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Carceri is a fizzy and kaleidoscopic, first-person "chaotic Art-toy" in which you explore/hallucinate an island resort that's also a concentration camp ("carceri" is Italian for prison) for sentient computer programs. Out sometime in May, it's the work of James Beech, who describes himself as "an on-again, off-again AAA veteran" with credits on Metroid Prime 4, Remnant: From the Ashes, and Crysis 3. The environments take hefty influence from Carceri d'invenzione, a series of prints created in the 18th century by Giovanni Battista Piranesi, whose name has become a byword for impossible spaces.

The kids today might be all about their Helldivers 2 premium warbonds and tactical strikes, but back when me and the boys were defending earth against giant insects, all we had were massive riot shields and miniguns, and by jove, we made do. Never speak to me about Terminids. If you can’t finish your truck-sized ants here on earth, don’t even think about asking for bizarre interstellar insectoids to kill. Anyway, good news for me and the proverbial boys, because multiplayer sci-fi anti-ant shooter Earth Defense Force 6 is dropping on July 25th, 2024.

If there's one thing that'll rile people up more than a robot blasting them with a laser cannon, it's having to create a new account. That's something Helldivers 2 players will have to do pretty sharpish, as Arrowhead announce mandatory account linking between Steam and Playstation Network. Why? Safety and security apparently.

Crossover fighting game Marvel vs. Capcom: Infinite first sauntered onto various videogaming mechanisms back in 2017. We forgot to review it. Oops. But others did, sometimes complaining about the art style, which was a chunky and plastic-looking departure from previous games in the series. It's now almost seven years later but at least one person has not forgotten this missed opportunity. A fighting game modder has been tinkering with shaders to bring the comic book style of previous games to Infinite. Looks cool.

I gave that Pools game a go recently - you know, the first-person traipse through some liminal spaces that happen to be pool themed. At one point it was trending on Steam and since then it's garnered loads of positive reviews, with people saying it's unsettling and drips with atmosphere. Reader, I do think it's quite atmospheric, but I do not think it's all that unsettling. If anything, I find it a bit dull, in a way that's semi-frustrating. Am I missing the liminal space-liker bit of the brain a lot of people have? Am I an anomaly here?

Good news, people whose day-to-day lives are woefully short on blingy Clancified squad-murdering. Ubisoft's elusive free-to-play shooter XDefiant finally has a release date, 21st May 2024. Or at least, that's when the preseason launches, providing six weeks of access to the modes, maps and factions from last month's server test.

Happy May 3rd, Battlestar Galactica fans! Remember what John Dune said about living long and prospering? He said: Oh, look, objectively excellent dogfighter Star Wars: Squadrons is under two quid on Steam. As Edwin pointed out to me, that’s about the price of a third of latte, although he does pay London prices. Also, Edwin, are you going around trying to buy the dregs of people’s lattes? I cannot judge. Were it in short supply, I too would debase myself for caffeine in an instant.

Fabledom somehow passed me by, but darn if it isn't leaving early access in about a week and a half. May 13th (unlucky for some) will see this fairytale kingdom city builder launch into 1.0, after a comparatively short but successful early access run on Steam. It looks very sweet, and reminds me of a kind of Foundation meets Lakeburg Legacies - at least based on the trailer, which puts an emphasis on it laid back and idyllic citybuilding, and love.

Co-op horror game Content Warning - aka "Lethal Company but you're role-playing as an abandoned places streamer and all your party members are squealing like hogs and putting on daft accents and Brian, will you please stop trying to feed me to that giant whisk so you can go viral" - has received a big update.

If I was writing What's Better, it would be a short series. The first entry would declare that the best thing in video games, obviously, was watching NPCs fight among themselves.

It's this which most interests me about The Forever Winter, which takes place in a "PvEvE conflict" in which enemy factions - including enormous, stomping robots - are constantly fighting one another while you and your squad try to scavenge and survive in their shadow. Its first trailer showing in-game footage is below.

Star Wars: The Old Republic's ongoing development switched last year from creators BioWare to Broadsword, with promise that the 13-year-old MMO would continue to receive new story content and improvements.

The approaching update 7.5 looks to bring both, alongside a Spring Abundance festival that includes "seed collecting, dancing, pie-baking, animal rehabilitation, and a galactic egg hunt."

Helldivers 2 oddly requires that I spend its in-game currency on items I don't want (capes, helmets, any emote other than the hug) just so I can gain access to the items I do (sniper rifles, SMGs, other weapons that ultimately turn out to be worse than what I already had).

I'm so far unconvinced by the need to pay real money to unlock a premium warbond, therefore. The trailer for the next premium warbond, coming May 9th, does contain glimpses of some weapons I'd like, however.

Chuck the original Half-Life and Minecraft into a reactor core with Lethal Company and the resulting, bleating, pustulant abomination might look a bit like Abiotic Factor, a one-to-six player first-person survival game from Deep Field Games and Playstack, in which a bunch of stranded boffins must find their way out of a massive underground lab.

On the one hand, you've got to deal with interdimensional horrors of various flavours, such as multiple-storey cryptids and squishy skinless wolves; on the other, invading squads of Combiney soldiers. Fortunately, you've got a big fat Ivy League brain stuffed with knowledge of killer gadgets, base construction, subterranean farming and battlefield medicine. My increasing phobia for survival games notwithstanding, I think this looks and sounds like a hoot - and it's out now in early access. Here's the launch trailer.

You might assume that Indika will be dour, given that it's a story-driven game about a nun in a grey, cold, alternative Russia. Then you watch its trailers and find surrealist imagery, genre-hopping, and a bleak sense of humour are part of its arsenal, and suddenly it seems, to me, irresistible.

It's out now.

Leonardo Da Vinci's Vitruvian Man is a legendary drawing of a nude with his arms and legs reaching towards the rim and corners of a circle and square. It's often invoked as an archetype for the humanist worldview of Man the Measure and Centre of all Things, holding a perfectly proportioned universe in shape. Rin D'Lorah, the heroine of new narrative RPG Sky Of Tides, is a bit like the Vitruvian Man, and the result is a game I find at once bewitching and powerfully offputting in its refusal to satisfy the conventions of the genre.

Logitech have kicked off its Playdays event for 2024, with some of their best headsets, mice and keyboards on sale across various retailers in the UK.

That list includes one the current best Wireless gaming keyboard, the G915 Lightspeed wireless, which is now on sale at Currys with two different form factors on offer: the full size model and the more compact tenkeyless (TKL) version.

Over the past while a few games have had post-launch patches, the exemplars being Starfield and Stardew valley, which have post-launch patches of different kinds and for different reasons. We take some time on the Electronic Wireless Show podcast to talk about this patch of patches, and what it was like in the good ol' days, where a broken game came out and stayed broken, gosh darn it!

Nate isn't here today, which means I can make fun of him for owning fish, or whatever it is he does, but in his stead James steps up with an RGB lighting-themed game where I have to guess what accessories people stuck lights on to turn into gamer accessories. This is because Razer stuck RGB lights on a pandemic mask and are in trouble over it now. Naughty Razer. Plus, we talk about the games we're playing right now, and dish you up some juicy recommendations at the end of the show.

Welcome to another edition of Should You Bother With, where the useless and the utilitarian of PC gaming hardware are sorted into two satisfyingly neat piles. And after the hard science demanded by SYBW’s previous look at Hall effect keyboards, I’m pleased to say that the concept behind this week’s focus can be summed in with as few words as "faster Internet." It’s Wi-Fi 7 – or 802.11be, to its friends.

Amazon's Gaming Week sale has lots of deals on gaming accessories and hardware, including a decent discount on the heatsink version of the 2TB WD Black SN850X SSD, which is still the best SSD for gaming you can get.

Buy now

Buy now

For someone who’s spent an embarrassing amount of my life staring at virtual maps, I am a downright directionless dunce when it comes to geography. Not ‘the country of Africa’ bad, but certainly not good enough that you’d want me on your pub quiz team. Also, I still do the Shredded Wheat rhyme internally when I have to follow directions. However, I do enjoy making maps turn a different colour in strategy games, Total War chiefly among them. Well, one such map is expanding before my confused idiot eyes, that being Total War: Pharaoh’s. It’s getting a new, distinctly Mesopotamia and Aegea-shaped bit. I believe that’s just south of Eastopotamia and Wegea.

As reported by Chinese outlet Campfire Camp, spotted by GamesRadar, and machine translated by Ian Games of the Ian Games Network, and then delivered fresh to your eyeballs by me, Nic Reuben of Reuben Paper Shotgun dot com, Elden Ring expansion Shadow Of The Erdtree will be the only DLC released for the world stomping rpg game. That’s according to FromSoftware's sadistic DM and notable swamp troll Hidetaka Miyazaka, although it doesn’t sound like he’s trolling this time.

Medieval city builder Manor Lords was Steam's most-wishlisted game prior to release, and has now managed the feat of transmuting that anticipation into broad enthusiasm and very healthy sales. Not too shabby, considering that it's mostly the work of just one person, Grzegorz Styczeń of Slavic Magic, who has hopefully found time to sleep now and then between fielding bug reports and preparing the game's first patches.

Styczeń understandably doesn't have much time for interviews right now - those troublesome archers aren't going to balance themselves - but yesterday I spoke to Tim Bender, CEO of Manor Lords publisher Hooded Horse, about how Styczeń is getting on. The answer, apparently, is: pretty good, because Styczeń has a healthy approach to early access development in keeping players close, without quite handing them the wheel.

Remember that bit in that Guy Ritchie film where Dexter Fletcher shoot a guy and then throws a glowing jar over his soldier that summons a bunch of skeletons to help him out? Me too! Must have been the direct influence for Sea Of Thieves' new Season 12, which launched earlier this week with a bang - from two smoking barrels! Among the additions in this season of the ever popular salty sea-dog open-world adventure are double barrel pistols. They deal less damage per shot but have higher rate of fire, and you can charge them up to fire both barrels at once.

On the other end of the weapon scale are new throwing knives, capable of sneak attacks, light slashes, or, you know, throwing. You can nab any throwing knives you see lying around, too, which is fun. But honestly, the Bone Caller tool (the aforementioned jar of skeletons, which has a great Jason and The Argonauts vibe) and the Horn Of Fair Winds are are probably more useful. The winds from said horn can make your ship go faster, but can also put out fires or crowd control enemies, or for some reason make you swim faster? I don't think that makes sense, to be honest, but the horn has limited uses so as not to make you an unstoppable wind machine.

I haven't ever raided in an MMORPG like World Of Warcraft for several reasons, one of which is the time commitment. I've never put in the many, many hours needed to earn the requisite gear nor partied up with the many, many people necessary to slay a big dragon. If only raiding was possible without these things… well, my saviour seems to have arrived in a form I wasn't expecting: 2D anime bunny girls. Rabbit And Steel is a co-op action roguelike that's raiding without the pre-grind and it looks rather wonderful.

I don't tend to do a lot of videogame discount posts because I have a mortal fear of enriching my backlog, but when I see the entire Mass Effect trilogy and all of its expansions for around the price of a slightly aristocratic sandwich, I am compelled to share. The Legendary Edition of BioWare's ravishing sci-fi RPG series is 90% off on Steam until 13th May. That translates to 6€, $6 or £5 for all three main games and 40 DLC packs, plus bells and whistles such as 4K Ultra HD and beefed-up character models. If you haven't played a Mass Effect game before, this is a pretty good place to start.

Roll7, developers of bright skateboarding games OlliOlli World and dual-wielding bloodsport Rollerdrome, are being closed down as part of large scale layoffs by parent corp Take-Two Interactive, according to documents seen by Bloomberg. The British studio has been responsible for some great stuff over the years but the report says they'll be following the fate of Kerbal Space Program 2 developers in being laid off.

Starfield’s biggest update since the Bethesda space game came out last year (remember that?) is arriving in a couple of weeks - with its Steam beta already live now, if you’re interested in poking around. The chunky patch finally tidies up the game’s oft-complained about surface maps to make them easier to navigate, as well as introducing new difficulty options, a decoration mode for the inside of ships and a bunch of other tweaks and fixes.

Good news! There’s a new Batman: Arkham game on the way that’s not Suicide Squad: Kill the Justice League. (Potentially) not-so-good news! It’s a virtual reality game that you’ll only be able to play if you own a Meta Quest 3. Hmm.

Your feelings on Funko Pop probably fall into one of two categories: you either hate the black-eyed, copy-paste figures modelled on pop-culture characters with a burning passion, or you own enough of them to construct a small fortress and defend your newfounded Funko nation from the government. Either way, it looks like the first video game starring the ubiquitous toy collectables might somehow scratch your itch.

While they ponder which developers should face the difficult task of following up one of the most acclaimed games in a long time by making a sequel by Baldur's Gate 3, the makers of Dungeons & Dragons are also putting their own money into making video games themselves. Over a billion dollars of their own money, in fact.