I love a good "Ah-ha" moment. I love them even more when they actually lead to the right word, and not something that's close but not quite there. Hmm. If only Wordle could tell when I typed with enthusiasm, and gave me an extra nudge for my efforts. Still, at least I had enough rows spare to correct my mistake.

Wordle today: A hint

Wordle today: A hint for Sunday, December 29

Today's answer is a kind of lively modern latin dance. Not a rumba or a cha-cha, the other one.  

Is there a double letter in Wordle today? 

Yes, a letter is used twice in today's puzzle.

Wordle help: 3 tips for beating Wordle every day 

If you've decided to play Wordle but you're not sure where to start, I'll help set you on the path to your first winning streak. Make all your guesses count and become a Wordle winner with these quick tips: 

• A good opener has a mix of common vowels and consonants. 
• The answer could contain the same letter, repeated.
• Avoid words that include letters you've already eliminated. 

You're not racing against the clock so there's no reason to rush. In fact, it's not a bad idea to treat the game like a casual newspaper crossword and come back to it later if you're coming up blank. Sometimes stepping away for a while means you can come back with a fresh perspective. 

Today's Wordle answer

What is today's Wordle answer?

One easy Sunday win? Sure thing. The answer to the December 29 (1289) Wordle is MAMBO.

Previous Wordle answers

The last 10 Wordle answers 

Previous Wordle solutions can help to eliminate guesses for today's Wordle, as the answer isn't likely to be repeated. They can also give you some solid ideas for starting words that keep your daily puzzle-solving fresh.

Here are some recent Wordle answers:

• December 28: DECRY
• December 27: GRAIN
• December 26: AFFIX
• December 25: SHARE
• December 24: EAGLE
• December 23: SAUNA
• December 22: BRAWN
• December 21: BLADE
• December 20: FLASH
• December 19: STRAY

Learn more about Wordle 

There are six rows of five boxes presented to you by Wordle each day, and you'll need to work out which five-letter word is hiding among them to win the daily puzzle.

Start with a strong word like ALIVE—or any other word with a good mix of common consonants and multiple vowels. You should also avoid starting words with repeating letters, so you don't waste the chance to confirm or eliminate an extra letter. Once you've typed your guess and hit Enter, you'll see which letters you've got right or wrong. If a box turns ⬛️, it means that letter isn't in the secret word at all. 🟨 means the letter is in the word, but not in that position. 🟩 means you've got the right letter in the right spot.

Your second guess should compliment the first, using another "good" word to cover any common letters you might have missed on the first row—just don't forget to avoid any letter you now know for a fact isn't present in today's answer. After that, it's just a case of using what you've learned to narrow your guesses down to the correct word. You have six tries in total and can only use real words and don't forget letters can repeat too (eg: BOOKS).

If you need any further advice feel free to check out our Wordle tips, and if you'd like to find out which words have already been used you can scroll to the relevant section above. 

Originally, Wordle was dreamed up by software engineer Josh Wardle, as a surprise for his partner who loves word games. From there it spread to his family, and finally got released to the public. The word puzzle game has since inspired tons of games like Wordle, refocusing the daily gimmick around music or math or geography. It wasn't long before Wordle became so popular it was sold to the New York Times for seven figures. Surely it's only a matter of time before we all solely communicate in tricolor boxes. 

Hey, have you heard about this game about digging a hole that's coming out next year? It's called A Game About Digging A Hole and that's pretty much what it's about. You dig a hole in your backyard and find treasure and ores and you sell all that stuff and use the money to buy other stuff to make digging go faster and get richer from digging up more stuff to sell, ad nauseum, until you're very rich from digging a hole in A Game About Digging A Hole.

It's also very clear from the trailer that nothing further of interest aside from the digging will occur.

Developed in about two weeks, A Game About Digging A Hole was made in Unreal Engine 5 by developer Cyberwave, who'll also be releasing their (much longer in development) survival crafting title Solarpunk some time in 2025. A Game About Digging A Hole will also release in 2025, and no price is available yet, though the Steam page says it "Costs as much as a ☕ coffee, but is fun for longer!"

"Dig deep, sell what you find, update your equiptment to continue your journey further and further. With every spadeful you dig, you get closer to the truth. There's no rush, no rules - just you and the adventure underground," says the developer.

A Game About Digging A Hole was apparently inspired by old school Flash game Motherload, which a lot of people reading this are not old enough to remember but which several other people will have heard the name of and will immediately have a full-body flashback to their middle school computer lab, complete with smells.

You can find A Game About Digging A Hole on Steam, where it will release in 2025.

Oh, right, what the hell? That is a lot of game releases. According to ever-reliable stat tracker SteamDB, that's our total for the year, and that is a lot. Like, a whole 5,600 more than 2023 which was itself a few thousand higher than 2024. It means that 2024 is what appears to be the highest single-year jump in game releases ever tracked on Steam with no signs of the flood slowing down. More games than ever, faster than ever.

Despite the onrushing tide of games, only a few more of them made the threshold of popularity that Valve requires for community profile features to get enabled—that's when they can have profile customization like trading cards, badges, and emoticons, and when they count towards a user's Game Collector and Achievement Collector totals.

Just 3,964 games reached that total compared to 3,874 in 2023 and 3,491 in 2021—with the number dropping by a few hundred for years before that. So there are more games than ever, but only a few more of them than ever are getting noticed and played by the community.

SteamDB also has their filtered list of the best-rated games of 2024 available, where you can see that people really love Balatro, but that's probably something you already knew, isn't it? That's followed up by MiSide, WEBFISHING, The WereCleaner, Sheepy, Satisfactory, Black Myth: Wukong, TCG Card Shop Simulator, Fields of Mistria, and 20 Small Mazes.

The takeaway from that list is that if you want recognition you should just put a lot of time and effort into a nice game and give it away for free.

The NieR Series social media accounts announced the milestone by sharing an image celebrating "Over 9 Million Global Shipments & Download Sales" alongside the message "This isn't possible without you."

It's quite the testament to PlatinumGames' and creative lead Yoko Taro's vision of an action-heavy action RPG with a wildly complex and at times even confusing story. It's a series that's clearly a labor of love, with the producer insisting it'll continue as long as Taro is alive to work on it.

And, clearly, there's demand for Nier with the game selling many millions of copies now despite the lack of any sequel in sight. It's buoyed long-term by the enthusiastic community of fans around it and the sheer value of the game: It's one of those that keeps serving up new content and secret endings even as you play dozens more hours and finish it over and over.

Nier: Automata clocked a 79% PC Gamer Review back in 2017, held back more than anything by a pretty lackluster PC port.

Nier: Automata also had a pretty well-received anime adaptation that, shocking no-one, unveiled yet more secret lore and endings that involve the game itself.

Wow, that was tough. No matter what I tried, today's answer seemed to keep slipping away. Oh sure I had some yellow letters around to help, but they didn't want to turn green, and nothing else was in a rush to help. I'm relieved my final guess worked out for me, but I really wish I'd got there sooner.

Today's Wordle hint

Wordle today: A hint for Saturday, December 28

This word's all about expressing a negative opinion, whether spoken out loud in a meeting or written up in a newspaper. You could do this publicly to denounce bad company practices, or point out the flaws in a proposed ruling. 

Is there a double letter in Wordle today? 

There are no double letters in today's Wordle. 

Wordle help: 3 tips for beating Wordle every day 

A good starting word can be the difference between victory and defeat with the daily puzzle, but once you've got the basics, it's much easier to nail down those Wordle wins. And as there's nothing quite like a small victory to set you up for the rest of the day, here are a few tips to help set you on the right path: 

• A good opening guess should contain a mix of unique consonants and vowels. 
• Narrow down the pool of letters quickly with a tactical second guess.
• Watch out for letters appearing more than once in the answer.

There's no racing against the clock with Wordle so you don't need to rush for the answer. Treating the game like a casual newspaper crossword can be a good tactic; that way, you can come back to it later if you're coming up blank. Stepping away for a while might mean the difference between a win and a line of grey squares. 

Today's Wordle answer

What is today's Wordle answer?

Here's your latest win. The answer to the December 28 (1288) Wordle is DECRY.

Previous Wordle answers

The last 10 Wordle answers 

Past Wordle answers can give you some excellent ideas for fun starting words that keep your daily puzzle-solving fresh. They are also a good way to eliminate guesses for today's Wordle, as the answer is unlikely to be repeated. 

Here are some recent Wordle answers:

• December 27: GRAIN
• December 26: AFFIX
• December 25: SHARE
• December 24: EAGLE
• December 23: SAUNA
• December 22: BRAWN
• December 21: BLADE
• December 20: FLASH
• December 19: STRAY
• December 18: HEFTY

Learn more about Wordle 

Wordle gives you six rows of five boxes each day, and you'll need to work out which secret five-letter word is hiding inside them to keep up your winning streak.

You should start with a strong word like ARISE, or any other word that contains a good mix of common consonants and multiple vowels. You'll also want to avoid starting words with repeating letters, as you're wasting the chance to potentially eliminate or confirm an extra letter. Once you hit Enter, you'll see which ones you've got right or wrong. If a box turns ⬛️, it means that letter isn't in the secret word at all. 🟨 means the letter is in the word, but not in that position. 🟩 means you've got the right letter in the right spot.

Your second guess should compliment the starting word, using another "good" word to cover any common letters you missed last time while also trying to avoid any letter you now know for a fact isn't present in today's answer. With a bit of luck, you should have some coloured squares to work with and set you on the right path.

After that, it's just a case of using what you've learned to narrow your guesses down to the right word. You have six tries in total and can only use real words (so no filling the boxes with EEEEE to see if there's an E). Don't forget letters can repeat too (ex: BOOKS).

If you need any further advice feel free to check out our Wordle tips, and if you'd like to find out which words have already been used you can scroll to the relevant section above. 

Originally, Wordle was dreamed up by software engineer Josh Wardle, as a surprise for his partner who loves word games. From there it spread to his family, and finally got released to the public. The word puzzle game has since inspired tons of games like Wordle, refocusing the daily gimmick around music or math or geography. It wasn't long before Wordle became so popular it was sold to the New York Times for seven figures. Surely it's only a matter of time before we all solely communicate in tricolor boxes. 

Posted to Reddit a few days ago is a bit of footage of WoW classic characters in Alliance capital Stormwind spreading the plague amongst each other in true 2005 fashion. It's not clear how the debuff got out of the raid instance this time. Some have suggested it wasn't that precise Corrupted Blood effect from the raid, rather one created by a weaker version of boss Hakkar the Soulflayer in another dungeon.

Looks like we are going back to 2005, someone in Season of Discovery figured out how to bring Corrupted Blood to Stormwind again, video taken a few minutes ago from r/classicwow

Corrupted Blood is perhaps one of the most famous events in the history of MMOs, breaking containment at that time to even be covered in mainstream press and receive attention from scientific authorities. In 2007 a study of the corrupted blood incident was published in The Lancet, one of the oldest and most respected peer-reviewed medical journals in the world.

To quote that piece: "The Corrupted Blood outbreak in World of Warcraft represents both a missed opportunity and an exciting new direction for future epidemiological research."

That turned out to be entirely true. During the 2020 Covid-19 Pandemic that data was referenced and considered by those same researchers while looking at the spread of the real-world disease.

We told the story of the Corrupted Blood incident in full ourselves in the documentary series Tales from the Hard Drive, hosted by Lenval Brown, the voice actor who narrated Disco Elysium:

World of Warcraft has remained the top of the pack in MMOs for the full 20 years since 2004, a fact we recently marveled over and examined in a big ol' feature.

Assuming of course you have an Xbox Series X/S to play on.

The confusion stems from a December 23rd tweet from the FortniteStatus twitter account that said the skin would be unavailable starting, uh, December 2024. Which weirdly meant that you would have been able to buy it for 23 days but you'd be forced to return it.

Anyway, vigilant users quickly noticed the error because, as Epic said back in 2020 when announcing Matte Black Master Chief as a skin, you'd be able to get it in Fortnite at any point in the future and there would be "no time limit for unlocking this style."

"We apologize for the confusion from our previous tweet saying it was no longer available," said Epic the next day. A Christmas Eve miracle, I guess. Or one more just-in-time victory for the one and only Master Chief. Or both. Anyone's guess at this point. Maybe the plot of Halo 7 will be MC trying to stay in Fortnite ala Wreck-It-Ralph.

This caused my colleague Harvey Randall some slight distress. "Mighty allfather of FPS games and co-creator of Doom John Romero decrees that 'gib' is pronounced in the most upsetting way possible," said Mr. Randall in an article at the time.

Except I'd been pronouncing it with a soft g, like giblet, my entire life. Ever since I'd first heard it. This isn't something we ever had to think about because it's a shortened version of a real word. The chunks are gibs, yes, the components of giblets. It's not like gif, for example, which is its own whole word.

Except now it's totally like gif for the Mr. Randalls of the world, and everyone else who's been saying gib with a hard g, even though that's neither how you say giblet nor gin. There are, it seems, many hard-g gib pronouncers among us—ask your Discord group and you might find some real discord.

So honestly what the heck, John? Just don't answer questions like this because now we have to quibble over pronunciation for the rest of time.

Looking forward to revisiting this in a decade or two when some kind of linguistic consonant shift means we pronounce giblets with a hard G but still pronounce gibs with a soft G. Presumably I am the only person in the world who has this particular nightmare, but by sharing this I have eased my burden.

The design was a collaboration between Microsoft and the artist GMUNK, and it's not like it was a secret or anything: There's been a post on GMUNK's website and a YouTube video of the thing in motion up online for nearly a decade. But I think we're all so conditioned to disregard or otherwise devalue so much of what we see, why on earth would anyone spare a thought for a corporate branding exercise destined to be replaced with videogame concept art or something anyway? I never consciously said "surely this image is CGI," I simply blanked out the default Windows 10 desktop background the way I might do to an advertisement or garbage post on Reddit.

But the fact that it came from a physical installation is mind-boggling⁠—with that knowledge, I look at the thing and wonder how it was even possible. GMUNK's webpage dedicated to the project explains it best, but basically: The artist shot different colored lasers and other light sources through a glass Windows logo suspended with wires, while the effect was further enhanced with billowing volumetric smoke pumped through the set. GMUNK captured the results with a high-speed camera, and the final image used in the Windows 10 desktop was a composite of several frames from the shoot.

The exercise definitely feels like it came from another era of tech marketing⁠—a slightly melancholic nostalgia piece from the freewheeling days of the go-go 2010s. I find myself pleasantly surprised that, just this once, something I had assumed to be more pointless visual noise from the computer was actually a genuinely interesting physical creation in the real world. You can check out some more shots from the photo shoot below⁠—my favorite is probably the red and pink variation on pitch black.

The yellow letters I found early on were a stubborn bunch, refusing to turn green no matter where I tried to place them. I ended up having to stop for a bit of a breather, giving myself the chance to look at it with fresh eyes. I'd like to pretend it all fell into place after that, but in truth I just had to fight some more until I finally got it right.

Today's Wordle hint

Wordle today: A hint for Friday, December 27

What would you call the seeds found in rice, wheat, and barley? There you go. 

Is there a double letter in Wordle today? 

No, there is no double letter in today's puzzle. 

Wordle help: 3 tips for beating Wordle every day 

A good starting word can be the difference between victory and defeat with the daily puzzle, but once you've got the basics, it's much easier to nail down those Wordle wins. And as there's nothing quite like a small victory to set you up for the rest of the day, here are a few tips to help set you on the right path: 

• A good opening guess should contain a mix of unique consonants and vowels. 
• Narrow down the pool of letters quickly with a tactical second guess.
• Watch out for letters appearing more than once in the answer.

There's no racing against the clock with Wordle so you don't need to rush for the answer. Treating the game like a casual newspaper crossword can be a good tactic; that way, you can come back to it later if you're coming up blank. Stepping away for a while might mean the difference between a win and a line of grey squares. 

Today's Wordle answer

What is today's Wordle answer?

Hey, looking for this? The answer to the December 27 (1287) Wordle is GRAIN.

Previous Wordle answers

The last 10 Wordle answers 

Past Wordle answers can give you some excellent ideas for fun starting words that keep your daily puzzle-solving fresh. They are also a good way to eliminate guesses for today's Wordle, as the answer is unlikely to be repeated. 

Here are some recent Wordle answers:

• December 26: AFFIX
• December 25: SHARE
• December 24: EAGLE
• December 23: SAUNA
• December 22: BRAWN
• December 21: BLADE
• December 20: FLASH
• December 19: STRAY
• December 18: HEFTY
• December 17: SCOWL

Learn more about Wordle 

Wordle gives you six rows of five boxes each day, and you'll need to work out which secret five-letter word is hiding inside them to keep up your winning streak.

You should start with a strong word like ARISE, or any other word that contains a good mix of common consonants and multiple vowels. You'll also want to avoid starting words with repeating letters, as you're wasting the chance to potentially eliminate or confirm an extra letter. Once you hit Enter, you'll see which ones you've got right or wrong. If a box turns ⬛️, it means that letter isn't in the secret word at all. 🟨 means the letter is in the word, but not in that position. 🟩 means you've got the right letter in the right spot.

Your second guess should compliment the starting word, using another "good" word to cover any common letters you missed last time while also trying to avoid any letter you now know for a fact isn't present in today's answer. With a bit of luck, you should have some coloured squares to work with and set you on the right path.

After that, it's just a case of using what you've learned to narrow your guesses down to the right word. You have six tries in total and can only use real words (so no filling the boxes with EEEEE to see if there's an E). Don't forget letters can repeat too (ex: BOOKS).

If you need any further advice feel free to check out our Wordle tips, and if you'd like to find out which words have already been used you can scroll to the relevant section above. 

Originally, Wordle was dreamed up by software engineer Josh Wardle, as a surprise for his partner who loves word games. From there it spread to his family, and finally got released to the public. The word puzzle game has since inspired tons of games like Wordle, refocusing the daily gimmick around music or math or geography. It wasn't long before Wordle became so popular it was sold to the New York Times for seven figures. Surely it's only a matter of time before we all solely communicate in tricolor boxes. 

Well, as proven and viewed widely by streamer Nandre, you can in fact hit Ante 39 and just straight up explode the videogame to win because 1.8e308, the highest number it will track on your machine in the game's code, isn't high enough to win the score requirement of that ante. Which is... also higher than the highest number your machine will track, so it just displays as "nan"—programmer speak for "not a number."

Nandre reached the goal to celebrate everyone's favorite Roguelike winning at The Game Awards 2024.

This puts Balatro in the distinguished company of other arcade-style games you can't actually hit the "end" of when playing an endless mode because the score just keeps going on. Tetris, perhaps most famously, is a case of this kind of highest-possible-scoring via breaking the game. The Classic Tetris World Championship keeps an archive of winners for the NES version.

Could you go higher still? Yes, actually you can, because—just like with Tetris ROM hacks—you could mod the game to handle ever-absurdly-higher integers with what I can only assume would be ever-more-absurdly-game-breaking consequences.

Gotta say, though, this makes me want a Balatro championship along the same lines with every play using a fixed seed. Are we doing that yet? Can we do that? We should all do that.

Anyway, if you're here you probably love Balatro as much as I do and should definitely see these rather unhinged outtakes from the live action Balatro trailer.

The promise-happy billionaire has not only declared that Neuralink is going to be full steam ahead, but that patients will be outperforming pro gamers within two years: And that's not even his wildest claim. Musk reckons Neuralink is going to have to speed up human brains so that AI doesn't get "bored."

Musk says our "low data rate" is too slow, you see, and this is a barrier to positive human-AI convergence. "Our slow output rate would diminish the link between humans and computers," says Musk, adding a helpful comparison to plants: "Let's say you look at this plant or whatever, and hey, I’d really like to make that plant happy, but it’s not saying a lot."

To be clear: The human brain is a computer that no Silicon Valley firm is even close to outperforming. But that's not going to stop our boy, who reckons Neuralink can increase our brain's output rate (how fast our brain is sending signals to the chip) by  "three, maybe six, maybe more orders of magnitude."

Some of these scenarios sound like hell. "Let's say you can upload your memories, so you wouldn't lose memories," says Musk, adding that this would fundamentally change the experience of being human: "yeah we would be something different. Some sort of futuristic cyborg… it's not super far away, but 10-15 years, that kind of thing."

The above was Musk in August this year, but it's a drum he keeps beating. A recent tweet by tech investor Apoorv Agrawal called Neuralink the "most important company of the decade", an assertion Musk leaped upon to make further claims:

"Bit rate and patient number will increase hyperexponentially over the next 5+ years. My guess is combined I/O bit rate >1Mbs and augmented humans >1M by 2030."

So over a million augmented humans in five years' time. But even that prediction looks positively tame next to Musk's previous notion that hundreds of millions will have Neuralinks within "the next couple of decades." Add to which Musk’s comments about the Input/Output rate of over one million bits per second, basically the speed of thought, and we are leaving "normal" brain function far behind for something that we don't really have a name for yet. Master?

I jest of course, and we'll get to why Neuralink is unquestionably A Good Thing and will almost certainly improve the quality of life for some individuals (it has already done this on a small scale). But there's a real distinction between the reality of Neuralink and the medical goals versus Musk's rhetoric, which essentially starts at predicting millions of people having the devices implanted and ends up with creating a race of supermen.

Some would call this visionary, the very reason that much is such a heralded individual for some. Others might point out just how far this thing is from non-medical applications as it stands, and the speed of that five year timeframe for getting a million people chipped.

To be clear: I'm not pretending to have any special knowledge of this. But what is abundantly clear is that, if Musk's wilder claims are even approximately close to reality, this would mark a social-technological revolution the likes of which we've never seen, and overnight create a two-tier species where a small percentage of the population is thinking six times faster than the rest. That seems a long way from a utopian prospect, and something that at the very least requires the kind of ethical and regulatory scrutiny that Musk recoils from (indeed, the SEC is sniffing around and not before time).

The thing is, of course, this feels unlikely to come to pass on Musk's timeframe. It is well to remember that, as well as the man's many outstanding achievements, there are a whole lot of unfulfilled promises, many of which are nowhere near as pie-in-the-sky as brain chips in hundreds of millions of people. Remember the network of one-car tubes? 

Musk has been promising that Tesla will have self-driving cars "next year" since 2014: Next year has yet to arrive. In 2019 he said there would be a million Tesla robo-taxis on the road by 2020: In 2024, they're still not here. As Covid-19 was declared a pandemic by the WHO, Musk declared there was nothing to worry about and predicted no new cases in the US: Tens of thousands would die. 

There's the Tesla bots, which he reckons will soon be bigger business for the company than its cars, except… when they were rolled out to do some bartending, it turned out that us fleshbags were still in control. And then perhaps my favourite claim of all: Musk says we won't just get to Mars by 2050, but on that date there will be a million people on the red planet. 

Neuralink itself has been the subject of other claims. The first trial was supposed to start four years before it did, and some of Musk's wilder claims about the technology include that it will somehow be able to "cure" autism and schizophrenia, which are not diseases, as well as give you super-sharp "eagle eyes."

In this context it's hard to parse the visionary, which Musk undoubtedly is in some ways, from the vaudeville hype-man. It is undeniable that advances are being made in brain-computer interfaces, and not just by Neuralink, that would have been unimaginable even a decade ago: And that we live in an age of breakneck technological progress such that no one has any real idea what things will look like in 2030, never mind 2050. 

What can and should be acknowledged is that Neuralink has successfully implanted devices in human patients, and those patients are able to interface with computers in a way that would have previously been impossible. Neuralink's first patient, Noland Arbaugh, likened the device to using the Force (as in Star Wars) and can now control a computer, play videogames, and talk to friends without any physical input. 

This is the tech story that has the biggest chance of either changing the world, or sputtering down all sorts of half-realised alleyways. Because it is a story about the human race, our capabilities and evolution and what might be next, as much as it is about silicon. If we live in a world with a million Neuralink-enabled humans, is that going to amplify the empathetic and social side of humans: Or one of the many others? 

Neuralink is one part of what could be the biggest shift in human society since the Industrial Revolution. "We're not just aiming to give people the communication data rate equivalent to normal humans," says Musk. "We're aiming to give people who [are] quadriplegic, or maybe have complete loss of the connection to the brain and body, a communication data rate that exceeds normal humans. While we're in there, why not? Let's give people superpowers."

Elon Musk is a busy man. Aside from Neuralink there's the AI wars, in which he's currently embroiled in a huge legal spat with OpenAI, as well as SpaceX, Starlink, the Tesla bots and cabs, and of course his obsession with trolling on X. This is the technology that has the potential to truly reshape things. Whether it does remains to be seen: But I'm making a note to check back in five years, and see whether a million of us really are rocking brain chips.

Santa's been, the turkey's decimated, the drinks have been drunk, and the hangover's starting to abate. So, now what to do with that Christmas money your great aunt stuffed into a weirdly archaic card? And if your great aunt didn't hand over any cash, what should you be spending your own money on because you didn't get what you really wanted for Christmas?

This is what we're here for, to give you great buying advice and tickle your consumerist fancy with tempting deals from a host of different manufacturers that we genuinely believe are great ways to spend your money.

The end of the year/January sales ought to be a good place to bag a bargain given that we're expecting a slew of new product, from new graphics cards to gaming laptops, in the coming weeks and months. So, the last-gen stuff still on sale ought to be a good price.

The counter to that is, should you find the deals on the goodies you're after to be particularly tantalising, then save your money. Because if you are looking at getting yourself a new GPU or laptop, it's entirely possible that—especially at the high-end—you're going to be better off waiting for the new generation to drop at the start of the year.

But for peripherals and gaming monitors, we're not expecting a lot of movement in the coming months, so this may well be a great chance to get yourself a new screen to make the most of your current gaming PC setup.

Quick links

• Amazon: big deals energy on everything
• Newegg: all of Newegg's After Christmas tech deals
• Best Buy: every Best Buy holiday deal going
• Secretlab: just the best gaming chairs
• Dell: save up to $1,000 on Alienware PCs and laptops
• iBuyPower: save up to $400 on quick-shipping gaming PCs
• Walmart: big discounts on PC gaming tech
• B&H Photo: save up to $800 on RTX 4080 gaming laptops and more
• Target: savings on low-end gaming laptops
• Staples: save on gaming chairs and peripherals
• Lenovo: savings of up to 25% on Legion laptops and desktops
• Razer: save up to $800 on Razer Blade gaming laptops
• Microsoft: save on Xbox Wireless Controllers and more
• HP: savings on Omen gaming laptops
• Corsair: save on PSUs, headsets, gaming chairs, and more

Nvidia Gaming PCs

• RTX 4060 - MSI Codex R2 | $779 @ Newegg
• RTX 4060 Ti - Yeyian Tanto | $1,000 @ Newegg
• RTX 4070 - Skytech Nebula | $1,100 @ Newegg
• RTX 4070 Super - Yeyian Tanto | $1,200 @ Newegg
• RTX 4070 Ti Super - HP Omen 35L | $1,750 @ HP
• RTX 4080 Super - ABS Kaze Ruby | $1,900 @ Newegg
• RTX 4090 - iBuyPower RDY Y70 004 | $3,299 @ iBuyPower

AMD Radeon-powered gaming PCs

• RX 7800 XT - CyberPowerPC | $1,399 @ Walmart
• RX 7900 XT - Centaurus Andromeda | $1,888 @ Amazon
• RX 7900 XTX - Yeyian gaming PC| $2,200 @ Newegg

• Back to top ^

Gaming laptop deals

• RTX 4060 - Lenovo LOQ | $840 @ Newegg
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• RX 7900 XTX: $870 @ Walmart
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• 1080p: Acer Nitro XZ270 | $150 @ Amazon
• 1440p: Acer KA272U | $140 @ Best Buy
• 4K 144 Hz: Gigabyte M28U-AE 28 inch | $400 at Amazon
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• Best gaming headset: HyperX Cloud Alpha | $79
• Best gaming mouse: Razer DeathAdder V3 Hyperspeed | $100
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Happy festivities time, people. Hope you all had a great Christmas, if that's your jam. If you have some present money burning a hole in your pockets there are some good deals coming out in the after Christmas sales, and I'm checking out the best ones.

Despite there being a bunch of new graphics cards on the horizon for 2025, the actual mid- and lower-end GPUs are unlikely to launch until the middle of next year. So, if you're after a good, affordable gaming PC today, the RTX 4060 is still going to be about your best bet.

The Superlight 2 Lightspeed scored a pretty healthy 88% when it first launched, and there haven't been any of the most recent Logitech G releases which have changed that impression. It's still a fantastic gaming mouse that delivers all that you could want from a speedy rodent.

The Hero 2 sensor is still great, with outstanding acceleration, and gaming response. And at just $80 it's a bit of a bargain.

Back down to its pre-Black Friday price, this last-gen Zephyrus G16 is stil a great laptop, even if it doesn't have the latest Asus ROG all-metal chassis. It's still an impressively thin device, and copes well with the RTX 4070 GPU inside it. If you're after a skinny gaming laptop, then the old Zephyrus G16 still fits the bill.

But yes, it could absolutely do with a little extra storage, and the Lexar NM790 is a great price once again, at $70 for a 1 TB.

The Zephyrus G16 with an RTX 4070 I reckon is still a great laptop, but it's not the cheapest RTX 4070 gaming laptop on sale today. Matching its Cyber Monday price, this Lenovo LOQ machine is packing a 115 W RTX 4070 and an octo-core AMD CPU, and will make for a quality device if you can cope with its chonky looks.

• GPU: Nvidia GeForce RTX 4070 mobile (115 W)
• CPU: AMD Ryzen 7 7435HS (8c/16t)
• RAM: 2x 8 GB DDR5-4800
• SSD: 512 GB PCIe 4.0 x4 SSD (2x NVMe slots total—1x 2242, 1x 2280)
• Screen: 15.6-inch, 144 Hz, 1080p IPS
• USB ports: 1x USB Type-C (10 Gbps) + 3x USB Type-A (5 Gbps)

On offer for the same price it was around Cyber Monday, this 1440p gaming monitor is serving the sort of specs that just a few short years back would have been considered cutting edge for a top-end screen. Today it's well under $150 and will deliver a great gaming experience for your new rig or new GPU.

This is a ludicrous price for my absolute favorite gaming keyboard, the Mountain Everest 60. It was a great price around Black Friday when it was $40, but now it's even cheaper down at just $30 it's an total steal for a hot-swappable, lubed, stabalised, dampened gaming keeb.

Buy it, you won't regret it. But I'd suggest also picking up the hot-swappable numpad, too. That's just $15 at Mountain right now.

Just a quick reminder that Corsair's excellent budget gaming chair is still available for a bargain $180 all over the place. We gave it a heady 86% when we first reviewed it at $250, and at this price it's an ace deal you will find hard to better when it comes to gaming chairs at this price.

I could've sworn the green letters… heck, every letter was hiding from me today. No matter what I tried I just seemed to turn up more greys. It turned out for the best in the end though, the answer not so much revealed but more the only possible word left I hadn't tried. Phew.

Today's Wordle hint

Wordle today: A hint for Thursday, December 26

You'd do this if you were attaching or sticking a little extra onto something else, like a pin on a shirt, or a stamp on an envelope. 

Is there a double letter in Wordle today? 

Yes, there is a double letter in today's puzzle. 

Wordle help: 3 tips for beating Wordle every day 

If you're new to the daily Wordle puzzle or you just want a refresher after taking a break, I'll share some quick tips to help you win. There's nothing quite like a small victory to set you up for the rest of the day. 

• A mix of unique consonants and vowels makes for a solid opening word. 
• A tactical second guess should let you narrow down the pool of letters quickly.
• There may be a repeat letter in the answer.

You're not up against a timer, so you've got all the time in the world—well, until midnight—to find the winning word. If you're stuck, there's no shame in coming back to the puzzle later in the day and finishing it up when you've cleared your head. 

Today's Wordle answer

What is today's Wordle answer?

Relax, you've got this. The answer to the December 26 (1286) Wordle is AFFIX.

Previous Wordle answers

The last 10 Wordle answers 

Keeping track of the last handful of Wordle answers can help to eliminate current possibilities. It's also handy for inspiring opening words or subsequent guesses if you're short on ideas for the day.

Here are the last 10 Wordle answers:

• December 25: SHARE
• December 24: EAGLE
• December 23: SAUNA
• December 22: BRAWN
• December 21: BLADE
• December 20: FLASH
• December 19: STRAY
• December 18: HEFTY
• December 17: SCOWL
• December 16: BOAST

Learn more about Wordle 

Wordle presents you with six rows of five boxes every day and the aim is to figure out the correct five-letter word by entering guesses and eliminating or confirming individual letters.

Getting off to a good start with a strong word like ARISE—something containing multiple vowels, common consonants, and no repeat letters—is a good tactic. Once you hit Enter, the boxes will show you which letters you've got right or wrong. If a box turns ⬛️, it means that letter isn't in the secret word at all. 🟨 means the letter is in the word, but not in that position. 🟩 means you've got the right letter in the right spot.

Your second guess should compliment the starting word, using another "good" word to cover any common letters you missed last time while also trying to avoid any letter you now know for a fact isn't present in today's answer. With a bit of luck, you should have some coloured squares to work with and set you on the right path.

After that, it's just a case of using what you've learned to narrow your guesses down to the right word. You have six tries in total and can only use real words (so no filling the boxes with EEEEE to see if there's an E). Don't forget letters can repeat too (ex: BOOKS).

If you need any further advice feel free to check out our Wordle tips, and if you'd like to find out which words have already been used, you can scroll to the relevant section above.

Originally, Wordle was dreamed up by software engineer Josh Wardle, as a surprise for his partner who loves word games. From there it spread to his family, and finally got released to the public. The word puzzle game has since inspired tons of games like Wordle, refocusing the daily gimmick around music or math or geography. It wasn't long before Wordle became so popular it was sold to the New York Times for seven figures. Surely it's only a matter of time before we all solely communicate in tricolor boxes. 

Unlike most major players in gaming, Valve is privately owned, so information on the company—headcount, revenues, that sort of thing—is generally not for public consumption. But court documents related to the ongoing antitrust lawsuit filed against Valve by Wolfire Games in 2021 showed that Valve had just 336 employees that year.

That's bigger than a typical tiny startup, yes, but also a very small fraction of companies like Ubisoft, which reported 18,666 employees at the end of September 2024, Electronic Arts, which had approximately 13,700 people as of March 31, 2024, or Activision Blizzard, which counted approximately 13,000 employees at the end of 2022, in its final year-end report prior to its acquisition by Microsoft. In terms of headcount, Valve is significantly smaller than even Baldur's Gate 3 developer Larian Studios, which had 470 employees as of March 2024. (It will always be the quirky little outfit from Ghent to me, though.)

What's also a bit odd is that of those 336 employees, only 79 were directly working on Steam, even though Steam is, by a country mile, Valve's big money maker. 181 people were working in Valve's "Games" department, doing whatever, while 41 were in hardware development and 35 handled administration duties.

Wolfire criticized this breakdown in its lawsuit, saying Valve "devotes a miniscule percentage of its revenue to maintaining and improving the Steam Store." That criticism presumably isn't just about Steam store functionality, but also its moderation policies, which have been under fire for years for allowing hate groups and extremist content to flourish.

By another measure, though, Valve is absolutely monstrous. Documents from that same lawsuit also revealed that in terms of how much money it makes per employee, Valve towers over the giants of the tech industry. A Valve employee with a fondness for numbers and time on their hands broke down the company's internal figures and then compared it with companies including Apple, Facebook, and Netflix. The email chain is redacted so Valve's per-employee revenue generation isn't known, but the second-place finisher, Facebook, pulled in roughly $780,400 in annual net income per employee, so we at least know it's more than that.

Those calculations are based on 2018 numbers and so may be out of date, although Valve hasn't grown significantly since then and it's not as though Steam has suddenly stopped raking in money. Valve obviously isn't earning the revenues of the other companies on the list, but in terms of raw efficiency, that's huge. And, rather like how the low Steam headcount casts an unflattering light on its moderation problems, that kind of cash-crankin' might lead one to wonder whether Valve's 30% cut on Steam sales (with reductions based on sales volume) is in fact behind the times, as Wolfire, Epic Games, and others insist. On the other hand, nothing succeeds like success, and Valve doing so much with so little suggests it has to be doing something right.

2025 could be an interesting year for Valve: After years of slowly grinding through the process, Wolfire's antitrust lawsuit against Valve was certified as a class action in November, meaning it now encompasses "all persons or entities" who have sold games on Steam since 2017. That same month, US Senator Mark Warner sent a letter to Valve boss Gabe Newell warning of "more intense scrutiny from the federal government" if it doesn't crack down on extremist content on the platform.

Today's Wordle was a string of happy accidents, every new row leading me straight to the winning word. I had three green letters show up on my very first row, and from there it just kept getting better and better. I couldn't be wrong if I tried by my third, because there was only one very obvious slot left to fill. Don't worry if it hasn't gone the same for you—that's why we've got the answer ready to go if you need a hand.

Today's Wordle hint

Wordle today: A hint for Wednesday, December 25

Giving someone a portion of cake, splitting responsibilities or chores between two people, or even letting someone know how you're feeling can all be this word. It's all about give and take.  

Is there a double letter in Wordle today? 

No, there is not a double letter in today's puzzle. 

Wordle help: 3 tips for beating Wordle every day 

Playing Wordle well is like achieving a small victory every day—who doesn't like a well-earned winning streak in a game you enjoy? If you're new to the daily word game, or just want a refresher, I'm going to share a few quick tips to help set you on the path to success: 

• You want a balanced mix of unique consonants and vowels in your opening word. 
• A solid second guess helps to narrow down the pool of letters quickly.
• The answer could contain letters more than once.

There's no time pressure beyond making sure it's done by the end of the day. If you're struggling to find the answer or a tactical word for your next guess, there's no harm in coming back to it later on. 

Today's Wordle answer

What is today's Wordle answer?

Here, for you. The answer to the December 25 (1285) Wordle is SHARE.

Previous Wordle answers

The last 10 Wordle answers 

Knowing previous Wordle solutions can be helpful in eliminating current possibilities. It's unlikely a word will be repeated and you can find inspiration for guesses or starting words that may be eluding you. 

Here are some recent Wordle answers:

• December 24: EAGLE
• December 23: SAUNA
• December 22: BRAWN
• December 21: BLADE
• December 20: FLASH
• December 19: STRAY
• December 18: HEFTY
• December 17: SCOWL
• December 16: BOAST
• December 15: FUNKY

Learn more about Wordle 

Wordle gives you six rows of five boxes each day, and it's your job to work out which five-letter word is hiding by eliminating or confirming the letters it contains.

Starting with a strong word like LEASH—something containing multiple vowels, common consonants, and no repeat letters—is a good place to start. Once you hit Enter, the boxes will show you which letters you've got right or wrong. If a box turns ⬛️, it means that letter isn't in the secret word at all. 🟨 means the letter is in the word, but not in that position. 🟩 means you've got the right letter in the right spot.

Your second go should compliment the starting word, using another "good" guess to cover any common letters you missed last time while also trying to avoid any letter you now know for a fact isn't present in today's answer.  After that, it's just a case of using what you've learned to narrow your guesses down to the right word. You have six tries in total and can only use real words (so no filling the boxes with EEEEE to see if there's an E). Don't forget letters can repeat too (ex: BOOKS). 

If you need any further advice feel free to check out our Wordle tips, and if you'd like to find out which words have already been used, you can scroll to the relevant section above.

Originally, Wordle was dreamed up by software engineer Josh Wardle, as a surprise for his partner who loves word games. From there it spread to his family, and finally got released to the public. The word puzzle game has since inspired tons of games like Wordle, refocusing the daily gimmick around music or math or geography. It wasn't long before Wordle became so popular it was sold to the New York Times for seven figures. Surely it's only a matter of time before we all solely communicate in tricolor boxes. 

In 2021, actors Sam Crane and Mark Oosterveen were whiling away the Covid lockdowns in GTA Online when they had an idea: "Why not stage Hamlet inside the game?" They recorded hundreds of hours of in-game attempts to perform Shakespeare amid the chaos of GTA 5 and put together a feature-length documentary, Grand Theft Hamlet, which has now won multiple awards, earned a 94% Rotten Tomatoes score, and will premiere in US theaters on January 17.

The film is already in a number of UK theaters, and was first shown at SXSW back in March, where it won Best Documentary Feature. Crane and co-director Pinny Grylls also picked up a couple of British Independent Film Awards.

The juxtaposition of a violent, chaotic videogame and Hamlet creates an obvious tension, though the amphitheater in GTA 5's Los Santos isn't necessarily all that different from Shakespeare's Globe Theatre, says Grylls.

"There's a certain thing, the irreverence of the fact that the people we were meeting didn't really give a shit," Grylls said in a recent interview with Radio Times. "You [co-director Sam Crane] said to me very early on, 'It feels like I went back in time to the Globe 500 years ago where people would just throw apples at you ... or there were prostitutes coming and going, and people were selling stuff.' The theater in Shakespeare's time was like that. It was popular entertainment. It wasn't a dark room where everyone had to be quiet."

We already know, of course, how much meaning and comedy can be found in the ways players interact in online games, and GTA Online has been a particularly fertile ground for dramatic roleplaying. Perhaps PC Gamer contributor Joe Donnelly didn't approach "I tried to rob a jewellery store as a blind drunk Bad Santa in a GTA 5 roleplay server" with a mind to seek the "moments of pathos, emotion, and lyricism" that the Grand Theft Hamlet website promises, but you know, same kind of thing.

Outside of Red vs. Blue, I can't think of another obvious instance of machinima getting a theatrical release, and reviews for Grand Theft Hamlet are positive so far. Empire called the film a "riotously funny, unexpectedly poignant ode to gaming, Shakespeare, the indestructible nature of art, and the benefits of befriending bazooka wielding extraterrestrials."

Grand Theft Hamlet is not available to stream right now, but will presumably be available on Mubi, which owns the subscription streaming rights, sometime after the US theatrical release in January.

Along with being great, Dredge is also a wee bit deceptive, at least at first glance. A cute little fishing boat, a lovely sunset, a quaint seaside village—the octopus is a little weird, yeah, but fish, right? They're weird by nature. But things take an odd turn in a real hurry, and I'm not talking about wind in the wire making tattletale sounds here: There's something decidedly not good happening in the depths.

"Dredge has the most immaculate vibes of any game I've played this year," PC Gamer's Mollie Taylor wrote about Dredge in 2023. "By day it's a relaxing and serene fishing game, but once the sun sets it turns into an unsettling realisation of how isolated your tiny boat is on those big dark waters. Dredge plays to that polarity wonderfully, crafting a delightfully spooky world that has my usual horror-averse self desperate to dig deeper into its mysteries."

And if "nyctophobia horrors" aren't your thing, Dredge also offers a "passive mode" that maintains the creepy atmosphere but tones down the outright awfulness. ("Awfulness" used here entirely in a complimentary fashion, to be clear.)

So Dredge is really good, and it's now really free—but only for the day. The Epic Games Store is in the midst of its not-quite-daily giveaways for the holidays (15 games over a three-week stretch) so you've only got until 11 am ET on December 25 to grab it.

If you're looking for something new to play over the holidays, allow me to direct your attention to Striden, and more specifically the new round of playtesting that's now underway. The holiday playtest features a brand-new co-op PvE mode that sets teams of up to five players on a mission to fix their radio so they can get out of town, all while defending their base against waves of enemies.

Striden seemed like a fairly straightforward multiplayer shooter when we got our first look at it earlier in 2024 at the PC Gaming Show, but there were a couple notable twists. The bear with the glowing eyes is probably the most prominent bit of "what is going on here?"—the bear is actually an unlockable weapon controlled by players that seems to do a pretty good job of turning opponents into paste—but I also couldn't help but notice the moose-drawn turret.

The resolution's not great but that is 100% a moose pulling an artillery piece. You don't see that every day.

There are actually stories of attempts to develop "moose cavalry" in 17th-century Sweden, although there's no real historical foundation to it, but it is kind of a cute fit for the game's setting: Striden is set in an alt-history 1970s on the Scandinavian peninsula, which has been battered by a nuclear exchange in a war between East and West. That's why the weaponry in the trailer looks not exactly modern, and also how the radioactive bears come into play, among other things.

Striden was revealed as a mix of Battlefield-style large-scale shooter and extraction shooters: In its initial form, the game pits four teams of five players against one another in a battle against each other and the brutal environment to accrue points that will enable them to call for rescue and escape to a presumably safer locale. The mode in this playtest is being developed in response to player requests for PvE action, and while developer 5 Fortress warned that it's still "in a very early stage" and thus not a "finished PvE experience," it's fully functional and should give players "a vibe of what is to come in the future." The studio says that will include things like side missions, more varied enemies, and more to explore on the new map.

The Striden playtest is open to all—just head over to the Steam page and hit the "request access" button, and you're in. It's set to run until January 2.

Bloomberg reported that the amounts that Netflix and Tencent paid Riot less than half of the $250 million it cost to make the series. Bloomberg also claimed that four people who were familiar with Arcane's production said that Riot didn't have a plan to recoup the lost revenue.

Despite Riot firing 11% of its staff earlier this year, Riot's co-founder Marc "Tryndamere" Merrill says that as far as they are concerned, Arcane was a huge success:

"People who look at the world through a short-term, transactional, cynical lens really struggle to understand Riot. This has been true with various people trying to claim that high-quality free games won't work, that esports will never work, that our music was insane, and are now saying that Arcane wasn't awesome and worth it.

"These people think we make things like Arcane to sell skins when, in reality, we sell skins to make things like Arcane. Riot is a mission-driven company where Rioters are constantly striving to make it better to be a player. That is why we have successfully done that over and over again across multiple games and now multiple businesses/mediums—games, sports, music & animation. Do we get everything right? Nope. But we are not focused on the short-term extraction of profits—we are focused on delivering exceptional value to our audience over the long term, again and again and again. To be clear, Arcane crushed for players, and so it crushed for us."

Riot's renowned for its incredibly expensive skins. Earlier this year, it released a $500 Ahri skin and then later fired the artist responsible for making it, as well as announcing a new exalted skins tier list days after even more layoffs, which see players having to roll the dice for nicer skins. Considering how much money Arcane costs, it's not really that surprising that Riot is using its skins made for whales to fund creative projects like series.

However, Arcane couldn't have been that much of a car crash. Riot recently confirmed that it is looking into making more League of Legends-inspired shows that will explore three new regions: Noxus, Ionia, and Demacia. I think we'll probably see Noxus next after the Swain teaser at the end of the last Arcane episode, but honestly, after the superb quality of Arcane's second season, I would be happy with just about anything.

Those things sound like a dream, sure, but in practice they kneecapped any semblance of challenge that makes those classes so fun to play. Every boss was now just a giant, arena-sized punching bag with varying mechanics to learn. At least, that's how it felt, anyway. Those things were already creeping in during Stormblood and Shadowbringers, but it was Endwalker where the oversimplification really came to a head.

The often easy and homogenised battle design has proven to be one of the 2021 expansion's biggest criticisms, something which lead battle designer Masaki Nakagawa and his team has been making up for in spades in Dawntrail. After all, even he admits they went a touch far with streamlining fights.

"Prior to [Dawntrail], our policy of reducing gameplay-related frustrations was sometimes taken too far," Nakagawa told PC Gamer in a recent interview. "And in some cases, even the hurdles and frustrations that existed to make the gameplay more engaging were eliminated, which made them less fun."

Discussing Endwalker specifically, Nakagawa confesses the team "vetoed some interesting ideas for mechanics so melee players wouldn't be frustrated by periods of downtime where they can't attack the boss; we removed them regardless of how interesting the mechanic could be." Like I said before, it did really feel like melee DPS jobs bore the brunt of Endwalker's underwhelming difficulty the most, though healers aren't far behind. "In hindsight, we should've weighed the interesting nature of an idea versus the frustration of being unable to attack, but our policies had formed an environment where such ideas were easily eliminated," Nakagawa said.

The team's mindset has since shifted to "placing greater emphasis on enjoyability," with Nakagawa calling it "a bold decision for us with a lot of unknown factors." It's been paying off so far, though: Dawntrail's battle design has been far better received than its predecessor, with story dungeons nailing the challenge even if there are still arguments over whether its savage and ultimate raids are still a touch easy.

But even with pure difficulty set aside, Square Enix has been doing more interesting things. There's plenty of downtime across its first four raids—players get knocked into the air and rendered unable to attack, melees have to zip far away from bosses to drop AOE puddles, and mechanics that require lots of movement have proven great practice for all my slidecasting when I play White Mage.

Interestingly, Nakagawa brings up the Alexander raids from Heavensward. As he points out, they're full of niche and bespoke mechanics that you don't see anywhere else across the game, ones that often rip you out of your rotation to do things like bat bombs away as a giant gorilla or hopping on a mount. "If we continue to veto ideas like those out of concern for frustrations, like losing DPS when turning into a gorilla, our content would lose its diversity and all bosses would end up following the same patterns," Nakagawa said. "That said, we also don't believe that everything needs to be unique; after all, some battles should remain orthodox while others can be tremendously innovative, and it was this ideology which led to the revision of our content design policies."

I can definitely understand Nakagawa's desire to perfectly balance regular rotation-based fights with some slightly whackier mechanics. Hell, I know melee DPS who won't even use Limit Break because it messes with their rotation. Finding a nice middle ground where a little critical thinking is needed while still largely being able to pump your rotation out effectively is something I think will take beyond Dawntrail to figure out, but great steps are already being taken.

In many ways I was doing just fine today—I had found something useful, I just needed to work out what to do with it. And I had lots of ideas, so that wasn't the problem either. I even had a few letters turn green. The problem was there were a lot of words I could make from them, and I really didn't have enough rows spare to narrow them down in time. I got there, but it was a close call.

Today's Wordle hint

Wordle today: A hint for Tuesday, December 24

This word refers to a majestic bird of prey famed for its keen eyesight and broad wingspan… and a golfing score too. 

Is there a double letter in Wordle today? 

Yes, there is a double letter in today's puzzle.

Wordle help: 3 tips for beating Wordle every day 

Looking to extend your Wordle winning streak? Perhaps you've just started playing the popular daily puzzle game and are looking for some pointers. Whatever the reason you're here, these quick tips can help push you in the right direction: 

• Start with a word that has a mix of common vowels and consonants. 
• The answer might repeat the same letter.
• Try not to use guesses that include letters you've already eliminated. 

There's no racing against the clock with Wordle so you don't need to rush for the answer. Treating the game like a casual newspaper crossword can be a good tactic; that way, you can come back to it later if you're coming up blank. Stepping away for a while might mean the difference between a win and a line of grey squares. 

Today's Wordle answer

What is today's Wordle answer?

Don't worry, the word you're after's right here. The answer to the December 24 (1284) Wordle is EAGLE.

Previous Wordle answers

The last 10 Wordle answers 

Wordle solutions that have already been used can help eliminate answers for today's Wordle or give you inspiration for guesses to help uncover more of those greens. They can also give you some inspired ideas for starting words that keep your daily puzzle-solving fresh.

Here are some recent Wordle answers:

• December 23: SAUNA
• December 22: BRAWN
• December 21: BLADE
• December 20: FLASH
• December 19: STRAY
• December 18: HEFTY
• December 17: SCOWL
• December 16: BOAST
• December 15: FUNKY
• December 14: DROOL

Learn more about Wordle 

Wordle gives you six rows of five boxes each day, and it's up to you to work out which five-letter word is hiding among them to win the popular daily puzzle.

It's usually a good plan to start with a strong word like ALERT—or any other word with a good mix of common consonants and multiple vowels—and you should be off to a flying start, with a little luck anyway. You should also avoid starting words with repeating letters, so you don't waste the chance to confirm or eliminate an extra letter. Once you hit Enter, you'll see which letters you've got right or wrong. If a box turns ⬛️, it means that letter isn't in the secret word at all. 🟨 means the letter is in the word, but not in that position. 🟩 means you've got the right letter in the right spot.

Your second guess should compliment the first, using another "good" word to cover any common letters you might have missed on the first row—just don't forget to leave out any letter you now know for a fact isn't present in today's answer. After that, it's just a case of using what you've learned to narrow your guesses down to the correct word. You have six tries in total and can only use real words and don't forget letters can repeat too (eg: BOOKS).

If you need any further advice feel free to check out our Wordle tips, and if you'd like to find out which words have already been used, you can scroll to the relevant section above.

Originally, Wordle was dreamed up by software engineer Josh Wardle, as a surprise for his partner who loves word games. From there it spread to his family, and finally got released to the public. The word puzzle game has since inspired tons of games like Wordle, refocusing the daily gimmick around music or math or geography. It wasn't long before Wordle became so popular it was sold to the New York Times for seven figures. Surely it's only a matter of time before we all solely communicate in tricolor boxes. 

The delistings, which as seen on SteamDB came in a single batch earlier today, were first noticed by Wario64 on Bluesky:

Adventure Time: Finn and Jake's Epic Quest, and Adventure Time: Magic Man's Head Games have also been removed. The games have also reportedly been taken down from non-PC storefronts. 

A reason for the removal wasn't provided, but the store page for each game now carries the same message, with only the title changed: "Attention players, OK K.O.! Let’s Play Heroes will no longer be available for sale after Dec 23rd, 2024. Thanks for playing, Cartoon Network Games." 

The one exception is Samurai Jack: Battle Through Time, which was published by Adult Swim Games—but Adult Swim is a division of Cartoon Network, so the separation seems entirely a distinction without a difference.

The takedowns come just a few months after Warner closed the Cartoon Network website, shunting people to its Max website instead, and follow removal of a bunch of Adult Swim-published games earlier this year. One big difference is that advance notice was provided in those cases, and the rights to at least some of the games being removed from sale were instead handed back to their owners after an outcry. In this round of removals, the notification that it was happening seems to have been given as it happened.

The games being removed from sale have been around for a while and don't have especially large player bases, but we quite liked some of them when they were new: We said OK K.O.! Let's Play Heroes "looks like a cartoon and plays like an arcade classic" back in 2017, and made a similar declaration about Samurai Jack: Battle Through Time in 2020, saying it "looks like a PS2 game, in a good way." Regardless of their merits, though, seeing games get disappeared for no discernible reason is irksome as a matter of principle, particularly when the company doing it is a division of Warner, notorious in recent times for vaulting movies Batgirl and Coyote vs Acme in favor of a tax writeoff.

I've reached out to Cartoon Network for information on the delistings and will update if I receive a reply.

I couldn't help noticing there are some great deals on city builders in the Steam Winter Sale, too. In particular, there are a handful of tasty sales on city builders from 2024. A few of the games below are the cheapest they've ever been, and a few have been on sale for the same price before, but all of them are at least 25% off. Take a look:

2024 city builders in the Steam Winter Sale

Valve doesn't release sales data for individual games, so we can't say how much any particular title on the list pulled in: Instead, they're randomly sorted in "buckets"—platinum, gold, silver, and bronze—indicating their relative success. Given the number of games released every month on Steam, even a bronze-tier ranking represents a significant success.

Five of the 12 games in the platinum category—PUBG Battlegrounds, Destiny 2, Dota 2, Counter-Strike 2, and Apex Legends—are free to play, and all five were ranked in the same category in 2023, a testament to the lucrative value of a free-to-play hit. At the other end of the spectrum, Elden Ring and Baldur's Gate 3 are both hanging in there: Elden Ring no doubt benefited from the release of the outstanding Shadow of the Erdtree expansion in June, but Baldur's Gate 3 maintaining its spot more than a year after release—with numerous meaty updates to its credit but no full-on DLC—is something of a surprise. Black Myth: Wukong and Helldivers 2 also made the cut, as did Space Marine 2, Black Ops 6, and Palworld.

As I mentioned, I also find it interesting that Starfield has dropped out of the list completely. Every platinum game from 2023 is somewhere in the 2024 ranking—further down the list in some cases (Sons of the Forest, for instance, is a bronze tier game this year)—but Starfield, unless I've overlooked it, is completely out. That's not meant as a dump on Starfield, I just find it genuinely surprising: Bethesda's sci-fi RPG didn't live up to the hype when it launched in August 2023 but that was an almost impossible bar to reach anyway, and it's not like it was a bad game, just not the expected leap forward on the formula. 

The seeming drop-off in interest in Starfield (from a sales perspective, at least) is particularly notable given that the much older Fallout 4 is still on the list, and although it doesn't make bestsellers lists anymore, the 13-year-old Skyrim is a prime example of a game with long term sales success, and has been re-released on every platform known to mankind.

Among new releases, Path of Exile 2 made the platinum tier despite only coming out a few weeks ago, as did Stalker 2, which is great to see. The hit strategy-city build Manor Lords is also up there, as is Dragon's Dogma 2, Dragon Ball Sparking! Zero, and the annual updates of NBA 2K and EA FC.

I also find the list of most played games on Steam Deck to be notable because it's such an incredible jumble of, well, everything. Stardew Valley, Balatro, and Vampire Survivors are rubbing shoulders with Cyberpunk 2077, Grand Theft Auto 5, and Elden Ring, a blend that reflects just how capable Valve's handheld gaming really is.

Other categories in the 2024 roundup include the games most played with a controller, some of which makes sense to me (Elden Ring, although it's not how I roll) and some which do not (Apex Legends, really? You've got a mouse and controller right here), and top VR games based on revenue. The full rundown of the year's biggest games on Steam, and links to previous annual rankings (although the 2017 and '18 rankings don't appear to be working at the moment) are up at store.steampowered.com.

So why, 10 years later, did The Forest just crack its all time concurrent player record today with a whopping 97,964 players?

Well, it might have something to do with the cracking Steam Winter Sale that's happening now. The Forest is 90% off, which means you can grab it for a mere two bucks.

That's not the whole story, though. Even after its sequel Sons of the Forest blew the doors off Steam in 2023, the original game continues to grow more popular. As it routinely drops to under $5 in various sales, its concurrent player count has spiked as high as 78,000 as recently a year ago. The 90% discount in this year's sale is the lowest it's ever been priced on Steam, however.

There's also been a huge rise in the popularity of co-op horror games, not just as a novelty but as a weirdly cozy hang-out experience where you can build, craft, chill, and laugh with your friends—plus scream your heads off when something terrifying happens.

At any rate, it's fun to see new players discovering this survival horror masterpiece, and no doubt people who bought and played The Forest way back in 2014 are jumping back in again now, too. There's still time to pick it up yourself for next to nothing: the Steam Winter sale lasts until January 2.

This theory started on a GTA 6 leaks Twitter account after it broke down a post made by a Rockstar Dev. To an untrained eye, the pictures were just of a Rockstar Games jumper, a paper bag, and a cat. But if you look closer, you can see how the cat hair on the jumper was shaped into a VI, and the phone number on a piece of paper next to the jumper is for a shop called 27 Auto Sales. After this, the account went on the lookout for everything 27 related, and to be fair, there's quite a lot.

Rockstar Games' Instagram account currently has 27 posts, 27 seconds into the GTA 6 trailer, you can see a pink car with the number 27 written on the back window, and the license plate of a Los Santos State Trooper car adds up to make 27. Although not every theory is this straightforward.

Some players have taken the 27 theory and run with it in all sorts of ridiculous directions. One player pointed out that there are 27 days in the lunar cycle, which in and of itself doesn't mean much, but it did bring the old GTA 6 moon theory back into the spotlight.

This involved players theorising that the next trailer will occur on a Waning Gibbous moon, all because someone spotted it in an update for GTA Online. There was also a Waning Gibbous moon on December 1, 2023, the day that the first GTA 6 trailer dropped, leading to players believing that Rockstar Games follows the moon cycle when planning all big releases.

That may sound quite ridiculous, but Red Dead Redemption 2's first trailer was released on October 20, 2016, and Red Dead Redemption's first "My Name is John Marston" trailer was released on November 30, 2009; both of these were on a Waning Gibbous moon phase.

However, I personally think that this is evidence that Rockstar likes to make waves at the end of the year rather than painstakingly working to ensure everything lines up with the lunar calendar. But if you're still a moon believer, then keep your eyes peeled on January 19, 2025, as this is the next Waning Gibbous moon phase.

Coming back down to earthly theories, someone else points out that if you added all the views on the GTA 6 trailer together, then that also gives you 27. But that only lasted for a few minutes until someone else in the world viewed the trailer or the person keeping track accidentally clicked off and back on the video.

Another slightly more academic theory uses the general Roman calendar to figure out that VI means December 27, otherwise known as the Feast of St John, Apostle, and Evangelist. This could also mean that we'll get a St John GTA 6 cameo because, at this point, anything seems possible.

In my mind, one of the most convincing arguments around the 27 theory or the most bizarre coincidence yet was pointed out by player insightangel. Apparently the identification order number for Bonnie and Clyde was 1227. 12.27 does link to December 27, and Bonnie and Clyde have been obvious inspirations for GTA 6's two protagonists, so to be fair, the reasoning is there.

"At this point, even if Rockstar wasn't planning to drop something on the 27th, now they have to," a player says. "[The] 27th is the perfect day." If nothing gets released in a few days, I'll be disappointed, mainly because it seems like a waste of a perfectly good theory.

But sadly, there's a very good chance that this is all just confirmation bias, no matter how badly I want it to be true. There are so many details in GTA 6's trailer, along with everything else that Rockstar publishes, that it would probably be pretty easy to pick out another random date and find evidence that it could work just as well as December 27, but I'm happy to be proven wrong.

"We're expecting some guests from Night City," Epic teased, and while no further details have been shared, it sure looks like both Johnny and V will be joining in on the fun.

As noted by Eurogamer, Johnny's arrival in Fortnite will be Keanu Reeves' second appearance in the game, having previously turned up several years ago as noted dog lover John Wick. Wick is known for more than just his deep affection for canines, but I find it a little amusing that despite such a vast difference in characters—Wick an assassin of focus, commitment, and sheer will, Silverhand a degenerate faded musician—it's actually Johnny who has the real body count. Silverhand, as you may recall, set off a suitcase nuke inside Arasaka Towers in 2023, instantly killing more than 12,000 people and leading to another 750,000 deaths in the months that followed.

I'm guessing that statistic won't come up in the context of Fortnite, but it would be extremely funny if the game's current season ended with Johnny vaporizing Seaport City. That's probably not going to happen either but I dare to dream. 

On the other hand, Fortnite leaker HypeX shared images of the Cyberpunk 2077 cosmetics coming to Fortnite, and included among them is what is 100% a nuclear warhead stuffed inside a gym bag. Make of that what you will.

Epic hasn't said when Johnny and V will appear in Fortnite, but I would expect it to happen very soon.

A contemporary interview about Metal Gear Solid from 1998 in the Japanese PlayStation magazine has now resurfaced, translated by Schmuplations and spotted by GR+, in which Kojima and series artist Yoji Shinkawa discuss the game's development, and the latter's influence over not just the game's aesthetics but the core design. Kojima recalls seeing Shinkawa's portfolio when assessing job candidates, and that "I’ve never seen anyone who I immediately wanted to give an S until Shinkawa" (Konami would internally grade submissions from C to A).

Kojima recalls the artist joining as they were wrapping up production on the original PC-9821 version of Policenauts, and reminisces about how picky Shinkawa was over the existing designs. "He complained about it up to the day before it went on sale," laughs Kojima, adding that some of the suggestions would be incorporated in the later versions of the game on 3DO, PlayStation and Saturn.

Metal Gear Solid was already in the planning phase, and Kojima had a rough outline for the game but "had not decided on any of the finer details." One of those rather important details was the mech at the centre of the game: The titular Metal Gear, which Kojima asked Shinkawa to design as a physical model. Shinkawa spent six weeks at home. "He was pretty locked up in his house there for awhile, so I’d call him occasionally, and dropped by a few times as a show of support," recalls Kojima. "The floor of his room was littered with junk and scrap, it covered everything, there was nowhere to step!"

"And it smelled like paint thinner," laughs Shinkawa.

The starting point for Metal Gear Rex, as the name suggests, was to make it somehow reminiscent of Tyrannosaurus Rex. "I mean basically it’s a weapon of war," says Kojima, "so I told him 'Don’t make it look like some robot from outer space.' I had a huge number of specific requests. For instance, I said I wanted it to feel like, when the human pilot gets in, that life is being breathed into the mech for the first time. Like, even though it’s a weapon, when it moves it feels like a living creature. But when the pilot exits and it’s left alone, it looks just like a jeep or tank or some regular vehicle, and once the pilot gets in and is driving it, it looks like a dinosaur."

As any fan of the series will tell you, part of Metal Gear's appeal is how the mechs straddle the line between machine and mankind. They are gleaming metal colossi that move and groan and scream like there's some biological component underpinning the circuitry, and that moment when Liquid Snake gets into the cockpit and Rex comes alive communicates exactly that sense of something inorganic coming to life, a machine somehow imbued with a soul.

Kojima credits Shinkawa with challenging and changing many of his initial ideas for the game, and says it changed his own methods. "Shin-chan possesses a very active imagination, and as soon as I hand him a task, before long he’s off making his own changes and modifications," says Kojima, and asked to provide an example says "this ninja would be one. I originally had no plans to add a character like that."

Kojima is referring to Gray Fox, better known as the cyborg ninja, who plays a key role in Metal Gear Solid and is core to some of the game's most memorable fights and dramatic scenes. Why did Shinkawa draw him?

"Because it’s cool," laughs Shinkawa.

"There were a lot of things added like that," laughs Kojima. "'Hell yeah, a ninja cyborg!' But now, of course, he’s actually become a central character for the plot."

Shinkawa recalls that Gray Fox began as a "normal soldier enemy" before "I thought I’d try drawing something cyborg-ish and this ninja-looking guy is what came out. Once I gave him a katana, the character really came to life for me. I thought, hey, this could actually work as a main character."

Kojima also mentions Otacon, the slightly reedy scientist responsible for Rex who becomes Solid Snake's ally and guide in Shadow Moses. As the name suggests Otacon was inspired by the idea of anime enthusiasts who attend conventions, and Kojima says Shinkawa is why the character ended up where it did and some distance from his original concept: "The image in my head was of a heavier guy, someone who’s always eating a chocolate bar, but somewhere along the way he turned out as you see here."

Finally, Kojima recalls his desire for Metal Gear Solid's characters to be "hardboiled" because the game was intended as "a serious, heavy story, and I wanted characters who could handle that world… I wanted characters who, just from looking at their clothing you’d be able to tell what kind of person they were, and what their motivations were."

"That’s one reason why I struggled a bit with Snake’s design," recalls Shinkawa.

"I remember, you struggled a lot," laughs Kojima. "The first design looked like Captain Future, and he was orange-colored."

"Now he’s black," laughs Shinkawa, "pitch black."

The full interview is well worth a read for any Gear-heads, and captures a younger and less-guarded Kojima in the days before he was one of the industry's biggest celebrities. What is most striking is the collaborative bond between the pair, with Kojima both wise enough to realise he's stumbled across an exceptional talent and brave enough to let that talent both inform and twist his own ideas. The Metal Gear Solid games veer between haunting and hilarious, capable of pontificating on geopolitics one moment and making a fart joke the next. The fact they hang together, and these worlds and characters feel so possible, is as much to do with Shinkawa's imagination as Kojima's ideas. No wonder that, thirty years on from wanting to give that portfolio an "S", Kojima has kept Shinkawa as the beating heart of all his games.

The remake in particular made it seem like EA might have plans to return to Dead Space, but sadly it sounds like that's not the case. Schofield sat for an interview alongside Dead Space's creative director Bret Robbins and animation director Christopher Stone on the Dan Allen Gaming Podcast (spotted by PCGN), discussing Dead Space generally, and near the end thoughts turned to a possible future for the series.

"We tried actually, the three of us," says Schofield. "Dead Space 4. They said no. We’re talking this year [we pitched it]. We didn’t go too deep. They just said 'We’re not interested right now, we appreciate it blah blah blah.' And we know who to talk to, so we didn’t take it any further, and we respected their opinion, they know their numbers and what they have to ship."

Schofield says the group "have some ideas" for where the fourth game will go, with Dead Space 3 having ended on something of a cliffhanger: Spoiler alert, but the third and thus far final entry ends with co-protagonists Isaac Clarke and John Carver crashing into a moon, their fate left ambiguous. Given that Isaac has rather an outstanding track record of surviving apparent death, I somehow doubt the crash has done for either of them.

"It’s a weird time in the industry right now," says Stone. "People are really hesitant to take chances on things. So, take it with a grain of salt. Who knows, maybe one day. I think we’d all love to do it. I’d make a Dead Space 4. I’m not saying anything about my current gig [multiplayer shooter Ready or Not]. I’m just saying I would make a Dead Space 4."

For his part, Schofield's currently trying to get a smaller project funded ("it's pretty special to me"), having left Striking Distance Studios after the release of The Callisto Protocol. And it may well be that this is the game that really gave EA the heebie-jeebies about a Dead Space continuation because, while it was a decent enough action-horror experience, it fell far short of publisher Krafton's rather absurd sales expectations.

In case you're not clued up on your 2000s internet lore, Charlie the Unicorn is a four-minute animated video featuring the titular horned horse as he ventures up Candy Mountain, only to have his kidney harvested by his fellow adventuring unicorns. It's peak 2005 internet culture, popping off on Newgrounds before being reuploaded to YouTube and amassing almost 100 million views between two different uploads.

The short trailer, showing off the new Unicorndog skin for Reindog, was captioned "We're going to Candy Kingdom to get the new Unicorndog Variant, Charlie!" accompanied by audio from Steele's work. He then quoted the post expressing his disappointment, writing: "MultiVersus is a game by Warner Bros, a company with an annual revenue of around 40 billion dollars. Here they are using my work, without permission, to advertise their game."

When questioned on why it was an issue, equating it to a TikTok audio, Steele responded: "I do not care if people use my work in non-commercial projects. If you yourself want to use the audio from Charlie the Unicorn for a meme, go right ahead. If you're a billion dollar company advertising your game, ask permission!"

A very valid and fair point, if you ask me. A simple "are we cool to use this" goes a long way, especially when it's a larger corporation rather than someone on TikTok with 10,000 followers with nothing to advertise. Steele also provided a little extra nuance in a Reddit thread, reiterating that his main issue lies with a large corporation directly piggybacking off his creation without permission.

"People should be allowed to use and remix art!" Steele wrote. "I've seen a number of references to my work in big-company projects before. For example, there's a dead unicorn with an enchanted kidney named Charlie in World of Warcraft. This is fine! It's completely within fair-use laws. Using my audio directly is not fair use."

He finishes off by writing: "I realize it was not the Warner Bros CEO David Zaslav himself who, reaching down from the Warner Bros water tower, personally yoinked my audio for this ad. It was (I assume) an underpaid and under appreciated social media team who did it. But it's Warner Bros who profits, and it's Warner Bros who did not give this game's marketing team the budget necessary to properly license media for their social media ads."

The whole thing seems like a level-headed and reasonable response from Steele. Calling out those responsible appropriately while acknowledging this likely fell on the shoulders of overworked and underpaid folk is the kind of nuance often left on the table in these situations, and I feel like Steele handled it pretty well. Better than I likely would've, that's for sure.

The original X post has since been taken down on the MultiVersus page, though the account has yet to further acknowledge its misstep. Whether it does or not, the scene is another unfortunate stain on the game's record—in November, it copped some major blame from Warner Bros. bigwigs for contributing to a hefty loss at the company, being specifically named as the reason for a $100 million writedown.

Tim Cain—who initially got the ball rolling and served as the first Fallout's sole designer until he brought in fellow Interplay developers Leonard Boyarsky, Chris Taylor and Jason D. Anderson—wouldn't have taken Fallout down this route. Indeed, back in the late '90s, after he left Interplay, he pushed back on the concept of multiplayer spin-off.

"Fallout wasn't designed to have other players," he said when Interplay picked his brain on the subject. And while Fallout Online would never materialise, instead culminating in a legal battle between Interplay and new owner Bethesda, you can certainly see some of its DNA in Fallout 76.

Despite the significant changes that have occurred since Cain bid farewell to the series, though, he doesn't think its transformation is a bad thing. "We were going in a different direction," he says. "I'm not saying it's bad. People immediately want to go, ‘Well, that's bad, right?’ No, they're both what they are, and a ton of people like it."

Fallout 1 and 2 were critical and commercial successes, hugely influential, and enduringly popular, but the series has only grown more powerful since Bethesda took the reins. We'll likely have to wait until the next decade until we get another Fallout, but in the meantime, Bethesda continues to expand Fallout 76, and we're getting a second season of Amazon's Fallout TV show.

"I mean, how many people played Fallout 3 and 4? Way more than 1 and 2 put together," says Cain. "You could almost argue it's fundamentally a different game. It's a very different game with the same veneer of the old one, and it obviously appeals to a ton of people. I'm the last person to want to yuck other people's yums. So I'm like, if you like this, play it, love it. Post videos of Let's Plays and have fun with it."

He doesn't understand why some players just want to dunk on the modern direction, either. "The opposite of that is what I don't get," he says. "When people post hour-long videos about why they hate a game. And I'm like, ‘Why aren't you just off playing a game you like? Why are you doing this? The masses are playing it, they don't need to know why you don't like it.’ But game playing is so personal and subjective that I don't even think there's a bad game out there. I just think there's bad games for you, and bad games for me, and maybe even bad games for 80% [of people]. But if you go to Steam, I defy you to find a game for which 100% of the reviews are negative."

The critic in me wants to argue, but I suspect I'd be a lot happier if I spent less time complaining about how far Fallout has deviated from the games I loved so much in the '90s.

X user momomo_us posted a screenshot of what looks to be retailer GPU listings, and sitting almost at the tippy top are two GPUs called the RX 9070 and the RX 9070 XT (via Tom's Hardware). Both new GPUs sit above AMD's current fastest graphics card in the listing, the RX 7900 XTX.

This new X0X0 naming convention seems to be confirmed by fellow leaker All The Watts!, who's posted a list of card groupings from the RX 9070-series down to the RX 8040-series.

And wouldn't you know it, there's a third. According to X user and known leaker HXL, the 8000-series nomenclature refers to RDNA 3.5 GPUs like Strix Halo, while the 9000-series naming scheme is supposedly for fully-fledged RDNA 4 GPUs.

All three leakers posted this new info within an hour of each other, so that could mean it's all a big game of telephone—or that they're all relying on the same leaked info at once.

The past three generations of desktop AMD cards have been known as the RX 5000, RX 6000, and RX 7000-series respectively, with the second digit used as the primary model differentiator. So this new skip-a-digit system would be a break from recent tradition, although it'd make a lot of sense.

AMD's latest Zen 5 CPUs are also called the 9000-series, although they use second digit identifiers like the Ryzen 7 9800X3D. Lining up the latest AMD GPUs and CPUs with a 9000 number each makes things relatively neat and tidy at least, with the change in identifier number hopefully meaning we don't have to break out a decoder wheel, as has been provided by AMD in the past.

Not only that, but it looks like an eagle-eyed redditor may have spotted images of at least one of these new cards displayed prominently in a recent advertising banner:

Are these reference 8000 series card? from r/Amd

Reddit user SubtleSerenity spotted a black and silver cooler design in several AMD ads on the platform, which looks distinctly different from AMD reference card designs previous. Hoang Anh Phu, another trusted AMD leaker, has since stated that they believe the card to be the RX 9070 XT—although as with all leak confirmations, pinches of salt all round are probably still a good idea.

Not that there's anything particularly exciting or revolutionary about what looks like a standard three-fan cooler design, but it still seems that AMD's marketing department may have let an ad loose too early. The card is shown in conjunction with a Ryzen 9 CPU, so the image has possibly been made for use with bundle deals yet to come.

With rumours abound that the top RDNA 4 card may be 45% faster in ray tracing than the RX 7900 XTX (and deliver raster performance equivalent to an RTX 4080), what we're now assuming is the RX 9070 XT might be a bit of a killer card. It's still not likely to compete with anything at the top of Nvidia's next-generation graphics cards, as AMD's Jack Huyhn has already stated it's not aiming for the high-end market with the new generation of GPUs.

Still, at the right price? It could still be a great card if these numbers prove out, and perhaps FSR 4 might even the playing field a bit more now it's rumoured to be getting a dose of AI, like Nvidia's DLSS. Still, it's all speculation for now, so we'll have to wait until CES 2025 to officially find out.

I didn't need a lot of rows to win today—I was done by the third—but this was still a very "sticky" game, one that took some serious effort to work out. Luckily for me I uncovered just the right sort of green letters on my very first guess, forcing me down a weird path that only led to today's answer.

Wordle today: A hint

Wordle today: A hint for Monday, December 23

This is a purpose-built hot and humid room, designed to help people cleanse and relax. Anywhere that feels similar, like an office with broken AC on a summer's day, could also be described using this word. 

Is there a double letter in Wordle today? 

Yes, there is a double letter in today's puzzle 

Wordle help: 3 tips for beating Wordle every day 

If you've decided to play Wordle but you're not sure where to start, I'll help set you on the path to your first winning streak. Make all your guesses count and become a Wordle winner with these quick tips: 

• A good opener has a mix of common vowels and consonants. 
• The answer could contain the same letter, repeated.
• Avoid words that include letters you've already eliminated. 

You're not racing against the clock so there's no reason to rush. In fact, it's not a bad idea to treat the game like a casual newspaper crossword and come back to it later if you're coming up blank. Sometimes stepping away for a while means you can come back with a fresh perspective. 

Today's Wordle answer

What is today's Wordle answer?

Let's go. The answer to the December 23 (1283) Wordle is SAUNA.

Previous Wordle answers

The last 10 Wordle answers 

Previous Wordle solutions can help to eliminate guesses for today's Wordle, as the answer isn't likely to be repeated. They can also give you some solid ideas for starting words that keep your daily puzzle-solving fresh.

Here are some recent Wordle answers:

• December 22: BRAWN
• December 21: BLADE
• December 20: FLASH
• December 19: STRAY
• December 18: HEFTY
• December 17: SCOWL
• December 16: BOAST
• December 15: FUNKY
• December 14: DROOL
• December 13: BOXER

Learn more about Wordle 

There are six rows of five boxes presented to you by Wordle each day, and you'll need to work out which five-letter word is hiding among them to win the daily puzzle.

Start with a strong word like ALIVE—or any other word with a good mix of common consonants and multiple vowels. You should also avoid starting words with repeating letters, so you don't waste the chance to confirm or eliminate an extra letter. Once you've typed your guess and hit Enter, you'll see which letters you've got right or wrong. If a box turns ⬛️, it means that letter isn't in the secret word at all. 🟨 means the letter is in the word, but not in that position. 🟩 means you've got the right letter in the right spot.

Your second guess should compliment the first, using another "good" word to cover any common letters you might have missed on the first row—just don't forget to avoid any letter you now know for a fact isn't present in today's answer. After that, it's just a case of using what you've learned to narrow your guesses down to the correct word. You have six tries in total and can only use real words and don't forget letters can repeat too (eg: BOOKS).

If you need any further advice feel free to check out our Wordle tips, and if you'd like to find out which words have already been used you can scroll to the relevant section above. 

Originally, Wordle was dreamed up by software engineer Josh Wardle, as a surprise for his partner who loves word games. From there it spread to his family, and finally got released to the public. The word puzzle game has since inspired tons of games like Wordle, refocusing the daily gimmick around music or math or geography. It wasn't long before Wordle became so popular it was sold to the New York Times for seven figures. Surely it's only a matter of time before we all solely communicate in tricolor boxes. 

You can watch a video of the October 23 event via TNT Sports Boxing on YouTube. Fury enters first, dressed normally⁠—for a boxer at a promo event at least, the man's still wearing a patterned blazer and a snapback. We then get Usyk's entrance, and he's in full Silent Assassin mode with a shaved head, black suit, red tie, leather gloves, a tactical-looking brief case, and a rendition of "Ave Maria" playing over the walkup straight out of Hitman: Blood Money. The real chef's kiss comes when Usyk reveals what's in the briefcase: A picture of Fury taking a punch to the face during a bout, which Usyk had his opponent autograph.

It's such an incredible bit, and I'm not just saying that because Usyk is an undefeated heavyweight boxer and I write articles for a living. The whole thing has, dare I say it, a touch of camp, and Usyk revealing the picture after so much build up is such a hilariously catty little gesture. Being able to commit to such a weird bit so fully as part of a multi-million dollar media event requires the paradoxical confidence to not take yourself too seriously. But also? Usyk got his man, just like Agent 47.

It's also such a weird, fun example of games' mainstream pull and recognizability. Hitman in particular is such a strange pull because it's a niche series of stealth games, but it's also internationally recognizable thanks in no small part to Agent 47's iconic design (and maybe also the significantly less iconic Timothy Olyphant movie). I'd love to hear an oral history of how this came about, but until proven otherwise, I'm just going to assume Usyk personally loves Hitman.

It's possible to get the most luxurious gaming chair for as little as AU$729 if you're willing (or happy!) to buy a limited edition branded variety. For example, this model with the Superman logo emblazoned on its backrest is going for the special price of AU$729, and so is this Game of Thrones inspired take bearing the logo of the Starks (if you embrace chaos and prefer the Lannisters, they're accounted for too). There are also a handful of esports-centric models ranging Horde, Team Liquid and Cloud9. Of the options on sale, the Horde model is probably the least conspicuously branded, though you'll need to like that particular shade of red.

Of course, the Titan Evo's standard model, the one without the branding and fancy colourways, is also on sale for the aforementioned AU$764. That's pretty much what you can expect to pay for the Titan Evo during a sales event, but as always the price is worth it.

While the Titan Evo is brilliant, I'm personally more interested in Secretlab's gaming desks, especially since my desk is over 40 years old (I ate breakfast at it as a child). The Secretlab Magnus Pro XL is our favourite gaming desk, and it's currently going for AU$1,269, down from the usual AU$1,408 (the non-XL version is going for AU$1,099, down from AU$1,218). That's a pretty normal saving for this desk whenever Secretlab has seasonal sales, but it's a generous discount on a weapons grade desk with brilliant cable management thanks to its onboard power supply column.

These two products—the Titan Evo and the Magnus Pro XL—are best-of-class in their respective categories, but Secretlab also makes a bunch of other stuff as well: it's well worth checking out the brand’s Christmas Sale if you're looking to upgrade your gaming space.

OK, so just up there, the really weird Balatro Friends of Jimbo (Pack 3) reveal trailer? Yeah, there's a weirder version of that. Well, there's outtakes from that, the video where Balatro publisher Playstack apparently paid relatively famous voice actor Ben Starr to be a silly clown. Which is to say that the voice actor of Clive from Final Fantasy 16 and Prometheus from Hades 2 is uh, you know, a goofy clown.

But apparently Ben Starr has some behind the scenes outtakes from the filming of that trailer. I say this because he has posted them to Twitter and they are extremely unhinged and borderline NSFW on account of what is done to those bananas.

This trailer is just the latest of the trailers for Balatro's smorgasbord of crossovers with other games, its "Friends of Jimbo" patches that have introduced yet more little pixel representations of pixel people to go on cards to score points with. This one's a (free) pack of crossovers with Divinity Original Sin 2, Shovel Knight, Potion Craft, Enter the Gungeon, Cult of the Lamb, Don't Starve, 1000xRESIST, and Warframe.

The first Friends of Jimbo pack released in August, bringing along all manner of little weird guys like an Among Us astronaut and Geralt, from The Witcher. The second Friends of Jimbo came in October, adding crossovers like Stardew Valley, Cyberpunk 2077, and Slay the Spire.

None of those, however, had a live-action trailer like the one for this last Friends of Jimbo pack. "I have a of of fucking friends," says Jimbo, as portrayed by Ben Starr.

Poker-themed deckbuilder Balatro is the game that caused PC Gamer to proclaim, this year, that the future of gaming belongs to weird little games. Which is something the rest of the year bore out, as Balatro continued to sell—breaching 3.5 million copies sold and even going to mobile platforms—proving that its infectious sense of humor and strange little soundtrack belong in gaming history books. You should probably go play it now. I know I'm going to.

The leak has come after the recent addition of the Eurofighter Typhoon, and after a forum argument over the scanning capabilities of its impressive CAPTOR radar system someone posted a restricted document in an effort to prove their point. This has earned them a ban and removal of the material. Which is what has happened to everyone else who has ever posted this kind of stuff and which this game is, to be clear, very famous for at this point.

Per a community manager on the War Thunder forums, you should not do this:

"I will take this opportunity to again remind everyone here, please do not, under any circumstances, try to post, share any sources unless you are 100% certain they are legally declassified and publicly safe for use. We will never handle or use them, and all it does is actively harm any possible future changes being possible by trying to use them. Do not do it. No good will ever come from it for you or the vehicle you are trying to post for," they said.

The news was quickly picked up by reputable defense establishment sites like the UK Defence Journal, among others.

It's honestly hysterical because a holiday leak is at this point a tradition. We got one last year too. It's such a common occurrence at this point that I'm not even sure we report on them all—in fact... we published a whole story to that effect last September. That was when some Eurofighter Typhoon documents first leaked.

Makes me feel bad for the moderators over there, honestly, who just want to build a community about their fun military sim without becoming embroiled in the politics of international espionage.

Anyway, a bit of personal commentary: If you'd like to ever work in the military or defense sector I'd recommend not playing War Thunder—or at least not posting on their forums about it. Prospective employers have got to be looking for it in their background checks as a potential weakness by now.

According to Variety, Amazon said that Secret Level's first week was its most-watched animated series debut of all time.

Aside from the announcement, though, there's no information on what games will be featured in Secret Level's second season, when it might debut, or how long it'll be. Unless it's already in-progress it'll take some time to coordinate all those licensing deals.

Season 1 of secret level had a lot of stars for what it was—Arnold Schwarzenegger, Kevin Hart, Keanu Reeves, Temuera Morrison, Emily Swallow, Merle Dandridge, Claudia Doumit, Clive Standen, and Laura Bailey, among others. It had episodes about Dungeons & Dragons, Sifu, New World, Unreal Tournament, Warhammer 40,000: Space Marine, Crossfire, Armored Core, The Outer Worlds, Mega Man, Exodus, Spelunky, Concord, Honor of Kings, Playtime, and one exceptionally weird one about Pac-Man.

For all that the PC Gamer team was... not impressed by the results. A mere five of the 15 episodes rated a 3/5 or better on PC Gamer's very informal round robin take on a Secret Level review.

Plus, there's a whole awkward episode dedicated to high-profile failure Concord, the very expensive and very public game that released this year before walking itself back into nothingness. PC Gamer's Tyler Wild said it was "like a message from a ghost whose unfinished business is creating a global multimedia franchise."

First on the docket, Geralt is 59 at the start of the first Witcher game, 61 by the events of The Witcher 3 in 1272, and 64 at the conclusion of his saga with Blood and Wine in 1275. And you know what? He's in amazing shape for a guy of retirement age, but I was honestly expecting Geralt to be older. Fantasy lifespan rules apply and witchers are supposed to live much longer than normal humans, though it's never specifically codified how much longer, and they usually die in the line of witchering before they can find out. It also brings me no pleasure to report that this introduces a lowkey highkey problematic age gap of 38 years between baby Geralt and the sorceress love of his life. Yennefer of Vengerberg, you're canceled. We're not calling you out, we're calling you in.

Continuing on the "Geralt is too young" train, if this birth year applies to the Netflix series, that means Geralt was only 20 years old in the first episode where he kills Renfri and earns his "Butcher of Blaviken" title⁠—this event seems to be undated in the timeline from the books. When I told my partner about this, she immediately felt sad for Geralt going through such a traumatic event so young, but I have more practical concerns.

A mega ripped master swordsman retiree is something I can suspend my disbelief over⁠—this is fantasy, you can do magic and Elf stuff and live a long time, we're all on the same page here. But have you ever met a 20 year-old who looks like Henry Cavill? You're practically still a boy at that age, only bodybuilding influencers on Instagram taking the scariest experimental horse steroids are going to look like that at age 20. I guess witchers are canonically not natty, but god damn, what do they put in those potions?

Regardless, once we know the year The Witcher 4 is set, we'll be able to figure out Geralt's age there too. My mind is a steel trap, no minutia of fantasy canon nonsense can escape it. I failed too many calculus exams in my youth to let that happen.

Mini Mini Golf Golf isn't a particularly good golf game. The controls feel a tiny bit off, the physics are occasionally unpredictable and there's not many holes to putt your way through. That might put off some people, which is a shame, as it's just the tip of a thoroughly weird iceberg. In reality, this is an experimental narrative adventure about climate collapse, human memory, time travel and awkward FMV videogame theory podcasts. Just… mostly told through the medium of miniature golf.

Released a few days ago and the debut title from Berlin-based arthouse game collective Three More Years, this is a high-concept sci-fi story set in the year 2063. Operating from a retro-futuristic space station orbiting above the (newly-formed) Greater Baltic Ocean, you're trying to piece together the history of what happened to our poor and abused planet while also communing with some kind of extra-dimensional entity that speaks to you through glitches in a minigolf game.

From the little bit I've played (and I wouldn't want to spoil you beyond this point anyhow), it's an audiovisual treat. A mixed-media collage of VHS-scrungled FMV, warped and glitching game geometry, text delivered through all manner of kinetic typography (including key narrative being written on the ground in the wake of your ball's travel) and an ever-shifting perspective as you hop between screens, tuning dials, tapping buttons or waiting for text to be printed onto your weird science clipboard.

There's a lot to unpack here. Even in its opening minutes, the game dives into the social repercussions and politics of tackling climate change, and how capitalism is unwilling or unable to address that. But it's also a human story, about overwork, memory, love, legacy and so much more. It's also sometimes about deep shower thoughts on games, with the developer's own podcast—Mini Mini Talk Talk, viewable independently here on YouTube—being used to deliver ideas and chopped up to provide hints at where the next branch of its non-linear plot lies. Y'know, when you're not lathing tectonic plate inserts using mini-golf controls.

While Mini Mini Golf Golf undeniably hits different, this isn't the first game to do weird high-concept things with mini golf. The psychedelic Wonderputt Forever delivers some surface-level social commentary through its unfurling, recontextualizing courses, but Wonderputt feels less interested in telling a story than conveying vibes. Above all else, Mini Mini Golf Golf is here to tell you a story, however weird its delivery. The game is out now on Steam for £9.89/$11.59, with a small launch discount available until December 19.

Almost… nearly… and won. Today's game was over so fast it took a moment to register with my brain, which was still stuck in puzzle-solving mode. Now I've caught up with myself I've no complaints though—there are definitely worse ways to end a week of Wordle.

Wordle today: A hint

Wordle today: A hint for Sunday, December 22

This word refers to muscular physical strength. Often treated in sentences as the opposite to "brains". 

Is there a double letter in Wordle today? 

No, a letter is not used twice in today's puzzle.

Wordle help: 3 tips for beating Wordle every day 

If you've decided to play Wordle but you're not sure where to start, I'll help set you on the path to your first winning streak. Make all your guesses count and become a Wordle winner with these quick tips: 

• A good opener has a mix of common vowels and consonants. 
• The answer could contain the same letter, repeated.
• Avoid words that include letters you've already eliminated. 

You're not racing against the clock so there's no reason to rush. In fact, it's not a bad idea to treat the game like a casual newspaper crossword and come back to it later if you're coming up blank. Sometimes stepping away for a while means you can come back with a fresh perspective. 

Today's Wordle answer

What is today's Wordle answer?

Need a hand? The answer to the December 22 (1282) Wordle is BRAWN.

Previous Wordle answers

The last 10 Wordle answers 

Previous Wordle solutions can help to eliminate guesses for today's Wordle, as the answer isn't likely to be repeated. They can also give you some solid ideas for starting words that keep your daily puzzle-solving fresh.

Here are some recent Wordle answers:

• December 21: BLADE
• December 20: FLASH
• December 19: STRAY
• December 18: HEFTY
• December 17: SCOWL
• December 16: BOAST
• December 15: FUNKY
• December 14: DROOL
• December 13: BOXER
• December 12: VYING

Learn more about Wordle 

There are six rows of five boxes presented to you by Wordle each day, and you'll need to work out which five-letter word is hiding among them to win the daily puzzle.

Start with a strong word like ALIVE—or any other word with a good mix of common consonants and multiple vowels. You should also avoid starting words with repeating letters, so you don't waste the chance to confirm or eliminate an extra letter. Once you've typed your guess and hit Enter, you'll see which letters you've got right or wrong. If a box turns ⬛️, it means that letter isn't in the secret word at all. 🟨 means the letter is in the word, but not in that position. 🟩 means you've got the right letter in the right spot.

Your second guess should compliment the first, using another "good" word to cover any common letters you might have missed on the first row—just don't forget to avoid any letter you now know for a fact isn't present in today's answer. After that, it's just a case of using what you've learned to narrow your guesses down to the correct word. You have six tries in total and can only use real words and don't forget letters can repeat too (eg: BOOKS).

If you need any further advice feel free to check out our Wordle tips, and if you'd like to find out which words have already been used you can scroll to the relevant section above. 

Originally, Wordle was dreamed up by software engineer Josh Wardle, as a surprise for his partner who loves word games. From there it spread to his family, and finally got released to the public. The word puzzle game has since inspired tons of games like Wordle, refocusing the daily gimmick around music or math or geography. It wasn't long before Wordle became so popular it was sold to the New York Times for seven figures. Surely it's only a matter of time before we all solely communicate in tricolor boxes. 

In the year 2055, New York City has become… rather pixelated. It's also a battlefield between factions including the police (who are corrupt), a corporation (who are corrupt), and the Yakuza (who are the Yakuza). As an assassin for an up-and-coming crime family, you're out to take down all the other factions in a city-spanning gunfight.

Neon Inferno is a run-and-gun sidescroller where you can also shoot enemies in the background, gallery-shooter style. Developers Zenovia Interactive describe it as "like playing Contra and Wild Guns at the same time".

It's got two-player co-op where you can choose to play as either of its extremely Tekken-ass main characters, Mariana Vitti and Angelo Morano, and it's coming to Steam at some point in 2025.

Speaking with Entertainment Weekly, Jonathan Dumont, creative director of Assassin’s Creed Shadows, said that "Naoe’s the fastest Assassin we ever made," following up that "She runs super fast, she has a lot of gadgets to keep her stealth so that she doesn't have to fight often. We wanted to satisfy that for players that come in for that ninja-Assassin game."

Dumont also hinted that Naoe would have a lean-forward, arms-back run akin to the style made infamous by its ubiquitous presence in the anime Naruto.

Assassin's Creed Shadows will have two playable characters, the deuteragonists Yasuke, a close-combat brawler samurai based on a historical figure who plays like the warriors of recent Assassin's Creed games; and the fictional Naoe, who it seems is more likely to appear as a traditional assassin matching the earlier games in the series: good at staying hidden, but in trouble if she's up against four or five enemies at once.

Assassin's Creed Shadows will release on February 14, 2025, and is set in the Sengoku ("warring states") period of Japanese history.

It's yet another thing to love about Naoe, the character that reminds us mostly of how Ubisoft used to make the greatest series of stealth games—Splinter Cell. Shadows will, appropriate to the name, let you finally hide in shadowed areas and extinguish lights to stay hidden à la Splinter Cell.

If you're surprised that a big title like Assassin's Creed is releasing that early in the year, well, it got delayed a bit and 2025 is absolutely packed with huge games.

Some previous rules changes have been accompanied by multiverse-shaking adventures to explain things like magic working in a totally differently way, like the Die Vecna Die! module that accompanied the shift from AD&D 2nd edition to D&D 3.0. This is a much less seismic shift. Instead, we get some common sense advice on making changes piecemeal rather than all at once, and a set of bullet points on rule changes of note.

A couple of those address whole new systems for crafting and weapon mastery, but others provide an invaluable list of things you might not even have noticed were different. For instance: the stunned condition no longer drops your speed to zero, presumably to differentiate it from the extremely similar paralyzed condition. Being stunned still breaks concentration, takes away your action, gives attacks against you advantage, and makes you auto-fail Strength and Dexterity saves, but you can still take your normal move. Now it's more like when you get hit in the head so hard your world is rocked and you stumble around in a daze, which is a useful distinction, and since you lose your action it's not like you can dash away.

Grappling and shoving are now initiated with an unarmed strike, where before they required an Athletics check. By my reading that's a notable change because it means you can trigger them on an attack of opportunity, where before that was impossible by rules-as-written. Someone tries to run away from you, now you've got a chance to grab 'em not stab 'em.

Healing magic is more potent, with spells that give you back hit points now doubling the number of dice rolled. Cure wounds is now 2d8 per level, and spells like Aura of Vitality and Prayer of Healing have been boosted as well. Everyone thank your cleric.

Heroic Inspiration can be used to reroll any die. Back when it was just called Inspiration, this mechanic gave advantage on an attack roll, saving throw, or ability check, but now you can use it on anything—including a damage die—after the fact. Though it's not mentioned in the guide, another difference with Heroic Inspiration is that if you earn it while you've already got it, instead of it going to waste you can now pass it on to another player. Which is nice.

And finally, drinking a potion costs a bonus action. Previously it took a whole dang action, which was so prohibitive it was house-ruled away by me and most of the other DMs I know (including Larian), so it's cool to have that made official.

Obviously the rulebook police aren't going to show up at your door if you don't update to the latest rules, but it's handy to have some official guidance on the changes if you want to keep up. Common sense should always be the final judge in your home game, especially when it comes to changes that affect a player's build. As WotC says: "It's perfectly fine for a player to wait until the current campaign wraps up or their character's story comes to a natural conclusion before switching to a character built with the 2024 rules, so long as that's alright with the group."

With premier stealth-tactics studio Mimimi Games shutting down, Hooded Horse will take over publishing duties for its final game: Shadow Gambit: The Cursed Crew. The 2023 isometric stealth release was widely considered a pinnacle of the genre and one of the year's best games—PC Gamer called it just that with its Best Stealth of 2023 award.

Mimimi announced last year that Shadow Gambit would be its final release, surrendering to the increasingly stressful reality of modern games development in favor of the health of its developers. "Working on increasingly ambitious games took a heavy personal toll on us and our families" it said at the time, wrapping up 15 years of development that included hits like Shadow Tactics: Blades of the Shogun and Desperados 3.

Hooded Horse is an up-and-coming strategy publisher, and hopefully a good long-term home for Mimimi's swansong of fantasy Caribbean pirates and their quest for the ultimate treasure on a literal ghost ship. The 2023 release received two really good expansion packs, Zagan's Ritual and Yuki's Wish, before the studio closed up late last year.

"Shadow Gambit is in its final form, and we’re excited to be partnering with Hooded Horse for its ongoing commercial needs," said Mimimi co-founder Johannes Roth in a press release. "We're very impressed by their approach to indie publishing and are confident they will help the game reach even more players."

Shadow Gambit got an 87% review here on PC Gamer, with reviewer Dominic Tarason calling it "Superb squad-based stealth strategy that embraces the magic of save-scumming." Which it definitely does, in a uniquely cool way, by having the whole thing work around time-altering magic.

Here's hoping the genre-defining hit stays available for many years to come.

Rhodes shared a few concept pieces of the Anderfels region of Thedas, home to the Wardens' Weisshaupt Fortress and the Hossberg Wetlands zone of Veilguard. The third piece is the really shocking one, showing a cloaked figure wrapped in bandages, their skin mottled and purple-grey where exposed. They're sitting on a throne with a Warden bodyguard posted behind them, and this character no longer seems able to speak, instead relying on a quill and stack of parchments to communicate. They're holding one such message up to the viewer: "Don't let her see me like this."

"Nobody else seemed to like the 'leper king' direction, but I thought it'd be cool," Rhodes wrote in the caption, referencing the historical Baldwin of Jerusalem who was memorably depicted by Edward Norton in Kingdom of Heaven and also inspired the Leper in Darkest Dungeon. "The Hero of Ferelden has been putting off 'The Calling.' The Blight takes more each year, but there's still too much to do on the surface."

This would have been an absolute bombshell if it had made it into The Veilguard. Dragon Age's Blight-fighting Grey Wardens take a little nibble of the stuff to get their powers. It means they're able to kill Archdemons, but it also starts a roughly 20-year countdown until they hear The Calling and start transforming into maddened ghouls. Once it looks like their ticket's been punched, a Warden's supposed to travel underground to the Darkspawn's home turf and go out fighting. In Inquisition, world state codex stuff had the Hero of Ferelden out looking for a cure for The Calling⁠—it's why they weren't around to help out.

Clearly, things didn't fully work out in this iteration of Veilguard's story. Rhodes doesn't say explicitly, but it seems like our Origins hero also would have been First Warden of the order in this scenario⁠—in the final game, the Wardens are led by a bellicose chap straight out of central casting for an obstructionist police commissioner and voiced by none other than Nicholas Boulton, Hawke's actor from Dragon Age 2.

And like the prospect of Sten getting blown up in Trespasser, this fate for our Origins hero would have been a megaton bummer but also rad as hell. The "don't let her see me" message in particular is so goddamn heart-wrenching⁠—it presumably refers to Morrigan, the hero's friend and companion even if they never entered a relationship. The hero's disfigurement and silence would also have elided questions of player customization and voicing a previously silent protagonist⁠—even if you played a dwarf, this presumably came at a time in development where world states were still on the table, and could have been addressed with a cheeky shortened model.

I'm basically a net neutral on this not having made it into the final game. On the one hand, while I really loved Veilguard, its version of Thedas definitely lacks a lot of the strife, edge, and tragedy from previous games. Seeing the Hero of Ferelden like this would have been utterly chilling and unforgettable. On the flip side, it might have stuck out like a sore thumb in the swashbuckling, D&D podcast-core game we wound up getting. I can blissfully pretend my Origins Warden (City Elf Rogue, romanced Morrigan) is out doing errands for the Witch of the Wilds, maybe delivering a care package to their adult son who used to be a demon god while he attends Redcliffe University, home of the Fightin' Mabari.

This isn't the first time BioWare considered doing something utterly heinous to our Origins characters: In an early draft of Dragon Age: Inquisition's Here Lies the Abyss quest, we would have had to choose whether the Hero of Ferelden or Dragon Age 2's Hawke gets lost forever in another dimension.

As shared by Stardew developer Eric "ConcernedApe" Barone on social media, Stardew's latest update has rolled out on PC, Android, and iOS—console players, sadly, must wait a bit longer for a fix on their nastiest bug: The one where you can't get divorced without crashing the game. Sorry about that one. Suffer on, I guess.

The patch contains just one balance change: Legendary fish ponds now produce roe much more often. Which seems right. They're ponds with legendary fish. Less roe doesn't seem very legendary, does it?

March of 2024 had a superb delivery for Stardew fans: The surprising and surprisingly huge Stardew Valley 1.6 update that added all manner of stuff, from drinking mayonnaise to a new kind of farm and three new festivals and eight-person multiplayer and new late-game content and, and, and. A lot, really.

Which of course meant that even though Barone figured he was done, well, he added a bunch of new stuff last month anyway in the 1.6.9 patch. Which fits with how he said he "could work on it for the rest of my life" shortly afterward.

Anyway, I'm sure that after perusing all that you'll not be very surprised to learn that this week PC Gamer gave Stardew Valley its Best Ongoing Game award for 2024.

"Our favourite game to return to was one that has never asked for more money: No FOMO, no DLC, not even a microtransaction in sight. It's just a wildly popular game that keeps getting bigger and better," said global editor-in-chief Phil Savage.

As Collum put it, "A big challenge in game making is trying to please everyone without watering things down so much that you basically ruin what's special. The truth of the matter is that it will be impossible to please everyone. Instead, we'll always strive to make the best decisions we can which make the game as good as we hope it can be. We'll always be heavily guided directly and indirectly by all of you. It's why we've put the latest patch out as a beta first."

Collum also looked to the future, laying out four changes we can expect to see. For starters, the practice of selling Blood Packs as DLC will end. Previously, the Total War games shipped as bloodless things and you had to buy an add-on that coated your soldiers in red after each battle. It helped keep the age rating of the base game low, and Creative Assembly made a few bucks out of people who want everyone to look like Dragon Age: Origins characters in post-battle dialogue scenes. From now on though, any games where blood is appropriate will come with it as a base feature and age ratings be damned. (If the rumors about a Total War: Star Wars game are true I expect we wouldn't see blood there, while Total War: Warhammer 40,000, should such a thing come to pass, would be drowning in the stuff.)

Second, the launcher's going to die. As it currently stands, no matter which storefront you own a Total War game on, launching it instead launches the Total War launcher first. It's not entirely pointless since it also serves as a mod manager, and so Collum says the team wants to have something to handle mod management ready to go before the launcher is removed. But it is going to go away at some point.

Next up: "Factions will no longer be an early-adopter bonus". Used to be that if you pre-ordered a Total War game or bought it in the first week of release you'd get the first faction DLC for free. In Total War: Warhammer 3, for instance, that meant the Ogre Kingdoms. From now on, Collum says, "we will still ensure some form of bonus such as discounts," but the practice of putting one faction aside for early adopters and making everyone else pay for it separately will die a death.

The final announcement is that the Shadows of Change DLC for Warhammer 3, released last year to much gnashing of teeth, will be broken up. As was the case for subsequent expansions Thrones of Decay and Omens of Destruction, Shadows of Change will be made available as three separate add-ons for players who just want one bit of it rather than the whole enchilada.

These are all fan-pleasing changes, addressing things the commentariat has been vocally complaining about for a while. Although I'm sure they'll find new things to fill their diapers about after these changes are made.

I am a knight made of lightning and black steel. Perched on the parapet of a vast gothic tower, I spy a dozen shambling undead in the valley below. I leap into the air above them, then plummet into the mob, exploding like a thunderclap, arcing electricity and shattered zombie bits in my wake. Sometimes it's cool when a videogame is just a big dumb power fantasy, and Voin—a first-person action RPG just launched into early access—is exactly that, and feels like a solid first step on a year-long roadmap to a full release.

As it stands in early access, Voin is pretty much exactly what the launch trailer shows, no more, no less. You are a cool magic knight. There's a lot of nasty undead in a (very scenic) dark fantasy kingdom. You go out, you kick asses, you get loot and levels and you do it again across several non-linear, semi-open world maps. There's some fun aerial movement, some spectacular spells and skills (I especially like the anime-as-hell 'backwards slow-mo leap to plunging sword strike' ability), and a satisfying slow-mo dodge mechanic. It's good, dumb fun—just don't expect much story in this initial early access release.

Weirdly, despite the great aesthetics (which shine through in the launch trailer), the game looks like a low-fi, bitcrushed mess in the store screenshots. By default, the game scales down its resolution and heavily reduces the colour palette used, and while this look can work for some more overtly retro stuff, I don't think it quite works here—it hides a lot of impressive map design. Fortunately you can turn all of this off, and I recommend you do so, as you're missing out on some great vistas and detailed hyper-gothic architecture. Both in the maps and in your hub fortress, where you get to diegetically cleanse cursed items using a huge magical bell in a lava-filled forge, and level up by passing through a mirrored portal.

One thing I do hope for in the full version (or at least later in early access) is more structured questing and goals. Right now the game offers some pretty environments and lots of enemies to hack up, but not much structure beyond kicking ass, hoarding loot and gaining power. There's some solid combat and spectacular environments here, but not much connective tissue. Oddly, despite the heavy metal visuals, the game's music is fairly understated too. Perhaps more soundtrack is coming later, but I feel this deserves a playlist of the most doom-laden dark fantasy metal around.

While some early access games feel almost fully formed on day one, Voin feels more like a utilitarian foundation for things to come. An entertaining and great-looking one at that, with a year of additional development already planned out for a late 2025 final release, but perhaps not worth jumping on immediately unless the black metal album aesthetics really speak to you. But if that's enough for you, Voin is out now in Steam early access for £15.07/$17.99, with a 10% launch discount that'll be running until Christmas.