Play the Backpack Hero demo, it’s great! If you’ve ever enjoyed shuffling and rotating items to fit into an inventory grid, do have a play of the free demo forBackpack Hero. It’s a roguelikelike dungeon crawler that’s all about inventory Tetris, filling your knapsack with weapons, armour, and items that can gain powerful bonuses and synergies depending on their placement. It’s an interesting and fluid bit of buildcrafting, and has me excited for the full game next year....

Take this in your stride Warstride Challengesis an early access FPS that takes the retro shoot ‘em up and straps it in a rally car. Each level is a course with straights and corners and demons. You must cross the finish line as fast as you possibly can, but the chequered flag only springs up if you’ve turned every demon along the way into a red paste. The game is an FPS for perfectionists and speed junkies who want to look cool....

I have already used the pun ‘Atreides Nuts’ and will not do so again Right, housekeeping first.Dune: Spice Wars’ Steam page describes it as a “real-time strategy game with 4X elements”. An odd choice, considering Shiro Games themselves downplay RTS elements in a Steam blog. Spice Wars is as much 4X as the dead eyes of two smiley faces, and one with enough forward momentum as to make such tantalising lies unnecessary....

But this great/horrible joke mod… kinda works? Part of the modern soundscape is a sing-song synthetic voice telling us about everything from slime recipes and teenage drama to unionisation procedures and scissor-wielding ‘fashion hacks’ that surely are covert fetish videos. It is TikTok’s text-to-speech voice, and it is everywhere. Now it’s even inHalf-Life, thanks to a mod which replaces the opening tram ride voiceover with a TikTok TTS version. It’s a distressing artifact, and I hate that it kinda works....

Campaign co-op launch targets the end of summer and Forge beta in September 343 Industries have finally detailed the long-promised roadmap forHalo Infiniteahead of the arrival of Season 2 in May, and it’s not great reading. Theroadmap sets outnew maps, modes and two batches of story events for Season 2. So far, so good. Yet it also hints vaguely at what’s coming in Season 3 – now starting all the way off on November 8th, with the open beta for Forge from September....

A minimalist notebook with decent gaming power Not to damn with faint praise, but the Lenovo Legion 5 is kinda okay. A bit alright. Reasonably reasonable. It’s a gaming laptop with specs, price and performance that are so straight down the middle of the road that they might as well be studded with cat’s eyes. Apologies in advance if this is not the most action-packed hardware review you’ve ever read....

Four RPS pals test whether ghost busting makes them feel good, but turns out you’re better off dead Midnight Ghost Huntis the latest in a steadily lengthening line of Prop Hunt-inspired party games. There are two teams: the Ghosts, and the Hunters. The Ghosts can possess objects in the world to hide inside, and their job is to survive until midnight. The Hunters must use a variety of high-tech gadgets and weapons to track down and destroy the Ghosts before that time, or else risk being hunted themselves once midnight strikes....

Another one for the Embracer Group Perfect World Entertainmenthave announcedthat they’re now known as Gearbox Publishing. Or Gearbox Publishing have announced that they’re no longer Perfect World Entertainment. Same difference. Gearbox Publishing say the change shouldn’t affect anything to do with the ageing live service games they steward, likeStar Trek OnlineandNeverwinter. They’re all part of the Embracer Group, y’see. Embracer went Christmas shopping in December tobuy Perfect World, along with Dark Horse Comics and some other companies....

Returning to look at more indie games Every weekend, indie devs show off current work on Twitter’s#screenshotsaturdaytag. And every Monday, I bring you a selection of these snaps and clips. Bodysurfing ultraviolence in this yet-untitled action game looks downright ridiculous, though I’m also interested in the garish skybox with a mishmash of branding and roads like a megacity-sized strip mall: wip of bodyboarding#screenshotsaturday#indiedevpic.twitter.com/DZnAdlzG65 The best sheet ghost I’ve seen was Halloween a few years back, outside a student pub on Edinburgh’s Cowgate, about 2 in the morning....

Still £100 above UK RRP, but that’s great progress for a GPU selling for £1000+ a few months ago. The RTX 3070 Ti is a great mid-range to high-end GPU, with excellent performance in rasterised games plus DLSS and RT support, but it’s been hard to find at a good price if you haven’t lucked out with a Founders Edition restock. Prices for third-party cards are slowly falling, and now have reached within £100 of the £549 UK RRP - an important milestone for GPUs that cost £1000 or more at the beginning of the year....

Nearly $20 off a great value NVMe SSD rated up to 3500MB/s. SK Hynix aren’t a company that most folks have heard of, but this Korean firm produces a sizeable percentage of the world’s flash memory and DRAM chips alongside the likes of Samsung, Kioxia and WD. They’ve also started making their own tightly integrated consumer SSDs, and today one of them is heavily discounted at Amazon.com. That makes it a great time to upgrade your PC with 1TB of fast storage for a historic low price....

Strap on your pointiest hats in August Who doesn’t want to go to wizard school? In fairness a few people, probably, and they’d best steer clear of Sega and Two Point Studios’Two Point Campuswhen it launches later this year, because there’s going to be a canny few wizards kicking about being all magical. Two Point Studios have shown off a new trailer for one of the courses to expect when you arrive on campus, which has a lot of the potion brewing and casting of spells that you’d expect from even a magical academic establishment....

It looks like a certain battle royale, but they really don’t want you to think that Ubisoft playfully confirmed over the weekend that they’re working on a much-leaked MOBA dubbed ‘Project Q’ ,tweeting“So, we heard you heard…” The game, which Ubisoftinsist isn’t a battle royaledespite its strong resemblance to other battle royales thatshall remain nameless, is still early in development. Ubisoft have nowoffered up registration for testing and updatesthrough Ubisoft Connect....