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As Alec wrote in his Styx: Shards of Darkness review, what the goblin stealth ’em up has going for it is purity. It’s a third-person adventure where stealth is the only option and being spotted is swiftly punished.
It’s currently free from GOG.com.
Cheap graphics cards are practically mythical these days, which is great news for gaming obsessed unicorns and centaurs, less so for us mere mortals trapped in boring old reality. But there is one last torchbearer of the budget GPU, and weirdly enough that’s Intel. If you happen to live in the US, then you can get your hands on the best cheap 1080p graphics card for a smidge more than $200 for Black Friday.
Now I know the idea of Intel making graphics cards sounds almost as preposterous as horses with horns, but they’ve been at it for a while. Granted, they’ve not been especially good at it for most of that time. The original launch of the Arc series was pretty disappointing. But Intel have worked to imrprove the performance of their GPUs, and now the Arc A750 is an excellent 1080p offering.
It’s also a perfectly acceptable card for those looking to make their first-steps into the world of Ray-tracing. As James notes in his review “if you’re specifically looking to try ray tracing on the cheap, know that the Arc A750 turns the tables on the RX 6650 XT with these kinds of settings. Where the A750 produced 47fps in Hitman, the RX 6650 XT could only manage 29fps, an even steeper drop from its respective rasterised performance.”
The Steam Deck is a wonderful piece of hardware, but if you purchased the 64GB version of Valve’s transformative handheld, it isn’t going to be long before you’re struggling for storage space. Modern games are large, to the point where some titles, like Baldur’s Gate 3, wouldn’t even fit on the basic model. Luckily, the Deck’s drive space can be expanded through slotting in a MicroSD card. And wouldn’t you know it? One of the best budget MicroSD cards is even cheaper than usual Black Friday.
VR might not have revolutionised the games industry as its early advocates predicted, but it has spawned a whole new way of playing games, which is arguably far more interesting. We’ve reached the point where if you don’t own a VR headset, you’re missing out on some genuinely fantastic titles, from stone cold masterpieces like Half-Life: Alyx, to exciting experiments like The Last Clockwinder and the 7th Guest. Luckily, you can get one of the best VR headsets around for a heavy discount this Black Friday, and you’ll also get some Amazon credit on top. Bargain!
Intel CPUs have disappointed twice this year, first with the why-even-bother Raptor Lake Refresh generation and now with a notable lack of decent Black Friday deals. There’s a small handful of 13th-gen chips at good prices, but nothing on par with the AMD Ryzen 7 5800X or Ryzen 7800X3D that Will highlighted earlier this week.
I have, however, spotted a surprise £20 discount on the Intel Core i7-14700K, which just happens to be the only CPU in the new 14th-gen lineup that actually is worth buying. And so, just as it carried the Raptor Lake Refresh launch, so too must it redeem Intel’s Black Friday showing.
I was just pondering writing something about Subnautica, inspired by news that there’s a new Subnautica project on the boil, and along comes the decidedly Subnautica-esque Honeycomb: The World Beyond with a new trailer. Developed by Polish team Frozen Way, whose other projects include, erm, Hairdresser Simulator, it casts you as Hennessy, a human xenobiologist who is starting afresh on the alien planet of Sota7.
As in Unknown Worlds’ survival sim, you’ll search various biomes for resources, build solar-powered habitats on stilts with nice, wide windows, and gradually amass a database of local animals and plants. Unlike in Subnautica, you won’t be constantly at risk of suffocation.
I know this is the second Crucial P5 Plus deal we’ve posted about in two days, but hey, it’s Black Friday week. ‘Tis the season. Besides, this time there’s something for us Britain-dwelling lot as well, as the 2TB P5 Plus’s price has been slashed 60% to £88 on Amazon UK – the lowest it’s ever been.
This is, to be clear, an almost mystifyingly small amount of money for a 2TB NVMe SSD that’s also capable of real high-end transfer speeds and game load times. Maybe not to the standards of its successor, the Crucial T500, but this is still a competitively quick-acting drive with oodles of space for game installations. The same goes for its heatsink-equipped edition, which also happens to be on sale in the US at $88, making it (currently) cheaper than the non-heatsink 2TB model. Good deals all round, then – told you ‘twas the season.
Made by solo dev Andy Brophy, Knuckle Sandwich is a turn-based RPG that’s about guiding a bloke through an island paradise and eventually uncovering some weird mystery. Its main hook? Turn-based battles are filled with WarioWare-style minigames, many of which are unique to the kooky residents or rats you come up against. Unfortunately, I’d say its main hook is actually its most painful barb, and one you’re barely able to extract by flicking some switches in the settings menu. A shame then, as exploring its strange world and absorbing its bonkers story beats is a wonderful thing marred by dire fights.
Let’s get this out of the way first: KnifePlayground: Horror Battle Royale is an absolutely terrible name for game. You might as well call Halo “GunMap: Alien Crowd Control”, or Baldur’s Gate 3 “TownDungeon: Party Enhancement Simulator”. But the project beneath the moniker has something to it. Announced just today and created by small Brazilian team MadMozer, it’s a first-person, multiplayer-focussed, Unreal Engine deathgame that traps you in a randomly generated mansion with a bunch of archetypal horror movie munsters – demon clowns, cursed puppets, toothy ghouls and hooded axe-murderers.
Black Friday week has already yielded some tempting deals on Nvidia’s latest mid-range graphics cards, the RTX 4060 and the RTX 4060 Ti. Up at the top of the GPU pyramid, meanwhile, AMD cards are getting in the act as well. Like, say, this £200-off deal on the MSI Radeon RX 7900 XTX Gaming Trio Classic, bringing it down to £900. Still a lot of money, sure, but the RX 7900 XTX is the absolute crème de la crème of the current Radeon lineup, with native 4K performance on par with that of Nvidia’s RTX 4080.
