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Final Fantasy Tactics – The Ivalice Chronicles director is a big PC gamer, and says he was ‘very particular’ about making sure they got the new UI just right

by admin October 1, 2025

Final Fantasy Tactics: The challenges of bringing it to PC – YouTube

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“They’ve actually done it: Not only can I finally play Final Fantasy Tactics on my PC, but this timeless classic has been done justice,” begins our 91% review of The Ivalice Chronicles, the long, long-awaited remaster of one of the all-time great strategy games. As the developers at Square Enix have recently attested, pulling off the revival for PC and modern consoles has been no easy task, in part because the original source code no longer exists.

In a new interview with PC Gamer at the Tokyo Game Show last week, director Kazutoyo Maehiro went into more detail about the specific challenges of adding a new PC-friendly interface to a game designed for the original PlayStation.

“I myself play a lot of games on PC, so … I was very particular making sure we got it right,” Maehiro said. “Tactics is a turn-based strategy RPG, so you might be playing it for a while. You’ll spend a lot of time with your hands on the mouse and keyboard. One of the things I wanted to make sure was people wouldn’t get tired from playing for extended periods of time. So when it came to that, it was a lot of discussions within the team: What kind of shortcuts could we have, what kind of ways can we make the mouse easier to use? We went through a lot of different iterations and discussions together to make that happen.

“We also looked at a lot of different strategy RPGs and RTS games as well. We would look at what kind of controls they’re using, what’s the standard that people have or what people are comfortable with, and we used that as a base to make what we have.”

The Ivalice Chronicles producer Shoichi Matsuzawa added that Maehiro wasn’t kidding about being particular. “Even down to the speed of the scrolling, he’d tell me ‘the scroll’s just a little bit off here,’ and I was telling him ‘we don’t have time for this! The schedule does not allow for more adjustments.'”

The duo also discussed making sure the game worked well on the Steam Deck, though it’s currently rated Playable rather than Verified due to some small text. That was a deliberate trade-off—they decided they weren’t willing to sacrifice any of the important information they needed to fit onto the screen.

Our TGS interview also covers updating Final Fantasy Tactics’ script to support its newly added voice acting without losing any of its sharp political commentary, as well as the archeological process of digging through the game code from past releases to cobble together this definitive version.

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October 1, 2025 0 comments

Product Reviews

Baby Steps review | PC Gamer

by admin September 24, 2025

Need to know

What is it? There is only one set of footsteps in the sand, because you are on your fuckin’ own, mate.
Expect to pay: $18/£15.30
Developer: Gabe Cuzzillo, Maxi Boch, Bennett Foddy
Publisher: Devolver Digital
Reviewed on: Windows 11, Intel Core i9, 32GB RAM, Nvidia RTX 4060
Multiplayer? No
Link: Official site

I fell while navigating some tricky rocks, rolling downhill like a wet sausage until I was caught by a grassy ledge. The only paths back up involved even tricker rocks, and predictably I fell again, tumbling off the grassy ledge to land next to a mudslide. Fortunately there was a dry path beside the mud, and unfortunately I found a single rock on that path, tripped, hit the mudslide, and slid to the bottom of it.

Walking back up that path I managed to slip into the mud twice more, the second time achieving such slippery velocity I flung myself back to a previous biome, landing in a lake. That motivated me to try a different route entirely, heading back toward a labyrinth of cardboard called Box Hell, at which point I spotted a ladder leaning against the hill I somehow completely missed the first time through this area, and which let me bypass all that mud-and-rock nonsense.

It still took me three goes to get up the ladder, of course.

This is Baby Steps, a parody of open world games, and our collective punishment for using the phrase “walking simulator”. You play Nate, a basement-dwelling loser mysteriously teleported from his couch to the wilderness like the Pevensie children being magicked to Narnia, only instead of plucky youngsters full of Blitz spirit you are a 35-year-old failure full of pizza.

There is a mountain in the wilderness and maybe if Nate climbs it he’ll be able to go home. It’s as reasonable an assumption as any, so off you set, taking your first steps, and almost immediately falling on your dumptruck ass.

(Image credit: Devolver)

Baby Steps recommends you play with a controller like a real yakuza, so I did. Squeezing one trigger lifts your foot, and pushing a stick moves that foot. You’ve got a fine degree of control over where that foot ends up before you put it back down, which will not save you. Nate has all the balance and grace of a moose on ice, and he’s doing this hike barefoot.

He could have got shoes at the start of the climb, but he turned them down. In the first of many delightfully improvised cutscenes, Nate meets a cheerful Australian hiker who offers help and he immediately says no. Nate is a man so awkward he wants every social interaction to end the moment it begins, if not sooner, rejecting every offer of help, including a map I would actually really have appreciated.

Baby Steps takes the idea of games as challenges, of hard modes and iron man runs and proud declarations that yellow paint is ruining videogames, and personifies it as a specific kind of man—the man who will not ask for directions no matter how lost he is. The next time someone dresses their victory over a videogame as some kind of macho triumph, I’ll be thinking of Nate, his onesie turning brown as he falls in the mud over and over.

Because it was there

In addition to the challenge of working your way from one campfire to the next as you ascend through a series of zones, there are optional challenges to hurl your wobbly cheeks at. Hats you can wear are precariously placed on top of trees or broken piles, and so are lost objects to return to nearby firetowers. But every time you tumble there’s a high chance you’ll lose your hat or whatever’s in your hand, and the act of leaning over to pick it back up can sometimes send you tumbling again. I lost a hat when I fell through the roof of a barn and couldn’t find it in all the straw, a moment so dispiriting I gave up on hats entirely and did the rest of the climb bareheaded.

(Image credit: Devolver)

But the moments that are most dispiriting are when you’re completely at a loss as to which of several hardscrabble climbs is even doable. Sometimes there’s only one way up (like the ant tunnels leading out of the sandcastle), but sometimes there are multiple paths of varying difficulty. How many times do you throw yourself at a broken rockface or a cactus bridge or a wet plank before you trundle off to see if there’s an easier way?

More than once I gave up on something that turned out to actually be the easy option because I blundered my first couple of attempts, then wandered around for an hour trying things that were far harder. At one point I knocked down a yellow shovel I could have used as a bridge and spent an age trying other ascents before learning that if I just quit out and went back in again the shovel returned to its original location.

(Image credit: Devolver)

Odds are you’ll find at least one moment in Baby Steps you think crosses the line from “funny satire of videogame design and difficulty discourse” into “actual bullshit someone should be ashamed of.” It’ll probably happen somewhere different for everyone, though the odds of it being one of the many bullshit moments in the sandy zone are high.

Scale Sheer Surface

I’ve heard people say they stopped enjoying Skyrim the moment they realized they could fast-travel. Once they started teleporting from one quest goal to the next all the fun went out of it. I enjoyed Skyrim even with the fast-travel, but I understand their position. Bouncing directly from objective to objective can be draining and joyless in a way that ambling around isn’t.

Baby Steps makes ambling into slapstick comedy, and I laughed a lot while Nate groaned and swore and blubbered. At least, for the first seven or so hours. The seven hours after that started to edge into being draining and joyless in their own way—honestly, sand can fuck right off forever, Anakin was right, just a hateful substance—but by that point the story had hooked me. The snappy dialogue of those cutscenes stays funny when the physics lols have worn out their welcome.

(Image credit: Devolver)

The reward for persevering in Baby Steps isn’t anything as ephemeral as a sense of triumph over adversity or whatever nonsense the masocore people get out of their boring games. No, it’s cutscenes where a character who is probably voiced by Bennett Foddy menaces Nate through sheer overbearing force of personality and Australian-ness.

Normally satire makes it hard to take the thing it’s satirizing seriously, but after almost 15 hours of waddlebitching my way up one mountain I loaded up Borderlands 4 and doing a doublejump-glide into a jetbike felt incredible. Baby Steps is a masterpiece, but I think actually I will just chill in a game with quest markers for a while.

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September 24, 2025 0 comments

Product Reviews

Hollow Knight: Silksong review | PC Gamer

by admin September 13, 2025

Nothing prepared me for the Sisyphean exercise that is playing Hollow Knight: Silksong. Part of that is my bad for skipping the original Hollow Knight—I thought I’d have plenty of time to try it before Silksong ever actually came out. But now it’s here and I’ve spent over 25 hours with the videogame equivalent of sticking your hand into the Dune pain box.

Need to Know

What is it? A 2D action game with challenging combat and platforming
Release date: September 4, 2025
Expect to pay: $19.99
Developer: Team Cherry
Publisher: Team Cherry
Reviewed on: RTX 5090, Intel Core i9 12900K, 32GB RAM
Multiplayer: Yes
Steam Deck: Verified
Link: Steam

Silksong may be one of the most painful 2D action games I’ve played, and the worst part? I inflicted that pain on myself by pressing forward until I’d seen just about every inch of the bug-inhabited land of Pharloom. And that’s saying something; despite being a 2D game, Team Cherry has stuffed enough levels, characters, and quests into Silksong to fill a 3D world. It never ends: Lift up a rock and you’ll find a boss eager to be your newest archnemesis or an obstacle course of spikes and blades that are about as rewarding as scratching a mosquito bite.

Silksong makes you feel like a fool for playing it in the first place. From the moment you start a new game and bring Pharloom into existence, it’s agony for everyone involved. Every bug is out to get you or struggling to eke out their own hardscrabble existence.

This diabolical commitment to knocking you on your ass in a world where everyone’s been knocked on their ass for the last few decades is what impresses me the most about Silksong. Not even a game as punishing as Elden Ring outright refuses to loosen its grip around your neck. There comes a point in every FromSoftware game where you earn the right to play with your food, often by finding a character build that works for you. Silksong, on the other hand, will let you upgrade your weapon so that eventually you might deal out as much damage as the enemies have been doing to you since Act 1.

I may be bruised and sore from the experience, but I’m happy to say that for all the pain Silksong put me through, it was worth it. Team Cherry made a whole game about getting to your car without your keys and it’s phenomenal, unflinching in its vision to fully consume you until you can see the mazes of Pharloom when you close your eyes.

Harmony

(Image credit: Tyler C. / Team Cherry)

I will kill anyone who dares complain about precious Sherma and his calming lullaby.

As much as I find the term inadequate for describing what’s truly special about Silksong, calling it a soulslike has some merit. Combat-wise it doesn’t quite fit, but the construction of Pharloom rivals (and echoes) that of Lordran in Dark Souls. Not only is it intricate and interconnected, but it’s warped by its tragic history. You can open the map and draw a line from the golden citadel all the way down into the stagnant, maggot-infested pools of Bilewater to understand exactly where the rot began.

Every shortcut and secret area contextualizes the horrors you face in the bigger, sadder picture. A pristine dining room in the upper chambers of the citadel hides a kitchen caked in dust and decay, and just below that, in a secret room, lies the tangled corpse of a centipede pontiff. There’s always something just out of view or lingering in the background that draws your eye, and those details always kept me hungry to see more. By the end of the game, I couldn’t tell what was more exciting: the fact that I somehow dug my way into an entire zone I hadn’t explored yet or the questions that new place raised about what’s really going on with Pharloom’s biggest mysteries.

There are plenty of bright spots on the journey through hell, like the little towns you can help rebuild and the bugs you meet in them. I ran so many errands for the group of bugs living in giant bells that they gifted me one of my own. I will kill anyone who dares complain about precious Sherma and his calming lullaby.

(Image credit: Tyler C. / Team Cherry)

Hornet, and the characters she runs into, are a splash of cold water in this gloomy dream. There are bugs of all shapes and sizes who welcome you with warm greetings, sweet melodies, and sometimes a bit of deception. I met a whole caravan of nomadic fleas with french mustaches, a bartender beetle, and a ladybug carny who charged me for target practice.

The wide cast of weirdos kept me sane when I was losing my grip from being repeatedly squashed by a metallic bug with a bell chained to her arm. Hornet’s tendency to soften from cold-blooded warrior to empathetic survivor when confronted with a bug-in-need or a fluffy flea added a tender counterpoint to the most abrasive moments. Even the fact that she speaks at all helps Silksong temper its overwhelming despair and it made me eager to talk to every bug I could find.

The thrill of playing as Hornet is what really anchors Silksong as a brilliant action game above all else. Skipping and dodging around enemies becomes a delicate dance that grows more and more intricate as you pick up new moves. I was merely poking at enemies in the first few hours of the game and by the end I was tossing out spike traps and silk missiles while bouncing between bugs like a pinball. When I wasn’t getting clobbered, it felt like the tables had turned and suddenly I was the boss with the unfair, unpredictable attacks. Silksong sets the bar for mastery so high that you can only reach it for short bursts, but it’s a carrot worth chasing when pulling it off is so unbelievably satisfying.

In those glorious, fleeting moments, I was able to take a step back and appreciate how creative Silksong’s boss fights can be. I almost wanted to stall during a duel with a glitzy butterfly on a stage full of explosive fireworks and spotlights so that I could enjoy the absurdity of it just a few seconds longer. And despite my waning patience when I was locked in a room with two mechanical dancers who mirror each other’s moves, I had to admit it was a clever way to learn how to stay focused on a single target while making me feel like I was part of the dance—which would prove useful for many bosses down the line. Again and again its commitment to cruelty had a purpose. This phenomenon continued until the final hours of the game.

Stubborn

(Image credit: Tyler C. / Team Cherry)

Most of Silksong is fair despite being unrelenting, and I suspect playing it in a compressed amount of time exacerbated the moments of pain. At the same time, there are sections, particularly the ones you’re forced to repeat every time you attempt a boss, that threaten curdling. One of the worst ones shows up near the beginning and forces you to pogo your way past rabid worms and flies with sniper rifles just to have a chance at seeing the boss again.

Silksong doesn’t always get the balance between effort and reward right. Some games will make you find an access code to unlock a safe with a key in it—Silksong will make you fight with your bare fists through four waves of flies with crowbars to get a key that unlocks a door leading to more flies with crowbars. You’re not even guaranteed to get anything after defeating a boss. For the first half, you’ll be lucky to find a bench to rest on that isn’t trying to kill you or take your money.

It’s an evocative choice to fill the game with checkpoints that you have to pay for to underline the disparity between the upper and lower halves of Pharloom, a clever bit of friction tied to the bleak state of the world. It’s also a choice to stack that on top of a system that empties your wallet if you die too much—and you will when just about every enemy and spike trap can knock out your health bar with a few mistakes. For as beautifully drawn as its tunnels and cathedrals are, not all of them made the climb worth it. Silksong, especially in the first half, requires you to take a blood oath on the promise that experiencing the entire thing will pay off.

(Image credit: Tyler C. / Team Cherry)

Silksong will beat you, burn you, rub your face in the dirt, and then dazzle you with another piece of a haunted clockwork world.

I may be bruised and sore from the experience, but I’m happy to say that it does, in fact, pay off. There were frustrating points in Silksong where I was reluctant to hand it to Team Cherry, but I’m still processing the shock that it managed to exceed my expectations after listening to people scream about Hollow Knight over the last seven years. I can’t tell you if the hype was worth it, because that hype exists on message boards and YouTube channels and Discords, not in the game I booted up on Steam every day for the last week. But I can tell you that Silksong glows with a level of precision and imagination that’s hard to find anywhere else.

It’s too good to let the brutal difficulty hold it back, or to hold me back from seeing all of it—even if I wish there were at least some options to tone down the nastiest punishments. Silksong will beat you, burn you, rub your face in the dirt, and then dazzle you with another piece of a haunted clockwork world, confident the sight will elicit a bloody, jagged-tooth grin. When that happens, the pain will fade away and you’ll press forward into the unknown, ready to endure whatever it throws at you just to stick around a little longer.

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September 13, 2025 0 comments

Borderlands 4 close-up of the Psycho bandit mask. The character is gesturing toward the view with two fingers, like they're picking a fight, and stands out on a red background.

Product Reviews

Is it better to be a ‘patient gamer’ or is playing new games at launch just too enticing?

by admin September 11, 2025

Borderlands 4 just launched and, predictably, players on Steam are already criticizing its PC performance. Meanwhile, the just-released Hollow Knight: Silksong didn’t raise any performance concerns, but gamers in China were dismayed to discover that the Chinese translation was botched.

Those are just a couple of the reasons some gamers have chosen to reject launch day hype in favor of “patient gaming”: Waiting a year or more to play new games, which means getting them cheaper during a sale and playing them after a bunch of big performance and quality-of-life patches have likely made them much better than they were at launch.

There’s even a pretty active subreddit dedicated to the idea: the main rule is that you’re not allowed to post about games that are under a year old.

But there’s also a reason HBO’s servers sometimes struggled with Sunday night demand at the height of Game of Thrones’ popularity. There’s something special about being there on day one (before they edit out the Starbucks cups) and reacting and emoting with the crowd. As I write, nearly 200,000 people are playing Borderlands 4 on Steam just hours after it released—on what is for me a Thursday morning.

Clearly, being a part of the launch day hubbub outweighs the benefits of waiting for a lot of people, and I don’t think it’s just because of publisher-manufactured FOMO.

I’m curious to know how PC Gamer readers feel about this trade-off. Do you usually take a wait-and-see approach to game launches, or are you preloading every time? Have you ever regretted playing a game at launch because it was later improved? Let us know in the comments below!

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September 11, 2025 0 comments

Gaming Gear

PC Gamer magazine’s new issue is on sale now: 007 First Light

by admin September 11, 2025

This month PC Gamer gets world-exclusive access to 007 First Light, IO Interactive’s exciting new James Bond game. From the company behind the Hitman series, this third-person action-adventure game places gamers in the shoes of a young James Bond before he has earned his 00 status, with the agent needing to go on a globe-trotting adventure to fulfil his mission. And, from what we’ve seen so far, First Light is shaping up to be the first game in well over a decade that delivers the genuine James Bond dream of being a suave, slick-talking and fast-shooting super spy. First Light seems to be coming with a licence to thrill!

(Image credit: Future)

Our features in this issue don’t stop there, though, as we’ve also got two other great long reads. First, we have a deep-dive into Raw Fury, the publishing house that is now famous for its exceptional indie catalogue of games. To get the inside scoop on Raw Fury’s approach to the gaming industry, discover the secret of its success, and find out what hot indie new games it has coming down the line, PC Gamer speaks directly to the publisher’s CEO Pim Holfve, as well as the firm’s beloved dog, Ponyo.

(Image credit: Future)

Then, secondly, PC Gamer delivers the ultimate one-stop shop of need-to-know information on Phantom Blade Zero, the awesome new wuxia action role-playing game developed and published by Chinese game maker S-GAME. For this, PC Gamer travels to China, goes inside S-GAME’s development studio, and speaks directly to the game’s director, Qiwei ‘Soulframe’ Liang, about his vision and why Phantom Blade Zero is definitely not a Soulslike. This is one to watch, that’s for sure.

(Image credit: Future)

Next, in terms of previews, we go hands-on with the suitably epic new action-RPG, Titan Quest II, get shrunk down to miniature size to deliver our early verdict on survival-crafting game Grounded 2, as well as go hands-on with Aether & Iron, Killer Inn, He Is Coming, Marvel Cosmic Invasion, The Ratline, Formula Legends, A Pretty Broken Adventure, Exekiller, and Riftstorm.

(Image credit: Future)

Meanwhile, in terms of reviews, the PC Gamer scoring machine delivers verdicts on the Unreal Engine 5-powered Metal Gear Solid Delta: Snake Eater, as well as Destiny 2: The Edge of Fate, Ninja Gaiden: Ragebound, Mafia: The Old Country, and Heretic + Hexen, among others.

(Image credit: Future)

All that plus a big group test of the best PCIe 5.0 SSDs on the market today, a reinstall of the now ancient hidden PC-exclusive gem, Drakan: Order of the Flame, a shenanigans-filled commencement of our new diary following the misadventures of Crispin the Preposterous, Oblivion Remastered foremost illusionist, an exploration of the truly excellent Smash Remix mod for Super Smash Bros., a deep dive into why The Elder Scrolls III: Morrowind’s town of Balmora is such an iconic location in fantasy RPGs, a tips and tricks guide to surviving being eaten by giant bugs in Grounded 2, a look at Final Fantasy XIV’s patch 7.25 update, a fresh dispatch from The Spy, a dramatic end to the PCG Investigator, Dick Ray-Tracing, and much more too. Enjoy the issue!

Our exclusive subscriber’s cover. (Image credit: Future)

Issue 414 is on shelves now and available on all your digital devices from the App Store and Zinio. You can also order directly from Magazines Direct or purchase a subscription to save yourself some cash, receive monthly deliveries, and get incredibly stylish subscriber-only covers.

Enjoy the issue!

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September 11, 2025 0 comments