Gordon Freeman is a nerd who cuts a heroic profile, but in Abiotic Factor you’re just a nerd: a regular, lab-coat-wearing new employee in a Black Mesa-like science facility that’s undergoing an unspecified security situation. Your job, at least for starters, is to avoid dying.

Out in early access on Steam today, Abiotic Factor’s premise seems to be striking a chord with co-op survival crafting fans: It hasn’t hit Steam’s top concurrents chart at the time of writing, but it has jumped to seventh place in Steam’s US top-sellers list just a few hours after launch.

I like how much Abiotic Factor commits to the ’90s parody corporate scientist theme: its character creator features 19 ties, 12 kinds of glasses, and 11 snazzy belts. And how refreshing it is to play a co-op survival crafting game that doesn’t immediately ask you to punch down a tree! The rough equivalent in Abiotic Factor is bashing an old beige computer case to bits and harvesting its power supply. 

A…

Even good UI changes are met with hostility from belligerent software users who liked things the way they were, so I won’t claim to know whether or not the choice to move Chrome’s downloads list from a bar at the bottom of the screen to a tray at the top right is good UX design or not. I’ll just meet it with hostility.

Until today, I was living in a dreamlike state of delusion over the loss of Chrome’s download bar. I tilted my head at its absence every time I downloaded something, but rather than believing that some cruel Silicon Valley fiend would really move my downloads from the place they’ve been since before I even started using Chrome—so, for decades—I shook it off, found the file in Explorer, and left the mystery for another day.

It wasn’t until I saw a tweet from Rust creator Garry Newman that I really comprehended the situation. “Chrome moving the downloads to the top right has ruined my entire life,” he wrote.

The update happened on …

Elden Ring’s Shadow of the Erdtree expansion (due June 20th) is currently looming large over my gaming time, inspiring the urge to return to The Lands Between and hoover up everything I missed in my first playthrough. There’s plenty to be getting on with, because not only is this world vast but absolutely riddled with secrets both above and below the surface⁠—including the dead hand of annoying Soulsborne bosses past. 

One category of miscellanies, however, is not down to the authorial intention of FromSoftware but the dedicated efforts of dataminers who, drunk on the power of having stripped-down many previous Soulsborne games, have discovered some astonishing details buried away in the game’s code. A great recent example of this was the discovery of unused underground areas, tied to a planned ‘Cataclysm’ system (never implemented) which would have seen the map change as you play.

This new revelation isn’t on quite that scale but, for those who’v…

Pharaoh: A New Era, a remake of the classic 1999 city builder from Sierra, is set to launch on Steam next week, and to ensure fans are ready for it publisher Dotemu has released a lengthy trailer showcasing its overhauled graphics and gameplay, and also dropped some hints on how to get off to a strong start.

The video covers all the basics, from the usual resource gathering and early construction to setting up trade missions with nearby cities. It also shows off the “completely redesigned” UI in Pharaoh: A New Era, which is aimed at simplifying the job of building and managing cities, and of course the new and improved visuals—it’s been a quarter century since the original, after all, and while that’s not exactly ancient in a civilizational context, it’s pretty old as far as videogame graphics go.

Also interesting, and kind of amusing (to me, at least), is the fact that all the remade buildings in Pharaoh: A New Era were “carefully evaluated by a certified Egyptolo…

I know we’ve had a downright deluge of roguelike deckbuilders over the past few years, but by golly I can’t seem to get enough of them—I just like gathering my funny little cards, and the process of rinse & repeat is soothing to me, as my recent Hades obsession can confirm. Toads of the Bayou certainly looks like the next darling to scratch that itch.

As revealed in this year’s PC Gaming Show, Toads of the Bayou is a deckbuilder-slash-roguelike game that blends cards with good ol’ fashioned turn-based tactics. Baron Samedi, a nasty spirit, has trapped you and your fellow hoppers in a cursed bayou to wallow and suffer. 

Unfortunately for Samedi, he didn’t realise toads have invented firearms. Classic blunder, could happen to anyone.

What’s interesting, to me, is how Toads of the Bayou has both combat and movement cards on offer—generally-speaking, deck builders are turn-based affairs where your only real consideration is finding synergi…

While Hollow Knight: Silksong didn’t have an exact release date, its appearance at the Xbox & Bethesda showcase in June of 2022—which Xbox made a point of saying was focused on games coming in the following 12 months—led us to expect that it would release by June, 2023. That may no longer be the case.

Matthew Griffin, who does marketing and publishing for Hollow Knight developer Team Cherry, has provided an update about its progress on Twitter. Griffin noted, “We had planned to release in the 1st half of 2023, but development is still continuing. We’re excited by how the game is shaping up, and it’s gotten quite big, so we want to take the time to make the game as good as we can.”

Silksong was originally conceived as an expansion for Hollow Knight, but quickly became a full-fledged sequel with a new protagonist, playstyle, and setting. Seems like it’s continued to expand during development, though whether this will result in a significant delay remains to…