Indie dev Antonio Freyre is at it again making stealth games, and has released the delightful No Sun to Worship, to the world. In this little stealth indie things have very clearly gone bad for humankind, and you’re a person charged with making it worse for whoever’s employing you one sabotage, murder, and assassination at a time.

No Sun to Worship is a stealth game where you’re a single person infiltrating larger groups, one where a meter shows how much noise you’re making and how visible you are: Your stance and movement are as important as light and sound. Missions have multiple ways to complete, with a clock to beat on subsequent plays and a hard mode if you want to “get your ass kicked.”

“A short, minimalist stealth-action game about the importance of art. We painted the sky ashen gray. Burned the heavens to starve each other. Now we walk an endless cemetery of regret,” is how developer Freyre describes it. Which I’d say—as someone who reads a whole lot of gam…

Ever received an email from someone claiming to be your long-lost relative, stranded without their wallet and passport during a vacation, and begging for $1,000 to make it back home? We all know it’s a classic scam. But let’s be honest, even the savviest among us can fall for something like that, and AI is making it even tougher to tell when someone’s trying to take us for a ride. The FTC (Federal Trade Commission) is now giving us a heads-up about a fresh con game where scammers actually call unsuspecting victims, pretending to be their own family members and using AI tools to make it more convincing.

Federal Trade Commission Chair Lina Khan (via Bloomberg) said at a recent event that we “need to be vigilant early” as AI tools develop, because we’ve already seen how these AI tools can “supercharge” fraud.

Khan was talking about crooks grabbing snippets of people’s voices from social media and training AI to mimic them. They use AI-powered text-to-speech software to feed…

After a ridiculously successful launch, dodging accusations of copyright infringement, and a great new patch, Palworld has confirmed the next step for the survival game that’s best known for giving adorable monsters guns: Palworld merchandise, which most players hope means plushies. 

“We are thrilled to announce that Palworld merchandise will be available for pre-order sales at Aniplex’s directly-managed select shop, Aniplex Online,” tweets the official Palworld account. “Product lineup details will be announced on Aniplex’s shop website later on. Please look forward to the ever-expanding Palworld!”

A prior tweet also confirms that Pocketpair has teamed up with Sony Music Entertainment (Japan) and Aniplex to carry out this new merchandise plan. Aniplex is known for producing and distributing anime series, but its store also sells merch like plushies and scale figures. So it’s understandable that most of the replies to Pocketpair’s tweet are just fans asking for vari…

Last week Snapdragon claimed that Windows games “just work” on its latest ARM chip, the Snapdragon X Elite. At the time we said we’d believe it when we see it. Well, now we’re seeing it. A small glimpse of it, anyways. Devin Arthur on X has filmed an X Elite laptop running Baldur’s Gate 3 at around 30 fps reportedly without any sort of porting taking place.

The video isn’t very long (via NotebookCheck) and only covers the starting area of Baldur’s Gate 3. The fps counter in the upper left-hand corner of the screen clearly shows it bouncing around just under the 30 fps mark, at least.

You have to appreciate what’s actually going on behind the scenes to see why this sort of performance could be a pretty big deal for gaming systems. The game has been developed exclusively for x86 systems: exclusively those built on x86 chips—Intel or AMD chips. The laptop, powered by the Snapdragon X Elite, is running Qualcomm’s own custom configuration of the ARM instruction set. To …

After some leaked screenshots from the EA app let the cat out of the bag last week, EA has revealed the full details on two new Sims 4 DLC kits coming this week. The Castle Estate Kit and Goth Galore Kit were both born out of themes voted on by players last summer and are launching this Thursday.

As a forever build mode player, the Castle kit is going to be my territory. The announcement post gives a preview of all 25 different stone structure choices including grand doorways, a portcullis, and several glass window options that I’m hoping have stained glass swatches. EA gave a pretty nice garden estate example in that post and I’m sure I’ll see increasingly ambitious builds once players get their hands on all those arches.

The Goth kit, on the other hand, I’m less thrilled by. Even as someone who spends minimal time in Create-A-Sim, I can spot at least five items—a leather jacket, dress, two tops, and a full body outfit—that look rather similar to existing cl…

Press releases from technology organisations can sometimes be really exciting, often very predictable, and occasionally rather sparse. A recent announcement from the PCI-SIG, though, that says new PCI Express internal and external cables will use a CopprLink naming scheme, but nothing else, almost seems not worth announcing at all.

All of the team at PC Gamer get countless press releases in their inboxes, which is great as that makes finding news quite a bit easier. We got one the other day from the PCI-SIG (PCI Special Interest Group) that looked quite interesting to begin with but ultimately left us feeling somewhat exasperated by the absolute dearth of information.

It said, and I quote, “PCI-SIG announced the new naming scheme for PCIe Internal and External Cables will be CopprLink. The PCIe 5.0 and PCIe 6.0 Internal and External Cable Specifications are currently in development and are targeted for release in 2024.”

That was it. Nothing about the cable…

Who says you’ve got to wait for next week’s Amazon Prime Day PC gaming deals to get a good price on gaming peripherals? Walmart is offering the Xbox Wireless Headset for only $50, which is half its usual price and the cheapest we’ve seen it since launch.

I really like the unique design of the Xbox Wireless Headset. It features convenient media controls through rotating earcups on each side, which are flat, allowing you to lay them on their side. It may seem like a small thing, but it’s the main reason that two years down the road, I still prefer this headset over more expensive gaming headsets.

The headset performs well out of the box, although if you want to make any adjustments or install firmware updates, you’ll need to use the Xbox Accessories app. Regarding usefulness, I rate the Xbox Accessories app as ‘Not Awful’ compared to other apps that handle PC peripherals like HyperX Ngenuity or Razer Synapse.

Since the launch of the $125 Starfield Xbox Wireless Heads…

Well it’s not every day that a PC Gamer writer stumbles across an indie horror collection themed around an alt-history and deeply cursed version of PC Gamer, but here we are (thanks Dominic Tarason for the spot). PC Cursed is an impressively elaborate and free grab-bag of 22 indie horror games which comes complete with a 60-page version of the imaginary magazine and even printable CD inlays (because the whole schtick is that this is a lost 1998 cover disc).

The collection is the work of Jacob Jazz and ends on one of their own games, and the whole shebang can be had for free here. I started off by playing a game called The Pizza, a lo-fi first-person experience where the setup is you’re someone getting ready for guests and ordering in the pizzas. As soon as my character ordered four pineapple pizzas I knew they were screwed and, sure enough, the game freaked me out before delivering a jump scare that had me quickly moving on with a mix of fear and adrenaline in my…

Update 26/04/23: This piece has been updated to include statements from Microsoft and Activision.

Original story: The UK’s Competition and Markets Authority (CMA) has unexpectedly moved to block Microsoft’s $69 billion acquisition of Activision Blizzard over concerns the merger would “alter the future of the fast-growing cloud gaming market”.

In a statement made today, the CMA said “The final decision to prevent the deal comes after Microsoft’s proposed solution failed to effectively address the concerns in the cloud gaming sector”. Those concerns were raised in the regulator’s findings last February, when the CMA provisionally said it would oppose the deal over its concerns regarding cloud gaming.

So, clearly, everyone saw this coming, right? Not quite. Despite the dour prognosis that February’s provisional findings seemed to serve up, the CMA underwent something of a U-turn last month, announcing that “a significant amo…