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Desktop Dungeons: Rewind is out now. If you owned the original ten years ago, then you already own this remaster of the wonderfully sticky puzzle roguelike. If not, you'll find it on Steam for £14.23/$17.

PowerWash Simulator has received two free pieces of DLC so far this year, both of which made use of the scrub em 'up's publisher, Square Enix, and offered up Lara Croft's manor house and Final Fantasy's Midgar for you to clean. Now a third free update has arrived, and it instead expands on PowerWash Simulator's own world.

The Sims 4's next two Kits represent two very different parts of the home. The Greenhouse Haven kit is all about giving you new options for how you design your garden, while the Basement Treasures kit lets you cram your subterranean hovel with "lived-in furniture and sentimental decor." Both will launch on April 20th.

Theme park management sim Park Beyond is getting a new closed beta test, ahead of its full launch on June 16th. It’s a whacky-looking game that lets you build impossible rollercoaster rides that are just begging to be sued, all while you try to turn a profit running your park. The closed beta is completely free and begins on May 9th, so if you want a test ride, you can register at this link. In the meantime, publisher Bandai Namco have also released a new, more in-depth gameplay trailer, giving us a closer look at some of the minutiae involved in running a theme park.

In the world of turn-based strategy games, it's probably fair to say that we've been waiting a heck of a long time for Jagged Alliance to make its next move. Almost a quarter of a century has passed since the last numbered entry in the series, and the many attempts that have been made to recapture its tactical, mercenary magic since then have been mixed at best, and reviled at worst. Haemimont Games, the devs behind Tropico and current custodians of the upcoming Jagged Alliance 3, know this, and their publisher THQ Nordic said as much back in September 2021 when it was first revealed, assuring players they were going to create a game that "really does justice to the Jagged Alliance legacy".

But in an era where turn-based tactics games are now increasingly defined by genre titans such as XCOM and Into The Breach, I'm not sure that legacy means all that much anymore. I've been playing a substantial early chunk of Jagged Alliance 3 over the last week or so, and its decision to pare back crucial information such as chance-to-hit and other modern conveniences has mostly left me feeling frustrated and annoyed rather than daring and excited. The writing also made me cringe so hard at times I think even the neighbours heard my groans of despair. It certainly looks the part of a modern strategy game, its detailed African landscape, top down perspective and interactive objects calling to mind Mimimi's excellent Desperados 3 and Shadow Tactics games, but the rest feels like it's been lifted straight out of the late 90s where we last left Jagged Alliance 2 - and not necessarily to its benefit.

Game Pass people likely have their mouths full with this month’s earlier offerings, which included the never-ending Loop Hero and the meaty Goat Simulator. But Microsoft have already announced the next wave of Game Pass additions for April, and there are some even tastier treats on the table.

Ray tracing is coming back to the Resident Evil 2 and Resident Evil 3 remakes on PC, according to Capcom. That’s after the graphical option was quietly removed from both games this past week, following a recent update. Fans had been wondering if the move was deliberate or not, but Capcom’s announcement seems to confirm that it was just a mishap. So, zombie slayers should be able to go back to running around in realistically lit corridors full of shadowy corners very soon.

To pre-empt your first question, no, Dead Island 2 was not worth waiting eleven years for. In its defence, however, few things are. If George Romero had taken over a decade to make Night Of The Living Dead, the fact it takes place largely in a basement would look less like canny guerrilla filmmaking and more like staggering incompetence. It only took NASA eight years to put men on the moon from the point they started trying, which puts the value of many inhibited projects (like my folder of unfinished novels) into depressingly sharp relief.

Dead Island 2 does not put zombies on the moon, though given how daft the main game is, don't rule out a Dead Island 2: Moon's Haunted expansion shambling your way in late 2023. Yet that doesn't mean it's a bad game. In fact, it's quite an enjoyable one. Together, Deep Silver and Dambuster Studios have raised a moderately entertaining sequel to Techland's ye olde zombie survival sim, one that injects some life into its desiccated subject matter by being incredibly shiny, wilfully silly, spectacularly gory, and generally a touch more imaginative than I expected.

Pentiment director and long-time Obsidian developer Josh Sawyer has shed some light on the Aliens RPG that was in production at the studio and sadly cancelled by publisher Sega. Looking back at cancelled games is always a fun "what if" exercise, especially in this case. Obsidian’s role-playing chops in an Aliens game? Were our charisma stats going to protect us from the ever-murderous Xenomorphs?

Hello folks. I come bearing a reasonably sensitive question for you today, and that's how the current cost of living crisis has affected your day to day gaming habits. We know times are tough for a lot of people right now, but if you can spare five minutes to tell us about it in a new reader survey put together for us by our corporate uncle Reedpop, we'd be very grateful.

As one of the very best survival games on PC (according to us and RPS readers), Valheim is getting even more ways to play around in its Norse sandbox. Developer Jonathan Smårs took to Twitter yesterday to tease a bunch of difficulty presets and customisable sliders, letting you modify the Viking experience to your liking. The options include both a creative mode (a là Minecraft) and a more 'immersive' option.

Valve and CodeWeavers have released the latest version of Proton, their compatibility software that allows Windows games to run on Linux-based operating systems – like that of the Steam Deck. Proton 8.0 is a biggun, smoothing out compatibility issues for over a dozen games (including the Dead Space remake and Forspoken) while making Steam Deck-specific fixes to many more.

These include an update that should make the repeatedly troublesome 2K Launcher behave itself again, while Tiny Tina’s Wonderlands gets improved sleep/resume functionality on the handheld PC. A crashing issue with LLife is Strange Remastered Collection has also been nixxed, as has a bug that for some reason forced open the Deck’s onscreen keyboard when launching A Plague Tale: Innocence and A Plague Tale: Requiem. Most of the other addressed problems don’t look as funny in my head, but you can read them all in the full patch notes regardless.

Downloading Proton 8.0 onto the Steam Deck is easy enough: just search for it in your Library, tap or select the icon when it appears in the results, hit Install, and restart when it’s done. Begone, foul keyboards.

The first-person puzzler Firmament is releasing on May 18th, developers Cyan have announced. The studio behind the influential Myst first teased the game back in 2018, before turning to Kickstarter a year later to fund their steampunk mystery, and now it’s ready for release, playable in both VR and “2D” - or flatscreen displays.

The Ryzen 7 5800X3D remains one of the fastest gaming CPUs on the market, and the release of Ryzen 7000 X3D CPUs has pushed prices down even further on the best option for existing AM4 motherboards and DDR4 RAM.

The 5800X3D is currently cheapest at TechNextDay, where you can use code TND-10 to get the processor for £286. That's more than £10 cheaper than the next-best price, at Amazon UK, and the cheapest we've ever seen this model.

Last week we posted a deal on a fast 512GB Micro SD card, and now we're back with another UK deal on an even faster and even larger model ideal for high-performance applications, from loading up a Steam Deck or Switch with a huge amount of game storage or capturing 4K footage on a DLSR, action camera or drone.

The SanDisk Extreme Pro 1TB is as good as it gets when it comes to Micro SD cards, with up to 200MB/s reads and 140MB/s writes, and it's down to £140 on Amazon today compared to £172 for the same card earlier this month.

The Samsung 870 Qvo is one of the best large-capacity SATA SSDs, offering up to 8TB of storage in a classic 2.5-inch form factor. It normally retails for around £452, but now it's 10% off, bringing it to the lowest price we've seen on Amazon UK: £408. That's a great price for a tonne of game and media storage.

We recently covered the RX 6950 XT hitting a new low price point in the US in the wake of the RTX 4070's release - and thankfully UK buyers have an even better deal available.

The ultra-fancy Sapphire Nitro+ OC model of the RX 6950 XT is now selling for £630, making it just £30 more expensive than Nvidia's latest graphics cards - a great deal if you look at specs like rasterised performance (where 6950 XT is around 20% faster) and VRAM allocation (where 6950 XT has 16GB compared to 12GB on the 4070).

1979’s Akalabeth: World Of Doom, eventually renamed Ultima 0, is the first commercial game by Richard Garriott (himself aka'd Lord British), and one of the very first roleplaying video games to enter the market. It’s also a precursor to Garriott’s Ultima series, introducing many elements that formed the core of the following games. But everything that Akalabeth invented would eventually be abandoned, first by its sequels and then the entire RPG genre.

When I think of quintessentially British games, a few highlights come to mind. Fable's fairytale world of stocky goblins and poverty-stricken orphans with Victorian-era voices is definitely very British, as is Banjo-Kazooie’s dry wit and sarcasm. A decent bucket of contenders, but the crown has to go to the Greggs Simulator, a free shop sim that tasks you with managing a Greggs pasty shop that's a staple of every UK high street.

Wonky launch woes aside, The Last Of Us Part 1’s PC release is a net positive. A new audience can now experience one of PlayStation’s best exclusives, but even better, modders can get their hands on Joel and Ellie’s trek, rejigging a familiar story in new ways. There aren’t too many exciting ones available to download just yet, but one “in-progress” mod reimagines the game in first-person, and it’s stunning.

When The Witcher Remake devs Fool's Theory and 11 bit studios announced their new RPG The Thaumaturge at the very end of February, I'll admit that the premise didn't immediately grab me. The announcement trailer was little more than an enigmatic pan through the streets of historic Warsaw, and its climactic reveal of a shadowy man performing some Naruto finger magic to conjure a Soulsian monster from the gloom made it seem like yet another supernatural yarn in the vein of Frogwares' The Sinking City and Cyanide's Call Of Cthulhu. The gameplay trailer (embedded below) that followed a few days later revealed a teeny glimmer of what its monster fights actually look like in the flesh, but I still wasn't quite convinced this supernatural tale of demon tamers and interdimensional rifts would end up doing enough to make it stand out.

But actually clapping eyes on it in person at GDC? The Thaumaturge had my full attention. Set in Warsaw in 1905 - a period where Poland didn't exist on any real-life map due to it being under occupation by Russia, Germany and Austria at the time - this dark fantasy RPG sees its titular paranormal 'miracle worker' delve deep into the city's political tensions, conducting isometric detective investigations that pull from Fool's Theory's support work on Larian's Divinity: Original Sin games, while also engaging in striking turn-based battles to root out the corruption plaguing its citizens. Plus, with its hard lean into Slavic, rather than Lovecraftian, folklore for its ungodly ghoulies, The Thaumaturge has shot right to the top of my 'keep an eye on this maybe surprise hit' list.

Fans have likely spent endless seasons in the comfort of Stardew Valley, and now the chill life sim is getting even bigger. Stardew Valley’s creator Eric Barone (otherwise known as ConcernedApe) is “taking a break” from working on his highly-anticipated Haunted Chocolatier. Barone will instead work on Stardew Valley’s upcoming 1.6 update, which focuses on improvements for modders, alongside some new content as well.

For hardware that’s all about searing speed, advances in SSD tech can be a Beckettian waiting game. Microsoft’s DirectStorage has only so far only found support in the ho-hum Forspoken, and PCIe 5.0 SSDs still aren’t widely available despite the first compatible CPUs and motherboards launching in 2021.

However, the latter are coming soon, and I’ve been testing out an engineering sample of the Crucial T700 to see how PCIe 5.0 – also known as PCIe Gen5 – drives could perform in an honest-to-goodness gaming PC. The short version: with maximum read and write speeds that tower over the current generation’s best SSDs, albeit with less impact on game load times than such explosive pace would suggest.

Publisher Nexon have filed a lawsuit against Ironmace Games, the developers behind the multiplayer looter Dark And Darker, accusing the studio and two individual developers of copyright infringement. The two Korean companies recently went public with their dispute, but now their beef has extended to the US legal system where Nexon is demanding a trial by jury.

Sundays are for spending your first weekend back in the UK in a while, and feeling a bit disoriented. Before you settle back in, let's read this week's best writing about games (and game related things).

Shardpunk: Verminfall smooshes together a bunch of different ideas you'll have seen before. It's got turn-based tactical combat against rats with magic rifles in a steampunk world already in ruins. It's got the need to keep on moving, lest an approaching rat horde overwhelm you. It's got bunkers in which your party rests, de-stresses, and tools up before moving on.

Kind of a Fallouty, XCOMy, FTLy, Vermintidey mix, then - which together seems very cool. It's out now, and there's a demo.

Occasionally I wonder if the market for wholesome town builders has reached saturation, but then a trailer pops up for another one and I'm never less than intrigued. The latest is Fabledom, which promises the pastoral fields and castle wall construction I adore, then adds a twist by being set within a fairytale kingdom. It's in early access now.

Mordhau is about alternately bashing at other players with swords, axes and polearms, and teaming up with other players for playful buffoonery with lutes, emotes, and spontaneous roleplay. It was one of our favourite games of 2019 and it's currently free to keep from the Epic Games Store.

Part of the fun of Vampire Survirors lies in discovering new weapons and items, and knowing that there are still surprises to uncover as you construct your monster murder machine. That thrill fades as complete more runs and reach the game's edges, but its DLCs are so far doing a good job of creating new, uncharted territory. The latest, Tides Of The Foscari, is out now.

If you're starting playing Ghostwire: Tokyo after it came to Game Pass this week, I have a hot tip for you: prioritise upgrading movement abilities. The freedom to glide from rooftop to rooftop over haunted Tokyo will bring you so much more joy than any incremental damage upgrade. That's the most important thing I have to say, that it makes for good virtuatourism.

Oh, and I suppose a free content arrived this week too, adding new side-missions, handy new combat abilities, and a new "rogue-lite" mode. The update, uh, apparently also added Denuvo, over a year after the game launched? Cool, cool.