When we first got confirmation of this week’s State of Play, Sony’s official description provided little to go on. PlayStation’s first-party output is quite slim this year, but some of us expected the company’s biggest game in 2025 – Ghost of Yotei – to make some sort of appearance.
After all, for a game coming out this October, we’ve seen very little gameplay to get us excited about its big release this fall.
To see this content please enable targeting cookies.
The good news is that Ghost of Yotei, did, indeed show up during the State of Play showcase. It was so brief, however, you may have missed it. Developer Sucker Punch treated us to a small teaser that left everyone wanting more.
And more certainly is on the way, because the point of that teaser was to announce a special State of Play presentation dedicated entirely to the Ghost of Tsushima sequel. Sadly, we’ll have to wait until sometime in July for that.
The July showcase will offer an extended look at Yotei’s “evolved” gameplay mechanics, exploration, combat and more, according to the PlayStation Blog. Hopefully that episode is scheduled for early July, rather than later in the month.
There are plenty of great medieval RPGs out there right now, from fresh releases like Kingdom Come Deliverance 2 to stalwarts such as Skyrim, and there are plenty more on the horizon as well. Adding to that list is Valorborn, which isn’t lacking in ambition, despite its tiny team of just three developers. With an old-school feel of games like Gothic and even a dash of Runescape, and embracing party-based gameplay, it’s certainly worth checking out.
Given its scope, and its general vibe, I half expected Valorborn to be a multiplayer, MMO-style affair at first. However, it’s aiming to deliver a lot of the depth and many of the features you’d expect from larger experiences into a single-player, open-world RPG. Its medieval fantasy world is home to everything you’d expect. It’s got several varied biomes, including an intriguing looking grayscale location or realm. You’ll face enemies such as reanimated skeleton soldiers, wolves, and trolls. You’ll encounter a swathe of NPCs. Every single building, castle, and cave can be entered and explored.
As you progress through Valorborn, you can take your custom character down one of two paths – assemble a party of companions to aid you in battle, or become a lone ranger taking everything on solo. Should you choose to bring other characters along for the ride, you’ll not only unravel your own story but theirs as well. I do love a good companion questline.
As all good RPGs should, you’ve got the freedom to level up in whichever disciplines and skills you feel fit. Become an all-rounder, or specialize in certain areas to become a super strong warrior, a master hunter, or a sneaky assassin.
Acquiring resources, building, and crafting are also core components of Valorborn. As well as renting houses in villages that you can then customize to your heart’s content, you can also construct bases out in the field when exploring. Weapons, armor, and tools can all be crafted from your home or a base. The resources you’ll need for all this can be looted, harvested, or hunted from the world around you.
I wouldn’t say there’s anything massively groundbreaking or surprising about Valorborn in comparison to other third-person RPGs out there already, but what is commendable is how a world this big and systems this deep are being made by Laps Games, a team of just three developers.
Valorborn is aiming to launch in early access in Q3 of 2025. If you want to learn more about it, or add it to your Steam wishlist, head to its store page here.
You can follow us on Google News for daily PC games news, reviews, and guides. We’ve also got a vibrant community Discord server, where you can chat about this story with members of the team and fellow readers.
While I’ll allow for the possibility that I’m just no good at the game, first I need to make sure I’m not just doing something wrong.
Having tried 7-8 times, I have not been able to even come close to winning the first quest in the Core Set as a solo player. Most of my games I’m not able to get a single advancement token on the first stage. Playing as a single player with just three heroes, the numbers seem stacked against me to be able to effectively quest and still attack and defend that round. The enemies pile up, or the threat tracker gets to 50 after a few rounds of holding the monsters back, or I have no choice but to take undefended damage and lose my heroes. I’m all good with having a challenging game, but for a quest with a difficulty level 1, explicitly described as an “introductory scenario,” I have to wonder: is this meant to be played one player, with a single set of three heroes? It doesn’t seem possible to generate enough willpower, attack strength, or resources. The rulebook doesn’t address single player mode at all, so if not, what are the official solo play rules?
Update: Upon further research and playing, I think I can safely attribute most of my failures to an underestimation of the importance of traveling to and exploring locations. While still not a total breeze, it made threat level much more manageable.
Looking for a social activity that’s basically COVID-proof? Allow us to present… two-player board games! If you’re lucky enough to live with at least one other person of a game-playing age and inclination, this is a fun thing you can do without the leaving the house, inviting anyone round, or (once you have the game), even spending money!
Convinced? Great! Here are some of our favourite games for two to help you prepare for whatever comes along next…
Hive, aka ‘insect chess’, is a strong contender for my favourite two-player game EVER, which is maybe surprising given my complete ambivalence about actual chess. This neat strategy game packs bags of depth and replayability into a handful of tactile Bakelite pieces, and will fit in a handbag or even a (large) pocket if you buy the mini version.
The game itself has just a handful of rules, and absolutely zero set-up beyond tipping the pieces out of the bag and splitting them by colour. On a turn, either add a new piece to the playing area or move a piece you’ve placed already. Pieces feature different types of insects that move in different ways. In the basic version of the game there are just five species to get your head around: ants, grasshoppers, beetles, spiders and the all-important queen bee.
You win the game if your opponent’s queen is completely surrounded by other pieces, regardless of whether those pieces are yours or theirs. There are just a couple of additional rules relating to placement and movement, but that’s basically the whole game (check out the Shut Up and Sit Down review here for a more complete run-through if you like to dot the ‘i’s and cross the ‘t’s).
Once you’re under way, this simple set of rules magically transforms into a quick-yet-satisfying playing experience that will get those mental cogs turning just enough without causing total burn-out, and will almost certainly leave you coming back for more.
As if that wasn’t enough, sturdiness of the pieces and lack of a board make this a game you can play pretty much anywhere. We’ve played Hive in the pub, in the park, even on a picnic blanket at a festival. Admittedly some of these settings might not be immediately relevant, but a game this durable will still be going strong when they are!
Once upon a time, way back when we were taking our very first steps into modern board gaming, Andy went on a quest to find a great two-player game for us to take on holiday, and came back with a neat little box containing Jaipur. We hadn’t played that many Euro-style games by this point, and initially I confess that the Middle-Eastern marketplace theme and apparent excess of camels left me a touch sceptical. But, as soon as I got to grips with the carefully balanced back-and-forth of the gameplay, my scepticism dissolved, and even the quantity of camels began to make sense.
Jaipur is a two-player card game in which players compete for the approval of the Maharaja, which they can gain by becoming the richest merchant in two out of three rounds of trading in the city of Jaipur’s market place.
The game mainly consists of a deck of cards containing a mixture goods to be traded and a WHOLE LOT of camels. The options on a turn are simple: either take one goods card or ALL THE CAMELS from the market place for free; swap goods cards from your hand and/or camels from your herd with the same number of goods from the market place; or, sell a set of matching goods to gain victory points (the more cards sold at once the better in terms of gaining points).
It’s straightforward on the surface, but with a hand limit of seven cards there are quickly some difficult choices to be made, and the more cards you take from the market the more new ones will appear before your opponent’s next turn and the higher the chance of them being able to claim something especially nice and shiny.
Again this game is super-portable, and packs a lot of depth and replayability into a neat little box. Plus, the recently-released second edition has given it a fresh coat of paint, making it extra vibrant and appealing.
If you prefer your games to have an engaging theme, or at the very least to contain cute plastic animals, Ice Team might be right up your ice floe. The aim of this simple, two-player race game is to get your team of polar bears from one end of the board to the other as quickly as you can, acquiring as many fish as possible along the way.
The modular race course can be arranged in different ways and there’s some randomness in the set-up, so the obstacles you’re tackling will be different each time. The rules for movement are simple: pick a bear and hop it to an adjacent ice berg tile or swim in a straight line across open water. Bears can leap-frog over each other should the opportunity arise, and some of the ice berg tiles do different things, from providing you with fish to letting you satisfyingly surf to the next spot.
There’s a bit of chance involved in winning, with the number of fish you acquire being partly determined by dice rolls, but there’s plenty of strategy too, especially when it comes to making your adorable team work together effectively.
This is a great choice if you’re looking for a game to engage a younger audience (the publishers recommend it for ages 8+), but we’re confident most adults will find it irresistible and more-ish too, and the theme feels just festive enough to make it ideal for Christmas but playable all year round!
Sometimes the premise of a game is so awesome that it’s enough to convince you to give it a try all by itself. We’ve persuaded a whole lot of people to try out Raptor at The Treehouse pretty much on the basis of theme alone, but the good news is that the gameplay is excellent too!
Raptor is an asymmetric game where one player takes on the role of a mother raptor, quietly minding her own business in the jungle/ desert (the board is double-sided) while tending her brood of babies. The other player takes control of a team of scientists, whose aim is to steal at least three of those babies away before the mother can get them safely off the board.
If you’re anything like us you already want to give this a go, but before you dive in let’s talk about how it works. Each player controls their pieces using a small deck of cards numbered one to nine. On each turn, both players draw three cards to choose from, and place the one they want to play face down. The chosen cards are revealed simultaneously (a mechanic we always love, incidentally), and determine who can do what. Each card has a particular power (adding new scientists to the board, say, or letting the mother raptor call some of her babies closer to her), but in order to activate that power the card must have a lower number than the other player. Whoever played the higher number instead gets to perform a number of actions (again, character-specific) equal to the difference in the numbers on the two cards chosen.
Every game of Raptor is guaranteed to be packed with narrative and drama. If the game has a flaw it’s that it seems to be harder to win as the raptors than the scientists, but that only makes victory all the sweeter when you do manage to get your brood to safety!
We know that for some people, competitiveness is a real barrier to enjoyment when it comes to board gaming, and probably never more so than when you’re stuck in a house together with no variety of opponents. Cooperative games offer a neat solution to this: all players work together to defeat the game, so you’re all on the same side and can rage or gloat as a team. The absolute classic of this genre is arguably 2008 release Pandemic in which players race to save the world from viruses, but although this saw a surge in popularity at The Treehouse back in March, we suspect the novelty of this particular theme has probably worn a little thin by this point!
Forbidden Desert was created by the same designer (Matt Leacock, in case you’re interested) and sees players stranded in the desert, racing to assemble a magical air ship from parts which have been scattered across the sand dunes, in order to escape to safety before their water supply runs out. So a bit like going on holiday somewhere hot, if you focus on the right bits!
Players take turns performing actions to bring everyone closer to their goal, moving around the board and excavating spaces to search for airship components. All the while, the sun beats down and a raging sandstorm roams the board, burying everything deeper and deeper under a layer of sand.
This game involves a bunch of really neat mechanics not to mention some great components, and can be played by up to five people if you have them available, although (like most cooperative games) it works beautifully with just two.
If all the options above sound a little too strategic, or if you’re up against some extreme board game scepticism, Tokyo Highway might be the answer. Ever since we added this to our library, we’ve been getting questions along the lines of “what’s that game they’re playing with the tiny cars? It looks so cool!”, and we can only agree: yes, it really does.
To be good at Tokyo Highway, you’ll need spatial awareness, a little bit of strategy, and perhaps most importantly, fine motor skills (don’t be fooled by the plastic tweezers that come with the game – they don’t help as much as you think!). The aim of the game is to place all of your tiny wooden vehicles on sections of your very own highway system, but in order to do this you’ll have to make it cross over and under your opponent’s roads in very specific ways, guaranteeing the creation of an urban planner’s nightmare!
This game is truly unlike any other we’ve come across, and has been known to lure in even the most doubtful gamers. Just make sure your table doesn’t wobble before you begin!
If you know the British Isles as well as I do, you’ll know that the fine city of Birmingham doesn’t exactly scream ‘potential videogame location.’ But what about if you take things back to the 14th century? And fill it with zombies. Now it’s got a chance. That’s exactly what God Save Birmingham is looking to do, and after watching around eight minutes of new gameplay footage, it’s just shot to the top of my ‘most anticipated zombie games’ list.
Now, I’ll admit that I usually prefer my zombie games to be co-op affairs that are full of massive, dynamic hordes and ludicrous weapons. Call of Duty Zombies. Dead Island 2. You know the vibe. For that reason, the likes of Killing Floor 3 and the concerningly silent John Carpenter’s Toxic Commando have been way up on my list of upcoming PC games that I’m looking forward to. However, I think God Save Birmingham just surpassed them.
This isn’t some co-op horde blaster where you can smack shamblers with an electrified baseball bat or suck zombies up into a portable jet turbine. I’ve seen snippets of gameplay before, but looking at the new extended trailer posted by IGN, it actually comes across as very The Last of Us-y with its third-person sneaking and meaty takedown animations. I doubt the narrative juice will be quite as potent in God Saves Birmingham, but when it comes to taking down zombs, it’s definitely got that TLOU flavor.
There’s also a big focus on using and reacting to the environment around you. Furniture can be moved to block doorways. Ladders can be repurposed as bridges for crossing gaps. Standing on chairs can help you jump up to ledges that would typically be too high. Everything (including you and the zombies) has realistic and reactive physics, and looks like a really fun sandbox.
The new trailer also shows just how deep its survival game mechanics go. Meters for hunger, thirst, fatigue, and panic can be seen. Trying to replenish these with items in your inventory will require real-time actions and menu scanning – there’s no pausing the action and instantly eating a loaf of bread here. Falling from a height inflicts a leg injury, which then hampers your movement speed. Objects can be disassembled for raw materials. There’s a proper cooking system too.
I think it all looks marvelous, and the medieval setting feels like a novel one for a zombie survival experience. God Save Birmingham is currently without a release date, but an early access launch is on the cards for it.
Be sure to check out our list of the best medieval games if, like me, you’re loving ye olde vibes of God Save Birmingham. Our upcoming PC games list is also on hand to show you what else is on the way in the near and distant future.
You can follow us on Google News for daily PC games news, reviews, and guides. We’ve also got a vibrant community Discord server, where you can chat about this story with members of the team and fellow readers.
Between Civilization 7, Kaiserpunk, Stellaris, and Commandos Origins itself, I’m still torn between which type of strategy game I like most. 4X is the biggest and bulkiest, but the longer a playthrough goes on, the more you can get lost in the micromanagement. City builders are more focused, and I’m a sucker for good road-building tools, but, by their nature, these games are limited to one type of strategy. So maybe it’s the RTS – challenging but accessible, tactical but faster-paced, the return of Commandos also marks a comeback for one of the genre’s best. Origins may have struggled a little so far, but if you’ve stayed away, the big new update could be enough to win you over.
Tough, intense, and an occasional test of your patience, our own Commandos Origins review explains precisely where the new RTS game shines and where it could use some improvement. Behind Enemy Lines, Commandos 2, and Destination Berlin are all legitimate PC classics – Commandos Origins naturally has a lot of expectation on its shoulders. But alongside our 7/10 rating, the response from players has so far been solid, and the WW2 game has a reputable ‘mostly positive’ rating on Steam.
However, a few key performance issues and problems with crashing have held Origins back. Released on April 9, if you’ve been cautious about playing the strategy game up until now, the new update could assuage your concerns. There are 29 general fixes, alongside 18 fixes that target issues specific to Commandos Origins’ campaign missions. Until now, some of the game’s foliage was inexplicably causing sharp drops in performance and there were cases where the framerate could slow to a crawl.
Those have both been remedied, alongside other “rare” crashes, and a significant problem where using the Marine’s abilities could also send you back to the desktop. The user interface has been tweaked and improved, and there is no longer a problem with broken achievements. It’s a big fix and it arrives just over a week since launch – hopefully, any other issues with Commandos Origins will also be promptly addressed. If you want to give the game a shot, you can get it here.
You can follow us on Google News for daily PC games news, reviews, and guides. We’ve also got a vibrant community Discord server, where you can chat about this story with members of the team and fellow readers.
