Rock, Paper, Shotgun
I don't much enjoy sports sims, but sometimes an imaginative spin on a sport will sneak past my guard. Electro Bop Boxing League has spins aplenty. You probably could have stopped at robot boxers, Developer Dob. You didn't have to give it a swaggering electro swing soundtrack as well. Special moves depicted as old-timey computer punched cards? Soldering limbs back on between rounds with a Repair-o-Gun? Little eggheads in lab coats clinging to the back of my gymrat C3PO as he pounds some would-be Megatron to shrapnel? Referee counts presented as a rebooting sequence? Developer Dob, you are spoiling us! Read more
Tides Of Annihilation trailer, trying to work out whether the new gooner-baiting Arthurian slasher has screwed up its portrayal of Britain’s public transport network. If it had, you’d best believe that’d be a headline. I’d have broken the internet with it. “Never mind turning the Dread Knight Mordred into a waifu,” I’d have written, hissing like a kettle. “Those absolute tourists at Eclipse Glow Games have made a mockery of the sacred N19 route from Finsbury Park to Clapham Junction.” Read more
"Ardenfall is almost cheeky in how close it is to a classic 'thesda game," Alice Bell wrote of the demo to this open-world RPG back in the Aliceful year of 2023. She also asked me about my own propensity for game discovery in my staff writer interview, to which I replied she knew I was OK at it because she nicked the idea for the Ardenfall article from a comment I left. Good taste, Alice, and good taste, me: Ardenfall is great fun. It's had a demo kicking around since 2022, and now it's set for an early access release this year. You'll find a steamin' hot tray-tray* below. Read more
What can we learn about games by comparing the thrill of a nailgun kill in Quake to the elation of triple word score in online Scrabble? For Richard Garfield, creator of Magic: The Gathering and KeyForge, it's actually quite a bit. Taking place over progressive rounds in which you'll pick and assign your force to capture victory points over an expanding tileset, Vanguard Exiles exists because Garfield is "smitten" with autobattlers, a love he traces back to an "epiphany" he had in the 90s thinking about the different roles a computer could play in both natively digital games and what he calls "paper games". "Yet they were both games," Garfield tells me over call, "I was playing them both digitally. The computer is vital. It serves a really good purpose, and yet, when you play [an autobattler], it feels like you're playing a paper game. You can sit back, think about your moves and understand really everything about the game before you execute, which is not the standard in a lot of digital games." Read more
Fans of damp tunnels and chatty skeletons may have enjoyed Lunacid, a first-person dungeon crawler which left early access in October 2023. Sin called it “lo-fi first-person dungeon skulking done right” and suggested that it “could well earn a place in some best of the year lists”. (It didn’t appear on ours, but in fairness, that was the year Baldur's Gate 3 devoured everybody’s brain.) Lunacid takes copious inspiration from Dark Souls developer FromSoftware’s old Shadow Tower and King’s Field games for PS1. Now, creators KIRA LLC are going even further with Lunacid: Tears Of The Moon - a new RPG made using FromSoftware’s ancient Sword Of Moonlight: King’s Field game creation tools from 2000, which came with hundreds of map parts, objects and characters plus scripting features and the ability to insert AVI movies and even a credits reel. Read more
Silent Hill f, a new incarnation of the survival horror series from Hong Kong-based Neobards Entertainment, which takes place in 1960s Japan. You are Shimizu Hinako, a schoolgirl equipped with the trademark Silent Hill combo of a broken-off pipe and a cartload of psychological baggage, whose hometown Ebisugaoka is engulfed by a monstrous fog. The choice of a non-US setting has ruffled the plumage of players who cherish Silent Hill's association with Twin Peaks and New England. Personally, I welcome the departure after the heady retro fidelity of the Silent Hill 2 Remake, and besides, the overall ambience doesn't seem that far removed from the elder Hills. Look, they've even got Akira Yamaoka contributing to the soundtrack. Read more
Here's one for the sci-fi slurping doomers among us. Hello Sunshine is a "survival mystery RPG" from the makers of Draugen, in which you must navigate a blistering desert by sheltering in the constantly moving shadow of a friendly robot. A collapsed corporation called Sunshine has turned the planet into a scorched wasteland leaving behind only warring mechs and dusty vending machines. "You play the final employee," say developers Red Thread Games. "Walk in the shadow of a giant robot during the sweltering days; stay close to keep warm during the cold nights." I wonder if any of this is a metaphor. Ah, who cares, it's got a cool trailer. Read more
Kingdom Come: Deliverance 2 hath been Patched, Adorning the Right Goode RPG with the Wondrous Art of Barbering and the Dark Science of Steamworks Modding, together with Sundry Fixes for Quests, Crashing and Performance Problems, Skills and NPC Behavioure. Yes, I'm aware the previous sentence can't work out which century it's in. In a perfect world I'd have had the time to dig out a medieval dictionary and translate this introduction into proper 14th century English. As it is, you'll have to make do with the one middle English word I can reliably remember from university: ywys! It means "indeed". This latest Deliverance 2 update? A mighty addition, ywys. Read more
Alienware Area-51 gaming desktop is the kind of PC that makes console players jellous. It's big, powerful, and costs as much as a used car. But if you're dropping this kind of cash, you want to make sure you're getting the best deal. Read more
Warhammer 40,000: Space Marine 2, which they assure us will continue to receive updates for "years". Read more
Teardown is one of those games that's just fun to look at, with all of its completely destructible voxel environments. When it first got announced it kind of reminded me of those old Flash games where you had simple creatures you could shake around and chuck stuff at, the joy of it being to see how far you could push things. Messing around like that is all the better with friends though, I reckon, and would you look at that, developer Tuxedo Labs have just announced today that a multiplayer update is on the way to the sandbox game. Read more
used your microphone to track how loud you're being, Eyes Never Wake uses your webcam to track whether your face is present or not. Read more
Maybe five or ten years ago, everybody was absolutely sick of climbing towers in Ubisoft games. Are we still? I’m not sure. If you’ve never scaled one of these landmarks, possibly because you have recently arrived from Mars, let me start you off on the ground floor. The open world tower mechanic dates back to the original Assassin’s Creed in 2007, and is a simple, perennially gratifying narrative loop. It goes like this: you spy the tower on the horizon, you scuffle and shoulder through the city towards it, you savour the ensuing clamber - all those sinuous parkour animations, the wind around your ears as the urban backdrop fades - and then you get a nice view of Creation that also renders the scenery more consumable, by unfogging your map and populating it with content. Read more
Zen-like spout splasher PowerWash Simulator is getting a sequel, and you need to get some mates: it's got both couch co-op and shared online campaign progression. It's also self-published by FuturLab this time, which likely means less Final Fantasy motorbikes but more revenue for the developers to make their own gilded nozzles. Here's a trailer. Read more
"Do they have any tips for how to get water stains off a plastic shower floor? I've tried everything," was Graham's pitch for a question to ask PowerWash Simulator 2 devs FuturLab following the reveal event a few weeks back. They're busy game development professionals, Graham, not your personal stain assistants. What kind of unscrupulous hack would use an interview opportunity to crowdsource stain removal advice? Anyway, here's 13 members of FuturLab sharing their top cleaning tips with us. Read more
Spectre Divide, a tactical free-to-play first-person shooter whose whole gimmick is that you control your own character and a clone, allowing you to switch between them on the fly. It was certainly a fresh take on the genre, but our former reviews editor Ed did wonder if that was enough to set it apart from Valorant or Counter Strike. As evidenced by developer Mountaintop Studios' imminent closure only six months after the game launched, it was not. Read more
The Sims players among us have been gazing cautiously at inZOI, a new neighbourhood and life management game from Krafton. I am cautious for essentially two reasons. One is that the game makes use of live generative AI: you can stuff its jaws with text, images and video to create items such as outfits and animate your pet humans, here known as Zois. Your Zoi's "actions and thoughts" are also based on "small machine learning" tech, which as the name implies is a teenier species of generative AI that commonly runs live on the user's own hardware. Going by the Steam page disclosure, the actual base game assets weren't AI generated, but then again, Steam AI disclosures can be rather unrevealing. We've published a fair bit about the risks and potential abuses of generative AI tools in video game development, so we'll be looking at that in more depth when the game hits early access on 28th March. In the meantime, here's the second reason I'm cautious: inZOI's key selling point over its obvious (and massively updated) rival The Sims 4 is that it has photorealistic visuals, and frankly, they creep the hell out of me. Read more
I know I should finish the 15 games I already started before buying more, but then Fanatical goes and drops a Steam sale like this. With discounts hitting up to 96%, there are some absolute steals here. It would be financially irresponsible not to take advantage, Right?. Read more
Nvidia’s RTX 5000 series launch has been nothing short of ridiculous. Every time a new GPU hits the shelves, it disappears faster than a PS5 in 2020. The RTX 5070 Ti is no exception. Despite being one of the most anticipated mid-to-high-end cards in the Blackwell lineup, getting your hands on one at a reasonable price has been a nightmare. Read more
Humble Games revealed they're publishing Town Of Zoz, a new action RPG that's all about fighting off rats from eating your crops, taking down baddies to gather up ingredients, and using said ingredients and crops to make some tasty meals. It's got wonderfully vibrant art and animation. The announcement trailer quickly won me over with the choppy, almost stop-motion-like quality of certain character models. Read more
A few weeks back, a new AI generated content disclosure appeared on the Call Of Duty Steam page, reading "our team uses generative AI tools to help develop some in game assets". This followed several months of community speculation over whether the FPS was using such tools to fever-dream up cosmetics, and a Wired report (paywalled) in which an anonymous artist alleged that the 'Yokai's Wrath' premium pack used genAI assets, via PC Gamer. As a disclosure, it's better than nothing, but only barely. While the admission of any GenAI presence is useful to those of us who would rather avoid it entirely, the description "help develop some in game assets" tells us very little. So who's at fault here? Are Activision skirting Valve's requirement to be purposely vague, or do Valve's requirements themselves invite vagaries? Read more
While never officially announced by Bethesda, rumours of an Unreal Engine 5 remake of The Elder Scrolls IV: Oblivion have been circling the proverbial dialogue pie since 2023, surfacing first via an alleged developer, then leaked court documents. Edwin wrote about its potential improvements to combat here, while noting that the same leaked documents also mentioned both a Fallout 3 remaster and Dishonored 3. This might well either prime you with a healthy dose of scepticism, or else have you running around the house shouting "Dishonored 3!" at your pets, as I do at least once a week. As reported by Very Gary Computing, "noted insider" NatetheHate reckons this Oblivion remake is getting revealed "in the coming weeks' - a claim they say they've corroborated. "Nate claims the game will likely release before June, while sources have told VGC it could arrive as soon as next month". Read more
Nintendo has left Star Fox to rot with the likes of Kid Icarus, while other series like Advance Wars have made a comeback (no shade to Advance Wars fans), but it has. Chuhai Labs are here to save the day with Wild Blue, an upcoming on-rails shooter just revealed yesterday at the Humble Games Showcase. The teaser itself didn't show a lick of gameplay, but it's worth noting that Chuhai Labs were founded by Giles Goddard, one of the programmers for the original Star Fox on SNES. Read more
Assassin’s Creed Shadows will in fact be compatible with the Steam Deck, Ubisoft say, despite a previous tech Q&A on the sneaky-stabby ninja sim declaring point-blank that it won’t. Announced on whatever the fuck Twitter is these days, the confirmation that Shadows will play nice with the Deck comes as a pleasant surprise – even without that prior naysaying, games with a GTX 1070 listed among the minimum specs typically don’t cope too well on the handheld’s frugal hardware. Read more
One thing this review can’t tell you is how exactly the MSI Claw 8 AI+ improves on the original Claw, for the simple reason that MSI themselves binned off the latter before I had a chance to try it. Three months, it lasted, before this do-over got announced. Three months! And people say the Steam Deck OLED came too soon. The good news is that the Claw 8 AI+’s mostly-internal revamping – new CPU, new GPU, fatter battery etc. – has produced a handheld that not only thrashes Valve’s upgraded Steam Deck on games performance, but is up there with the best of its Windows-based brethren-portables on longevity. You know what, it probably is better than the Claw. Yeah. Read more
There are no wilds in Monster Hunter Wilds. Instead, beautiful dioramas. The fauna are as ferociously believable as ever, but the flora are plastic aquarium plants. You regard each new environment with wonder precisely once, then adopt the suction-hungry gaze of a Kirby-esque loot inhaler. You turn off your Seikret's auto-trundle just to feel the wind in your hair, then realise the freedom it offers is roughly analogous to the the freedom you have to stand up and scratch your bum on a bus. "You aren't in conversation with the landscape of Wilds in the same way as you are in Breath Of The Wild or Shadow Of The Colossus," wrote Brendy. The scoutflies "reduce lush and curious environments to an all-purpose gumbo of Matrix code and button prompts," wrote Edwin. That thing about bums just now, wrote I. For all their fidelity and art direction, these biomes are laminated. Save the odd mushroom or helpful rock slide, there's no reason to interact with them in ways that reinforce their believability as real places. Read more
Avowed's game director Carrie Patel has been on the blower to Eurogamer about why Avowed doesn't have any romance in it, which is to say it does, actually, if you're paying attention, and also, affairs of the heart aren't supposed to feel like min-maxing your Wizard, Kevin. To put that another way, she has gently suggested that relationships are more relatable when they aren't some kind of mechanic or system. Read more
“While GTA lets players experience a fictional underworld of lawless enterprise, the entities behind PlayerAuctions own and operate a real one". So claims a lawyer for GTA 6 and Borderlands publisher Take-Two Interactive in a complaint filed on Tuesday against third-party asset marketplace PlayerAuctions. They accuse PlayerAuctions - who have already faced similar accusations from Roblox - of selling modified player accounts obtained by hacking, via Polygon. (I have no choice but to respect the hustle of trying to make GTA's "fictional underworld of lawless enterprise" sound as cool as possible during a lawsuit. "While GTA lets players do cool and fun fake crimes...") "The website PlayerAuctions.com offers a vast online marketplace containing thousands of listings for unauthorized, infringing GTA V content – including heavily modified player accounts, in-game assets, and virtual currency – all gained by using hacking software, cheats, and technical exploits,” continues the complaint. Read more
Today in "news that will get you banished from society if you try to explain it to anyone who doesn't live on the internet," the owner of an erotic Balatro subreddit has had their moderator status revoked from the main subreddit after a brief civil war surrounding AI generated art culminated with developer LocalThunk intervening. Cheers to Garbage Day for the spot. Many threads lie dead and buried in the bloody wake of all this, but the brief rundown is that moderator DrTankHead - who also runs r/balatromance - waded into the following thread: Read more
Verity Amersham's pockets are overflowing. Her school uniform hides a paperclip, a safety pin, two school badges, two books, a bottle of wine, a bottle of chloroform, a handwritten note, and more. None of it will do any good, as I have failed once again. Verity will be expelled from school. I have saved Verity from her fate previously. Expelled! is Inkle working in their Overboard! mode, which Alice B so enjoyed upon its surprise release in 2021. Here, again, you play and replay a short 45-60 minute story, trying new ideas and learning more each time. It also returns to the interwar years for a different kind of pastiche of golden age mystery fiction: the school story. Read more
Ender Magnolia: Bloom In The Mist, and co-developers Adglobe and Live Wire are already back with a pretty solid update. The major addition is a New Game+ mode, which allows you to start the "evil-purging adventure anew, this time armed with gear and relics from previous playthroughs”, and face “harrowing hordes of smarter, stronger enemies with new attack patterns." Read more
GTA 6 aesthetic, than because the latest trailer ends with main character Trotter squatting weirdly on a coffee table. He perches there with track-suited elbows akimbo, smiling faintly. Mockingly. Read more
Celeste in my top five. The platforming is tighter than any Mario entry, the art and soundtrack are stellar, and the story really hits home for me too. You can imagine how excited I was when Earthblade, the follow-up from developer Extremely OK Games, was announced, and how upset I was when it was cancelled a couple months back. Still, we've been treated to a small taste of what the game might have been like in the form of a mini-album with a select set of tracks from composer Lena Raine. Read more
Grand yet furtive robot action-adventure Steel Seed will launch on April 10th, developers Storm in a Teacup and publishers ESDigital Games have announced. Not heard of Steel Seed before? You would've if I'd ever written up that demo build I played at last year's Game Developer Conference. I don't know why it's taken me this long to mention the game, given that it contains one of my favourite things in fiction: a machine the size of a world. Read more
Disco Elysium spiritual successors in the works from former staff, controversy regarding the exits of key team members behind the beloved RPG, and an in-development expansion cancelled, you might have been wondering what Studio ZA/UM will do next. Well, that answer is here. In a recent presentation held for the press, ZA/UM revealed a first look at their next game. It's called C4 and it's about espionage. Read more
Call of Duty: Warzone. In the intervening period, a sort-of-sequel was released simply titled Call of Duty: Warzone 2.0 - now just called Call of Duty: Warzone, too - and the single, bountiful map players War upon has changed several times over. Yesterday on March 10th, the day Warzone officially released back in 2020, Activision shared a teaser trailer confirming that the game's original map Verdansk will be making a comeback. Read more
The first enemy I encounter in the Steam demo for Songs Of Rats is a giant golem, encased in fridge-thick armour with fists the size of fridges and a thousand-fridge stare. If RPGs are good at anything, it's making numbers scary. To wit: The battle golem has 40 health, and I have a nerf crossbow with pretensions that does one entire damage. I manage to do two entire damage, and he downs me in two hits. This may well be what it feels like for a real life rat to fight a real life fridge, and in that, Songs Of Rats earns its name. The intro is all 80s cheese meets a desperate melancholy bolstered by bleak and bitty retro-futurist visuals. It's also very pen n' paper, down to losing health if you don't have enough food and the limited action points you have to spend each day on exploration. A trailer for you. It took some digging, I tell you. A certain other song about rats has monopoly on the search term. Read more
The Last of Us season 2, right? I mean, everyone knows what happens quite early on in the game, because it was a pretty controversial narrative choice so everyone and their mum has spoiled it. I haven't played it myself and I know what happens, but it seems like streaming service Max is happy to pretend that everything is peaches and cream (more or less) in their adaptation. A new trailer for The Last of Us season 2 dropped over the weekend that is full of drama and light on spoilers, which is why I'm staying quiet too, but it has been funny watching all of these trailers knowing that they're lying just a little bit. Read more
Sony are experimenting with AI-powered characters who'll speak to the player directly using OpenAI and Chat-GPT to hold a conversation, according to leaked footage seen by the Verge. The video shows familiar robot whacker Aloy from the Horizon games "responding to queries with an AI-powered synthesized voice and facial movements". Sony's copyright patrolmen showed up with a "'ello 'ello what have we 'ere" and got the video taken down from YouTube. But, shhh, there are other ways to see it. Read more
Battlefield Labs community testing program, and consists of multiple consecutive minutes of burly shootyfolks running down alleyways through showers of grit, firing very briefly at enemy troopers, and getting themselves bullet-bonked back to the lobby screen. EA had been taking the videos down, but have seemingly now decided to let them roll. It's the kind of tactical withdrawal in the face of overwhelming numbers that seldom occurs to me when I play Battlefield, because I always play Battlefield in the character of a movie extra. I am here to cultivate the ambience for other players by prancing around yodelling "INCOMING", not contribute to our victory. Read more
Alta used to be a champion fighter. Now, she can’t even lift her sword. After she collapses in the forest, a kindly teashop owner called Boro invites her to join him. Maybe a spell of cozy gardening, cleaning, and making tea for customers will help her feel better? But it’s only an offer. You can go back into the forest at any time. Obviously, I tried to leave. Firstly because I know how to accurately roleplay a stressed, overly devoted burnout who puts all their value in their vocation. And secondly because, come on. This game was written by Davey Wreden, the creator of The Stanley Parable. There’s got to be some kind of secret to ignoring the clear invitation of the game, right? Read more
Monster Hunter Wilds has a new update that makes copious little and large changes to the popular animal-hitting sim. As often with PC game patch notes, the changelog is a balance of mealy fare such as fixes for broken weapons, and moments of absurdity, such as addressing a problem whereby you'd hack the tail off an Ajarakan only for it to transform into another monster's appendage. Also, you'll no longer be able to cheese the Gore Magala by somehow dropping a dozen boulders on it simultaneously. Read more
Suikoden I & II HD Remaster Gate Rune And Dunan Unification Wars is an unwieldy subtitle for a pair of comfy and often cheerful RPGs, but it's one you could easily see on the slipcover for a thick slab of historical fiction. It scans. Suikoden is never so striking as when military drums sound up beneath sweet singsong flutes. When farmers and teachers and fishermen throw down rakes and books and rods to take up arms for the chance to someday farm and fish and teach again. Read more
One of my favourite things in the entire world is the brash poetry inherent in the word 'skyscraper', and the many writing and language lessons gleaned from considering how utterly mundane that word actually feels to use. This week, the Cities: Skylines community join me in the "probably thinking too much about skyscrapers" club. Paradox's city builder has turned ten. To celebrate, they've constructed a towering roadmap of freebies for it and Cities: Skylines 2, including new radio stations, new content, and a free-to-play Steam event for the original running March 20-24. Read more
Mazeworld, an elder Apple Macintosh first-personifier in which you explore a Carollian landscape of blue-walled darkness and rainbow-shelled snails. I was a young slip of a boy when Mazeworld released, and prone to daymares about crocodiles floating through the ceiling. Imagine my reaction to a game in which you are immediately confronted by a slathering, bodiless Cheshire Cat, its face a grinning smear that is only visible when it's charging right at you. I'm always looking for games that similarly hide themselves, throwing you into a chasm of occult potentiality from which anything might emerge, given the appropriate rites. Games like Nix Umbra, Death Of A Wish and now Nothing Beyond This Point, a topdown metroidvania in which you are a flaming cube surrounded by floating rods, dropped into a pixelart-scuffed void. RPS reader Mr_B recommended it in our last weekend plays thread, and I couldn't resist trying the demo. Read more
A new trailer for Death Stranding 2: On the Beach has dropped. It puts a ten-minute dent into the upcoming open world game's enigma, but the most tantalising question still remains: is Kojima using that subtitle to deliberately remind everybody of the original's most infamous scene? Bold choice if so, although not the only one. Here's the trailer, complete with familiar mechs and very familiar bandanas. See Konami, this is what happens when you pop out for five minutes to re-release Suikoden. Read more
Over the weekend, hectic 1v1 shooter Straftat got yet more free maps in an update. The developers added eight new cramped deathzones alongside a further four maps for owners of the "maps 'n' hats" DLC, then threw in a new submachine gun and a music player for good measure. But over on the game's Discord server, amid the mine-laying mercenaries and bum-sliding shootscum, the developers also held a poll that revealed future plans. They asked players what they'd prefer: a 2v2 mode or a four-player free-for-all? "We'll do both," said devbrother Leonard Lemaitre, "but it's a matter of which one comes first." Read more
New week, new PC games, new Maw liveblog, hungering for our headlines! But first, the obligatory paragraph of twaddle: lately I've been wondering whether we should put the Maw on a diet. The creature may be indiscriminate, but we news sentinels have noticed that stuffing the Gorging Chutes with certain story flavours can produce... eruptions. Our pataphysical nutritionists have accordingly devised a new regimen of no more than two Bethesda headlines a week, plus at least one game marketed as a "deconstruction", and double helpings of ray-tracing on Fridays. Will we stick to it? Probably not, but I'm interested to hear what you all consider a healthy weekly diet of news. While you ponder, here's what's hitting the digi-shelves in the next five days. Read more
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! I'm starting to regret phrasing it like that, to be honest. The word "selection" evokes either bureaucracy or crap small versions of chocolate bars. I'm now imagining "guy who travels to Europe because he heard the chocolate is better but can only find stale Curly Wurlys". That'd suck so bad. This week, it's Last Call, Tacoma, Lost Records: Bloom & Rage, and loads more's Nina Freeman! Cheers Nina! Mind if we have a nose at your bookshelf? Read more
Sundays are for playing a bit of Split Fiction and tinkering with that new expensive camera you bought, the latest in a long line of attempts to adopt a new hobby. You're almost 40 so if this one doesn't stick you may as well just give up and start a Band Of Brothers re-watch. For Eurogamer, Florence Smith Nicholls wrote about their experience at a Disco Elysium-inspired LARP. Read more
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