Intel's Arc B580 graphics card impressed us a few months back, thanks to genuinely decent performance with plenty of VRAM at a mainstream price, but we never got around to reviewing the even cheaper B570 model - until now. That might not be such a bad thing though, as it's meant that we could spend some real time using this GPU as it's meant to be used, get an idea of availability and run some extra tests on the driver overhead issues identified by the tech press post-launch.

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The arrival of a new Inkle game is always cause for celebration in my books, but I'll admit I was somewhat surprised when Expelled received 'An Overboard Game' as an addendum. Previously known as Miss Mulligatawny's School for Promising Girls, the name change did dampen my excitement for it a bit, because as much as I've enjoyed Inkle's games in the past, Overboard is probably the one I've liked the least. It's got nothing to do with the game's top notch writing or deliciously villainous heroine, nor its frankly brilliant premise of trying to get away with literal murder before you arrive into New York by boat and face the awaiting police.

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The story of the AMD Ryzen 9 9950X3D is refreshingly straightforward: it is as fast as the chart-leading Ryzen 7 9800X3D in games but has double the cores, so it's significantly better in content creation scenarios like 3D modelling or video transcoding where all available threads are used. If you want a single CPU that can do it all, this is the one to get - even at a hefty £659/$699.

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If you weren't already worried about game developers - and, heck, you really should be by now - the growing emergence of games explicitly about burnout is certainly a good reason to start. Wanderstop, in a similar vein to last summer's Dungeons of Hinterberg, is exactly that, only this time instead of opting for a breezy vacation to get away from it all, your location is a little more confined. Imagine Alice in Wonderland except, instead of a whole forest to act as her psychological gauntlet, Alice is trapped in a single clearing that's been turned into a kind of max-security plant-based rehab facility.

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Before I tested the Radeon RX 9070 and RX 9070 XT, I wondered just what else AMD could try. After all, we've seen good performance, competitive pricing and even gigantic cost reductions on legacy cards to improve their value, yet AMD still makes up a fraction of the discrete graphics card market according to the Steam Hardware Survey. What makes RDNA 4 any different?

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Split Fiction isn't your dad's It Takes Two - which is just as well, as that dad's currently a tiny wooden puppet being serenaded by a singing couple's counselling book. It might look and feel very similar to It Takes Two, particularly in the way its dual protagonists Zoe and Mio can leap, bound and grapple with playful exuberance through its bevy of winding and fast-paced action sequences. But it doesn't take long to realise this is an altogether different beast that's easily Hazelight Studio's most ambitious and inventive co-op adventure yet.

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Knights in Tight Spaces expands on every part of the Fights in Tight Spaces template, but an abundance of new ideas swamps the clarity the original game had.

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Despite the overwhelming power of the RTX 5090, it was perhaps the RTX 5070 that saw the most headlines in the wake of Nvidia's 50-series announcements. RTX 4090 levels of performance from a $550 card is a heck of a promise, but what's arrived isn't anywhere near as exciting. Instead, we're looking at something akin to the RTX 4070 Super, a good card by all accounts at its $600 price point, but equipped with DLSS 4 and discounted to $550. That's a reasonable upgrade, but not one that'll grab the headlines.

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While Waiting is a game that belongs in a gallery. It's installation art, and maybe you know the kind. It's a lark, but a difficult, complex, ponderous lark, if such a thing is possible. It's WarioWare designed by Beckett. It's Super Bartleby Bros. It's a game about waiting, a state of being that so many games are designed to try and minimise or avoid entirely (or sell you ways to jump past, granted). And yet just as waiting pops up in games even when designers are trying to avoid it, waiting can disappear utterly when you try to focus in on it and it alone. While Waiting. So it's about the things you do as waiting is taking place. But does that mean you've ceased to wait, or that you're still waiting and you're doing this other stuff too?

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Partial as I am to a thunderous multiplayer gunfest, I've been firmly in Delta Force's camp since it was revealed in 2023. The bipartisan military junta of Battlefield and Call of Duty is in dire need of a shake-up, and the passion Team Jade seemingly has for Delta Force - a somewhat forgotten series in the West, but a cultural phenomenon in China where the studio is based - made me hopeful its take on big-budget buddy blasting would help change the tune for this particular strand of first-person shooting.

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One of the great magic tricks of the Two Point management games concerns how the series tackles subjects that a lot of people struggle to agree on. You know, like healthcare and education. And yet, with a few chirpy cartoon characters wandering around, a bit of silliness in the detailing, a handful of goofy names in the resume stack and some light satire playing over the tannoy, the whole thing rushes past in a cheery blur. This time out we're looking at museums. Does Two Point have anything to say about this stuff? No and - sort of - yes, actually. It's interesting.

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Let us consider for a moment the duality of Monster Hunter. At a basic level, it couldn't be easier to explain - practically everything you need to know is right there in the title! This is a series about tracking enormous beasts, clobbering them into submission, then crafting their bits into better gear, fancier weapons - endlessly repeating that cycle until you simply can't muster the enthusiasm anymore. But it's also a series that's accrued such a vast wealth of interlinking and often comically opaque systems over its two decades of existence that even old-timers like me usually end up having to resort to a Google.

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The RTX 5070 Ti is here - and it's not a bad value, actually. In fact, with a small bump to raw performance and the inclusion of multi frame generation for $50 less than the previous generation card, it may be the best performing GPU you can get for $750... assuming that it's actually available at its MSRP for more than a fleeting moment at launch.

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Anyone unfamiliar with the Like A Dragon series might assume it's the gaming equivalent of a Wetherspoons with poor acoustics: suffocating noise, confusing conversations, reused textures, and the constant, anxious threat of erupting violence. And while it's true that at least 60 percent of your problems can be resolved by hitting menacing men with bicycles, the Yakuza games actually have disarming emotional range. They're as much about reflective conversations on rooftops as they are about punching bears; the only games that let you crush an enemy's ass with a weaponised bollard and make you contemplate what it means to grow old in a world you no longer recognise.

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It's been five years since the end of Life is Strange 2, Don't Nod's impassioned but sometimes meandering roadtrip tale. Ditching the small town trappings and blue-haired fan-favourite from the series' original story was a bold move for the developer, and a deliberate push for a different-feeling sequel. But while Life is Strange 2's episodic study of American social issues and the changing relationship between two young brothers had some impressive moments, it also felt like too much of a curveball for some fans, who had expected a more familiar follow-up. It was at this point that Don't Nod and its Life is Strange series permanently parted ways, leaving future franchise entries to be developed by other hands.

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Egypt, present day. A woman makes her way through the Tomb of Seth accompanied by a silent man holding a burning torch. As the woman collects health packs and shoots scorpions that look a little like lobsters, the man with the torch works methodically, briskly lighting every room they move through. When he moves quickly, something exciting's going to happen - you can feel it. When he stops, you know that you're going to have to do something clever or dangerous to get him moving again. That's just the way it is.

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What Avowed lacks in gloss it makes up for with charm, depth and a playful heart. It's one of this year's most pleasant surprises.

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Urban Myth Dissolution Center sits at that awkward junction between enthralling detective game and slightly tedious visual novel. On the face of it, it looks and behaves much like Capcom's Ace Attorney games, though more in the vein of the Miles Edgeworth Investigations duo than Phoenix Wright and Apollo Justice. There are six cases to solve here, and you'll do so through a mixture of 2D point and click investigation work, social media rumourmongering, and some Case of the Golden Idol-style blank-filling to draw your conclusions together.

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After just under a year in early access, this sequel to the beloved 2021 Metroidvania Ender Lilies: Quietus of the Knights is finally ready for prime time. Set a few decades after Ender Lilies (but which you don't need to have played to appreciate this standalone adventure), Ender Magnolia: Bloom in the Mist begins in a very similar fashion. You awaken in a dark and fantastical landscape with only the tiniest scrap of memory to help you get your bearings, but you quickly discover you possess a strange ability to control synthetic, robotic beings called Homonculi to help you fend off wayward attackers. As before, this is a journey of discovery, healing and trying to fix a world where everything - and everyone - has seemingly turned against you, all through the lens of befriending monsters and drawing on their respective abilities to help you push further into this strange and dying land to find the source of its malignance once and for all.

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Direct sequels in games are funny things, aren't they? As narrative contrivances go for honouring all the choices you made and characters you built in the first part of the story, there are usually two schools of thought on how to keep building on that foundation effectively. One is the Star Wars Jedi: Survivor route, where developers rummage even deeper into their bag of tricks and somehow emerge with even wilder skills and abilities that make the first game's power curve look like training wheels.

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Civilization 7 is by no means a bad game. I open with that to acknowledge its competence, and to damn it. Civ is the archetypal 4X, and in some senses, Civ 7 remains a standard-bearer. It's better, in a general sort of way, than most recent attempts to unseat or deconstruct it. There's lots going on, production values are high, and it innovates with a new structure and revamped diplomacy, city expansion, and more.

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With a new found sense of tension, and showpiece Contract missions, Citizen Sleeper is transformed. This follow-up has improved the RPG formula in every way.

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If Nvidia's RTX 5090 was tricky to review, its 80-class offering is even more challenging. PC users have grown used to this tier of card outperforming the outgoing flagship, but let's be clear - RTX 5080 is a slower card than the RTX 4090 while the new RTX 5090 is much, much faster. In many ways, you can think of the new 5080 as a 4080 Super Super. There's a small but appreciated bump to performance against its predecessor - around 13 percent in my testing - and it's delivered for the same price. And of course, you get the latest DLSS 4 feature set, including multi frame generation, which we'll be looking at in this review. So, this is the best GPU you can buy at its price-point - but it's also the only new GPU available at this price-point.

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Stop me if you’ve heard this one before. There is a monastery located high in the mountains of Europe. Grisly secrets lurk within its fortified walls: inhabitants afflicted by strange diseases; bodies dropped from towers, chickens pecking at the bits of splattered brain. Scariest of all? The sheer hypocrisy of those who profess love to God and their fellow humans yet never miss an opportunity to subjugate - with words, cane, or an object much sharper - those more vulnerable than themselves.

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The story Eternal Strands tells is pretty good. A bunch of magic-users known as Weavers are attempting to recover their cultural homeland, which has been sealed behind a mystical barrier for ages. I am always up for any decent pulpy story that involves getting a gang of misfits together and returning to a hallowed place after centuries have passed. You know, and then trying to find out what went wrong.

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I love killing stuff. Always have. It's good for the soul, I reckon. It's tough to fester rage and resentment when you've just slo-mo-shot a Nazi in the gonads (hey, there's an achievement for it!), which is why I'll shortly be petitioning the NHS to have Sniper Elite: Resistance available on prescription. It can't pay off your credit card or make your nine-to-five any more palatable, no, but an hour of this a night has to be good for you. Like an apple a day. Or flossing. But, you know, violent.

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It never goes well for the greenskins at the vanguard of an orc invasion force, but spare a thought for the guys in the second row - no less doomed, and with the added dread of seeing precisely what's coming to them. "Is it just me," bellows one orc to another in a goofy baritone, over the boom of drums and cannon fire, "or are these traps getting stronger?" Seconds later, he rounds the corner into a shipyard and steps onto a briar patch which, by rights, ought not to be there. Not to mention the auto-crossbows firing from the ceiling, the plants belching poison from the corner, and the saw blades ricocheting off the walls. Uruk-bye, my perceptive friend. That's a four-times combo.

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Nvidia's RTX 50-series "Blackwell" graphics cards arrive with this, the RTX 5090. At $2000/£1940, this is an extremely expensive proposition, but it makes some alluring promises in return: best-ever gaming performance from the GB202 GPU, 32GB of high-speed GDDR7 memory for games or content creation, and DLSS 4 with multi frame generation to max out almost any monitor's maximum refresh rate in supported games. Does it deliver?

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Bears, a recent TikTok video suggested to me, are friend-coded. Why is that? Honestly, they look so cuddly. We give stuffed fabric versions of them to children and share videos of them waving as we pass by in SUVs. Speaking of SUVs, we know that, like most animals on the planet, bears are having a hard time because of us. There's guilt there, and tenderness. And yet if we were to meet a bear in the wild, it would be - well, it would be incredibly bad news for us.

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It feels strange to be seeing out the twilight months of the Switch with an HD remaster of a Wii game from 15 years ago, but such is the position we find ourselves in with the launch of Donkey Kong Country Returns HD. Originally made by the folks at Retro Studios and now remastered by prolific Switch publisher and porting house Forever Entertainment, this challenging 2D platformer is itself an attempt to recapture DK's glory days from the SNES, making this something of a double dip in the rose-tinted pools of nostalgia.

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Back in 2006, I brought Dynasty Warriors Vol. 2 for the PSP to Show and Tell at school. Yes, I was that kid. It was a simple enough pitch. Behold, bemused classmates: a hack-and-slash power fantasy where you dominate 3rd-century Chinese battles, cleaving a hundred soldiers with each swing. There are loads of officers to play as, and some of them have massive swords, and some of them have glaives, and some of them are sorcerers, and they're so cool, and, you can ride around on your horse, and you capture bases, and, there's this one really cool guy, and he wears these big antlers, and he has the best horse in the game, and the whole time there's electric guitars going weeeooow in the background.

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Sometimes, you don't quite know what makes something work until you experience another version of it that doesn't. This is, unfortunately, my experience of Marvel Rivals, a team battler that is eminently playable and moreish, but also never quite properly good.

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Audeze is an American brand best known for making everything from some serious audiophile grade headphones to some of the best gaming headsets we've tested. Their MM-500 is more of the former option, as a big, chunky and impressive set of planar magnetic cans which have an eye-wateringly high price tag to boot - you'll just need to fork out £1699/$1699, no big deal really.

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The Sihoo Doro S300 has to be one of the most interesting, if futuristic, looking chairs I’ve seen in a long time. It’s been marketed by the Chinese brand as a ‘zero gravity’ chair, possibly designed to make you feel as if you’re floating in mid-air when in reality you’re writing an important email.

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Back in April, Sega dubbed 2024 the Year of Shadow, in celebration of Sonic's Adventure 2 nemesis. We've had Lego sets, mobile game events, a motorcycle tour, and of course the excellent Shadow campaign in Sonic x Shadow Generations. But it's all been leading up to this, the main event: Keanu Reeves, as Shadow, in Sonic 3.

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I don't think there's much of a finer example of a 'heritage brand' than Cambridge Audio. Founded in 1968, they've been making fantastic audio kit including amps, record decks and headphones for such a long time, and as such, are a brand I've admired from afar. Their P100s are their first run at wireless, over-ear headphones with noise cancelling, which is as competitive of a market as it gets for audio.

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The last time I wrote for Eurogamer, it was to tell the story of how Nintendo announced the end of Animal Crossing: Pocket Camp as a freemium live service game and sent me into a tailspin of despair. The only thing helping me through this bleak time was the fact that, tucked at the very end of Nintendo's email, was the revelation that my save data could live on in a paid app - Animal Crossing: Pocket Camp Complete - which would arrive in "the future".

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As I drag on another hoodie and fight the urge to put on the heating, the soft sands and sun-bleached stones of Ambrosia Island are undeniably appealing. So, too, is Mythwrecked's promise of a wholesome, frictionless adventure - as we haul ourselves towards 2024's finishing line, I can't imagine anything more delightful than losing a few hours exploring a lush, tropical island.

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I like a good gimmick. I think the term unfortunately has negative connotations, used by people to downplay something neat as the only thing going for a product - a game, film, bit of tech, etc. The Cabin Factory is essentially one gimmick. It's not really a full game built around a gimmick, it's just the gimmick. It's a really cool one, though. Is a cabin haunted? Yes or no. Simple. I couldn't play with headphones on, needed to make the room bright, and had Bluey playing on my phone next to my monitor to lower my stress level. It's a damn scary gimmick!

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The review embargo lifts today for Intel's Arc B580 graphics card - the firm's second generation GPU architecture, fully supporting hardware-accelerated machine learning and ray tracing. Intel is aiming squarely at the budget gamer with the $250 Arc B580, promising 12GB of VRAM and average performance that is, according to its own benchmarks, around 10 percent faster on average than the market leader: Nvidia's more expensive RTX 4060 8GB. A B570 is following in January, with a mild haircut to shaders, bandwidth and VRAM (10GB), with a mooted $220 price-point.

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Path of Exile 2 is hard - there's no getting around this simple truth. It's a truth you need to understand before you play the game in order to get the most out of it, and to accept it, if you like. Like the Souls series, this is a game about relishing the challenge and overcoming seemingly impossible odds to move forwards. Through perseverance and trial and error, you will succeed, and you will feel all the more incredible for it.

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I thought we'd all decided during the Xbox 360 days that checkpoints just before boss fights that kicked off with reams of unskippable dialogue were very annoying indeed. No one in their right mind wants to hear the same voice lines repeated over and over again each time you restart a fight, especially fights that are as tough as those in Behemoth. But I guess developer Skydance wasn’t paying attention during that era because this game features some of the worst checkpointing I've experienced in a long time.

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There's a moment when I'm swimming that I can't get over. I'm about to start the front crawl. Feet up against the side of the pool, arms pointed forward, face in, kick out, and then...

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Fairly early on in Caves of Qud, I found myself in the great cave of Golgotha. This was a good while back now, but I'm still thinking about it - I'm still thinking about that cave. The great cave at Golgotha is part of a fairly early quest. You go in to find a malfunctioning robot and then fix it - just to show you're good enough to go off on another, far more meaningful questline. Fine. But that cave! You drop in via an elevator shaft, and if you're particularly careful - or if you can't fly - you have to take it strictly one level at a time on your way down. And what's down there? Darkness. Salty water. Puddles of green goo. But also conveyor belts, stretched and tangled across the earth. Sparking machinery that can give you a nasty shock. Doors that you'll need to find the right key to unlock. The past and the future tangled together, and yet somehow it's all ancient.

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This probably isn't what you want to hear from someone reviewing Flight Simulator 2024, but I spent my first three hours in-game gleefully running along the ground. From the air, this year's iteration is even more breathtaking than its already astonishing 2020 predecessor; from the ground, though, it's something else entirely. Touch down anywhere in the world, set out on foot, and the detail is extraordinary; cool winter light shines through dense forests of alpine trees on sheer snow-covered mountains; bleached rocks and parched flora pepper endless expanses of undulating desert sand; wind-blasted cliffside pathways wind through tawny thickets down to pebbled beaches and gently shimmering water - and provided you stay away from the lumpen photogrammetry of urban sprawls, it all looks so real. If Flight Simulator 2020's holiday in a box potential already had you smitten, developer Asobo's follow-up justifies its existence on its explorable landscapes alone.

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I've always found the Monument Valley games slightly frustrating, because they're beautiful, creative things that don't seem to have that much room for the player. They're quietly misleading in this regard. With their fixed viewpoints, Persian influence and love of Escher-like geometry, they look like perfect brain-teasy puzzle games. In reality they're more akin to the likes of Uncharted than they are something along the lines of Echochrome or Crush. The plan is all laid out for you and you can't really deviate from it. Hit your marks, know your place, and save your sense of wonder for all the visual tricks the developers are playing on you.

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The legacy of Indiana Jones has been on rather shaky ground lately. His last two films didn't quite hit the mark, and it's been even longer since a game has managed to do him justice either. It's a feeling that developer MachineGames seems acutely aware of, too, in the opening stretch of Indiana Jones and the Great Circle. If there was ever a need to prove the studio fully understands what makes Indy great and what he's about, then letting us play a word for word, and almost shot for shot recreation of the iconic prologue from Raiders of the Lost Ark certainly isn't the worst way to go about it.

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It's a bit surreal playing Fantasian with randomised Final Fantasy battle music. But it's not unfitting. At one point I was in a fraught battle against a giant fiery salamander as the unmistakable piercing strings of One Winged Angel distracted me, as if Sephiroth himself was about to swoop down from the sky. To help or hinder, who can say.

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Genshin Impact comparisons are getting boring, aren't they? Oh look, here's a free-to-play open-world game that you can play on your phone, better break out the old waifu jokes and gacha complaints. Well, you might only have to indulge my own Genshin comparisons this one final time, because after spending over 40 hours in the batty, fashion-obsessed world of Miraland, I think Infinity Nikki might just replace Genshin as the new standard that future open-world gacha games are compared to. The main reason I suspect we'll all be changing the target of our eye-rolling is because, while developer Infold Games has clearly nabbed a fair few ideas from Genshin Impact's (now signature) open-world design, it's the first of these post-Genshin-style games to hit the sweet spot between emulation and innovation. Quite the achievement for a series with roots in the mobile dress-up genre.

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Threshold is the kind of horror game that keeps just enough at arm's length to really set your mind ablaze while you're playing. After landing a coveted job with the government, the game begins as you prepare to take on your first shift looking after an important maintenance post just outside the city walls. But before you even arrive, it's clear that something's a bit off. A low, angry and muffled voice directs you into a lift. There's an oxygen meter to your left, and as you start the long ascent up to the surface you watch your supply dwindle away to almost nothing. The air is thin up here, so much so that the clerk you're relieving, a no-nonsense chap called Mo, speaks to you via hastily written notes, as talking simply involves too much effort.

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The Night Train to Lantern City. Just saying these words out loud immediately conjures an image of a place with warm, hushed lighting spooling out of glazed windows, with billows of steam and smoke misting over the landscape. It's certainly an evocative kind of opening, but 30 Birds goes one better, placing its detective heroine Zig on a train careering through space on tracks made of clouds, heading toward a city made of actual paper lanterns. It's a dreamy and impossible kind of architecture, its inhabitants shifting up and down each lantern's colourful panels and wrapping their 2D bodies around the edges of a very real, 3D space, with doorways transporting them to other miniature lamp spaces hanging around its periphery. The locals themselves are a little impossible, too, as you'll clock sentient aubergines and disco-loving djinn glyphs, and, of course, a heck of a lot of birds as you saunter through the city's various districts.

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Loco Motive is one of those games that's very easy to enjoy and feel like you're having a jolly good time while you're playing it. A point and click adventure in the vein of old LucasArts games, this is a funny and exquisitely animated romp across a 1930s Orient Express-alike that delights at almost every turn. It's a murder mystery at its core, albeit one that isn't afraid to laugh at its own expense and employ the same kind of daft puzzle logic as Monkey Island and Day of the Tentacle did before it. There are so many things I like about it, so why did I feel increasingly indifferent to it by the time I hit the end credits?

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To return to Warcraft: Orcs and Humans and Warcraft 2: Tides of Darkness in 2024 is to go back to some of the earliest building blocks of the real-time strategy genre. There were, of course, many great RTS games that preceded Blizzard's high fantasy take on the genre - not least Westwood Studios' seminal Dune 2: Battle for Arrakis. But the point remains: considering these games first appeared in the mid-90s, they are naturally going to feel just a tiny bit antiquated by modern genre standards. An obvious point to make, perhaps, but I think it's important to state upfront that these Warcraft Remasters are very much the games as you (probably) remember them, as opposed to being big, sweeping remakes that have been updated with all the recent mod cons you've probably become accustomed to in the years since.

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I bloody love a theme park: the sights, the smells, the gleeful screams, the sense of utter transportation. But most of all, I love the breathless clash of science and art behind these thoroughly encompassing illusions. I’m the kind of theme park nerd who still gets genuinely giddy when they see technology and creativity crash together like this, and who's been daydreaming their perfect rides and coasters into existence since a run-in with Disney's Haunted Mansion at the age of three became a bit of an obsession. For people like me, the original Planet Coaster was a dream. For all its flaws, it was a brilliantly implemented, beautifully presented suite of creative tools capable of turning theme park flights of fancy into digital reality, and its sequel promises the same, but more.

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Stalker 2 was made in the midst of war. You've probably heard how Ukranian studio GSC Game World bussed workers out of the country shortly before the Russian invasion. Or how some developers have died in the war. While the first-person shooter released this week doesn't assault the player with overt references to that ongoing conflict, small glimpses of Ukrainian nationalism do peek through - the flag's colours on a box of matches, a field of poppies marking the eerie resting spot of fallen soldiers.

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Breaking up can be hell, but at least most of us don't have to deal with partners and exes who are also actual demons at the same time. Unfortunately, the same can't be said for London shop worker Michelle. Not only is she still reeling from a bad break-up with her very human girlfriend that happened several years previously, but she's also recently caught the eye of a very demanding arch-demon called The Duchess who simply won't take no for an answer - cursing Michelle with a third eye and the prospect of death and eternal damnation if she doesn't submit to love The Duchess in three days' time.

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The last thing I needed was for Pokémon Trading Card Game Pocket to be good. But here we are! It's a cracker, and annoyingly, worryingly, compulsively so. Over the past week or two since The Pokémon Company unleashed this fearsome dopamine machine onto the world, I've been hard pressed to put it down, filling erstwhile empty moments during tooth brushing, kettle boiling and, erm, definitely not working with just one more quick game.

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When meeting someone for the first time, you don’t tend to start by eviscerating their personalities and pointing out all of their deepest flaws, but Dragon Quest III HD-2D Remake doesn't shy away from insulting you and getting straight to the point. This is an old-school JRPG where how you approach your stats matters and it won't hold your hand to guide you through it. There are dragons. There are quests. And there are a whole lot of deaths.

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When you think of Lego games, chances are your brain will go straight to one of the licensed Traveller's Tales games from the last 20 years or so. Whether it's Star Wars, Batman or Indiana Jones, there's no denying their joyful cycles of wild and wilful destruction, clackety building and reams upon reams of daft jokes over the years have come to define what we expect and want from any new licensed Lego adaptation. And I think it's important to state up front that Lego Horizon Adventures, which retells the story of Sony's Horizon Zero Dawn for a fresh and younger kind of audience, is not that kind of Lego game.

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Every morning over the past few weeks I've woken up to the soft wahoos of the Super Mario brothers, the chirping of Pikmin, or snippets from Zelda: Breath of the Wild's beautiful orchestral score. Nintendo's rich library of sounds - most of which are recognisable before you've even opened your eyes - has gently stirred me from slumber and commanded me to sit up and get out of bed. Because until you do, Alarmo doesn't want to stop.

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After playing as an eighteenth-century detective to solve 12 terrible murders in Color Gray Games' sensational debut, The Case of the Golden Idol, the decision to suddenly jump the story forward 300 years for this near-contemporary sequel came as something of a surprise. Not only did there seem to be unfinished business ripe for further unravelling at the end of Case's conspiracy caper, but its detailed pixel art and gurning cast of grotesques also felt so of a piece with its historical set dressing that I wondered whether its freeze-frame tableaus would have quite the same effect at such a far remove from their stylistic beginnings.

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The story of Tetris is pretty well known by now. There have been books and documentaries - foremost among them a wonderful BBC doc called From Russia with Love - and there have been movies and YouTube histories and all that beautiful jazz. And yet what I adore most about Tetris Forever, a new playable, interactive documentary from a team that has already shown it's very, very good at making playable, interactive documentaries, is kind of perverse. What I adore most are the moments that Tetris Forever steps away from the familiar story, the familiar falling shapes, the familiar talking heads and talking points, and makes Tetris feel really weird again.

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It's no great surprise that an animation costing a whopping $250m for two short seasons is ending before it gets to a third, but that doesn't make it any less of a shame. Arcane is a wonderful series, obviously beautiful but also deeply earnest. This show is unafraid to feel things, and feel them hard.

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Based on its first few hours, Metro Awakening could be considered quite the challenger to Half-Life: Alyx's VR crown. The first thing you see once the game starts proper is a small room bursting at the seams with interactive physics objects that can be picked up, inspected and thrown at the walls. More than that, though, they can interact with each other - throw a chess piece at the chess board for instance and multiple pieces sat atop it will be knocked over. Drop a heavy book on the keys of the piano in the corner and it will play the exact notes the book landed on. Hell, there’s even a guitar you can pick up and strum - and as far as I remember, even Alyx didn’t have one of those!

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I will never forget the day my uncle told me about his neighbour's cat Malcolm. Partly because my family always manage to crowbar it into conversation somehow whenever we get together, but mostly because Malcolm is indeed, by all accounts, a bit of a shit (pardon the swear). Every day, he'd waltz through my uncle's cat flap, gobble up the two lots of food he'd put down for his own pair of scaredy-cats, then turn around and promptly leave again. Certain retellings sometimes have him peeing on the mat. Others, puking his guts up.

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It's been a rough old time when it comes to benchmarking CPUs, I can tell you that. The Ryzen 9000 release back in August was let down by relatively meagre performance improvements and an unready software ecosystem, while Intel's 285K and 245K launch last month showed a significant performance regression versus 14th-gen - despite a genuinely interesting shift in architectures. Thankfully, AMD is here to save the day with the Ryzen 9 9800X3D.

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Playing Call of Duty: Black Ops 6's multiplayer this week I felt something I hadn't felt when dashing about in Call of Duty for a little while: just ever so slightly bored.

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Why is it that games don't draw more often from the realms of musical theatre? I'd argue they're just as much a part of our cultural fabric as films and TV shows, but for whatever reason they very rarely manage to get a look in. Sure, they might not be the first thing that 30-something-year-old white men look for on their tapestry of pop culture references, but for a certain sub-section of the gaming population, a dialogue exchange riffing on the lyrics of Les Misérables, say (shout out to Subsurface Circular), is just as likely to elicit a delighted fist pump from me than yet another Twin Peaks reference in something like Alan Wake, for example.

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The telescope is not quite a telescope, but it still works like one. And, more importantly, it still feels like one. You put your eye to the glass and then you move left and right to scan a glorious horizon drawn in sunny skies and churning ocean currents. What's out there? What's waiting for me? Where next?

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I love Slitterhead. I love it despite the fact there's a lot about Slitterhead I don't like very much. A little like that lad you went to school with that you barely liked then and like even less now in adulthood, Slitterhead is crass and seedy and pretty gross. Your other half keeps asking why you don't just ghost him if he's that bad, but the truth is, you're kinda crass, seedy and pretty gross, too. He just brings it out in you, the same as Bokeh Game Studios apparently brings this out in me.

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Mouthwashing begins with a series of contradictions. "I hope this hurts," your mission log reads after listing the number of days your space freighter has spent hauling cargo across the cosmos for your bosses back at Pony Express. "Steer right," you decide, after your ship's computer tells you specifically to deviate left in order to avoid a collision with an unknown orbital body. Then it's time to use the emergency key to override the cockpit console and disengage the autopilot, sealing your fate along with those of your four other crew members in the process.

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There often comes a point in No More Room in Hell 2 when you realise that you're screwed, and it usually arrives about five minutes before the inevitable occurs. Surrounded by shambling corpses, barricades shrieking under their literal dead weight, you'll be popping zombie heads with grim precision when cold reality sets in. Maybe it's the click of your revolver as its ammo runs dry that triggers the revelation, or a fellow survivor you barely know being overwhelmed by the horde. Maybe it's just the sight of another score of undead stumbling into silhouetted view. Either way, the feeling is the same: you're going to die, and no amount of struggle will prevent it.

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If you want to sum up Call of Duty: Black Ops 6's campaign in a single moment - and really all of Call of Duty in a way; this is quintessential CoD - then look no further than Ground Control, a mission roughly three-quarters of the way through the story.

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We're enjoying something of a golden age when it comes to quality video game adaptations. You'd think the acclaim of shows like The Last of Us and Fallout would be ushering in a new dawn of franchises that successfully straddle TV, cinema, and gaming, and yet here I am, slogging my way through yet another sterile, slow, and offensively forgettable licensed offering that fails not only seasoned players but also any newbies unfortunate enough to have chosen this franchise jump into gaming for the first time, too. It's astonishing, really, given the A Quiet Place movies are, on paper, perfect fodder for a terrifying video game adaptation.

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Towards the end of Life is Strange: Double Exposure, protagonist Max Caulfield insists she will not accept another impossible choice "between two shitty options". She's referencing, of course, the original Life is Strange's climactic dilemma, where players were forced to choose whether Max sacrificed her hometown or her closest ally. It's a moment that has reverberated through every Life is Strange game since, and has come to define a series centred around young adult drama and living with the consequences of your actions. Max's declaration she won't pick again between two similar no-win scenarios is meant to feel triumphant: she has experienced that trauma once, and is now older, bolder and wiser, so will instead fight to forge a third path. It makes for a heroic scene, and raises expectations for the game's ultimately rather maddening climax. But it simultaneously also glosses over the reality of that original, heartbreaking decision: that its impossible nature was the point.

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A fantasy role-playing game of astonishing spectacle. This is the best Dragon Age, and perhaps BioWare, has ever been.

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One thing I've always admired about football journalists is their ability to keep finding something new to say about what is, ultimately, the exact same game. In one sense that's just the nature of football, a sport which seems to defy all logic in its ability to create sparkling new drama from the same, enormously well-documented scenarios. But in this case I'm really talking quite specifically about a single club, in Manchester United. A club of which - sorry - I am a lifelong fan.

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After its joyful romp through the multiversal lens of its Night Springs DLC earlier in the year, Alan Wake 2 rounds out its pair of story expansions by going back to what it does best: dialling up the horror, switching off the lights, and having all manner of shadowy ghouls lurch out of the darkness to give you a good old scare. In The Lake House, FDC agent Kiran Estevez finally takes us beyond the chain-link fence of Cauldron Lake's most secretive, walled-off area - the titular research lab where inside its brutalist, concrete depths lurks an experiment that's gone terribly, terribly wrong, and threatens to cause another catastrophic event that could spell disaster for the nearby town of Bright Falls.

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This feels like a rebuilding year for Intel. With AMD's Ryzen processors going from strength to strength and thermal degradation issues dogging Intel's last desktop CPUs, Team Blue has unveiled a new tile-based architecture for both mobile CPUs (Lunar Lake) and desktop CPUs (Arrow Lake S). Lunar Lake arrived to generally positive reviews, with excellent power efficiency, AI hardware support and reasonable performance, so can the new Core Ultra 200S desktop chips pull off the same trick?

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To a casual observer, adapting Ryu Ga Gotoku Studio's swaggering action-RPG looks like a much more straightforward, greenscreen-free proposition. No need to build clanking mech armour or deploy CGI sleight-of-hand to convincingly remove your leading man's nose. The Yakuza brand started out as a contemporary street-level Tokyo crime saga, albeit one capable of reaching operatic heights of melodrama. Thanks to an obsessive amount of architectural and anthropological detail, its fictional setting of Kamurocho has always felt palpably real, from the iconic red gate on Tenkaichi Street to the tight, cluttered warren of the Champion District.

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There's a moment a couple of hours into Batman Arkham Shadow when the prologue ends abruptly and the main game kicks off. It's here where the experience turns from what seems like a traditional, straight forward and fairly linear Batman game in the style of Rocksteady's Arkham series into something else entirely. It took me a little while to put my finger on it, but as I wandered freely around the interior of Blackgate penitentiary, listening to prisoners' conversations as I tried to find some contraband to bribe a guard with, it clicked. This is a Batman Arkham game in every possible way, but it oozes some absolutely delicious Chronicles of Riddick: Escape from Butcher Bay vibes, too.

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You've got to feel for Sam the postwoman. Every day she brings Wilmot the next instalment of his puzzle club subscription, and every day she tries to engage him in conversation - about the weather, why there are five cars in the neighbour's driveway, her sister Ruth moving in, her next walking holiday… Heck, she even invites Wilmot to go on holiday with her at one point. A bit forward, if you ask me, but who am I to stand in the way of human and sentient white cube relationships?

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After years of experimenting, Sega has now established two types of 3D Sonic level. The first are the open zones of Sonic Frontiers that give the hedgehog the space and freedom to unleash his speed, the sort of wide open design only possible (just!) on modern hardware. The second are the tightly-focused, mostly linear stages that evolve the side-scrolling original games into 3D rollercoasters with dizzyingly shifting perspectives, a design first popularised in the Sonic Adventure games.

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I miss expansion packs. Blizzard in particular was famous for what we'd now call "post-launch DLC", updating the likes of StarCraft, Warcraft and Diablo with incredible upgrades that extended beloved storylines while adding on much-needed polish and complexity for players in love with their games. To my intense joy, Vessel of Hatred is very much a Blizzard expansion pack in that classic mould, continuing the cliff-hanger ending of Diablo 4, adding on a wickedly fun new character class and cleaning up some of the cruft that had accumulated over five seasons of play.

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Forgive me reader, but I'm going to reference a tweet. The other day I saw someone I don't know talking about films, and it said: "There is a loss in going from Cronenberg, who is obsessively steeped in Heidegger, McLuhan & Freud, to his legions of imitators, who are obsessively steeped in Cronenberg, giallo & The Shining." They may or may not have been right (reading between the lines, they were probably talking about The Substance, which is a film I haven't seen yet - and hear is very good! - but which is kind of beside the point anyway).

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The Honor Magic V3 is a serious feat of engineering, packing a bigger battery, more advanced camera setup and more powerful specs than its predecessor into a phone that's both thinner and lighter. Like the latest foldables from Samung and Google, it feels like there's once again solid progress being made in the foldable space.

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Is it really time for another Mario Party game already? With Jamboree marking the third get-together on Switch for NintendoCube's long-running minigame marathon, it barely seems long enough to have got the last one out of our system, let alone had time to start craving yet another merry-go-round of Mario-based board game antics. In its defence, one of Jamboree's main attractions is how it's tried to fix a lot of the flaws partygoers had with its various predecessors. It finally introduces online party modes, for example, has the highest number of minigames ever included in the series (over 110, if you're keeping count), as well as a handful of special motion-control modes, and a full-blown single-player campaign for those unfortunate souls who don't have the benefit of three other nearby friends to play local co-op with them.

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Did you know that Studio Ghibli got its name from an Italian plane? As the story goes, founder Hayao Miyazaki took inspiration from a World War II era aircraft called the Caproni Ca.309, which was used for reconnaissance in the North African desert. The plane was commonly known by its nickname Ghibli, which roughly translates to 'southern wind' in Libyan Arabic. A Ghibli wind is known as a fierce, hot and dry air current that carries dust from the North African interior towards the Mediterranean sea. For this reason, some have speculated that Miyazaki chose the name to indicate Studio Ghibli's intention to shake up the animation industry.

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I have a bit of a love/hate relationship with arena fighters. My recent (one-star) Jujutsu Kaisen: Cursed Clash review is probably a decent example of that. Although I've come to loathe it in recent years, I actually have very fond memories of the genre. Coming home from school and mashing buttons in split-screen multiplayer was the norm for me, and my friends and I unanimously agreed that Dragon Ball Z: Budokai Tenkaichi was the cream of the arena fighter crop.

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What's the true meaning of fantasy? Often it's synonymous with magic, fairies, and dragons; tales of heroism and drama; vast, elaborate worlds that defy the impossible. Metaphor: ReFantazio gives us all of this, but Atlus goes deeper too. What is the real purpose of a fantasy story? Is it a metaphor for our own world? And what if a fantasy story centred on, of all things, a magical election?

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Phoenix Springs doesn't so much start as awaken, adrift in a shimmering void of static to an only slightly discordant choral swell. And that's just the title screen. Developer and art collective Calligram Studio's debut project is an astonishingly assured piece of work, presenting a constantly, hypnotically churning world of loosely sketched lines, pitch-black shadows, and stark primary hues that's part queasy expressionist nightmare, part perpetually receding dream. It's a game of striking jump cuts and slick transitions, of rich diegetic soundscapes underscored by threatening synthetic thrums. Even its protagonist's ever-present narration crackles and whispers as if broadcast through a transistor radio picking up a signal from another realm.

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For a new game studio, there are few genres as difficult to break into as that of the tactical shooter. With the space dominated by behemoths Valorant and Counter-Strike, newcomers are up against established games with deep tactical gameplay, distinctive world designs, and dedicated communities. Newbies face a demanding set of player expectations, with a checklist that includes immaculate gunplay, perfect pacing and ultra-clear level design as the bare minimum. And only when you get beyond that do things get really interesting. What have you got that's fresh, and can encourage new forms of tactical thinking? Can you provide enough of a hook that players will want to stick around to master the mechanics? Is your game simply different enough to stand out?

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Coming back to a game like Starfield - or indeed any Bethesda RPG - always begins with a series of inevitable questions. Where am I? What the heck am I doing again? And why can't I fast travel anywhere to get my bearings? Oh yes. It's because I'm over-encumbered. Again.

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Silent Hill 2 Remake is a bloody triumph.

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Better strap in folks, this killer thriller has a few twists in the tale. Shadows of Doubt is, on paper, my dream game, a detective simulator where you solve procedurally generated crimes through a combination of Obra Dinn-esque deduction and Deus Ex style infiltrations. In a fully simulated city of hundreds of citizens, you solve thefts, murders, and kidnappings by legally or illegally entering homes and offices, scanning for fingerprints, searching for clues, and cross-referencing dizzying amounts of information to track down the culprit.

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Grado made some waves in the headphone world back in 2020 with its limited edition Hemp headphones which, as the name suggested, were made of hemp and maple, combining the warmth of a wood cabinet for audio with a dose of the good stuff. 2024 has seen Grado make the Hemps a permanent part of their range, with an appropriate price - $469 in the USA (up from their previous price at $420), and £439 in the UK. Of course, that's by no means cheap, and it's a lot more than previous Grado models I've looked at, such as the lovely SR325x. I've been using the Hemps for the last few weeks to see if they're worth that higher price.

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For a series approaching its 40th birthday, Princess Zelda's moment to take centre stage in her own legend has been a long time coming. She came close in 2009's Spirit Tracks, even if it was as a ghost locked inside a suit of armour, and we felt her presence at almost every turn in 2023's Tears of the Kingdom - an impressive feat considering the time and distance separating her from your over and underground ramblings. But even in her brightest moments, Zelda has always played second fiddle to her sword-wielding hero Link. Until now, where it's Link who gets spirited away by the latest evil being of the day, and it's Zelda who must finally restore the world of Hyrule to rights.

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A sequel that takes the thrilling cold-survival city-building heart of Frostpunk and evolves it in every way, while losing none of what made the series so special to begin with.

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Since its debut in 2006, Dead Rising has built its reputation as the zany zombie sandbox game about making your kill counter constantly tick up while using everything and the kitchen sink to smash rotting brains. But as you went about depriving the zombie masses of their putrefying faculties, it quickly became clear that Dead Rising wasn't just another mindless action game, as it tackled themes and issues around US consumerism smartly and seriously.

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It's probably strange to accuse a game like The Plucky Squire of realism. This is a game in which a heroic character from a children's fantasy book can leap from the pages and rove around the bedroom desk on which the book was being read. It's a game in which you can move back and forth, from 2D illustration to chunky, squishy 3D in the name of adventure.

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