In late March the news broke that four Korean companies were competing to pitch for the StarCraft license from Blizzard. NCSoft, Nexon, Netmarble, and Krafton are all absolute giants and, attracted by StarCraft's long and storied history in South Korea, were pitching everything from an MMO to a mobile game as a continuation of the iconic RTS series.

South Korean financial news outlet MTN is now reporting that the process has ended with Nexon winning the license. Nexon's pitch was previously described as a "unique" take on the StarCraft universe, and the MTN report adds that the deal includes the Korean and Japanese distribution rights for "Overwatch mobile."

This Overwatch game is being developed by Blizzard and, per a machine translation, "is known to be a MOBA (Multiplayer Online Battle Arena) game on a mobile platform. It was also called 'Overwatch 3' by domestic game companies that participated in the bidding."

Wait, come back! I suppose with Overwatch Mobile the surprise is that it's taken Blizzard this long, and regardless of how it's being referred to internally I very much doubt it will release as Overwatch 3. As for StarCraft, there are no details on Nexon's intentions, but the fact that something might actually get made again in the StarCraft series has to be a good thing: the big question is whether it'll be an RTS, or even reflect those roots in a meaningful way.

Either way, it will be many years before we see what comes of this, but StarCraft is more well-known and beloved in South Korea than anywhere else in the world, and Nexon will see this as a massive opportunity in its home market.

It's not the only StarCraft project in the offing either. Last year we learned that Blizzard does have at least one more StarCraft project under development in-house that's—drum roll please—the studio's third attempt at making a shooter (following the cancelled projects Ghost and Ares).

"If it's not cancelled," said author Jason Schreier at the time. "I mean, this is Blizzard after all. Yes, that is a project that, as far as I knew, was in development. At least, as of the time that I wrote this book [...] this felt like such an interesting and useful nugget to include because it really just shows you that Blizzard cannot quit StarCraft shooters."

Things like StarCraft: Remastered and Hearthstone crossovers are nice, but it's been 15 years since Starcraft 2: Wings of Liberty and 10 since the final installment in the trilogy, StarCraft 2: Legacy of the Void. A series as big as StarCraft can certainly survive a long period of absence, but the bigger worry for fans will be whether its future involves a strategy title of some description. Shooters and spinoffs are all well and good, but they're not StarCraft: let's hope that, somewhere in Nexon, the decision-makers agree.

I recently interrupted a colleague mid-flow on an old Razer Huntsman to ask why they enjoy clacky keyboards so much. In response, they offered me an impassioned speech about mechanical keyboards, concluding with the words "God, I wish it had a lever, you know? Something I could pull at the end of every line — like a type writer!"

Seems some of us yearn for a return to ~ The Contraption ~ but what if you still want that tactility without the risk of waking up the whole house with your 3 AM machinations (or in my case, yet another run of Blue Prince because I refuse to be beaten by a shape shifting mansion of all things)? Well, stewards of silence Be Quiet have recently expanded into peripherals, ushering in sound dampened gaming keyboards that will allow you to plot in peace. As a modular, full-size keyboard, the Dark Mount not only enjoys versatility, but a premium price point to match at $255/£240/€260.

Before I really dive into the weeds, let me address the most obvious point first: is it actually that quiet? In a word, yes; while not completely silent, multiple layers of sound dampening foam and silicone make every keypress pleasingly understated. Even the space bar, typically the noisiest key on many keebs, has been quietly wrangled here.

Besides its sound dampening innards, the Dark Mount unit I'm reviewing owes much of its lower-key clacks to Be Quiet's silent linear mechanical switches. To briefly compare it to its smaller sibling, the Light Mount, these switches give every keypress a lovely, straightforward actuation without the oh-so-subtle springy feedback of Be Quiet's also available tactile switches.

In my Light Mount review, I likened every keypress upon those tactile switches to a steady descent towards solid ground. To leverage the same metaphor, the tactile switches offer a little bit of a grassy bounce while the linear switches on the Dark Mount are perhaps more akin to gently touching down on hardwood flooring.

The keycaps themselves are made of PBT rather than the smoother feeling ABS, though this more textured feel doesn't distract from what remains some great feeling keys (as far as materials go, PBT is the hardier, longer-lasting choice besides). But, if neither that or any of the above is your vibe, you can swap both keycaps and switches very easily with the puller that comes in the box. So long as what you want to swap in is compatible with the board's 5-pin sockets, you can customise the feel of the Dark Mount to your liking.

Now, let me finally address the nervous truck in the room: there's more than meets the eye to this gaming keyboard. On its own, there's not much to it, with the exceedingly extra RGB light bar lining the entire outer edge of the board being the main thing differentiating it from the Light Mount at first glance.

Like that smaller keyboard, you can also adjust the brightness and flick through lighting profiles using shortcuts mapped to the function and arrow keys, with further customisation possible in Be Quiet's IO Center software. With itty bitty, individually customisable segments that run the entire light-up-length of the keyboard, the Dark Mount's underglow lighting effect is a real show stopper.

But even with such an impressive light show, this tiny desk party is only just getting started. Flipping the main part of the keyboard over, you'll notice a number of extra USB-C ports. Besides the expected USB-C port on the top edge of the keyboard for the dedicated wired connection to your PC, there are two more besides it, plus another two found on the right and left hand edges of the board. These are for the Dark Mount's two main modular attachments, included in the box.

As modular designs go, The Dark Mount isn't simply reminiscent of the Mountain Everest Max, but the numberpad attachment feels directly comparable—and that's for good reason. This is because Be Quiet's parent company, Listan Group, bought Mountain a few years back, with both the modular Dark Mount and its Light Mount sibling likely the direct results of that acquisition.

My review unit comes with a media dock that can be slotted into two positions along the top edge, plus a numberpad that can slot in on either the left or right edge of the keyboard for ambidextrous placement. The numberpad features more of its lovely, sound-dampened PBT keys, plus eight more remappable buttons above those.

The media dock features a tactile scroll wheel for volume control, plus a number of media control buttons, as well as a small integrated screen with its own menu navigation buttons. Scrolling from left to right, this small dock screen offers controls for time, date, and brightness, plus some basic lighting profile customisation options.

Installing the Dark Mount's modular attachments is fairly straightforward, though I initially found the number pad's retractable USB-C connector quite stiff. My oh-so-helpful colleague had no such issue however, demonstrating that the numberpad is far sturdier than I'd initially worried. Generally, the modular design's attachment mechanisms are fairly elegant, concealed by easily detached dustcover panels when not in use—though I feel like these are the first things I'm going to lose.

Dustcovers ready to go walkabout are far from the only inelegant aspect of this keyboard, either. Ready to fry some small potatoes? To begin with, the modular design of the keyboard necessitates a similarly separated magnetically attached wrist rest, making it feel much less secure than the Light Mount's detachable palm rest.

The ambidextrous placements available for both the numberpad and the media dock make this a versatile keyboard—but unfortunately, the Dark Mount hasn't completely won me over on the subject of modular keyboards. For a start, I'm well and truly a media knob convert, so the Dark Mount's low profile scroll wheel just doesn't do it for me. The low-profile media and menu control buttons are similarly too shallow to actuate in a way that offers much tactile feedback; on a mechanical keyboard, I found it an odd sensory contrast.

The eight plastic buttons on the numberpad offer slightly clickier feedback, but there's no question that the numbered PBT keys below are the main event. Still, these eight keys can be customised via IO Center to offer a variety of functions with one press. It's neat to, say, put my PC to sleep or open the task manager with a single button click. But, like the co-ord that seemed like a good idea at the time but is destined for Depop, I just don't reach for them. Still, just because I couldn't make this versatile keyboard work for me, doesn't mean that you won't easily make it your own.

Not to encourage any sibling rivalry, but I found myself vastly preferring the cheaper Light Mount (even if it isn't as affordable as its respective keyboard ancestor, the Mountain Everest 60). As nice as it is, I came away feeling the Dark Mount's attachments were much-of-a-muchness for my day-to-day use.

There's also the fact that, on both of Be Quiet's keyboard offerings to date, gaming-specific features are light on the ground for the price point. If you're looking for a more esports-geared feature set that includes Rapid Trigger and customisable actuation, I'd say you're better off picking up the Corsair K70 Pro TKL (though you can find even cheaper options among our best gaming keyboards guide). That said, for my money (and my cluttered desk space), the Light Mount still does everything else I want in a much more focused package compared to the Dark Mount, while also offering some of the most vibrant, customisable RGB-lighting I've had the pleasure of gawping at.

On an average day about a dozen new games are released on Steam. And while we think that's a good thing, it can be understandably hard to keep up with. Potentially exciting gems are sure to be lost in the deluge of new things to play unless you sort through every single game that is released on Steam. So that’s exactly what we’ve done. If nothing catches your fancy this week, we've gathered the best PC games you can play right now and a running list of the 2025 games that are launching this year.

Navicula Meatus

Steam ‌page‌ ‌
Release:‌ April 25
Developer:‌ Torgomind

Browsing Steam every week for this column is worth it just to find games like Navicula Meatus, a weird-ass grid-based dungeon crawler with an art style splicing Scorn with the Garbage Pail Kids. Set in "a peculiar world of murky alleys and fleshy growths", it's much more puzzle heavy than recent modern indie blobbers like Dragon Ruins or Cyclopean: The Great Abyss, and developer Torgomind insists in the Steam description that "fun and gameplay have also been excised to allow for pure streamlined immersion". In other words: don't expect this to be fun. Expect it to be discomforting, maybe even traumatizing, and possibly a little bit funny.

BrokenLore: Don't Watch

Steam‌ ‌page‌
Release:‌ April 25
Developer:‌ Serafini Productions

While BrokenLore: Don't Watch looks positively conventional next to the above, it's still quite weird. It's a first-person survival horror starring a hikokomori—a person who has completely, voluntarily withdrawn from society—living in a tiny Tokyo apartment. Your solitary life is threatened by mounting pressures to interact with the real world, and so, BrokenLore takes place both in the apartment and inside the protagonist's mind, where a grotesque stalking figure lurks. The art style borrows heavily from the PS2 era, though it definitely looks better than a PS2 game most of the time.

Replicube

Steam‌ ‌page‌ ‌
Release:‌ April 24
Developers:‌ Walaber Entertainment LLC

Replicube is a programming game about generating increasingly complex voxel-based objects. Basically, the game displays a 3D object, and it's your job to replicate that object however you see fit using code. As you can imagine, the results will vary dramatically from player-to-player, so there are leaderboards for measuring both source code size and execution efficiency. This is a feature-rich program: there's a 3D voxel editor, a 2D image editor, and even in-game discussion boards.

GeckoShop

Steam page
Release:‌ April 25
Developer:‌ Reptoid

At first glance GeckoShop looks like another in the endless stream of retail simulators flooding Steam, though it distinguishes itself with a unique art style (ie, not the generic sub-realism that blights the genre) and the fact that you're selling geckos. To sell geckos you need to have geckos, so there's a creature collector aspect as well, and the small but busy open world is full of bizarre NPCs with quests to delegate. If you're frustrated that most of the first-person retail sims on Steam are completely devoid of personality, you should give this a shot.

Dishventory

Steam‌ ‌page‌ ‌
Release:‌ April 25
Developer:‌ Final Offer

I usually ignore card games because I'd really rather prefer to do the dishes. So imagine my reaction when I found Dishventory, a strategy card game about doing the dishes. Is this possibly the worst thing ever made? No! It looks pretty fun, as far as card games go: you have to place dirty dishes on a board in the most efficient order possible. Every couple of rounds you get the chance to buy from a random array of mess-defying cards, and if you survive five days, you win. It's free, too.

As much as I'd call myself a strategy enthusiast, it's always been difficult for me to get into the really crunchy, grognardy, rivet-counting wargames like Gary Grigsby's War in the East or Combat Mission. Of all of the recent Paradox grand strategy games, Hearts of Iron 4 is the one I have the fewest hours in. That ultimately comes down to the fact that I am, at heart, a roleplay dork. I care more about whether two characters are going to kiss than what caliber cannon is fitted on my medium tank.

So from the first time I saw Burden of Command—a new take on World War 2 tactics that bills itself as a "leadership RPG"—I was immediately intrigued. And after stumbling through its somewhat cumbersome tutorial, I found that it was just what I'd been waiting for.

"RPG" might be a bit off the mark. The way I would actually describe Burden of Command is as a tactical World War 2 visual novel, which is just as offbeat and interesting as it sounds. Taking on the role of an American lieutenant in 1942 and commanding a platoon through basic training and eventually the first wave of Yanks to land in North Africa, there are two main modes of play woven together.

You have tactical, grid-based combat with line of sight, cover, and suppression that could be mistaken for one of those grognard games I mentioned. But you also have text-based interstitials featuring colorized period photography, and occasionally even taped interviews with real WW2 veterans. These include many small and large decisions that can affect how you develop as an officer and the fate of your men.

Your officer has a few personality traits that exist almost entirely just for flavor:

• Sarcasm, denoting how often you deal with stress like a Buffy character
• Directness, measuring your inclination to skip the formalities and get to the point of a matter
• And verbosity, which affects how likely you are to pipe up during a briefing scene rather than just clicking through it to get to the next mission.

Your reputation for any of the above might be commented on by other characters and earn you nicknames like "chatterbox."

More impactful are the approaches your character adopts, which can each give mechanical bonuses in battle and unlock options in certain narrative decisions. You can be an officer who leads by the book, focusing on Discipline, for example. Or you can face every challenge with a sort of heroic bravado, specializing in Zeal. I started out with a core value of Compassionate, hoping to prioritize saving as many lives as I could.

But I quickly pivoted to the Clever approach, as I found that was actually the way to save the most lives at the end of the day. Concern and an open heart aren't enough. You have to be crafty and effective.

The US Rifle Company you'll be commanding is led by a captain and composed of four platoons that each have a lieutenant in charge, and these five officers are the only ones who have visible combat stats. There are also a handful of named sergeants and privates, however, whose under-the-hood personalities can be shaped by your decisions in ways that can affect how they behave in the future. These characters, notably, can die—not just on the battlefield, but as the result of narrative decisions. I lost one of my sergeants in a tragic training accident before we even shipped out, seemingly to teach me a lesson about how vulnerable any named soldier is.

Squads in combat are a bit more abstract, though. They don't actually have a set number of guys in them that can be killed. That goes for both you and the enemy. Rather, each has a morale score that can be lowered temporarily by battlefield conditions like suppressing fire, or for the rest of the mission in the form of "casualties." These can be replaced between missions, assuming your higher-ups can be convinced that you need reinforcement.

This ties into one of the most interesting ways Burden of Command sets itself apart as a tactical game. Generally, a squad cannot be killed just by shooting at it. To remove an enemy from the map entirely, you have to assault their position and force a surrender. This requires you to first lay down suppressing fire on them, which both prevents them from shooting at your assault squads as they approach and increases the chances the assault will be successful.

So the tempo of a battle very much follows a move-and-fire doctrine, where you have to scout out an enemy position, suppress it, then ideally flank it and go in for the assault. Your own squads, likewise, might take a lot of casualties and end up pinned down. But they won't generally be completely wiped out. You'll simply run out the turns allowed to you to finish the mission and have to accept a more dire narrative result.

Each map also has two different objectives for "Mission" and "Men." Mission is how quickly and effectively you completed the tasks the brass gave you, which earns you Prestige to use in leveling up your officers. Men is a measure of how well you treated your soldiers on the mission, primarily by minimizing casualties. This earns you Loyalty, which is used to level up your squads.

Getting high marks in both, I found, is usually easier than focusing on one or the other, since securing objectives in a timely and effective manner naturally lends itself to not taking a bunch of unnecessary losses, and vice-versa. But occasionally you will be forced to prioritize.

This all adds up to a war story that seems to be extremely branching and adaptable. I'm not sure exactly how adaptable yet, because I've only seen one path and the single auto-save and inability to restart a mission means you can't just go back and try a different choice. But based on the minute things I have seen Burden of Command react to, I'm very interested in finding out just how much the scenario might diverge if I called my shots very differently.

It really is that rare breed: a wargame for roleplayers. And while it may have me agonizing over every decision I make, that's exactly how I like it.

Pasokon Retro is our regular look back at the early years of Japanese PC gaming, encompassing everything from specialist '80s computers to the happy days of Windows XP.

Sometimes I buy obscure old games for what I like to imagine are grand, noble reasons. A niche developer makes an unusual puzzley twist on the RPG, and I must learn more. A great idea turns up 20 years too early on hardware that could barely run it, and I just have to know if it works anyway. An ancient dungeon crawler dares to combine horror with extensive map-making, and I need to see it for myself.

And then there are times like this, where I see the words "Initial D typing game" and just know it's going to be so daft I have to experience its particular brand of absurdity with my own eyes.

No setting could be more unsuited to the typing game treatment—not even Sega's The Typing of the Dead felt as forced as this. The '90s street racing manga and anime adaptation of Initial D are full of achingly cool people driving hyper-tuned cars I will never see outside of old arcade games and Tokyo Xtreme Racer. It's about as effortlessly stylish as anything could ever hope to be. Which means it's also on the exact opposite end of the cool spectrum as "accurate touch typing" and "being the sort of person interested enough in typing games to have them shipped from the other side of the planet." (Hi).

I expected to have nothing more than a bit of a laugh with 2000's Initial D: Ryosuke Takahashi's Fastest Typing Theory, to confirm it was a silly idea and a fun curio for my shelf I'd soon put away forever. A brief run through practice mode quickly corrected my casual attitude. This game is as deadly serious about the typing tutor part of the package as it is showing off nighttime drifting around hairpin corners.

There are separate sessions for each hand, colour coding to show correct finger placement and their corresponding keys, and a full dual-handed test too. When I'm done I'm shown my clear time, tracked to the hundredth of a second, as well as how many slip-ups I made and my five most commonly fumbled keys. I've been judged in three specific areas, none of them drifting a tuner Toyota Trueno, and found deeply wanting.

Seeing my weaknesses laid out in this way wounded my writer's pride. I type all day and night. I've worn keyboards out, haphazardly stuck them back together, and then typed some more. So when some decades-old game has the gall to tell me I'm anything less than amazing at the one thing I do all the damned time, you bet I'm going to take it personally.

I think Ryosuke Takahashi's Fastest Typing Theory did this on purpose. I took my white-hot umbrage and poured it into the main "Battle" mode, ready to unleash my lightning-fast reflexes against the game's five opponents, unaware that I was so wounded by its mild accusations I was about to dedicate an entire afternoon to showing an ancient piece of typing software who's boss.

Rather than try to meaningfully integrate the races with my frenzied keyboard mashing, these sprints instead follow a video > typing > video > typing pattern, the compressed action pausing in certain places to allow for some burning hot key pressing action.

The short and low resolution clips used to sell each "race" aren't exactly up to modern technical standards, but as they're all directly lifted from the '98 TV series Initial D: First Stage (as is the fabulous Eurobeat soundtrack and numerous snatches of dialogue), they're still enough to drum up some genuine excitement. Watching another one is my reward for typing well, and I'm soon caught up in clearing the latest word off the screen, always afraid I'll take a second too long or fumble too many keystrokes, every error chipping away at my health bar until I crash out.

At first I assumed the text I'm asked to type out would lean towards racing/car terminology in a vague attempt to justify the licence, so I was surprised to see the Japanese names of countries, rivers, and short words that would translate into "periodic table", "shampoo", and "hamster" turn up instead.

Weird, but nothing I couldn't handle. I was doing pretty well in no time at all, actually. My typos were down, my speed up, and my initials were plastered all over the game's arcade-like high score table. I soon had a string of breezy victories to my name and confidently clicked on the next race without giving it much thought.

It felt as though the game had suddenly slammed the accelerator to the floor. By the end of the fifth stage I'm desperately typing out full sentences, sometimes with punctuation, and swearing like I'm facing the final boss of a soulslike. No more single words to quickly clear away for me. Oh no, now the challenges demand perfect inputs like "AREHAHASIRIKONNDEKO-SUWOYOKUSITTERURAINNDAYO" and "ITUMADENETEYAGARU.OKIRO,DENNWADA."—and that's if I'm lucky.

I've had less stressful hospital appointments.

Just as it's on the verge of becoming truly unbearable the game throws out something that could be translated as "Count Dracula can't handle the sun" just for fun. I end up swearing again, only this time it's because I'm trying to focus on typing accurately without laughing my head off.

Against all odds, this is a genuinely useful typing tutor. The practice sessions are of real practical use, and the Initial D framework makes it all feel more like play than real homework even when things get tough. The lack of any true link between these two seemingly incompatible halves turns out to be for the best, the unpredictable text forcing my eyes to focus on the screen and trusting my fingers to do the rest. I am a better touch-typist for playing this, and I got to see some great '90s drifting, too. I'm not sure if my freshly honed skills will transfer to Tokyo Xtreme Racer, but I'm still counting them as a win.