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This week's new PC game releases and our weekly newsblog
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Image credit: Pierre Denys de Montfort/Wikimedia Commons
Another week of PC game releases is upon us and oh heck, slow down. There are an alarming number of games out this week that I want to play, from large-scale 3D productions to itty-bitty time-killers, each sinisterly appropriate to my Steam stats and wider research interests. Are videogame publishers and The Maw in cahoots to overwhelm me with impulse-buys and sabotage my attempts to Report the News? It’s possible. It’s possible. The Maw can be pretty cunning for an indiscriminate force of cosmic famine. The creature has been known to forge alliances with misguided mortals, seeking to flank and overwhelm harried news writers. How else to explain Phil Spencer’s T-shirts?
But let’s not worry about that for the moment. Without further ado, here’s a list of PC games out this week that I, for one, consider worthy of a click, if not necessarily a purchase: low-poly vertical shmup Dark Gravity (19th Feb); floral/insectile bullet hell Nidus (19th Feb); dieselpunk Advance Wars homage Empires Shall Fall (19th Feb); roguelike not-Poker Balatro (20th Feb); faerie survival sim Nightingale (20th Feb, early access); biopunk side-scroller Slave Zero X (21st Feb); Skynet-era RTS Terminator: Dark Fate – Defiance (21st Feb); build-optimising action-RPG Last Epoch (21st Feb); post-apocalyptic car-whisperer Pacific Drive (22nd Feb); hellish feud ‘em up Solium Infernum (22nd Feb); primordial horror management sim The Tribe Must Survive (22nd Feb); claustrophobic desktop shmup Windowkill (23rd Feb).
As ever, let us know if I’ve missed anything obvious, like a new Half-Life game or something. Also as ever, you can follow our efforts to sift good news stories from the currents of the interweb in our weekly liveblog below.
10:33 am UTC
PCG have dug up an Elden Ring mod that turns the whole game upside down. Different starting locations! New classes! One to occupy you while you wait for the Shadow of the Erdtree DLC, perhaps.
– Edwin Evans-Thirlwell
10:23 am UTC
Xbox big cheese Phil Spencer has generously told the Verge that Microsoft don't want everybody to become a Game Pass subscriber. "I tell you honestly, running the business, having a diversity of business models that are working is pretty critical," he said. "The one thing I will say about the Game Pass subscriber revenue is that it’s consistent."
– Edwin Evans-Thirlwell
10:12 am UTC
Eleventh Hour Games have been detailing what they're adding to budding Diablo-killer Last Epoch for this week's 1.0 launch. The changelog is so massive they've broken it into chapters. Here's part 1, which covers a couple of new classes, and part 2, in which there is much talk of new items and gear. Do the words "Spine of Malatros" mean anything to you?
– Edwin Evans-Thirlwell
10:03 am UTC
A surprise gift from our tech team - we can now give posts titles without automatically bumping the liveblog to the top of the site (as we generally do when covering major events, such as game conferences). This means we can now do a little clickable "contents page" for days of the week up the top of the feed, there. Bless the techies!
– Edwin Evans-Thirlwell
09:57 am UTC
ZA/UM have formally acknowledged layoffs and a project cancellation reported last week by GHLF. "As with all studios, we adapt the size of our team to the work underway, growing when we start a new project and shrinking if one is cancelled," a spokesperson told VG247. "It is always hard to lose talented colleagues, and we thank those leaving for their many contributions to ZA/UM."
– Edwin Evans-Thirlwell
09:55 am UTC
Arrowhead are currently capping Helldivers 2's concurrent players at 450,000 players to stop the servers exploding, as reported by PCG.
– Edwin Evans-Thirlwell
09:51 am UTC
Via PCGamesN, the Satisfactory devs still have "a huge backlog of ideas", even as their long-in-early-access factory sim rumbles towards 1.0 release.
– Edwin Evans-Thirlwell
09:25 am UTC
IT IS MONDAY
Set up a cordon around the emergence site! Salt the entrances and exfoliate the wallpaper! FEED THE MAW.
– Edwin Evans-Thirlwell
