The best games like Stardew Valley(Image credit: NPC Studio, composite by PC Gamer)Fields of MistriaWhy: The level of heart and detail in the character dialogue is unmatched.Fields of Mistria❤️ Romance: Yes⚔️ Combat: Yes🤝 Co-op: NoAfter two years of early access and an imminent 1.0 launch, Fields of Mistria has become my absolute favorite in the post-Stardew farm sim scene. It solves so many of my little farm simming gripes with...

What would you say to the following pitch: a Deus Ex fan mod, in the works for seven years, set in a Deus Ex forum whose moderator has been abducted. The factions consist of people like goat worshippers and llama devotees, some enemies use sporks, and people use phrases like "What the radish?" without cringing. Oh, and almost all the voice actors come from the (real-life) forum in which the...

It's that time of year again: The next Call of Duty is on deck, and Activision's got the beta dates to prove it. Modern Warfare 4 won't hit the streets until late October, but the multiplayer beta begins a full two months ahead of time.As usual, Activision is holding two beta weekends: One for those who pre-order the game and one for everyone else.Weekend 1 (August 21-25): For those who...

This week, Path of Exile will ditch a system that defined it for over a decade, making the action RPG considerably easier to approach for new players. The developers at Grinding Gear Games told PC Gamer that they're questioning everything that's sacred going forward, but apparently some things are still off the table—at least for now.A major roadblock for new and returning players is PoE's lengthy campaign. Every new league,...

It's a little surprising there aren't more The Elder Scrolls clones. Aside from Avowed, the only other example I can think of is Tainted Grail: The Fall of Avalon. It launched in May last year after a stint in early access, and the response was positive, perhaps surprisingly so, considering how tough it must be for a relatively young studio to make a game of this scale. Our reviewer wrote...

It's taken centuries of human advancement, but soulslikes and demanding third-person action games have finally reached a level of cultural proliferation where we as a society can ask the all important question: What if the dinosaurs could have simply parried the meteor?That's the tantalizing possibility suggested by Dinoblade, a probably paleontologically accurate soulslike launching on Steam later this week that portrays dinosaurs just as the fossil record tells us they...

The Palworld 1.0 update adds 72 new pals—most of which you can catch, while the remainder at least adds an updated entry to your Palpedia. That's a big undertaking with the expanded Palpagos map and the new World Tree region to explore, and referencing the in-game map can be a real pain, but that's where I come in to hopefully make the process a bit easier. How to catch every...

hen I played 007: First Light earlier this year, one element of it stood out to me as unusual—and that is the arc relating to Bond's fellow 00 trainees, Cressida Bright and Lennox Monroe. IO Interactive puts a huge amount of work into building these characters, successfully selling you on the inherently bizarre concept of James Bond having flatmates.Yet just as you warm to these characters, they vanish from the...

I still remember cursing aloud when I was first sent to prison in GTA 5 roleplay. You see, unlike in regular Grand Theft Auto—story mode or Online—getting arrested in RP has consequences. Sure, you face the same trigger-happy cops when you fall foul of the law, where you're pursued until either dead or in cuffs, and are then hit with the same 'Wasted' or 'Busted' mandates depending on the outcome...

Eight years after leaving the games industry, Gears of War creator Cliff Bleszinski is considering a full-time return to game development.Bleszinski left the games industry in 2018 after the closure of his studio Boss Key Productions, caused by the commercial failure of its two games—the multiplayer arena shooter LawBreakers, and the '80s-themed Battle Royale game Radical Heights. At the time, Bleszinski swore off making games forever.Yet now, in a wide-ranging...