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The Sims 4’s next expansion, Growing Together, and the incoming free update for the base game are adding a lot of new outfits and furniture and a proper infant life stage, but the really exciting thing is the expansion’s deeper simulation of relationships, which looks like it’s entering straight-up strategy game territory. It’s enough to make a Build Mode purist like me a little jealous.

In a presentation of the expansion’s features, Maxis showed off lots of Create-A-Sim features with Live Mode implications. Most interesting among them are the new social likes and dislikes and the family dynamics system. In the same way you can choose preferences for music styles or activities for your Sims, you’ll also be able to determine what kinds of traits and interactions they enjoy from oth…

For the ergonomically minded, scouring the web for Cyber Monday deals using a basic gaming mouse and keyboard might be a bit of a pain. Thankfully we’ve been doing all the wristwork for you so you can concentrate on getting yourself a setup that’ll soothe that carpal tunnel messing with your high scores.

I’ve made sure to add a few different solutions, including a 75% board that’s one of the best gaming keyboards around—I’ll explain my reasoning for that a bit later. That’s the Asus ROG Azoth now $200, by the way now down from its usual pricey $250. I recommend pairing it with a good wrist rest, and an ergonomic gaming mouse.

• We’ll carry on curating the best Cyber Monday PC gaming deals all the way through.

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Before you jump down my throat, no, Dominion wasn’t the first tabletop game with deckbuilding in it, with predecessors like StarCraft: The Board Game. Dominion was, however, the first to build an entire game around the mechanic, giving birth to the genre that would hop to PC with Dream Quest, Slay the Spire, Monster Train, and so on. 

Dominion was unavoidable at board game night in 2008, with everyone wanting to pretend to be medieval landlords who could buy up markets and villages and occasionally witches in the tireless hunt for the thing every board gamer wants—victory points. Digital versions followed, in the form of apps and a browser-based Dominion you can still play. What makes this version different is that the AI opponent is powered by neural networks, and it c…

I don’t like poker, but I love Balatro—and I mean, hey, I’ve at least got that in common with its creator (though I’ve played considerably more deckbuilders than they have). It’s pretty astounding that someone with zero experience in almost anything their game is about could make such a banger, but here we are. 

A few weeks after its release, almost everyone on the PC Gamer team has an embarrassing amount of hours logged into this thing. My attention has been split almost evenly between Balatro and Helldivers 2, the latter of which has completely shaken up the landscape of live-service shooters, which gives some indication of the former’s quality.

Luckily, Balatro has enjoyed a success that’s proportional to just how dang good it is—it hit 500,000 copies sol…

Keep your Wordle win streak heading in the right direction with our help, no matter how your daily game’s going. Scroll on down and you’ll find a range of tips and a hint for today’s game and further down, the answer to the July 18 (759) puzzle if you need it.

Today’s Wordle answer didn’t give me too much trouble but that doesn’t stop me being annoyed with myself: I could’ve solved this puzzle an entire row sooner if only I’d gone straight for a word people actually use in the 21st century instead of something better suited to a Shakespeare play.

Today’s Wordle hint

A Wordle hint for Tuesday, July 18

Any passenger travelling in a plane could be considered one of today’s answer—some people even do this frequently. This word can also refer to…

Heading into Chasing the Unseen, I was expecting Shadow of the Colossus, but without the sword. What I got instead was a delightfully weird, mindful little experience about climbing—and after spending most of my time this week shooting bugs for Super Earth and desperately trying to learn tabletop rules for my gaming group, it’s just what I needed.

You play a teeny-tiny monk exploring a surreal network of floating islands. You’ve got a glider, a Breath-of-the-Wild style climbing button, and a jump—that’s it. It’s a completely stripped-back experience filled with eerie music, and while its beasties are a touch unsettling at first glance, Chasing the Unseen isn’t really trying to scare you.

Its big, sprawling levels are difficult to navigate and a touch frustrating …

Family Sharing is a pretty great feature on Steam: Simply put, it lets you share your game library with friends and family, so if you and your brother and your mom all want to play Helldivers 2, for instance, you don’t all have to buy it separately—as long as you don’t all want to use the Steam account at the same time, anyway. That one-at-a-time restriction was removed today, though, as Valve announced a pretty big overhaul to the system that combines Steam Family Sharing and the Family View parental control system into one big package called Steam Families.

Steam Families functions very similarly to its predecessors, but makes a handful of improvements, the biggest being that members of the family can play different games at the same time. 

Under the old system,…

 Yesterday’s State of Unreal 2023 presentation was rather overshadowed by a certain surprise game announcement, but Epic showed off some genuinely amazing tech coming to Unreal Engine 5 in the near future. We got to see impressive new procedural environment tools, Lords of the Fallen showing off the engine’s enhancements to character creation and realistic armour and clothing, and more. But what really blew my socks off was the MetaHuman Animator stage demo.

We’ve seen MetaHuman before—it’s a tool that allows developers to generate highly realistic human faces, fully rigged for animation. Actually animating those faces in a way that matches their realistic look—avoiding the uncanny valley—has been a difficult and time-consuming process thus far, however. Mot…

War Thunder is generally in the news because some of its players, if you’ll excuse the phrase, are a little extreme. War Thunder is a free-to-play competitive game where a large part of the appeal is how accurately different military vehicles are represented, and arguments over the depiction of things like a tank’s turret have seen actual military secrets deployed in order to win forum arguments. War Thunder players take War Thunder very seriously. And for once they’re not mad at each other, but at developer Gaijin Entertainment.

The game has suffered an absolutely extraordinary and sustained review bombing campaign over the last week. It currently shows as ‘overwhelmingly negative’ on Steam’s recent reviews and the overall rating has dropped to ‘mixed’. One player who has 2,200 h…