Character creation doesn’t get too complicated, but you might hesitate over choosing your character’s Background and the perks that come along with it.

Yes, you're trapped underground in the dark surrounded by horrors. But it's still perfectly lovely and chill.

These three statues represent the first three bosses that you'll have to take on: Glurch, Ghorm, and Malugaz. Before we worry about them, though, we'll want to start cleaning up the immediate area.

Snaking my way from one clearing to the next was super fun, even if the actual controls (I mainly played on a gamepad) are so simple. If you’re the type of player who revels in simplicity, this could be your crafting game.

With all these new Explorers navigating the underground, we wanted to give you a little re-cap on seasonal events in Core Keeper. Seasonal events are themed events that activate in-game at certain times of year!

Chris started playing PC games in the 1980s, started writing about them in the early 2000s, and (finally) started getting paid to write about them in the late 2000s. Following a few years as a regular freelancer, PC Gamer hired him in 2014, probably so he'd stop emailing them asking for more work.

While it doesn’t reinvent the wheels of its genre, Pugstorm’s Core Keeper emerges confidently out of early access and I’m looking forward to revisiting it over and over again in the coming years.

It’s a familiar cadence: use resources to beef up your base, craft items that help you explore further, gear up for the boss fight, make secondary bases, and improve the return routes to key areas. As the paths you’ve created grow more convoluted, you can rely on your map, which you’re able to pull out as an overlay.

Bigger jumps, no gravity, faster running, a dash, a grappling hook, unique weapons etc. Even when these items don't offer a mechanical change, they often combine with other items that do, leading to a more enjoyable exploration and feeling of progression. It is this sense of progression that makes up for the fact that it has a similar mining system to core keeper's. But pelo such equivalent exists for core keeper, and it is disappointing to unlock the next tier of pickaxe when the only thing you're looking forward to is .... the next tier of pickaxe.

I think the biggest praise I can give to the game is that I cannot wait to dig into it with a few friends over the coming weeks. It's the kind of game you can slowly chip away at over several evenings and the hardcore mode even offers some replayability down the line.

I was always mod-skeptical with Baldur's Core Keeper Gameplay Gate 3, but being able to install them with one click has completely changed my mind

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Even if we’ve seen these ideas before in other games, this is still the kind of meandering sandbox that I can enjoy losing myself in.

The first time I saw glowing red eyes blinking in the dark in one of the more distant biomes I got so panicked I wound up swinging a berry pudding I had in my inventory instead of my sword. Tunneling into any new area, surrounded by pitch-black darkness and only clearing a path wide enough for yourself can be creepy and claustrophobic.