Gothic dev's Elex will be with us in October

CD Projekt and BioWare have them roundly beaten when it comes to story and characters, but I do have a soft spot for Piranha Bytes' moderately shonky RPGs, which tend to be pretty great at exploration. Following on from the Gothic games, and the increasingly piratey Risen series, is the upcoming Elex, which mashes up fantasy with science fiction and the post-apocalypse. Oh, and there are jetpacks, because jetpacks are most definitely in this year.

There are loads of videos floating around of Elex on YouTube, including an appearance at this year's PC Gamer Weekender, so you can see for yourself how it compares to Piranha Bytes' other games. If you like what you see, then you might be interested in the release date, which has just been announced as...October 17. Smartly, that's not too close to the traditional November rush.

I can't find a recent trailer with any game footage in it, so here's today's 'official CGI trailer', which shows the grimly bald protagonist strutting about to some middle-of-the-road rock music.

Tom loves exploring in games, whether it’s going the wrong way in a platformer or burgling an apartment in Deus Ex. His favourite game worlds—Stalker, Dark Souls, Thief—have an atmosphere you could wallop with a blackjack. He enjoys horror, adventure, puzzle games and RPGs, and played the Japanese version of Final Fantasy VIII with a translated script he printed off from the internet. Tom has been writing about free games for PC Gamer since 2012. If he were packing for a desert island, he’d take his giant Columbo boxset and a laptop stuffed with PuzzleScript games.