Another intriguing Baldur's Gate 3 custom campaign mod has emerged to confront your party of quirky RPG adventurers. This one's a short story which lets you take a break from BG3's main story to attend a dinner party at the house of a not-at-all creepy rich bloke, who happens to be very good at jamming out on the organ via illusions.
"Since the last round of EMTERR ‘stabilisation’, they’ve been trying to force us lifers out," the phantom line engineer tells Zero Parades protagonist Hershel Wilk. "We can’t be fired, not easily, but they can take away the work that made us stay in the first place,” he continues. “I have two options. I could falsify my reports and declare line 9 safe for construction anyway, or I could quit. Either way, the company can’t lose."
Approximately 15 minutes later, I’m talking to a monkey sat atop a pile of goods in a random abandoned house. "YOUR PRESENCE IS WEAK. FATE DELIVERS ME AN UNWORTHY ADVERSARY," it says, before declaring its name to be the KING OF TRADE. Immediately, one of the voices in Herschel’s inner chorus, dubbed Statehood, starts shouting back about needing to defeat the forces of capitalism.
Both of these are scenarios I ran into while playing the Next Fest demo of the spy CRPG finally emerging from ZA/UM, following years of reported bad times and discord at and around the Disco Elysium studio. Both of them feel simultaneously like encounters you could plausibly have run into in the original Disco, and like they could just as easily be pale imitations dressed up to resemble that first game’s much quoted trenchcoat of surrealist detecting.
Former staff of Enotria: The Last Song developers Jyamma Games have revealed to RPS that they’re owed months of unpaid salary, following layoffs at the company last year. They've shared an inside look at a troubled independent studio dealing with payment delays, multiple changes of direction, and general confusion that stretches back to spring 2025.
The botanical puzzles of Botany Manor have officially rotated out as the Epic Games Store shifts into a much darker, rain-soaked atmosphere for mid-February. From today, February 12, until February 19 at 11:00 AM ET, you can permanently add the cinematic thriller Nobody Wants to Die and the comedic mystery The Darkside Detective: A Fumble in the Dark to your library for zero dollars. This week’s rotation is a resourceful haul for fans of narrative-driven investigation, providing a high-quality double-feature that would otherwise cost you $40 at retail.
Nobody Wants to Die is a photorealistic, noir-inspired adventure built in Unreal Engine 5 that drops you into a futuristic New York City in the year 2329. You step into the role of Detective James Karra, a man using high-tech time manipulation tools to reconstruct crime scenes and hunt a serial killer targeting the city’s immortal elite. It handles heavy themes like transhumanism and class divide with a thick, atmospheric tone that makes it an essential pick for narrative junkies. While the Steam Store currently lists the game at its standard $24.99 price, it is a massive value-add to any library right now. If you happen to miss the 7-day window, you can typically find global keys on the G2A Marketplace (affiliate) for roughly $2.30 to $5.00 during major sale events.
Providing a sharp contrast to the grit of NYC, The Darkside Detective: A Fumble in the Dark is a pixel-art point-and-click adventure that prioritizes humor over horror. You follow Detective Francis McQueen through nine paranormal cases in the “mildly cursed” town of Twin Lakes, solving mysteries that range from ghostly disruptions to full-blown demonic urban legends. It relies on self-aware writing and classic adventure logic, currently holding an “Overwhelmingly Positive” rating on the Steam Store where it retails for $14.99. For a resourceful backup later on, the G2A Marketplace usually has keys for approximately $1.90 to $2.50, making it one of the most accessible cult hits in the genre.
If you are looking to spend some actual cash while the Winter Sale is active, the storefront is currently hosting some of the highest-rated games in the industry at significant discounts. For fans of massive, cinematic storytelling, the 90+ Metascore hit God of War Ragnarök is currently 33% off, providing a sprawling Norse epic for around $40. For an even deeper discount on a legendary title, Red Dead Redemption 2 is sitting at 67% off, which is a resourceful way to grab a 93-rated masterpiece for less than $20. Strategy enthusiasts should look toward Total War: Three Kingdoms, which is currently slashed by 75%, a price point that makes the 85-rated campaign an easy recommendation. Finally, for a perfect cooperative experience, the 88-rated It Takes Two is currently 80% off, offering one of the most inventive puzzle-platformers ever made for just a few dollars.
The post Investigation and Noir: Today’s Epic Detective Double-Feature appeared first on Game Reviews, News, Videos & More for Every Gamer – PC, PlayStation, Xbox in 2026.
Boy am I glad to see Styx again. Not because I felt any great yearning to return to the murky, Temu-Warhammer dark fantasy setting of long-forgotten RPG Of Orcs and Men, you understand. But because Blades of Greed represents an ever dwindling chunk of ore from that once rich seam of B-tier games that are just bloody good at what they do. The zenith of the "shorter games with worse graphics" category that people on Bluesky claim to want (and rarely seem to actively seek out, alas).
Clair Obscur: Expedition 33 secured five awards at this week's Academy of Interactive Arts & Sciences' (AIAS) DICE Awards (not to be confused with EA's Stockholm studio of the same name), including the coveted Game of the Year prize, while Sucker Punch's Ghost of Yotei secured three, including for Adventure Game of the Year.
Hello and welcome back to our regular feature where we write a little about the games we've been playing. This week, Bertie plays a classic but finds himself getting a bit bored; Marie adopts a black cat called Salem; Tom can't get out of the menus; Victoria makes a young child cry; Dom Platinums a game and feels very smug about it; and Connor finds an inventive way to play two MMOs at once.
Baldur's Gate 3 developer Larian has changed its stance on generative AI following backlash faced at the end of last year.
The analyst who forecasted a Witcher 3 expansion release in 2026 has told me they're "100 percent certain [CD Projekt Red] will release significant new content this year".
More than five years after its troubled original release, Cyberpunk 2077 continues to be one of the most relevant open-world RPGs of the modern era. Much of its success comes from the believable relationships it quickly establishes between its key characters and V, but the pre-disaster prologue with preem choom Jackie was never meant to go on for too long.
The Duffer brothers, creators of Stranger Things, have said the final battle of the TV series was partially inspired by Baldur's Gate 3. Matt Duffer was apparently playing the game while devising the showdown.
Troy Baker, one of the most well known actors working in video games, believes generative AI could have a positive effect overall on performing arts. Baker thinks it'll cause a reaction whereby people will seek out "authentic" experiences more - live shows, live theatre - and turn away from "gruel that gets distilled to me through a black mirror".
The upcoming third season of HBO's The Last of Us TV adaptation will feature a new actor playing WLF member Manny.
Polish developer Rebel Wolves has unveiled the main musical theme for its promising dark fantasy role-playing The Blood of Dawnwalker, and surprise surprise, it sounds a lot like The Witcher 3.
43.8 million player votes later, the winners of the 2025 Steam Awards have been announced, with Hollow Knight: Silksong securing top prize, Game of the Year.
It's been another strange, difficult, and yet somehow also brilliant year for video games in 2025. Triple-A releases have been sparse again, compared to the boom times of old, with a great big GTA 6-shaped hole left in the final few months of the year. And yet once again, every gap left by the established order has been filled twice over with something brilliantly new.
2025 has gone by in a flash, hasn't it? Well, apart from the days I've spent tabulating all your Game of the Year votes and presenting the results here - that has felt like an eternity and I think has given me permanent neck pain. But, let's not worry about that. I'm sure you'll agree it was worth the sacrifice.
I think a lot of Dispatch can be distilled into a single moment at the beginning of the game when the player comes face to face with a penis. There it is, dangling visibly between the legs of an unclothed, toxic-drenched super-villain you're about to fight. The camera all but centers on it. There's no way you can miss it unless you've flipped the nudity switch off, in which case it's replaced by an even more conspicuous black box that only amplifies the naughtiness of the part hidden within. But most people don't turn nudity off because they're expecting boobs. That's what we usually see. In Dispatch, however, it's a penis we see waggling unavoidably on our screens.
While most of the world is opening presents, you’re waking up in a trashed room with a tie that wants you to kill yourself. Epic Games decided the perfect holiday mood was a deep dive into the mind of a disaster-prone amnesiac. Today, December 25, you can claim Disco Elysium – The Final Cut for free. If the Epic launcher isn’t your thing, the Steam Store has it slashed by 90%, basically pricing it at the cost of a cheap beer. It is a bleak, hilarious, and genuinely intelligent game that makes you do the one thing most holiday games avoid: actually think.
You are a detective, though you’ve forgotten your own name and misplaced your badge. There is a corpse hanging in the lot behind the hostel, and you are technically supposed to be investigating it. However, the real “combat” happens inside your skull. The game treats your psyche like a chaotic board meeting. Your different personality traits—like your Reptilian Brain or your Limbic System—frequently interrupt your conversations to argue with you or suggest you do something incredibly self-destructive. It is a system where a failed dice roll isn’t a game over; it just leads to a more interesting, often more pathetic, branch of the story.
The “Final Cut” means you get full voice acting for every weirdo and philosopher in the city of Revachol. This version of the game lets you lean into whatever internal ideology you want, whether that is becoming a “Hobocop” who lives in a trash can or a “Superstar” who thinks he can solve crimes through the power of disco. The “Thought Cabinet” allows you to internalize bizarre concepts you find in the world, which slowly bake in your brain until they change your stats or unlock new ways to interact with people. It is a mechanic that rewards curiosity, even when that curiosity leads you into an embarrassing social disaster.
You have until December 26 at 11:00 AM ET to snag this for free on Epic. This is a game for people who want to explore a world that feels lived-in, decaying, and deeply weird. It handles heavy topics like failure and political collapse without losing its sharp, cynical sense of humor. Whether you grab it for free on Epic or pay the pocket change for it on Steam, it is an essential pick for anyone tired of the standard “go here, shoot that” mission structure.
The post The Morning After a Very Bad Christmas: Disco Elysium is Free on Epic appeared first on Game Reviews, News, Videos & More for Every Gamer – PC, PlayStation, Xbox in 2026.
