Deus Ex is a series about breaking into buildings. What makes it great is that it lets you work out exactly how you want to do that and gives you a ton of tools to execute your plan. Each game presents you with a series of architectural contraptions - puzzle boxes, really - full of guards to deal with (or sneak past), cameras to avoid (or hack), and bite-sized stories to find among the paperwork and email inboxes. A single locked door has a multitude of workarounds: you could hack a nearby compu...

No Man's Sky has managed to rediscover some of the hype it had back in 2016, when it disappointed us (and some other people maybe?) a little. With a peak of over 40,000 concurrent players the day the Next update arrived—now up to 80,000 on the weekend—there's clearly a resurgence of players and interest. Chris likes what he's seen of the expansion: "It's time to try it again." Not everyone will, of course, but it's an interesting case study for a ...

This article was originally published in two parts across PC Gamer issue 313 and 314. For more quality articles about all things PC gaming, you can subscribe now in the UK and the US.   Jake Hughes was working as a model designer on Starship Troopers when he received a call from Peter Marquardt. Marquardt was an actor—he played the bad guy in Robert Rodriguez’s first film, El Mariachi—but he also had a passion for games. The pair originally met on the set of Wing Comman...

Warren Spector is stuck in Prey. The director of Deus Ex, who has worked on many games since labeled "immersive sims"—in fact, he coined the term in a post-mortem of Deus Ex —has been playing the modern games inspired by classics like Thief and System Shock. But he hasn't finished Prey yet. Or, as he puts it: "The crew quarters are kicking my butt." He's enjoying it though, just as he enjoyed the other recent immersive sim from Arkane Studios, Dishonor...

At the start of the 1988 adventure game based on William Gibson's genre-defining cyberpunk novel Neuromancer, you wake up face down in a plate of spaghetti. Well, it's synth-spaghetti because this is the future, but that doesn't make it any more comfortable. Like the book's protagonist Case you're a down-and-out former console cowboy who has lost the ability to hack, though in your case it's not due to traumatic surgery but simple poverty. You can't afford ...