October 2021

The next game from Eric “ConcernedApe” Barone, creator of Stardew Valley, is called Haunted Chocolatier, a cute sim about a chocolate shop. Not much is known about the game yet other than that you run a haunted chocolate shop and go on adventures to collect ingredients. But ConcernedApe has posted a new developer diary on the Haunted Chocolatier website with some design details about his vision for how Haunted Chocolatier’s combat will go. The post is accompanied by a gif of the combat in action, showing how off-handed items like Shields will play out in fights to stun opponents who…

Welcome to This Week in PC Gaming, a show where we take a look at the new games, updates, events, and more coming at you over the next week, every week, until the end of PC games as we know it.  This week we finally get a game about a forgotten war in Call of Duty Vanguard that’s bringing a new campaign, zombies mode, and Warzone goodies. Unpacking is a lovely puzzle game about unpacking stuff. Let’s Build a Zoo has you crossbreed adorable animals into adorable monsters.  The PC gaming forecast is all about the release of Intel’s 12th…

DreadXP, the publisher of the Dread X collections of indie horror hors d’oeuvres, is doing something a little different for its next game. It’s a romantic visual novel and dating sim called Sucker for Love: First Date, it’s coming in December, and we’ve got the very first, very weird, trailer. To be fair, it’s not all that different from what DreadXP has done previously: It’s actually an eldritch horror dating simulator in which you’ll pursue the women of your (literal) dreams—Ln’eta, Estir, or Nyanlathotep—by invoking rituals inspired by the Cthulhu mythos. It might even be familiar to fans: Sucker for…

The other week on the Skyrim subreddit, a player explained that, despite years of playing Bethesda’s vehicle for cool mods, they’d come across something they’d never seen before: craftable spiders you can throw at people. Spiders that explode into flame, jumping shock spiders, poison spiders, mind control spiders, and more. Over the next several days, players either admitted they hadn’t noticed them either, or crankily declared that everybody knows about the Skyrim mind control spider grenades, come on. One reason the spiders flew under the radar for many players is that they’re part of the Dragonborn DLC, and can only…

The Zenimax website currently has a bunch of open job opportunities at the Texas branch of id Software, and several of them mention the positions will be involved in “the development of a long-running iconic action FPS.” Assuming that Wolfenstein remains with Machine Games and Rage with Avalanche, that leaves Doom and Quake as the only id games that fit the bill—unless your personal definition of FPS includes Commander Keen somehow. The job listings repeatedly mention “sci-fi and fantasy” when referring to environments, which sounds like Quake, and following this year’s remaster of the original, which came with a whole…

(Image credit: 1C Entertainment)Right now in Early Access you can only play Forgive Me Father as a gun-toting priest, but the finished game should also give you the option to play as a journalist. Its most immediate, compelling draw is the striking aesthetic—a blend of 2D and 3D art with hand-drawn comic-style figures and foreground assets that make great eye candy, especially when they’re drenched in bloody tentacles.  As with most Lovecraft-flavored stories, everything takes place in an early 20th century New England coastal setting with a strong fishing economy. Scattered notes paint a Dishonored-esque picture of the town of…

From 2010 to 2014 Richard Cobbett wrote Crapshoot, a column about rolling the dice to bring random obscure games back into the light. This week, a mixed bag of 1990s… well, classics may be a strong word. Games that existed? Yes, let’s go with that. 1990s games that existed. Before the internet became omnipresent, before the indie game revolution, there was a model called ‘shareware’. The idea was that developers could release new games cheaply, leaving distribution to fans and companies willing to act as distributors. Gamers meanwhile could get huge chunks of free game—for a long time, a third…

God of War is coming to PC. So is Uncharted 4 and its spin-off The Lost Legacy. We’ve already got Horizon Zero Dawn and Days Gone, and it’s presumably just a matter of time until Square Enix owns up to Final Fantasy 16 getting a PC release and puts a date on it, and Final Fantasy 7 Remake too. But there are still plenty more PS games that would fit the PC, that would be suited to mods and running at 60fps or higher on a fancy monitor. Which one are you holding out for? Which PlayStation-exclusive do you want on…

A controversial line of gamer-marketed “blue light protection” skincare products associated with content creator Rachell “Valkyrae” Hofstetter has been cancelled after strong negative backlash last week. The Rflct website is gone, replaced with a short message to those who were associated with the brand” “RFLCT is no longer available. Thank you to all who played important roles to conduct research, develop products, create a brand and serve as partners along our journey. While we believe in the formulations created, after further reflection, have decided to move forward on new paths, effectively terminating the RFLCT brand,” the site says. (Image credit: Rflct)Rflct…