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Last month, Facepunch Studios began overhauling player progression in its nihilistic survival sim Rust to coax players out of their bases and encourage more PvP combat, introducing a “controversial” blueprint fragment system that requires players to locate and piece together blueprints to upgrade their workbenches above level one. Despite the apparently mixed reception of blueprint […]

As much as I’d like to keep up the charade that I’m not a very competitive player in most games, the degree to which I’ve been lying to myself has become painfully evident as I get back into Rust. It’s been a while, but now I remember why I quit—this game brings the devil out […]

If there’s one thing Minecraft knows how to do, it’s create a themed DLC. I was ecstatic when I discovered the Hello Kitty and Friends DLC earlier this year, which puts all the best Sanrio characters directly into your game and turns the traditional experience into a farming simulator. But although the newest crossover, a […]

Losing a huge portion of your base to a Creeper explosion is basically a rite of passage when you start playing Minecraft. But over a decade later, I still find myself getting incredibly frustrated every time I let one stray a little too close to my home, or into a farm I’ve created, before it […]

Whenever I get the itch to play Minecraft again, I always browse the Marketplace first to see if there are any packs I can add to make the game that little bit more exciting. There’s an overwhelming amount of content you can spend your coins on, like adding a larger variety of animals and fish […]

Prologue: Go Wayback!, the ultra-hard hiking sim developed by Brendan Greene’s studio PlayerUnknown Productions, has technically been playable for a while now. The studio has been running an open beta for the last two and a half months, giving players curious about Greene’s first proper game since PUBG: Battlegrounds the chance to try it out. […]

There’s no feeling quite like taming a horse in Minecraft, trying to ride it back to your base, and being met with a huge body of water. The sinking feeling in your chest, knowing that you’ll either have to leave it there and run off in an attempt to find the materials to craft a […]

When I started playing Minecraft in 2012 you didn’t have any sort of help or guidance when it came to crafting. You had to rely exclusively on your own knowledge, or constantly tab out of the game to look up crafting recipes. It wasn’t until the in-game recipe book was introduced in 2018 that I […]

Well, damn. The novelty of a brand new Star Trek: Voyager game tricked me into setting aside my natural cynicism, and I got burned. Star Trek: Voyager – Across the Unknown, I’m sad to report, is about as tasty as Neelix’s cooking. A budget survival game that commits the worst sin: it’s just so bloody […]

Customising your Minecraft experience with the best Minecraft mods is a must for anyone getting tired of the normal routine of base building and cave exploring. However, if you’re after something a bit more exciting than a mod designed to streamline your experience as an explorer, it’s worth checking out Minecraft horror mods, which can […]

Customising your Minecraft experience with the best Minecraft mods is a must for anyone getting tired of the normal routine of base building and cave exploring. However, if you’re after something a bit more exciting than a mod designed to streamline your experience as an explorer, it’s worth checking out Minecraft horror mods, which can […]

While by no means the longest-running early access project on Steam (that honour belongs to the perennial alpha juggernaut that is Project Zomboid) top-down survival RPG Necesse has been in development for quite some time. Fair Games’ pixel-y fantasy romp first stepped onto the road back in 2019, and only revealed it was prepping for […]

Techland has released its post-launch roadmap for its free-running, zombie-dropkicking spinoff Dying Light: The Beast. As gaming roadmaps go, it’s closer to what you’d scribble on the back of a packet of ciggies than the cartographical masterpieces produced by Ordnance Survey, with Techland’s plans stretching over just 11 weeks. But this pencil-scrawl to your local […]

I think we can all agree that the creeper is one of the most iconic videogame enemies—next to the murloc, the goomba, and whatever the hell’s going on with the tonberry. But it turns out that Minecraft‘s devs probably wouldn’t have added it based on their current design goals. That’s per a recent dev blog […]

I’ll be honest, if you asked me to run down a list of good settings for a survival/crafting extraction shooter, ‘train’ would not feature highly. By their nature, trains are long, cramped, and narrow, and the only material you’re likely to come across is that one weird tissue that some former passenger has left wedged […]

I’ve taken a few peeks at Deathground since it was announced back in 2020: it’s a co-op survival horror game where up to four players sneak and creep through an abandoned research facility, being stalked by ravenous dinosaurs every step of the way. It’s Jurassic Park simulator, in other words, where you try to complete […]

I’m a pretty avid explorer in Minecraft, and that’s been the case since I started playing in early 2012. But, if there’s one place I actively avoid visiting, it’s the vast expanse of ocean you always come across in the world. No matter how hard I try, it gets to a certain point where I […]

Having worked from home most of my adult life, I am familiar with the appeal of never having to leave my house. My commute to work is about ten steps long and I can do it in slippers if I like. I don’t have to take out a second mortgage if I want a coffee […]

Arctico is sort of like Subnautica without all the underwater dread. Walk into a body of water in Arctico and you’ll suddenly be in a kayak, cruising over the calm blue surface toward a fishing spot. It may be a game about expanding a research base in a lonely, hostile environment, but it’s a much […]

The limits of Minecraft’s procedural-generation math become apparent the further away you get from your starting position. First you cross into the jitters, a region where movement gets all, well, jittery. Keep going and eventually you’ll reach the Far Lands, an alien landscape where patterns of blocks stop resolving into pleasant hills and streams, instead […]

Palworld developer Pocketpair has proved time and again that it’s no stranger to supporting other indie games, whether that be by setting up shop as a publisher to help struggling devs or by simply giving others the shout-out that they deserve. This time, Palworld’s devs are seeking to spread the good word of Core Keeper, […]

Minecraft has shared some details about its fourth game drop of the year, Mounts of Mayhem. As always though, the first round of information includes some exciting additions the game can expect, but doesn’t expose a lot of details like a release date. Luckily the official blog post about the drop, alongside the announcement at […]