For Analogue, the boutique gaming brand that made its business in mining the emotions of the cash- and nostalgia-rich grown-up hardcore, the game has surely changed. When the company burst onto the scene in 2015, the use of FPGA technology to run old games was relatively new. Now, everybody is at it - and so Analogue finds itself needing to more precisely carve out and defend its corner of the market.

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In the opening of the new Call of Duty, Milo Ventimiglia lays a cigar on the grave of series fixture Frank Woods. He takes a long stroll through a cemetery with Troy Marshall, the powerful backbone of last year's story, now white-haired and walking with a stick. Four decades have passed since the events of Black Ops 6; gone in the blink of an eye, the pull of a trigger.

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Confusing things, video games. I've always thought that Tetris is the ultimate game: the game we'll all still be playing when the sun explodes. And yet, at the same time, I've also thought that there are better puzzle games out there. Well, there's one better puzzle game at least.

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Arc Raiders is notionally about humans battling to the death over scraps on a blasted Earth ruled by robots. But it's really about risking your virtual life for some apricots to satisfy the world's most demanding chicken. It was on one such poultry-induced shopping expedition when I encountered three men cresting a rise over a sand dune, bristling with weapons.

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For all the struggles that Xbox has suffered over the last year, one thing that can't be said is that gaming's biggest publisher hasn't enjoyed some bright spots. One such gleaming piece of their unwieldy portfolio is Obsidian Entertainment. The California-based studio, most famed for role-playing adventures, has already enjoyed success this year with Avowed and an early access release of Grounded 2. They've saved the best for last, though - The Outer Worlds 2 is the best of this hearty trifecta.

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Is there a sound more beautiful than the ding of a squirt well-squirted and a job well done? A baby's laugh, you might counter, or the chittering chorus of a brand-new day. But as someone who's put a good 92.7 hours into the original PowerWash Simulator, I feel confident saying that ding, and the Pavlovian pleasure it instills, is indeed the most glorious sound of all. And with the advent of PowerWash Simulator 2, it's time to do it - and ding it - once more.

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Part of me thinks I should tell you what happens a couple of hours into Keeper. And then how it continues to evolve, again and again, from there. These are such big, magical moments in Psychonauts developer Double Fine's latest adventure - a mesmerising trek through a mysterious world, with, perhaps, a touch of thatgamecompany's seminal Journey in its DNA - that slapping five stars on it without delving deeper almost feels like I'm doing my job wrong. But to hell with that. Instead, I'm going to do my best to preserve at least some of Keeper's secrets, so you might get to enjoy its remarkable sense of goggle-eyed wonder unsullied too.

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The Chinese Room has managed to make something from a box of inherited parts, but this action RPG feels hollow and functional, and is only redeemed by some stellar performances from the characters and cast.

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Ball x Pit (from here on out I'm going to call it Ball Pit, because that x is more than my brain and my typing fingers can handle) (Editor's Note: not if I can help it!) is the latest roguelite from Devolver Digital. But it's also the latest game from Kenny Sun, a developer I've been following, on and off, for ages.

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Do I like the ROG Xbox Ally X? Yes. Does it give me those sweet techdorphins you get from using a lovely bit of new kit? Will it replace my Steam Deck? Almost certainly. Is it an Xbox? Hmmm. While writing this I actually paused here to figure out the sound I made after asking myself the question. While I wrote "hmmm", it was more sort of a "tsk" but a questioning one. The kind of sound you'd make if asked the universe's most impossible question. "Is this new handheld an Xbox or a PC?" I ask myself again, hoping my abrasive tone will knock some sense out of my brain.

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Enjoying modern, Switch-era Pokémon games as someone familiar with the good old days is often a question of how much you're happy to let slide. With Sword and Shield it was the eerie Potemkin Villages, the whiff of cut content, the sudden and, I still maintain, very bad decision to do away with dungeons entirely that you had to let go. But in exchange you got one of the series' biggest gambles, an actually-kind-of-great first stab at open world zones in the Wild Areas.

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After the muddled innovations and watered-down warfare of Battlefield 2042, Battlefield 6 was pitched as a return to what made the series great. And it is that…mostly. Gone are the ponderous 128-player maps that stretched 2042's action too thin, and the pseudo-futuristic setting with gimmicky hero shooter-like abilities. Back are the rollicking 64-player slugfests, the more grounded quartet of soldier classes, the lowercase modern warfare setting, and even the single-player campaign. All this infused with a fetching burned-orange aesthetic and a renewed emphasis on crumbling, billowing destruction.

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There's a moment around Little Nightmares 3's midpoint when, following a tepid first half so safe it often feels like a tribute act, new series developer Supermassive finally seems to hit its stride. Slowly the hum of a mysterious subterranean void gives way to rain-lashed walkways as our diminutive protagonists brave the exterior of some vast, heaving machine. Then the reveal of the grand Carnevale, its sprawl of big top tents and twinkling lights, its parade of grotesque fairground thrill seekers, all perfectly framed. Little Nightmares 3's often slavish adherence to the past means it's burdened with far too much frustrating legacy faff, but even so, it's hard not to get lost in the spectacle of it all.

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"Just think of it like a video game!", Consume Me's increasingly put-upon protagonist Jenny tells herself early on as she prepares to take the dieting plunge. The final year of school is approaching, adult life is looming, and if that wasn't enough, the words of her overbearing mother - how will she ever get a boyfriend if she doesn't lose some weight? - are lodged in her brain. It'd be enough to overwhelm anyone, let alone a teenager still trying to find her place in the world.

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Small form factor gaming PCs are getting ever more popular, but the often fiddly assembly process is one that you don't need to undertake yourself. This is where the Wired2Fire HAL 9000 Mini PC I've been testing recently comes in. It's a well-specced mini PC with full-size desktop parts, including an AMD Ryzen 7 9700X processor, RTX 5070 Ti graphics card, 32GB of DDR5-6000 RAM and a 2TB Kingston Fury Renegade SSD. All of this fits inside the Cooler Master NR200P Max V2, an 18-litre case that ranks amongst our top Mini ITX PC case recommendations.

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To be Hercule Poirot is to know you're probably going to win. Agatha Christie's best-known child is sharp, methodical, and insufferable, even more so now because Microids decided to make him hot. Some might argue that it doesn't matter what Poirot looks like, but those people are wrong; I know a few of the older Blazing Griffin games stuck with Poirot's shiny egg-shaped head, but none can hold a candle to the bowtied visage of David Suchet. I try not to dwell too much on this as I reacquaint myself with Microids' tall, angular daddy-o - head full of hair, resplendent in a white suit and silk cravat - who first appeared in 2023's Murder on the Orient Express. Tonight, this Poirot is in the club, and unlike David Suchet (or the entirely rizzless Kenneth Branagh), he could probably get it.

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First, in 2011, we got Dead Island, Techland's opinion-dividing, melee-focused zombie adventure, taking place on the sun-soaked island of Banoi. Three years later, Kyle Crane made his debut in Dying Light, literally dropping into the city of Harran as all hell broke loose. Now, after rescuing that city and its remaining sentient inhabitants from despicable forces (or not, if you instigated one particular ending from the expansion Dying Light: The Following), he's back, and he's out for revenge on the man who's spent the last 13 years torturing him.

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I still can't figure out how to think about Ghost of Yōtei. And, honestly, its predecessor, Ghost of Tsushima, even four years on. I enjoy these games - I enjoy these kinds of games, even. I'm a sucker, if you'll forgive the pun, for the Sucker Punch style of open world. A kind of Diet Assassin's Creed: even lighter; even shallower; even simpler to grasp and follow around, sword in hand, air in head. Sometimes with video games and their often unfathomable complexity and depth, these games feel like just about all I can handle. Sometimes you just need Love Island, Emily in Paris, an infinite, blue-lit bedtime scroll. And sometimes you snap out of it.

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A fun arcade karting experience is often too chaotic for its own good, but a tight handling model with a high skill ceiling offers surprising depth.

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In Hades, we meet Sisyphus, the once founder and king of Ephyra, now relegated to the underworld and tasked with pushing a boulder up a hill for eternity because he dared incur the wrath of Zeus. He's an unlikely ally; a cheerful chap seemingly content with his perpetual lot, keen to dish out advice, boons, and the odd joke. Sisyphus is a suitable parallel for Zagreus, in the first game: his task may be endless, but he can find the fun in it - no matter how many times the boulder rolls down the hill, he rolls up his sleeves and takes on the challenge once more with feeling.

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The story of Ramza Beoulve is presented to you as a historical accord - an account of a tale recorded by one historian and told to you by another. It's subjective, an interpretation of loose facts collected by an archivist with a notable bias: to celebrate the achievements of your protagonist, a man whose influences and inspirations have been concealed by the church. As such, different readings of this story can proffer different results. Historical records are spotty at best, and even when written by the victor, choose to omit often-important facts.

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Baby Steps walks a fine line between frustration and accomplishment to provide a walking simulator and climbing experience quite unlike anything else.

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While I broadly believe that looter-shooters are the worst thing to happen to virtual gunfighting since Daikatana, Borderlands is a bit of a guilty pleasure of mine. There is something about Gearbox's cartoon caper that slips through my armour like a Jakobs throwing knife. I even liked Borderlands 3, heaven help me.

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After an absolute age, EA's wheelie classic is back with great handling and a whole world of slightly jarring niceness.

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If you take nothing else from me today, just take these three words: stick with it.

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The Nothing Headphone (1) sees the trendy smartphone brand take a first stab at the extremely competitive wireless noise-cancelling headphone market. With their £244/$299 price tag, they sit right in the middle of a sector that's long been dominated by Sony, Bose and others. We've also seen some other excellent options including the Cambridge Audio Melomania P100 attempt to break the trend, with varying levels of success.

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It's nice to have a friend. More than one if you're lucky. My memories of childhood friends are predictably tied to the era: Sunny D, Apple Fruitang, MTV, bikes, and VHS tapes are all there, hanging around the back of my mind. Surprisingly, though, it's stupidly long walks that I remember most fondly, although rather hazily. Like most kids before they had jobs (a paper round came some years later), we didn't have much money, and what we did have we wanted to spend on sweets, so we'd often walk miles to avoid getting a bus - we even had a squeaky metal trolley we'd wheel about to carry all our stuff as we ventured to the distant pitch-and-put or tennis courts.

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Metroidvanias are the games where I'm allowed to get stuck in several places at once. Head upwards and there's a boss that I can't beat. Try going down the stairs instead and there's an environment that kills me just for stepping into it. Left and right are dead ends that I don't have the tools to navigate yet. Stuck on all four points of the compass! That's a Metroidvania.

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Cronos: The New Dawn invites you into a rich and authentic representation of 1980s-era communist Poland in the wake of a terrifying cataclysm - The Change - that has completely wiped out humanity. This strange disease has rendered mankind into grotesque beings, set on merging into aggressive clumps of biomass and in the process becoming all-powerful. It's our protagonist's job - the Traveler, ND-3576 - to travel back in time and 'awaken' lost souls who refuse to move on. The one key imperative to note here, when you aren't soaking in all the impending doom, is: don't let them merge. The game won't let you forget this in a hurry.

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Strange synths rumble and whir in an electronic hum. Wind chimes tinkle. An unearthly screech in the distance and the bass escalates in intensity. Rain tickles the DualSense. What exactly is out there?

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Last year Honor's Magic V3 foldable phone impressed, offering mature software, a thin and robust design and more powerful hardware. This year, thanks to the unlucky reputation of the number four in China, we've gone up two to the Magic V5.

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Video games are good at making us feel things for clumps of pixels, especially when those clumps are in constant mortal peril. Herdling joins a long tradition of extended escort quests that deftly fiddle the heartstrings: everything from Ico and The Last Guardian to the burgeoning library of Sad Dad simulators that define modern gaming.

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I, like many, was worried about Metal Gear Solid Delta: Snake Eater when it was first announced. A remake of what to me is one of the best Metal Gear games ever made, all these years later it could easily have run havoc over an all-time classic for the sake of nostalgia bucks. I am so, so happy to have been wrong.

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What do we actually mean, when we call a game rewarding? I reckon typically it's one of two things. First you have games that reward you for playing them well: rewards are given in return for achievement or superlative skill – a new outfit, a Legendary Cuirass, a skill point or two. Then you have the ones where you're awarded simply for playing the game at all, that kind of external stimulus for engagement. The Skinner box method, basically, where you get daily bonuses for everything from simply logging in to maxing out your battle pass. What Sword of the Sea reminded me, as I lanced my way through desert dunes, 720'd my way across cliff edges, nosedived off a mountain face, or just awkwardly bunny hopped my way along a ledge I wasn't sure I was actually meant to climb, is that there's a third way. A game that rewards you neither for just playing nor for playing well, but for playing it right.

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I hate to start a review with a cliché, but reader, I'm doing it. Mafia: The Old Country is that occasional sort of experience that is 'more than the sum of its parts'. On paper, I don't think I should like this game as much as I do. When I stop and really think about it - y'know, squinting a little with concentration - I actually think I really do like it a little less. But on balance, in my heart, I greatly enjoyed the whirlwind of mob tropes developer Hangar 13 has strung together here.

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The ant-sized thrills of Grounded return in a sequel which lays exciting foundations for the future. There's work to do but, already, an exciting adventure to have.

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When I was small, my Dad would read to me before bed. One night I asked if he would re-read The Lion, The Witch and The Wardrobe only to be told he'd had enough of 'Jesus Lion.' Instead, he brought out a book with a dragon raging above a burning town on its cover. It was called The Hobbit. I was easily enchanted with Bilbo's journey - talking eagles, riddles in the dark, Smaug - and, best of all, there was more.

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Amongst its many riches, Wheel World is a reminder that a game can appear to be constructed from familiar pieces while still feeling entirely unfamiliar to play.

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Comfort meals. Everyone has a go-to dish they eat when they just need a shot of nostalgia or the proverbial warm hug - a bowl of soup, say, or a nice big packet of crisps. Or a tough-as-nails action-RPG that'll have you lobbing threatening obscenities at the fictional monsters on your screen in the late hours of the night. Slight tangent there - I promise this isn't an intro to a recipe blog. It's namely because playing Wuchang: Fallen Feathers feels a lot like, you guessed it, eating your favourite comfort food, if your comfort food happens to be strict soulslikes. It's great, sure. It's also rarely going to offer you any real amount of surprise.

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To properly encapsulate how I feel about Donkey Kong Bananza, you almost have to start at the finish. No spoilers here, obviously, but I have to say that I think this game has one of the finest finales of any Nintendo game ever. There's a delightful build-up of adrenaline as story beats and experimental mechanical evolutions are gleefully layered atop each other. It's difficult to not have a great big smile on your face as the game hurtles towards its finish. It's pretty masterfully done.

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The stealth strategy genre lost one of its great studios two years ago when Mimimi Games, developers of Shadow Tactics, Desperados 3, and Shadow Gambit decided, after that string of absolute bangers, to call it a day. In lieu of a new Shadow game from the masters, River End Games - a new group of industry veterans whose CVs cover everything from Unraveled 2 to Battlefield - have stepped into that void with Eriksholm: The Stolen Dream, and it makes a fairly good crack at scratching that itch.

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There's a moment in Alcatraz that I think is pretty much perfect. Here is the deal. I have two goals I'm aiming for. There's the secret tape, which I can see, high up, but cannot reach, and there's a mini mission where I must free a prisoner from the main prison block. To do that, I need to knock over a bunch of wheelie bins to find a set of hidden keys, and then beat it back to the central block to unlock the doors.

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Audiophile headphones don't have to be super-expensive, as Meze proved with the 99 Neos we reviewed last year. Now the 99 Classics are here, offering a step up in materials - walnut earcups and a spring steel frame - and a subtly different sound signature in exchange for a higher £269/$309 price.

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More and more companies are making premium wireless headphones as of late, from established players such as Bowers & Wilkins and Focal (creators of the marvellous Bathys) to newer disruptors such as Noble Audio, the folks behind the Fokus Apollo set I have here. These are a £589/$649 set of wireless noise-cancelling headphones that marks the brand's first move into over-ear designs, with an unusual hybrid approach that combines traditional dynamic drivers and more modern planar magnetic drivers.

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Reviewing System Shock 2's 25th anniversary remaster should have been the easiest gig of my career. A stone-cold classic lovingly updated by a studio that exists because of System Shock 2? Let's whack five stars over a picture of SHODAN's face and call it lunch.

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We open with a scene of touching paternal intimacy. Sam Porter Bridges is sitting with a baby strapped to his chest, at the top of a mountain in northern Mexico. The young child is Lou (BB of the first Death Stranding), no longer attached to Sam in a creepy jar but a regular baby carrier. The pair's hands touch, one big, one small, the deftly rendered physical contact framed by a gigantic powder-blue sky and a panoramic landscape riven by deep rocky gorges. Sam picks himself up, seeming to dance fleet-footed all the way down the spindly, photorealistic ridges in front of him. As he runs, sometimes bounding, Lou giggles with delight.

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On my best runs, with the best accidental match-ups, I've been the watering can guy. I'll deploy alongside two far more talented players, and they'll fix machinery and fight the hordes while I handle the watering. I'll put out ground-based fires to allow for freedom of movement and to stop enemies being enraged by flames. I'll put out any fires on my allies when they accidentally set light to themselves, so they don't have to race back to the nearest shower block.

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Perilous are your first and millionth steps on the sands of Dune: Awakening, an unashamedly harsh game that throws you deep within the desert, along with nothing but a crafting kit and a vague mission: Find the Fremen, wake the Sleeper. What starts as a lonesome journey of scavenging scrap metal and sucking dew from planets gradually morphs into server-wide clashes over spice and fortune. It's a survival game experience unlike any other I've played.

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In a world where the dividing line between a handheld game and a Big Telly game is entirely down to personal preference, it might seem redundant to single out TRON: Catalyst for praise as being particularly good on portables. But it is. It has the feel of a really good PSP or DS era tie-in game. It's engineered for compactness and bite-sized play sessions, with simple controls, short quests, and concise story beats. And its compactness is reflected in the price. There's no mistaking Catalyst's modest, indie budget. Its scope and ambition, however, are anything but modest.

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What's the most you've ever spent on a computer mouse? For the vast majority of people, the amount probably doesn't exceed £20 - and even for PC gamers, the most popular mice tend to fit into that £20 to £40 window, like the £38 Logitech G502 or £18 Razer DeathAdder. Add on wireless, or high-end components, and you might be looking at double that figure. - including the highlight of today's piece, the Finalmouse ULX Prophecy, which costs one hundred and fifty of your Earth pounds.

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You might not believe it based on the score, but I was fully in MindsEye's corner during the runup to launch. There was a time when cover shooters and city-sized driving games were wearyingly common, but at a time when every action game is a soulslike, a roguelite, a live-service multiplayer shooter, or Doom, the good old fashioned GTA clone is a rare treat indeed.

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The Alters achieves something tense and new by merging strategy base-building with third-person exploration and a sci-fi story about cloning yourself. But repetition and complicated busywork mar the overall effect.

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Mario Kart World offers neat twists on the classic Mario Kart formula, but its open-world ambitions are somewhat let down by some classic Nintendo quirkiness.

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For years, the rule in Hollywood was pretty simple: familiarity but with a twist. Cheers, but it's in a coffee shop, and everyone's in their twenties. Lost, but it's in LA with Joseph Fiennes. Sure, this didn't always work - I still think fondly of you, FlashForward - but it worked a lot of the time. Crucially, it was easy to grasp why it should work. We love formulas, and we love gentle variations on the formula to keep us guessing, to keep us nimble. But at the heart of it there's familiarity, and familiarity is a very, very lovely thing in the right circumstances.

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Nintendo Switch 2 Welcome Tour costs £7.99, and for a while it does feel a bit like you've paid someone to show you their carefully alphabetised 5K completion medals. A big part of the tour is a stamp rally. You are a tiny little person moving through dioramas formed by massive versions of the Switch 2 hardware and its accessories, and whenever you reach a new feature - a button, a port - a little stamp station pops up and you collect the stamp.

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It's that most thrilling time, the dawn of a new hardware generation. It's gaming Christmas! As a critic, that means it's time for that finest tradition - an intense period of bedding in with a new piece of hardware, vigorously road-testing it so that we can inform you, our delightful readers, if this thrilling new piece of tech is worth your money.

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Up until now, Subset Games has made two games, and they're both kind of ideal. Perfection has no place in art, but these things are really special. FTL is a terrifying and hilarious game about steering a ship across the galaxy in short hops, managing various stats, accidentally venting your comrades into space, and dealing with robot invaders who can literally shoot their way into your hull. Into the Breach is a game of tactics and positioning as you take three units into compact turn-based battles that clearer heads than mine have pointed out wouldn't be out of place on the games page of a newspaper.

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We've seen an explosion in the number of affordable direct drive (DD) racing wheels over the past couple of years, with Fanatec and Moza offering increasingly inexpensive options that still deliver the precise, quick and long-lasting force feedback that cheaper gear- or belt-driven wheels can't match.

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The first boss is a real hurdle. I'm not talking about the tutorial boss - you're meant to fail at that one - but the first true boss. The Tricephalos Nightlord is a fiery cerberus with a chain whip, who splits into three separate dogs to chase you down. You can't progress until this overgrown puppy is downed, proving a big challenge early on. But isn't this sort of block always the Dark Souls way? It just shows how Nightreign is an authentic Souls experience. I wouldn't have it any other way.

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The RTX 5060 is here, finally completing the 50-series lineup that debuted five months ago with the 5090. The new "mainstream" graphics card is far from cheap at $299/£270, but ought to offer reasonable performance and efficiency while adding the multi frame generation feature that's exclusive to this generation of GPUs. However, the 5060 also ships with just 8GB of VRAM, which could be a big limitation for those looking to play the latest graphics showcases.

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Blades of Fire manages to feel original, lovable, and born of genuine passion, despite the near overwhelming number of problems that could have extinguished it.

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In Iceland, when the mists descend, perspective is scrambled. Robbed of context and references, the very small can be mistaken for the very large. A boulder becomes a mountain. A stream becomes a river. With a camera in hand, it's a pleasant task to wander around the pitted black earth and hunt for these instances. Frame things just right, leaving out the tell-tale stakes of a fence or a tentative spreading of moss, and you can create your own Himalayas. The eye is eager to be tricked. The brain is eager to fill in any absences. Click.

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Heard about the changes to Doom? They've gone medieval with it, sort of. Also, they've added bowling. Sort of.

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A wondrous dreamlike world to explore in or out of VR, but a story that doesn't always hit as hard as you might want.

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A zany, knockabout co-op action adventure that's kaleidoscopically colourful but wears you out before you get to the good stuff.

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At first blush, the Nacon Revolution X Unlimited might look like 'just' another pro-grade Xbox controller to rival Microsoft's oft-recommended Elite Series 2, but the inclusion of Hall Effect sticks, a screen and some unique PC features could help it become one best PC controllers we've tested. That said, it does have its weak points too - and an eye-watering asking price. Here's what I've discovered after a couple of weeks of testing versus the Elite Series 2 and Scuf Instinct Pro, a top third-party option.

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For such an ostensibly small game, there's such bigness to Despelote. On the surface this is a game about football, its humble joys and seemingly unstoppable knack for rendering whole nations enraptured. Beneath that surface however is something more inward facing, a reflective game about its creators, and the act of creating - about the act of remembering, too, this game being one about their own, half-imagined memories. The result is special, something personal and universal all at once.

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There's a library in Skin Deep that really isn't screwing around. It's in outer space for one thing, and for another its calm, ordered stacks are protected by fidgety electrical gates that zap you if you're trying to move through them with a book you haven't checked out. Check enough books back in, meanwhile, and you'll be rewarded with a gun. I suspect this place is a librarian's dream.

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One of the loveliest books I've read in the last few years is J. L. Carr's short novel A Month in the Country. The book's about a lot of things - and I may have written about it before on Eurogamer - but, broadly, the novel concerns a veteran of the first world war who turns up in a small village up north to uncover a piece of art that's been concealed in the church. For a month he works in the church, restoring a lost mural element by careful element, having nightmares of the mud and gas at night and making tentative friendships during the day. Nothing happens and everything happens. At the end, he leaves and is - somehow - transformed by the experience.

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There's a conversation at the start of Clair Obscur: Expedition 33 that stuck with me throughout. A pair of ex-lovers discuss why they split up: one wanted children, the other did not. It's the sort of human question that makes a fantasy story - no matter how surreal - a relatable one.

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Acclaimed point-and-click studio Wadjet Eye's gently paced, time-travelling genre-hopper blends elegant puzzling and intricate, affecting storytelling to beautiful effect.

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Over 20 years ago, SNK blew the world away with Garou: Mark of the Wolves. Since then, Fatal Fury has become a relic of the past, loved only by those with wrinkles on their face and a place for gaming classics in their hearts. That flickering ember remains dormant no longer with Fatal Fury: City of the Wolves, a grand resurgence with more money thrown at it than the next unsustainable AI start-up. But does City of the Wolves have what it takes to carve a home for itself in a market dominated by Street Fighter, Tekken, and more? Judged on what I've played, I'd say it's got a damn good shot at doing so.

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Stronger emotional stakes and faster-paced drama promise an explosive climax that ultimately pulls its biggest punch.

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Nvidia's GeForce RTX 5090 is the undisputed most powerful consumer graphics card, but which 5090 is the best one? In terms of value, the answer is the cheapest one you can find - probably the Founders Edition at a steep $2000 - but what if you're willing to spend even more and want absolutely top-tier performance?

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One of the things video games do really well is absence - specifically recent absence. Dump me into a game world and give me enough clues that someone else has just left and I'll be happy for hours. A cigar still sending up a ribbon of smoke from an overflowing ashtray, the wind plucking at a curtain where a window has been left just slightly open, a microwave that has some kind of horrible lasagne in it that's still - jeepers - giving off a hint of steam? Games are brilliant at this kind of Marie Celeste set-up. Instant mystery. I don't need actual people around. I just want to know who, what, why?

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If you ever find that you've fallen asleep in a big-shot Hollywood story meeting, and you need something to say that makes it look like you've actually been paying close attention, you could do worse than this. "Whose story is this again?" This question - who is the true focal point of the adventure being pitched? - seems both central to any film and also one of the easiest things to lose track of in the detailing.

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Few still-perfectly-decent games have felt as desperate a disappointment as this one. South of Midnight is gloriously pretty, a game of sumptuous environmental detail and rich attention. It's one of the best sounding games I've played in an age, with a highly unique, artfully implemented original score woven into its sound design. And it's also extremely well acted, a cut above the vast majority of video games in emotional authenticity and heft. But goodness me can it get tiresome to play.

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Next year Devil May Cry will catch up with its lead character's hair by celebrating its silver anniversary. The hellacious Capcom action series launched in 2001 and has nimbly zigged, zagged and pirouetted over the course of six core installments. Viewed as a gunslinging, sword-swinging continuum, the through line of the franchise seems to be this: if a demon is worth slaying, it's worth doing it with needlessly flashy style.

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Right now, the best gaming monitor you can get is probably a QD-OLED 4K 240Hz model from MSI, Dell or Asus. Some compelling options using third-gen Samsung QD-OLED panels arrived last year in a 32-inch form factor, and now we're seeing the same specs in a more compact 27-inch design. That should allow for better compatibility with smaller desks, better glanceability for esports and crisper text rendering at 166PPI, but how does it work in practice?

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SteelSeries made their name with a range of reliable mouse pads in an era where most players used whatever came with their computers - or no mouse pad at all! Their QcK range has endured as a popular option for more than 20 years, but the mouse pad space has seen significant evolution as of late, mirroring similar explosions for the likes of mechanical keyboards and ultra-light mice. Boutique mouse pad firms are now producing a wide range of specialised options for esports aficionados, from low-friction speed pads made from exotic materials to control-focused 'mud' pads designed for ultimate precision. That meant it was time for a refresh at SteelSeries HQ, with the Danish firm taking cues from some of the most popular enthusiast brands to produce the QcK Performance lineup that we're reviewing today.

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Not long after I'd started college I found myself accidentally walking into an ongoing lesson. I can't remember what was being taught, but I do remember the faces of 20-odd near-adults turning to look at me as I casually strolled into the room. "Can I help you?" the teacher asked safely behind the scowls. I mumbled something about being sorry like a charisma-less Hugh Grant, then backed out sheepishly wishing to never return and perhaps combust on the spot. Everyone has been in a slightly uncomfortable and perhaps aggro environment that you wanted to nope out of, so we all know the feeling. When I tell you, then, that Atomfall, a quaint-looking English-countryside-set first-person sci-fi survival adventure features the most hostile environment I've ever encountered, let it be a warning. The people here are carrying a lot worse than angry faces in this tale of a locked down community and a struggle over what to do about the mystery at the centre of it.

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Alongside its tea ceremonies, rangu poetry and Sumi-e ink drawing, Assassin's Creed Shadows makes several mentions of the Sakura festival, Japan's annual cherry blossom celebration. The brief appearance of falling petals each year, lasting just a week or two, is seen as a symbol for the fleeting nature of beauty and life itself - the idea being, especially back during feudal times, that you should enjoy the moment while it lasts. You might survive the invasion of one warring daimyo, but another is likely not too far behind.

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For ten years, Xenoblade Chronicles X has lived as the black sheep of Monolith Soft's grand RPG series. Its nameless, blank canvas protagonist, its full tilt into hard military sci-fi, and its recruitable cast of misfit, gung-ho soldier types all stand in direct opposition to the soaring fantasy and authored melodrama of its numbered stablemates. It couldn't look or feel more different on the surface, but playing X again now, a decade on from its original release, I've been surprised by just how much it laid the foundations for what was to come later in the series.

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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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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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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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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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