It has been a while since a traditional roguelike RPG caught my eye, but no longer: Path of Achra is a dark fantasy game of an ancient earth where gods and sorcerers battle with mighty warriors and heroes. You’re an adventurer on the path through Achra seeking the Obelisk beyond, which you do via a series of little mini-roguelike dungeon areas, each small enough to fit on a single screen.

Self-described by the developer as a “broken build sandbox,” Path of Achra has that special sauce that lets you really enjoy mixing and matching all kinds of weird starting classes, origins, and gods—all of which give you powers—with its ten paths of magic and abilities. That’s stuff  like elemental magics, but also necromancy, astral powers, psychic abilities, and blood magic.

Achra’s combat is all about triggering effects: Combining stuff like when you move, when you hit, or when you stop near an enemy to cascade into further powers and scythe down enemies at scale. Y…

Like most PlayStation first-party games, God of War Ragnarök requires a PSN account. A fact that we’ve known about since the State of Play earlier this year, alongside a short blog post that mentions this in italics at the bottom of the page. But just because it hasn’t come as a surprise doesn’t mean that players are happy with this outcome.

God of War: Ragnarök is currently at a “mixed” review status on Steam, thanks to some players review bombing the game. “PSN requirement is ridiculous,” one review says. “It’s a shame. I’m a big fan of the God of War series, but I’m not on board with this ransom approach.”

Although some are willing to look the other way, that is, if Sony adheres to a short set of demands: “Sony has managed to really piss off pc gamers with this one. They need to do something to make amends with the pc community. First, they need to backtrack on this PSN thing—then, they can announce Bloodborne for pc. If they do this, we’ll forgive t…

While you might be sick of all the live service games that swarmed us last year, there’s every chance you’ve played at least one one for a substantial amount of time—Fortnite, Destiny 2, Apex Legends—these games are popular for a reason.

The fact remains that if a company can find the golden goose, it’ll be set for years if not decades. This has led, however, to a ton of otherwise promising games signing their own death warrant—Suicide Squad: Kill the Justice League is this year’s prime example. If they don’t perform well immediately, they’ll shut their doors months later—years, if they’re lucky.

Digital Extremes (Warframe) CEO Steve Sinclair argues in an interview with VGC, however, that companies are too quick to pull the ripcord if their games don’t do gangbusters on release: “They think the release is make or break, and it’s not. They have a financial way to be persistent, and they never do it … It comes out, doe…

As part of the bountiful season of videogames we now have instead of E3, the Xbox and Bethesda Games Showcase included the announcement of Persona 3 Reload, a remake of a JRPG that only just arrived on PC with the port of Persona 3 Portable in January of this year. A subsequent IGN interview has revealed the remake won’t include content that was added in either Persona 3 Portable or Persona 3 FES, most significantly the option to play as a woman instead of the default male protagonist.

“So first I’d like to mention that since the basic concept of the Persona 3 remake was to remake the Persona 3, we don’t have the FES and Portable contents included,” Persona 3 Reload’s producer Ryota Niitsuma told IGN. “We wanted to really genuinely work on recreating the Persona 3 experience.”

Persona 3 FES, short for “festival”, was an expansion/director’s cut that added an epilogue called The Answer, which fans of the series tend to consider redundant at best, but it also expanded on t…

A raid by the Norway House RCMP (Royal Canadian Mounted Police) turned up “nine firearms that were illegally owned and obtained, over 130 grams of a substance believed to be crack cocaine, machetes, a sword, bear mace, and ammunition”, according to a news release posted to its website yesterday.

The raid was part of an ongoing investigation into illegal firearms and controlled substances, leading to the arrest of “Larson Cromarty, 26, and a 17-year-old male youth”. The RCMP posted a photo alongside the release, but anyone familiar with everyone’s favourite bad boy Arthas Menethil knows “a sword” is selling this bad boy short.

The replica (I hope) is of Frostmourne, the mourneblade of the Lich King of Warcraft fame. Aside from apparently being a popular means of home defence in Canada, Frostmourne has the power to shatter or entrap the souls of its victims, and can raise the dead. It’s one of gaming’s most iconic weapons, taking its place in the hall of fame alongside Kra…

Apple has long been cozy with TSMC, the manufacturer of the chips that end up in ever-popular iPhone, iPad and Mac products. When you’ve got as much cash on hand as Apple does, it puts it in a favorable position to negotiate deals with the Taiwan-based chipmaker. Now it is reportedly seeking to lock in 100% of TSMC’s bleeding edge 2nm production capacity, giving it a competitive advantage when products eventually make their way to the market.

According to 9to5mac (via Extreme tech), Apple’s chief operating officer met with TSMC bosses to negotiate terms to secure 2nm capacity. The report cites ‘local sources’, so there needs to be a pinch of salt here, but given Apple’s track record of locking up TSMC’s capacity, this would certainly come as no surprise.

TSMC’s 2nm process is currently scheduled to enter risk production in 2025, with volume production set for the second half of 2025. That means the upcoming iPhone 16 family with A18 chips will stick with 3nm, but it coul…

I found the Deflecting Hard Tear super early in my Shadow of the Erdtree playthrough, went “well, that’s neat,” and promptly forgot about it for a good 40 hours or so. It turns out, though, that this confusingly-described Physick mix-in is an utter game-changer worth basing an entire build around. “Enhances spontaneous guard” basically means “Turn Elden Ring into Sekiro.”

I’ve never been able to nail the Souls series’ picosecond-long, intensely unforgiving parry windows, but like many people I fell in love with the perfect guard system in Sekiro: Shadows Die Twice. Time your block to just when an enemy hits, and you’ll avoid all the damage, filling up your enemy’s stagger bar instead. The timing’s pretty generous, and if you don’t get it exactly right, you’ll still block the enemy attack at the cost of filling up your own stagger bar. It’s a system I was always hoping FromSoft would bring back, and I was delighted to see Capcom crib off From’s notes in the Resident Evil 4 Rema…

Watch On

“But can it run Doom?” is an adage that has managed to travel through almost every piece of tech on the market. From controlling the game with a toaster to running Doom on a pregnancy test (please wash your hands after), it has almost become a benchmark of geeky creativity. 

A joint effort from researchers at Google Research, Google DeepMind, and Tel Aviv University has managed to get the classic shooter running on nothing but a neural network (via Futurism). This essentially generates a frame, based on a model that is trained on the real game. You can check out a video of it running in real-time right here but there are natural limitations to it. 

For the unaware, a neural network is an AI structure modelled after the human brain that uses machine learning to process commands and prompts. They are notably used in predictive models, due to their ability to grasp concepts more broadly than traditional AI. 

A large part of making them better i…

Win today’s Wordle your way. Refresh your daily game with our guides and general tips, take a look at a helpful clue if you’d prefer a general pointer, or if you simply want to make sure you win, feel free to scroll or click straight to the answer to the January 14 (574) puzzle—it’s entirely up to you.

I love it when a plan comes together, or more accurately, when a little flash of inspiration hits me out of nowhere and turns what feels like a ridiculous idea into a solid green line of Wordle winning.

Wordle hint

A Wordle hint for Saturday, January 14

The answer to today’s Wordle is the name of a grey, furry, and pretty cute Australian marsupial that likes to spend a lot of time in eucalyptus trees munching on their leaves. There are two vowels to find today, with one of them used twice. 

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Wordle help: 3 tips for beating Wordle every day 

If there’s one thing better than playing Wordle, it’s playin…

All the Wordle help you need is waiting just below, and that’s true whether you’re after some general tips and tricks, a targeted clue for the August 2 (774) game, or today’s answer delivered in a single click. Let’s help you win Wordle the way you want to.

I thought I was lucky when I revealed two greens on my first go, but today’s puzzle turned out to be a close call. No matter what I tried I just couldn’t find any other letters of any colour for too many goes—and when I finally did, it took another guess to unearth the today’s Wordle answer.

Today’s Wordle hint

A Wordle hint for Wednesday, August 2

Today’s answer is a biblically old way of describing a man’s offspring, as well as an alternative way of saying something causes or produces a particular effect. “Violence ____s violence”, for example. There’s only one vowel today.      

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Is there a double letter in today’s Wordle? 

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