“In Legend of Grimrock 2, a sword is a sword.”

LEGEND OF GRIMROCK 2: pure PC gaming essence

his is what you get if you boil down Dark Souls until the only things left are some water stains and powdery minerals. That simplicity isn’t a bad thing—this is where Dark Souls and plenty of other modern RPGs came from after all, the grid-based first-person dungeon crawler genre largely defined by classics like Ultima Underworld and The Bard’s Tale.

TIn Legend of Grimrock 2, I’m not thumbing through item description after item description looking for narrative tidbits or scanning the environment for a sense of its history. In Legend of Grimrock 2, a sword is a sword. A dungeon is a dungeon. The game’s goal is still something precise, but indefinable, not anything a collaborative wiki page can lay out and decrypt. The goal here is mood, and the mood is a cocktail of wonder and fear. The tension between the two is what charges every push forward into booby-trap laden dungeons with a tiny emotional tax. Legend of Grimrock 2 is still an incredibly atmospheric game.

Murdered seven turtles and ate their children.

t’s hard to overstate what a big, risky decision it was to add a tenth class to Hearthstone. In the six years since the game launched, the developer had consistently played down the idea that adding another hero was a serious possibility, citing obvious problems with how to design a unique identity and balance it around and against the existing classes. But a lot has changed about Hearthstone in the last year or so. Since the arrival of a new leadership team led by game director Ben Lee, who joined from CD Projekt Red, the cadence of nerfs—and buffs!—has increased, the cost of collecting cards has come down thanks to the duplicate protection across all rarities, and a new mode was finally added in the form of the brilliant Battlegrounds auto-battler. But for me the biggest bombshell has been Demon Hunter, which launched alongside the Ashes of Outland expansion on April 7.

IIt’s also hard to overstate just how broken Demon Hunter was on day one. In the Standard mode, according to third party data tracking site HS Replay, the class had a 56.2 percent win rate. Which sounds fine until you consider that every other class had a sub 50 percent win rate. Demon Hunter was the only class going positive, and that win rate would have been much higher but for the fact all the Demon Hunters were playing each other. “It was the most powerful deck I’ve ever seen since starting the Data Reaper Project,” Vicious Syndicate founder Ohad

Zach told me. “It made Galakrond Shaman in the first week of Descent of Dragons look like an arena deck. It’s very possible that a refined aggro