First premiered at the Future Game Show, I was intrigued by The Bookwalker: Thief of Tales’ Dishonored-like stylized Victorian vibe, and then pleasantly surprised indeed to see it already has a free Steam demo and impending June 22 release date. I decided to load into that demo to see about all this tale thieving myself.

Bookwalker primarily plays like a point-and-click adventure, but it also has turn-based battles and tight resource management, a combination that reminds me of last year’s Sunday Gold. The Bookwalker also boasts an interesting dual-world mechanic where you switch between first-person exploration of an apartment building in the “real” world, and the isometric puzzling and battling of its “fictional” worlds. 

You play as a writer in a surreal, alte…

The Diablo 4 beta that ran over the weekend was really good—a return to form for Blizzard in the eyes of many fans, myself included. But it was also rough around the edges in a number of notable ways. The reason, Diablo general manager Rod Fergusson told Eurogamer, is simple: It was a real, actual beta test.

“‘Beta’ has been a twisted word that has become ‘marketing beta’, which means demo, and for us this was a true beta because we wanted to be able to test that load and what does it mean to get a lot of players in?” Fergusson said. “And Friday was a little bumpy because of that, but the way that we looked at it is the issues we find now are issues that will be a lot smoother at launch. And so this weekend was to prepare for next weekend, and next weekend prepares for launc…

If you thought Intel had already strung every drop of performance out of its top Raptor Lake die, you’d be wrong. Though it does appear that it’s getting tougher and tougher for the company to crank up clock speeds. The unreleased Core i9 14900KS has been spotted in the OCCT benchmark database with a supposed multiplier of 62x—it’s aiming at 6.2GHz, effectively—and with peak wattage exceeding 400W.

Crikey, that’s one helluva hungry computer chip, as spotted by Benchleaks on X. That’s the sort of wattage we can expect from a high-end graphics card. Though this is only two limited benchmark runs and the final product hasn’t been announced yet.

The benchmark in question does offer a little insight into the proposed computer chip. It’d maintain the same combination o…

CPU design has been undergoing something of a shake-up recently, what with the addition of NPUs into the mix and some radical configurations and chip construction techniques to optimise them. Flow Computing, however, has an even more radical suggestion. It’s touting a co-processor architecture that gives regular old CPUs a helping hand, with claims of up to a 100x performance increase after some software trickery.

Flow is a startup backed by Finland’s state-owned VTT research organisation (via Techcrunch), and its proposal is to add a Parallel Processing Unit (PPU) integrated into a co-processor that works alongside a traditional CPU to help traffic-manage incoming tasks. 

Modern, multicore CPUs can handle dozens of threads at a time, but synchronising them all and hand…

There’s a change in Cyberpunk 2077 2.0 so small players might not have noticed it, simply swapping the model used for one background NPC in the corpo prologue. Players did notice it, however, because some of them believe the original model was intended to be an Elon Musk cameo.

According to a recent biography of the world’s wealthiest person by Walter Isaacson, Musk showed up to CD Projekt’s office while wielding a 200-year-old gun to demand a cameo in Cyberpunk 2077. That doesn’t mean they actually put him in there, though.

When one Twitter user posted before-and-after screenshots with the lament, “Oh my god they removed the Elon Musk cameo from the Corpo opening in Cyberpunk 2077”, senior quest designer Patrick K. Mills couldn’t help but comment. “That wasn’t Elon musk, it…

PC Gamer’s 30th anniversary issue is on-sale today, and includes a slew of major interviews with some of the creatives that have shaped the most important games in history. One of those is System Shock, and Warren Spector told PCG’s editor Robert Jones his major contribution was to stop “it many times from getting killed.” The same roundtable also included Larry Kuperman and Stephen Kick of Nightdive Studios, which developed the recent (excellent) remake, who had an interesting observation to make about that game’s reception.

Part of its nature as an immersive game was that System Shock didn’t hold players’ hands: it gave them objectives, sure, but then it’s up to you to work out where you need to go and what to do. It avoids things like the breadcrumb trails so perv…

Long-running strategy series Dominions gets a new entry this week, as Dominions 6: Rise of the Pantokrator will launch on January 17, 2024. The Dominions series has players take on the role of a powerful demigod-creature attempting to become the  next god of gods, the Pantokrator. The deep, complex strategy games are known for their wild variety of pretender gods, units, factions, and magic spells.

Dominions is a core series for people who love niche, complex strategy games focusing on incredible flexibility. The core parts of the gameplay, which for much of the community focuses on multiplayer, are about assembling a magical economy to support carefully-constructed armies of mundane and mythical troops. So at its simplest you might raise an army of frost giants in order to s…