There are some things in life that I admire but can’t claim to properly understand. These include the literary works of James Joyce, the vegan lifestyle, and people who want to play incredibly scary games in VR. I like horror games, but there’s a limit on my tolerance, and Amnesia: The Dark Descent landed right on that limit when it slithered out of Frictional Games’ culvert a terrifying thirteen years ago. Hence, the mere idea of playing that game in VR makes me shudder.

But if you are the kind of person who likes to put on white VR goggles and later take off brown pants, let me introduce you to Sclerosis: an Amnesia VR remake. To be clear, this is not an official remake of Frictional’s landmark horror. But it is also a bit more than just a mod. Sclerosis’ ModDB page describes it…

Intel has quietly introduced its first consumer Wi-Fi 7 products; the Wi-Fi 7 BE200 and Wi-Fi 7 BE202. Even though the Wi-Fi standard is yet to be fully ratified by the IEEE until some time in 2024, the first motherboards with the BE200 controller are set to launch very soon, alongside the launch of Intel’s 14th Gen CPUs.

The two adapters have appeared on Intel’s Ark site (via TechPowerUp). The BE200 is listed as being ‘Wi-Fi 7 Pre-certified’. Its maximum speed is listed at 5Gbps, with 2×2 TX/RX streams and support for the 2.4GHz, 5GHz, and 6GHz bands. For comparison, Intel’s AX211 Wi-Fi 6E controller tops out at 2.4Gbps.

Details regarding the BE202 are limited. No speed is provided and what type of device it will appear in is currently unknown. 

The BE200 is set …

Final Fantasy 14, as I’ve previously discussed, is a little too straightforward when it comes to its casual fayre—though that’s not to say said content is “bad”. Dungeons are often pleasantly cinematic, with interesting mechanics and banger soundtracks. They’re just… pretty easy.

This has been, it would seem, upsetting healers tremendously—because when there’s not a lot of incoming damage, you’re not really using your full kit. It doesn’t help that said healers’ damage rotation is usually “push one button, and re-apply a DoT sometimes”. Having a couple of healers at max level at present, I can confirm this diagnosis. In fact, healers are the job I hop onto to turn my brain off—which is great for me, but not so great if it’s your main role.

P…

“You know I’ve been on some amazing movie sets,” drawls David Hasselhoff to the camera, “but my favourite set of all? Planet Earth.” Nailed it Hoff, makes ya think. Not content with his bit-part in the fall of the Berlin Wall, the Baywatch and Knight Rider star now has his sights set on climate change and, specifically, getting us gamers off our behinds to do something about it.

Hasselhoff is the face of a new campaign called Make Green Tuesday Moves (MGTM), a “videogames climate change alliance”, which aims to offer unique DLC on the first Tuesday of every month using various celebrity endorsements. “MGTM will see proceeds from the sale of in-game items—which can comprise new and/or upcycled DLC goods such as characters, costumes and objects—invested into fully certif…

Hi-Fi Rush was an early surprise in 2023, being announced and released on the same day as well as being a cartoony rhythm-action brawler from a studio known for horror. Our review found it didn’t quite stick the landing but nevertheless delivered stellar moments, which is definitely how I felt about it: there aren’t too many games where you can beat robots into scrap to the beat of a Nine Inch Nails song, and Hi-Fi Rush certainly delivers that.

The game’s latest free update has arrived and brings two new modes, both of which are unlocked after you’ve beaten the main story. BPM Rush sees guitar-wielding protagonist Chai facing enemy waves with the beats per minute (BPM) of the music increasing as you progress, increasing both the speed of Chai’s combos and the enemy movesets…

Frictional’s latest horror game Amnesia: The Bunker is out today, and it is really good. Almost unexpectedly so, to some extent: Frictional has made some of the best horror games, but the Amnesia formula is well over a decade old now (and much older than that, if you count the Penumbra series) and it’d be fair to expect it to be a little stale by this point. But no: We called it “an essential horror game and an inspired next step for the series” in our 93% review.

To celebrate the release of The Bunker, GOG is making one of the older games in the series, Amnesia: A Machine for Pigs, free until June 9. It’s a bit of an oddity in the Amnesia pantheon: The GOG store page describes A Machine for Pigs as “the darkest, most horrific tale ever told in a videogame,” but in reality it’s ea…

Cable management is one of the banes of the PC building world. Anyone who has assembled their own machine has battled against the slew of mandatory cables to get their machine running. First, there’s making sure everything can actually be plugged in, which isn’t always easy depending on your setup. Then, there’s hiding any evidence that this was ever done. 

Often this involves cramming all those loose bits of cable into a hidden pocket at the back of the case, but PC part makers don’t exactly make this task an easy one, with all those ports on the front of the motherboard. It’s enough to make many give up on cable management altogether. This might be set to change, with a new motherboard from Asus smartly sporting its connectors on the back. And gosh darn it all. it’s so simp…

I wasn’t expecting to see Dragon Age: The Veilguard turn up at the Xbox Games Showcase over the weekend ahead of the gameplay reveal it had already planned for tomorrow. But turn up it did, with a CG trailer that had a lot of fans, including me, very nervous about the plastic-y, poreless character designs. Partly to quell that public panic, I’m willing to bet, BioWare just gave us a “sneak peak” at 24 seconds of the planned 15+ minute gameplay reveal tomorrow. Everyone take ten deep breaths. It looks better—probably.

As my colleague Robin Valentine pointed out yesterday, the CG trailer debuted at the Xbox show had serious hero shooter vibes, with a “hello fellow kids” kind of banter that I don’t associate with the dry, dark humor of Thedas. 

I was worried t…

Diablo 4’s sorcerers have had, uh… a bit of a hard time, the poor guys. While they were super promising in the game’s beta—with a ton of sorcerous excitement when the game opened its gates—things haven’t exactly been smooth sailing since.

For starters, the pre-season one patch crushed them disproportionately—alongside other nerfs, it unilaterally ramped up enemy damage. Sorcerers were already pretty flimsy, so this gave them a critical glass jaw. It also snuffed out Devouring Blaze, a key skill in their toolkit. 

The class has never quite recovered, and while there’ve been attempts to bring them back up to par, as Blizzard makes Nightmare dungeons more intense the wins they’ve gained have only grown smaller. Also there was a unique that kinda ju…

Just one day after Amazon Games and 505 Games parent company Digital Bros announced significant cuts at their companies, Humble Games has confirmed that it too has laid off employees, telling Video Games on Sports Illustrated that the layoffs were required “to ensure our long-term success.”

Humble Games is the publishing arm of Humble Bundle, which began in 2010 as a low-priced collection of indie games raising funds for charity. It was initially presented as a one-off but the success of the program spawned further bundles and eventually a digital storefront. Humble Games launched in 2017 as “a multi-million-dollar investment for games large and small,” offering “a wide range of publisher services with trusted teams to cover ports, marketing, localization, and everything a develop…

I’ve had my hands on the new Meteor Lake-powered HP Omen Transcend 14 for a few weeks now and I’m very impressed. I love a good 14-inch gaming laptop at the best of times, but the fact this machine is already impressively affordable—at least in the context of the mega-bucks Razer Blade 14—and comes with a stellar OLED screen makes it an instant favorite.

That is only compounded by the fact that it’s already on offer with a $300 discount and you can find the Transcend 14 for just $1,270 at HP right now. You will have to configure it a little as that link will just take you to the RTX 4050 version, which I wouldn’t recommend as the much more powerful RTX 4060 edition is just $70 more. Seriously, why wouldn’t you?

With the 65W version of Nvidia’s latest low-end mobi…

After a whole 48 hours of mourning for Hearthstone’s doomed Mercenaries mode, it’s now time move on in the form of a new mini-set coming to Standard next week. I’m delighted to say that Naxx will once again soon be out. Yes, the next slimline expansion is called Return to Naxxramas and it drops on February 14, because card games are for the lovers.

The set contains 38 cards, four of which are Legendary minions, and we can exclusively reveal one of the coolest, most flavourful of those below.

Yep, your boy Rivendare is back, and he’s brought his equally dead friends.   Rivendare, Warrider is a neutral minion with 6/6 stats that costs 6 Mana. His text reads: “Deathrattle: Shuffle the other 3 Horsemen into your deck.” But what do they do, you impatiently trill.…

One of the most essential school supplies for public school students has a sustainability problem. A report from the non-profit consumer advocacy group PIRG says that the planned obsolescence of public school-provided Google Chromebooks is costly to taxpayers and the environment. 

The biggest contributor to “Chromebook churn” is that these devices provided for students last, on average, about four years, claims PIRG. As of March 2021, 48.1 million K-12 students have been provided Chromebooks, and remote learning has become more commonplace due to the pandemic. This means a student will go through several Chromebooks throughout their school career.

A couple of factors contribute to the churn; the first and most common is that the Chromebook OS essentially has an expirati…

Farming game Immortal Life has just released from Early Access after a few years in development, bringing a unique spin to the genre of Harvest Moon, Rune Factory, and Stardew Valley. YiFeng Studio’s fam life game is based on a sect of martial artists who, finding their home school devastated, resolve to rebuild the misty valley into a place of learning and beauty.

It’s heavily based in the Chinese fantasy aesthetics of wuxia fiction and the idea of “cultivation,” or improving one’s powers and spirit in order to achieve martial arts mastery and immortality.

To that end you use your powers to become and ever-more-potent farmer, deploying magic to plant seeds, water then, and harvest with enchanted tools. You also fish, cook, and craft to cultivate your soul. You also make bet…

The latest Helldivers 2 major order has had some issues—but fair play to Arrowhead, the climax of said order is very dang cool, and far better than the lack of rewards offered for the Menkent Line.

In case you’ve not been keeping up with your Super Earth-mandated news broadcasts, last week divers were deployed to Meridia, the site of a super colony of Terminids. They were instructed to inject dark fluid, an experimental substance that spaghettified some scientists and was “liberated from the Illuminate following the First Galactic War”, into the planet’s crust.

The Illuminate are a missing faction from Helldivers 1 that has yet to teleport their Protoss-adjacent butts into the sequel. But it’s fine. We treated the dark fluid with three separate democracy baths and homo…