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Remnant: From the Ashes fans, rejoice! We are celebrating the first free content update and new modes of this post-apocalyptic game by giving away custom pro-gaming headsets from SteelSeries, plus digital copies and some swag. Check out our prize bundles:

GRAND PRIZE (one winner)

• Custom Remnant: From the Ashes Arctis Headset from SteelSeries – Choose ONE of the following: Arctis Pro Wireless for PC or Arctis Pro Wireless for PS4

• Digital code for Remnant: From the Ashes on Steam, Xbox One or PS4

• Remnant: From the Ashes Prize Pack, including a thermal bottle, external hard drive, backpack and beanie

FIRST RUNNER UP (two winners)

• Custom Remnant: From the Ashes Arctis Headset from SteelSeries – Choose ONE of the following: Arctis Pro Wireless for PC or Arctis Pro Wireless for PS4

• Digital code for Remnant: From the Ashes on Steam, Xbox One or PS4

• Remnant: From the Ashes thermal bottle and external hard drive

SECOND RUNNER UP (ten winners)

• Digital code for Remnant: From the Ashes on Steam or PS4

To sign up to the giveaway read our official rules, accept our terms and conditions, and fill out the form below. You can also get extra entries by completing the additional actions in the form, like following us on social media.

If you have trouble viewing the form please use this link.

Remember to mark your calendar because the winners will receive an email on October 1st with instructions on how to claim their prize. Good luck!

Every victory in Overland, no matter how small, is won by the skin of your teeth. That’s a feeling any good turn-based tactical strategy game gives you, of course. But Overland’s pared-down options, compact maps, and fast-rising stakes mean that nearly every decision–the car you drive, the company you keep, where you move, what you carry–feels vital and could potentially have major ramifications. A mysterious and omnipresent race of creatures (I think) has ravaged the USA, and for the characters under your care, road-tripping from the East Coast to the West Coast seems to be the best course of action. The journey across Middle America is a beautiful but difficult one, filled with life-or-death obstacles right from the get-go, and Overland’s roguelike structure means you will see dozens, if not hundreds, of ordinary people (and dogs, all of them good) perish in fraught situations. But the high risk makes its small victories, like finding a cool item or escaping an area unharmed, feel all the more rewarding, more motivating. Overland is filled with bite-sized doses of relief that feed you with the encouragement you need to continue helping these poor folk on the off chance that maybe this time, you might make it all the way.

The post-apocalyptic survivors of Overland don’t possess the combat expertise of XCOM or Fire Emblem soldiers. The randomly-generated personality traits for characters are simple in nature, but make them feel more grounded and sympathetic than your typical strategy soldier, perhaps emboldening them as a good yeller, or informing you that someone “really misses their family.” Attacking and killing the unnerving and aggressive rock-like creatures that stalk you in each area you traverse is an option (if you happen to be carrying a makeshift weapon, at least), but clearing the playfield of hostiles isn’t really the objective here. In fact, the noise that you make in attacking the creatures only attracts more, and in the game’s densely packed maps, consisting of a 9×9 grid filled with buildings and solid obstacles, it will quickly create a scenario that is impossible to escape.

Overland is instead a game that centers around your roadtrip vehicle. The vehicle you drive is your lifeline, and as you move from area to area on your trip west, your main priority is to keep that four-wheeled machine fueled and in good shape. You start with a simple hatchback but will eventually stumble across different models, and your type of vehicle will inform your strategy–vans let you transport more survivors than your standard car should you encounter them and pickup trucks provide plenty of storage for items but sacrifice seating. SUVs are a late-game godsend that marry the best of both worlds. Escaping an area on foot is possible, but as you’d expect, it’s impossible to make any cross-country progress–your characters will be funneled into an area with a beat-up car to try and salvage in order to move forward.

Keeping your engine running is the game’s central challenge, and it’s a demanding one. You need to scavenge new areas for fuel canisters, perhaps finding them in dumpsters or slowly siphoning gas from abandoned cars, and you might find some useful tools and items to assist you along the way. But where Overland creates its challenge, and in turn, its compelling high-risk decision making, is in the strict limitations it puts on what you’re actually able to achieve. Restrictions characterise every aspect of the game: Your characters can only take two actions per turn and two hits before dying, and getting injured reduces your actions per turn to one; your vehicle can only take two hits before exploding, and its movement is limited to the two-lane road down the middle of the map, which will often be littered with junk; each character can only hold one item, meaning scavenging is an onerous task that potentially means giving up the ability for a character to defend themselves, and the compact maps mean you’re always one square away from either narrowly slipping by or getting skewered by a creature. The lack of choice and options available to you in the overall moment-to-moment makes the ones that are there feel intimidatingly important–one misstep can cause serious havoc.

There are items and character traits that can help push these boundaries. For example, your lone starter character will always be equipped with a backpack to carry an extra item, some traits will let survivors perform specific actions for free, and most (but not all) dogs have an inherent attack option. But it’s rare for you to feel like you have a complete handle on the situation in Overland, and even then, it’ll definitely be short-lived. The margin between success and failure is very fine, and constantly having to fly by the seat of your pants and improvise is a heart-pounding feeling–an undo function is available but has limits and conditions, and the game saves after the end of each turn.

All of these factors help guarantee that every new run of Overland you play will be filled with memorable narratives born out of the natural flow of the game. One time, I was eking through a road blockage by having two characters clear debris as a third slowly snaked the car through a narrow passage, all while dozens of creatures bore down on us. A larger creature shoved debris between the clearing crew and the car, leaving me no choice but to escape on foot and leave the driver behind to a grizzly fate. In another situation, my crew of three stumbled across a brand-new, well-equipped pickup truck. But it could only seat two people, and after some consideration, I purposely drove away with my two favorites, abandoning the weakest member of the group. Later on in the run, that person would come back to try and get revenge. In one of my favorite scenarios, one of my human characters was cornered, unarmed, by a creature while scavenging. In a moment of desperation, I commanded her two other companions, both dogs, to race to the car, grab a wooden pallet from the trunk, and work to pass it to her relay-style so she could block the hit she was about to take. Overland is filled with these kinds of thrilling, dire scenarios where you need to improvise an immediate solution or resolve to just drop everything and get the hell out of there.

There is a caveat to a game with so many difficult decisions, however: The risk of getting yourself stuck in a bad situation with no obvious way out and a feeling of merely perpetuating your eventual demise. You’ll likely have many forlorn campaigns in Overland, especially when starting out, where the difficulty and hopelessness can feel overwhelming. Perhaps you’re constantly driving on fumes and finding it’s too difficult to obtain fuel from any of the areas presented to you, or perhaps your survivors are all injured and movement-restricted, making it feel impossible to achieve anything meaningful. Overland does present you opportunities to crawl back from these hopeless brinks–believe me, it’s possible. But it can sometimes feel like the procedurally generated aspects of the game are stacked against you–especially when you have a crew equipped with debuffs like “Bad Driver” and “Clumsy,”’ guzzling up gas at an increased rate and making a racket with every action they take.

But Overland’s brutal, minimalist design is tough to stay away from. The bite-sized victories you narrowly eke out with each new area are incredibly moreish, and the game feels very well-suited to portable play on both Nintendo Switch and on iPhone through Apple Arcade. The game’s clean, stylish art direction and somber, eerie soundtrack help to build the intriguing sense of mystery, too–whatever is happening in this post-apocalypse is likely much bigger than you or your survivors will ever have the chance to fully understand.

All that matters is getting your survivors to the West Coast and making it through seven different biomes filled with an increasingly distressing variety of threats and hardships with whatever tools you can scrounge together. Overland perfectly captures a feeling of being helpless, of only just getting by, and of being afraid to venture too far away from your car into the pitch-black dark of night. Every movement you commit, every action you command, and every item or character you sacrifice for another will be an apprehensive decision. But taking each of those tough steps makes you even more grateful to hear the soft chime of your car’s open-door alarm when you make it back, and the rev of the motor when you escape down the highway, relieved to leave another pack of abnormal creatures behind.

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It’s been nearly 40 years since First Blood arrived in theaters, introducing the world to a Vietnam veteran named John Rambo. That movie paints the traumatized war hero as someone who doesn’t want to kill, even though he can with ease. The three sequels that followed quickly cast that aside, instead indulging in the kind of over-the-top violence that action movies in the ’80s were known for. Rambo blew things up, crashed tanks into helicopters, and seemed satisfied with the very high body count.

Now Sylvester Stallone is playing the role again after a 10-year absence. Rambo: Last Blood finds an older version of the character, settled on a horse farm in Arizona. Since we last saw John, he’s taken custody of his niece and, along with a woman who lives with them, raised her to the point where she’s ready to head off to college. This is a Rambo movie, though, so it’s expected that things would go horribly wrong and turn violent. Unfortunately, in following that path, Last Blood has lost track of what exactly a Rambo movie–and the character himself–is.

While the film flirts with giving Rambo inner peace in his elder years at first, that all quickly fades away when his niece goes looking for her deadbeat dad in Mexico. She immediately winds up being kidnapped by a cartel that deals in sexual slavery led by a pair of Mexican crime lord brothers. It’s then up to Rambo to cross the border between the US and Mexico, where he kills a bunch of evil Mexicans and frees his niece from the cartel’s nefarious clutches. On his way home, he literally drives over a barbed-wire fence serving as the border wall between the two countries–this movie isn’t exactly subtle. The entire plot feels like a joke. However, in 2019, it’s a dangerous joke that rings a little too close to home.

Last Blood villainizes Mexico, painting its citizens as con artists, sex traffickers, and bloodthirsty killers. It’s the type of story that ratchets up the xenophobia of Americans with bigoted views and stokes the fears they have about people from other countries.

The message from the beginning, when John’s niece says she wants to go there to find her father, is that Mexico is a dangerous place. Once there, everyone Rambo encounters–save for a single character who appears in a couple of scenes to deliver exposition–is comically evil. This movie is too lazy to draw fully-formed characters around Rambo, or a realistic idea of what life in Mexico is like. Instead, it relies on racial stereotypes and stoking fear to tell its story.

Eventually, when the cartel comes to Rambo’s home for retribution, he brutally kills them all with a series of booby traps that feel as though they’re lifted out of some demented version of Home Alone. The movie spends a decent amount of its very short runtime with a montage showing Rambo setting up the traps that will immediately conjure images of a young Macaulay Culkin in your mind.

Stallone has experience revisiting his well-known characters to give them depth that was previously missing. It’s happened in Rocky Balboa and the two Creed films that followed. Last Blood could have done something similar. There’s a way to stay true to the Rambo franchise but also work in actual character development. And there’s a way to do it without creating something as grotesque as Last Blood. Instead, we’ve ended up with a film that seems to misunderstand the character and has cast him in a different light.

This John Rambo is, inexplicably, a sort of doomsday prepper. He’s a man who has, for some unknown reason, built an elaborate series of tunnels under his Arizona farm and filled them with weapons and explosives and is merely waiting for a reason to put it all to use. It’s hard to look at that character as a hero, no matter how much sympathy the movie tries to make you feel.

But let’s talk about those tunnels and what goes down inside of them. The violence on display in this movie has more in common with the Saw franchise than previous Rambo films. While guns, knives, and a bow and arrow have always been closely associated with the character, those weapons become tools of flat-out mutilation in the new film, leading to a number of incredibly uncomfortable and disturbing scenes.

It could be argued that 2008’s Rambo turned up the gore from previous installments of the franchise, with scenes that included things like John using a massive gun to literally shoot people in half. Still, even that movie never lingered too long on the horrible mess Rambo made of things.

Last Blood, on the other hand, almost takes glee in getting up close and personal with some of the most disgusting things you’ll ever see play out on screen. While there will undoubtedly be an audience for that sort of thing–there are seven Saw films and an eighth on the way–it’s out of place in the world of this franchise.

As for the performances, the only person getting significant screentime is Stallone. This older Rambo is quieter, which is welcome at first. Stallone seems to revel in playing a settled-down John for a short period of time. He’s at a point in his life where the biggest worries he has are his niece going to college and constantly battling back against the PTSD he still suffers from his time in Vietnam. Once the film goes off the gore cliff, he remains the quiet older man, which is a bit unsettling given the fact that he’s massacring dozens of people.

The film is filled with a bunch of secondary characters, from his niece Gabrielle (Yvette Monreal), to a Mexican journalist (Paz Vega), to the older woman that lives with John and Gabrielle (Adriana Barraza). It’s unclear what her connection to the two of them is, but don’t worry about the details. The movie doesn’t.

Then there are the bad guys. Oscar Jaenada and Sergio Peris-Mencheta play the sibling crime lords and they couldn’t be less interesting as villains. They’re evil because that’s who they are. The movie doesn’t care enough to explain what motivates them or give them any sort of depth. They’re just the bad guys, and that’s about it.

None of the characters outside of Stallone’s Rambo warrant much discussion. The movie makes sure of that by not really giving any of them any depth or development. They are all there simply to serve as something for Stallone’s character to react to.

It’s unfortunate this is how the Rambo franchise has to end–if this is, in fact, the end. While the franchise has been hit-and-miss when it comes to critical reception–the first received great reviews, the ones that followed not so much–they found and connected with an audience who celebrated them. This is a character that’s lasted nearly four decades and even had his own cartoon at one point–seriously, there was a children’s cartoon series based on Rambo. Whatever your feelings toward the franchise are, though, it’s clear that this is not the direction it should have headed. This movie is mean, gross, xenophobic, and undeserving of the time or energy you’ll spend watching it.

Kind Words (lo fi chill beats to write to), a game that encourages people to write nice things about each other over the internet, seems like a recipe for disaster. Every time I boot up the game, I wonder if this is going to be it, if this is going to be the moment when its formula backfires and pairs me up with a sadistic troll. Surprisingly, it hasn’t, even as the game has garnered increased attention and users since its official launch. The folks behind Kind Words aren’t worried about the attention though–not yet anyway–as they’re confident that the game will not become so popular that it evolves into something too difficult to control.

If you’re unfamiliar, Kind Words is a writing game developed by Popcannibal, a studio also responsible for Elegy for a Dead World–a game that encourages players to explore the worlds of long-dead civilizations and compile their own thoughts and stories for what happened. Instead of crafting fictional stories, Kind Words hits a bit closer to home and pushes players to write about their own life. You sit in a room while chill beats play over the radio, and you can write a letter about how you’re feeling that’s sent out into the world for others to respond to. In turn, you can also look through a pile of letters that other people have written and reply to them. To thank people for their words, you can gift them with a sticker from your collection.

It’s a simple gameplay loop that can lead to some emotional moments. You can talk about virtually anything–whether that’s a troubling coworker, a crumbling relationship, quiet doubts, or a challenging level on a video game that seems impossible to get past–and get advice or encouraging words from other people. “Kind Words is an experiment in letting people exercise their empathy,” designer Ziba Scott said in an interview with GameSpot. “It actually plays out that it’s more about being empathetic than [sympathetic].”

Kind Words was made in response to the current American political climate and the hateful online speech it’s inspired–Scott hoped to create a place for people to support one another instead of tearing them down. “This particular type of game, it didn’t exist as far as I know,” Scott said. “And a lot of the interest I have in making games is making games that don’t exist… that I want to exist.”

Most likely anyone who’s spent even an hour on the internet can probably guess as to how Kind Words could be a very, very bad idea. Posting your innermost, troubling thoughts online to be anonymously responded to seems like it’s almost asking to be bullied by a troll who’s looking to stir up trouble just because they can. And even without trolls, someone with the best intentions can still accidentally post something potentially triggering for others. Kind Words could also be misunderstood as a way for someone to seek help for suicidal or troubling thoughts–which would be a mistake because no trained professionals are tied to the game. To assist people in this last group, Kind Words has a list of sources that people can reach out to if they want professional help, although–because it’s all anonymous–there’s no way for moderators to be proactive and directly connect users to sources they might need. As of this interview, Scott reports Kind Words is up to 15,000 users, all of whom have contributed a total of over 150,000 letters. That’s a lot of text to monitor and moderate to make sure Kind Words remains inclusive and, currently, Scott and artist Luigi Guatieri are the only two doing so. “It’s just me and Luigi,” he said. “I’m absolutely exhausted.”

To Scott’s credit, he’s willing to admit when something related to the reporting system is wrong and he’s actively working to implement better systems so Kind Words remains a safe space. For example, he’s noticed that many users seemingly don’t want to use the report button to point out specific writers because of the implication that such a button is only used in online games to get someone in trouble. “I may need a word other than report,” Scott admitted. “I don’t know. Something between report and feedback, because I do want people to respond when they think, ‘This person looks suicidal’ or ‘I think this person might hurt somebody.’ Because we get a lot of those [letters].”

He’s been making indie games for a long time and he figures, like most of his previous games, Kind Words will just eventually fizzle out before it becomes too much of a problem to manage.

Currently, reporting someone in Kind Words allows you to detail what type of problem you’ve noticed–ranging from outright trolling to simply being worried about a letter’s content–but you do have to report the person first before the game presents you with the options of whether you want to help or hinder them. That’s not great (ideally reporting for bad behavior and pointing out worrying behavior would be two different buttons from the outset), but at least including the distinction ensures problems are being correctly labeled for when the moderators look them over.

“I’ve removed ass from the filters cause it turns out everybody was just saying bad-ass, half-ass, or kickass, and no one was calling someone an ass,” Scott said, when talking about ways he’s tried to automate the process so moderating the game is more manageable. “And it was just causing a lot of work for me. I’ve also removed bitch cause they were just talking about ‘bitchin’ sweaters’ or ‘cancer’s a bitch.’ Fuck? That’s not worth filtering at all. Only in combination with other things do I filter that.”

But Scott did go on to point out that he knows it’s important the entire process is never fully automated. There will always be trolls out there, and they can learn to trick machines. “[I learn] from trolls, learn the language,” he said. “I’ve learned a lot of coded language stuff I didn’t know about before. Coded racial language, things like that.” Players point things out to Scott and he, in turn, starts looking out for those patterns. As such, the exact rules of what’s okay and what’s not are constantly evolving as Scott amends the filters to account for lingo he never would have thought of. “Every time someone posts a random string of emojis, I just stop and wonder, ‘Is this just garbage or is this some really deep cut racism?’ I don’t know,” Scott said. “I’m just very glad I don’t and will never allow pictures ’cause I can’t handle that.”

Even with the implication of new writers potentially bringing in harmful content that he’s not aware of, Scott isn’t worried about Kind Words spirling out of his control. He’s been making indie games for a long time and he figures, like most of his previous games, Kind Words will just eventually fizzle out before it becomes too much of a problem to manage. “Maybe I’m being optimistic in my pessimism, but in my 10 years of making indie games, having a game be too popular for too long is just not something I’ve experienced,” he said, laughing. “Right now, at this point, we’re still on the front page, just barely, of Steam and that’s keeping [players] coming. And we’re going to be going to some festivals and I’m prepared to put a lot of time into this for a while. But I’ve got six, seven-year-old games on Steam that I maybe hear a peep from once a year.” And if Kind Words does actually continue to grow, he points out, then he’ll ideally be making enough money to be able to focus on moderating the game full-time. “There are much worse fates than that,” he said,” Either way, I think it’s a win-win. I’m not too worried. Maybe I should be and I’m just too tired to see my future right now. But I’m not too worried about it. I’m mostly enjoying this.”

With his game in a safe place, Scott is instead focusing on creating additional in-game content for Kind Words’ players. “We’ve got a bunch of stickers in the works,” he said, excited. “I haven’t really talked about it yet. I don’t know if it’s a spoiler or anything to tell you, but we’re going to sell the stickers as DLC packs for just a couple bucks.” Like the stickers currently in-game, you’ll be able to earn these new stickers when people trade them to you. The DLC sticker packs aren’t meant to be exploitative, they’re more of a “donate to the developer type thing,” as Scott puts it. Scott didn’t comment on what the new stickers might be, but he did confirm that the ones currently in Kind Words are references to his previous games, so it’s possible these new ones could be too.

I like Kind Words, I really do want more people to play it. Composer Clark Aboud’s lo-fi chill beats add a relaxing tone to the charmingly dream-like setting created by Guatieri. It’s an ideal backdrop for writing and I’ve started booting up the game and running it in the background whenever I encounter writer’s block at work. The supportive anonymous responses to my own troubles have helped alleviate many of the concerns I desperately want to tell someone but are also too much of a bother to confide in a family member, friend, or coworker and not enough of an issue to devote to an entire therapy session. And knowing there’s a possibility of earning a sticker–and thus its corresponding decoration to put up in my in-game room–scratches enough of my Animal Crossing itch to motivate me to contribute to the pile of letters from other people looking for responses. For anyone just looking to vent, and hoping for some friendly support, it’s a wonderful outlet. I’m just wary of what the game could devolve into if its player base grows too large.

Though maybe Scott and his team’s decision to keep the game limited in scope will ultimately prove to be the game’s biggest perk: a smaller title has an easier time remaining outside of a troll’s radar. “We put a fair amount of thought into [Kind Words] during development and I think it’s just within the scope of what I feel we’re able to safely moderate,” Scott said. “I hope for what I’m perceiving: that the game is doing far more good than harm.” Me too Scott, me too.

Kind Words (lo fi chill beats to write to) is currently available on PC.

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