The girl in the room, Madotsuki, is the protagonist of cult indie game Yume Nikki, which means ‘Dream Diary’. Yume Nikki doesn’t feature dialogue or plot, it only offers scarce menus and simple instructions. In an era that predated the overwhelming influence of Youtubers, Yume Nikki became famous thanks to the weird, memetic nature of its imagery. Yume Nikki, after all, was made in RPG Maker 2003, an engine with an easy learning curve. Fans became developers, coalescing theories and ideas into m

Originally slated to come out last year, Intel’s 3D XPoint technology encountered more than a few delays. Earlier this year, Intel launched the enterprise Optane P4800X drives, priced at $1500 for 375GB, and today 3D XPoint comes to consumer SSDs with the Optane SSD 900P family of drives. It turns out that 3D XPoint is so fast (according to Intel) that it doesn’t benefit from having more active 3D XPoint die. If I give equal weight to all the areas of performance, the Optane 900P ends up dominat

Developer Ninja Theory is set to break even from harrowing hack-and-slash Hellblade: Senua’s Sacrifice months ahead of schedule, partly thanks to its decision to publish the title independently, the studio’s chief creative director has said. The decision to publish the game independently—the first time Ninja Theory has done that—was a big help because it means it gets the bulk of the money from sales, rather than a big-name publisher taking a slice. [Self-publishing has] opened up a bunch of doo

This week: which game character do you hate? I do still have a soft spot for Laguna, who was basically Squall’s missing personality, and I always kinda liked Zell, who I believe is the character most Final Fantasy 8 fans actually hate, themselves. Philippa Warr: Warren from Life is StrangeThe thing about Warren was that his character seemed tangled up in something the developers were leaning towards. I hated being around him in the game and the more the game didn’t give me the freedom to be real

Framed, a two-part series of noir puzzles games built around rearranging comic book-like panels to change the flow of scenes, is coming to Steam next year with the release of the Framed Collection. For reference, Framed and Framed 2 currently cost $8 on mobile platforms, so it’s reasonable to expect the Framed collection to cost $10 to $20. Framed and its sequel, Framed 2, were originally mobile games available on iOS and Android devices. The Framed collection sports full mouse and controller su

Kingdom Come: Deliverance is a first-person RPG that embraces a “realistic” portrayal of the medieval world: No magic, no dragons, no dungeons filled with gold. Instead, there are grown men who throw poop for fun, and brutal combat with weaponry that could break a Volkswagen in half. Combat in the game is physics-based, with more than 30 target zones on each character and up to four layers of armor. “We worked with experts to make fighting in Kingdom Come as real as possible. Kingdom Come: Deliv

These are all games released on PC in a single week, which is crazy. Tom Senior: Fighting fantasyAs a fan of absolute nonsense I was very pleased to see that Injustice 2 will be coming to PC this season. But the night and day difference between how Destiny 2 looks and feels on PC over the now zoetrope-style PS4 version is indisputable. That’s a lot of storage—336TB to be exact, which will put me well over a total of half a petabyte in total storage capacity for my home setup. I’m struggling to f

It was big, sad news when Electronic Arts closed Visceral Games and pulled the plug on the Amy Hennig-led Star Wars game it had in development. But as a very in-depth report from Kotaku makes clear, the situation was a lot more complicated than that. With Star Wars you have to have that back and forth,” a former Visceral employee said. “People think, ‘Oh it must be so cool to work on Star Wars.’ It actually kind of sucks.” The success of Star Wars Battlefront only made things worse.

He has always been willing to go big, with almost no guarantee that the hard work would pay off. I prefer to think of them as the Lennon and McCartney of competitive fantasy card game management. As competitive games go, none is more meme-y than Hearthstone, and Frodan knows his audience better than anyone. Frodan tells me several players blocked him on Twitter, and more “still talk very negatively about me to this day.” Somehow, a card game has proven him right.

I’m still working my way through Assassin’s Creed: Origins, and I’ll have a full review in a few days (my review in progress can be seen here in the meantime). You can tell if you’ll be able to kill someone before you try to kill themAs an assassin, one-hit kills are your bread and butter. You can set arrows on fire with your own torchThere’s a couple ways to set your arrows on fire in Origins. Origins doesn’t tell you this, but you can then use that grounded torch to set the tip of your arrow o

Dell recently upgraded its XPS Tower Special Edition desktop with Intel’s newest 8th generation Core processor (Coffee Lake) family, and you can snag one at a discount using coupon code TENOFF. That shaves 10 percent off the price, bringing the cost of entry down from $1,000 to $900. The least expensive pairs a 6-core/12-thread Core i5-8400 processor with a GeForce GTX 1050 Ti graphics card. It also has 8GB of DDR4-26666 memory (single module, single channel), a 256GB PCIe SSD + 1TB HDD for stor

Your job is to inspect the papers of people who want to enter the country and decide who gets in and who’s kept out, being mindful of terrorists, smugglers, spies, mimes, and so on. It sounds like a fairly straightforward time management game but as we said in our 2013 review, it’s actually much more impactful than that. “The mental-emotional tug-of-war the game manages to stimulate through paperwork is impressive, but a lot is owed to its perfect pacing,” Evan wrote about it. “Above all Papers,

MSI introduced a new SKU to its GS63 Stealth laptop family. The newest model (GS63 7RD Stealth) features the same slim design measuring 14.96 x 9.8 x 0.69 inches and weighing 3.96 pounds, but packs a more affordable GeForce GTX 1050 GPU inside. The GS63 Stealth has a 15.6-inch 1080p IPS display rated to deliver 100 percent coverage of the sRGB color space (72 percent NTSC). External connectivity consist of three USB 3.0 ports, a USB 3.1 Type-C port, and a USB 2.0 port. A GeForce GTX 1050 does no

The standard jump feature can be used in standard situations, but there are many areas where it does not suffice. After all, PUBG features a play area of considerable proportions. “Due to the nature of this system, we expect possible issues, bugs and problems to occur,” the PUBG team said. The developers also promised ongoing efforts against PUBG cheaters, including “new measures to better identify and track” the people who play unfairly. We are now able to use the system to identify and ban the

As hard drive makers continue to increase storage capacities, some consumers view large capacity HDDs with trepidation, at least when it comes to trusting a single drive to copious data. Previously the highest capacity drives in the company’s stable were 8TB models. Granted, those account for the bulk Blackblazes HDD aresnal, but as it transitions to higher capacity HDDs, there aren’t any major red flags. In addition, enterprise drives typically have a 5 year warranty versus a 2 year warranty fo

Wolfenstein 2: The New Colossus retains the unexpectedly strong storytelling of its predecessor. BJ and the gang are colorfully characterized throughout the bombastic story, making the narrative itself a fun ride. As far as I’m concerned, Wolfenstein 2 is a Nazi killing simulator, and as we said in our review, it’s one of the best. Shooting Nazis is a classic FPS pastime, so to celebrate Wolfenstein’s return, I’ve put together a compilation of the many wonderful ways you can kill Nazis in The Ne

Destiny 2, Wolfenstein 2, and Assassin’s Creed: Origins were all released this week, and there are big Halloween sales underway at Steam, GOG, and Humble at this very moment. In other words, you’re already up to your eyeballs in things to play. For the next two days, inXile’s heavy-narrative RPG Torment: Tides of Numenera is free to play on Steam. Other inXile games are on sale as well—in fact, this is apparently the first “official Steam weekend sale” for an indie developer rather than a publis

We’re publishing the results of this developer survey to give you more insight into the business of releasing games on Steam, and how developers feel about the biggest PC game distributor. For every game sold on Steam, Valve gets a cut. Developers raised issues and voted on them, which I processed into a report for Valve. Filter issues that are Steam issues to Steam support team instead of to the developer. Ensure Steam users understand that leaving a critique is implicit approval.”5.

Today, Intel launched the first consumer variant of its 3D XPoint Technology SSDS, the Optane SSD 900P family of drives. Says Roberts, “The Intel Optane SSD 900P Series is amazingly fast, easily the fastest drive I have ever used. We continue to enhance Star Citizen so the performance benefits with Intel Optane drives will continue to grow, alongside Star Citizen, into the future.” For game developers, and software developers in general, the extremely low latencies offered by Optane 900P SSDs sh

Last year, the Golden Joystick Awards opened its doors to the public for first time in its three decade-spanning history. The same applies this year—and you’ve only one week left to cast your vote. Choose between PC Gamer’s Best PC Games ever, Edge’s 100 Greatest Videogames, GamesMaster’s Ultimate Guide to Minecraft Vol 20, Retro Gamer’s Book of Arcade Classics, The Nintendo Switch Book, and The PlayStation Book celebrating over 20 years of PlayStation. The 35th Golden Joystick Awards presented