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When was the last time you played a good 3D character platformer? For me, it was probably Psychonauts 2. But before that? Outside of Mario? I'm not sure I'd be able to tell you. For whatever reason, the 3D character platformer has become an increasingly rare breed, it would seem, which makes them even more heartening to see when they do occasionally poke their head above the parapet and leap onto our screens. Song Of Nunu: A League Of Legends Story is one of them, channelling the joyous, boundless enthusiasm of its late 90s and early 00s predecessors to create a simple, but straightforward adventure that you could just as easily enjoy alone as an adult, or with a child in tow. It did not, alas, quite make me cry as developers Tequila Works intended (that honour still belongs to Rime and Rime alone out of their back catalogue), but there's much to admire here while having your heartstrings lightly plucked at the same time. And you don't need to know a jot about League Of Legends to enjoy it.

I’m not sure any of my Lego constructions would hold up to anything more aggressive than an accidental bump or the over-excited nose of a dog, let alone wave after wave of ghastly monsters. Soon I’ll be able to put that hypothesis to the test, as the next game from the creators of shopkeeping-sim-turned-dungeon-diver Moonlighter looks to throw endless horrors at your custom-made grand design.

Spirit of the North followed in the wake of indie darlings like Journey and Abzu as a quietly meditative single-player adventure through nature that laid out its moving story without a word of dialogue. Four years on from its release - and three years after it came to PC - developers Infuse Studio have revealed a full sequel.

Gangs of Sherwood, the co-op PvE game inspired by the English folk hero but set in a gritty neo-medieval future closer to the grimdark world of Warhammer, has seen its release date pushed back by almost a month.

Dungeons of Hinterberg popped up during Xbox’s not-E3 showcase over the summer, revealing a beautifully cel-shaded blend of dungeon-crawling, puzzle-solving and relationship-building. Having had a bit more of a look at the game’s social sim aspects via this week’s Xbox Partner Preview - yep, it still looks gorgeous and sounds fantastic.

If you haven't already, please do say hallo to our two new guidesers, Jeremy and Kiera. They've joined us just in time for Halloween and certainly won't be sacrificed in any form of ritual, no, they'll absolutely be around this time next week. In fact, they'll be more than around, they'll be... all over the place. And everything will be peaceful and prosperous for another year for all of us. But Halloween is next week, so what are you playing this weekend? Here's what we're clicking on!

Turnip Boy Commits Tax Evasion is the good kind of distraction: a silly, finite, Zeldalike in which you rollick around a pixel art pasture and tick off todo list items by bish-boshing enemies and assisting vegetables. Alice B called it the funniest game she'd ever played.

This is an advanced heads-up that it'll be free to keep from the Epic Games Store from November 2nd.

Fortnite's original map is coming back, Epic have confirmed. The news was announced via X (formerly Twitter) weeks after several leaks had suggested that time travel shenanigans would revert the free-to-play shooter's map back to its original Chapter 1 layout.

From now until Monday, Diablo 4 is free to play. The trial is available via Battle.net and includes the entire game. If you want to keep playing past Monday, it's currently 25% off, too.

Mouse house life sim Disney Dreamlight Valley has been in early access since it launched last year, with the plan being that it would ditch the fee and become free-to-play upon its full release.

That plan has changed. Dreamlight Valley will leave early access on December 5th but will remain a paid-for game.

Ebay has decided we have entered Halloween season with the publication of a SPOOKY20 code good for 20% off a range of PC gaming components and peripherals (and other stuff).

We're zeroing in on an RX 7800 XT graphics card, the best value option from AMD's RDNA 3 lineup. The Gigabyte Gaming OC model is down to £485 from a price of £560. That's a good deal, with the cheapest RX 7800 XT elsewhere coming in at £510.

If you love The Legend of Zelda: Wind Waker but wish it had more blood, death and inclement weather in it, consider Sands of Aura. Released out of early access today, this is a top-down fantasy action-RPG set in a swirling, post-apocalyptic world in which you build up a town and sail between island dungeons in a sandship.

The sandship, or rather, "grainwake" sailing sees you bouncing merrily from dunes as vast, ominous structures loom out of the haze. The combat takes some inspiration from the Souls games, but the top-down perspective makes it feel like a classic arcade action title. Boss battles involve dodging or parrying colourful streaks, waves and clusters of projectiles. The developers, 12-person Chashu Entertainment, say it's a difficult experience. It looks it.

Yesterday we looked at a pretty solid deal - a 24-inch 1440p 165Hz monitor for just $200. Today we're going one better, with a 27-inch model that costs just $160 with free shipping from Monoprice. The Dark Matter 27-inch monitor is one we've recommended before, and though it lacks the Fast IPS panel we prefer it's still a solid option at this incredibly competitive price point.

After spending hours poring over Alan Wake 2 this week, corkboards full of photos, red string and important little clue nuggets have definitely been on my brain. Alas, Remedy's horror-fuelled detective 'em up keeps its problem-solving a little too much at arm's length for my tastes. Every piece of evidence you collect has its own set place on the board, for example, and heck, even the thrill of joining the dots with a set of pins and string is taken away from you, as its deduction work is all swept up in a wave of automation.

Happily, other developers are stepping in to fill that string-based gap, and chief among them is the French-made Chronique Des Silencieux, whose Steam demo I played over lunch today. You play as a rookie detective in this charming point and click game, and your entire raison d'etre is to point out contradictions Phoenix Wright-style between testimonies you gather and the evidence you accumulate. Only instead of shouting, "Objection!" you do it by manually sticking pins and red string between the offending bits of information. It's delightful, and well worth a nose if old Alan leaves you wanting this weekend.

Capcom have unveiled the next generation of their in-house RE Engine, which came in alongside Resident Evil 7 in 2017 and has been used by a bunch of projects over the years, from the excellent Devil May Cry 5 to the forthcoming possibly-excellent Dragon's Dogma 2. RE Engine's successor, the REX engine, is a response to three things - 1) RE Engine productions getting bigger in terms of assets, and more diverse in terms of genre, 2) RE Engine games being increasingly made by overseas developers who speak different languages, and 3) unflattering comparisons with various commercial tools, like Unreal Engine and Unity.

I lost my way with Lunacid last year, early on after stumbling through a small warren of spongey enemies. Trying it again this week rewarded my patience and taught me that I'd had the tool I needed all along, but dismissed them because it didn't work immediately. Playing beyond that has elevated it from "not my thing but I should cover it because it's someone else's" to "wait, this might be my thing? Damn it".

I'm braving the long dark of Moria, and the major dilemma at present is that I can't line up my feasting table with my hearthfire. In Free Range Games's plucky dungeon sim The Lord of the Rings: Return to Moria, you're a dwarf trying to reclaim the once-proud undercity of Khazad-dûm, tunnelling between procedurally generated networks of halls and crafting your own havens and upgrade facilities from long-wrecked forges and mansions.

The game is set after Sauron's defeat at the end of The Return of the King novel (spoilers, I guess?), at a time in Middle-earth canon when most of the big names were busy shaking hands and doling out promotions, but there are still plenty of orcs, trolls and other threats to worry about in Moria. Right now, though, the real headache is that I can't make my base of operations symmetrical.

Earlier this week, Square Enix decided to ruin over a decade's worth of CD collecting by sticking all of their incredible Final Fantasy Piano Collection soundtracks online, for free, on pretty much every streaming service imaginable. The sheer cheek of it! Honestly, I'm still mildly shocked by it all. Just the thought of all that brilliant music, available to everyone, for zero pence and import fees. What an outstanding gift to the world. (Well, the real gift would be re-printing the fabled Final Fantasy X-2 Piano Collections CD and/or sticking that online as well, if you ask me, but hey, I'll allow them this one little omission).

After all, there's an absolute treasure trove of music you lucky lot get to dig into now, so if you're wondering where to start or just fancy yet another guided tour through some of Final Fantasy's best music tracks, allow me to forcibly volunteer myself to regale you with some of my personal favourite highlights.

The psychiatrist Viktor E. Frankl posited that humans are motivated, above almost all else, to search for meaning in their lives. He would probably be unsurprised, if more than slightly confused, to see that spirit manifest in a rumour that the rubbish performance of Cities: Skylines 2 is being caused by excessive teeth.

A widely-shared reddit post suggests that rendering the highly detailed chompers of Skylines 2’s citizenry, who lack the LOD (level of detail) implementation that would reduce their model quality at a distance, is a major cause behind the game’s inability to pump out frames per second. Developers Colossal Order disagree, and have put out a statement denying this "bizarre story."

You can probably guess what’s coming. Alan Wake 2’s PC performance has been the subject of nervous uh oh-ing since well before the release of its onerous system requirements; Remedy comms director Thomas Puha even implored players to "look at the image quality" instead of framerates, like Dean Learner exalting the storytelling of Punch of Judy.

Actually, that’s not fair. Alan Wake 2 is much more enjoyable than Punch and Judy. And, like Remedyverse predecessor Control, there is something impressive about just how much visual tech you can choose to put on show: ray tracing, path tracing, Nvidia Ray Reconstruction, frame generation via DLSS 3, the lot. This wealth of options has produced the most intricate settings guides I’ve put together in ages, and you can consult it yourself lower down this page.

Crytek's Hunt: Showdown may yet receive a single-player campaign, if the stars align, as the developers dig ever deeper into the asymmetrical multiplayer shooter's wonderfully plague-ridden narrative backdrop. Originally released out of Steam and Xbox early access in 2019, the game introduced single player PvE trials back in June 2020, much to Alice0's enthusiasm. It also now sports a scripted, voiced tutorial in which you stalk around farmhouses, learning the ropes and murdering wooden dummies at the behest of a leathery dude in the bushes. Could some kind of proper story component follow? Crytek have certainly thought about it.

You haven't even downloaded Remedy's Alan Wake 2 yet, assuming you're planning to, which means it's already time to start thinking about what you'll do once you've finished it. Apologies, the news beat is a cruel mistress and the present is always past, but in my defence, jumping irresponsibly around the timeline does make sense for a supernatural horror game that follows two characters through different dimensions.

Remedy's plans for the game include a chunky New Game+ mode, aka "Final Draft", which will hopefully arrive in late November, and two DLC packs, Night Springs and The Lake House. The first concerns Alan Wake's fictional in-game TV show, a homage to the Twilight Zone, while the second involves "an independent government organization" that can surely only be the Federal Bureau of Control.

Destructible money-grabbing multiplayer shooter The Finals is now available to play in open beta. The beta runs until November 5th and includes three maps, a new mode, and sixteen unlockable rewards that will carry over to the full launch.

Foxhole is a massively multiplayer battlefield in which players can be frontline soldiers or part of a rear detachment providing supplies and logistical support. A major free update is out today, Naval Warfare, which as the name suggets brings that persistent online war to the sea, with gunboats, destroyers and beach landings to contend with.

Even after several years of updates and an excellent expansion, Cyberpunk 2077 still isn't bug-free. I said as much in my Phantom Liberty review. The difference now versus launch back in 2020 is that the bugs are now within acceptable limits.

CDPR continue to fix them, too. Patch 2.02 is out now.

Ubisoft's multiplayer Jolly Rog 'em up Skull and Bones is caught on the reefs once again. Recently tipped to appear in early fiscal year 2023-2024, it's now due to make landfall in the publisher's FYQ4 - sometime between January and March 2024. What's the Golden Age of Piracy equivalent for "vapourware"? I'm picturing a spectral vessel like the Flying Dutchman, crewed by glum-faced producers and with a big grimacing statue of company CEO Yves Guillemot affixed to the prow.

The troubled naval combat sim isn't the only Ubisoft project experiencing misadventures. As revealed in their latest earnings report, the publisher have also pushed back a mysterious "large game", originally due to launch before the end of their current fiscal year, to the next fiscal year, which means at some point after 31st March 2024. Speculation runs rife that the anonymous blockbuster is Ubisoft Massive's Star Wars Outlaws.

Valve have spent the past year or so gradually updating the Steam interface, partly to bring parity across its various forms such as the handheld Steam Deck and on-the-telly Big Picture mode. Now it's virtual reality's turn, with the launch of SteamVR 2.0.

Every road network I ever constructed in Cities: Skylines had deep-rooted performance issues I'd then spend dozens more happy hours trying to unravel. I hope Colossal Order are having a similarly fun time trying to fix the performance issues present in Cities: Skylines 2, which launched earlier this week. The first patch is out now and it includes optimisations for rendering, fog, depth-of-field and more designed to make the citybuilder's framerates less gridlocked.

Here's something you don't see every day: a 24-inch gaming monitor with a resolution of 2560x1440. It's much more common to see 27-inch monitors at this resolution, with a 24-inch screen providing a sharper image as a result of a higher DPI. This model from Chinese manufacturer Koorui also comes with a Fast IPS panel with 1ms GtG pixel response times and a 165Hz refresh rate, making it a great choice for fast-paced gaming too.

This Koorui monitor has also been reduced in price, dropping from an initial MSRP of $400 to just $200 after a cool 50% reduction - with a $15 gift card thrown in too.

WD's Black SN770 is one of many PCIe 4.0 SSDs that's come down in price substantially over the last year, and it's now possible to get this drive in a gargantuan 2TB size for less than $87. That's around $100 less than these drives cost one year ago, after first debuting for an eye-watering $270 in February 2022!