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Guard Duty is, and I often hesitate to use the word, genuinely charming, with really beautiful animation. In spirit it reminds me a lot of the Lucasfilm p’n’c puzzlers like Day Of The Tentacle or Monkey Island, or even Westwood’s Legend Of Kyrandia series, but with a bit of a Terry Pratchett-esque flair to it. Some of the puzzles do feel a bit obscure sometimes, but I genuinely found myself laughing out loud, and thoroughly enjoyed the cast of weirdos Tondbert encountered early on....

It was a big day for me when I could finally afford a to flip a whole house in House Flipper, that being the titular goal of the game. The awful grey/orange kitchen and living area up top there is my creation, the sort of fun new build advertised for students (except every home in House Flipper is a detached home in a MASSIVE garden). Turns out, flipping houses is really easy and I don’t know how everyone isn’t winning at capitalism all the time....

Forgive me, for I’m about to sound like that Marks & Spencer “This is not just food…” ad person. Yes, it’s got that tough soulslike outer shell, but bite deeply, firmly into its centre and you’ll discover an even more complex flavour. One that’s positively oozing with loot. Not only is there plenty of loot to hoover up, the combat is as snappy and as complex as you want it to be....

It’s a board game (or a card game if you want to get quibbly) but there’s a decent enough digo-version. You and up to three other players are competing to establish control over the galaxy, and you do that by building up a tableau of cards. You’ll probably have some planets that generate resources, some facilities that let you turn those resources into points, and a bunch of miscellaneous factories and outposts that tweak what else is possible....

If everyone sells more of a thing, it gets cheaper. If everyone buys more, it gets more expensive. Simple concept - or so you’d think. But as I said in this article about Planet Zoo’s warthog crisis, “economics is what happens when millions of individual, rational decisions act together to create utter madness on a grand scale”. That’s OTC in a nutshell. Playing as one of a number of space-focused megacorps, all embellished with some wonderfully shrewd flashes of character, your job is to set up shop on a planet or planetoid - Mars, Ceres, Io and Europa are all available - and make enough space money to buy out your competition....

The fan-run project Hawakening has a step-by-step walkthrough for folks who owned Hawken on PC that want to jump back in the cockpit. There are no multiplayer servers of course, but there are some game modes that you can play against AI opponents. The folks behind Hawakening say in the video below that as far as multiplayer goes “we haven’t figured that one out yet, though we are on our way....

Scholomance is the school founded by the dastardly Kel’Thuzad, previously seen in a World Of Warcraft dungeon. In Hearthstone: Scholomance Academy we’ll have far more of a student-y experience, probably without slaughtering the faculty. So, dual-class cards! Taking another page out of Magic: The Gathering’s book, Scholomance Academy will introduce 10 allied class pairings, and either class can use the cards in them. These are “designed around mechanics and strategies they both share,” Blizzard say....

You can catch it all down here when Alex wanders into the Siren Record Store while waiting on her brother Gabe. While poking around, she gets a quick introduction to resident record jockey Steph and a longer conversation with avid woodsman Ryan. As you do in Deck Nine’s choice-based adventures, Alex starts off with some easy picks, like helping Steph choose a record for the radio station and deciding whether Ryan’s interest in bird calls is “different” or “nerdy”....

Details on Artifact’s upcoming reboot have been trickling out of Valve for months - from its hard pivot away from Artifact’s card marketplace to word the card-shuffler will have a singleplayer campaign. This week, we got our first look Artifact 2.0 in action, courtesy of this condensed gameplay preview from Valve. In the vid, two Valve devs run through a round of Artifact’s new Hero Draft mode, a new addition that’ll build a deck for you based on the heroes you draft up....

And most importantly, the guns didn’t annoy me at all! In fact, their craic contributed a great deal to my enjoyment of the strangest FPS I’ve played in a while - one where I was forever grinning at the screen like an idiot. If you’re a fan of Rick And Morty from before it got weird to be a fan of Rick And Morty (or Squanch Games’ back catalogue, or general bizarro laughs), this is one for the wishlist....

On this page: Where is the greenhouse key? How to get inside the Dartmoor greenhouse What’s inside? Where is the greenhouse key? If you’ve checked out all of the rooms in the mansion, you’ll have found the greenhouse key chain in Emma and Gregory’s room. Emma has the key, so unless you want to knock her out to get it. This is extremely difficult to do without ruining your save, so the method below is a better option....

IOI laid out all the changes and their content roadmap for the rest of March in a new blog post. Hitman 3 had a rough start to its second year, as a clusmy Steam launch led to hasty compensation. New content continues to dribble out regardless. This week saw the arrival of The Nebulae, the Genera and The Vitae to the Elusive Target Arcade mode, for Hitman 1, 2 and 3 respectively....

I’ll be taking a closer look at what kind of speeds you can expect from a variety of today’s top graphics cards on Friday when the game comes out, but right now I thought I’d put Horizon Zero Dawn’s recommended GTX 1060 spec through its paces to see what it’s made of. Can it hold a candle to its engine-sharing stablemate Death Stranding? Let’s find out. As a reminder, here are Horizon Zero Dawn’s minimum and recommended PC requirements....

How do you change the difficulty in Diablo Immortal? Before you can change your Hell difficulty level in Diablo Immortal, you must finish the main story quest and reach level 60. This can take some serious time, especially if you don’t know how to farm XP and push past level gates, so check out our guide to leveling up faster in Diablo Immortal for tips. Once you reach level 60, you can change your difficulty at any time by traveling to Westmarch....

To find out, I’ve spent hours running games and installing apps in the Deck’s dedicated Desktop Mode, which is accessible any time by simply holding down the power button and selecting it from the restart options. What I’ve found is that the Steam Deck can do a respectable impression of a budget desktop – that’s just not the reason you should ever buy one. Using the Steam Deck as a desktop: setup and essential kit...

With Ori 2 releasing on March 11, we got to chat to Coker about what makes the new soundtrack, and the game underneath, tick. Turns out it’s not just about playing the hits - although I am dying to hear “the most emphatic” version of the main Ori theme - but showing character psychology through subtle tweaks, and establishing a larger cast of characters without driving ears insane with repetition....

Alas, however, the existence of this heartbreaking toad-on-a-rope is entirely its own fault; I may have set up the world around it, but I kept my hands out of the machinery of life. The blame for the Teneon’s flailing necktie of a body lies firmly at the door of natural selection - or at least the astonishing simulation of it that lies at the heart of Tom Johnson’s Ecosystem. I was introduced to this game just shy of two years ago, as I attended EGX Rezzed with the mission of “finding every game on exhibition featuring eels”....

In this guide, we’ll cover how to get a shield in Tunic so that you can block enemy attacks and avoid taking damage from many enemies. How to get a shield in Tunic After finding a sword in the East Forest and fighting the Guard Captain, you’ll come back to the Eastern Belltower. Ring the bell here by hitting it with your sword and then use the rope on the right side to drop down into the room below....

The gold camo is available for every weapon in Warzone 2, so you can add some glitz and glamour to everything in your arsenal, but you’ll need to earn it for each weapon separately. That’s going to take a while, but by the end you’ll be able to display just how good you are at COD. Or, just how much time you have to grind through challenges. In this guide, we’ll break down how to get the gold camo in Warzone 2, covering the process that you’ll need to follow regardless of which weapon you’re using....

That’s not to say that adding a fan will improve performance (like the best graphics cards and best CPUs for gaming might), nor that your PC will burst into flames if you keep using the fan configuration it came with. But thermal throttling can be a genuine issue for CPUs and NVMe SSDs in particular, so some added airflow could help with your components’ long-term health. You could end up with a quieter system too, as having more case fans means they don’t need to spin as fast to shift a healthy amount of air....