4 NEW PC WINDOWS GAMES

The Sinking City – March 21

Frogwares’s Sherlock Holmes series is the closest I’ve come to a gaming guilty pleasure. They’re low budget, often buggy, the cases you solve hit-or-miss, and the mechanics for finding a solution even more inconsistent. And yet they often rise above their station, delivering excellent character moments for Holmes and Watson, or seizing on a neat detective game gimmick (like Crimes and Punishments with its red herring endings).

Point being: I’m always interested in what Frogwares is up to, even if the results aren’t perfect. And with Cyanide’s 2018 Call of Cthulhu game a mess, that makes  our best hope for a truly unsettling mythos experience. The cinematic trailer below gives me no idea whether this is mostly an action game or a detective game, but I’m at least excited to find out.

Sekiro: Shadows Die Twice – March 22

Dark Souls is dead. Long live Dark Souls. If you believe From Software, the Dark Souls series is finished forever. That doesn’t mean From Software is done making that style of game though.

Enter Sekiro: Shadows Die Twice ($60 preorder on  game, but Sekiro takes those ideas—deliberate combat, pattern recognition, grand boss battles, impenetrable lore—and transposes them to Japan’s Sengoku period. It is, in so many ways, recognizable as a From Software game.

And yet it’s not afraid to deviate from Dark Souls as well. Exploration is more active, as your character has a grappling hook-arm that allows him to leap to rooftops and branches or swing across gaps. That, in turn, makes stealth a viable option—either bypassing enemies entirely or leaping down on them unawares for a quick kill.

Mortal Kombat XI 

We don't know much about Mortal Kombat XI yet. Announced in December at The Game Awards, all we've seen is a single CGI trailer of Dark Raiden fighting two Scorpions. That means uh...well, Dark Raiden and Scorpion are in the game. It also seems like the character customization elements of Injustice 2 will make it over to this latest Mortal Kombat. But what will the campaign look like? That's what I'm most curious to see. The seamless cinematic-driven campaigns of Mortal Kombat IX andX weregreat, but after four games (including the Injustices) it seems like it might be time for a shakeup. Rumors claim Mortal Kombat XI will include a full-on adventure mode with a map to explore, a la 2005's Shaolin Monks, but we'll see.                                                                                                               

Rage 2 – May 14

still find it hard to believe Bethesda’s funding Rage 2 ($60 on  was great. Maybe another of Bethesda’s weird bets will pay off. After all, Rage 2 mashes up id’s shooting with Avalanche’s Mad Max driving, which certainly sounds like a winning combination.The question is whether the story can pull its weight as well. Lest we forget, the first Rage played pretty well. It was just boring as hell. Rage 2 seems to be shifting towards a quirkier Borderlands-lite style of humor, which might help propel the action along...or might get old quick. It’s hard to tell.