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Capcom are working on a sequel to Okami, the wonderful 2006 Zelda-like in which you play a sun goddess in a wolf's body, roaming a world of ink and parchment. It’s being co-developed by M-TWO Inc, Machine Head Works Inc and CLOVERS Inc, and directed by original Okami game director Hideki Kamiya. I am tickled pink, I tell you. Find a trailer below.
]]>Naughty Dog have announced their long-gestating new game, and their first in a long while that's not a sequel. Intergalactic: The Heretic Prophet is a science fiction bounty hunter game set on a mysterious isolated planet, and the first cinematic trailer is below.
]]>Aaron Paul, he of a heartbreakingly fraught performance as Todd in Bojack Horseman, and also Breaking Bad, is starring in a new strategy story game from AdHoc, a studio with ex-Telltale developers at the helm. Dispatch is a story-focused strategy game where you’ll play a broke superhero trying to get himself a new mech suit by working at a hero dispatch center. Having trouble tracking a trailer down for this one, but you can find it here on Steam.
Wait. I’ve found it! Leaving that last bit in though. Consider it my gift to you reader. The gift of visible workflow at 4am.
]]>I'm a big fan of Sonic & All-Stars Racing Transformed, which pit Sonic and pals against a stable of characters from Sega's other games, including Total War and Football Manager. I'm less of a fan of Sonic's other kart racing exploits, but I'm still cautiously interested to learn he's getting back behind the wheel. Sonic Racing: CrossWorlds was just announced.
]]>Back in the mid '90s, I was hooked on an PC racing game called Screamer. It got a sequel a couple of years later, and then the series went dormant. Until now, when it's seemingly returning as a foreboding, anime-infused racer about defying death, once again called simply Screamer. Huh! Huh. You'll find a trailer below.
]]>Fumito Ueda is the august visionary behind ICO (small boy rescues small girl from evil castle), Shadow Of The Colossus (grieving boy murders several massive stone animals), The Last Guardian (small boy and huge, dopey dogcat escape from another evil castle). Now, he's getting into Gundams, though it looks like small boys are still a feature. Epic Games Publishing have just unveiled Ueda and genDESIGN's latest creation - Project: Robot. Find a trailer below.
]]>Well here's one I didn't see coming: a new Onimusha game. It's called Onimusha Way Of The Sword, and is the first new game in Capcom's samurai action-horror series since... well, that upcoming VR entry doesn't count, and nor does the Warlords remaster in 2018. So, 2012? Maybe 2006, if you rule out the Unity browser game? Cor.
]]>Arrowhead and Sony have released a new Helldivers 2 update that introduces the long-rumoured third faction, the Illuminate. Titled Omens of Tyranny, the update also stirs in city maps and a driveable jeep with a mounted gun that immediately reminds me of Halo's Warthog, and is hopefully just as fragile and bouncy. Here's a trailer.
]]>Looter FPS Borderlands 4 has gotten its first trailer, courtesy of Medium Geoff’s Happy Hour and..wait. What you mean it’s three hours? I’m going to die tonight, aren’t I? Ah well, at least I’ll die doing what I’m ambivalent about. Here’s the trailer for Fourderlands, which is out sometime next year.
]]>I've lost track of how many Yakuza games are in development at any given moment, but it seems makers Ryu Ga Gotoku Studio have space for more on their plate. During this evening's Game Awards, they announced "Project Century", a new third-person brawler set in 1915. There's a trailer below.
]]>The Long Dark creators Hinterlands have announced The Long Dark 2, another helping of open-ended wilderness survival. Actually titled Blackfrost: The Long Dark 2 - a travestying of naming conventions that is surely more harrowing than any post-apocalyptic winter - it's out in early access in 2026, and introduces urban environments together with a "Will to Live" sanity system and co-op multiplayer. Here's the trailer.
]]>It's the Game Awards this evening, which means another year of Josef Fares appearing on stage to performatively say "fuck" like he thinks it's naughty. Thankfully this year he also had a game to show: Split Fiction, a new co-op action adventure. It's about two aspiring authors, one who writes science fiction and one who writes fantasy, being sucked into and having to survive inside their own fictions.
]]>The Geoffies have delivered us a first look at the gameplay for Obsidian’s spacefaring RPG sequel, The Outer Worlds 2. It looks, as you might expect, very much like the first one, but a bit nicer. The game itself was announced back in 2021, but we’ve seen nary a vaguely satirical sign nor very large gun since. Now we have both, plus some punching. Here’s that trailer.
]]>World of Tanks creators Wargaming are getting into the mech-bothering business with Steel Hunters - a new free-to-play Unreal Engine multiplayer shooter, in which Transformers-style juggernauts fight for control of an energy source called "Starfall" on smashable, post-apocalyptic maps. It’s just been announced at Wrasslin' Geoff’s Winter Hootenanny, aka the Game Awards, and there’s a 10 day PC playtest underway right now. Here’s a trailer.
]]>Final Fantasy VII Rebirth launched on console back in February, and if I'd had to guess, I'd say it would arrive on PC about a year later. Hey - guess what! Square Enix just gave Rebirth a PC release date: January 23rd, 2025.
]]>CD Projekt have screened the first trailer for The Witcher 4, the next instalment in their fantasy monster-slaying series. It’s another single player open world RPG, and The Witcher 3: Wild Hunt’s Ciri is the protagonist. In fact, she's the protagonist for a whole new Witcher saga, though there’s a tease at the end of the footage that crusty old Geralt may return as well.
]]>RPG Solasta: Crown Of The Magister is getting a sequel. Solasta II launches in early access next year, and they’re aiming to have a demo out sometime earlier. Like its predecessor, this one’s a party-based CRPG with tactical combat, featuring single player and online co-op. Here’s a trailer. Warning: it has shiny rock people in it, the worst videogame enemy.
]]>Remember when From Software’s Hidetaka Miyazaki said they weren’t thinking about Elden Ring 2, but they were thinking about the continuation of Elden Ring in general? Well, who had “three player co-op musou” on their bingo card?
]]>Pac-Man is doing a Prince Of Persia: Warrior Within, everybody. That’s to say, the Bandai Namco series is doing one of those dark, edgy iterations. It’s called Shadow Labyrinth, it’s out in 2025, and it’s a 2D hack-and-slash with gruesome monster designs. But none so gruesome as Pac-Man, who can transform into a huge champing black hole. Wakkawakkawakkawould you play this?
]]>Sifu and Absolver developers Sloclap have announced Rematch, a 5v5 multiplayer football game with a gentle dusting of science fiction, out in summer 2025. If, like me, you really enjoyed the French developers' previous martial art sims, you might, like me, find this news deflating. Football? We already have that at home. It's like a martial art, but all you get to kick is some... ball.
I'm not sure I'll ever entirely swallow my disappointment, but credit where it's due, Rematch does look like both an enjoyable game and a quietly disruptive one. It's also struck a chord with me inasmuch as it's a new way into the culture of a sport which I have pretty mixed feelings about.
]]>NINJA GAIDEN: Ragebound is the next entry in the venerable series of action slice-em-ups, revealed tonight at pre-Geoffies. It’s arriving in 2025 as a joint effort between Koei Tecmo, Blasphemous developers The Game Kitchen, and retro revivalists Dotemu. Trailer below.
]]>A master thief creeps over cobbles in an early modern metropolis that splits the difference between Edinburgh, Glasgow and Liverpool. Lit by gaslamps that can’t quite dispel the industrial haze, they pass for a civilian - a rough one, admittedly, but not shady enough to cause an itch in the swordarm of any passing guard.
Until, that is, they take to the thieves’ highway - following the trajectory of their grappling hook upward to the rooftops, from which they can see the shape of the city, and the moon beyond. Up here, it’s a parallel world - the trees on street level answered by chimney stacks, and the distant hills echoed by the rise and fall of steep gables. “We’re super proud of these rooftops,” says Greg LoPiccolo. “It’s an amazing landscape that we put a lot of thought and effort into, and it’s a lot of fun to traverse.”
Back in 1998, LoPiccolo was the game director who saw Thief: The Dark Project to completion. Today - after an 18 year detour to Harmonix to lead projects like Guitar Hero and Rock Band, among other adventures - he’s the game director of Thick as Thieves. “It really is an opportunity to do something unique and cool and new, on the shoulders of this stuff that is now well-respected,” he says. “Thief has some legs, right? People still talk about it to some degree.”
]]>Open world fuhgeddaboudit simulator Mafia: The Old Country will release in summer 2025, according to a Youtube trailer that has leaked on social media ahead of tonight's Game Awards. The trailer also treats us to a few snippets of the game's story scenes, shoot-outs and punch-ups. We get to see wise guys swinging knives, riding horses and glowering silently at sun-baked Sicilian countryside.
]]>Tonight is The Game Awards 2024, the first since Geoff Keighley killed E3 and consumed its heart in front of a group of screaming schoolchildren. Just saying, this had better be good, Geoff, especially after the 2023 show’s "embarrassing" shooing-off of developers whose acceptance speeches cut into that valuable trailer showcase time.
Who will need to please wrap it up this time? Which games will be revealed? Will there be a musical number to top last year’s Herald of Darkness performance? (That was fun, actually, fair play on that one.) You can find out right along with us, as we once again fire up the RPS liveblog-o-tron to report all the developments as they happen. Even the ones that happen at 3:45am, when I’ll be desperately trying not to collapse into my keyboard like a felled tree.
]]>At first I thought Marvel Rivals was basically rebranded Overwatch, in the way it's a free-to-play PVP hero shooter. And in some ways, it is. Fights are like if you took a MOBA and forced both teams to bash heads constantly. Success lies in picking off Spider-Man or Squirrel Girl or Marcus Fenix so as they wait to respawn, you hop on the big area that needs capturing. Or you push the cart while tanky Hulk absorbs bullets with his biceps and John Marvel snipes from afar.
The more I played Rivals, though, the more it hit me that it's specifically a messier, more complex Overwatch. A hero shooter with a surprising amount of polish and charm, sure, but also one that slides off my brain like water off Birdman's back. I understand why it's supremely popular at the moment and yet, I really don't.
]]>After a failure-riddled start, my attempt to turn S.T.A.L.K.E.R. 2’s mutants into beasts of war is finally bearing fruit. I’ve engineered a Bloodsucker attack that wiped out the worst of villains – someone who was mean to me – and I’ve progressed far enough to really open up the map, and with it, access to more of the Zone’s fiercest fleshwarps.
Also, rats. Buoyed by the successful Bloodsucker siccing, I’m back on the trail of some mysterious anomaly scanners, and word is I might find a lead inside a local maze of wrecked cars. It’s heavily guarded by some gangster types, but for once, I won’t have to dash off in search of some far-off muties and coax them back here using my neck as bait. Mercifully, a gaggle of overgrown rodents are already hopping around right outside the labyrinth’s entrance. I beckon them in like a bouncer on his last day, then sprint past the stunned gunmen, who can barely shoulder their rifles before being set upon by a pack of giant carnivorous hamsters.
]]>In more ways than one, today’s Total War: Warhammer 3 expansion marks a milestone for game director Rich Aldridge and his team at Creative Assembly. Omens Of Destruction’s three headline legendary lords each bring new campaigns and units for their respective factions, but it’s the fourth lord - a Khorne champion free to all players - that I imagine Aldridge will end up remembering the most fondly.
When Total War: Warhammer released back in 2016, it shipped with eight legendary lords - famous characters from Games Workshop’s fantasy setting that here act as faction leaders. The number grew steadily and, in terms of announcement order at least, today’s addition of Arbaal The Undefeated marks the series’ 100th. That's a hundred campaigns, a hundred joint efforts of game design, animation, art, writing and voice work.
Aldridge has never been shy about the team’s ambition for the series to eventually offer up each unit from every Fantasy Battle 6th edition army book ("The goal is to do everything, right?"). But ambition is one thing, and considering the fraught conditions at Creative Assembly and parent company Sega over the past few years, it’s not just the addition of the 100th lord that feels like something to celebrate. It’s taken time, effort, and a siesmic shift in update frequency, but Total War: Warhammer III is in the best place it's ever been.
]]>If Space Marine 2's wanton devil-mulching left you hungry for more fantastical depictions of medieval zealotry, maybe take a look at Band Of Crusaders, an open-world party-based RPG in which you are the Grandmaster of a knightly order, trying to keep a bunch of wily Archdemons out of Europe. It seems to play a bit like XCOM, with an oppressive world map that is slowly encroached upon as you travel around recruiting soldiers, interacting with settlements, and picking real-time fights with hellfiends "inspired by biblical descriptions and European folklore". Naturally, parallels with real-life xenophobia and sectarian hatred abound. Here's the trailer.
]]>Today’s advent calendar game is already inside your head, for this is not a game you stop playing, merely one you step away from between rounds. Even after you quit, it lingers on the edge of your awareness like a muffled bassline. It glitters in the air around you like a cloud of spores. It cannot be denied. It can only be…
]]>If your PC has ever started randomly roaring, and you check Steam only to find Space Marine 2 is panic-installing a 9 billion gigabyte update, then perhaps Valve's new upcoming feature is for you. For most of us, Steam simply slurps down fresh gigs of installed games automatically when a new update is released (and sometimes schedules the updates according to its own capricious whims). But the platform is testing a new option in the beta client, which lets you set download behaviour to git new gigs only when you actually launch a game. This would be a terrible curse, for reasons I will explain, but it's only going to be an option - not the new default.
]]>I have to write at least 250 words for a news post. Rock Paper Shotgun’s CMS (content management system) even has a built-in widget that shouts at me if I don’t write at least 250 words. "Page 1 body content is quite short" it says if I go under. How cute is that "quite"? I love being fooled into getting charmed by automated systems via colloquial British understatement. Anyway, I bring this up because I honestly don’t have anything to add about Blippo+. I just wanted to inform you all of its existence. It's a "casual" "FMV" "Cinematic" "Pixel Graphics" "1980s" digital product from developers also named Blippo+, as well as publishers Panic, who've previously unleashed the horrible goose and Thank Goodness You’re Here! on the world. Have a visual orientation:
]]>Creation is an act of kindness. One person sloughs off a piece of themselves, shapes it, wraps it, and sends it out into the world in the hope that it might mean something to someone else. Other people do this for us all the time and mostly we don't even notice. The work is unseen and unremarked upon even as, through repetition, we come to depend upon it. Until, one day, that light that they shine can't be seen. Maybe you left home, or maybe they did, but now it's your turn to perform such acts of kindness. To carry the tradition forward for others - and for yourself.
Friends, it's time to play Skeal.
]]>Infamous evolutionary flop Spore, for all its flaws, still had a lot of magic to it. It was fun to design your weird creatures, to watch them try to walk, and - in principle - to turn your humble creations into a spacefaring species.
Curiosmos is a very different game, but it has a little of the same appeal. It's a galactic playground in which you smash meteors together to make planets, then tinker with the ecosystems of those planets to make life and watch that life evolve. All while a hungry black hole lingers nearby, eager to consume everything you have created. There's an explanatory video below.
]]>Hyper Light Breaker is a prequel to the excellent topdown action-RPG from 2016, Hyper Light Drifter. The differences are myriad, given that Breaker is also 3D, open world, co-op and a roguelite. It also now has a release date for its launch into Steam Early Access: January 14th, 2025.
]]>One of video game's greatest pleasures is being able to shoot bits off an enemy and then append them to yourself. TankHead gets it. It's about steering a tank through a desolate sci-fi landscape, blasting similar tank and mecha enemies to bits, then scavenging them for parts using a drone.
It's been in quiet development for years, but it got a big reveal during tonight's Day Of The Devs stream. It was also released during tonight's Day Of The Devs stream, so you can buy it from the Epic Games Store now.
]]>Back when I played Path Of Exile 2 at Summer Games Fest, I fought a cave-dwelling boss who summoned hordes of grotty subterranean wildlife to swamp me. Fortunately, I was rolling a Witch - perhaps the best beginner POE2 class - so I could summon an army of skeletons in response. A similar horde vs horde encounter is underway at POE 2 developers Grinding Gear Games. The game launched in early access over the weekend, and has already drawn so many players that the developers are emergency-hiring additional staff to cope with the waves of support emails.
]]>In "non-violent and poetic" 2D platformer Symphonia, you're an extremely fancy violinist exploring a realm of musical machines, where gas lanterns kindle fitfully as you approach, crotchets adorn vast cogwheels, and reams of what I really hope isn't actual catgut feed through titanic pegboxes overhead. Sampling the demo, I was immediately enflamed by the orchestral score and placed in a mood of white-gloved sophistication only slightly spoiled by the familiarity of the underlying platform moveset, and by my repeatedly falling into pits.
]]>When I were a lad, you’d open an advent calendar and get a piece of chocolate shaped like a bell with an aftertaste so rancid you’d wish you’d eaten the little cardboard window instead. And you’d bloody well make do, too. Not these days. Now, you get a squadron of tiny automata with drills for noses that burrow through your battle lines and utterly wreck your vulnerable missile launchers. Country’s gone to the tiny robot dogs, I tell you!
]]>First covered by Alice O (RPS in peace) in 2017, Short Trip was a chill hand-drawn game about driving a tram through a mountain populated by cats. Back then, it was only available as a free-to-play browser or itch.io experience. Seven years later, though, and on this very day, it's out on Steam. Not only that, it's arriving with all the tramming of the original, with an added "scheduled mode" that adds more charm to an already lovely game.
]]>Ever wondered what the intro cutscene to Legacy Of Kain: Soul Reaver would sound like voiced by Solid Snake actor David Hayter? Quite specific of you, but a new documentary from Noclip might just have what you’re looking for. The Past, Present & Future of Soul Reaver interviews key developers from the action adventure game, and about halfway through host Danny O’ Dwyer gets hold of some archive materials, including old audition tapes. These include Mark Hamill reading for Janos Audren, and Jennifer Hale for Ariel.
The biggest treat, of course, is hearing Hayter read for Raziel, especially as it’s that excellent opening monologue. You’ll find the video below, with Hayter around 37:30.
]]>The Steam Deck OLED has joined Valve’s Certified Refurbished programme, offering a much cheaper way of getting your hands on the best handheld PC around. Provided you don’t mind it being in someone else’s first, anyway. As with official refurbs of the original Steam Deck, "certified" Steam Deck OLEDs are formerly-broken models that have been returned to Valve, fixed up and tested in-house, then put back on the market at steep discounts. You’re looking at £389/$439 for the 512GB spec and £459/$519 for 1TB, down from £479/$549 and £569/$649 respectively.
]]>Bulletstorm, Painkiller and Outriders developers People Can Fly are "suspending or parting ways" with over 120 people, shelving one video game project, downsizing another, and "restructuring some of our support teams" in the face of market turmoil.
]]>I am a Winter baby. My birthday is very close to Christmas, and so you’d think this might make me immune to the serotonin-sapping effects of the greyest season in a “I was born of the cold. Moulded by it” kind of way. No such luck, I’m afraid. So, since there’s only so many Vitamin D supplements and delightfully festive lunchtime Gin and Tonics one can consume, I figured I’d ask: what are your favourite comfort games for the bleaker months? The special places you can always rely on for an escape when the weather outside is frightful, and the Cosy Fireplace Ambience 4K (10 hours) keeps getting interrupted by adverts for crypto scammers and War Thunder.
]]>While it’s always worth starting a new game of Cyberpunk 2077 just to hear Judy say "his own choomba shot him!" for the thirtieth time, there’s now a slightly more tangible reason to start a new journey into Night City’s open world. Update 2.2 went live yesterday, bringing with it a host of fixes, as well as some deeper customisation options for both your character and vehicles. The base game is also 55% off on Steam until the 18th of December, with the Phantom Liberty expansion at 20% off, or both in a 48% off bundle. Cyberpunk is on sale often enough, although these current discounts line up with the cheapest it's ever been on Steam. Again: worth it for the line.
]]>It seems as if every "wholesome" game is either a Stardewlike or a Animal Crossingbut. Little Rocket Lab? Stardewlike. Piece By Piece? Animal Crossingbut. To be more specific, it's Animal Crossing but your chibi fox protagonist is specifically running a shop, mending and painting objects to sell while maintaining cleanliness and the plants outside. If you can't get enough of upcycling in Trash Goblin, here's one more for you.
]]>Ooh, this feels like the biggest news out of this evening's Wholesome Snack showcase: nourishing photography adventure Toem is getting a sequel, appropriately called Toem 2. It looks to follow much of what made the first so well liked, including its pocket-sized black-and-white worlds in which you wander about, snapping photos and helping the locals.
]]>Pity the "relaxing" games which set out to blanket their players in a wholesome fog. These minimalist or slight experiences set their stall against the mainstream philosophy of video game design focused on action, rules, clear progression, and often violence. So it is with Naiad, a sometimes pleasant swim down a river in which you sing to make flowers grow and discover poems by interacting with birds, bees, butterflies and other fauna.
Yet here's the cause of my pity. All those other games, with their decisive action, systemic consequence, and neck-snapping: I was playing those to relax, too. Why else would I have snapped all those necks? Being shorn of base pleasures does not make Naiad a restorative oasis amid a desert of stressful video games, and it doesn't make it more relaxing than its peers. In fact, it makes for an experience that left me restless, even a little anxious, when it made me feel anything at all.
]]>Stardew Factory? Factory Valley? Whichever it is, Little Rocket Lab is a factory-builder about efficiently placing conveyors and robot arms, and is drawn in the warm, pixel art small-town of a Stardew-like. That sounds like a fitting combination, although it does mean you're building a NASA-sized rocketship on the outskirts of your quaint hometown. That can't be good for noise pollution. There's an announcement trailer below.
]]>Duck Detective's first case was The Secret Salami, which paired its cosy mystery about stolen lunches with a protagonist whose divorce and destitution were played entirely straight despite his being a duck. The results were seemingly delightful, and here comes a sequel.
Duck Detective: The Ghost Of Glamping will offer a further 2-3 hours of mystery-solving and is aiming for release in 2025.
]]>Marvel Rivals, the free-to-play hero shooter from NetEase, launched late last week and is exceedingly popular. It's currently fourth on the Steam daily most played, right between Path Of Exile 2 and the evergreen Grand Theft Auto 5. I think there are three reasons for this enthusiasm: 1) it's free-to-play with the usual comet's tail of microtransactables 2) it's third-person Overwatch with Marvel characters, a straightforwardly enticing licensing sandwich, and 3) people want to have sex with a larger-than-usual proportion of the cast and especially awful tongue-monster Venom, who has a good butt in this one. No, I'm not going to share pictures. You'll have to google that filth yourself.
But perhaps you are a sophisticated soul who has no time for such salacious nonsense. You're more interested in hearing how they're patching the thing. Enough with the butts already, dang it - this is a new multiplayer game so there must, of course, be patches! Fair enough: here's what NetEase are changing or fixing in the first major update, out now.
]]>I feel guilty about repeatedly comparing Nebulous: Fleet Command to Homeworld, inasmuch as it's an appalling bait-and-switch. It's like offering somebody a cake that is actually a cunningly painted hunk of torpedo fuselage. It's like offering to shake hands while wearing one of those comedy hand buzzers - except that the hand buzzer is an intricate simulation of zero-G physics, missile behaviours and comms jamming, featuring spacecraft with proper internal layouts that require you to think hard about attitude control if you don't want, say, your engines to become Swiss cheese about 90 seconds before you need to retreat from combat.
Being a "true" 3D real-time space strategy game, Nebulous looks and sounds a lot like Homeworld on the surface, but it's nothing like as straightforward. It is systems within systems. It is a game in which you can, theoretically, plot the path of a single guided munition through an asteroid field, so as to catch an enemy cruiser in the back. I barely understand how to make a ship fire on another ship, using plain old armour-piercing shells, and now they're threatening to add carriers, fighters and bombers. Customisable ones! The humanity. Here's a trailer.
]]>The demo for SNØ: Ultimate Freeriding isn't that new. It actually came out in September, but I'm filing it under the secret best unspoken RPS site category of "News (To Me)", a whizcrack piece of web 3.0 technology that allows us to travel back in time and 'announce' things that don't seem any less noteworthy for their advancing age.
If you think that's a desperately cavalier and confusing way to run a news section, I can only suggest that you email a complaint to our news editor. Spoilers: our news editor is me, and I have already thrown your complaint in the bin. Mate, I don't tell you how to do your job, but I'd be more than happy to, if you let me know what it is. Anyway, what were we talking about. Oh yeah, skiiing!
]]>London Gatwick Airport is a rare shade of brown, known to neither science nor art. A brown that doesn’t appear on the light spectrum. No easel contains it. It is a dusty brown, a damp brown, a hot and earthy brown that hums with the stinging malodour of disturbed ancient moss where once old forests stood. Descending into Gatwick’s cloying brown from 33,000 feet is like flying under and up Gandalf’s wretched cloak and landing in one of the several horrible little magic pouches he keeps by his balls.
Microsoft Flight Simulator 2024 captures Gatwick’s brown perfectly. Next to the stupefying natural beauty of Yosemite, the imposing imperial skyscrapers of the Manhattan skyline and the surging majesty of the Alpine peaks, this local rot-tinged patch of West Sussex is the most impressively realistic depiction of a place I have seen in a game.
]]>Among my last-resort tactics for generating precious PC gaming news is to go on holiday - for as sure as toast lands buttered side down while cats always land on their feet, as sure as the number 13 breeds calamity and Star Citizen committing to a release date guarantees a delay, myself going on holiday will always, somehow, conjure a big story from the crevices. It's basic physics. In this case, I was on holiday from Friday through Monday, and this fact and this fact alone appears to have coaxed some toy manufacturer into taking the internet's most cherished indie gaming platform offline by means of a "bogus" phishing report, sent by "AI-powered" brand protection software.
The situation has now been resolved, thankfully, and you can access Itch.io as normal, but I will never pass up the opportunity to cast shade on Funko Pop, whose NFT-garlanded bobbleheads I hate as I do veruccas and forest fires. So here's a quick recap if you, too, missed the drama.
]]>Goblin-hitting bonanza Path Of Exile 2 launched into early access last weekend and the devs Grinding Gear Games have dropped some big patch notes that outline some things they've updated already, or things they plan on updating in a future patch. Things like dodge-rolling, checkpoints, items, currencies, and other stuff I can't list here because the intro to this article would expand and pop into a flurry of common rarity boots and bones, maybe with the odd purple rarity sword mixed in.
]]>Today’s advent calendar pick is one of 2024’s finest games we missed. It troubles our dreams and waking moments alike. It mushrooms in our peripheral vision and drifts towards us as we batter out advent calendar posts, hoping we can finish writing and beat a tactical withdrawal to the kitchen before the accusatory phantom overwhelms us. It’s a game about sin and projectile patterns and llamas. It’s...
]]>I’ve got a strange relationship with the stealth sandbox murderbox that is Hitman: World of Assassination. If you were to ask me to list my favourite games, the latest Hitman trilogy would be in the top five, no question. And yet, I must have gotten intimidated at some point with the amount of new updates and all the spiffy unlockable suits I was missing out on, and just haven’t touched it in a couple of years now. Is the appearance of Jean-Claude Van Damme as the game’s newest elusive target enough to reel me back in? I'm not sure, but I will say that I doubt Sean Bean can stretch his legs like that, even with the legendary flexibility offered by O2's famously variable plans. Here’s a trailer.
]]>If we follow Marshall McLuhan’s ideas about technology being an extension of the body, then the copy and paste keyboard shortcuts are my equivalent of a trip to one of Cyberpunk 2077’s ripperdocs. In the writing of this single article, I will use them for links, HTML code, and other ephemera. I even copied McLuhan’s name across from a different tab, which I’m sure he’d appreciate/be horrified by. I love those shortcuts. I need them. They are the wind beneath my wings, and the crud buildup beneath the bottom left of my keyboard.
I cannot say how the first tailor to gaze upon a sewing machine felt, nor the first egg-abacus attendant to behold the sorcerous ticking of the automated egg timer. But I think now that when they saw those things, they were afraid. As I am afraid now.
]]>I’m quite smitten by the Nintendo DS stylings and traditional roguelike charms of Shiren the Wanderer: The Mystery Dungeon Of Serpentcoil Island, but I’m having real trouble summoning up the motivation to repeatedly grind through its opening levels to get to the interesting stuff. Early stages soon lose any real sense of surprise, and later ones can feel low on real agency. I want a new roguelike run to feel vital and verdant; heady with grand plans and plan-shattering twists. But by having randomness influence each run so significantly, Mystery Dungeon feels fickle instead of emergent - less than the sum of some incredibly novel and creative parts.
]]>Indiana Jones and the Great Circle isn’t just good. It’s excellent. If you’re excited about playing the game on launch day (or beyond) and want to get the best deal possible, then look no further.
]]>Fancy taking the piss out of video games? Here you go, a fun little tool you can run in your browser easily lets you rewrite famous game quotes. The Death Generator offers a gallery full of (mostly) retro games and a simple text box that will replicate the exact font used by those games, all so you can make the little shopkeeper in Zelda say rude words, or entirely rewrite the pre-mission dossiers of Goldeneye 007. There's a lot more than that though. I've done a bunch, come see what I mean and have a go yourself.
]]>The big question a Tekken player always wants to know is: which DLC character is coming next? Well, you'll know by the end of the week, as the studio is planning to reveal this at Geoff Keighley's winter festival of expensive advertising, the Game Awards. However, there may already be some clues in a trailer they've just released, which suggests some sisterful slapping is overdue. The trailer also promises new moves for all characters in a Season 2 update next spring, along with some minor presents in a winter update due sooner than that. But yes, come see for yourself.
]]>There’s an awful lot behind this door, lemme tell ya. Hours of adventure, of tension, of action, of sci-fi strangeness. It’ll be great. Unfortunately the door itself is bugged out so you’ll need to reload a quicksave or something to get it open.
]]>It's not just because he's a Nazi. It's because he's a smartass Nazi. As the main antagonist in Indiana Jones And The Great Circle, Emmerich Voss vacates the archetypal armchair usually reserved for secondary fascist goons, so that he can goosestep straight into the big boy seat himself. He smiles with all the sleaze of right-hand-man Major Toht, the grubby gestapo who gets that right hand burned in Raiders of the Lost Ark. Yet he also engages in the pseudo-intellectual trash talk of the main archaeological rivals to Jones, like Rene Belloq or Walter Donovan. He is a hideous grab bag of all the things that make an instantly detestable villain in the series. But there's something else. Voss is so immediately and gutturally hateable because he resembles a type of racist encountered not in the 1930s, but one you've probably met today: the asshole you meet on the internet.
Warning: Here be spoilers.
]]>The only sound that greets you upon booting up Eclipsium is a loudly throbbing heart. As one must when encountering horror media, the game and I immediately enter a spiritual staring contest, each of us knowing the real game here was it trying to freak me out. "It’s fine", I decided. "It’s just a heart! I’ve got a heart. It’s actually very useful. Nothing to be scared of". Thing is, Eclipsium’s menu heart is actually massive and sits, like The Eye Of Sauron, atop a giant obelisk. “Ah. That’s definitely a horror thing, that” I was forced to admit. "If my heart was on a giant obelisk, I’d be proper shaken up, I reckon."
So starts Eclipsium’s very first bit of aggressive disorientation, and it basically just escalates from there. I obviously can’t describe the vibes without slightly spoiling the vibes, so do pop over to Steam for a demo if you’re curious and, oh, there’s a potted plant, the sound of its rustling mixed in such a way that it sort of sounds like it’s shrieking at me. Well.
]]>“Hang on a sec. Haven’t I seen this exact genre of little guy before?” was my reaction upon encountering the yellow-eyed, hat-shrouded mage of isometric adventure Oolo. Some quick internet sleuthing turned up this lovely bit of art featuring Final Fantasy 9’s Vivi, Journey’s Traveller, and He-Man’s Orko. It’s a great feeling to begin your week identifying an archetype of diminutive magician, and I hope it becomes a regular occurrence. Another pleasant discovery was Oolo itself, which you can discover yourself through the shrouded magic of this link to it’s free demo.
(Do I need to keep writing ‘free demo’, by the way? I tend to alternate. It’s obviously redundant but I feel writing ‘free’ gives it a certain gravitas. Free tax rebate. Free sunrise. Free oxygen. It makes things sound better.)
]]>Happy this week all! It's almost time to give 2024 the finger, swallow a flagon of mince pie formula and tapdance backwards into the holiday, but the Maw still needs a little feeding and it has no appetite for mince pies. Nor will it eat tinsel, candy canes, mistletoe, snowmen or reindeer, though goodness knows we've tried. So much screaming. No, the Maw's penchant remains for new PC game releases, and thankfully, they are as thick on the ground as reindeer pelts.
]]>Hello reader who is also a reader, and welcome back to Booked For The Week - our regular Sunday chat with a selection of cool industry folks about books! Everyone knows about ‘hardback’ and ‘softback’ books, but have you heard of the quickly discontinued ‘rice puddingback’? While hiring so many rice grain artists to transpose the blurbs in beautiful calligraphy made for an impressive spectacle, they were eventually banned after several fatal train slippage and/or smellage incidents. Ah well! This week, it’s Charlene Putney, who’s been writing for games for over ten years, including bits for Divinity: Original Sin 2, Baldur's Gate 3, NUTS, and Saltsea Chronicles! Cheers Charlene! Mind if we have a nose at your bookshelf?
]]>Today's door is shimmering and promises dark magics within. It's an unlikely marriage of big budget publisher and a genre beloved most by smaller development teams. What mastery will unlock the door and expose the vast arenas within? Why, clicking to read more, of course.
]]>Sundays are for, I hope, upgrading my PC swiftly and successfully and then getting down to business. Think of all the games I can now play! But I'll probably just play Dune Imperium.
Gail Mackenzie-Smith in Electric Lit wrote a Dear John letter breaking up with Wordle.
]]>There's no perfect time to release a video game, but if I were deciding when to release one, do you know when I'd do it? Alongside the largest blockbusters of the year, at a time when everyone is broke from buying presents, and on the same day as a huge awards show is distracting the industry's media.
Ballionaire apparently shares my thinking. The pachinko-inspired roguelike is launching on December 10th.
]]>I had a few merry evenings playing Escape Simulator back in 2022. Of the co-op escape room games I've played, it was the best, both in terms of its relatively neutral framing (with little heavyhanded storytelling) and its pretty solid puzzle design. The game was expanded in the time since with a versus mode and several crossover DLC, and now there comes a sequel.
Escape Simulator 2 will explore "darker escape room themes", looks visually more detailed, and comes with a new editor for those who wish to design their own escape rooms.
]]>This happened on Thursday, but we were busy with other, less interesting news. Late or not, I can't let it pass unremarked upon: Caves Of Qud, the vast, weird roguelike which has been in development for 17 years, hit version 1.0. It brings multiple endings to the game, a revised UI, improved tutorials and much more.
]]>You could open today's door, sure. You could also blow it up with an explosive, though. Or shoulder-barge your way through the wall beside it. Or plant some C4 on the ceiling and go up and over. Or I think that's a load-bearing pillar over there - may as well just bring down the entire advent calendar to find out what's behind today's door.
]]>Morning, all. Hope you're keeping those game-playing hands nice and toasty this winter. You can do it however you like. Wear gloves, huff on them, sit on them, give a fluffy cat a good squeeze. I personally like to clasp a mug of almost-too-hot coffee while I gaze at my Steam library wondering where the hours have gone. To each their own. Here's what we're all clicking on this weekend!
]]>The protagonists of two of my all time favourite RPGs share something in common. Both (the best Final Fantasy game) Final Fantasy 8’s Squall and The Witcher 3’s Geralt simply cannot get enough of leaving their friends and the entire world in mortal peril while they sneak in a quick round of cards, and I love them for it. Way back when the Wild Hunt released, there was a special edition kicking about that gave you a few decks for Gwent - the fleshed-out, playable card distraction that ended up being responsible for some of the game’s best moments. I pined for those decks, but I never acquired them. Now, Hatchette Board Games is putting out a full physical edition of Gwent next year.
The set contains "over 400 cards and a playmat" for £44/$39.99. I’m still recovering from various Fantasy Flight LCGs, so my value sense for this stuff might be a bit skewed, but that strikes me as incredibly reasonable. A good Gwent deck consists of only about 25 cards. They’re not bad cards, either! I’ve got a real pet hate for tabletop versions of videogames that just use in-engine screenshots for the cards, but these ones look to have the proper artwork from the game on them:
]]>Where were you during the Summer of Doronko Wanko? Why, I remember it like it was March, and not actually Summer, when the delightful free game about a mucky pomeranian was unleashed into the world. Yep, yep. It was definitely March. Roughly translating to ‘covered in mud doggy’, the game set you the task of racking up tangible financial damage to your owner’s house by getting mud everywhere - first by normal dog means, and then with giant mud cannons. You can grab it for free on Steam here.
It stole our hearts, it did. And talking of stealing things and having a good time doing it, it’s also releasing on the Nintendo Switch soon, which means the Steam version of Doronko Wanko is getting some free DLC to celebrate. It isn’t arriving until next Spring, but it’s bringing three new mystery dog breeds with it when it does.
]]>If you’d told me last year that face of all-out, GPU venerating, fully ray-traced PC game visual excess would be that of a de-aged Harrison Ford, I’d have asked which exact colour of paint you’d been eating. And yet here we are, with Indiana Jones and the Great Circle loving its ray tracing so much that the effects can’t ever be fully switched off.
]]>Every fascist in this game has a cold. The Hitlerites and blackshirts of Indiana Jones And The Great Circle sneeze and cough as they patrol the dig sites of Gizeh, or the marble corridors of the Vatican. Although this is the Machine Games' clever way of letting you know where your enemies are at all times, it is also mildly funny, as if all the Nazis have been secretly kissing each other, spreading the same rhinovirus from Italy to Egypt to Nepal and beyond. More than that, it's a stubborn reminder that, despite the many hours of perfectly motion-captured cinematics that accompany all this, you are still playing a video game. A snotty tissue that separates the Indy of taut two-hour cinema and the Indy of a sweeping first-person punch 'em up that will take days to complete. All this is to say, you will notice the difference. But that might not matter; they're both still Indiana Jones.
]]>Open a door, then back here again, open a door, then back here again. It's as if we're caught in some infernal loop. Thankfully we get to talk to you, our attractive friends, in the moments between.
OK, ready to go again. Let's open the door.
]]>When last we left myself, on a mission to survive S.T.A.L.K.E.R. 2 by weaponising its monsters instead of shooting its guns, my one-with-nature experiment was yielding mixed results. At best. I’d successfully lured some bandits into the deadly lair of a bucket-tossing Poltergeist, but several attempts at more actively siccing mutated pigs on the Zone’s human baddies had all failed, even when I’d seemed to actually tame one.
Now, my only friend lay dead at my feet, and I’m in dire need of some new beasts to master. And some cash. It turns out that a fighting style that involves letting shopping trolley-sized swine creatures chew on my heels is bad for the ol’ HP, and having recently blown my savings on half a sausage, I’m forced to shift focus from my current debt collection mission towards a means to fill my own coffers.
]]>I think It’s safe to say that Trigger Happy Interactive’s upcoming survival horror Total Chaos is a bit of a palette change from their last offering - the frenetic, neon-drenched, chainsaw-legged Turbo Overkill. Still, it’s not often we see psychological horror combined with ultraviolence, and anything that gives off even a whiff of Condemned: Criminal Origins has my attention.
Total Chaos started life as a popular Doom 2 mod, and while I dare the say the limitations of that game sell the atmosphere a little better than this much sleeker update, I certainly trust Trigger Happy enough to make the most of the new engine. The game is set in New Oasis, a “once bustling haven for coal miners” that is now most definitely not bustling, nor haven-like.
]]>The Horsemen of the Apocalypse are War, Famine, Death and Pestilence. The Drivers of the Apocalypse are Grappling Hooks, Vehicle Swapping, Boss Battles and Upgrades. You'll get to meet all four of the latter in the video game of the same name, a combat racer from Dinosaurs Are Better (citation needed) and their publishers Bonus Stage.
]]>The demimimise of Mimimi means I'm now on the lookout for my next opportunity to crouch behind a hedge, distract a man with a stone or coin, and then choke him unconscious. (And in the game.) Eriksholm: The Stolen Dream looks like a worthy candidate. Announced last year, there's now a new trailer showing the isometric (isometrish?) narrative stealth in action.
]]>Some day, somebody's going to make a cosy or wholesome submarine game, in which the submarine does not sprout leaks, does not run out of O2, and is never once invaded by any octopod-raddled zombies. That day is not today. Today there is only icy darkness and suffocation. Say "hello" and probably also "AIEEEEBLubLBBLBLBL" to Darkwater, a new co-op horror extraction game in which you brave the frigid oceans of an alien moon.
]]>Nightdive, you done good. The Thing: Remastered is an ultra-sharp and commendably playable update to a game that history will remember as ‘actually a pretty good pick at Choices when you really just popped in to get some Revels but got embarrassed when the till staffer said “is that everything?” in a tone that could have been neutral but equally could have been a damning indictment of your character’.
I’m being slightly facetious here, of course. History actually remembers Computer Artworks’s 2002 shooty horror game for how incredibly ambitious and conceptually inventive its proto-sus social squad system was. In homage to the body-snatching alien paranoia of Carpenter’s 1982 horror classic, The Thing tasks you with not just assembling and directing a squad, but keeping them from breaking down or turning on you - in fear you might be hosting the titular molecular stowaway.
]]>Dogubomb’s Blue Prince boasts my favourite shapeshifting house in a video game, which admittedly isn’t setting a very high bar. Perhaps surprisingly, most video game houses do not shapeshift. Despite being made out of pure imagination and carbon emissions, they remain nostalgically shackled to the limitations of brick, mortar and Euclidean geometry. Blue Prince’s abode is different. It is a house made of house. You’ll actually design the layout yourself every time you wander through it, picking from a selection of mismatched room types whenever you open a door.
]]>There was a crowded second there when I read the press release and thought they’d militarised the Beano, but Menace is not, in fact, about Dennis the Menace joining the Colonial Marines. It’s the new turn-based tactics RPG from the creators of Battle Brothers, and look at that, it has a freshly deployed gameplay trailer.
]]>Covering announcement shows mean saving oneself for huge reveals, and since I might be the only person in the world right now this excited for FPS Mekkablood: Quarry Assault, I wondered if it might be better to hold off until a less pressing time. And then I thought, no: the people need to know. Not about the game itself, since it's been announced for a while. Simply that I, personally, cannot resist a first person mech game where you have a fast food beverage inside your cockpit. It’s an extremely niche set of parameters and I’m elated it’s finally been fulfilled. Let’s chuffing gooooooooo!
]]>Anyone who is not trying to sell your something will tell you that ‘punk’ is a mostly meaningless term, mainly popularised by Malcolm McLaren and Vivian Westwood so they could sell bondage gear to teenagers. It is, of course, very punk of me to recognise this. However, this hasn’t stopped every other videogame released in the last 74 years trying to coin their own punk subgenre. The latest to do so is ‘brinepunk’ FPS Abyssus, which seems to have mostly arrived at the terms by being ‘a bit Steampunk, but underwater’. Abyssus looks cool, and so with the power vested in me by the Greggs vegan sausage roll I had for lunch today, I hereby declare that this is the last game allowed to do this. Let’s see if it’s making the most of it, at least.
]]>Ah, it feels just like yesterday when Citizen Sleeper 2: Starward Vector had around a year of development time left. Actually, I’d say it feels like it precisely around February 2nd of this year. Well, would you look at that. It seems making excellent RPGs isn’t Jump Over The Age’s only skill. They’ve also predicted the exact release of their game to within a 3 day margin of error: the actual release date is the 31st of January, 2025.
]]>4X strategy and RPG stalwarts Shiro Games have announced SpaceCraft, a "massively multiplayer management and crafting adventure" set in Normandy during the Middle Ages, haha, of course not - it's set in space. They won't be winning the T.S. Eliot poetry prize with that title, but I guess it gets the job done. Here's a trailer.
]]>Tactical Mutant Ninja Turtles? Turn-based Mutant Ninja Tactics? I'm undecided, but its actual name is Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles: Tactical Takedown, so maybe I should just call it that. It's just been announced and it's coming to PC next year.
]]>“So, you’ve fallen off a mountain,” strikes me as a brilliant book to write and then stock in every mountainside gift shop across the land, purely for the image of a falling climber rapidly scanning the pages as they tumble comically to their doom, searching for the one piece of sage advice that might alleviate their predicament. If you, personally, are reading RPS while falling off a mountain at this very moment, I’m afraid I can’t help you. Luckily, if you bonk your head on Steam on the way down, you’ll find a demo for stylish open world climbing game Cairn, which should hopefully distract you from your imminent pancaking.
Cairn is from The Game Bakers, of Furi and Haven fame. We first saw it at the Day Of The Devs this year. I was fresh off the lovely Jusant at the time. “Ah, another relaxing and whimsical French game about mountain climbing!” I thought. I was a fool. It’s far more intense, this one, although there are dashes of Breath Of The Wild and Death Stranding to add some whimsy and wonder to your Sisyphean struggle. Plus, it's very pretty. Here’s some new footage, or possibly some old footage depending on badly the embargo has messed up my schedule.
]]>Dealing with perpetually unsatisfied, stunningly entitled hordes of chittering monsters and the occasional visit from a lumbering oaf of a boss can be tough work. But enough about working in retail - dungeon crawling action sell’em up Moonlighter is getting a sequel! Moonlighter 2: The Endless Vault looks to be just what you want from a follow-up. Created once again by Digital Sun, whose recent works include the excellent Cataclismo, it’s prettier and vaster, with expanded merchanting and deeper dungeoneering. It's out sometime in 2025.
]]>One of my favourite anime shows is Sakura Quest. It's the story of an unemployed lady from Tokyo who accidentally gets herself appointed "Queen" of a struggling backwater village by the regional tourist board. From that case of mistaken identity proceeds 25 whole-ass episodes of Machiavellian haggling with crusty bigwigs over things like organising a concert. It's playfully dull, heartily mundane entertainment. No supernatural flourishes here - just the magic of paperwork and the thrill of bureaucracy.
I'm reminded of Sakura Quest by Danchi Days, a forthcoming cosy adventure with irresponsibly enticing Game Boy Advance-style visuals. It casts you as Hoshino, a teenage girl who's just moved to an old "danchi" housing complex and is trying to revive the yearly tradition of a summer festival. How will she do this? By means of haggling - haggling, and a bit of CSI.
]]>Developed by Mistwalker, a studio founded by Final Fantasy dad Hironobu Sakaguchi, Fantasian was originally released on Apple Arcade in 2021 and locked within the big fruit's exclusivity cage. Now, though, Mistwalker and Square Enix have come together to re-release the RPG for us PC heads, calling it Fantasian Neo Dimension. It's actually out today, too, if you're interested in an interdimensional journey to reclaim some lost memories.
]]>The world is changing. Geopolitics are fractious and unnerving, environmental catastrophe seems more likely each day, and rampant digitally-disseminated disinformation further erodes our trust in one another. But I'll let lesser reporters tell you about that stuff. I'm here to report that Capcom have made the big bonk feel good again. They’ve heard player feedback on the missing weapon oomph caused by the lack of hitstop in the Monster Hunter Wilds beta, and they’re bringing back the bonk.
Here’s a handy breakdown of the issue by X user Blue Stigma, but briefly: hitstop is the brief pause in an attack animation the moment the weapon connects with an enemy, giving you a real sense of bonkitude and making say, a hammer feel different from a dagger. As the video showed, the hitstop was greatly reduced in Wilds compared to previous Monster Hunters, and many players reported the combat just feeling a bit off as a result.
]]>I'll come out and say it: I had no idea, really, what Infinity Nikki was about before I dove in. I knew from some trailers that it was a free-to-play game about collecting pretty dresses and exploring a relentlessly positive open world. In those respects, I was correct.
I'd just missed the really big part - the fact it's a pacifistic Genshin Impact wearing a pretty dress. And as that realisation sunk in for the first time, my heart also sank with it. I really tried, I mean really tried to get into Nikki's gacha offerings; to delight in its menagerie of menus and cash in countless currencies for fun socks or glitzy tiaras. Sadly, I won't be logging back in ever again.
]]>Hang on, before you enter today's door, take off your shoes at do– Ach, it's everywhere. Take off your socks as well. Damn, it's in all my trouser pockets and– How did it get in my ears? I hate this stuff. Let's just hose ourselves down on the frontstep before we go in.
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