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“It’s kind of a sociological experiment” For Blizzard, World of Warcraft neighbourhoods, Azeroth NIMBYs, and curtain-twitching drama is all part of the plan

by admin October 7, 2025

If you’ve played World of Warcraft at any point during its modern era, after it crossed the threshold from Classic to the MMO monster that is ‘Retail WoW’, you’ll know it’s not the social experience it once was. Better raiding, new lands, vast new adventures, yes, but it’s also a game that has become less collaborative. Many players are an island, separated from their peers.

Enter the upcoming Midnight expansion and this may very well change. You can’t close Pandora’s box, of course, the days of summon stones and server-wide events are long gone. But through housing and neighbourhoods World of Warcraft might teach players how to be social again.

These neighbourhoods are large spaces filled with affordable plots of land where houses can be quickly bought and customised; perhaps World of Warcraft’s most fantastical addition in years. These neighbourhoods can be both private and public, allowing pre-existing Guilds and total strangers to form miniature communities together in a singular digital space.

Watch the World of Warcraft: Midnight gameplay reveal here.Watch on YouTube

“I think we always knew we wanted to have neighbourhoods, or at least from a very early point,” associate game director Paul Kubit told Eurogamer. “We didn’t want you to just be locked in your own house, doing your own stuff all the time. You can hang out there for a long time, for sure, but we wanted the game to nudge you like, ‘hey, if you want some cool rewards, step outside and interact with your neighbours’ and so on.

“I think one of the watershed moments for us is when we said ‘neighbourhoods should be guilds and guilds should be neighbourhoods’. We already have these strong social groups that people enjoy spending time in, and early on I don’t think we made that connection that they should be tied quite closely together. They don’t have to be, of course: you can have a charter neighbourhood, you can live in a public neighbourhood.

“If you are already in a guild of folks who are interacting with one another, this is a cool opportunity to take that relationship that might be focused on raids or PvP or whatever, and you’ll be able to cohabit a space. You’ll be able to see how I decorate my front yard, and it’ll add opportunities to roleplay where our game hasn’t always had lots of open invitations to roleplay. When you’re in a neighbourhood, it makes you want to [do more of that]!”

The question then is, well, what do neighbours actually do with each other? Once they set up their homes, what’s to stop them from teleporting in and out of their abode without so much as a /wave, or a /spit when someone puts up a gaudy fence the estate doesn’t like? The answer, per Blizzard, is Endeavors: monthly events that thrust an entire neighbourhood out into the world to complete events for a chance at that WoW catnip – sweet loot and unique rewards.

Kubit elaborates on the feature and its inspiration: “I think the trading post is a pretty good touchstone for the type of activities endeavours provide, and it’s a wide breadth of activities too. Is it casual, is it hardcore? It’s both!

“You can advance your neighbourhoods by doing simple things like questing, killing, gathering herbs. Most of this will take place in the old world (referring to older zones from previous expansions), or pretty much all of it! That content will scale to your level, and you’ll be able to hang out with NPCs there, kill creatures, hunt rares. Depending on where you go, the gameplay will differ, then you come back and get some cool items for your house.”

This all sounds lovely, but when you bring players together like this, you risk clashes. Like any real neighborhood, gripes bubble up. ‘I don’t like the way Grogmar’s house looks, why would he dye his table that way, gosh.’ How exactly will Blizzard deal with the newfound threat of Azeroth NIMBYs and neighbourhood drama?

“It’s kind of a sociological experiment, right? We do know a lot of folks want to make sure their neighbourhood looks one way or another” Kubit explains. “Ultimately, we’re giving players a lot of control to do what they want to do. This extends not only to how you customise your health, but also the neighbourhood you want to live in. With that power comes… We’ll see how players handle it. Obviously there’s the terms of service, so as long as players aren’t being jerks to each other… We’ll see.”

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October 7, 2025 0 comments

Product Reviews

Inside the astonishing development of 1999’s The Wheel of Time FPS: ‘The fact that we shipped anything at all is kind of a miracle’

by admin October 4, 2025

Weird Weekend

Weird Weekend is our regular Saturday column where we celebrate PC gaming oddities: peculiar games, strange bits of trivia, forgotten history. Pop back every weekend to find out what Jeremy, Josh and Rick have become obsessed with this time, whether it’s the canon height of Thief’s Garrett or that time someone in the Vatican pirated Football Manager.

There’s a good chance you haven’t heard of The Wheel of Time. No, not the beloved series of fantasy novels penned by Robert Jordan, or the less beloved but still pretty good TV show cancelled by Amazon, or the recently announced and preposterously ambitious RPG. I am of course referring to the other Wheel of Time, the first-person spell-slinger developed by Legend Entertainment and released in 1999.

The Wheel of Time was praised by critics when it launched, partly due to its association with the popular series of fantasy novels, but equally due to its decent singleplayer campaign and innovative multiplayer mode. Despite this, it sold poorly, fading quickly amid the torrent of first-person shooters that rushed across shelves in the late nineties.

(Image credit: Legend Entertainment)

But if The Wheel of Time has slipped from your memory, it’ll stick like a Heron-marked blade in a Trolloc’s chest once you hear the tale of how it was made. Even in the notoriously difficult world of game development, where projects shift and change more often than the dreamscapes of Tel’aran’rhiod, the story of The Wheel of Time is a wild ride.

Indeed, the reason it exists at all is largely down to the determination of one man. Glen Dahlgren is a game developer and, in more recent years, novelist, whose other projects include Unreal 2: The Awakening and Star Trek: Online. But The Wheel of Time remains his favourite, despite the fact that guiding it from conception to birth seems, from the outside, like a five-year long ordeal. “The fact that we shipped anything at all is kind of a miracle,” Dahlgren tells me halfway through our chat. “My old boss at Legend used to say every game you ship is a miracle, and I didn’t really understand that until this game.”

New Spring

(Image credit: Legend Entertainment)

The story of The Wheel of Time’s creation is convoluted to say the least, and Dahlgren gives his own intricate account of it on his website that’s well worth reading. But it starts with a concept that Dahlgren dreamed up after Legend released the 1994 adventure game Death Gate, one which had nothing to do with The Wheel of Time.

His idea was for a fantasy, multiplayer FPS that combined the fast-paced action of Doom with the move/counter-move play of Magic: The Gathering, along with roleplaying elements from the boardgame WizWar. The result would have been a four-way mixture of combat and espionage, straddling the line between a fantasy MMO and something vaguely reminiscent of the Half-Life mod Science and Industry.

Players would control networks of spies from their own customisable fortresses, and engage in complex, reactive spell-based combat. “I’m choosing to do something to you, and you can do something about that if you want … and the more powerful it is, the slower it’s going to be,” Dahlgren says. “I love the idea that it was a strategic choice, not a tactical choice … the interplay of those offensive and defensive artifacts [was] really fun.”

(Image credit: Legend Entertainment)

The idea stretched far beyond Legend’s experience making low-budget adventure games, seemingly doomed to obscurity following Legend’s acquisition by the publishing giant Random House, which wanted to exploit Legend’s particular talents for its own suite of books licenses. Unsatisfied with the licenses offered to him by the publisher, Dahlgren made a curious gambit. He suggested that Legend make a game based on The Wheel of Time by Robert Jordan—an author who had no existing relationship with Random House.

“I really wanted to play with that world,” Dahlgren says. More than that, he wanted to ensure the videogame rights for The Wheel of Time ended up in safe hands. “I wanted to save him from Byron Preiss, because that was the other organisation that was after his license, and they made horrible games,” Dahlgren says.

Dahlgren was happy to abandon his multiplayer concept and continue making adventure games provided the stories excited him. Since Dahlgren’s idea gave Random House an excuse to approach Robert Jordan and possibly convince him to sign a book deal with them, the publisher agreed.

The Great Hunt

(Image credit: Legend Entertainment)

Reenergised, Dahlgren wrote a design doc for an adventure game set in The Wheel of Time—one that took place in a 3D world, featured real-time puzzles, and included an inventive real-time with pause combat system that let players select blade techniques (known as sword-forms) from a list. Dahlgren sent this to Jordan, elaborating upon the design while waiting for Jordan to reply.

Jordan did reply, but it was less than enthusiastic. Desperate to salvage the idea, Dahlgren flew out to meet Jordan along with Legend’s then-president Bob Bates. Together, they had what Dahlgren believed was a jovial, productive meeting. “He showed us around his house. There were weapons in places, which was really cool. I got to ask him where he likes to work, and he said he does his thinking all over the house,” he says.

Dahlgren returned to work feeling confident the project was saved. Then he received what he calls “The Fax of Doom”. This reiterated all of Jordan’s original concerns in even more definitive fashion, seemingly putting an end to the whole project.

(Image credit: Legend Entertainment)

According to Dahlgren, Jordan’s doubts centred around a general reservation about the marketability of adventure games. “He understood the limitations of the genre,” Dahlgren says. “The genre itself was not doing very well. It was on its way out, and he didn’t want a game that didn’t have a chance to be big.”

But there was a lifeline. During the meeting at Jordan’s house, Dahlgren had wheeled out an alternative game concept that he’d cobbled together on the flight to meet the author, one that took place in a parallel dimension to The Wheel of Time. “One of the ways I convinced Jordan that I can make this game is ‘I’m not going to stomp on his storyline. I’m not going to kill his main character,'” he says.

Jordan expressed interest in this concept, but there wasn’t much else to it. In a mixture of inspiration and desperation, Dahlgren retrofitted his idea for the Doom/Magic/Wizwar FPS onto this concept, with players assuming the roles of various Wheel of Time factions which attempt to steal the magical seals which keep The Dark One (the story’s godlike villain) at bay.

The Gathering Storm

(Image credit: Legend Entertainment)

Dahlgren drew up a design document and an accompanying experience document, and sent them off to Jordan, who approved it. Random House, however, did not, and as part of a growing ambivalence toward gaming in general, pulled its financial support for Legend (while keeping its stake in the company).

Now, Dahlgren had the go ahead from Jordan, but no publisher to fund the game he had just received the nod to make. On top of that, Dahlgren also had no technology to make the game. To solve this problem, he hired an eclectic team of artists, architects and character designers to create detailed concept art and went pitching.

Eventually, the team secured the interest of Epic Games. Mark Rein, Epic’s Vice President, was receptive, and following a meeting with Rein and Tim Sweeney, Dahlgren received a copy of Unreal engine and its level editor to mock up a prototype. Dahlgren produced this himself, then showed them to Epic.

(Image credit: Legend Entertainment)

According to Dahlgren, these prototypes are what convinced Tim Sweeney of the potential of licensing Unreal Engine to third-party developers. It also provided Dahlgren with the opportunity to do something he’d wanted from the start—to shift Legend from being a developer of niche adventure games to a creator of blockbuster first-person shooters.

“What I wanted to be was a version of Raven [Software],” he says. “We would be that for Epic. We would be the one to come in and say ‘Listen, we can make something different than what you’re making, something that has a different soul … even though it’s using your technology.'” This is also why Dahlgren didn’t do what seems so obvious today—make a Wheel of Time CRPG. “Everybody asked me ‘Why don’t you just do an RPG?'” he says. “That’s not what I wanted to do. What I wanted to do was a first-person shooter.”

Among all this, Legend also wrangled a new publisher—GT Interactive. Finally, everything was in place to begin making the game Dahlgren had dreamed of. There was just one small problem. The deal Legend signed didn’t come anywhere near to footing the bill for the game Dahlgren had envisioned.

The Dragon Reborn

(Image credit: Legend Entertainment)

Undeterred, Legend set about building a prototype of its magical multiplayer espionage game for GT Interactive. Through developing this prototype, Dahlgren and The Wheel of Time team realised two things. First, the grand, complex multiplayer experience they had envisioned needed drastically reducing in scope. Second, the prototype itself made for a surprisingly engaging singleplayer adventure.

With this new perspective, and after struggling repeatedly to meet its development milestones for the original vision, Legend opted to redesign The Wheel of Time. This new design stripped out all the espionage and persistent, MMO-like elements from the multiplayer, narrowing the scope to just the customisable citadels and the counter-based magical combat. This multiplayer would be accompanied by a more traditional linear FPS campaign, one with its own Wheel of Time story.

For this new story, Dahlgren abandoned the parallel universe concept and made The Wheel of Time a prequel to Jordan’s novels, allowing for a story that better fit the new structure while upholding Dahlgren’s assurance to Jordan that he wouldn’t mess with the main narrative of the books (years later, Jordan would write his own Wheel of Time prequel—New Spring). The story would revolve around the four playable factions in the multiplayer—The Aes Sedai, the Children of the Light, the Forsaken, and the dark forces within the abandoned city of Shadar Logoth.

(Image credit: Legend Entertainment)

The story would also take players through environments based upon the four citadels in the multiplayer, like Shadar Logoth and the White Tower, allowing Legend to build the singleplayer using the multiplayer’s assets. “Choosing those four factions is what drove most of the environments out of the gate, because I needed their home bases,” Dahlgren says. The central plot came to Dahlgren on a flight to Italy to visit his then-girlfriend. “I couldn’t write it down because I had no piece of paper, I had no pen. So I had to sit there for, I think it was four hours, and just to repeat it over and over.”

Making some of these environments fun to play in proved a significant challenge. In the books, Shadar Logoth is an abandoned, cursed city, with no corporeal enemies to fight. So Legend had to come up with threats and obstacles that felt appropriate for the setting, like a strange mist that attacks the player, and dark tendrils that writhe out and block your path. Dahlgren believes these environments at least partly inspired the look of Shadar Logoth in the recent Wheel of Time TV series. “I think that the TV show guys absolutely played our game,” he says.”

Building the White Tower, meanwhile, was all about trying to provide a sense of scale and detail that evoked the high fantasy setting of the novels. “I want[ed] to bring a piece of fantasy fine art to life,” Dahlgren says. “I don’t think anything in the game was the kind of scale that you would see nowadays … [but] they’re architecturally beautiful. The textures are amazing.”

Lord of Chaos

(Image credit: Legend Entertainment)

By this point, Dahlgren had been working on the project for around four years. With a year to go until launch, Legend had only just put together a team capable of making it. It was at this point Dahlgren was called into a meeting with Legend co-founder Mike Verdu and producer Mark Poesch, who told Dahlgren they planned to cut the singleplayer entirely. “‘We are gonna trash this down to the bare bones'”, Dahlgren recalls. “‘We need to release something, it’s gonna be a multiplayer game, and that’s all it’s gonna be'”.

Dahlgren, desperate to save the story, begged for a chance to revise the scope one more time, and see what he could trim from the whole package to rescue the single-player. Verdu consented, and Mike went back and began cutting yet more spokes off The Wheel of Time.

Levels and ideas were cut. The multiplayer was slimmed from teams to four players working as individuals, and the interactive NPCs Dahlgren had intended to convey the narrative were replaced by straightforward cutscenes. “That became the game that we shipped,” Dahlgren says.

(Image credit: Legend Entertainment)

Even when The Wheel of Time was done, it wasn’t. Dahlgren wasn’t present for the game’s official launch date, as he was getting married in Italy. Yet when he returned from honeymoon, he discovered the game hadn’t shipped after all, while in his absence Legend had put together a demo that Dahlgren says “made no sense”.

“It had no story structure. It had nothing. So I had to just dive in and try to get that demo back on track,” Dahlgren says. “I’m like ‘this is what happens when I leave'”.

A Memory of Light

(Image credit: Legend Entertainment)

The Wheel of Time released on November 9, 1999. Critically it was well received, scoring 90% in PC Gamer US. Commercially, though, it was a flop. Dahlgren puts this down to several factors, such as the marketing. “GT was going under, and they only had so much marketing money to throw at it, and they threw it at Unreal Tournament,” Dahlgren says. “I don’t even know if we were placed on the right section of the Best Buy shelves at the time, which sucks.”

But he also believes that the counter-based spell system inspired by Magic: The Gathering demanded too much learning from players at the time. “It might have been one of the things that made the game less accessible than I would have liked,” he says. “There were so many ter’angreal (the magical items players used to cast spells) that it became hard to mentally map what you needed to do to react to the right thing.”

Nonetheless, The Wheel of Time proved influential in other ways. As it was developed concurrently with Unreal, certain tech and design ideas fed into both Epic’s debut shooter and the engine which supported it. “We made our own particle system. They didn’t have a particle system at the time. We worked to create AI that they had never seen before,” Dahlgren says.

(Image credit: Legend Entertainment)

Even Unreal’s level design appears to have been influenced by Legend’s work on The Wheel of Time. “They were standard levels [for] the time,” he says. “Rather than a full on place that you could explore. As soon as we showed them some of the stuff that we had produced as concept sheets, Tim said ‘I can’t believe this is my engine.’ Then, suddenly, in Unreal you see a lot of half timber buildings. So I think we absolutely influenced them.”

And while it wasn’t a smash hit, The Wheel of Time’s multiplayer did find a core community of players who appreciated its ambition, even in its stripped-down form. “Once the muscle memory was there, people loved it. They loved the idea of bouncing back attacks against each other, or putting on a fire shield before you walk through a bunch of landmines somebody had placed.” Dahlgren says. “I never played my games after they were done, but this one I played forever because it was so fun.”

The Wheel of Time also sowed the seeds for Dahlgren’s emerging career as a fantasy novelist. His first novel, The Child of Chaos, derived from an alternative, Wheel-of-Time-less story concept he used in a pitch to Activision while searching for a new publisher for the game, as Activision wasn’t interested in the Wheel of Time licence. His most recent novel, The Realm of Gods, won numerous awards, including the Dante Rossetti Grand Prize for young adult fiction.

(Image credit: Legend Entertainment)

And what did Jordan himself think of Legend’s game? In the latter stages of development Dahlgren reconvened with Jordan to show him what Legend had spent so many years working on. As Dahlgren guided Jordan through the game’s opening section, he was nervous.

“As we were walking around, he didn’t say anything,” Dahlgren says. “And then he said. ‘Yes, this is beautiful.'”

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October 4, 2025 0 comments

The Sims 4 shows off its getaway themed Adventure Awaits expansion in first gameplay trailer

Game Updates

The Sims 4’s Adventure Awaits expansion is exactly the kind of getaway I’ve been looking for

by admin October 3, 2025

In this, the year of unmitigated bullshit, a bit of a jolly holiday away from it all’s probably what most of us could do with. So consider it fortuitous timing, then, that The Sims 4’s latest expansion, Adventure Awaits, provides exactly that. Unfortunately, like holidays often do, it also comes with a bunch of screaming children. Boo.

The Sims 4: Adventure Awaits

Adventure Awaits is The Sims 4’s 20th Expansion Pack and includes pretty much everything you’d expect from these bumper-sized bits of marquee DLC, including a bumper-sized price tag. You’ve got a new world to explore in Gibbi Point, a new Park Worker career, new building bits, new skills and traits, plus new clothing options (this time leaning more toward the chunky and rugged, although you do get a couple of wetsuits thrown in). More broadly, though, its focus is split – with some thematic awkwardness – between expanded gameplay for child-age Sims and all that Getaway stuff.

To date, my sole experience of trying to raise a child involved them catching fire and turning into a ghost (in the Sims, obviously), so I haven’t spent much time putting Adventure Awaits’ kid-focused bits under the microscope. I can, though, tell you they include imaginary friends – and yes, evil ones are possible – new traits, new games, new modular playgrounds (which explains why you can barely move for slides and climbing frames in Gibbi Point), plus a Formative Moments system that influences their skills and specialties in later life. These can also be applied retroactively to your adult Sims, meaning you can turn them into, say, a Childhood Grief Survivor, making them more proficient at Undertaking and more resistant to Fear of Death; an Explorer Extraordinaire who’ll remain energised for longer, or a Danger Kid, who’s more resistant to food poisoning from spoiled food and can better endure extreme heat and cold. The list is long, and even as a brat-averse Sims player, I do like the sense of history it gives the grown-ups.

The Sims 4: Adventure Awaits gameplay trailer.Watch on YouTube

But that’s not why I was looking forward to Adventure Awaits. I’ve always liked the idea of whisking my Sims away to exotic climes for a well-earned break from the daily grind, but The Sims 4’s actual implementation of holidays has always felt a bit flat. You pack your family in a suitcase, jetset off for a welcome change of scene, and then almost immediately find yourself stuck in the same aimless cycle of pooping and eating until it’s time to go home. The fact some expansion worlds have a distinct focus – snowsports in Mt. Komorebi, for instance, and jungle exploration in Selvadorada – does mean trips away can be given a bit of local flavour, but they’ve never felt exactly like holidays before.

Adventure Awaits, though, introduces a new Getaway system that lets you create itineraries your Sim will merrily follow once they reach their chosen destination – so they too can now experience the kind of militant vacation scheduling that makes us all yearn for a holiday from the holiday we’re supposed to be enjoying. Essentially, you pick a lot destination, your length of stay, and an end-time, then start assembling a schedule of activities to be undertaken every four hours – so, say, some 12pm kayaking followed by a frantic 4pm WooHoo. Again the list of options is pretty all-encompassing, meaning it’s theoretically possible to create a Getaway to suit all tastes and one that feels right for your chosen destination.

Image credit: Eurogamer/EA

And so I packed the magnificently bearded Max Legroom off to Granite Falls national park, a map that’s always felt a bit dull and directionless. But with the scheduling system in play, he started his two day camping trip with a refreshing shower before improving his Natural Living skill then moving onto some energising watersports, a bit of butterfly collecting (Adventure Awaits introduces the new Entomology skill if you fancy incubating your own caterpillar), a spot of outdoor recreation – which can now include diving, kayaking, and archery for adults – then a cosy meal around the campfire before ending the day with some stargazing. Finally, my holiday felt like a real holiday! But of course aimless pooping and eating is still a valid option too.

There’s more to Getaways than that, though; it’s possible to give Sims specific roles, with each group following their own itinerary concurrently, and Getaways can be assigned up to five “rules” from a broad list. So Hardcode mode will cause your Sims’ needs to diminish more quickly – handy if you want to add a bit of realism to your survivalist pursuits, for instance – or you might want your Sims’ friendships to fade faster while vacationing together for true holiday authenticity. There’s even a No Strings Attached rule if you want what happens at a Getaway to stay at the Getaway. I’ve not played around with everything yet, but the system is flexible enough – particularly in conjunction with the new custom venues system – that it can be used to build anything where some sort of scheduled autononmy might be handy. You could set up a recurring spin class populated by instructors and fellow spinners, for instance, and I’m pretty sure one of EA’s included pre-sets is essentially a competitive sex party.

It all makes for a lot of new storytelling possibilities, but Adventure Awaits includes a bunch of other stuff I’ve enjoyed mucking around with too. The new Papercraft skill is surprisingly involved, for instance, letting your Sims craft everything from origami trinkets to “derpy” paper mache animals. And there’s a lengthy list of creations to unlock, meaning you’ll be able to make all sorts of cute stuff as gifts and decorations by the time you’re done.

Image credit: Eurogamer/EA

More than anything, though, I love the new Gibbi Point map, which has something of a New Zealand vibe. Over in Wonderwood Wilds, it’s all dense forests, spouting geysers, and crystalline lakes – making it the perfect home for Sims who like their air fresh and the landscape rugged. And the nearby Camp Gibbi Gibbi means things are looking good for a Friday the 13th teen massacre this Halloween. Crystal Valley, meanwhile, is Gibbi Point’s residential quarter, full of houses you might describe as cabin chic, and Jellyfish Junction is all about waterfront leisure, featuring quaint shops, an outdoor gym, an open air theatre, and more scattered along its picturesque wooden docks. And the water even glows at night!

Whether all this is enough to tempt £35 out of your pocket is obviously a matter of taste, but The Sims 4’s Adventure Awaits expansion – with its rugged outdoorsy vibes and flexible creativity tools (and, I guess, sex parties?) – feels like it’s aimed squarely at my specific areas of interest. Sure, it’s not exactly the same as shifting my arse and taking myself on holiday, but why shouldn’t Sims get to have a bit of fun every now and then too?

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October 3, 2025 0 comments

Game Reviews

Consume Me review – difficult to finish, in a different kind of way

by admin October 3, 2025

Jenny Jiao Hsia’s dazzling, semi-autobiographical tale of teenage life finds wit and warmth in its WarioWare weirdness, even as it deals with difficult themes.

“Just think of it like a video game!”, Consume Me’s increasingly put-upon protagonist Jenny tells herself early on as she prepares to take the dieting plunge. The final year of school is approaching, adult life is looming, and if that wasn’t enough, the words of her overbearing mother – how will she ever get a boyfriend if she doesn’t lose some weight? – are lodged in her brain. It’d be enough to overwhelm anyone, let alone a teenager still trying to find her place in the world.

Consume Me review

Developer: Jenny Jiao Hsia, AP Thomson, Jie En Lee, Violet W-P, Ken “coda” Snyder
Publisher: Hexecutable
Platform: Played on PC
Availability: Out now on PC (Steam, itch.io)

Consume Me is a semi-autobiographical work from co-designer Jenny Jiao Hsia that deals openly and honestly with some pretty tough themes, including dieting, disordered eating, and fatphobia. That might sound like a difficult sell, but Jiao Hsia’s slice-of-life adventure adopts a format that’s immediately, winningly approachable. This is a cheery, pastel-hued phantasmagoria of hyper-kinetic split-screen cutscenes, slapstick WarioWare-style minigames, and time management challenges that (“Just think of it like a video game!”) cleverly uses the language of the medium – its penchant for repetition and routine, its love of ever-escalating pressures – to mimic Jenny’s daily struggles.

Here, the perils of a drifting mind while studying are abstracted to a minigame where you attempt to align your furiously spinning gaze with the pages of your book as thought-bubble distractions rush in; where laundry folding is a game of lightning-fast reactions, and the simple act of walking the dog becomes a comical dance of poop dodging and cash grabbing as you navigate New York City’s streets. And all this minigame silliness is pulled together by a compellingly presented story, told with boundless energy and genuine wit, charting Jenny’s increasingly fraught journey into young adulthood.

Consume Me launch trailer.Watch on YouTube

Each chapter of Consume Me focuses on the kind of familiar right-of-passage events (summer pool parties, fledging romances, high school rivalries, and college applications) that, from the other side of youth at least, feel comparatively trivial. But most of us probably have enough residual trauma from our teenage years – when everything seemed to be of absolute, apocalyptic importance – that it’s easy to empathise with Jenny’s spiralling circumstances and feel the pressure of expectation just as vividly as she does; even if you didn’t have the kind of complex relationship she has with food.

For all its easy breeziness, Consume Me is, at its heart, a game about the unhealthy, unsustainable patterns people can become trapped in when trying to live up to impossible standards, whether they be external or self-imposed. And for Jenny, that manifests most prominently as an obsessive focus on her weight and food. Her initial dieting successes – swimsuit-body confidence! An adorable boyfriend! – are quickly internalised as a causal link that must be maintained, and so no matter what other complications emerge in her life, fastidious food management remains an ever-present aspect of the game. As she puts it, “If I can’t control this one part of my behaviour, then everything falls apart.”

Image credit: Eurogamer/Jenny Jiao Hsia/AP Thomson

Each day, you’ll diligently prepare another meal, attempting to place tetronimo-shaped food items into your grid-like stomach, Tetris-style. Each item has a Bite value (Consume Me explicitly avoids the term ‘calories’), and your goal is to fill Jenny’s Guts while keeping within the week’s Bite limit. It’s a brilliantly effective, and impressively economical, way of putting players into Jenny’s mindset, where food is framed as an adversary to be overcome rather than enjoyed.

There’s a lot of this kind of design elegance throughout Consume Me, where experiences – and even emotions – are conveyed as much through gameplay as story. That’s most evident in its overarching framework of time management, where you’ll need to use Jenny’s limited free time as efficiently as possible in order to complete each chapter’s checklist of objectives. Early on, her responsibilities – studying, chores, and sticking to her diet – seem manageable enough, but with only a few hours of free time available each day, staying on top of things quickly become a tricky (and stressful) balancing act. One wrong move can have a dramatic knock-on effect; overeat, for instance, and suddenly you’ll need to spend a precious hour exercising to get back within your Bite limit. Then there’s the added complexity of your ever-dwindling mood, energy, and guts meters, all requiring diligent maintenance in order to avoid locking yourself out of critical activities each day. You can probably see where this is going.

Image credit: Eurogamer/Jenny Jiao Hsia/AP Thomson

Once Jenny’s holidays are over and the school year begins, things get increasingly chaotic as her checklist of responsibilities grows ever-more demanding – essay writing, college applications, long-distance romance-ing, even the destruction of high school enemies, all piled on top of everything that’s come before. Increasingly, you’ll find yourself falling into unhealthy (and detrimental) habits – knocking back energy drinks and staying up late – just to squeeze a few more hours out of the day, and the sheer mental effort required to keep Consume Me’s plates spinning can be exhausting. Which is obviously the point.

Consume Me accessibility options

Reduce shake effect toggle; reduce flashing colours toggle; separate music and SFX volume sliders; subtitles in English, French, German, Spanish, Brazilian Portuguese, Simplified Chinese, and Traditional Chinese.

It’s hard to criticise something as intensely personal and mechanically deliberate as Consume Me, where Hsia and co-developer AP Thomson have made very specific design choices in order to tell a very specific story. But it’s clear from Consume Me’s surprisingly accommodating difficulty progression and its presentational breeziness, that – for all its intentionally wearying cycles of repetition – this is a game the team wants players to see through to the end. I’m not sure it finds quite the right balance though, and for me, even with its relatively scant eight hour runtime, it did begin to outstay its welcome, still marching slowly toward the next inevitable escalation long after it felt like its point had been made. And I can’t help wonder if it might have been a little more impactful if it’d wrapped up sooner.

But when I think back on my time with Consume Me, it’s not the stresses that stick with me; it’s the game’s effervescent wit and invention, its canny design and generous spirit (even the most adversarial characters are sympathetically written), and more than anything, the powerful authenticity of its voice. As daft as it often is, this is a game that captures Jenny’s struggles and triumphs so beautifully, and so convincingly, even a sequence introducing her relatively brief flirtations with religion manages to feel – and I say this as someone who’s long been iffy about the whole church thing – genuinely affecting. Consume Me’s pacing didn’t always work for me, but it remains a fascinating, thoughtful, and impressively assured creation all the same. And I can’t help admiring its method – and its message – immensely.

A copy of Consume Me was provided for this review by Hexecutable.

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October 3, 2025 0 comments

Game Reviews

BioWare’s future under EA in question, studio veteran warns, if it makes “the kind of games that this new company isn’t interested in making anymore”

by admin October 2, 2025

BioWare veteran Mark Darrah has discussed the $55bn private acquisition of EA and what the future holds for the RPG studio, suggesting it could be sold to pay off debt.

The buyout, announced earlier this week, is by a group of investors comprising Saudi Arabia’s Public Investment Fund, and investment firms Silver Lake and Affinity Partners. Of the $55bn, $36bn is in equity with the remaining $20bn in JPMorgan debt, which EA will need to cover.

In his latest YouTube video, Darrah (best known as a producer across the Dragon Age games) suggested EA may be looking to sell off some of its biggest IPs and studios in order to service that debt.

Dragon Age The Veilguard Review: The BEST Bioware Has EVER Been! (Spoiler-Free)Watch on YouTube

Darrah explained EA is incentivised not to take risks, and selling off an IP only for it to become a huge success elsewhere would be a notable risk. Doing nothing “keeps them from getting into trouble”, but now that incentive could be completely flipped to drive immediate revenue.

“EA has a huge repository of dormant IPs that are just sitting there dormant,” said Darrah. “It seems unlikely that the new resulting structure is going to be eager to suddenly revive a bunch of those IPs.

“So one option might be to sell the whole lot of them for a hundred million dollars if you can get it, because a hundred million dollars can come off the debt. You might even see them toying with the idea of shedding some of their existing studios. Maybe they shut them down, but maybe they look for opportunities to sell off entire studios, or entire groups.”

He continued: “It makes a tonne of sense for this new group to want EA Sports whole and strong and to continue doing what it’s doing. EA Entertainment…may make a lot less sense. So you could imagine potentially all of EA Entertainment being sold off to another group with deep pockets.”

EA Goes Private For 55 Billion?!Watch on YouTube

He even suggested that, as this deal has likely been in the works for a while, it’s conceivable EA’s new structure was intentionally planned to make it easier to sell off parts of the business. As such, EA owns plenty of studios that haven’t shipped a game in a while, or have experienced problems, or make “the kind of games that this new company isn’t interested in making anymore”.

Darrah noted EA has “a lot of momentum” in not selling studios, but added “we’re in a new world now”. “It’s incredibly unlikely that EA stays exactly as it currently is in a private structure, especially carrying £20bn worth of debt,” he said.

So what does this all mean for BioWare specifically?

“For the studios that have more of a track record, especially a track record that maybe doesn’t line up with your own political views…you’re going to look at that studio and wonder how you make them fit into your new structure,” said Darrah.

“It’s hard to imagine that you have BioWare pivot from having very progressive messaging to having the reverse because it’s what the government wants. It’s hard to imagine that the public perception of a game that comes out of BioWare, even if you do do that, isn’t apocalyptically bad.” That would mean leaving the studio alone, or assuming it no longer fits in the organisation.

While Darrah is, of course, merely speculating, the deal certainly brings the future of all EA’s studios into question. Yet with the progressive nature of its RPGs, BioWare’s future under a Saudi-owned company is particularly uncertain.

In a statement to employees, EA CEO Andrew Wilson said the company’s “values and our commitment to players and fans around the world remain unchanged”.

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October 2, 2025 0 comments

Subnautica 2 trailer still - woman waving

Gaming Gear

With Silksong in our hands, Steam’s new reigning wishlist kings are both kind of basket cases: The partially-released Deadlock and lawsuit lightning rod Subnautica 2

by admin September 8, 2025

Just as prior wishlist chart-toppers The Day Before (lol), Manor Lords, and (briefly) Stray gave way to Hollow Knight: Silksong’s long reign, so too has Team Cherry’s platformer passed the torch to a new contender. Subnautica 2 is now the most wishlisted game on Steam, followed by Valve’s MOBA-shooter Deadlock. Slots three through five are taken up by Battlefield 6, Borderlands 4, and Light No Fire.

Steam’s publicly available data isn’t the end-all, be-all of the hobby⁠—not the least because it doesn’t account for other storefronts or console players⁠—but it is useful for divining trends and getting a snapshot of the current gaming scene.

It’s kind of weird that the two most desired PC games of the moment are such basket cases, right? They boast pre-release anti-hype cycles to give the long Silksong silence a run for its money, yet we apparently can’t get enough of them.

Let’s start with Deadlock: Given the fact that it’s an honest-to-god new Valve game, it’s shocking it hasn’t just clinched number one by default. But it’s a kookster: The second most wishlisted game on Steam is already being played for free by tens of thousands of people⁠—about 45k at the time of writing, according to SteamDB.

The game is not out, but we’re already at a point where lapsed players can have discussions about whether or not to come back to it. Before Deadlock’s playtest broke containment, it became the gaming story of the moment despite Valve pretending it didn’t even exist.

At the beginning of Summer 2024 (this thing’s been around for over a year!), screenshots, gameplay footage, and even datamined information was leaking out of the then-secret playtest like a sieve. Valve finally “announced” the game⁠—really just acknowledged it⁠—last August, and the vast proliferation of invites to the invite-only game has effectively soft-launched it.

That might be the most confounding fact of all: Valve invented the early access model, but won’t brand its own, effectively early access game as such. If I’m being honest, I kind of love the chaos of it all, even as I wish the studio would finally tackle a singleplayer game again.

Subnautica subpoena

The number one wishlisted Subnautica 2 has a more familiar, but also troubling story: A falling out and legal clash between senior creative and managerial staff behind the game, one that doesn’t seem likely to resolve in time for Subnautica 2’s projected 2026 early access release.

Studio Unknown Worlds was acquired by publisher Krafton in 2021, and a sequel to the developer’s beloved underwater survival sim, Subnautica, was slated to launch in early access this year. In July, Krafton replaced the senior leadership of the studio: CEO Ted Gill, designer Charlie Cleveland, and co-founder Max McGuire.

The ousted developers say they were terminated unfairly in order to duck paying them a $250 million bonus, and that the game could have still launched in early access this year. Krafton claims the trio dropped the ball, that Subnautica 2 was far behind its agreed-upon early access launch milestones, and that going through with the planned release would have been disastrous.

More than anything, I’m just struck by the anti-charisma of these games and some of their immediate predecessors at the top of the list. A messy lawsuit for Subnautica and a messy not-launch for Deadlock. Silksong gave fans nothing but stony silence for years, and The Day Before seems to have gotten there on accident, much to the detriment of developer Amazing Seasun.

Manor Lords and Stray, while having far less abnormal pre-launches, are still far from traditional blockbusters in character: A hardcore city builder and a moody, meditative indie platformer.

Classico triple-A juggernauts like Borderlands 4 and Battlefield 6 can still make it up there, but that kind of pedigree and budgetary heft isn’t the guarantee of success and popularity it used to be. It’s of a piece with so many of the biggest games in recent years being surprises⁠—Baldur’s Gate 3, Balatro, Helldivers 2, REPO, Palworld⁠—and so many old guard publishers like EA and Ubisoft falling on hard times.

Aside from just making a good game and hoping it catches on, nobody seems to have cracked the code for getting people excited about a new release these days. Most devs can’t just pull a Silksong and say absolutely nothing while a memetic legend spontaneously develops around their project.

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September 8, 2025 0 comments

Product Reviews

It’s kind of weird that Helldivers 2 isn’t in Steam’s big third-person shooter sale, but there are plenty of other great deals so I don’t really miss it

by admin August 26, 2025

Most of the time, I’m an FPS guy: third-person shooters tend to lack the immersive qualities of first-person bang-bang, and the weird over-the-shoulder perspective makes aiming a headache (which I am sure has nothing to do with the fact that I don’t play many TPS games). But every now and then one comes along that’s just too good to ignore, which very circuitously brings us to the point: The new Steam TPS Fest, a week-sale that’s all about disembodied gunplay.

“It’s a fest full of games in the third person,” the TPS Fest page says helpfully. “And those persons are shooters.” And indeed they are, but in terms of specific genre—at least as defined by Steam—there’s quite a range to choose from: 569 action games, 276 adventures, 101 RPGs, 81 “casual” games, 63 strategy, 54 sims, eight sports games, and—somehow–two racing games. (I suspect someone may be playing a little fast-and-loose with some of those designations.)

Anyway, the pick of the litter as far as I’m concerned has to be Control Ultimate Edition, which includes the base game, The Foundation and AWE expansions, and all other additional content for just $4/£3.29/€4—90% off the regular price. That’s a whole lot of videogame for four bucks, and Control really is primo stuff—and, I have to admit, its extremely effective blend of gunplay and powers almost certainly works better in third person than it would as an FPS.

My personal favorite, though, is Max Payne 3, and I mention it specifically because it’s grossly underrated and deserves the love—and if you haven’t played the first two and don’t especially want to, this final part of the trilogy works perfectly well as a standalone game. It’s an incredibly cinematic shooter, very different from Remedy’s take on the character (which is mainly why it tends to be not as well regarded) but easily up to their level. For $6/£5.39/€6, you won’t regret it.

And if you do want to play the first two Max Payne games (and you should), you can also get those on the cheap. Take note, however, that the Max Payne Complete Pack bundle, which includes all three games, actually costs more right now than buying the games separately. I have no idea why and it might be changed at some point, but for now double-check before you push the button.

(Image credit: Steam)

Helldivers 2, one of the most popular third-person games to come along in years, is actually not on sale right now, but that’s okay because Tom Clancy’s Ghost Recon Breakpoint and Ghost Recon Wildlands are, and they’re both a lot of fun, especially if you can jump in with a friend or two.

Breakpoint had an infamously tough start but Ubisoft did a good job of whipping it into shape with post-launch updates, and for $6/£5/€6—90% off—it’s a solid pick. Wildlands is actually 50 cents more than Breakpoint for some reason, and I quite like it too, but honestly you don’t need both. Breakpoint would be my pick, but maybe check to see what your friends are already into if you’re not sure which way to go.

Sniper Elite 5: Maybe you get tired of X-ray nut shots. I do not. $10/£9/€10, 80% off.

100 Testicle Nut Shots in Sniper Elite 5 (4K) – YouTube

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Earth Defense Force 6—I used to work with a guy who was a big fan of the EDF games, and this one is a solid addition to the series. Half-price, $30/£25/€30.

Star Wars Outlaws may not be the most original Star Wars idea, but it’s still a very good game—I’d probably play it myself, except I really don’t like Star Wars. If you do, you can score this one for $31.49/£27/€3149, less than half the regular price. If you’re not sure, there’s a demo so you can get a feel for what it’s all about.

Senior editor Wes Fenlon is a big Risk of Rain fan, and that’s good enough for me: Risk of Rain 2 is 67% off, taking it down to $8.24/6.59/€8.24.

If you like a little survival horror mixed in with your firefights, The Callisto Protocol is down to $9/£7.49/€9, 85% off. It wasn’t a huge hit but it does what it does quite well.

And one more, although there’s a lot more to rifle through than just what I’ve mentioned here: Suicide Squad: Kill the Justice League is 95% off, taking it to just $3.49/£3/€3.49. And sure, it had problems, was probably a bad idea right from the jump, but if you can’t get three bucks of fun out of this thing, I think we have to consider the possibility that it might be a “you” problem.

So there you have it, even more ways to spend your money on Steam. You’re welcome. Steam’s Third Person Shooter Fest is live now and runs until September 1—after that, you get a week off and then it’s time for the Steam Political Sim Fest. No, I am not kidding.

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August 26, 2025 0 comments

Game Updates

Silksong will get DLC and “some of the plans for that stuff are kind of ambitious as well”

by admin August 23, 2025

Hollow Knight: Silksong began life as a DLC expansion, but then developers Team Cherry decided the concept was “too large and too unique”, and upgraded it into a full game. They spent six years working on the thing in almost total silence, while fulminating legions of the terminally online quietly drove themselves bonkers hunting for release date clues. We now have a Silksong release date – it’s just two weeks away – so in theory, the nightmare is over. Except, oh dear – Team Cherry are planning post-launch content for Silksong, and they’re already calling it “ambitious”.

All that’s from this week’s breakout interview with Press X To Jason Schreier, the person who considerately does all the investigative reporting in games journalism so that humbler souls like myself can spend our days taking the piss out of him. According to Schreier, “they’re already making big plans to add extra content to Silksong in the months and years to come.” Then there are some snippets from Team Cherry’s founders Ari Gibson and William Pellen.

“Launching it is obviously quite exciting,” Pellen said. “What comes after for us is equally as exciting.”

“The most interesting thing now is what can we add to it next,” interjected Gibson. “We got a plan. Admittedly, some of the plans for that stuff are kind of ambitious as well, but hopefully we can achieve some of it.”

Those monsters! I look forward to revisiting this post in 2030, assuming RPS hasn’t been turned into sausages by then, while writing up the latest rumours about Hollow Knight: Polyestertune or Satinmelody or whatever they end up calling the third one. In fairness, Hollow Knight did get actual DLC expansions before Silksong that launched at a regular rate.

In any case, the DLC tease is perhaps better interpreted as show of kindness. Earlier in the interview, Gibson and Pellen fret that by actually releasing Silksong, they’re spoiling things for players for whom the real Silksong is speculating endlessly about the release of Silksong.

“It’s nice that people are passionate about the game, and that they’ve obviously formed their own strange or very exciting communities around it,” said Gibson, diplomatically. Added Pellen: “Feels like we’re going to ruin their fun by releasing the game.” I guess their tantalising talk of “ambitious” post-launch material is a bid to keep the dream alive, then.

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August 23, 2025 0 comments

Product Reviews

Way of the Sword might be a more forgiving kind of samurai epic

by admin August 20, 2025

Capcom’s Onimusha series has been on a long hiatus. Combining Resident Evil-style rendered backgrounds with more agile characters, adding in demons, magic and a feudal Japan setting, the series span multiple sequels — and consoles — til the fourth entry in 2006.

Roughly two decades (and console eras) later, Capcom has returned to the series, even getting the definitive samurai actor, Tom Cruise Mifune Toshiro, to play the hero, the legendary swordsman Miyamoto Musashi. At Gamescom, the company is now demoing an early slice of Way of the Sword, which covers most (but not all) of the game shown at SGF 2025 just a few months ago.

It’s an interesting time to return to the samurai-meets-demonic-threat universe of Onimusha, following a sudden boom in games tapping into feudal Japan. Most recently, the latest Assassin’s Creed was set there, while, Sony’s upcoming Ghost of Yotei (not to mention its predecessor) both tap bushido and swordplay in historical Japan.

While I played through the demo, I made a lot of mental comparisons to Sekiro – a game that’s now several years old and still unbeaten by me. Onimusha draws together similar themes of demon forces run amok, but has a more forgiving approach. Gameplay centers around blocks and parries, plus weak and strong attacks, all while pulling in orbs dropped by dying enemies that act as the game’s currency. (Health orbs are also dropped by certain foes.)

Onimusha Way of the Sword hands-on

(Capcom)

The Oni gauntlet that absorbs these souls can also be used to see invisible demons and unlock areas that are spiritually blocked. It’ll also act like a sort-of demonic movie projector, showing what happened during the demon invasion in the area.

Early enemies were predictably sluggish demon swordsmen and archers, getting me back up to speed with how Onimusha fights play out. Even if it predictably looks lightyears ahead of its predecessors, Way of the Sword doesn’t reinvent how you cut up these demon hordes.

In comparison to other action games, guarding seems very forgiving. You can hold the guard button down, and it’ll block basic projectiles and melee attacks from all directions I spent some time leaning into exhausting stamina gauges, timing parries for one-hit Issen critical attack and batting away arrows back where they came from.

Don’t get me wrong, it’s satisfying and fun, but I’m itching to see how the series will build on what’s pretty basic attack flow. Musashi had acccess to a dual-short sword special attack, Two Celestials, that barrages the enemy with attacks and tops up his health levels.

This suggests more special attacks and magical flourishes should open up later in the game. The preview during SGF 2025 also showed ways to utilize the environment for defensive attacks, holding up wooden boards to block arrows, for instance, although that didn’t trigger during my playthrough.

Onimusha Way of the Sword hands-on

(Capcom)

The highlight of the demo was a confrontation with Musashi’s rival, Ganryu Sasaki. He’s great villain fodder — and has also been somehow gifted his own Oni gauntlet. The duel was the only time I felt under threat during the demo, and even then, I didn’t die once. There’s enough of a health meter to test yourself against Sasaki’s lavish sword attacks and lunges. Once you wear down more powerful enemies, you can make a single, concentrated attack to either glean more orbs from them or hit for heavy-duty damage.

The early taste of Way of the Sword is a fun, easy romp, so I’m curious to see how Capcom evolves the formula of Onimusha — and where the true challenges might lie.

Onimusha: Way of the Sword is set to be released in 2026 on PS5, Xbox Series S|X, and PC.

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August 20, 2025 0 comments