moment with a haunting image of Bathtub Zoltan Chivay—the REDkit modding tools for The Witcher 3: Wild Hunt, and full Steam Workshop support, are now live.

The Witcher 3 mods are plentiful already thanks to the release of Modkit in 2015. But Modkit isn’t REDkit: While it enables users to mess around with what’s already in the game—turn Roach into a unicorn, for instance—it doesn’t enable the creation of entirely new content. REDkit does, including quests, cutscenes, environments, and more, which is what makes the rollout such a big deal: Throw Doug Cockle a few bucks and you could basically make your own full-on expansion.

“You’re a…

First noticed by user WeirdConcern4666 on the Starfield subreddit, it’s actually pretty easy to dip out of your ship and do a spacewalk thanks to two quick Starfield console commands. There’s not much to do out there in the void at the moment, but doing a cheeky extravehicular activity (EVA) lends itself to some nice screenshots, and I’m excited for the modding potential here.

Here’s how to teleport out of your ship and fly around:

• Hit the tilde (~) key to open up the console. Disregard the achievements warning⁠—where we’re going, we don’t need achievements
• player.setpos x 10 will teleport you just outside the exterior of your vessel
• setgravityscale 0 will set the game to zero g, letting you …
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Right up there with the Turbo button on ’90s PCs, the Prt Sc button on your keyboard is almost as useless. Microsoft is about to change that, however, with the Turbo button making a stunning comeback! I’m joking, of course, it’s set to actually make the Prt Sc key worthwhile by making it launch the operating system’s screen capturing Snipping mode.

In the latest test version of Windows 11, available via the Beta channel of the Windows Insider program, the fix is in. That means, by default, the Prt Sc key will now open the snipping tool on a single keypress, giving you access to Snipping mode, whether that’s the standard rectangular select, freeform, window, or full-screen modes.

Previously, hitting the Prt Sc key would simply save the entire desktop to your clipboard, but if…

With a saving of nearly $22, the best wireless gaming mouse you can buy right now is well worth picking up. The Razer DeathAdder V3 Pro might not look very special but it boasts a 30,000 DPI optical sensor, an 8 kHz polling rate wireless dongle, and a build quality second to none.

However, I don’t think you should buy it. Not because it’s a poor deal—far from it—but simply because there’s a better deal to be had. Well, I say deal, but it’s not technically on sale in the Prime Day event, even though it’s a few dollars cheaper than the Razer’s MSRP.

I’m talking about the DeathAdder V3 Pro’s lesser sibling, the V3 HyperSpeed. Its optical sensor isn’t as capable, rated to a peak of 26,000 DPI, and the wireless system has a polling rate of 1,000 Hz (though you can buy…

As a Windows 11 user, you may have run into the same issues that I have with the notification centre. You kind of want to leave notifications on in case you miss anything, and while you can’t really be bothered to customise them individually to prevent everything from bugging you, you also kinda want it to just leave you the heck alone. 

Well, now Microsoft looks set to add yet another way for apps to infiltrate your notifications bar in the form of a new API soon to roll out to app devs. It will allow apps to automatically ask for permission to pin their apps to your taskbar, as well as ask to become the default app. 

Because that won’t be annoying at all.

In a recent Microsoft UX blog post, the company announced a “principled approach to app pinning”, one t…

I wasn’t expecting to see Dragon Age: The Veilguard turn up at the Xbox Games Showcase over the weekend ahead of the gameplay reveal it had already planned for tomorrow. But turn up it did, with a CG trailer that had a lot of fans, including me, very nervous about the plastic-y, poreless character designs. Partly to quell that public panic, I’m willing to bet, BioWare just gave us a “sneak peak” at 24 seconds of the planned 15+ minute gameplay reveal tomorrow. Everyone take ten deep breaths. It looks better—probably.

As my colleague Robin Valentine pointed out yesterday, the CG trailer debuted at the Xbox show had serious hero shooter vibes, with a “hello fellow kids” kind of banter that I don’t associate with the dry, dark humor of Thedas. 

I was worried t…

All the help you could need to win today’s Wordle just the way you want to is right here. Go straight for a guaranteed win with a quick click to today’s answer, give yourself a few pointers with our handy tips, or guided assistance with our clue for the October 27 (860) game.

My second guess today turned out to be almost right in a very wrong way, leaving me with a lot of yellows that in theory could’ve been sorted very quickly, if only I had any idea how to organise them. Let’s just say I took the nail-biting scenic route to today’s Wordle answer, and leave it at that. 

Today’s Wordle hint

Wordle today: A hint for Friday, October 27

As a social rank, this word marks someone out as beyond upper class. This is the realm of dukes, princes, and…

Need some help with Wordle today? Some days those yellows just don’t want to settle in, or they don’t until it’s too late. That’s where our daily Wordle help comes in. Keep on scrolling and you’ll find all sorts of tips for today’s game, as well as a helpful clue written just for the October 5 (838) puzzle, and the answer in plain text if you need it.

Wow, that was a slippery Wordle. I thought I had the answer every time—every available letter carefully considered, every possibility covered—only to find myself slightly less wrong than I was before. There was no doubt today’s winning word would turn up in time, but it always seemed closer in the moment than it actually was.

Today’s Wordle hint

Wordle today: A hint for Thursday, October 5

…

Update: Valve has now officially launched its “certified refurbished” Steam Deck program, offering the handheld devices in 64GB, 256GB, and 512GB variants.

“Each Certified Refurbished Steam Deck has been thoroughly tested to the same high standards as our retail units,” the program page states. “Every device goes through a complete factory reset, software update, and an extensive examination involving over 100 tests at one of Valve’s facilities. Among the tests are all controller inputs, the audio system, the screen, and internals. Battery health is also assessed to ensure proper functionality and longevity.

“All refurbished units meet or even exceed the performance standards of new retail units. Although they may have minor cosmetic blemishes, they provide …

Fatshark promised to have a team continue working on Vermintide 2 alongside development of Darktide, and has stuck to that promise. In November it added a new level called Trail of Treachery for free alongside a collection of premium cosmetics called Absent Friends, and a patch that addressed a couple of outstanding bugs and brought Vermintide 2’s hefty download size down by 25 GB.

The party continues with Tower of Treachery, another free map that will continue the story begun in Trail of Treachery. Turns out that Sienna Fuegonasus, the resident pyromancer of the Ubersreik Five, has a twin sister named Sofia who is the black sheep of the family, by which I mean a necromancer. Sofia has taken over an old tower belonging to Olesya, the spooky lady who transports you to and from each…

RAM chip manufacturer Micron has recently been making some interesting claims about its next generation of ultra-fast memory for graphics cards, GDDR7. Compared to what’s currently being used (GDDR6X and GDDR6), Micron says its forthcoming tech is “expected to achieve greater than 30% improvement in frames per second for ray tracing and rasterization workloads.”

That’s a remarkable performance boost, no matter how you look at it, and it’s normally the preserve of the significant architectural changes a new GPU design brings in. However, while it’s certainly true that the data transfer rate and bandwidth of GDDR7 will be at least 30% greater than the fastest GDDR6/6X on offer right now, it’s a different story altogether when it comes to actual games and applications.

Micron s…

Warhammer: Vermintide 2 is five years old, and that means it’s free to play over the weekend. The big birthday celebration also sees the return of A Quiet Drink, a special event level in which players brawl with a horde of Ratmen and Chaos Warriors while trying to find someplace to get a drink.

We liked Vermintide 2 an awful lot when it came out in 2018, declaring in our 80% review that its bad matchmaking and RPG progression were more than made up for by “feverishly fun” combat and level design. Since then it’s gotten a steady stream of updates, both free and paid, including the great roguelike-inspired Chaos Wastes mode. Vermintide 2 was a major hit for Fatshark, and remains popular to this day: In fact, its peak concurrent player count over the past couple of months hasn’t been…

Ubisoft says it is cutting ties with Rainbow Six Siege streamer Thaqil and removing his streamer charm from the game as a result of a series of racist jokes he made on Tiktok about the Black operator Castle.

Thaqil made at least three videos on Tiktok targeting Castle: A “Kiss, Marry, Avoid” in which he said he’d avoid Castle “because he’s black,” a “challenge” to name an operator based on the letter N in which he picked Castle, and one in which he looked meaningfully at a banana after being assigned to play Castle. The Tiktoks have since been deleted but are still accessible on Twitter.

“Ubisoft does not tolerate any form of racism, bullying or harassment,” Ubisoft told NME. “We believe in providing positive and engaging entertainment experiences where everyone feels welcom…

I love a Civilization reveal. The grand strategy series has been going for 33 years, and Firaxis always finds something to change with each new one, always controversially. Civilization 6 unraveled cities into districts that span multiple hexes, for example. Will Civilization 7 stuff them back onto one tile? Or revamp something else entirely, like combat or the victory conditions? Will they make another stab at a battle royale mode? (Probably not.)

We’ll have answers later this month. First, we’ll see Civilization 7’s debut gameplay trailer at Opening Night Live, the Geoff Keighley showcase that precedes the Gamescom convention in Germany. That’ll be on August 20 at 11 am PT, viewable on the Gamescom Twitch channel.

Immediately after that, Firaxis will stream a 20 m…

In a new interview with IGN, voice actor Doug Cockle, famed as the voice behind The Witcher trilogy hero Geralt of Rivia, says it’s “inevitable” that AI will be increasingly used in the process of game development, and that’s not necessarily a bad thing—but it is potentially “dangerous” if voice actors don’t take steps to control how their voice is used.

“AI is inevitable and developers will use AI,” Cockle said. “We are not 100% sure exactly what that means.

“They’re already doing it in various ways, filling in background, NPC voices, and things like that, which is unfortunate because those voices were all human beings at one point, and the voices are all modelled on human beings. So they have taken someone’s voice, put it into their database, digitized it, and are us…

Two of the largest NAND flash manufacturers are eyeing up a mega merger, reports suggest. Kioxia, once part of Toshiba, is said to be nearing a deal with Western Digital that would see the two companies combine to become a new SSD storage entity to rival market share leader Samsung.

According to Kyodo News, the companies are expected to agree to the merger by the end of the month.

US-based Western Digital’s shareholders are expected to own 50.1% of the new company when the deal goes through. Kioxia will make up the rest. Toshiba and SK Hynix will have a say in how the new company will be set up, however, as Toshiba still owns a huge stake in Kioxia since the company was spun out of its own memory arm and SK Hynix is an indirect investor, Nikkei reports.

Nikkei suggests…

Save your win streak in a single click with the answer to today’s Wordle, give every game a boost with our guess-improving tips and advice, or find direction with a clue written specifically for the July 7 (748) Wordle. However you want to win, we’ve got all you need right here.

This turned out to be a quick and easy Wordle for me; a simple case of two letters, three letters, then a win. Finding the answer that fast is still a bit of a pleasant shock even after playing daily, for goodness knows how long, although it does leave me wondering how to spend my idle PC time until tomorrow.

Today’s Wordle hint

A Wordle hint for Friday, July 7

The word you’re looking for today is the name of a delicious fried cake-like treat, often formed into a circular…

There are plenty of Wordle tips waiting for you below, covering everything from general daily play to a fresh clue for the December 6 (900) game. Need something a little more direct? You’ve got it. Keep on scrolling and you’ll soon find yourself staring at today’s Wordle answer.

Ah, today’s puzzle was another quick one, thanks in part to a slip of the keyboard that accidentally revealed a letter I hadn’t thought to try. That may not be the smartest way to win, but I’m happy to take a little bit of dumb luck in whatever form it happens to appear in. Hopefully tomorrow my fingers and mind will be back to their usual selves, and… actually, maybe I’ll just hope for dumb luck again.

Today’s Wordle hint

Wordle today: A hint for Wednesday, December 6 Read more

Earlier this month, Polish game devs, including several from CD Projekt Red, formed the Polish Gamedev Workers Union (PGWU). This came in the wake of further layoffs at the company in July, to the tune of 9% of its workforce. At the time, CEO Adam Kiciński explained the move as something to help make the teams more “agile and effective”, but agile and effective doesn’t pay the rent.

“This event created a tremendous amount of stress and insecurity,” explains the union’s website, “affecting our mental health and leading to the creation of this union in response. Having a union means having more security, transparency, better protection, and a stronger voice in times of crisis.”

The devs at CD Projekt Red have shed more light on the situation during an interview with IGN, …

Update 02/01/2023: Added comment from one of the co-creators. I also note that in the last few minutes the AI has recreated an actual skit from Seinfeld.

AI may well be about to take our jobs and incinerate us to save the planet, but there’s also something purely fun about watching these various technologies emerge blinking into the light. There are highly questionable use cases, sure, and the arguments over things like AI lawyers or AI art entering competitions are going to run and run, but for every huge project with potentially world-altering consequences there are a hundred tinkerers out there doing weird and wonderful things with this nascent tech.

I bring you Nothing, Forever. This is the name of an always-on Twitch stream, embedded below…

The world of custom RTX 4060 graphics cards is a strange one for sure. From adorable, single-fan Mini-ITX GPUs, to unnecessary three-fan models, there’s a 4060 for everyone it seems. And with the RTX 4060 Ti 16GB having launched today to little enthusiasm, I thought it was a good time to go over just how experimental and strange some of the third-party designs for Nvidia’s recently released RTX 4060 are, and why this card in particular affords such wild design variations.

Add-in boards like Lenovo’s Mini-ITX GeForce RTX 4060, currently limited to the company’s own prebuilt PCs, could one day hit retailers and give mini-PC enthusiasts all the benefits of a 40-series card in a small form factor. We’re also seeing somewhat unnecessary experimentation, such as that of Gigabyte’s tripl…

Andrzej Sapkowski’s got a new Witcher book on the way, which means he’s out and about being his usual scorchingly, wonderfully honest self on the interview circuit. Most recently, he’s been at Vienna Comic Con, where he chatted with Austrian gaming website Cerealkillerz about writing (don’t do it), videogames (he doesn’t play them), and the Netflix Witcher TV series (they didn’t listen to him).

“Maybe I gave them some ideas,” Sapkowski said when asked if he ever gave Netflix feedback on the show, “but they never listened to me.” Emitting what I can only describe as a kind of cackle, Sapkowski repeated “they never listen,” before giving an impression of a Netflix exec irritatedly asking “Who’s this? It’s a writer, it’s nobody,” and dismissing Sapkowski with an airy wave of the hand…

Quite a few years after we first got a look at its early development and it won a bunch of indie show awards, surreal RPG Knuckle Sandwich will release next month: November 23, 2023. The game got a lot of attention back in the era when Undertale was still fresh because it offered something similar, and yet, very distinctly different.

“Guide a young man through his first day in Bright City – a bustling island paradise with a horrible secret. Find a new job, make new friends, and attempt to solve a mystery revolving around a ludicrous gang and a fanatical cult,” reads the official description.

The trick is that in addition to an offbeat sense of humor, Knuckle Sandwich’s turn-based battles are all played out in minigames reminiscent of the WarioWare series. Specific to e…

The $1 PC Game Pass introductory price has evaporated again. The deal has been offered off and on for years now, but mostly on, and has included as much as a three month subscription to Microsoft’s game library. Mostly it’s been one month for $1, which was reduced to 15 days for $1 at the start of August, and has now been reduced to nada. PC Game Pass is back to $10/month from the start. The console version is also its standard $11/month, and Game Pass Ultimate is $16/month.

It’s pretty obvious why the deal was dropped now: to keep us from paying $1 to power through Starfield in two weeks, which would come to a 98.57% discount on Starfield’s $70 Standard Edition, with the obvious caveat that you’d have to stop playing at the end of the trial.

The regular $10/month PC Game Pa…

If you’re finding today’s Wordle a bit tough, then you’re in the right place because you’ll find everything you need to solve the April 8 (658) game right here. There’s a helpful clue just below if you’d like a pointer, links to our archive of past answers and handy guides, and even a quick clickable link to today’s answer too.

Today’s Wordle turned out alright in the end, although the first two guesses couldn’t have gone much worse if I’d tried. There’s nothing quite as crushing as typing out a really great, balanced opener… and seeing not a single letter turn yellow. Still, it’s unexpected situations like these that help make every Wordle answer so much fun to find.

Wordle hint

A Wordle hint for Saturday, April 8

Wordle needs you to find…

There’s a long tradition of connections between Dungeons & Dragons and the videogames based on it. Pool of Radiance, the 1998 videogame that kicked off the Gold Box series, was also released as a pen-and-paper adventure called Ruins of Adventure in the same year. More recently, Baldur’s Gate 3 incorporated parts of the adventure Baldur’s Gate: Descent into Avernus—if you want to know more about why there are so many tiefling refugees fleeing Elturel, that book has your answer. (Wyll’s dad shows up in it too.)

The next D&D supplement is Planescape: Adventures in the Multiverse, and it includes at least a few things players of 1999’s Planescape: Torment will recognize. For starters, one piece of official artwork shows the Smoldering Corpse Bar, which either still has I…

Keep your Wordle win streak growing, and learn how to make the most of your crucial opening guesses with our helpful guides and tips. Get all the help you need with today’s Wordle, too: there’s a clue for the March 29 (648) puzzle just below, and a little past that, you’ll find the answer to today’s game ready and waiting for you.

I struggled far more than I should have with today’s puzzle. Not enough greens and too many greys started me off on the wrong foot, and two more goes with little to show for it had me worried that there was no coming back. Thankfully, a couple of well-placed greens finally showed up, and I guessed today’s Wordle answer on my next move.

Wordle hint

A Wordle hint for Wednesday, March 29

This term often refers to a steady …

Of all the VR painting apps around, Vermillion is the one we’ve got our eye on right now. It brings the joy of painting with realistic, analog colour mixing into VR games, and one artist has been taking full advantage of its features in Half-Life: Alyx.

Liz Edwards is a Senior Character Artist working on Apex Legends. Just recently, she’s been diving into City 17 to create gorgeous oil paintings of the characters (via Mixed), and her surroundings. When used as an application overlay in VR games, this comprehensive oil painting sim is giving artists the tools to capture gorgeous gamescapes that are far beyond what a simple screenshot can accomplish.

Designed on a whim by Thomas van den Berge (support the creator) in under a week, Vermillion’s beta overlay mode allows artists …

The sky-high cost of the best OLED gaming monitors versus OLED TVs is something of a conundrum, what with 27-inch 1440p OLED monitors being priced up with 48-inch 4K OLED TVs. But here’s the thing. LCD monitors are still very good and can be had a startlingly low prices.

For proof, consider this quartet of extremely affordable gaming panels for Amazon Prime Day. Pricing kicks off at just $90 and even the most expensive option is $250. They’re all high refresh with at least 144 Hz and you get a choice of resolutions and form factors from plain old 1080p up through 34-inch ultrawide.

Arguably the best all-round deal of the bunch is the Acer Nitro XV271U. It’s a 27-inch 1440p model, which remains something of a size, resolution and pixel density sweetspot for gaming, with a 1ms…