Vampyr is Dontnod Entertainment’s forthcoming action RPG about plagues and vampires and a doctor protagonist battling his newfound bloodthirsty affliction and the Hippocratic Oath. It’s a far cry from the studio’s previous game Life Is Strange, then, but isn’t without its narrative arms—best outlined in the following story short. Against a mellow slant on Blue Öyster Cult’s Don’t Fear the Reaper, here’s that:Not much in the way of actual in-game footage there, however I enjoyed Steven’s hands-of

After going dark for the past few years (our last preview is from 2014), Capybara’s 2D roguelike Below is back under the spotlight. The only mark my tiny hero is going to leave on this world is a corpse. The camera is distant, the way I remember it in Below’s first announcement trailer from 2013. Dead on impact, I awaken as a new tiny hero on the beach. This time, Piotrowski directs me a bit to make sure I find the other secrets the demo has to offer.

Three game companies, including free-to-play giant Nexon, have been penalised by South Korea’s Fair Trade Commission over the use of loot boxes. Nexon, NextFloor and Netmarble have been fined a total of around $1m over deceptive in-game item sales, including randomized loot boxes. When all 16 puzzle pieces were collected, certain in-game benefits would be granted. The FTC believes Nexon didn’t adequately indicate the odds of receiving these puzzle pieces, but Nexon claims this is a misunderstand

I played through a demo of Rite of Ilk with Turtleneck Studios’ co-founder Alanay Cekic at PAX East this past weekend. It was a slightly less than authentic co-op experience, given that Cekic didn’t want to spoil the solutions for me by interjecting. The rope holding Mokh and Tarh together is the central element of most of the light physics puzzling. Later in the game, Cekic lets on that Mokh and Tarh will face three different boss fights. Turtleneck Studios initially didn’t plan to support onli

With a few hundred hours already sunk into Skyrim, it’s rare for me to feel much wonder or excitement while playing. In the few hours of Skyrim VR I’ve played, I’ve spent more time stopping, standing, and staring that I have since perhaps the very first time I played it back in 2011. Instead of robotically rushing through the town of Helgen as quickly as possible to complete the tutorial and break into the open world, I really, y’know, played it. Sure, the wagon ride and the wait for your turn o

It’s no secret many coaster simulator fans long for the old days of theme park management games. As a classic RollerCoaster Tycoon 2 fan, Parkitect looked exciting to me from the moment I saw its Kickstarter. If a staff member isn’t performing or guests are leaving trash and breaking scenery, the game’s tools let you know why. Also in the name of transparency, the finance management tools are clearly laid out. Though it might look and feel like a classic, Parkitect uses new tech and exciting com

Renaine is an 8-bit 2D platformer about an immortal knight, Aine, trying to avenge her friend Ren by killing a dragon. Luckily there’s a free online demo you can try for yourself. Renaine is currently on Kickstarter, where it’s already raised $9,174 of its $5,000 goal with 25 days left in its campaign. “That’s it,” the Kickstarter reads. “You will never get permanent upgrades in this game,” the Kickstarter reads.

2018 marks the 25th anniversary of the great point-and-click adventure Myst, and to celebrate the big birthday Cyan announced last month that updated versions of all the games in the series would be released later this year. Myst, Riven, and Myst 5: End of Ages are readily available on Steam and GOG, but Myst 3 and 4—Exile and Revelation—for some reason are not. The 25th Anniversary Collection will include Myst Masterpiece Edition, Riven, Exile, Revelation, and End of Ages, plus Uru: Complete Ch

I had the same curiosity about my Far Cry 5 followers—when I dismiss them, do they legitimately find their way back to their respective homes? But instead of going home, your human followers usually go to a pizza joint where they hang out together. I did, eventually, tail him all the way back to his cage at the Fang Center, and then decided to try the same thing with a human companion. In the pizza place was every other human companion in Far Cry 5. They’re all just chilling in this pizza joint,

Originally released as a free prototype on Itch in 2016, oceanic survival game Raft will launch on Steam Early Access next month on May 23, developer Redbeet Interactive announced today. Raft has one of the most explanatory titles since Minecraft: it’s a game about surviving on a raft adrift in an endless sea. You can go it alone, but you can also play Raft with friends online, which is especially exciting because it means you get to push your friends into the sea. Raft will cost $20 when it hit

“We decided to create a player level system where you meet different requirements to level up and then use your level points to unlock bonuses like faster crafting speed or more followbaby spots,” the update says. Scavenging and weeding have been “totally revamped,” and players can now discover “wild harvestables” that will randomly grow in certain areas. I wouldn’t be surprised to see that change, however: During a February interview with creator Rebecca Cordingley and her cohort Ben Wasser, Wa

And while plenty of cards were exciting, for many people the best thing to come out of today’s stream was a new feature called Borrowed Decks which—you guessed it—let’s you borrow your friend’s decks. So just for that 1v1 friendly play experience, now you can use each other’s decks. You can swap decks and play each other’s decks against each other.” Hearthstone players have been clamoring for a way to share their collections with their friends for years, and borrowing decks feels like a tidy sol

Welcome to the Game 2 is a first-person horror game about hacking. You play as investigative reporter Clint Edwards, and it’s on you to rescue a woman named Amalea from a group of mysterious masked hitmen. Your goal is to find eight ‘hidden hashes’ embedded in the deep web and use them to determine Amalea’s location. You’ll spend most of your time on the simulated computer scanning web pages, source code and surprisingly robust file libraries. Welcome to the Game 2 is now available on Steam for

It’s been a long time since I’ve used Windows 3.0. If you do as well, you can take a nosedive into nostalgia by downloading the source code for Windows 3.0’s File Manager. Microsoft has uploaded the source code to Github, where it is available to download and tinker with under the MIT OSS license, as TechCrunch notes. You could use the source code to compile a new Windows app for managing files like it was done in the old days. Either way, it’s pretty neat that this still works in Windows all th

We’ve seen some interesting deals from Dell in the past few weeks, many of which have come by way of using a coupon code. That is the case yet again for an Alienware Aurora desktop that is decked out with a Core i5-8400 processor 8GB of RAM, a GeForce GTX 1080 Ti graphics card, and 1TB hard drive. You could, for example, drop down to a GeForce GTX 1080, bump the RAM to 16GB, and swap out the 1TB HDD for a 256GB NVMe solid state drive. The price is the same—$1,600 before discount, and $1,400 afte

In what first seemed like an amicable split , former Rockstar boss Leslie Benzies sued his former employer in April 2016. Benzies alleged he was unlawfully dismissed and was entitled to unpaid royalties in excess of $150 million. Now, the ex-GTA 5 producer has suffered a setback in his case against Take-Two, Rockstar, and Dan and Sam Houser. The court has denied or dismissed several of Benzies’ claims. As detailed here (again, via Gamastura), Benzies “remains entitled to receive certain royaltie

The Witcher 3 is one of those RPGs that people just keep on playing and keep on modding. To that end, a recent mod called E3 UI and HUD promises to restore The Witcher 3’s interface to what it looked like in 2014, a year before CD Projekt finished the game. The map offer the biggest change: it now looks hand drawn and most of the icons are gone by default. “You may also have noticed the missing level indicator on monster no matter whether you have scaling on or off,” the mod page says. There was

Right around a year ago, HyperX (a division of Kingston) released its first gaming mouse, the Pulsefire FPS. Fast forward to today and HyperX’s second gaming mouse, the Pulsefire Surge, looks to be a better option. For its second run at building a gaming mouse, HyperX went with a Pixart 3389 sensor, giving the Pulsefire Surge a native 16,000 DPI to work with. What will likely be more widely appreciated with the Pulsefire Surge is the greater level of customization that is available. “If you’re l

Ubisoft has confirmed that Splinter Cell superhero Sam Fisher—voiced by original voice actor Michael Ironside, or someone who sounds an awful lot like him—is coming to Ghost Recon Wildlands in a special “crossover event” that’s coming as part of the Special Operation 1, the first of four major updates planned for the game’s second year. The new PvE mission will be playable solo or co-op in teams of up to four, and will offer exclusive rewards including Fisher’s famous goggles for players who com

Nvidia announced that it is ending driver support for 32-bit OSes effective this month. That means no more Game Ready driver updates or other performance enhancing driver releases, and also no bug fixes. The same applies to Nvidia’s GeForce Experience software—it’s dropping 32-bit support, though “existing features and services such as optimal game settings will continue to work on Windows 32-bit operating systems,” the company noted. In related news, Nvidia is also discontinuing GPU driver supp