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I was quite pleasantly surprised when it was announced last year that Moonlighter was getting a sequel. In that "oh, I never would have guessed this game would get one" kind of way. Moonlighter 2: The Endless Vault, as its full name goes, doesn't have an exact release date just yet, but during today's Triple-I showcase it did get a release window, which is the next best thing I suppose. It's a vague-ish window though, sometime this summer.

Right, anyone fancy a small look at the next update for Enshrouded? Today's Triple-I showcase delivered exactly that, though I have to admit it's pretty brief, and doesn't show all that much. The game's sixth update, Thralls of Twilight, is due out sometime in May, and seems to come with some big additions. For one, there's new enemies that "creep, crawl, and stalk you further," which sounds… pleasant.

I’ve been keeping an eye on the Alienware Area-51 reboot ever since Dell teased it at CES. It looked sharp, had decent specs, but for a while, your only GPU option was the RTX 5080. That changed, and honestly, it changed for the better. You can now get it with an RTX 5090 paired with Intel's new Core Ultra 9 285K, and yes, the starting price is $5,499.99. It's not cheap, but if you’re aiming for a high-end rig without spending weeks chasing down parts or dealing with shipping delays, it’s one of the more straightforward options out there.

There's a whole bunch of games set in space that let you duke it out in dogfights, form strategies around entire fleets, terraform planets, all often pretty violent acts. So, I found it very funny to see X4: Foundations at the Triple-I showcase today, which received a trailer for its upcoming Diplomacy update which is literally about just talking things out. Seriously, when it says that it's introducing diplomacy it means it, as when it arrives you'll be able to send diplomats to negotiate and forge alliances so that you don't have to jump to war right off the bat.

FakeFish, the devs behind the cosmic/ survival horror co-op game Barotrauma, have just revealed their next game at the Triple-i showcase, Frostrail. It's another cosmic horror co-op game, albeit with an incredibly different vibe. Where Barotrauma has you trundling through a submarine, Frostrail opens things up a bit, putting you in an icy, apocalyptic looking setting where you have your own train to get you from place to place.

Vampire Survivors has had a few crossovers in its time since releasing in 2022, like with Among Us, Contra of all series, and the one that felt like an inevitability, Castlevania. The game's latest collab was just announced at this year's Triple-I showcase, and personally it's a bit of a head scratcher: Square Enix's SaGa series. Referred to as the Emerald Diorama update, specifically because of the most recent entry in the series Emerald Beyond, it was introduced with another lovely animated segment showing off a magical catgirl and a battery-looking robot.

Announced just now at the Triple-I Initiative, Ikuma - The Frozen Compass is a wintry 3D action adventure in which a tenacious young buck and his dog get stranded on an Arctic island. The key thing to know is that it's a co-op game, a co-op splitscreen game, if you please, which means that you and your friends must decide, right now, which of you will play the dog.

This game is described as "a powerful story of love, loss, and endurance", which doesn't bode brilliantly for the dog, so whoever dons the collar needs to a great tragic actor. I encourage you to spend a few weeks rehearsing the business of lying bloodied in the snow next to a dead yeti, whining heroically at the back of your departing owner, who has decided he's more of a cat person anyway. Come now, let me see your expression of puppy-eyed anguish. There's a nice juicy biscuit in it for you if you can make me cry.

If I was ever offered the opportunity to clone myself, I'd quite quickly say "no thank you, there's one too many of me in this world already." However, in The Alters, the needs must, as it sees its protagonist needing to create clones of himself (the titular "Alters") so that he can escape a hostile planet he's crash-landed on. It's a little bit crafty, a little bit management gamey, and as revealed during its latest trailer during the Triple-I showcase, it now has a release date of June 13th, 2025.

I was all primed to ignore Void/Breaker forever based on it being pitched to me as a roguelite FPS in which you "escape an endless cycle" and "craft infinite weapon variants" in order to "forge deadly synergies". I joke, I joke. There is, of course, no way of ignoring the roguelike and/or roguelite genre in this, the year 2025. We are all caught in the endless cycle of roguelike or roguelite releases, doomed to forge synergy after synergy until whatever software our universe is secretly running on finally blue-screens. Bet it's Windows 7.

Today in 'game pitches that would keep you reading a novel if they were the first line' is Neverway, a horror RPG with life sim bits from Coldblood Inc. Burnt out from years working a dead-end job, Fiona (and I'll quote this directly because it's the blasé single sentence that did it for me) "starts over on a farm and becomes the immortal herald of a dead god". Lovely stuff. Cucumbers. Carrots. Cthulhu. City slickers will say it's fake, but we've seen the punchline to this whole cosmic joke, squirming between the beets.

Excellent dwarven miner-shooter Deep Rock Galactic has been quiet for a while, but only because devs Ghost Ship Games having been putting the wrenches to its upcoming roguelite spinoff Deep Rock Galactic: Rogue Core. After last week’s teasing of some of the 'Reclaimer Tech' that Rogue Core’s bearded delvers will wield, we now have a meatier, action-heavy trailer showing how that kit can be put to use against rampaging xenobeasts.

The trailer, revealed during the Triple-I Initiative livestream, also end with the announcement of a closed alpha playtest, which aspiring battleminers can sign up for via Rogue Core’s Steam page. And that’s not the only DRG news to emerge, dusty and covered in alien bits, from the showcase, as Deep Rock Galactic: Survivor was confirmed to launch out of early access on September 17th.

The legend goes that in the 12th century, King Canute plonked his throne down on the seashore and commanded the tide to go out, thereby empirically demonstrating to all the toadies at court that he was not, in fact, God Almighty. You don’t need to order the ocean to piss off in Endless Legend 2: it’s already in headlong retreat. But not from you.

In the boss fights of South Of Midnight, you've got to find a pulsing wound on the body of the monster and strike it to cleanse the giant beast of its "stigma". In truth, these creatures are analogues for human characters, sometimes people who have literally transformed into beasts, afflicted by a thorny curse that drives them into frightening states of rage or panic. This is a game about festering trauma - history as a painful wound you've got to poke in order to eventually heal. Strip back the scales and feathers of folk allegory and these are human tales of shame, hunger, neglect, and abuse, some more effective than others. It's a gorgeous game with a killer approach to music, if sometimes hobbled by the ropey trappings of its action adventure genre.

I think this is the best deal I've seen on a PC controller in a long time. Lenovo just dropped official Xbox wireless controllers (Series X|S variants) to Black Friday equivalent prices. Pulse Red and Shock Blue are going for $34.99 with the code SPRINGGAMES, while other colors like Carbon Black and Astral Purple are $39.99 with SPRINGBACK. These are some of the best gamepads for gaming on PC, and honestly, for a first-party controller that doesn't feel like it was pulled from a bargain bin, it's an absurdly good price as well.

Ubisoft's lawyers have responded to a legal action from players of defunct racing game The Crew by insisting that those players never owned the game in the first place. The players made their lawsuit to complain about the game being made unplayable when servers were shut down last year, but Ubisoft have now responded to argue that the game was only "licensed" to those playing, and players should never have expected the game to be useable in perpetuity.

The Outer Worlds 2 is still set for release sometime this year, and our Ziffly chums at Ian Games have gone got their hands on 11 minutes of exclusive footage from the RPG. That video is below. Watch it in isolation for a guaranteed blissful Reuben-free experience, or keep scrolling to read my awful opinions. Spoiler warning for one small part of one quest, and opinion warning now: I, uh, I don't love it!

Sapphire Nitro+ RX 7900 XTX is currently going for just $999.99 at Woot (owned by Amazon), and that's genuinely impressive considering it usually hovers around $1,100 in 2025. If you're on the hunt and buidling yourself a high-end gaming PC, this GPU is definitely worth considering at this price.

Baldur's Gate 3 is finally on sale, and it's not a minor token discount either. The Steam Store has knocked 20% off the full price, bringing it down from $59.99 / £49.99 to $47.99 / £39.99 until April 21st. If you've been waiting for any excuse to dive into Larian’s massive, sprawling RPG, this is it.

The years pass and the animals perish and the oceans rise and the wealth gap widens and I repeatedly think to myself through a fug of nitrogen oxide, Steam discounts and microplastic sediment, “man, those Oddworld games were excellent, weren’t they”. If you've yet to have the pleasure, you can scoop up the entirety of the squalid anti-capitalist satire universe on Fanatical right now for a pound or dollar. It's been a while since I read Theses on Feuerbach, but I'm pretty sure that counts as praxis?

Blood in the Thames would probably be the least of your worries if you took a few big swigs of that mess. Blood On The Thames, however, is a murder mystery interactive fiction type of game, and you could swig a lot worse.

The release of Monster Hunter Wilds brought with it the usual comments about the hypocrisy of a series that wants to both protect ecosystems and grind them up for parts. "When will Monster Hunter just be honest about its desire to endlessly turn dragons into pants," we lamented to ourselves. "When will the Monster Hunters recognise - nay, embrace the fact that they are the biggest Monsters of all".

We could have saved ourselves a few thousand words and just pointed at Hunters Inc, instead. It's basically a first-person low-budget Monster Hunter game in which the Hunters are Orcs. Orcs do not do self-deception, as a rule. They do not go for sanitised violence or anthropocentric fantasies about becoming "nature's caretakers". They are straightforwardly happy to club things to bits. Looks like ludonarrative consonance is back on the menu, boys!

Two Microsoft software engineers who interrupted a Microsoft anniversary event to protest against the company's dealings with the Israeli military have been fired for misconduct, according to a report. Software engineer Ibtihal Aboussad, who is based in Canada and once worked for the company's genAI division, lost her job on Monday 7th April due to "wilful misconduct, disobedience or wilful neglect of duty," according to internal documents picked up by CNBC. Another Microsoft software engineer, Vaniya Agrawal, had announced that she would resign on April 11th, but according to another document cited by CNBC, Microsoft have terminated her job in advance.

Woot's mechanical keyboard sale is packed with great options, and this time it’s not just throwaway budget boards with rainbow lights. These are solid, well-built gaming keyboards with proper features like hot-swappable switches, wireless connectivity, and layouts that make sense. The prices are low enough to raise an eyebrow, but the specs hold up, even if you’re picky about your setup.

Fanatical's Build Your Own Easter Bundle deal is live, and it's one of those "I can quit anytime I want" type of situations. You pick your own lineup from a pool of 17 indies, and the more you grab, the cheaper each game gets. Start with three for £1.65 / $1.65 a piece, but I'd go for seven or more to drop it to £1.45 / $1.45 per game. It's almost rude how cheap that is.

Some video games aim to pull originality from the ether, and some video games try to accomplish it by theatrically amassing a bunch of rad parallels and sort of crushing them together until the molecular boundaries give way, and a new Element is produced. This is the vibe I get from Welcome To Brightville, a new "emergent immersive sim" that reminds me instantly of Thief, Dishonored, Bioshock and recent soulslike Lies Of P.

The setting blends "industrial Victorian architecture, neo-baroque extravagance, and futuristic cyberpunk elements" to produce a "manapunk" world in which magic and machinery jostle together like cats in a bag. It's a heady stew of references, and perhaps not that novel for a dark fantasy RPG - people have been slopping the cyber over other literary genres for a while now, and don't get me started on the abundance of -punk derivatives. Still, it rattles and whirrs along convincingly enough in the below announcement trailer.

Inspired is one word for it, anyway. Still, since Heroes Of Might & Magic-likes aren't exactly giving roguelite deckbuilders a run for their ubiquity, I'm broadly receptive - the warmest and most exploitable of the four gamer emotions. Stormbinders is a turn-based strategy set in a fantasy land with bad weather and badder shimmering angelic eyeballs. You may recognise what it's going for. This may delight you.

You'll choose a hero, then get stuck into the campaign. "The story progresses across unique scenarios, uncovering a tale of magic, heroism, unlikely alliances and betrayals," reads Steam. The titular Stormbinding sounds like the interesting twist here. The game randomises weather patterns each time you boot it up, which apparently adds new wrinkles to both battle and the global map.

Stock markets tanked and gaming laptops went into hiding this morning as US President Donald Trump’s globe-spanning tariffs came into effect. Based on nonsense maths, these heavy taxes on imported goods are already sowing havoc within the gaming hardware industry, leaving manufacturers – whose production operations are commonly based in China and Taiwan – to scramble together a plan. Most headlines have focused on the upcoming Nintendo Switch 2’s US pre-orders being delayed as a result, but PC gear is very much following suit, with Razer pausing direct sales for its new Blade 16 and Blade 18 laptops.

Palworld developers Pocketpair have announced their next gig as a fledgling games publisher. They're palling up with MythicOwl to release the latter's jaunty delivery sim Truckful, in which absolutely nothing waits for you in the woods. In which there are no ghost trucks. In which "hidden paths, misty wetlands, unforgiving marshes and dusty quicksands [do not] tell the stories of the past, waiting to be discovered". Here's a trailer.

'18 Wheels Of Thunder' boasts Big Rigs: Over the Road Racing's original box art, in a font forged from guitar pedals, light beer, and divorce papers. Flames jet from the snout of the marauding 'rig like snorted breakfast tequila following an especially piquant ex-wifely punchline. A rammed police car flails uselessly against the sheer girth of but one of those 18 thunderous wheels. Perhaps we might imagine a single tear trickling down the exasperated coparoo's cheek. As we reach out to wipe it from the case, we unwittingly dissolve the '1' from the tagline, leaving us with only '8'.

The 8 remains, smugly, for two decades. 8 is the Metacritic score for Big Rigs: Over the Road Racing. That is so incredibly powerful that words fail me. Not for Metacritic, meaningless institution run by and for leprous prestige weasels that it is. It's powerful for Big Rigs. To get less than a 61 on Metacritic, a game must either be so brazenly committed to its own bizarre artistic vision that it fizzles the minds of lesser critics like Skittles in lemonade, or simply be unplayable wank. I have read a lot of evidence that points toward the latter, but that can't be true, or it wouldn't be on Steam, right? Cheers for the spot, PCGN.

Right, Doom: The Dark Ages is still a month away, but I'm guessing there's some of you that could do with a bit of boomer shooting to fill the gap in the meantime. Metal Eden will probably scratch that itch, the next game from the devs behind the quite violent and flashy Ruiner, given that it's out May 6th. That's still about a month away though, so you could always try out the free demo that dropped today offering a small taste of its sci-fi shooter.