What do you add to the game that has everything? We named Caves of Qud the best roguelike of 2024 due in part to its sheer density of simulated, deep-future, science-fantasy stuff: You can begin a playthrough as a fairly normal guy, and by the end of your run could be playing a clone of yourself who later became a psionic four-armed turtle man wielding a gun that uses blood for ammo and fires vacuum pulses that eat life.

With a tapestry of potential interactions already so profoundly, magnificently weird, what could Caves of Qud possibly be adding in Diaspora, an expansion that will be entering early access in December? Well, playable trees is a good start.

According to publisher Kitfox, Diaspora "includes several new feature arcs centered around the influx of riotous life and culture into marsh-moated ruins of Qud." Chief among them is the ability to start a playthrough as a mutated animal or plant. Those among you with Qud experience might be thinking, 'Aren't there already animal- and plant-themed mutations?'

And there are. But where before you could begin as a human and mutate into beast-shape or plant-form, now—in a sort of beautiful symmetry—you can begin as a tree and mutate into a man. Or, you know, a progressively weirder tree. A tree with wings. And a scorpion tail, maybe. Who can say?

Alongside the new mutant animal and plant stocks—and an accompanying expansion to the catalog of potential player mutations—Diaspora's early access launch will also seed new creatures and artifacts throughout Qud. These will surely bring with them their own new and exciting forms of existential peril. The camelfolk trade caravans are getting some love, too—and their saltback tortoise steeds will, for the first time, be mountable.

As it's an early access launch, those are just the initial offerings. Throughout the course of its continuing development—expected to last "on the order of one year"—Qud's creators plan on adding a new multi-step questline, new factions and underground villages, "roaming, seasonal mega-caravans," more items, creatures, mutant stocks, and (take a deep breath) new fungal infections.

If that last bit doesn't sound exciting to you, you've clearly never enjoyed hosting a sentient skin infection of tiny mouths which occasionally "harmonizes into sensible speech" to reveal a secret about the in-game world. You can see why I'm excited, right? Hello?

Caves of Qud: Diaspora launches in early access on Steam on December 9.

I was stuck in elo hell for a good four years, then I entered elo purgatory for another five years, and now I'm apparently in elo heaven, but for some reason it still feels like elo hell. I guess that's just part and parcel of playing online competitive multiplayer games.

While I'd never want to relive the pain of climbing from Bronze to GM, I am morbidly intrigued in whether I still have that fight in me. So I've found a happy medium, playing a strategy roguelike that provides players with "all the satisfaction of reaching rank 1, none of the toxic teammates or 40-minute hostage games".

In Escape from EloHell, you're set the task of collecting MMR as you climb the ladder from Iron 4 to Challenger, rank 1 in just 60 matches, before the season resets and you have to start again. The only way to gain MMR is to win matches, but unlike an ordinary competitive multiplayer, Escape from EloHell is a roguelike in which you have to gamble on your ability to win matches to gain effects which will help you in the long run.

It was all going pretty well at first, I managed to report P1mple Guy which got me 14 MMR and I proved that I can indeed gank, and finally I 1v1'd a job application and actually got it, no points for realism though, that was far too easy. But I will give points for realism in that almost every time I was about to rank up I'd be hit with a curve ball that'd see my MMR fall a couple of spaces, now that's what it's like to try and get out of elo hell.

In the end I was only able to climb to Bronze 3 in my first season, with 48 wins and 12 losses. It simply isn't good enough. On my second round I got to Bronze 2. Then Bronze 1. Then back to Bronze 3. And then all the way up to Silver 1. Yeah, this is almost too realistic.

Warhammer Survivors launches on November 10, 2026 and its Steam demo is available now, as revealed by a new release date trailer showing the expected dozens of playable Warhammer heroes slaughtering the expected thousands of enemy fodder with boltguns, enchanted hammers, and at least one Leman Russ battle tank. Our Fraser Brown has already spent 10 hours with the demo, and is entirely smitten with its prerequisite goblin slaying. And Tyranid slaying. And Skaven slaying.

I thought Warhammer Survivors sounded like a neat spin-off—Vampire Survivors in a Warhammer skin, created by Boltgun developer Auroch Digital. Having spent 10 hours with its demo, however, I'm increasingly convinced that it deserves to be catagorised as a sequel.

A lot of care has clearly gone into the hero design, maps and all the horrible beasties trying to eviscerate you, and rather than simply replicate Vampire Survivors, Auroch Digital has included a bunch of novelties and new ideas, like followers and more overt boss battles.

Playing it on my Steam Deck has already had a terrible impact on my sleep routine, just like its predecessor. And with its launch just around the corner on November 10, I think I'm just going to have to accept that I'm going to be very tired for the rest of the year.

This is how I knew Dicevaders got its claws into me: the first thing I did this morning was boot up my Steam Deck (which is next to my bed, of course), just so I could get another run in before logging on for work. This kind of compulsive behaviour hasn't been part of my daily routine since Titanium Court back in May, and before that, Blue Prince in 2025—so Dicevaders is in good company.

You play the captain of an alien invasion force hurtling through the stars in this roguelike deckbuilder, which is about activating units on a grid using three dice. Each column on the grid corresponds to a number on the dice. You draft your units in each column, roll the dice, then the outcome determines which columns of units will score. As you can see below:

Your units don't actually go anywhere or fight anything. They each have a strength stat which forms the base score of each turn. Let's say you roll a pair of threes and a six, as I did in the screenshot above. Your units placed in the third column will have their strength stat multiplied by two, while the unit in the sixth column will only score its basic strength stat because one dice only equals a 1x multiplier.

The goal is to hit a target damage number across four turns, which successfully triggers the invasion. If you don't hit the number, you start losing health on each further turn until it's game over. Of course, you can also buy a suite of artifacts which positively affect the score in many ways, from increasing multipliers to bolstering the permanent strength stats of your different units.

Written down, all of this sounds pretty familiar. And it is! But what's key to Dicevaders' appeal is how much scope it gives you to affect both the outcome of each dice roll and your current run. Sure, chance is a factor in how you play, yet there's an intensive resource management layer here that makes it feel fair.

For example, you have a currency called 'Budge', which is self-explanatory: you can spend one Budge point to move a dice roll either up or down one per turn (so, a four becomes a five or three), and you can do this for all three dice. You can also spend another currency called 'Chrono' to re-roll the dice completely. That gives you quite a bit of scope to avoid the dice roll landing on the columns with all your dud units.

Both of these resources are finite. The game isn't that stingy with them, however, and you have numerous ways to get more, which is what gives Dicevaders its feeling of fairness. In between each turn, you're given cash to spend on units, artifacts and both these vital currencies.

You can also freeze an item to buy it on the next turn if you're short on cash—again, all of this adds to the feeling that the developers want to give you the power to turn your luck around, rather than write off a run early.

The other resources you're managing, of course, are your units. As well as their strength stats, most of them have specific abilities, too: teleporting around the grid between turns, attacking three times per turn but only if they're placed on the bottom row, or randomly activating other units around the grid to add their points to the score total. There are many other variants.

Managing them is about positioning and getting their strength stats as high as possible to increase your base score. In a fun touch, you can sacrifice one unit between turns and give their strength stat to another. You'll fatten up a unit's strength with one of your artifacts, only to feed them to a different unit that has the special ability to attack six times if they're played in the sixth column. Suddenly, that unit is six times more useful, and you've opened up another spot on the grid to drop another unit in.

Or maybe you'll have a network of Swarmers that share one giant strength stat with adjacent units of the same type. Which is exactly what I had going on with these yellow lads below, meaning they'd do the same base damage whether I rolled a 3, 4 or 5 in Prism Tower-like fashion.

"Shit yeah!" I yelled after figuring this out, before realising my artifacts weren't scaling fast enough to keep reaching the score target. It becomes apparent that there is a staggering number of strategies you can employ to hit the high numbers in Dicevaders, and it's excellent at teaching itself as you go.

Just by following a few simple tutorial screens, I'm punting scores into the millions already—but by no means do I feel like I totally understand the shape of the game yet. It's hit that roguelike sweet spot.

Dicevaders seems to repackage some of the art and characters from last year's well-regarded Starvaders, which was also a roguelike deckbuilder with more of a shooter bent. I haven't played that, but this seems rather different—the alien invasion stuff is just a pleasantly cartoonish skin for a game about managing a grid of increasingly outrageous numbers.

I can't honestly say that Dicevaders feels completely new and fresh, or that it'll bust the cobwebs if you're burned out on the hundreds of games trying to be the next Balatro. I can't even say I fully understand why certain numbers are triggering the way they do about 20% of the time.

But it's the real deal in terms of high-level synergies and how much control it offers you over each situation. I don't feel like I'm pissing time into an abyss, either, which is always the risk with these games—it's complex and has a lot of moving parts, and there are too many unit types available for you to become entirely dependent on a single strategy. It keeps you changing things up.

Now if you'll excuse me, I'm going back to bed to play some more of it.

Are you aware of Oh!Ware? I'm guessing not. The deckbuilder has been on Steam for about a week as of this writing, with a humble 23 reviews to its name so far. It caught my eye though, because the fundamental mechanic underneath the very 2026 trappings of a roguelike structure and marbles standing in for cards is mancala—a slightly older board game you probably played at some point in your childhood.

And by "slightly older," I mean somewhere between 1,500 and 7,000 years older.

I was probably predisposed to love mancala as a kid: My dad was a big backgammon guy, and mancala is a lot like backgammon, but played with marbles or similar shiny colored glass pieces. (Kids still like shiny colored glass baubles in the TikTok era, right? I'm very out of touch.) What I didn't know about mancala until today is that it may be the oldest board game in recorded history, but precisely when and where it was invented is still undetermined.

"Some historians believe that mancala is the oldest game in the world based on the archaeological evidence found in Jordan that dates around 6000 BC," summarizes Wikipedia. But other, more concrete evidence of the game, as dug up by archaeologists, is thousands of years newer—around 500-600 AD. Mancala isn't definitively the oldest board game, then, with ancient competition from the likes of senet and mehen, but it's an OG regardless.

And now also a roguelike, though "deckbuilder" seems a bit off since the game is played with marbles. Does that make it a bagbuilder?

On booting up Oh!Ware's demo and skipping past the tutorial like I was hot shit, I realized I have not played mancala in at least 25 years and had no idea what I was doing. But I clicked a bunch to move some marbles around, collected mana(?) and killed a spider, who I really don't think had any business playing a board game that requires opposable thumbs. Then I was offered the archetypical pick three, but with amusing choices including "blessing marble" and "aggro marble."

I need to go study up on mancala now, but if anyone plays Oh!Ware, please let me know if I should aim for an aggro meta or a blessing meta. I really don't want to lose my marbles.

When I first heard about this card-based roguelike city builder, I was confused. Then I played a round. And another. And another. And another. And before I knew it far too much time had passed and I was absolutely hooked. That game is Toxic Frontier, and we just revealed it at the PC Gaming Show Tokyo Direct.

Toxic Frontier plays on a hexagonal grid that makes it feel a bit like Settlers of Catan, only I'm not screaming at my housemates because they won't accept my very reasonable trade offers. You draw cards such as villages, forests, sheep, mountains, lakes, and more, and try to find the synergies while expanding into the titular toxic wasteland.

You don't combine cards just by stacking them on top of each other. Some you do, but it often gets more complicated than that. Surround a village with other villages, for example, and the central one becomes a town. Repeat the process and you get a city.

That process is hampered by the terrain you discover as you slowly push back the fog. By building up your settlements and expanding the land, you'll push deeper into the toxic mists, often unearthing nasty horrors like wandering mutants that will raid your lumberjack homes, or polluted wastelands that have to be cleansed.

But where does the roguelike element come into it? Well, each level has a semi-randomised set of objectives and you only have a limited number of cards to complete them. Each card you place also rewards you with points that you need to unlock more cards. Bigger and more complex combos give more points, so you've got to experiment and try to make the most out of what you've got.

I learned the hard way that not all the combos are easy to do, so expect to lose a lot when the game comes out. When that is, we don't know. For now, all you can do is wishlist Toxic Frontier on Steam.

Check out our Steam page with all the games, updates, and DLC featured in the show. You can also read our roundup article which includes every announcement from the show in the order it aired.

Never say I'm biased or I don't have an open mind, because here I am, telling you about a videogame where raccoons—my favourite animal on this Earth—are the enemy. Heartbreaking, I know. In The Rabbit Haul, the crafty little scamps are pestering a bunny named Sprout, so they decide to turn their garden into a warzone that can keep the mischievous Trash Panda Posse at bay.

Why does Sprout need to keep the raccoons away? Well, they kind of destroyed the town. I'm sure they didn't mean to and were just looking for snacks. Still, one has to defend one's home, so Sprout gets to planting deadly organic weaponry during the day and fighting off the hordes of ringtails at night. Sprout gets in on the action themselves, so you won't just be passively watching your plants do all the hard work.

The Rabbit Haul feels a bit like plants versus raccoons, only instead of pure tower defense, you actually have to tend to your garden to grow your organic weaponry. You prepare the flora in a grid, and can choose to either overwhelm your foes with unimaginable force or try to outsmart them with clever plant synergies. You'll have to improvise, adapt, and overcome, because the waves of raccoons get stronger each night, and if they're successful, they'll trash your garden and steal away your resources.

The Rabbit Haul is a roguelite, so you'll be rebuilding Sprout's town between runs. Restore shops, fix up homes, and welcome new characters into the cosy little hamlet, and unlock upgrades that'll help you in future attempts. And no farming sim would be complete without some dress up options, so rest assured, you can put Sprout in lots of adorable little outfits.

Revealed for the first time at the PC Gaming Show were new features, such as a snowy biome, what looks to be a pirate raccoon enemy type—again, why must this game make me fight the things I love—more characters and plant towers, and even an infinite mode. Best of all, we also revealed the release date. It's tomorrow, September 21. You can wishlist The Rabbit Haul on Steam so you remember to pick up a copy.

Check out our Steam page with all the games, updates, and DLC featured in the show. You can also read our roundup article which includes every announcement from the show in the order it aired.

The best art is all about descending into someone's twisted psyche. It doesn't matter who, but the deeper we get into their very being, the better. Now buckle up and prepare for Wane, a roguelike where you quite literally navigate through the deconstructed mind of Declan Wayne, a fading archaeologist.

We just revealed the game at the PC Gaming Show Tokyo Direct, and it looks like a corker—for any non-Brits, that means it looks really good. "I used to believe that memory makes a man," says Wayne as he narrates over the gorgeous trailer. "Now I know, it can unmake one, too."

That line and the art style were already enough to get me excited for Wane, but then the brass instrumental music swelled and instantly shot this game to the top of my wishlist. It oozes style, and the combat looks pretty hardcore, too.

We see one guy simply do finger guns and magically shoot someone from across the room, and then a woman with a hammer bigger than herself leaps over a railing and does a cinematic slam attack, complete with impact frames. It looks awesome.

These are just two of the six adventurers you can use to form a party of three who must venture into Ravelle, a map of Declan's mind. Each biome is a different section of his psyche, so expect to face off against all of his demons.

This is a roguelike, so expect to die. Between runs, you'll return to Declan's shop, sell goods, and prepare for the next expedition into his mind. You'll probably learn why he's going to all this effort, too.

Wane is being developed by Metis Creative, a tabletop publisher and now videogame studio, too. The trailer reveals little about the world of Wane, but given the history of the devs and the stunning art style already shown, it's a world I already can't wait to learn more about.

There's no release date for the game just yet, but there is a demo coming in 2027. For now you can wishlist Wane on Steam.

Check out our Steam page with all the games, updates, and DLC featured in the show. You can also read our roundup article which includes every announcement from the show in the order it aired.

You know, for like a solid month after Ball x Pit released, it had several members of PC Gamer's staff in a white-knuckle chokehold. Editors, staff writers, possibly an accountant or two—the game's blend of Breakout and roguelike swept through these offices like a delightful plague, leaving none of us unchanged.

Time to be changed again, then. At the PC Gaming Show Tokyo Direct, we just saw Ball x Pit: Risen Ballbylon, an entirely new expansion for the game with new characters, gameplay, buildings, passives and, brace yourself, new balls.

It's coming on November 12, and friends, it sure is a lot. Sure, there are all the lovely loops you've come to know in the base game, but now they are garnished with vast quantities of additional stuff: 20 new ball evolutions, eight new hunters, four new biomes, 20 new buildings, 46 new passives.

I think that, if you felt like you had mastered all that Ball x Pit had to offer in its original form, you've now got something like a master's level exam to familiarise yourself with the materials for.

We got a little glimpse of some of those new hunters, by the by. Fancy playing a sentinel? How about a word I'm 90% sure is potager? Or you can go for my immediate favourite, the scandalmonger, whose whole thing is that he constantly rotates balls about him like some kind of nightmarish Las Vegas evening show. I'm going to be that guy, I think.

It's a hell of a lot of new stuff for a game that already had a hell of a lot of stuff as it was, and I can already feel its approach. I feel it in the soles of my feet, like the distant vibrations of an approaching army. Come November 12, I fear these offices may never be the same again. Wishlist it on Steam.

Check out our Steam page with all the games, updates, and DLC featured in the show. You can also read our roundup article which includes every announcement from the show in the order it aired.

A fun fact about myself is that I love mushrooms. I love finding them in the wild, I love putting them on pizza (please don't put wild mushrooms on your pizza), but most of all I love seeing them in games. It's quite a niche passion to be sure, but that hasn't stopped me from running around as a little mushroom man in my current DnD campaign. And now, I get to run around fighting them in my latest roguelike deckbuilder obsession: Shroom and Gloom.

Travelling through a subterranean dungeons full of vines, bones, and (crucially) shrooms, the aim here is to fight your way through areas to complete quests and unlock new characters, gather helpful items, and explore the different pathways.

Pretty standard, right? Wrong. Because Shroom and Gloom isn't just any old deckbuilder, it's a deck builder with two decks.

The first deck is for exploration, there's shovels to dig for new cards, lighters to start campfires for warmth, and tools to break through doors so you can progress onto the next area, among many, many other things. The catch is that you can only use so many of these in one go, thanks to your limited stamina.

This means you have to be strategic with what you do and when. Early on I made the mistake of getting way too excited digging holes and breaking open treasure chests. I soon had no stamina left to break the lock on the door to progress and I was forced to take a rest.

Now, that doesn't sound too bad, but resting in a fungal forest full of gloom isn't very comfortable. You can make campsites more bearable by lighting campfires, killing any shrooms lying around, and removing any human remains. But even then there are some negatives which you can't avoid. At each campsite you'll be able to see how much damage you'll take if you decide to sleep there, and let me tell you, it's almost never worth the rest.

You also replenish your stamina after each fight, so most of the time you'll want to just forge ahead and chew through some mushrooms, which brings me onto the second deck: your combat deck.

This holds cards which deal damage to enemies, stun them, or heal yourself, readied when you're jumped by a group of shrooms. The whole idea here is to not just stab your enemies, but take a couple of bites out of them as well; they are mushrooms afterall. You can add spices and hot sauce to them, cook 'em up (which means they'll take more damage), or just have them plain, whatever tickles your fancy.

My favourite part of fighting in Shroom and Gloom are all the combos. Once I got a hang of it I was dishing out successive attacks which toppled whole groups of mushrooms in no time at all. First I'd add a bit of spice, then mix in some hot sauce, stab a couple of them with my rusty knife, and finally start the flambé; bon appétit.

There's not a ton of meta progression in Shroom and Gloom so far. But that's ok because there are a couple of cards which can repeatedly help you through your expedition, and unlocking new characters will grant you different bonuses. But for the most part, good old fashioned practice is what will really help you progress on your runs here. Learning which enemies I should attack first, which cards are the best to get early on, and having the knowledge that I should always feed the rat meant I got further and further through after each death.

Dying also isn't so bad when it means you get to amble through countless hand-drawn stills which are all layered on top of one another to create the impression of a 3D tunnel. There really is so much to marvel at in Shroom and Gloom so I can't wait to get stuck in again and follow it throughout its early access journey.

Blood Dungeon adheres rigidly to the autoshooter or 'bullet heaven' format: it's about moving around a scrolling arena auto-gushing projectiles that turn a steadily increasing horde of enemies into XP. Every level up grants a choice between two or three randomised perks or improvements, steadily turning the player into a blur of pulsating DMG-emitting fireworks. Rounds are usually over in less than ten minutes.

I loved Vampire Survivors but then I got over it. I've never been gripped by any of the clones. But Blood Dungeon has some appealing bullet points going for it: it transforms the commonly top-down autoshooter into a sidescrolling platformer. At a glance, it looks more like Spelunky than it does Brotato or Deep Rock Galactic: Survivor.

The presentation is more appealing than your average bullet heaven fare too: Blood Dungeon is the work of Nidhogg studio Messhof and their distinctively globular 2D art style is a perfect fit for precision-oriented action. Animations in particular are often brilliant, and the music—which its creator Matthew Hoey aptly describes as dungeon drum 'n' bass—is simultaneously madcap and hypnotic.

There's no denying Blood Dungeon is a sleek, well-wrought take on this modern subgenre. It's probably among the best examples of it. But as the hours I spent with it wore on it started to feel exquisitely meaningless. I was reminded why I dropped Vampire Survivors.

Blood Packed

Blood Dungeon starts like all roguelites: vainly. I am Gun Man, a man with a piddling machinegun which shoots every 1.21 seconds. Thanks to the blood left by my fallen enemies, within a minute I've upgraded it to shoot twice rather than once, and then, thirty seconds later, I've acquired a sword that rotates around my body, shredding bats as I roam the lurid halls. By the time I die there are four double-sized swords surrounding me, my gun issues five bullets per round virtually non-stop, and the halls have turned into impenetrable walls of monster flesh.

Five hours later I've unlocked a handful of other characters and all six of the maps. I've upgraded my health, my jump height, my damage output, the amount of weapons I can equip per run, and my repertoire of powerful upgrades has expanded dramatically. If I'm lucky my character will be lost among an overwhelming array of erupting, tantruming firepower by the eighth minute.

My favourite weapon for achieving this is easily the bouncing ball, which can demolish most of the game's first bosses within seconds if I focus on upgrading it. I also love the turrets and the laser, though the shotgun whose spread can be increased from three to upwards of 13 shots is pretty fun too.

I also like most of the characters, except the unwieldy flying mosquito (I'll admit it's a skill issue). They all throb with panic, which well they should. My overall favourite is probably Skinja, who cartwheels around the maps at a blinding pace while issuing volleys of the aforementioned shotgun pellets. I also liked the Baby, whose low health is well-compensated by a revolver that one-shots most early round enemies. There's also Hypnomancer, who loads out with gas which, naturally, he farts from his arse.

But it's the sidelong perspective that appeals to me most, even though all maps stick to common survivor archetypes: there's the X-axis corridor map, the Y-axis pit map, and other gimmicks like the map with a lot of water, and the map you have to mine through. Importantly, every map has a fixed layout but the locations of items and keys are, for the most part—but not entirely—randomised.

Most maps also loop back on themselves, so the genre's sense of constant, hysterical forward momentum is complemented by a newfound focus on map knowledge: knowing where to reliably find health and explosives is the difference between beating the area's third and final boss or dying for the umpteenth time to its second. If I spend the less frantic opening minutes unlocking as many doors as possible, it'll make the final minutes when there's barely a safe place to stand much easier.

Slot Your Throat

But Blood Dungeon does inevitably feel like a grind. The opening hours are an enticing onslaught of rewards and unlocks, but by the ten hour mark, with my fist deep in its basket of candy, the basket is ripped away and my nose pressed to the grindstone. It lays bare the disappointing truth that the game itself can't withstand the absence of its rewards.

Still, Blood Dungeon feels superb to play which is essential for an arcade game but oddly, kinda rare for a Survivors-like. I guess most Survivors-likes don't need to feel good because the genre usually amounts to little more than a slot machine simulator. It fast-tracks RPG character progress so that dopamine hits come thick and fast in units of seconds rather than hours. Then, in the final five seconds or less, assuming the RNG hasn't been so kind as to make me unstoppable, it steals everything away and invites me to start again.

I can get better and better at moving around in Blood Dungeon but if the RNG doesn't favour me I'm still stuffed. Being at the mercy of chance is baked into its design, of course, but there is a big unambiguous line between the story-generating unpredictability of a Nethack or Spelunky and the more-ish, non-nutritive unpredictability of a lottery.

And that's ultimately what Blood Dungeon and its ilk feel like to me, once I've put the controller down and walked away from their exquisitely compulsive loops and dazzling visual noise. It's addictive, and that's the only reason I keep playing it. It gets easier as I play, but that's not because I've improved much: it's overwhelmingly attributable to the wider array of weapons, charms and spells I have at my disposal at hour fifty versus hour one.

Still, Messhof pulls its own Survivors-like off with flair and applies a thin layer of skill reward. I enjoyed the time I spent playing it. But now that I've put it down, I never want to think about it again.

Amidst the constant flood of negative and depressing stories about the gaming industry, it's nice to get a glimmer of good news now and then. Today that news comes via the court of Judge John Hodgman, who has ruled that it is perfectly legal to play Slay the Spire 2 in bed—even if the person in bed with you doesn't agree.

Some background, if you don't know what the hell I'm talking about: actor, author, and all-around funny person John Hodgman has a podcast called Judge John Hodgman where he rules on the disputes brought into his virtual courtroom.

These gentle disputes are typically between friends, family members, or partners, and consist of good-natured beefs or unusual disagreements: for example, one memorable case I listened to recently involved one person who thought it was perfectly normal to flush leftover soup down the toilet instead of dumping it in the sink, and another who (rightfully, imho) thought that was a pretty goddamn weird thing to do.

Hodgman hears both sides of cases like this and then makes a thoughtful ruling on who is in the right, with the plaintiff and defendant agreeing to abide by his decision. (I won't spoil the soup case: it is fascinating.)

This most recent dispute brought before Judge Hodgman involves whether or not it's OK to play games, particularly Slay the Spire 2, when in bed with a partner, and really, who better to adjudicate such a case than John Hodgman? He not only plays PC games (until recently he was regularly streaming himself playing SimCity 2013) but he also portrayed the PC in the old Mac vs PC ads that foolishly tried to convince us that a hoodied, goateed Justin Long was more appealing than a nerdy yet dapper John Hodgman. What the hell were you thinking, Apple?

In the case, Dan complains that his fiancée, Elissa plays her favorite game, Slay the Spire 2, in their bed on a laptop. Dan believes screens don't have a place in the bedroom and Elissa's nighttime gaming habits are ruining her chances for healthy sleep. Elissa says playing games before bedtime actually helps her sleep and she has trouble drifting off if she doesn't do some gaming before bed. Who's right and who's wrong?

Well, as you already know from subtle context clues like me saying earlier that Dan is wrong, Dan is wrong—but for a few reasons. First, Dan admits Elissa's gaming habits aren't actually keeping him awake at night: the light from her laptop screen and whatever tapping or clicking she's doing don't interfere with his rest at all.

"Pick an arbitrary battle and stick with it," Hodgman says when Dan admits to stubbornly storming off to sleep on a couch when he sees Elissa bringing her laptop into their bedroom.

"One of the major arguments for marriage is to have someone in the room with you while you're playing a video game," Hodgman says. "When Dan leaves the premarital bed out of spite to prove a point to you, Elissa, how does that make you feel? Really eager to marry him?"

I know there's a school of thought that says you should cut down on screentime right before bed, and some folks feel similarly to Dan that bedrooms should only be for sleeping and, well, let's call it "WooHoo" to keep it videogame related.

But Judge Hodgman ultimately rules in favor of Elissa because, honestly, Dan really doesn't have a case: he wasn't himself losing sleep due to Elissa's gaming habits, he just believed she should share an identical sleeping philosophy. And since he's her fiancee and not, y'know, her dad, Hodgman ruled Elissa can decide for herself what she wants to do before going to sleep.

I think it's a sound ruling, though I do have one sticking point: as a legal expert myself (I took a single business law class in community college 15 years ago and got a B) I think Hodgman should have recused himself from this case, and any case dealing with sleep, as he frequently advertises a mattress company on his podcast. Classic case of conflict of interest and grounds for appeal.

You can watch the entire case on YouTube or download the Judge John Hodgman podcast here.

Moonlighter is a hybrid of management sim and roguelite dungeon crawl in the vein of Recettear: An Item Shop's Tale. I was more intrigued by its shopkeeping side—where you put your loot on display and hope the locals in your hamlet are in the mood for a magic sword or some banged-up armor—than I was by its dungeon runs and boss battles, but your mileage may vary.

That mileage is currently good value, because right now you can add Moonlighter to your Steam account for free. Digital Sun and 11 Bit Studios have set it to zero dollars until August 9 to celebrate the upcoming release of Moonlighter 2: The Endless Vault, which is currently in early access but will be hitting 1.0 on September 2.

Moonlighter 2 adds more Hades to the formula, as Sam Desatoff noted in our preview, writing, "It’s impossible not to see the touch of Hades in Moonlighter 2's combat (it's isometric now!), or in the way Will gets to know the characters loitering around town. The hub area of Tresna could be a respectable stand-in for the House of Hades or The Crossroads, and I enjoyed familiarizing myself with the town and its residents."

Moonlighter 2 also shifts away from the first game's Binding of Isaac-esque dungeon exploration for more of the FTL/Slay the Spire-influenced node-choosing that's all the rage. But it's still embedded in a town full of locals to befriend, to throw some Stardew Valley into the blend. If it's the sequel you're more interested in, you can download a demo from Moonlighter 2's Steam page.

In a July 29 IGN interview, prolific director Guillermo del Toro shared his love of the hardcore action-roguelike, Dead Cells, but lamented its difficulty, wishing there was a mode that eased up on the roguelike restarts. Dead Cells studio Motion Twin has since responded to IGN, and recommends del Toro try the easy mode it's already got in there.

"We'd like to officially add this moment into our own personal Cabinet of Curiosities," the studio told IGN. "We are surprised and truly honored to see that Mr. del Toro is a Dead Cells player, and we can even help him right now: there is an Assist mode in the game!

"This mode lets you resurrect at the start of the current biome or closest checkpoint, rather than restarting the entire run. Thank you very much Guillermo for your kind words and your time on the game. We hope this little message will help you!"

Assist mode kinda sounds like exactly what del Toro was asking for: "You get 35 levels in and then you start again, you get faster, but please do a version without respawning for the elderly players." We could be mistaken, but I and PCG news writer Elie Gould interpreted his complaint to be directed at the roguelike genre's consequences on death: Losing all your stuff and the map getting randomized. Hopefully the director will find what he's looking for in Assist mode.

And lest you judge del Toro too harshly for not catching Assist mode before going on the record about it, a frequent, recurring Google query we've noticed in our eternal quest for SEO succor is "How do I save in [X new videogame]," a question usually answered with "pause the game, then hit the 'save' button." None of us are free from sin. There are (almost) no dumb questions.

One of the beautiful things about the PC—about open, general-use computing on the whole—is that you might, at any point, stumble across a GitHub repo that contains its own small civilisation. You'll find some hoary app or game that has lived a thousand lives before you ever became aware of it, that one magical lunatic, or team thereof, has been working on in their off-hours since the year still started with a one. They have communities, traditions, in-jokes, histories. They are worlds.

Sometimes, worlds that live within other worlds, as is the case with Sil-Q, a free-and-open-source take on Rogue (as in Rogue, the 'Rogue' in 'Roguelike') that extricates the action from an anonymous dungeon and transplants it into Tolkien's First Age of Arda: the setting of much of The Silmarillion.

Taken by itself, Sil-Q is not actually that old. Its first release only took place in 2017, but its ancestry, fittingly, stretches back a lot further. Sil-Q is a continuation of Sil, which released in 2012 and ceased development in the mid-2010s. Sil is based on Angband, which first came out in 1993 and which is still under active development today. Angband, meanwhile, derives from 1983's Moria—also still going, heroically.

Some or all of which you might already know, given that Moria was an influence on Diablo 1 namechecked by David Breivik himself, but it was new to me when I discovered Sil-Q on my weekly quest for reasons not to play videogames that came out this year.

Angband was sprawling—a hodgepodge of fantasy concepts in the Dungeons and Dragons mould, with a Tolkienian underpinning. Your goal was eventually to kill Morgoth, the legendarium's first and worst dark lord. This was not, strictly speaking, lore-friendly. In the history of Arda, Morgoth was never slain, but rather permanently kicked out of the party—banished from the world until the Battle of All Battles.

It's also just, you know, kind of at-odds with the general vibe of Tolkien's world. Sauron was not defeated because Frodo powerlevelled hard enough to stab him to death.

So Sil and its descendent take Angband's general gameplay, the Rogueness of it all, and tighten the corset around its fidelity to the setting. Its enemies are all ripped from Tolkien's pages. You can no longer play as races like kobold, or as classes like mage and druid. Instead, you choose between the Noldor (cool elves), Sindar (slightly less cool elves), Naugrim (an elvish borderline slur for dwarves, which seems rude), or the Edain (men, who suck).

These aren't races in the D&D sense—you aren't doing anything so mechanical as picking between different packages of advantages and disadvantages. Instead, they reflect Arda as-written: men really are kind of lame. They might be Eru Iluvatar's favourite, but they're neither fast, nor hearty, nor strong of will. They lack all the advantages the elves and even dwarves get. To play one is to deliberately hamstring yourself.

From there, you choose your House—the precise lineage of cool elf or lame guy you descend from, which then impacts your starting proficiencies and stats—and off you go into Morgoth's fortress. But you're no assassin, the goal is to pry one of the stolen Silmaril gems from the dark lord's black crown, then run the hell away before he notices.

This is what grabbed me about Sil-Q, I think. It's not that it doesn't care about balance, it's that balance and the game's mechanics are all subservient to a dedication to the setting. The world is the thing, and if the world demands that being a mortal man confer no advantages whatsoever then that's damn well how it's going to work. This is probably not something they are teaching in game design school, but I like it.

And then you're actually roaming around Morgoth's dread fortress and, dammit, you're in pure Silmarillion town, baby. You're fighting orcs and picking up strange mythical weapons that glow blue when you're near 'em, dying over and over and over again in classic Rogue style. You are a heightened hero of the first age, evading the blows of your enemies like Fingolfin at Dagor Bragollach. Or, possibly, getting devoured by a pack of wolves in the very first area. That is also a possibility.

If you're as Silmarillion-brained as me (or moreso, which has been known to happen), I strongly recommend you check Sil-Q out. It's a game that runs on anything and has 40 years of history and 5,000 years of lore. It doesn't get much more Tolkien than that.

I drip-feed roguelikes into my gaming schedule: one too many total resets and my brain could break beyond repair. I always knew this wasn't an unusual approach but I didn't ever think it would be an opinion I'd share with one of my favourite filmmakers, Guillermo del Toro. But the world is a strange place.

Thanks to a new interview with IGN we now know that del Toro is a gamer with excellent taste, and a fan of Dead Cells—with a small caveat.

"Dead Cells was really interesting to me, I just hate respawning," del Toro said, chuckling. "You get 35 levels in and then you start again, you get faster, but please do a version without respawning for the older, for the elderly players. I'm available, you contact me and send it to me, please I beg you. Because I like the world, great design."

It may go against the entire point of a roguelike—and Dead Cells' very specific promise of "no checkpoints"—but honestly, I get it. Some of the best worlds in videogames exist in roguelikes, they can be so beautiful to wander through, while also being excruciatingly painful.

Dead Cells isn't the only good example of this, there's also Hades, Noita, Wildfrost, and Binding of Isaac, among many, many others. So the idea of having an easier way to explore and experience these worlds does sound pretty nice, although I do also think the difficulty is what makes exploring these games so rewarding.

Other than suffering through Dead Cells, del Toro also shares the other games which hold a special place in his heart. "BioShock is a world I could get lost in for ages," he said, also naming Journey and Monument Valley. "I love Left 4 Dead, Death Stranding made me cry, Shadow of the Colossus made me introspect about so many untangible things."

Hell yeah, excellent choice Guillermo. Shadow of the Colossus is one of my all-time favourite games, its setting, musical score, boss design, and subtle story are all absolutely outstanding—it's one of the few games I always love to replay.

Del Toro threw one curveball at the end of the interview: "Every day of my life, every moment I have free I'm still playing Angry Birds—I'm really good at it." You know what, hell yeah again. I remember Angry Birds as being a good bit of fun back when I played it a lifetime ago. I'm glad someone's still finding joy in it, I guess.

Having been playing games almost as long as I've been alive, I've fought and killed more goblins than I could ever hope to count. While MMOs, RPGs, RTSes, and all kinds of other acronyms have happily enabled my lifelong war with goblinkind, Flask—an autobattler that just released a demo on Steam—is the rare sort of game that's prompted me to ask instead what's in a goblin's heart.

The answer, of course, is valuable goblin blood. That's why I—and other debt-ridden alchemists—are dispatching squads of mutant homunculi adventurers into the wastes beyond the Goblin Gate to carve a bloody (and therefore lucrative) path towards personal solvency. And I'm having an excellent time.

I don't have much history with autobattlers, but I was drawn to Flask by its art style, crafted by artist John Kenn Mortensen. It's scratchy; it's grotesque; it's somewhere between a metal album cover, a Hieronymus Bosch triptych, and an Edward Gorey book. Every one of its roguelike runs is a charming gallery of ghoulish freaks, twisted meat, and—if you're lucky—an outpouring of emerald gore.

But I was pleased to discover that there's something to this autobattler business, and Flask makes that appeal easy to find. While you're piloting your mobile alchemist's tower beyond the Goblin Gate, you're not personally fighting against the denizens of the lands beyond. Instead, you're dispatching a squad of homunculi that you're gradually mutating with ability-providing alchemical flasks, snacks that bestow passive perks, and playstyle-shifting organ grafts.

By the time all those factors are in play, Flask has accumulated a delicious complexity of potential playstyle synergies, with each class of homunculi having multiple ability themes to mix and minmax according to your ideal combat brew. But each component of the formula is introduced at a comfortable rate across a run, with each successful battle earning more goblin blood to turn your initial starter homunculi into a squad of hardened freaks that each feel like they're acting out their own game of Slay the Spire in real time.

My most successful run so far carried me all the way to the castle at the heart of the ruined goblin metropolis. My Warrior homunculus, I'd built around a mechanic called focus—a buff that would be cleared if it took any damage, but which I paired with an ability flask that allowed the buff to be cashed in for a flurry of extra attacks.

Meanwhile, I'd built my Rogue for sustained—but accelerating—damage. Each round, it would spread increasing stacks of poison on enemies before shifting into stealth, pairing that damage over time with an attack that got progressively harder-hitting every time it was used. By the end of a battle, it was able to one-shot enemies through the armor they'd piled on throughout the fight.

My real hero, however, was my Ranger. Ranger flasks typically involve loading the homonculus' rifle with bullets that are then fired by other abilities, but I lucked into a brutal combo to lay on top. Some flasks have a gamble mechanic, like one that gave my Ranger a chance to fire another bullet for free with some extra damage on top. But I could prime that with another flask that guaranteed successes on my next gambles, letting my Ranger start a round by loading their gun with bullets that they'd pack with damage buffs before emptying their magazine in a barrage that mulched almost anything it was pointed at.

I was rolling in sweet, sweet goblin blood. But goblins aren't the only thing your homunculi face in Flask: Throughout your run, you'll regularly be confronted with the homunculi squads of other player alchemists to test your autobattle buildmaking. My steamrolling was brought to an abrupt end by somebody's setup that managed to turn their Warrior into a juggernaut that stacked more armor every time I blinked, and dealt more damage any time I touched it.

I don't really know what was happening there, but even though all my beautiful mutant children were soon a spattering of secondhand goblin gore, I applaud the brilliance of their destroyers' creator. It's fine. I can always build another.

Flask doesn't have a release date yet, but you can play the demo now on Steam.

Mewgenics might be the hottest Edmund McMillen roguelike in town, but stone cold classic The Binding of Isaac: Rebirth is no worse off. In fact, more abandoned children are fending off malformed horrors in their mother's basement than ever—the game reached a new all-time concurrent player count peak on Steam today.

The new big number is a whopping 123,429. It's simmered down a bit as I write this, but it's still comfortably in six figures territory. Not bad for a game that first released in 2014, effectively supplanting the Flash original.

Even as the roguelike scene has continued to boom over the last decade, Isaac remains right around the top of the pile with heavy hitters like Slay the Spire, Balatro, and, well, Rogue.

Mods probably have something to do with it, as they helped the game bloom into all sorts of new forms once the Let's Play and Twitch streamer circuits drew countless eyes to it. But the game itself is no slouch, arguably remaining one of the most essential in its genre.

PC Gamer's Chris Thursten gave the 2011 version an 83% in his review, saying it'll "draw you in and spit you out without a second thought." Players simply refuse to be spit out, trapped in an endless cycle of punishment and rebirth not unlike Isaac's relationship to Christianity.

Notably, that new peak The Binding of Isaac just reached is a dash higher than Mewgenics's all-time peak, right around 115,000. Isaac is certainly being helped along by its long-held reputation, as well as the Steam summer sale, which currently has the game going for just $1.49—the steepest discount in the game's history.

That's Rebirth, keep in mind… the original Flash-based game is more expensive by about 5 cents just in case you want to pay more to get less. That's very in these days.

Whenever I think roguelike exhaustion has set in, another game comes along to drag me back into the endless grind. This time it's Everything is Crab, an action roguelike that plays fast and loose with the theory of evolution—instead of evolving over millions of years, all you need to do is enjoy a big meal and you'll sprout antlers, tentacles or wings.

Since it launched last month, Everything is Crab has become part of my nightly routine. I take the dog out for a walk, brush my teeth, pretend I'm going to bed, and then I spend the next 2 hours on my Steam Deck making delightful new freaks. And it doesn't look like I'll be able to escape its clutches any time soon, as a meaty update has just dropped.

Evolution 1.1 coincides with the news that Everything is Crab hit the 500,000 sales milestone—a very respectable number that really should be higher, because this crabby roguelike is extremely good.

So! The update! There's plenty to sift through, including a new evolution, Tracker, which will allow you to "track specific targets and get varied bonuses against them". It's a level 3 evolution with the predator affinity, and there are other evolutions and specialisations that apply the tracked effect, turning you into the ultimate hunter. Those awful bee-dogs won't know what's hit them.

You'll also be able to play around with a new ultimate, Lick Wounds, so you can self heal instead of frantically running around looking for healing food. Thank god. I have died so many times while trying to find sparkly morsels to munch on.

New specialisations have been added to Stoner, Leech and Spur, and you can skip specialisations instead and get 10 mutagen points in return.

It'll also be easier to unlock new evolutions, and ones that were locked behind challenge progression can be obtained by completing pressure levels for the first time. So, for instance, you'll be able to unlock the new Lick Wounds ultimate by beating pressure 3, and Tracker will unlock after beating pressure 7.

Expect new cosmetics, too, which can be unlocked by completing challenges. The world itself has also received a wee makeover, "with additional foliage, trees, obstacles and other map elements sprouting up to make the world feel more alive".

On top of all that, there's a whole bunch of balance and quality of life tweaks, along with Twitch integration, changes to the Charm ability and new accessibility options. You can check out all the changes in the patch notes.

More additions are on their way, too, with another big update planned for late summer, featuring a "community-designed" addition and more free cosmetics. Autumn, meanwhile, will see the arrival of some premium DLC, along with more freebies.

Slay the Spire 2 just released a major balance patch—and aside from forcing me into an update for my Silent Ascension 10 guide in the near future—it's delivered a whole heap of changes to the game, including one fascinating RNG bugfix discovered at the hands of a determined player.

RNG can always be a nightmare to figure out, mostly because human brains just don't perceive games of chance all that well. If you've ever missed on a 99% chance shot in XCOM, you know this feeling—a 1 in 100 chance is unlikely, but not impossible. And yet your brain tells you that some great and unforeseen injustice has visited you if it happens.

Anyway, one player spent about eight hours trying to prove they weren't crazy. User tckmn on the subreddit released a manifesto that's credited in the patch notes, an "eight-hour descent into madness", without which "we wouldn't have caught the issue."

The problem in question relates to Neow's Bones, a starting option that allows players to take on two starting relics in exchange for a curse—which could either be a non-event, giving you a curse that's just a dead card. Or you could get something like Debt, which could utterly spoil the economy of your run.

Turns out, you could tell if certain runs were more likely to give you Debt than others—specifically, if you started in the Underdocks, Neow's Curse was 54% likely to give you the Debt curse.

As the devs themselves explain it: "Most games, including STS2, use pseudo-random number generators (PRNGs). A PRNG is fed a seed value, and given the same seed value, a PRNG will always generate the same sequence of random numbers.

"Since we fed different seeds to each PRNG, we expected their results to be completely unrelated. But we were wrong, and it turns out that our strategy allowed players to predict outcomes given knowledge of unrelated parts of the game."

The issue was that the decimals which governed which Act 1 you got also happened to correlate to your Neow's Bones curse: "For example, if our act roll is >0.5 (we’re in the Underdocks), then it’s highly likely that our Neow’s Bones curse roll will be <0.5, which cuts the potential curses you can obtain in half."

But rest assured, "your suffering is now truly random!" Mega Crit's swapped to a system that's far less predictable.

The patch itself also has a ton of other changes—balance adjustments for instance, which impact the Regent most of all. It's swings and roundabouts, with some cards like Monarch's Gaze getting a bump, and others, like my darling Reflect, being nerfed slightly.

The Doormaker has also been laid low: "As we said in the patch notes of the beta patch that brought this change: while Doormaker had interesting micro decisions in the fight, he was over the complexity threshold of what we want and had lingering issues. We decided that starting over fresh will let us hit what we actually want for an Act 3 boss."

He's now been replaced by the Aeonglass, a fearsome boss that's a bit of a DPS race, pumping Wither curses into your hand that deal damage to you, ramping rapidly whenever the boss upgrades them. You can view the full patch notes on Steam.

Back in January, I wrote about From the Top, a roguelike designed for those of us who had experienced the unparalleled childhood thrill of detonating your older brother's Beyblade with an imported Japanese Driger V2 that your parents had given you earlier that day on Christmas morning of 2003. (Many such cases.) From the Top was a promising omen: a sign that a subgenre precision-targeted at a specific vintage of millennials might soon emerge.

Today, I am pleased to report that the dream of the burgeoning Beyblade-like space is alive and well in Slayblade, a top-battling roguelike with a demo in this month's Next Fest.

Compared to From the Top's darker vibe, Slayblade is leaning even harder into Y2K nostalgia. It's all airy Toonami-core soundtrack and pixelated overworld sprites, and the designs of its pseudo-Beyblades are right in line with the era's chunky, gratuitous plastic molding sensibilities. Except you might end up with a Wu Tang logo as one of your battle top components. Don't worry about it. It's for the children.

You play as a nameless Slayblade battler, aiming to secure the Slayblade World Championship title—an achievement which will, obviously, allow you to discover why your father disappeared after inventing perpetual motion Slayblade technology "that would have solved the energy crisis." To get there, you'll have to complete a days-long run of skating between cash prize Slayblade battles, exchanging your winnings for top parts and tournament entries.

You can also use your Slayblade to mow lawns for extra money and experience if you want. Or you can partake in "illegal," high-risk Slayblade battles. I don't know what would render a battle top match illegal, but I do know I'm too afraid to ask.

As you'd expect, each of the available Slayblade parts—divided between top heads, bodies, and tips—have their own attributes and effects. In addition to a weight stat that affects the Slayblade's impact, handling, and momentum, each part has an active effect that'll trigger if you fling your top into a "power up cube" during a match.

The combinations can be pretty potent. For example, that Wu Tang logo I mentioned will halve the time until the next power up cube appears when triggered. On its own, that might not seem like much—but pair it with a Buster body that summons a spin-draining ghost to chase your opponent when you collect a cube, and you could flood the Slayblade arena with vampiric phantoms that can quickly leave the other top lifeless.

In one of my runs, I matched a Slayblade body that placed a landmine in the arena with a "Flat Earth" tip that flattened the typically bowl-shaped arena into a level plane: When my opponents slid into my explosives, there was nothing keeping them from immediately skittering out of bounds, earning me an easy victory.

Slayblade's Next Fest demo is fairly short and rough around the edges: The available part selection isn't particularly deep, each run will abruptly cut off at the point you'd enter your initial Slayblade tournament, and there's a healthy amount of placeholder art and menu text waiting for another pass. But as an early playtest, it's another promising take on a proof of concept that I'm pleased to see.

Slayblade doesn't have a release date, but the demo is available on Steam now.

Now, you might be wondering why this isn't titled "the best builds for Ascension 10", and that's because while builds are still important at higher difficulties in Slay the Spire 2, they're also actually a lie—Ascension 10 isn't about getting the perfect synergy, it's about plugging leaks. Your starter deck is a problem, and you need to fix those problems as quickly and as soon as possible.

I'll get into what Silent's builds are at the end of this article, but really, you'll be better served at Ascension 10 by understanding which cards cover up which weaknesses. Or, as the title might suggest, the best Ascension 10 cards for Silent. Not the best cards overall, but rather, the ones that'll get your hiney out of the fire the fastest. Let's go.

Best Silent cards in Slay the Spire 2

By far, the most powerful mechanic the Silent has at her disposal is the Sly modifier—wherein if you discard a card with Sly, it'll play anyway. However, this comes with a huge asterisk: You generally don't want to pick most Sly cards before you have a reliable set of discard options, since they usually aren't worth their energy cost alone.

If you get too many Sly cards too early on without ways to get rid of them, you'll have essentially created curses for yourself—and you'll lose in Act 1 to terrible hands that see you eating huge damage.

Other than that, the general priority for Ascension 10 stays true: Get early damage and 1-2 AoE cards, get good defensive/block options, then go for card draw and discard so you can both improve your hands on a turn-by-turn basis and set yourself up for Sly synergies.

Early Picks

These cards aren't necessarily run-winners in their own right—some of them might stay put in your deck for the whole run, while others might be less useful as time goes on. But again, this is A10—you need to cover for your weaknesses as soon as possible, regardless of whether or not these cards fit into your imagined build.

It's all about early value. In the first few floors of any run, your job is to grab cards that are just better than a strike—because strikes don't give you nearly enough damage to get past A10's scarier, tankier fights.

• AoE - Echoing Slash/Flick-Flack/Dagger Spray: You'll want at least one of these early on. STS2 has a lot of nasty multi-target fights.

• Poisoned Stab/Bubble Bubble: Poisoned Stab is decent damage, and Bubble Bubble is a natural combo to it—nine whole poison for just one energy is a good deal, as long as you can set it up properly, which is what Poisoned Stab will always do for you.
• Backstab/Assassinate: These cards get stronger with good turn-one draw, but they're never a bad idea in Act 1 where you're starving for energy and quick, easy damage. Just don't take too many, since they don't scale well on their own.

• Strangle: This card doesn't scale too well, but if you're able to pick up a couple of shiv cards to supplement it, the early damage value it offers can be massive.
• Ricochet: Ricochet stays useful until the endgame thanks to its Sly property, and it's not a disastrous card to play early on even without discard, given it's the equivalent of two non-upgrade strikes.
• Flechettes: This thing's better than it seems, especially if you're able to get fat hands with card draw. It'll usually be doing 10 damage for 1 energy even on a sub-par hand—but if you can draw a few skills, Flechettes is excellent.

• Snakebite (No, really): This card gets memed on a lot, but Snakebite is actually fine—it has Retain, which means once you draw it, it's basically out of your deck until you have a chance to use it. It combos nicely with Flechettes, and some enemies or bosses will have turns where throwing 7 poison at them is valuable. You probably don't want more than one, but Snakebite is just fine.
• Dagger Throw: Better damage than a strike, card draw, and potential synergies with Sly—if you see this in Act 1's early fights, just get it.
• Dash: Dash is kinda garbage late game, but good early game just because of its value—you're blocking and attacking for two energy, meaning you can play a defensive turn without falling too far behind on tempo.

Defense

Once you've got some early value under your belt, you'll want to figure out your defensive game, too. Damage in A10 is severe, and chances are high you'll be taking chip damage at least every fight—and resting at campfires more than you can upgrade your cards. Snagging an early defensive plan doesn't just help you dodge damage, it also makes you stronger in the long run.

• Footwork: Dexterity is so good, and Footwork is a cost-effective power that, on its own, can prevent dozens of points of chip damage over the course of several fights. One Dexterity is solid, two is amazing. Three is probably too much, but if you've got relics or energy gain to support it, you can grab more of those, too.
• Abrasive: A touch situational, and only worth playing if you've got good discard options, Abrasive is still great for the reasons Footwork is great. Dexterity's super valuable, and the thorns are a nice bonus.
• Blur: Blur's extremely useful not necessarily because of its value (though that is good), but because it can help bail you out of nothing turns where you draw a bunch of defence but the enemy isn't attacking. A blur can transform a wasted turn into a lovely bit of setup for the next one.

• Leg Sweep: This almost made the "Early Picks" list, because Weak in A10 is an incredibly useful status effect, and the Silent only has a few ways to apply it. Almost always worth having one of these in your hand.
• Blade of Ink: Similar to Leg Sweep, Blade of Ink is a nice, fuss-free way to cause Weak in your deck—it also synergises with the Mystic Lighter relic, so it's a must-pick if you've got that knocking about.
• Untouchable: If you have good discard, you should always grab an Untouchable or two. It's a free block.

• Afterimage: Again, chip damage in Ascension 10 is the enemy—no matter your deck, having one Afterimage in it is useful. Having two, albeit harder in A10, is excellent. This plays especially nice with Shiv cards, so make sure to grab a few if you get it.
• Escape Plan: Save for a few specific enemies, Escape Plan is basically free. If you play it and don't draw a skill, you haven't wasted any energy. If you play it and do draw a skill, you just got 3 block for nothing. See it, click it.

Draw, Discard, and Retain

Once you're all set up, the Silent wants to figure out its draw/discard game—Sly is your friend, which means that discard is your friend, and card draw is just good insurance on any character playing any deck, as having good draw reduces your chances of having wasted turns—which, in A10, can be fatal.

• Prepared: Prepared is solid, baseline, but if you can upgrade this bad boy it can be responsible for winning your run—it might even be worth forgoing a rest at a campfire if you've got the Sly cards to support it. No Sly cards in your hand? Prepare might draw them for you. Sly cards in your hand? Prepared will let you play them. You cannot lose.
• Tools of the Trade: This is basically a Prepared that auto-plays at the start of your turn, and it's good for all the same reasons.
• Well-Laid Plans: Never underestimate Retain—a Well-Laid Plans means you can keep a hold of useful cards for synergies, or remove crappy cards from your draw pool, allowing you to have more effective turns.

• Reflex: Reflex plays nicely with all of the other cards on this list, boosting their draw to give you even bigger hands—which usually means better turns.
• Acrobatics: Never a bad card to grab. Fish for Sly cards in your deck, or draw some cards and play a Sly card already in your hand.
• Backflip: Card draw with a little block. What's not to love?

• Calculated Gamble: You want one of these in your deck, especially if it's upgraded—bad turns kill A10 runs, and being able to simply go "no, I'd like to do something else" is always useful. Bonus points if you're getting rid of (and auto-playing) a bunch of Sly cards, too.
• Hidden Daggers: The Discard plays nicely with Sly, and the two extra shivs are just a sexy bonus.

Ramp/Scaling

Last in your priorities is ramp and scaling—for the non-card game folks among you, that basically means "things that let you play more cards earlier in the fight" and "things that multiply your existing damage, or let you get more powerful over time".

• Adrenaline: This is a "see it, pick it" card. Card draw and extra energy to play with? Get it. Get it yesterday.
• Accelerant: If you've got a poison deck and you're offered this, get it. A measly one energy to effectively double your poison damage is a great way to make you scale into the later acts.
• Tactician: If you've got a good amount of discard going, Tactician helps your discard turns go further, helping to solve your energy problems.

• Noxious Fumes: If you're building any sort of poison deck, Noxious Fumes is worth getting—it might be worth getting even if you aren't. This also counts as an AoE damage card, so it's super valuable.
• Shadow Step: Plays nicely with Sly cards, and increases the damage of your next turn.
• Tracking: If you've got good ways to cause Weak in your deck, tracking is monstrously powerful. It also plays nicely with shiv archetypes, as well as cards like Flechettes and Ricochet.

• Accuracy/Phantom Blades: If you're building a Shiv deck, you'll want to start grabbing these cards—but not before you've got a few Shiv creators in your pocket.
• Corrosive Wave: If you've got a bunch of card draw, Corrosive Wave is a no-brainer. It's a cheap, effective way to potentially throw a whole bunch of poison on your enemies—and it makes poison decks play much faster under the right circumstances.

Situationals

I'd hesitate to call any of these cards bad; most cards are useful in Slay the Spire 2. But they're so situational that you want to make sure you pick them only when you've already got the other cards or relics that make them work.

• Envenom: On its own, Envenom just isn't worth playing—but if you've got a decent shiv deck going or ways to get free powers like a mummified hand, it's a nice supplement to certain decks that improves your scaling.
• Bullet Time: Combos well with high-draw decks. Get a big, nasty hand and then drop a bullet time to play everything in it. Otherwise, skip it.
• Speedster: Similar to Envenom, the energy cost of Speedster is just too high to make it worth playing—unless you've got a deck with an obscene amount of draw and the energy to back it up, in which case, Speedster can win you runs. It's a feast or famine card.

• Serpent Form: More often than not, Serpent Form just doesn't work. Three-energy powers are way too costly at Ascension 10—but again, if you've got the relics and/or energy generation for it? It might be worth taking.
• Fan of Knives: A very good card. However, because of how little you can find Rare cards in Ascension 10, you're unlikely to get this before you've got a couple AoE cards in your deck; Snag it if you're still somehow lacking in AoE, if it's offered to you early, or if you're building Shiv.

Best builds for Silent in Slay the Spire 2

Again, I must emphasise—if you wanna win Ascension 10 runs in Slay the Spire 2, you should be building for solutions, not builds. Stubbornly trying to stick to a certain archetype is a great way to get killed. However, it's good to keep them in mind, given you'll more or less be trying to steer into one of these versions of Silent whenever you play.

Shiv

• (+) Good to build for if you find a Kunai, Shuriken, or Ornamental Fan.
• (+) Mystic Lighter + Blade of Ink combo is very strong, as Blade of Ink counts as an enchanted attack.
• (-) Most reliant on synergy cards.

Worth building into if you get an early Kunai or Shuriken relic, as both give you in-built Strength and Dexterity, scaling that the Silent's particularly good at taking advantage of. Shiv decks primarily rely on cards like Fan of Knives, Accuracy, Phantom Blades, Blade of Ink, and Afterimage. And, naturally, cards that generate shivs themselves, such as Hidden Daggers.

Still, given the amount of supplementary cards you need, it's only really worth building for Shiv if you've been given the aforementioned relics or if you're given no real other synergistic option.

Poison

• (+) Poison scales well.
• (+) Good to build if you get lots of defensive relics and good block cards.
• (-) Very slow tempo.

The second-strongest archetype, poison is just pretty good. It deals its damage right before the enemy's turn, and by its nature has in-built scaling. Poison decks only really struggle with AoE damage, and they can be a little slow to start off with.

You'll want to build for Poison if you get certain key cards like Corrosive Wave, Accelerant, Bouncing Flask, or an early Bubble Bubble—or if you find yourself with a lot of relics that provide you block, allowing you to survive long enough to start ramping up those poison stacks.

Sly (Draw/Discard)

• (+) The strongest Silent archetype.
• (+) Builds out of cards you want to be getting in Shiv and Poison builds, anyway.
• (-) Getting Sly cards before you get discard options can brick a run.

By far the strongest out of the Silent's current archetype, Sly is just busted—and this archetype's already empowered by things you want to be building for any way, namely card draw and discard.

Even if you're building for Shiv or Poison, chances are you'll have some Sly cards in your deck, and a lot of the best cards for Silent—Adrenaline, Calculated Gamble, Tools of the Trade, Hidden Daggers, and so on—are naturally Sly enablers, as well.

A dozen roguelike action RPGs show up on Steam every month, but none of them have grabbed me like Cursemark. I play plenty of these games and know how long of a grind it usually takes to feel like you have a satisfying combination of skills that you could call a build. In Cursemark, I was wiping the screen clean of monsters in just 15 minutes.

That's impressive for a game that's not even finished yet. The early access version of Cursemark—which dropped today—already has enough in it to keep me replaying its first few levels, and developer Clyde Games plans on adding a lot more over the next several months.

The studio's previous game, Into the Necrovale, shares some DNA with Cursemark: Pixel art, skeletons, and hundreds of unique items that combine into devastating builds. Action RPG fans who like mowing down waves of monsters without much difficulty seem to love it. From what I can tell, Cursemark is more akin to a soulslike with dodge rolls and tanky enemies, which means it takes a little longer to ramp up your character into a monster-slaying god.

Every run of Cursemark is about surviving long enough to tip the scales in your favor. Basic spells, like a fireball, can be upgraded with runes that increase their damage and size or weaken enemies with various status effects. I had enough runes stacked onto my fireball in one run that I could barely see what I was fighting behind the trails of fire covering the battlefield.

The longer your run goes on, the tougher the enemies get. It's not always possible to keep up with them depending on how lucky you are with drops. I tried to protect myself from enemies I couldn't see through all the flames with a spell that coated my character in defensive ice, but eventually got shredded by massive sword swipes I couldn't anticipate. If there's anything I hope to see ironed out during early access it's the lack of visual clarity as you accumulate more and more power.

Even though it can be tough with so much on your screen, it's still fun to see how ridiculous all the effects get once you're deep into a run. While you don't need to manage your gear, you can swap around your runes at any point to experiment with different combinations. In my last run, I was saving up some currency to unlock an ultimate ability that summons a cloud of hornets that chase after enemies. The woman in the game's main hub offers an assortment of different elemental spell schools to permanently unlock, like a list of spells that shock enemies and have a higher chance to deal big critical hits.

Much like other action RPGs, Cursemark has a dictionary of keywords to help you understand all the effects to play with. People with a buildcrafting brain will probably catch onto the synergies even faster than me. But even if you're not an expert, you'll start to see how the pieces fit together as you familiarize yourself with the different effects runes provide. It didn't take me very long to realize how broken it is to increase the size of your spells so they repeatedly apply DoTs on everything in the room—which then sets you up to clear them out with spells that deal bonus damage to anything affected by those DoTs.

The depth of Cursemark's systems on top of a world filled with secret passages, shortcuts, and optional challenges, changes how you approach each run. And even if you die—and you definitely will—you always have something to bring into your next attempt, be it permanent upgrades or the knowledge of a smarter route to your destination.

Cursemark is the perfect kind of little roguelike action RPG to play on a lunch break or when it's late and all you want to do is smash monsters while chatting with some friends. I'm excited to see what kinds of spells and areas get added over time because it's already a blast.

There's a free demo you can play right now on Steam, or you can pick up the game on sale for $12.74 (from $14.99) until June 22.

To Kill a God knows just how to pique my interest. A cursed realm trapped in a cycle of life and death. The aesthetic of a polished survivors-like but with action-oriented combat and movement. Cults and tyrannical demigods to carve through. Oh yeah, it's got the juice.

What compels me most is its skill tree that also doubles up as a map and route planner. You see, each stop on your journey through the Death Spiral both powers you up and gets you closer to that titular act of god killing.

Coined the SkillMap, it combines the buildcrafting of a skill tree with the choice of where to actually go. Now, instead of simply levelling up to get the powers you want, you'll need to traverse the world of the Death Spiral and fight your way to your abilities. It makes the trek into a part of your progression in a way I think is really intriguing.

Will you take a shorter route with fewer skills or a longer route with more? A safe route with weak abilities, or a risky one that gets you better build synergy? It's a mechanic that centres choice, the core of a videogame. I also like that it feels less random than upgrades in some rougelites are.

In a new trailer debuted at the PC Gaming Show, we saw a new character in action: Talorim the mage. Rather than the up close and personal sword strikes of the warrior or the ranged attacks of the archer, Talorim uses magic to deal area of effect damage. It's a tactic that makes To Kill a God seem even more like Vampire Survivors, as it becomes beneficial to be surrounded by enemies.

If you want to try them out for yourself, there's a new To Kill a God demo you can download on Steam, right now.

Check out everything revealed at the PC Gaming Show.

I don't know what was in the air a few years ago, but climbing games are all the rage now. As soon as you reach the summit of one peak, another looms tantalisingly on the horizon. I may be 31, but I have absolutely no desire to go mountain climbing in real life, unlike my peers. But give me a game where the goal is to go up a big rock and I'm all in—eyes closed, head first, can't lose.

At the PC Gaming Show, we just got an explainer of Ascenders: Beyond the Peak from the creative director of developer Ludogram. Build a team and plan a route up a deadly mountain. Sounds simple, right? Well, actually, no it doesn't, and it's only going to get more tricky. Lovecraftian horrors await you, and monsters and the mountain itself will try to stop you reaching the goodies at the top.

You'll have nine different classes to choose from, each with different levels of mobility and abilities to utilise on your ascent. The catch is, you're all connected by a single rope, so if one team member is lagging behind, you may have to cut them loose and send them to their death. Brutal.

You can also use gravity as a weapon, though. Drop rocks or weapons on enemies to bonk them on the noggin and send them hurtling below. If you can position everything right, you might get a two-for-one kill.

Aesthetically, the game reminds me of Into the Breach, just vertical instead of horizontal. You move your team along a grid and can see warnings about environmental hazards such as avalanches and your own explosives' radius.

And, for the aspiring alpinists out there (that's a new word I just learned, it's a mountain climber who does high, difficult ascents), there's a whole base camp feature where you'll plan which mountains to climb, who to take on the expedition, and what gear you'll need. There are also rest stops up the mountains that will help you reset and recover, but not all of the classes get better at the same rate, so you may still end up taking weakened teammates on the climbs and have to make tough calls later on.

If that all sounds like your cup of tea, check out the Ascenders demo on Steam, and don't forget to wishlist the game ahead of its Q3 early access launch.

Check out everything revealed at the PC Gaming Show.

We just got our first look at Maximum Thunderness during today's PC Gaming Show, and this shoot-em-up roguelike looks just as chaotic as it sounds—with giant green goop aliens, tanks, and more explosions than a Michael Bay film.

Maximum Thunderness is a side-scrolling shoot-em-up roguelike that its developer, Berzerk Studios, promises will deliver "the energy and aesthetic of a Saturday morning cartoon—sugary cereal-induced fever dream." Something that, by the looks of this trailer it almost certainly delivers on.

It's been a good couple of decades since I watched Saturday morning cartoons, but I have to say this does kind of remind me of that feeling of sitting down at the weekend and seeing what's on Cartoon Network, Toonami, or Kix—good times.

But this roguelike isn't just a tornado of colours and bullets, it's also a co-op game, so you can enjoy all of this with your friends. You all work together, killing green alien monsters and blowing up every single thing in your path as you make your way across the 2D map.

But it's not just one straight road. The map has multiple branches as players can take different routes across the city and gain different buffs as they go along, such as Super Defender which gives you +4 shield and +1 shield regen, Incendiary Bullet which gives each bullet a +2% chance to create a fireball (that must be where all those explosions are coming from), and Chain Reaction which increases the Lazrifle damage by +4 for the rest of that stage when overheating.

Then with each stage you complete you can get more cash and an upgrade booster pack with different kinds of perks, like the ones above, to choose from. Which will hopefully make your run a little easier.

But as is the case with roguelike, if you die then all that progress and the perks are lost. You'll need to start again from square one with a fresh slate, which means new perks,and maybe some of your old favourites—if you're lucky.

Berzerk Studios has been bringing "creative, polished, and most of all, fun games filled with humour, headbanging tunes and sometimes, gallons of gratuitous violence" for over a decade now. With 30 games published, Maximum Thunderness is its next venture into the bloody foray of action games yet again and it's set to release this autumn, and there's a Steam demo you can try out now.

Check out everything revealed at the PC Gaming Show.

I love a deckbuilder, me—something about carefully putting together an engine of collapsing game mechanics to run over whatever roguelike challenge awaits me really scratches an itch. Shroom and Gloom intrigues me, because it's asked: What if we scratched two itches?

An upcoming deckbuilding roguelike by Team Lazerbeam, Shroom and Gloom sees you plunging into the depths of a fungal "under-realm" that cannot be safe to breathe in. But hey, some plucky adventurer's gotta do it, and there's cards down there!

The real intrigue is the fact you're putting together two different decks. One for exploration, and one for combat. It's akin to one of my under-appreciated favourite roguelikes, Griftlands. Griftland's not a game I'd call perfect by any means (it very clearly wears the skin of the open-world RPG it was meant to be) but it asked you to build two decks—one for combat, and one for social encounters.

The way Shroom and Gloom takes that concept and tweaks it from social combat to exploration seems to me a more natural expansion of the genre—transplanting the choices you typically make in, say, Slay the Spire's event rooms and instead making them a part of your hand. Trading in health for bashing down locks, resting up, digging for weapons, and so on.

One thing that also intrigues me is the fact there aren't any block cards—having played the demo (albeit an older version, not the one dropped at the show), Shroom and Gloom is more concerned with stacking max HP and healing items in your deck.

You'll inevitably take damage, the question is whether you're grown beefy enough to shrug it off, and whether you can heal it, usually by generating food cards via certain attacks or by applying the "Seasoned" debuff. It's a refreshing take on the genre—and one that incentivises taking more risks.

The exploration deck's interesting, too, essentially dictating what between-room buffs you have access to. For instance, in the demo I've played, you could grab a training dummy to upgrade your cards or a frog statue to forget them—you can also get powerful passives that encourage you to, say, overeat as much as you can to improve your max HP.

Either way, Shroom and Gloom feels like a novel take on a relatively well-done genre and, as of the PC Gaming show, has a new demo available now. You won't have to wait long to play more, as it's launching into early access later this year.

Check out everything revealed at the PC Gaming Show.

It must be stressful to be Dracula. Not only do you have to pay what must be extortionate taxes on your big stonking castle, but you also have to decide where all those confounding metroidvania rooms go to thwart the prospective vampire hunters who want to take a crack at the big D. Well, ReVamp is finally giving voice to that administrative stress.

Developed by Digital Sun (the folks who made Moonlighter and Cataclismo), ReVamp is a castle defence roguelike where you need to craft your own castle from assembled pieces to make it as hard to invade as (in)humanly possible.

You won't just be sitting idly by while your meticulously-placed forces of the damned whack knights upside the helm, though—ReVamp'll also have you leading from the front rather than the throne, dropping boots into your castle to fight in it yourself. As the Steam page puts it, "You are not just the ruler of the castle. You are its final defense."

And, as announced during the PC Gaming show, ReVamp will be entering playtesting soon—you can scan the QR code in the trailer above to sign up yourself via Discord, or click that link.

Honestly, ReVamp looks sick as hell—not only is it looking gorgeous, with animation and artwork that reminds me, appropriately, of the Castlevania Netflix series—it's also from a studio that knows their roguelikes from haunted basement to parapet, but it's also a really fun spin on a handful of genres.

I'm always a fan, conceptually, of games that spin the duties of hero and villain on their head—and a tower defence roguelike where you're also designing the layout of a castle you'll be fighting in is a real novel concept. Also, I just like a good roguelike. Give me a repeatable gameplay loop and one of three upgrade options to choose from, and I'm a happy little camper.

Check out everything revealed at the PC Gaming Show.

There's just something so cool about using melee weapons in a cyberpunk setting. The katana in Ghostrunner—sublime. The mantis blades in Cyberpunk 2077—inspired. SlashZero, as the name suggests, lets you slice and dice enemies across various timelines. Oh, and you can juggle them in the air with sick combos, too. I haven't seen this much off-the-ground action since my housemate battered me at Super Smash Bros. Ultimate.

In SlashZero, you take on the role of a Timehacker. Their mission is to take down the Lord of the Void, Hieros, who seems to have thrown the whole world into disarray. There are also scattered Authority Keys, Codes, and Blessings all over the place. You'll collect these on your forays into the disparate timelines to upgrade your build on the fly.

The different builds shown off in a new PC Gaming Show trailer look pretty cool. As a fan of Dead Cells, I'm excited to get stuck in and see what synergies I can come up with. The game's 3D anime style lends itself perfectly to the frenetic combat, which sees the characters darting around enemies as they slice, shoot, and summon tornadoes and fiery explosions with elemental powers.

You can freeze enemies in place and go to town on them, racking up huge damage while they're immobile, or you can summon lightning bolts that chain onto multiple foes if you're surrounded. The fire looks like my go-to, though. Burning columns of it rise up from the ground, and hot circles form outward from your Timehacker. I like to control space and get that burn-over-time damage so I'm still getting rid of my opponents even while repositioning.

The trailer shows two of the Timehackers in action—a guy with two swords and a woman with guns that can rapid fire or blast like shotguns—and a third is coming soon. If you want to see more, wishlist SlashZero on Steam and sign up for the playtest here.

Check out everything revealed at the PC Gaming Show.

Videogames are all about choice. But does that mean your decisions should be seen by everyone? What if your choice is to screw over your "friend"? What then? Another Door dares to ask, and answer, that question.

In a world premiere trailer at the PC Gaming Show, we just saw the spooky roguelike in action. The way it works is this: You and your buddies are presented with a series of choices. One example in the trailer has you pick between two cards—take 15 damage, or, if multiple people pick the other card, take 75 damage.

The no-brainer is for everyone to pick the first, but you don't know what anyone else will do until the die is cast. In the trailer, everyone goes for the latter card and takes a heavy hit, showing being selfish doesn't pay off. But it might, and that's where the gambling aspect of Another Door kicks in.

One card offers 30 HP, but another will give you 60 HP if only you choose it. Double or nothing, baby. Other effects are a bit more nebulous right now. You can either receive five gems from a grazing beast or get some plague. I don't know why you'd opt for plague, maybe it's a good plague and not the bad kind that decimated Europe. I guess we'll know for sure when the game (developed by Indieklem and published by No More Robots) launches.

It's all a bit like Among Us. You have to convince everyone else what to do, but can you trust them, and can they trust you? The answer is a resounding no. This is a game for the liars and cheats of the world, not an innocent little goody two shoes.

If you want to ruin some friendships, then you can jump into the Another Door online demo on Steam right now.

Check out everything revealed at the PC Gaming Show.

I've got a big soft spot for Serious Sam. Back in the day, a young Josh really marvelled at that one bit—you know the one—where what-felt-like-a-million Beheaded Kamikazes pour over the sand dunes and begin charging directly at your position. It was probably the first game I played that made fun of games, that mucked about with familiar tropes to create something that felt like a long piece of affectionate mockery.

All this to say I am glad Sam is still here and still Serious, and we just got a glimpse of his latest adventure—Serious Sam: Shatterverse—at the PC Gaming Show. This is Behaviour Digital's co-op roguelite take on the Sam Saga. Samga. Anyway, the point is you'll be charging into runs over and over, creating different builds through modifiers, and generally dying a fair bit until you crack 'em. You know, a roguelite.

From the PCGS trailer, Shatterverse is an appropriately blood-speckled affair filled with myriad recognisable enemies from Sam's many other games. Gnaars? Check. Kamikazes? Check. Did I see a Walker in there? Entirely possible! It was hard to see through the sheets of gore.

Shatterverse also looks like, uh, a 'verse. That is to say, it's bringing together all manner of Sams and art styles to render you and your pals' playable characters. There's polygonal Sam, lizard Sam, portly dad Sam. A lot of Sams, in essence. I rather like it. This is a series that's now been going for (I'm sorry) a quarter of a century. It's fun to mix and mash its legacy like this.

We didn't get a full release date at PCGS, save a wink that the game is due out this year, but there is a Steam playtest upcoming in the relatively near future. If you're interested in shattering Sam's 'verse, you can sign up to check it out over on Steam.

Check out everything revealed at the PC Gaming Show.

Cooking sims and deckbuilders have both evolved a lot over the years, but the two genres weren't combined until Arcane Eats debuted at last year's PC Gaming Show. In it, you run a fantasy-themed restaurant and feed your hungry diners, from goblins and orcs to fairies and dwarves. Now, the game has another new demo for you to sink your teeth into, and a trailer narrated by none other than celebrity chef Gorgon Ramsey.

As someone who grew up on Hell's Kitchen and Kitchen Nightmares, I recognised the intonation and blue language in the voice over immediately—it's a solid impression. You'll have to put your cooking skills to the test to impress the likes of Gorgon Ramsey, Guy Fairy, Wolfman Puck, as well as newly introduced Jewelia Crag-Child—I'm a sucker for pun names.

You play by creating dishes out of cards in your deck. You'll have ingredients like star potatoes or a giant eagle egg that you use to form the base; upgrades in the form of kitchen tools, such as twin cleavers that allow you to double your next ingredient; and garnishes like black abyss pepper which add a spicy kick to your meals. Just like real life, there are a lot of combos to try.

You've got to pick and choose the dishes customers get, which may lead to some upset diners. You'll learn the tastes of regulars and even try to impress the legendary chefs mentioned above—if you do, you'll get the coveted three Mythril Star rating. You'll also be able to climb the ranks of three guilds that each reward different types of cards. Go hearty and heavy with the Hearth, turn up the heat with the Grove's elemental spices, and become a mise-en-place master with the Order.

Arcane Eats, developed by the very appropriately named Wonderbelly Games, has a new demo that you can try out today; download it on Steam.

Check out everything revealed at the PC Gaming Show.

So there I am, a regular console cowboy jamming through the hyperfractals of cyberspace, siphoning some choice credits from those lamebrain corpos, when a modem link threw me over to a real nightmare: a webbed out, vibe-coded server from the Basilisk Corp crawling with transmitted viruses. And even worse, they’d managed some hot new dimensional display tech to really make the steal feel real. These megacorps, man. Always find some evil new way to surprise me.

Talking about 868-Back, the latest puzzler roguelike from Michael Brough, makes me feel like a parody of what Hollywood used to think hackers are.

With its bizarre visual mishmash of pixel art and notebook doodling and 1980s digital futurism, groovy bass-heavy jams rolling along in the background, text dunked in a vat of cool technobabble, every second of my scrounging through backdoor servers has the air of classic cyberpunk hacking. I’m Hugh Jackman in Swordfish, I’m the Lawnmower Man, I’m Julia Stiles in that one episode of Ghostwriter ranting about the new wave, next wave, and dream wave.

Pop culture loved to make hacking into the world’s highest security computer systems seem like the easiest (and sexiest) thing in the world, and at a glance 868-Back looks similarly simple. Peek at a few screenshots and you’d be forgiven for thinking beating The System requires little more than clicking around a souped up Minesweeper board. But just as hacking is a bit more complex than the movies make it out to be, I realized hard and fast that Back is a whole lot more than it lets on.

The rules are deceptively simple: taking place on randomly generated 6x6 square grids, you’ve got to turn-based crawl through eight floors of constantly spawning enemies, using a limited resource to snatch weapons, the currency needed to use them, and score points at the same time.The cyberpunk yin-yang is strong though: every item or point gained means instantly spawning more enemies across the already small map, resulting in an endless cavalcade of tricky catch-22s. You need tools to survive, but you’re gonna have to survive to get them, and every button you press, every square you step on, could save or destroy you.

It's a game defined by high stakes, one where you’re constantly betraying yourself in acts of digital hubris. Every single run I've failed (and I’ve failed a lot—BACK does not play gentle) has been from me seeing a bunch of points ripe for the taking and knowingly biting off more than I can chew because "yeah, I'm a cool guy, I can probably handle 10 more baddies."

I can almost never handle 10 more baddies.

For a while this intense single-screen game of tactical maneuvering felt positively claustrophobic, the small arena eliminating downtime and severely limiting my own options. But the more I played, the more I started pushing against BACK’s on-the-surface simplicity, stretching its limitations into all sorts of surprising ways. I was pushing myself and enemies through walls, hopping around the screen like a busted chess piece, and even purposefully calling up that army of foes only to confidently cheat death and make out like a bandit. After a few hours, what once was suffocating had become liberating, that tiny grid of 36 squares now an entire world to play in.

In a way, 868-BACK feels less like any roguelike it visually resembles and more like playing a game of Go—the learning curve not so much from any challenge in the game itself and more from having to rewrite the way you consider playable space.

Back the planet

Fans of 2013's 868-Hack will already be intimately familiar with all of this. Everything from that masterpiece of game design—its brilliantly constructed play space and ruleset, its evolving sense of understanding and discovery, its devious temptations to screw yourself over with the promise of a few more points—can be found here in the sequel. But where Hack was spartan—and gosh, 2013 was a long time ago—Back is determined to explode the concept out as far as it can possibly go.

I noticed something was radically different the second I started. Where the original involved hacking through servers and absolutely nothing else, Back turns a run into a more expansive experience with a broader game played out on top of the server crawling, having you uncover and map out a path through various locations you can choose between. On higher levels that aim for score (while you’ll initially be playing just to survive, both 868 games are ultimately oddball high-score chasers), this "world map" and the more involved hacking start feeding into each other in increasingly complex ways. But even before you've gone all Neo and seen through the code, surprises abound to help and hinder you once you dive into a server.

'Surprised' definitely described me when I uncovered a new server that seemed innocent enough on the outside, hopped on in, and suddenly found myself… in 3D?

Plenty of roguelikes have embraced large scale modifiers, those typically optional systems that shift everything against you for an extra challenge. Take Slay the Spire’s ascensions, with their ever-expanding enemy buffs forcing you to tighten up your strategy more and more. 868-Hack was no different, offering a host of effects once you’d manage to chain enough successive runs together.

868-Back takes the concept to new extremes.

Not only are they more deeply ingrained into the roguelike loop—higher level servers grant score multipliers but also start stacking modifiers against you—nearly every one is dedicated to deeply altering how I play, dozens on dozens of effects forcing me to completely reconsider the space I’d just become confident in.

When I found myself playing in a new dimension, the 6x6 grid now like something out of Wizardry, my overwhelming thought was "Is this even allowed?" When I later got stuck in true Silicon Valley hell, vibed code started stymying my agency while pop-up ads undercut any triumph by forcing me to throw away precious resources. "Is this even possible?" I despaired.

The answer, both times, was somehow yes. I just had to learn how to look at my little cyber-world in a new way, from a different angle. I just had to hack my own brain.

868-Back feels bottomless. A solid dozen hours in and despite the seemingly simple design of it, there are still mysteries big and small waiting for me (and you, on Steam), still surprises at every corner, still constant moments where what I thought I knew is unraveled and rebuilt in an instant. It’s a marvel, a game that constantly feels like the whole world is insurmountable and like you’re cheat-coding your way past it at the same time.

And best of all, when I’m not failing horribly, it makes me feel like the smartest, coolest (and maybe even sexiest) hacker on planet earth. Gotta love a game that lets me lie to myself like that.

Terrible news! The Fractured Kingdom has been chosen to host the Horrific Games, the “world's most boring and expensive international sporting event”. I have two options: pretend to be pleased, or desperately try and find a joint host—a nearby country which might help bear some of the financial strain. I plump for the latter. “Thank goodness,” says Sir Blandolph, the head of the Snivel Service. “Our dreadful neighbours are willing to host some of the really dire events.” Even so, there's a decent chance the ordeal might end my premiership.

The prospect of the Horrific Games looms ever larger during my term as Prime Monster. I find myself hastily confirming impossible deadlines and injecting more cash. At a certain point, I'm informed the Games will require the construction of 12 new stadiums. “Apparently,” says Blandolph, “one of them has to be dedicated entirely to Synchronised Falconry!”

When I refuse, it doesn't go over so well with the voters. “Prime Monster, I am afraid you have underestimated the public's ravenous desire for watching strange monsters indulging in niche activities that stretch the definition of sport to its utmost degree.”

Before long, I find myself in parliament, trying to explain away the collapse of a shoddily-constructed arena. In the chamber, I emphasise the number of humans killed in the accident—a silver lining for the MPs in my own party, who are all zombies.

Eventually, the dreaded day comes. I attend the Horrific Games as a guest of honour, and receive a three-point reduction in the public polls for my trouble. “The papers are saying we humiliated ourselves with tens of millions watching all over the world,” says Blandolph, “but I don't agree. I'd be shocked if viewing figures were that high.”

If I've learned anything this past week, it's that being Prime Monster is truly thankless. It's enough to make me pity Keir Starmer—the real life British PM who, at the time of writing, is peddling hard to keep his own leadership on track after disastrous results in the local elections. Vultures are circling, and right now, few would bet on Starmer making it to the end of his first term.

Running the UK is clearly a form of roguelike—a truth that Prime Monster recognises by applying a Slay the Spire-style structure to its warped political simulation. Once you're elected as leader of the Fractured Kingdom, your job is to pass bills in parliament—and to do so, you'll need to win over your MPs during turn-based card battles. Attacks represent biting comments that undermine the power of the opposition leader. And when you're not on the offensive, you're trying to increase the unity of your own party through persuasive pontificating.

The fact that you can't actually tell what anybody's saying only sharpens Prime Monster's satirical edge; in this chamber it's only the strategic moves that matter, not the pledges made or issues debated.

Win enough bill battles—while safely navigating the dilemmas that pop up inbetween—and you might just get through the next general election. Or not, and watch your leader wind up as a half-forgotten portrait on the wall of Number 13.

A general election in Prime Monster is a hands-off affair: by that point, it's too late to make a difference to the outcome. But it's an enjoyable spectacle nonetheless, full of knowing nods to British political culture. On television, the results are declared by the Abominable Peter Snowman—a white-furred take on the real-life Peter Snow, a broadcasting legend who presented UK election analysis for three and a half decades.

“Make your voice heard for exactly one day, then be quiet,” reads the cover of the Daily Wail, the Fractured Kingdom's favourite and only broadsheet newspaper. It reports that the country's borders have been closed in an effort to increase voter participation—a wry joke that couldn't feel more relevant right now. In England, the average voter turnout in local elections over the past decade has been 30-35%. In my own council ward this year, things were a little better, with turnout reaching 49%—but it's fair to say the fate of the country is often decided by the minority.

Prime Monster definitely offers some explanations as to why voters in the Fractured Kingdom might be disillusioned. Every so often, you'll be given the option to grant peerages to unpopular figures with deep pockets—or to bring up a particular issue in parliament, and paint your donors in a favourable light. In the context of the game, these offers are very tempting. More cash means you can buy powerful permanent abilities, enabling you to draw an extra card every turn in battle, or handicap your opponent before the fight's even begun. Corruption very often pays.

But the tone of Prime Monster tends to veer towards farce, and that's what makes it such entertaining and cathartic company. At one point, my ghoulish avatar stayed up all night to invent new policies because the old ones had been accidentally shredded—only to find that the public preferred the rushed drafts. A scene straight from The Thick of It.

Elsewhere, I found myself bolting the door after one of the Queen's horses had trampled yet another citizen to death. And answering a question about my favourite biscuit in an interview—attempting to name something well-loved and controversial without tripping over my own tongue.

In my latest run, I played as the creaky Thatcher-esque Rotilda De Cay of the Zombified People's Movement (“Opening minds across the nation”). And my most regular opponent was the bumbling, baffoonish Bonar Straw—a cartoonish take on the UK's own straw-haired political poltergeist, Boris Johnson. My nemesis waffled and cringed through all his speeches, but I dared not underestimate him. I could all-too-easily waste my time and resources rebuffing his poorly constructed points, while his hot air filled the room.

What did all this conversational combat achieve? Well: my MPs voted through the 'Lend a Hand' scheme, aimed at tackling the premature limb loss that affects one in five zombies. The bill relies on mandatory arm donation from humans, on a monitored 'use it or lose it' basis. On top of that, I'm pretty sure I legalised arson. Oh well: it'll save on winter fuel costs.

If I'm honest, the issues themselves faded into the background as I fought for my political life at the highest levels of power. And in that sense—despite its roster of vampires, werewolves and animated scarecrows—Prime Monster very much reflects reality.

For those who haven't seen the light, Deep Rock Galactic is a cooperative horde shooter involving a bunch of dwarves mining a planet for an uncaring mega corp. It's basically Left 4 Dead but instead of zombies, you're shooting bugs, and you've also got to collect materials. Dare I say it: DRG is the best co-op horde shooter.

But Deep Rock Galactic was just ground zero. Since then, these dwarves have gone on to infiltrate other genres and take their thrones too. This takeover started with Deep Rock Galactic: Survivor, which is, you guessed it, DRG if it were Vampire Survivors. Like the main game, you can still dig paths through the environment and collect resources for upgrades, firmly setting itself apart from the rest of the genre. Plus, it's the perfect game for my ROG Ally, so I can play Deep Rock on the move (or, more commonly, in bed).

And now Deep Rock Galactic: Rogue Core has released into early access. Again, the name gives it away, but it's DRG if it were a roguelike. As Wes Fenlon explains in our first impressions, it's not quite hitting the peaks of the main game (yet, at least), but it's a reverse-engineered roguelike twist on one of my favourite games of all time. In other words: I'm doomed.

The basic gist is that you pick a class (they're more like hero characters), load into a mission to race to the bottom of a monster-infested mine, and grab various upgrades along the way. Much like in the main game, it's how these characters interact with each other that's the star of the show. After accidentally picking the Guardian one match, I think it might actually be my favourite of the bunch. I can fire a shotgun blast of orbs that stun enemies or use that energy to create a creature-repelling field. And my ultimate ability places a bubble shield that restores armour to allies.

This plays into various builds you have to scrounge up on the fly, like faster ability regeneration when standing still, firing lightning when you have armour, and so on. And in typical DRG fashion, you're encouraged to problem-solve with your team, which is oddly rare for co-op games in my experience, not least because each player gets to bagsy an upgrade.

Rogue Core is admittedly a bit barebones right now, but developer Ghost Ship Games has proven with Deep Rock Galactic that it's able to massively expand and iterate on projects over years. I'm dying to sink more hours into Rogue Core's early access as my current roguelike obsession. And I'll no doubt dive back in when it's almost unrecognisable further down the line.

Most impressive of all, Ghost Ship has proven just how malleable its dwarves are. So much so that you'd have thought Deep Rock was always a survivor-like (sorry, "bullet heaven") or a roguelike.

I'm curious where the series will go next. Perhaps a rhythm game? Racing? Honestly, it could be a life sim aboard the mining rig and I'd still be down for it. You know what? That's actually not a bad idea. I might be a tad biased though, given my work profile picture is the Scout and my Steam name is literally Deep Rock Propagandist.

In the dwarven caste system of Deep Rock Galactic, the Reclaimers are the elite of the elite, too skilled to waste their talents and training on mining. Except, well, they're still dwarves, which means any trip into the depths of new Deep Rock spin-off Rogue Core will still see you breaking out the pickaxe to chip away at minerals here and there between shooting waves of monsters.

Being the mining company's equivalent of a Navy SEALs actually seems like kind of a bad deal. Shooting monsters is fun and all, but humans, Protoss, every species has a squad of gun-toting toughs who've raced against the clock to take down a boss before time runs out. It's the miner dwarves doing an honest day's work who really have it made. Who else gets to pop into the mines for a 10-minute egg hunt one day, then on the next establish a mining facility with a network of pipes snaking through tunnels dug by their own hand? When that gets stale, there's always a drilldozer to escort or mining robots to find and repair.

That's my roundabout way of saying that the real treat of Deep Rock Galactic, still going strong after eight years, is that it looks like a conventional co-op shooter but doesn't really play like one. Exploration and collaborative problem-solving using each dwarven class's unique utilities (a zipline, a platform gun, a big ol' set of drills) take priority over killing enemies, and its many updates over the years cemented it as the co-op FPS to play if you always fancied capture the flag over team deathmatch.

With Rogue Core, Deep Rock's developers have reverse-engineered their one-of-a-kind co-op game into a far more conventional shooter. Rogue Core is polished, competent, and a good time with a couple buddies in a Discord chat, but samey runs and a drip feed of modest upgrades don't give it the dramatic peaks of my favorite roguelikes.

Here's the gist of Rogue Core's structure:

• Pick one of five classes and fill in your unlockable enhancement slots with perks like "+25 base health" and "+5% reload speed"
• Pick a mission, which at least from what I've seen so far is always the same mission: race through a mine, call the elevator, defend it, and repeat until you reach the same boss fight at the end
• Mine the resource that allows you to level up your gear mid-run as efficiently as possible, while occasionally veering off to a side objective that will probably reward you more of that resource, or an upgrade that ends up feeling a bit more substantial
• Return to the hub, collect your bonus points for achievements like "downloading data from six terminals" and use those to unlock more minor upgrades

In theory, I like the ways Rogue Core's developers have tried to encourage teamwork. When you collectively mine enough of the neon green upgrade crystal, expenite, everyone has to gather together to take turns picking from a random array of perks, jockeying over who should get a rare or epic option. A few classes have abilities that deploy around them—I've mostly been playing as the Falconer, who can pop down a bubble that makes my allies deal electric damage for 15 seconds. The Guardian can drop a zone that restores armor, critical for surviving big enemy waves.

Using those abilities effectively requires being more locked in to exactly where your teammates are and what they're doing than I think this style of hangout co-op game is really geared towards, which is why I had the most fun with Rogue Core's Retcon class. Her main ability lets you rewind time for yourself, reversing damage you've recently accrued, with a complementary ability that makes you hit harder the more damage you take. At no point does this require me asking my teammates to come stand inside a circle.

More expenite, more problems

The process of picking upgrades as a team is also not entirely a slam dunk, both because it feels like it slows down the game—everything pauses once you launch the upgrade menu together—and because the upgrades are often a bit underwhelming. A buff to crit chance, 10% improved cooldown, that sort of thing. There are more exciting ones, but so far the Rogue Core runs that have handed me a gun that chains electric damage from one enemy to another, and a random upgrade that makes electrified enemies explode, feel more like the exception than the expectation.

The power scaling (both of the upgrades Rogue Core throws at you in a run and in its meta progression) seem geared around the fear that players will run out of things to do too quickly and start pounding the Steam review score in frustration. Each class has a "bio booster deck"—because every roguelite is required by law to use cards somehow!—but they aren't customizable until you've "ascended" two max level classes, which will take many hours of play.

There are a bunch of guns, but unlike in loot-based games like Darktide, you don't get to build up a specialized arsenal in Rogue Core and dedicate resources to speccing it out, or choose to shape a build around it. You just pick a random gun from the equipment locker at the start of a run. The guns that are there are quite fun to shoot, some chunky and some pingy with hit feedback refined from years of Deep Rock development. There are a bunch of elemental attributes that are as exciting as they are in any game—I love freezing a whole pile of skittering monsters with a perfectly lobbed cryo grenade.

Moment-to-moment it's pleasant, and sometimes even hectic and exciting when you run up against the mission timer and have to race to the elevator. But Rogue Core seems to take it for granted that I'll want to play the same exact mission dozens and dozens of times, and is using the structure of a roguelite to simply dole out tiny incremental rewards for doing so. It locks down many of the interactive side objectives in the mines until your character is higher level, denying early runs from the spice a little extra variety would give them.

The other way to design a roguelite, the Risk of Rain 2 way, is to shower the player with power-ups that embrace the chaotic potential of wildly imbalanced builds. You stack and you stack and you stack. You rarely slow down to pick between three, because you'll likely end a run with so many items that you're playing your character in an entirely different way by the end of a run than when you began it.

Deep Rock Galactic doesn't need that sort of exponential power fantasy, because the missions are short, each dwarf has a distinct role to fill, and fending off enemies is more about survival than sadism. Rogue Core, at least in its early access launch, doesn't have that clarity of purpose, leaving its Reclaimers stuck with a bit of a ho-hum life.

If they're really the elite of the elite, they deserve an arsenal with the child safety locks turned off.

Game developers are burning through genres, high concepts, and even annoying machines that scammed you on the boardwalk as a child to fuel quick-hit Balatro-likes or Vampire Survivors-likes at the same rate the smartphone industry's sucking down rare earth minerals. I get why: compulsive play is core to the design, they can be made relatively fast and relatively cheap, and a day or two on the Steam charts (or a viral Twitch stream or YouTube video) can drive 100,000 sales at a time when just surviving to make another game feels like a real win.

But good lord are there a lot of them. 257 new roguelites have dropped on Steam in the last 30 days, according to SteamDB, and even discounting the shovelware there are too many to keep track of. There are the deckbuilders, the action games, the… Minesweeper-likes? That tag doesn't even cover games like Far Far West that prioritize weightier descriptions—FPS, online co-op, loot—perhaps because that combination of words carries an innate implication with it. Of course a co-op horde shooter with randomized loot is a roguelite. Duh.

Perhaps this bite-sized style of repetitive play (with soothing metaprogression!) is what our fractured psyches are best suited to at the moment. They're the game equivalent of doomscrolling without looking up for four straight hours, most of that time wasted on glazed-over unblinking eyes except for the one really funny video that will stick in the mind (the game equivalent of a truly sick Balatro hand). At least we're playing "gambling" games instead of pouring the last dregs of our inflation-ravaged checking accounts into prediction markets, right?

I was ready to declare that I'm fully worn out on the format—that I hope we're nearing the bottom of the barrel for ideas that can be crammed like Play-Doh through the deckbuilder or Survivor mold—and then some jerk went and announced Pin-Crawl, "a dungeon crawling pinball rogue-lite."

Ah damn. Ah hell. As translator Stephen Meyerink posted on Bluesky where I first saw the game: I'm in danger. You're killing me here, Eddy.

Pinball is my kryptonite, or maybe more accurately the cheese you can bait a trap with to make me go all Monterey Jack. Is its pull diminished slightly by not being an actual, physical pinball machine? Sure! Nothing beats the real thing.

But in the same way that Balatrofying mahjong was a grave threat to my friend Baxter, the compulsive nature of crafting wildly multiplicative roguelite builds but with the trappings of pinball is like a lab-grown block of cheese bioengineered to my exact olfactory wavelength.

Pin-Crawl, which has a page on Steam but currently no release date, doesn't at a glance have the same pixel art and particle oomph as Xenotilt or Demon's Tilt, which are great (but more conventional) digital pinball tables. But Pin-Crawl has the roguelite twist, where upgrades start doing crazy shit like bombarding the screen with stars or triggering frenzied multiballs and "spells to give you a unique advantage against the dungeon's inhabitants." It has stats! Bosses! Meta progression, no doubt, that will make more exciting things happen the longer I play, even if I don't get any better at the actual pinball!

I want to say no thanks, I don't need any of that. But I can't. I do need it. I need it because I played Sonic Spinball as a child and haven't been entirely right since.

This is not the first game to put a twist of this sort on pinball: there's another one coming out this year, even. But more common, somehow, is the pinball metroidvania, which requires a bit more commitment and I think is a tougher sell. Pinball is better in short sessions, and metroidvanias need a bit more narrative pull to keep you engaged over the long term, a tricky marriage that in my experience only Yoku's Island Express has pulled off brilliantly.

Despite being a metroidvania, Yoku's Island Express is a breezy game, easy to polish off in a single weekend. I assume that whenever I play Pin-Crawl the weekend will instead evaporate, leaving me wondering where the hell 48 hours of my life just went—but at least I'll have one 3.6-billion point multiball combo to show for it.

Slay the Spire 2 has—among some of my coworkers—been a bit of a contentious little game. Back when it first came out, my fellow writer Robin Valentine wrote that Slay the Spire 2 felt more like a remake than a sequel after beating it with an eight year old deck, calling it "a really impressive late expansion pack." Still good, but treading over old ground.

Here are my creds: I've since been consumed by Slay the Spire 2, I've put nearly 140 hours into it (a number that shocked me when I went to check it for this article), and I've currently squeaked out Ascension 10 wins on Ironclad, Silent, and Regent (and am working on my wins with the Necrobinder and Defect now).

And while I do agree with Robin that a lot of the same decks can win those earlier ascensions, the more I play, the more I'm deeply taken by Slay the Spire 2 in a way that I was never absorbed by the original—which I went back and played a bit of before this and just didn't have the same zest for.

Slay the Spire 2 is samey, sure, but it's deceptively so. There have been several core, granular baseline level changes that have, in my estimation, made it feel very different.

Different energy

The first, the most obvious shift, is in the ancients—at the end of each act of STS2, you have a chance of rolling between a set of ancients, each of which will have their own trade-off boons. In STS1, beating one of the acts netted you a relic which almost always gave you one more energy per turn—and, because of how tempo worked, the non-energy relics were almost never worth taking.

Slay the Spire 2 has such a better variety in this regard. They can be completely run-defining. Getting one extra energy per turn is still incredibly valuable, but relics that offer that often come with major downsides.

Take Vaaku's Whispering Earring, for example. You get one extra energy, but you have zero control over your first turn, with Vaaku playing your cards from left to right—this is a massive gamble, but it's almost always possible to survive a bad first turn, right until it isn't.

Tezcatara's Seal of Gold is also majorly impactful, too. At first glance, losing five gold per turn for extra energy doesn't seem terrible—but I've had entire builds won with the right choice of relic from the merchant. Take my Ascension 10 Regent win, where I managed to snag a Mystic Lighter to buff a sharp-enchanted Seven Stars.

Suddenly I had a card that dealt 18 damage seven times (for a total of 127 damage) for a piddly one energy, with cards to help buffer the star cost and recycle it back into my draw pile. If I'd taken the Seal of Gold, I wouldn't have been able to afford it.

Nonupeipe's Glitter relic is a stand-out, giving all Act 3 card rewards a once-per-combat replay. This thing alone has completely steered my gameplan from a thin deck to a thick boy with lots of value.

Speaking of, the card enchantment system's great, too—I want to shout out Clone, which is absolutely absurd in some runs, letting you get potentially dozens of the same card type if you're able to finesse rest sites enough to use it. Momentum turns every card into the Ironclad's Rampage, Royally Approved can make any card a core component of your deck. The possibilities make my roguelike heart giddy.

Enemies close

Then there's the enemy design, too—I just like STS2's encounters a whole lot more. Yes, even the absolute bullshit ones. I'm looking at you, Hunter-Killer.

STS2's rogues gallery is flooded with brutal encounters that scale quickly and, at higher ascensions, require you to cover your bases. Rather than trying to thin your deck to get an infinite loop, Act 1 becomes a make-or-break rush to make sure you've got defense, damage, draw, and energy generation all handled ASAP.

This is much better than the feeling I got from STS1, where I just felt as though I was trying to stumble into a synergy. All of my runs in STS2 feel more constructive—I'm building up a solid deck brick by brick, rather than just fishing for the right combo of cards. And that steadier pace makes it feel all the more exciting when I do stumble into something special.

It's a complete shift in design philosophy—one that extends to the bosses, too, which challenge your decks in far more interesting ways than in the first game. So often in STS1, the Timekeeper (screw that guy) would often just spell doom for my deck, and given the fact you only see who you're fighting in Act 3, it would almost always be too late to change course.

In STS2, though? There's not a boss I can't design around. Even the Doormaker (who will be taking a sabbatical soon, per the game's beta branch) can be prepped for simply by spending Act 3 making your deck just a little bit thicker.

Again, it's subtle, but STS2's pacing is completely different. You can see this in how some cards have fallen out of favour—the Ironclad's Demon Form, for instance, now just isn't very good, because opportunities to play a three-energy power are few and far between.

And yes, some of the old decks are still there, but there are new ways to play even the old guard, too—the Silent's Sly mechanic completely changes the feel of the character, for instance, and the Ironclad's old archetypes are actually more niche. I've won far more runs on Ironclad just by going for value and energy generation than I have with the Barricade + Body Slam or Whirlwind + Double Tap shtick.

All in all, I think STS2 feels markedly different—the tempo of fights has changed, the meta has been adjusted, its two new characters are big departures, and you've got far more interesting and diverse incentives to swap up your strats mid-run. There's a reason I'm going for A10 runs on every character here, but gave up my climb in STS1: I simply like this version a lot more.

Which is impressive, given the rock and a hard place developer Megacrit found itself in. Slay the Spire 2 was never meant to be a sequel, with Megacrit wanting to develop DLC for the first game. Alas, Humble Games shut down, making issuing major updates to other platforms a near-impossibility.

Megacrit has, in my estimation, made lemonade out of lemons here. I'm not glad it was forced into making a sequel, but I'm certainly happy it did.

Battlestar Galactica's resurgence in 2003 was a landmark moment in science fiction, taking a weirdly Mormon '70s sci-fi romp and turning it into a gloomy space thriller full of political and military drama. "Yes," it said, "sci-fi will have its prestige drama moment as well." We'd had DS9 and Babylon 5 years before, but Battlestar clawed its way out of its niche and became a mainstream phenomenon.

In comparison, Battlestar Galactica: Scattered Hopes is a lot more understated. The static character art, pixelated bridge and cute polygonal ships do not scream "space opera", but beneath its slightly muddled presentation sits a game that elegantly captures the tension and chilling proximity of extinction that made for such an exceptional show.

The short pitch: It's FTL in a convincing Battlestar Galactica suit. It's probably the best sci-fi property to go down this route, too. Sure, Voyager is also a comfy fit, which is why we got Star Trek: Voyager – Across the Unknown, but I bounced off that quickly. It had the structure down, but it really dropped the ball when it came to space battles. In Scattered Hopes, like FTL, the space battles are the meat.

In your first run, you'll start with a small fleet of mostly civilian ships led by an outdated gunstar (smaller but faster than a battlestar), and you must jump across space to meet up with the titular vessel, managing constantly dwindling resources, ship armaments, squadrons and the humans onboard—both your crew, who can be assigned various roles and level up, and the factions that represent the last of humanity.

There's a fair amount to juggle, and plenty of pressure, but a relatively simple structure holds it all together and gives you room to focus.

Scattered Hopes is divided into two distinct phases: fleet management and combat. When you're safely inside a new system, you have a few turns to do a spot of management. Assigning squads, levelling up characters and picking their next ability, putting out fires—often literally. There are crises and opportunities, sometimes with multiple steps, and while the rewards can be tempting, there's always a cost: time, resources, health.

Systems have points of interest that you can spend resources to explore, or you can send one of your crew to investigate for greater rewards—if they have the energy. Maybe you'll send your pilot to explore a planet and pick up valuable resources, or ask your XO to bring a drifting civilian vessel into your fleet.

These civilian vessels can't fight, but they serve as support ships. By training their crew, you'll net bonuses that help the entire fleet, turning them into handy resource factories. Let's hope you don't get them blown up.

Unfortunately, Scattered Hopes really wants to blow them up.

After you've used up all your turns—sometimes leaving some problems unresolved, prioritising the most important problems—the Cylons will appear and battle commences, with the tattered remnants of the Twelve Colonies fighting simply to survive another day.

Survive is the key word here. You won't be blowing up massive Cylon capital ships. Your goal is just to stay alive until you can jump out of the system and into (fleeting) safety. Combat plays out in real time, but you're expected to make liberal use of the tactical pause feature, giving you breathing space to adjust your tactics and plan for the next assault wave.

The friction you'll experience in the fleet planning phase is echoed here in the combat phase, where you'll be dealing with mounting crises with limited resources. But this time the crises are nuclear warheads and Cylon ships, and the limited resources are your squadrons. The good news is that, for the most part, your wee ships (and the weapons attached to your flagship) are pretty bloody powerful. Unfortunately, that isn't quite the safety net it might seem, given the superior numbers fielded by your robotic foe.

While it is common for battles in tactics games to feel like discrete puzzles, it is so much more overt in Scattered Hopes. Each enemy fleet is its own conundrum, spitting out various complications—different enemy squadron classes, missiles, nukes and exotic guns, along with weird modifiers that will force you to make tactical adjustments, taking into account your own vessels' speed, manoeuvrability and damage potential.

And you've only got a small box of tricks to deal with this whole mess—which you naturally must use as efficiently as possible.

It's simple at first. Send your speedy Viper towards an area where you know a lot of lightly-armoured vessels are jumping in (you always get to see where enemies will appear) and it'll sit there waiting to strike. Using one of its abilities, you can make sure it hunts down and kills every last one of them. Meanwhile, you keep your Raptor closer to the fleet, where it can use its impressive range to take out enemies and missiles hurtling towards your vulnerable ships. It's slow and can't fire when moving, so it works best as a turret.

Should a bunch of new enemies appear while your squadrons are engaged, you can use your flagship's flak cannon to take out a large group, if they're lightly armoured. If they're not? Bring out the nukes!

The nuclear option is a risk, mind you. Specifically when it comes to friendly fire. But sometimes you need to make hard calls. If you've got enemies bearing down on you and there's no chance your nearby Viper will be able to take them out, it might be worth the cost to just annihilate everything, Viper included, if it saves the fleet.

Hard calls like this become increasingly common as the Cylons amp up the pressure, or when you encounter enemies with traits that are tricky to manage. Maybe you'll be fighting Cylons with the Tactical Jump mutation, which gives them an immediate speed boost when they jump in, potentially making it tough for your Viper to hunt them down and kill them. Or you might be unfortunate enough to jump into a system that's full of mines just waiting to blow up any squadrons that get near, necessitating a significant change in strategy.

You'll be able to unlock the ability to field more squadrons, and there are all sorts of enhancements you can choose for your ships, squadrons and characters, but the Cylon threat just keeps on escalating—you might be getting stronger, but it never gets easier.

While the main goal is simply surviving until you can jump, you still need to consider what you'll be left with when you get to that point. Scattered Hopes emphasises this in a variety of ways, but perhaps the most effective is the ship health system.

Your flagship and civilian ships can take a real beating, but you can't just wait until they're on the cusp of destruction to act. See, each ship has three thresholds, and once their health gets below them, you'll have to deal with a negative situation, from moderate to major, depending on which threshold you've passed. So the health of your ships matters long before it gets to zero.

I'm a big fan of how developer Alt Shift has handled the combat portion of Scattered Hopes, but the human element is what makes it a Battlestar Galactica game. Between brawls you'll have to deal with the opposing needs of the fleet's various factions, all the while realising that you can't please everyone. When factions are happy with you, you'll get opportunities that benefit the fleet, but when their respect for you drops, they'll only generate crises, costing you valuable time and resources.

You'll also need to manage the morale of your crew, and the health of the whole fleet. When people die, get injured, or become too sick to work, the fleet's health goes down, and when it drops to zero that's you done.

So you'll need to make deals, piss people off, go out for drinks with colleagues and do your best to hold everything together by whatever means you have available. Which will be a lot harder if a human-looking Cylon infiltrates the fleet. Paranoia, witch-hunts, all that tension from the show is present here too.

It's stressful! And great! It's got so much of what I love about FTL, but it's still charting its own course. The fleet management and scale of the combat phase change things up dramatically, making the FTL-like structure feel new again. So it's weird that it's not made much of a splash. Maybe BSG doesn't have the cultural cachet it once did (it definitely doesn't), but even if you never watched it, or simply have no fondness for the misadventurers of Adama and Starbuck, Scattered Hopes still has plenty going for it.

Darkest Dungeon is one of the best dungeon crawlers period, and a huge part of its appeal is the dour, gravely tones of a mysterious "ancestor" who narrates your every move. The man behind the musings, Wayne June, sadly died last year—and in the wake of news like this, a ghoulish question tends to arise: who, or what, could fill his shoes? Red Hook co-founder Chris Bourassa took to Reddit last week to clarify that it certainly won't be AI.

"In one of his last emails to me, Wayne gave us permission to train an AI on his voice, something he'd staunchly opposed prior to the end. We'd never asked to do it. I think he was trying to put the game/team/fans first—offer us a 'way forward,'" Bourassa wrote. "I declined, and we donated to his family anyway.

"I would never, ever erode his incredible and timeless performances by teaching a machine to sound like him. His voice and delivery was human, and I'm forever grateful I got to write for him."

Comments on the thread are elated by the stance. "It’s refreshing to hear yourself and the Red Hook team honour Wayne’s memory like this," commented user Figgymcslickback. "Bravo sir." User RiR_Crayon concurred: "Red Hook doing giga chad moves as always."

"So glad to hear it," wrote user Curnbabs. "You're never gonna be able to train an AI to do this properly. You guys are gonna find someone else. It's going to be different, but that is not a bad thing."

It speaks volumes to the potency of June's performances that he left such an impact on players, despite the fact that the Darkest Dungeon games are his only listed videogame credits (though he was also in Dota 2 in a Darkest Dungeon-themed announcer pack, and collaborated with PC Gamer on occasion). If you want to hear more of his voice work, he narrated a fair few audiobooks and has a YouTube channel with readings of stories by H.P. Lovecraft and Edgar Allan Poe. He also used it to share this incredible shitpost where the Ancestor hosts a cooking show.

AI voice acting may have found a place in games like The Finals and Arc Raiders, but even Embark's CEO has conceded that real voice work is better than its artificial counterpart. Voice actors in the gaming industry have been outspoken about AI's inability to give a truly human performance, and even if the team at Red Hook were willing to take June up on his offer, the notion that the resulting line reads would compare to the man's actual work is farcical.

The roguelike genre is not only more crowded than it's ever been, it's more iterative too. The vast majority of games simply build on or remix an existing formula—whether walking in the footsteps of Slay the Spire, Hades, or Vampire Survivors. It's rare to find something truly unique.

So it's refreshing to be able to say that Everything is Crab is not quite like any other roguelike you can play right now. That's not to say it doesn't have its influences—the most obvious being the creature phase from controversial 2008 sim Spore—but its focus on ecosystem and evolution sends it down all sorts of fascinating avenues.

The premise, though, is simple. You play as a little blue blob, trying to survive in a world of weird animal hybrids. It's essentially a top-down action-RPG, with your attacks and dodges on cooldowns—but starting out, you're slow and weak with no real abilities to your name. You're not much of a threat to the land's various predators.

Food is the key. As you snatch meals here and there—from fallen fruits to the flesh of slain animals—you start to level up, which gains you new evolutionary traits. With extra eyes, a sharp beak, a developed brain, and six legs, you can become an agile, precision fighter, dodging around enemy strikes, while increased size, a set of horns, and a protective shell will let you charge into the fray as a tough brawler.

An impressive number of these evolutions are represented visually on your character. This is really Everything is Crab's coolest trick—animating whatever nightmarish mish-mash of body parts and organs you put together seamlessly, with details as subtle as which specific kind of snout you have or exactly how many legs and eyes you've thus far acquired.

The most interesting part, however, is that it's not just about creating the most powerful combat build you can. You're not clearing rooms in a dungeon, you're finding a niche in an ecosystem. Enemies don't just exist to fight you, they follow their own patterns of behaviour, including hunting smaller prey, foraging, and fleeing from danger.

Success isn't in how many of them you can defeat, it's in how much sustenance you can get, however you can get it. Being an apex predator, feasting on the meat of fallen beasts, is one way, but equally another is to live as a tiny scavenger, stealing meat from others' kills and dodging nimbly away when they retaliate to hide in a burrow. Or as a lumbering herbivore, eating fruit and mushrooms and trusting in natural defences like spikes and poison to keep you safe.

You can specialise in surviving in different environments—growing fur so you can range into snowy regions, scales to protect you from the desert heat, a prehensile tail for swinging between trees in the forest, or wings for flying over the sea. As you evolve, so do other animals, opening up even weirder niches. I'm fond, for example, of stacking up my poison resistance so I can keep preying on blobfish long after they've mutated to make everyone else who hunts them die a slow, painful death.

At regular intervals, your journey is interrupted by a boss fight, penning you in to face a huge monster. But brilliantly even these much more constrained encounters still offer wide open possibilities. If you're not equipped to battle, you don't have to—you can dodge, hide, or simply heal through their attacks until their patience is exhausted, at which point they'll wander off into the world to rampage through other creatures instead. Or you can slay them in a whole myriad of different ways, from brute force to poison to an army of hypnotised minions.

One of my favourite little features is that at the end of a run, you can click a button to make a record of the bizarre creature you ultimately became, saved as a set of screenshots of your build and even a little animated gif of you in action. Now that's a game understanding what it does best.

Everything is Crab is a really interesting, creative take on a genre that all too often takes elements for granted, and though nowhere near as ambitious as Spore, in some ways it does realise some of its goals in a much more fun and interactive way. But unfortunately it's not without a few recessive traits that grow increasingly difficult to ignore.

Level headed

The biggest problem is that you simply level up too much. Yes, I'm complaining that my lobster is too buttery, but the much too frequent acquisition of new evolutions diminishes the personality of each run, as you find yourself gathering many of the same traits over and over. The game is so eager to show you its best material that it burns through it too fast, and the thrill of trying out new mutations is quickly lost.

At its worst, it can totally disrupt the flow of a run. Many of the game's most effective strategies revolve around increasing the pace of level ups—through everything from upgrading your eating speed to increasing the spawn rate of vegetables to gaining passive progress from chewing the cud.

Given those extra level ups can also be used to purchase more traits that speed up your levelling even more, a snowball effect can quickly take hold that leads to constant interruptions in the action. At worst I've had runs where I can barely go a few seconds between just-slightly-too-slow evolution pop-ups, my time in the menus completely eclipsing the actual action.

Outside of runs, the game has something of the opposite problem. The overall meta-progression is disappointingly slow and unsatisfying. There are a few things to unlock, but fundamentally the main mode consists of just doing the same runs over and over through slowly increasing difficulty levels.

Variety is in theory provided by challenges—one-off runs with more extreme modifiers, such as turning the entire world into a desert or making every animal but you a giant. But it takes a long time to unlock new ones to try, and many of them simply feel more harsh than fun.

Too many are variations on partly or completely randomising your evolutions, which just removes the joy of build-crafting, and modifiers like "you cannot heal in any way" feel needlessly cruel. In such an interesting digital ecosystem, it feels like there should be more exciting variations to explore.

The result is that Everything is Crab makes a really wonderful first impression, but its long-term survival is a little more questionable. I've had fun with it for the 15 hours or so I've played so far, but really I'd probably already seen the majority of what it had to offer 10 hours ago. I'm certainly not feeling the kind of pull that can make the roguelike genre so all-consuming, to keep coming back for one more run.

That does make Everything is Crab feel more like a novelty than the next big thing—but I still love quite how novel it is. Even if some of its ideas need more refinement or more support around them, they are still really creative, fresh ideas, and well worth experiencing, especially at its agreeably low price. Hopefully with ongoing support, it may continue to evolve in the coming months, perhaps gaining the mutations it needs to lure me back for more.

September 14, 2000: That's the day Microsoft released Windows Millennium Edition, the second-worst iteration of Windows in its long history. It also marked the final release of MS-DOS, which for so many years had undergirded its operating systems. In 2006—two decades ago—Microsoft ceased long-term support for Windows 98 and Me, meaning that MS-DOS's life was truly over.

Two days ago the latest update for NetHack dropped, and you bet your ass it still supports MS-DOS, just like it did when it first released in 1987.

We already covered NetHack's surprise 5.0 release and some of its fun patch notes, but I had to dwell on this for just a minute. In the era of multimillion-dollar games releasing and shutting down within weeks, here's a game that's been steadily updated since 1987. It's only two years younger than Windows.

Microsoft supported MS-DOS for a total of 25 years, from 1981 to 2006. NetHack's closing in on 40.

Perhaps even more absurd is that the NetHack development team still maintains an official binary for the Amiga—you know, the personal computer line that went extinct in 1994.

While it's novel as all hell that you can play a still-being-updated-in-2026 game on a decades-old PC, perhaps more appealing to most players today is a very slick, recent client for NetHack, called NetHack 3D. The game has long been open source, and while it's gotten many 2D tilesets and one very ugly 3D adaptation over the years, NetHack has always been an ASCII game first and foremost, just like Rogue and Hack before it.

NetHack 3D is by far the nicest modern interface I've seen for the game—nice enough to tempt me away from playing in a terminal connected to nethack.alt.org. NetHack 3D adapts the game's incredibly complex controls into some quite intuitive context menus, with mouse support on PC and touch support on mobile. You can switch to ASCII mode if you want, but the default way to play is with a 2D tileset, and there are several options sourced from the NetHack community. I can't say I'm crazy about NetHack 3D's AI-generated logo, but at least the rest of the graphics are player-made tilesets.

NetHack 3D's layered-on-top configuration options and polished UI don't prevent you from typing in any of NetHack's more obscure interactions manually, just like you always could, but it simplifies all the basics. There's even a novel first-person mode, which is not going to be the ideal way to play in a game as deadly as NetHack, but still—it's surreal seeing it from a literal new perspective, 39 years into its life.

I'm not kidding when I call this the best roguelike ever made, either—well, perhaps Caves of Qud has supplanted it, but no other game really comes close to expanding on the original Rogue with so many interlocking interactions and systems that there's even a kitchen sink reference. Without NetHack, there probably never would've been a Dwarf Fortress. There's a reason the game's in the damn MOMA.

If you've never played NetHack, this is now by far the easiest way to ease into it. The tilesets are nice, but don't be scared to try the ASCII mode. Give it enough time to learn the symbols used for most monsters and items, and it'll start to feel like you can see the Matrix.

As roguelikes go, NetHack is a museum piece. I don't say that because it's old—though it is extremely old, originally released as it was in the same year that Lethal Weapon hit theaters—but because it is literally in the Museum of Modern Art alongside SimCity 2000 and Portal. It's a massively influential and historic game, and as of yesterday, it's new all over again.

That's thanks to a 5.0.0 release because, yes, the game is still in active development after nearly 40 years. It's an open-source project with the source code maintained by a pantheon of coders and community members called the DevTeam. The game itself is an immediate descendant of Rogue, the original ASCII-based dungeon crawler that we now use as shorthand when describing games like Balatro, Hades, and countless others.

You can check out the 5.0.0 release blog post for a brief intro, which notes that "a list of over 3100 fixes and changes" awaits players who dive into the new version. Old saves and "bones files" (dungeon floors that save when you die so you can load them into another game) won't work, so it's a great time to start fresh alongside everybody else. The main menu page of the NetHack website includes a download link to Windows, DOS, and Amiga versions.

If you want to read the changelog, which the release blog notes may contain spoilers, you can do so on the NetHack GitHub page. Like other games with detailed systems and procedural generation, the notes are a bunch of delightful nonsense: "pets avoid eating shapeshifter corpses unless starving or nearly feral," one line reads. "Demon lords hate Demonbane," reads another.

It may be a bit intimidating to charge face-first into a legendarily intricate game with ASCII graphics from the '80s, though, so I recommend checking out PC Gamer's let's play series, NetHack from aaaa to Zruty. In it, senior editor Wes Fenlon and NetHack guru Jeremy Nissen dig into why the game is so celebrated and how you might approach playing it yourself. The series just turned a decade old, but that's only around a quarter of NetHack's lifespan, so I'm sure it holds up fine.

There's an oddly momentous feeling to the idea of Deep Rock Galactic Survivor introducing a new class to the DRG universe. After all, the original four have been the only ones we needed for eight years now. What can you possibly add to a quartet that's stood the test of time for that long?

I love that developer Funday Games' answer is: "What if a dwarf had a car?"

Introduced in the new Heavy Duty expansion, the Demolisher class has a full complement of new weapons and three subclasses, just like the core four. But unlike them, he thought to bring an industrial vehicle that's basically like if you tried to turn a go-kart into a bulldozer.

Perhaps stupidly, even after seeing that this was the new guy's USP, I didn't actually expect him to control like a car. But nope, sure enough, instead of running around freely like the other dwarves, he has to accelerate, reverse, manage his turning radius, and in my experience do a lot of dodgy three point turns. (And yes, the car does do a little beeping noise like a truck when it reverses. Adorable.)

You really feel the weight and heft of the vehicle as you play—and that has its advantages too. Smaller enemies can be rammed out of the way with the front plow, for example, and it also mines through terrain faster than a pickaxe.

All together it completely changes the feel of Survivor's action. After 150 hours with the game, I'm suddenly having to retrain my muscle memory. No longer is survival about juking around the hordes, slipping through gaps in their formations and setting off explosive bugs with agile feints. The car's not only not nimble enough for that, it's too wide and bulky.

Instead, I'm looking for the parts of the swarm free enough of the bigger, tougher bugs that I can simply slam my way through, and planning out wide, circular routes through the level that avoid the dangers of sharp changes of direction and take advantage of faster digging.

I'm picking health and armour upgrades far more than I would normally, and artifacts that trigger on damage, so I can safely spend more time in the thick of it. That lets me get the most out of the Demolisher's new weapons, which largely focus on close-range damage and leaving a path of destruction behind you. Carving a path through the hordes laying elemental mines as I go and blasting a jet of flame out the back is a whole new kind of power fantasy for the game.

Also included in the expansion is a new biome, Glacial Strata. It isn't too revolutionary—slippery ice, falling icicles, and frost exploders mix things up a bit but feel like light touch features compared to the challenges you face in some of the existing zones. Retroactively adding a Glacial Strata level to every existing sector certainly gives you a lot of new levels to work through, though, which is very welcome.

Much more exciting is the new mode: Egg Hunt. The objective is to… well, hunt for eggs buried in each level, and bring them back one at a time to a containment cell in the centre of the map. It's a different rhythm to Elimination—rather than systematically clearing the map, I'm making repeat trips back and forth, encouraging me to carve out useful repeat routes.

My immediate instinct is to make things as easy for myself as possible by digging out all the eggs and a clear path in one big loop and then going back for each one. But that kind of min-maxing has its own drawbacks—every egg triggers a swarm event when uncovered, which can quickly get overwhelming if stacked up at once. There's definitely some nuanced strategy there to (ahem) dig into.

The best bit, though, is the final sprint. Once you've deposited three eggs in a level, the drop pod arrives—but instead of leaving right away, you can stick around to try to grab the last two remaining eggs for extra rewards. The pod does wait a bit longer than normal—two minutes rather than 30 seconds—but it's still a frantic dash to get them without being left behind that adds a fun burst of adrenaline to each level.

After three stages and a lot of eggs comes the finale: a giant worm monster bursts out of the ground and rudely demands you give them all back. It's another refreshing change of pace—while Elimination's dreadnoughts chase you around, making movement speed and mining bonuses a must, Egg Hunt's brood nexus boss is rooted to the ground, presenting a whole different kind of challenge.

If I simply circle it pumping shots into its fleshy body, I get quickly swamped by the swarm, especially as it summons its own extra bodyguards. Sneakier tactics are required. One method is to keep doing big loops, drawing the horde away before sprinting back to get some damage in, and then running off again.

Alternatively, I've had success focusing on weapons with enough range and piercing to penetrate through the swarm to the fleshy boss within, and then sticking close, weaving through the bugs and trusting to some health and armour upgrades to keep me alive.

As a veteran of so much time with the game already, it's thrilling to be in this kind of headspace again, trying to crack new strategies and playstyles. And for the price—$10 / £9—it's a huge amount of extra content for a game already bursting with reasons to replay.

Those of you pinching pennies aren't left out, though—alongside the DLC, a new patch has launched, adding a robust endless mode for true sickos, an expanded tag system for weapons that comes with new upgrades and overclocks, and new mastery milestones that allow you to earn yet more bonus stats to help you on your runs.

If anyone feared that coming out of early access would slow down the pace of support for gaming's best Vampire Survivors-like, they can certainly put those worries to rest this week. Now if you'll excuse me, I've got another 150 hours to fit in somewhere.

Mewgenics is easily my favourite game of 2026 so far—in fact, I gave it 92% in our review. I love its emergent storytelling, its chaotic build-crafting, and its incredible depth. What I wouldn't claim, however, is that it's perfectly balanced.

It's always been clear that certain classes are behind the curve while others are endlessly reliable. Equally, a handful of the random events you can discover during runs had an outsized impact, potentially derailing your adventure with one unlucky moment.

The good news is, the upcoming 1.1 patch is taking a very serious look at these pain points—with a much more dramatic suite of changes than I expected. Though a date isn't set yet for when this update will go live on the main branch, it's already available as a beta, and the developers have put out a full set of patch notes.

It all looks like very welcome stuff to me. On the events side of things, the most problematic or unrewarding ones—such as those requiring you to sacrifice a cat for potentially no good outcome, and the one that doles out Blood Frenzy just when you least want it—have been substantially toned down.

The real meat of the update, though, is the class changes. The ever-reliable hunter has received a pretty substantial nerf, with less damage and scaling on key abilities, and the fighter's Merciless passive now no longer triggers from actions that cost movement, kneecapping a whole range of infinite combos that I certainly didn't exploit several times during the review process (ahem).

There's a lot more buffs than nerfs, however, with the mage and tinkerer in particular coming out smelling of roses. Mages now have a substantial increase in the range of their basic attack, meaning your squishy glass cannons don't have to rush up to the front lines anymore, and big improvements to the damage of a bunch of their spells. It's good to see that that includes the Forbidden spells, which previously never felt worth their debilitating side effects (which have also now been toned down).

Tinkerers, meanwhile, can now throw their weapons without it costing an action, and can enjoy reduced mana costs, more ways to gain the tech buff, and an inherent resistance to explosive damage on the various bomb-based passives. That should all add up to much more consistent damage, easier build-crafting, and much better survivability.

Beyond that are some quality of life fixes, and a few bosses have received a boost in health—particularly the Coven fight, which should pose much more of a challenge now. Some changes have been made to breeding, too, preventing the abuse of the mutation stat to avoid birth defects from inbreeding, though I think only the most min-max focused home owners should notice much of a difference there.

Oh, and shout out to my new favourite patch note ever: "Hitler's suicide can no longer miss." Not only a top-tier sentence out of context, but the implications make me laugh too—I had no idea you could cause that attack to miss, and I've no idea what would even happen next if you did. A perfect testament to Mewgenics' endless web of wildly overlapping systems.

The full patch notes are below, and you can also read them along with instructions for trying the beta branch on the game's Steam page.

Breeding/House Changes

• Fixed some issues with high amounts of negative Stimulation.
• Fixed Stimulation treating birth defects on parents the same as positive mutations. Higher stimulation now decreases the chance of birth defects on parents being inherited.
• The effects of Stimulation are now reduced the more inbred a kitten is.
• The chances of inheriting a parent's birth defect are significantly increased the more inbred the kitten is.
• "Mutation" stat will no longer reroll any existing mutations or birth defects.
• "Mutation" stat will now only roll simple mutations (+2/-1 stat ones) until >10 Mutation. More Mutation beyond this will increase the chance of rolling mutations with effects.
• Heads that have 1 eye/eyebrow/ear (ex. Cyclops) will no longer also count as the "Missing" birth defect for the other eye/eyebrow/ear.
• Chance of inheriting a voice from a parent is now 75% instead of 98%.

Events

• Baphomet: Removed bad outcomes from sacrifice and lose 10 HP options.
• Steven Fetus: Removed Deja Vu from bad event outcome and replaced with a new pool of disorders for it.
• Sacrificial Altar: Removed bad outcomes from sacrificing cats.
• Itchies or Wheezies: Itchies now also gives a forever flea familiar and Wheezies now also gives +2 LCK.
• Insatiable Rage tragedy no longer only gives Blood Frenzy.
• Infestation weather event:  Units now only spawn charmed maggots when killed.

Disorders/Parasites

• Hypersomnia: fixed order Sleep applies so that passives/items affecting sleep can trigger correctly.
• Malaria: Now only reduces CON.
• Naegleria Fowleri: Become AI controlled instead of dead at 0 INT.
• Schrodinger’s Syndrome: +1 to all stats and gain an extra turn at the start of battle.
• Sociopathy: -5 CHA, +5 INT.

Cleric

• Cleanse: Is now single-target. Range increased to compensate. Upgrade changed to make it hit a large area.
• Open Wounds: Now deals magic damage.

Druid

• Plant Mushroom: -2 mana cost.
• Summon Caterpillar: -1 mana cost.

Fighter

• Merciless: No longer triggers during actions that cost movement points.

Hunter

• Ball Of Spiders: No longer scales damage with DEX.
• Egg Sac Trap: -1 mana cost.
• Flea Shot: No longer scales damage with DEX.
• Heavy shot: -2 damage, 50% miss chance, +1 mana cost.
• Hunter's Boon: Now only triggers once per turn, but triggers off of any kill and not just enemies.
• Scattershot: +3 mana cost. Upgrade no longer exempts allies from its radius.

Mage

• Mage Basic attack: +2 range.
• Blizzard: Reworked to deal very high damage with 100% Freeze (and no Slow).
• Bolt: +2 range.
• Burning Paws: +1 Burn. (upgrade +2 Burn.)
• Fire Blast: +2 range.
• Firebolt: +2 range, +1 damage.
• Five: Trigger is now exactly 5 Mana or HP.
• Forbidden Spells: Now have 2 separate disorder pools, a basic pool (90% chance) and a crippling pool (10% chance). Psychosis is in the crippling pool. Luck affects which pool is chosen.
• Forbidden Flame: Burn increased.
• Forbidden Flood: Damage increased.
• Forbidden Frost: Damage/heal increased.
• Forbidden Fulmination: Damage increased.
• Four: Trigger is now exactly 4 Mana or HP.
• Freezerburn: +1 attack radius
• Ice Paws: +2 Slow, +5% freeze chance. You can damage frozen units. (upgrade +3 Slow.)
• Icicle Zapper: +1 damage.
• Jolt: +2 range.
• Inferno:  Now deals 8 damage, 8 Burn (upgrade 12 damage 10 Burn).
• Lightning Paws: +1 damage, +5% Stun chance. (upgrade +2 damage, +7% Stun chance.)
• Light up the Stage: +1 sparkle per turn. (upgrade +3 sparkles per turn)
• Long Cast: +2 range. (upgrade +5 range, +1 magic damage.)
• Overload: +2 damage. (upgrade +4 damage.)
• Shatter: -1 mana cost.
• Thunderburst: Now deals 12 damage, 50% Stun (upgrade 16 damage, 100% Stun)
• Tri-Attack: +2 range +1 damage.

Monk

• Fist of Fate+: repeat must hit different targets each time.
• Stance Switch: ai control now attempts to use this if it’s out of other actions.

Necromancer

• Evil Incarnate: -3 mana cost.
• Flesh Golem: -3 hp cost per cat to cast.

Psychic

• Shatter the Sky: -2 mana cost.

Tank

• Ass Blast: -1 mana cost, +2 Knockback.
• Clap: -1 mana cost.

Thief

• Caltrops: +1 movement. (upgrade +5 movement.)
• Nail Flurry+: Multi-hit amount is now locked in when the ability is cast instead of updating mid-ability if DEX is gained or lost.
• Poison Gas: +1 poison. (upgrade +2 poison)

Tinkerer

• Tinkerer Basic Craft/Throw: AI is slightly better at sequencing these now. (prefers to craft without wasting move first, prefers to use weapon before throwing it)
• Added "Blast Resistance" status effect. Blast resistance is added onto EMP, Mr. Mega, Napalm, and Demo Man tinkerer passives.
• Throw Weapon: no longer costs an action to use.
• Bombchu: -2 mana cost.
• Build Nuke: -2 mana cost.
• Conductor: now makes your weapon inflict electric damage if you are wearing metal.
• Electrolyze: -2 mana cost.
• EMP: +1 explosion damage. (upgrade +2 explosion damage.)
• Firecrackers: -2 mana cost.
• Lightning Rod: now grants Tech instead of Charge. Upgrade now grants Energized.
• Math!: now deals electric damage + stuns on prime numbers. Upgrade now gives you Tech on prime number instead of refunding mana.
• Mr. Mega: +1 blast radius, +2 explosion damage. (upgrade +4 explosion damage.)
• Napalm: +2 Burn. (upgrade +4 Burn.)
• Rocket Ride: -2 mana cost.

Misc

• Hitler's suicide can no longer miss. Increased the shield amount on his explosive phase.
• Added +4 HP to Führerfötuses.
• Final Boss & his Cat Clones are banned from rolling Depressing elite buff.
• Soahc's form change now ignores combat speed setting.
• Added +50 HP to The Coven and Tormentor.
• Added +50 HP to Dreadnoughtus’ head and +2 damage to its legs.
• Cursed Items and Parasites are no longer excluded from item degradation.
• Head mutation that gives you a bonus turn now has -2 speed.
• Spewer: HP nerfed to 100
• Stacy: base HP buffed to 125

Other Changes/Fixes

• Inventory "Slot" sort order now matches the order shown above the cat.
• Jester collar will always appear at the end of the class list, even if unlocked before Monk.
• Inventory/Furniture "Alphabetical" sort lists now use locales for sorting (change needed for some future language support).
• Backpack button added to shop screens.
• The tooltip for items with active abilities now shows the ability button in the tooltip.
• Added element indicators to item buttons.
• Misc tooltip fixes (Half-Rat, Robotic Arm).
• Misc localization fixes.
• Misc typos fixed.
• Fixed incorrect tiles in one level in The Rift.
• Fixed Rare Cat Tree C's art not matching collision.
• Loot cutscenes now all show a fallback cat for moral support if you loot with only one cat in the party.
• New cat vocal sound sets added.
• Fixed Champion Katzebot portrait not properly showing.
• Added tooltip icon for Temporary Item.
• Gave RiftKitten tooltip text.
• Added fallback behavior for another type of save file corruption
• Some random rolls with 0% or 100% odds will no longer advance the RNG.

Slay the Spire 2 has been one of those roguelike time vampires in recent weeks, for me—in between my usual binges of larger games, I tend to vanish into this genre for a bleary-eyed 80 hours because I can simply rinse and repeat, rather than having to worry about long-term narratives or complicated RPG systems.

Anyway, in my—oh my god, that can't be right. 118?—hours with Slay the Spire 2, I've come to feel like it's justified itself as a sequel. There's a lot of the same stuff going on, but there's also enough of a balance shift (and the inclusion of two new characters and co-op) to leave me satisfied.

But that wasn't originally the plan for MegaCrit. In Edge issue 423 (thanks, GamesRadar+), Mega Crit co-founder Casey Yano says that "In a Reddit comment a long time ago, I was like 'we're not going to make a sequel! Why would we do that? We'll just update the first one'."

Given you are reading an article about Slay the Spire 2, that didn't pan out: "I guess we were a little naïve."

The main reason had a lot to do with Humble Games going under back in 2024. Humble helped Mega Crit publish the game on consoles and mobile—without them, those versions of the game couldn't be supported (per the studio's FAQ).

Basically, it gets real hard to justify updating the PC version of your game when every single other version of it is beyond your reach to do anything about—either you leave console and mobile players in the lurch, or you risk entering a publishing rights quagmire. "We couldn’t just work more on Slay the Spire 1, because its future was very murky," Yano explains.

Eventually, the studio decided that if it wanted to go ahead with its plans, "it would have to be a sequel." And, hey—judging by the amount of hours I've spent on it already (the equivalent of around 2.8 working weeks. I need to get other hobbies) it wasn't the worst move in the world.

Vampire Survivors continues to be a huge deal, and publisher poncle has grown massively since its release in 2022. In an interview with The Game Business, the studio's chief strategy officer Matteo Sapio talked about the smash hit that now has over 27 million players—and what it's planning to do with all that dough.

"Vampire Survivors exploded, and in two or three months, it sold more than one million copies," Sapio said. "[Solo developer Luca Galante]'s yachts are video games. So instead of buying a yacht, he made the Emerald Beyond DLC [for Vampire Survivors] with Square Enix, which we released for free. Things grew organically from there.”

We've seen some of that growth pay off already in the form of Vampire Crawlers, the deckbuilding dungeon crawler spinoff, but more is on the way. "Our idea is to have little teams of people—five, 10, 15—working on different projects. The structure will be, we will have a designer, a bunch of producers, and this little team that’s agile and flexible," Sapio said, adding that the goal is to maintain an indie ethos on a bigger scale.

“We don’t want to be AAA or AA. We’re efficient with costs. We don’t take useless risks. We invest in people. So, with 15 projects, one can fail, one can go good, and you balance that.” In this same talk, Sapio mentioned that the company is opening new studios in Italy and Japan and has plans to dole out its Survivors engine for even more licensed partnerships like Warhammer Survivors. While it's being developed by a different team and borrows a tabletop setting for its aesthetics, it's nonetheless "part of the official Survivors lineage."

Sapio hopes poncle just keeps on growing from there. When asked where he sees the company in five years, he said he'd like to see "40 projects in parallel development at all times everywhere in the world," adding to the notion that he'd rather see more small games rather than one monolithic game.

Enter the Gungeon celebrated its tenth anniversary earlier this month. Having sold over 14 million copies in its lifetime, Enter the Gungeon was one of the early architects of the modern action roguelike, alongside games like Nuclear Throne, forging the path for the genre's modern phenomena like Hades, as well as variants of it such as Vampire Survivors.

It's a game with a heck of a legacy. But it's a legacy that its creators are ambivalent about. Speaking to Polygon, Dodge Roll designer Dave Crooks and composer Adam Kidd Drucker (better known by his stage name Doseone), have some concerns about where the genre is headed, and the tricks modern roguelikes use to keep people playing.

"So few people are trying to make something that is truly evocative of this experience of playing Rogue," Crooks explained. He cited the example of Minos, the game where you design a labyrinth and then defend it against attackers. "I watched a dev explanation of the game and he said (paraphrasing) 'But don't worry, this is a roguelike, so death is not the end!' And I'm like, that is the exact opposite of what 10 years ago somebody would've said a roguelike was!"

In particular, Crooks pointed to how the roguelike has become infiltrated by gambling mechanics. "The most obvious thing I see is a screen that pops up three choices every 45 seconds", he says. "The whole game, the way the power curve is designed is like you have to be interrupted by this serotonin blast of fanfare and three choices… It’s more relatable to a slot machine being popular.”

Crooks sees this as beginning with Vampire Survivors, and becoming more prominent in subsequent games like Balatro. "Especially on the back of Vampire Survivors and Balatro, I think it has gone a little bit … God, I don't want to be the person that says this, but a little cash-grabby," he observed. "What fundamentally makes those things fun is much more like a slot machine than the experience of playing Rogue. And literally developing a game that ticks the boxes of a slot machine in those ways is just easier to do."

I think part of the problem here is that nobody seems to bother distinguishing between roguelikes and roguelites anymore, because virtually all of them are roguelites, while more authentic roguelikes such as Caves of Qud are much thinner on the ground. It's a point that Drucker touches upon, noting that "I think we’re seeing it mutate to the version of itself that popularity obfuscates."

Nonetheless, I also think Crooks is accurate when he says that the games that followed in the wake of Vampire Survivors are becoming overly reliant on progression-based gimmickry rather than interesting game mechanics, possibly why the reception to games like CloverPit and Raccoin has been slightly cooler, though both are still popular.

Dodge Roll isn't finished stamping its own mark on the roguelike, though. The developer is currently working on Enter the Gungeon 2, which aims to stay true to the original game's blend of roguelike and bullet-hell, but with a 3D art-style. Based on Crooks and Drucker's comments, it'll be interesting to see if the sequel zags harder away from the current zeitgeist, and how that'll affect the final experience.

I think I broke Vampire Crawlers.

And I don't mean that in the tee-hee, I'm exaggerating just a little bit way. I know that Vampire Crawlers is all about making crazy builds with stacking stat buffs and strong synergies that can clear encounters in seconds, just like Vampire Survivors. But I think I've cracked the code with what may be the best build in the entire game.

Not only is this build ridiculously effective, but it also pretty much puts the game on autopilot. It's all thanks to one funny little skeleton guy.

Vampire Crawlers Mortaccio Build

Mortaccio is a skeletal Crawler that you can unlock by slaying a total of 444 skeletons. He starts with a set of Bone cards and a single armor card, and he boosts your Amount stat every time a blue card is played.

There's a really simple game plan to dominate with Mortaccio. All you need to do is overwhelm your opponents with a barrage of Bones by padding your Amount stat whenever you can. That means playing a lot of armor cards, and equipping the Your Shield My Liege Arcana (which makes armor persist between turns) will make Mortaccio unkillable.

Once you start a run, the most important goal is getting a Spellbinder card in your deck. Spellbinder cards cost 0 Mana and increase your Duration by 2. Once Mortaccio is active, you don't ever want him to leave. Duration-boosting gems can also help out here.

With Mortaccio active, you'll add even more Bones to the pile every time you apply armor. Bones cost 0 mana, and they can combo with Golden Armor to seriously strengthen your defenses. Add in some Duplicator cards—which also combo with Bones—and you'll crush anything in your path with a cascade of calcium.

This strategy needs upgrades to survive deeper dungeon floors, so seek out gems that increase Might, Area, and Amount to buff your Bones. If you can nab a Reverse Combo gem, apply it to Golden Armor so your Bone cards can benefit from combo bonuses and deal additional damage.

This build works best with plenty of re-rolls so you can specifically target what you need. The best overall gems for this setup are Decimate and Triple Damage, both of which can upgrade Bones to a serious threat. Triple Damage is self-explanatory, but Decimate makes a card deal a fixed 10% of the enemy's HP as damage.

You'll still need something for single-target encounters like bosses since your Bones won't be able to bounce as much in those situations. Ideally, you should chase something that costs two Mana so you can combo with Golden Armor. The Holy Wand is a personal favorite of mine.

Other than that, just keep stacking gems like Echo or Copy that will let you unleash a comical amount of Bones each turn. A Clover card is another thing to look out for since its repeated Luck buffs will help you find stronger gems.

Top things off with a Bracer to increase your hand size and more blue Armor or Pummarola cards to trigger Mortaccio's skill, and you'll breeze through even the hardest dungeons. There may be another build out there that's even better than this Mortaccio setup, but for now, I'm too bone-headed to try anything else.