There’s something unnerving about the abandoned compound you’re exploring, the low-resolution visuals giving it the feel of a handheld camera video. And that’s not to mention all the blood, smashed windows, tape recordings, or the fact that you’re poking around the site of a mass suicide. It’s a first-person narrative game due out later this year in which you investigate Black Sage Ranch, New Mexico, formerly home to the Perfect Heaven cult. The goal is to find out what happened, and what motiva

For those of you who scoff at air cooling, Alphacool has your back with a pair of new full-coverage water blocks for graphics cards. Specifically, the company’s new Eisblock GPX water blocks are designed for the fastest consumer cards from AMD and Nvidia, including the former’s Vega products and the latter’s GeForce GTX 1080 Ti and Titan X cards. We’re not sure what exactly (if anything) would prevent the new water blocks from working with lower end cards—for example if you wanted to use one wit

Ubisoft is staying tight-lipped on The Division 2, the sequel to its online multiplayer shooter, until E3 next month, but some details are slowly beginning to emerge. Yesterday we learnt that the game will release within the next year, and now we know that Ubisoft is focusing on making sure it has more content at launch than The Division, as well as a better end-game. “We were surprised a little bit by how fast people consumed content on [The Division],” Ubisoft chief executive Yves Guillemot sa

The Hungering Deep, the first of several free major Sea of Thieves expansions, will surface on May 29, Rare has announced. The trailer above features a one-eye pirate telling campfire stories about terrifying deep sea monsters, which is surely a hint of what’s to come. Rare previously promised that the update would add a number of new mechanics as well as new rewards for players. The first summer update is Cursed Sails, which will add a new ship type, and the second is Forsaken Shores, which wil

Valve appears to be cracking down on sexual content in Steam games, with three separate developers claiming that they’ve been told their games will be taken off the platform if they don’t remove some of their most explicit content. All of the games have anime-style visuals and are overtly sexual in nature, but their genres vary. !, said it had been contacted by Valve about “reports of pornographic content” in its game. Consistency is the issue: Valve appears to crack down on some games with grap

PlayerUnknown’s Battlegrounds Desert Knights mode, a 50-player deathmatch between ten teams of five players, lasted less than 24 hours when it launched two weeks ago. It was meant to run for three days, but developer Bluehole pulled the plug early because it was messing up the game’s servers. After ironing out those issues, the mode is back, and it’ll run until the end of this weekend. Desert Knights, the latest of PUBG’s deathmatch-like War modes, takes place in a small blue zone on Miramar tha

Text-heavy RPG Torment: Tides of Numenera is free to play until Sunday, and if you want to play it beyond that then it’s on sale for equal to its lowest ever price. Both the free weekend and sale are on Steam, and the sale ends on Monday. If you’ve never played Torment and you’re a fan of old-school isometric RPGs, then you should really give it a try. Combat features, but you can play the whole thing non-violently, talking your way out of tough situations. It also had a free weekend back in Oct

The small studio’s game, Seed, is a virtual reality project where you can breed and grow procedural plant life, either to complete missions or to enjoy a playful sandbox. The specific terminology is relatively new—garage biologist, biohacker—but, as Curry points out, there is a long tradition of amateur experimental biology. The radium-dial clocks actually make an appearance in the game, as does a technique which uses the plant alkaloid colchicine to alter chromosomes. Plants grow quickly and pr

As we already know, No Man’s Sky will get a substantial update this July in the form of NEXT. But today during an Inside Xbox livestream, Hello Games’ Sean Murray confirmed that the update will usher in a feature many have been baying for since launch: fully-featured cooperative multiplayer. In fact, anything you can do in No Man’s Sky appears to be possible with friends, from on-foot exploration to deep space aerial combat. If it’s anything like previous No Man’s Sky patches, there will be more

Black Ops 4 is the series’ first truly modern shooter in years. Early indicators showed up in Black Ops 3, but Call of Duty: Black Ops 4 has fully transformed into a 5v5 team-based class shooter now. Of course, Black Ops 4 is not Overwatch, not by a long shot, but the influence from its sibling within the parent company is clear. With special abilities and class synergies and visible health bars, Black Ops 4 values trading information as much as shooting men in the face. Specialist character cla

Boot Hill Bounties picks up where Boot Hill Heroes left off, with Bronco County about to head to war. Boot Hill Bounties tasks you with rounding up five yellow-bellied cowards who call themselves “outlaws”. While the western flavor is certainly welcome, Boot Hill Bounties’ intricate combat system is where it truly shines. Beyond everything there is to do, Boot Hill Bounties is a great-looking game. It’s available now, but I highly recommend picking up Boot Hill Heroes and playing through it firs

The Humble Store Spring Sale has now been underway for about a week, and that apparently means that it’s time for a new free game. For the next two days, Stardock’s Galactic Civilization 2: Ultimate Edition, which includes the base game and the Dark Avatar and Twilight of the Arnor expansions, is yours for the taking if you want it. In fact, GalCiv2 got a surprise update in 2015 that made major improvements to gameplay, races, and AI, and even tuned up the graphics a bit. Galactic Civilizations

Far Cry 5 was Ubisoft’s second-biggest release ever, Assassin’s Creed: Origins delivered a record fourth-quarter performance, Rainbow Six Siege viewership continues to climb, and sales for the year—€1.732 billion ($2.043 billion)—exceeded expectations. Of particular note around these parts is Ubisoft’s continued, and growing, success on PC. The PlayStation 4 still dominates Ubisoft’s sales by platform, but PC accounted for 21 percent of total sales for the fourth quarter—just two points behind t

Far: Lone Sails is described on Steam as a “vehicle adventure,” but that really doesn’t do the experience justice. More accurately, it’s a slow, solo, contemplative journey across a barren, not-quite-realistic landscape littered with the detritus of a crumbled civilization on the run. But that’s the point—developer Okomotive said that Far: Lone Sails is “just you and your machine vs. the big nothing,” and it absolutely nails a sense of isolation and scale. In case it’s not clear, I’ve played Far

Spintires: Mudrunner, the game about driving Soviet vehicles through Soviet mud for no particular reason, is getting new, free DLC at the end of the month called The Ridge. It adds a new coastal map to the game that’s bisected by a mountain ridge players can cut across to save time—if they’re willing to take the risk. The Ridge also adds two new vehicles to the Spintires world, the D-538 heavy duty tractor, and the B-6A lightweight tractor. Instead of picking up all your logs at one place, they’

The other is power consumption, and if recent studies are accurate, that could ultimately be what slows things down. Eric Holthaus at Grist wrote about Bitcoin’s energy use last year. In the six months since then, he says Bitcoin’s energy footprint has more than doubled. He also points to a newly published peer-reviewed study that predicts it will double yet again by the end of the year. These factors combined have slowed Bitcoin’s energy consumption growth rate to 20 percent per month so far th

Much of what we say in today’s Call of Duty: Black Ops 4 reveal event, including Zombies, battle royale, and the absence of a single-player campaign, was expected. “With all the features of Battle.net, I think it’s going to be pretty amazing what Black Ops 4 is going to have to offer.” Black Ops 4 will be fully integrated with all of Battle.net’s social features, including friends lists and the ability to talk to other players across other Battle.net games. Black Ops 4 will be the first Call of

Lian Li has a bit of an obsession with aluminum, as evidenced by its extensive line of brushed aluminum cases, and that has spilled over into its fan product line with the launch of the Bora Lite RGB. The new fans are similar to the original Bora RGB family, except they’re housed in CNC milled aluminum frames instead of plastic. “The Bora Lite 120’s most iconic feature is its aluminum frame. The CNC milled frame adds a touch of modern, industrial feel whilst also improving the overall look of th

The Call of Duty: Black Ops 4 event today confirmed that, why yes, the highly-revered co-op zombie mode will make a return to the series. It brings along a story as well, one that sees you and your zombie-battling companions traveling through time, visiting the Titanic in one instance and Ancient Rome in another. The three campaigns from the trailers will be available the day Black Ops 4 launches, and will feature a number of customization options so players can tweak these campaigns. Called Mut

Ubisoft’s open-world pirate game Skull and Bones has been pushed back until at least April next year. Ubisoft said the decision was in part motivated by strong sales of its back catalog and “excellent momentum of recent releases”. “Ubisoft has decided to give itself more time to develop Skull & Bones to offer players an even more engaging experience,” the company said in its financial report, in which it also announced that The Division 2 will be out within the next year. The game’s creative dir