Critical Hit(Image credit: Future)Welcome to Critical Hit, where Mollie (or someone else on the PC Gamer team) celebrate and lament all things videogame music, audio design, and the ways our favourite games make our ears tingle. This week I'm that "someone else", and I'm here to talk your ear off about time signatures!So I've recently given in and decided I won't be waiting for Deltarune's final chapter before I played...

I can turn an overgrown property into an industrial vineyard in a single year no problem. I've done it in the valleys, islands, and fields of countless farm sims. Usually it's just as easy to pluck one of its provincial hotties out of town to become my spouse (the overworked leader type, ideally), but magical girl-inspired Fields of Mistria has given me a bad case of choice paralysis. I love...

Games about cleaning are the rage. The recent success of House Flipper, Power Wash Simulator and Unpacking demonstrates there's a mainstream-sized appetite among PC gamers for making messy places neat and tidy. But the micro-genre goes back way further than that. The 1982 arcade game Bubbles was about using a bubble to clean a filthy sink. Cosy foundational text Harvest Moon—like its descendant Stardew Valley—has you gradually transforming a forgotten...

If you've looked at memory prices recently, you've probably seen Corsair DIMMs selling for astonishing prices. The 32 GB Vengeance DDR5 RGB kit sitting in my PC right now is selling for $480 at Amazon, whereas I bought it for $90-$100 just a couple of years ago. Corsair RAM can still be some of the cheapest comparatively, but it's very pricey nonetheless.So, Corsair must be raking in money hand over...

You won't win any prizes for guessing that Grand Theft Auto 5 has sold well since its initial 2013 release, several lifetimes ago, but on a recent Take-Two earnings call, CEO Strauss Zelnick revealed the up-to-date, astronomical figure: 230 million copies."The Grand Theft Auto series once again exceeded expectations, and to date, Grand Theft Auto 5 has sold over 230 million units worldwide," Zelnick told investors on the August 7...

We all know the cost of RAM is ridiculously high these days thanks to the global memory shortage. But it can be useful (and depressing) to put these prices into context historically. To that end, scientist, developer, and software performance expert Daniel Lemire commented on X that "On a historical basis, computer memory has been falling at an exponential rate for decades. But we just undid about 20 years of...

August 6th, 2026 was the 40th anniversary of Metroid, one of the few videogames in history to be so influential it has a whole genre named (at least partially) after it. You'd be forgiven for not realizing last Thursday was such a significant date because Nintendo seemingly forgot itself—and not for the first time.But the anniversary didn't go completely uncelebrated. Posted to the Metroid subreddit last Thursday, a new fan...

First spotted by Eurogamer, ExplorEverythingOnce on the Battlefield subreddit claims to have received a full refund on Battlefield 6 from Steam support after 470 hours logged, well in excess of the platform's standard refund window of two hours within two weeks.ExplorEverythingOnce supplied a redacted screenshot of their Steam purchase history, showing a full refund of BF6's more deluxe "Phantom Edition," which they claim to have purchased on launch day. They...

I'm seated on the edge of a transport helicopter, legs dangling in the breeze, when our pilot flips on the radio to Flight of the Valkyries. "Duh duh duh duh, duh, duh duh duh duh, duh" three passengers sing in non-unison, their VOIP lagging two seconds behind the actual song. The pilot interrupts the performance with an announcement: "Jump quick once you see grass, because we're headed to the hot...

Across the ages, theorists and theologians have wrestled with an irreconcilable question: Is free will an inherent capacity of the human soul, or a misapprehension of things predetermined and divine? Is it a unique function of the human animal, or an illusory quirk of cognition bound by circumstance and necessity?If free will is indeed a figment of our moral imagination, how then do we account for the rare and heroic...