6 games that had a huge impact on PC gaming, but are rarely celebrated today

February's when the big games start coming out, but this week I played a demo on Steam for a smaller game I'd hate to see overlooked. The Pale Beyond is a survival management sim about a polar expedition. If I was glib I'd called it Frostpunk On a Boat, which I am, so I will.

One difference is that every member of your crew has a name, face, and personality. You get to know them before everything goes to hell, so that if they die you feel as bad about it as you did when you got Thane killed at the end of Mass Effect 2. And as well as food and fuel, you've got a third resource to worry about evocatively called "decorum". More than just morale, it's a measure of the crew's willingness to maintain a stiff upper lip and pull together rather than seeing each other as more tempting meals than another tin of spoiled rations.

We could probably all do with some more decorum in our lives. I hope your decorum score stays steady, and I'll talk to you again next week.

If you ask me, we're ramshackle contraptions designed to hunt, gather, and perish early from preventable disease, and this society stuff all started going downhill the second we got into agriculture. When we were young, hale, and nomadic, roaming the steppes and plains? Those were our glory days. At least we can relive them via a recent video from a streamer called boesthius, who undertook the Civilisation 6 "no settle: domination challenge" to win a match of Civ without founding any cities of his own.

A few weeks ago, images of an odd-looking PSU from Corsair leaked out. What made it so odd? Well, the connectors were on the "wrong" side. Could such an aberration be real? Yep: Corsair officially announced the new RMx Shift ATX 3.0 line of PSUs, making it the "world's first power supply with side-positioned connectors," and honestly, I'm surprised no one has come up with this sooner.

For every entry on PC Gamer's list of the 50 most important PC games, there are a dozen other less-celebrated trailblazers that don't get as much love as The Secret of Monkey Island or Doom or Deus Ex. The genealogy of games has always fascinated me: Tracing back genres to their evolutionary roots, discovering where ideas become accepted, fell out of vogue or just forgotten. Why are survival games massively popular in the 2020s, when the survival games of the '90s have completely faded from memory? Why did it take so long for deckbuilders to become a hit genre, when Magic: The Gathering was doing it on PC 25 years ago? These games--while seldom thought about nowadays--were hugely influential on PC gaming as we know it today.

On paper, Forspoken is a game that should have resonated with me. It's a Luminous Productions/Square Enix venture, a developer I remain deathly loyal to despite its poor track record in recent years. It features some of my absolute favourite things in life: nail art, cats, parkour, and badass matriarchal rulers. Yet Forspoken is let down by its sheer unwillingness to break the mould. In many ways, it's the exact type of game you've seen countless times across the last 15 years. An open world RPG with superpowers, mystical creatures, and a terrifying world-ending threat.