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Electro Bop Boxing League is a swanky atompunk autobattler with a wonderful sense of fun

Edwin Evans-Thirlwell — Fri, 14 Mar 2025 17:39:20 +0000

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!

New Tides Of Annihilation trailer is a buttery montage of bossfights

Edwin Evans-Thirlwell — Fri, 14 Mar 2025 16:27:19 +0000

In my hectic pursuit of a scoop, I have spent a non-zero amount of today peering at a smudgy image of a London bus sign from a 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.”

Morrowind-inspired indie RPG Ardenfall releases in early access this year

Nic Reuben — Fri, 14 Mar 2025 14:35:52 +0000

"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.

Magic: The Gathering creator Richard Garfield on designing Vanguard Exiles so you could play with dice if your computer died

Nic Reuben — Fri, 14 Mar 2025 14:00:47 +0000

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."

FromSoftware fanatics are making brand new RPGs with the Dark Souls dev's 25-year-old game-making tools

Edwin Evans-Thirlwell — Fri, 14 Mar 2025 13:10:14 +0000

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.

Konami's first proper new Silent Hill in an age is a welcome change of scene after the Silent Hill 2 remake

Edwin Evans-Thirlwell — Fri, 14 Mar 2025 12:00:50 +0000

Konami have given us our first proper look at 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.

You'll only survive the scorching wasteland of Hello Sunshine by walking in the shadow of a giant robot

Brendan Caldwell — Fri, 14 Mar 2025 10:25:34 +0000

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.

Kingdom Come: Deliverance 2 update brings full stealth rework, plus barbers, modding tools and oh so many fixes

Edwin Evans-Thirlwell — Fri, 14 Mar 2025 10:14:44 +0000

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 15th 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.

I've found an Alienware Area 51 RTX 5080 build that's worth the money

Christian Wait — Thu, 13 Mar 2025 17:40:00 +0000

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.

Warhammer 40,000: Space Marine 3 revealed with Titus back as lead

Edwin Evans-Thirlwell — Thu, 13 Mar 2025 17:31:35 +0000

Saber and Focus Entertainment Publishing have announced Warhammer 40,000: Space Marine 3, another bloody serving of Adeptus Astarting with a fresh single player campaign and multiplayer component, plus unspecified "innovations that will redefine the standards of third-person action games". Saber will work on the new action game alongside Warhammer 40,000: Space Marine 2, which they assure us will continue to receive updates for "years".

Teardown is getting a multiplayer update, so you can rough up innocent walls with your best friends

Oisin Kuhnke — Thu, 13 Mar 2025 16:55:33 +0000

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.

Can't wait to bang my head while playing this survival horror that lets you hide from its monster using your webcam

Oisin Kuhnke — Thu, 13 Mar 2025 16:50:35 +0000

I'm often put off by gimmicky horror games, but sometimes I see one and think "yeah, that'll be a laugh." This time around it's Eyes Never Wake, the debut survival horror from developer Allan Hedlund. Where some horror games in recent years have 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.

No Assassin's Creed sequel has ever matched the weird poetry of the first game's towers

Edwin Evans-Thirlwell — Thu, 13 Mar 2025 16:42:09 +0000

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.

PowerWash Simulator 2 devs tell us their tips for real life house cleaning

Nic Reuben — Thu, 13 Mar 2025 15:00:00 +0000

"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.

PowerWash Simulator 2 has split-screen co-op for "twice the wash-power"

Nic Reuben — Thu, 13 Mar 2025 15:00:00 +0000

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.

Spectre Divide shutting down six months after launch reminds us how hard it is to make a live-service game

Oisin Kuhnke — Thu, 13 Mar 2025 14:57:11 +0000

Crikey, it's still looking rough out there in the industry at the moment, isn't it folks? Yesterday unfortunately brought the news that another online game is shutting down, with the studio alongside it. In this version of the story that we've heard all too often recently, it's 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.

InZOI's system specs make me want to see this handsome Sims killer running on a pocket calculator

Edwin Evans-Thirlwell — Thu, 13 Mar 2025 13:09:27 +0000

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.

Fanatical Steam Spring Sale is amazing for PC gamers, here's my top picks

Christian Wait — Thu, 13 Mar 2025 12:36:51 +0000

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?.

These CyberPower RTX 5080 Ti prebuilds on Amazon are the cheapest I've seen so far

Christian Wait — Thu, 13 Mar 2025 12:36:05 +0000

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.

I'm already smitten by upcoming action RPG Town of Zoz thanks to how much it understands food

Oisin Kuhnke — Thu, 13 Mar 2025 12:15:07 +0000

I love a game that features some kind of cooking element, so I was quite pleased yesterday when 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.

Call Of Duty's generative AI disclosure reveals a glaring issue with Steam's policies

Nic Reuben — Thu, 13 Mar 2025 11:55:47 +0000

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 vagueness?

An official Elder Scrolls Oblivion remake will release as soon as next month, claims report

Nic Reuben — Thu, 13 Mar 2025 11:53:19 +0000

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".

Wild Blue is a spiritual Star Fox sequel from one of the SNES game's original programmers

Oisin Kuhnke — Thu, 13 Mar 2025 11:35:41 +0000

I couldn't tell you why 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.

Nah actually Assassin’s Creed Shadows will get Steam Deck support after all, Ubisoft say

James Archer — Thu, 13 Mar 2025 10:23:53 +0000

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.

MSI Claw 8 AI+ review: second time’s the charm for this powerful handheld revamp

James Archer — Wed, 12 Mar 2025 17:05:26 +0000

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.

Monster Hunter Wilds' unconvincing biomes would shine with some of Kingdom Come: Deliverance's disempowerment

Nic Reuben — Wed, 12 Mar 2025 16:23:44 +0000

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.

Avowed game director says romance is more romantic when it isn't a system

Edwin Evans-Thirlwell — Wed, 12 Mar 2025 16:18:49 +0000

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.

Take-Two sues GTA 5 account boosters for pressuring "innocent" players into buying unauthorized goods

Nic Reuben — Wed, 12 Mar 2025 09:31:37 +0000

“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.

Localthunk quells AI art civil war started by Balatro erotica subreddit mod

Nic Reuben — Wed, 12 Mar 2025 09:27:36 +0000

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:

Expelled! review

Graham Smith — Wed, 12 Mar 2025 04:00:00 +0000

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.

Ender Magnolia's latest update invites you to fight its toughest baddies again with a new boss rush mode

Oisin Kuhnke — Tue, 11 Mar 2025 17:12:05 +0000

It's not even been two months since the release of 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."

Grimy 90s GTA homage Vivat Slovakia leaves early access in April

Edwin Evans-Thirlwell — Tue, 11 Mar 2025 16:47:07 +0000

I confess, I'm writing up the 1.0 release date for grubby open world game Vivat Slovakia less because I'm tantalised by the carboot sale 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.

Celeste composer shares a snippet of Earthblade's soundtrack, and now I'm even more gutted it was cancelled

Oisin Kuhnke — Tue, 11 Mar 2025 15:59:43 +0000

I'm not all that big on ranking games, truth be told - why would I want to catalogue a piece of art that way? But seeing as you have me at gunpoint (just pretend for me), I'll admit I'd probably put 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.

In Steel Seed, you parkour through a planet-sized machine - it's out in April, and here's a demo

Edwin Evans-Thirlwell — Tue, 11 Mar 2025 15:06:04 +0000

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.

Despite it all, Disco Elysium's original studio have revealed espionage-filled new game, C4

Oisin Kuhnke — Tue, 11 Mar 2025 14:00:00 +0000

With several 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.

Call Of Duty: Warzone's original Verdansk map is coming back, but a bit later than expected

Oisin Kuhnke — Tue, 11 Mar 2025 13:20:44 +0000

The passage of time is unfortunately an unstoppable thing, and I seem to have blinked and five years have passed since the release of 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.

The grimy sci-fi in Songs Of Rats feels like Mothership RPG meets Fighting Fantasy

Nic Reuben — Tue, 11 Mar 2025 11:23:09 +0000

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.

The Last of Us season 2's latest trailer once again skirts around that Big Narrative Event

Oisin Kuhnke — Tue, 11 Mar 2025 11:12:34 +0000

We all know what's coming up in 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.

Leaked video shows PlayStation toying with Aloy from Horizon as an AI chatbot

Brendan Caldwell — Tue, 11 Mar 2025 10:22:08 +0000

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.

Oops, Battlefield 6 features revealed by leaked Battlefield Labs footage

Edwin Evans-Thirlwell — Mon, 10 Mar 2025 18:02:55 +0000

A bunch of playtester footage for the next, modern-day-set Battlefield game has slipped past EA's non-disclosure agreements and erupted all over social media. The footage stems from the company's 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.

Wanderstop review

Jay Castello — Mon, 10 Mar 2025 14:00:00 +0000

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?

You can no longer nuke Hirabami with endless flying boulders in Monster Hunter Wilds

Edwin Evans-Thirlwell — Mon, 10 Mar 2025 13:10:39 +0000

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.

Suikoden I & II HD Remaster review

Nic Reuben — Mon, 10 Mar 2025 12:30:36 +0000

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.

Paradox celebrate 10 years of Cities: Skylines with a roadmap of anniversary goodies

Nic Reuben — Mon, 10 Mar 2025 12:22:50 +0000

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.

There is Nothing Beyond This Point except a promisingly odd metroidvania about exploring the void

Edwin Evans-Thirlwell — Mon, 10 Mar 2025 12:13:49 +0000

One of my Foundational Video Games is 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.

New Death Stranding 2 trailer features a familiar bandana and a weapon to legally surpass Metal Gear

Nic Reuben — Mon, 10 Mar 2025 10:35:15 +0000

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.

Brutalist shooter Straftat teases a four player free-for-all mode

Brendan Caldwell — Mon, 10 Mar 2025 10:12:31 +0000

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."

The Maw: what's new in PC games this week?

Edwin Evans-Thirlwell — Mon, 10 Mar 2025 09:56:21 +0000

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.

What's on your bookshelf?: Last Call, Tacoma, and Lost Records: Bloom & Rage's Nina Freeman

Nic Reuben — Sun, 09 Mar 2025 16:00:00 +0000

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?

The Sunday Papers

Graham Smith — Sun, 09 Mar 2025 11:00:00 +0000

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.

What are we all playing this weekend?

Ollie Toms — Sat, 08 Mar 2025 08:00:00 +0000

It's been a long week, hasn't it? The balm for me is that I'm spending Saturday feeding squirrels at one of my favourite Glasgow parks, and then visiting a cat cafe. It's a good time to be me. I hope you've all got a healthy dose of animal in your lives to help get you through these chilly March mornings. Games, too. Lots of games. Here's what we're clicking on this weekend!

Project Citadel is a new RTS inspired by Halo Wars from former Ensemble and BonusXP devs

Edwin Evans-Thirlwell — Fri, 07 Mar 2025 18:00:34 +0000

There have been many attempts to reboot the RTS recently, ranging from throwbacks like the recent Age Of Mythology: Retold to splicey novelties such as Battle Aces. I’m not sure any have managed it, but I’m always glad to see fresh blood spilled in the house of Westwood. Which brings us to Project Citadel, a new space-me-do from Last Keep, a studio founded by former staff of Stranger Things devs BonusXP and Age Of Empires outfit Ensemble. It pitches you against an alien empire, and blends squad mechanics redolent of Halo Wars with a roguelike format that aims to support shorter play sessions, while still supposedly allowing for vintage strategy gambits like booming and rushing.

Nvidia GeForce RTX 5070 review: an RTX 4070 Super with a DLSS 4 badge

James Archer — Fri, 07 Mar 2025 16:58:35 +0000

I knew the RTX 5070 was tricking me. Parked next to the extravagant silliness of the two-grand RTX 5090, this £539 / $549 graphics card looked like a very agreeable deal, offering all the same DLSS 4 and Multi Frame Generation as its bigger, pricier brothers. Also, an upgrade to the RTX 4070 Super, a GPU that could handle 4K without looking too out of place in a premium 1080p rig. Tragically, though, the RTX 5070 breaks a sacred covenant, a mutual understanding between PC owners and parts makers that’s held strong for decades: if you buy a new version of a thing, it should be faster than the old version of that thing. Look past the MFG illusion, and far too often, it isn’t.

After two hours, open world shooter Atomfall is far more Far Cry than S.T.A.L.K.E.R.

Edwin Evans-Thirlwell — Fri, 07 Mar 2025 14:21:40 +0000

I was towards the end of my Atomfall demo when it clicked for me - clicked like the gravelly report of a shell entering the breech of my rusty yet devastating shotgun. Guided by the deteriorated state of my weapons, and by James' Gamescom write-up, I’d been trying to play Rebellion’s alt-Sixties open world FPS like S.T.A.L.K.E.R., hoarding my ammo and avoiding unnecessary bloodshed as I crept around an English woodland full of druids ranting about atomic fungus. I’d made it to the heart of the druid encampment - a National Trust castle of the kind that would typically be 30% wedding venue, 50% giftshop - only to reach a dead end in a banqueting hall. I had a key for a lock I couldn’t find. Perhaps it lay in a tent outside the castle, or in one of the surrounding caves?

The sequel to Robocop: Rogue City sounds more like Dredd

Brendan Caldwell — Fri, 07 Mar 2025 12:32:23 +0000

RoboCop will be climbing an apartment tower full of slimebags in a standalone follow-up to his trudging but faithful 2023 shooter. Robocop: Rogue City - Unfinished Business is so over-named it looks like DLC, but is actually an independent sequel from the same developers, and directly follows the events of the recent criminal justice 'em up. It'll see metal man Murphy going floor to floor as he and other Detroit city policefolk ascend a residential tower after "a group of highly trained mercenaries armed with cutting-edge weapons takes control of the building and turns it into their deadly fortress." Wait... doesn't this sound like another cyberpunk dystopia?

The Forever Winter's water will no longer drain away while you're offline

Brendan Caldwell — Fri, 07 Mar 2025 11:11:24 +0000

Mechy and messy extraction shooter The Forever Winter sees a big update today that addresses the biggest player complaint the game had on launch - the precious water that drained away in real-time, even while you weren't playing the game. The patch to the early access shooter reworks water so it becomes a currency that you use to infiltrate the game's brutal maps at different entry points, instead of dripping away and threatening to leave you thirsty and destitute. And this isn't the only promising news - enemy spawning changes, reworked gunplay, and a new map also appear.

Goblin stealth gaming returns in Styx: Blades Of Greed, out in 2025 - here's the first trailer

Edwin Evans-Thirlwell — Fri, 07 Mar 2025 10:30:52 +0000

Cyanide and Nacon have announced Styx: Blades Of Greed, the third in a trilogy of goblin stealth games known for puke-based mechanics and many a snarky note-to-self. I never completed the previous Styx: Master Of Shadows or Styx: Shards Of Darkness, and if I'm honest, I fear Cyanide's impish infiltrator is doomed to forever butt his smirking, warty head against the 6/10 glass ceiling, with Thief's Garrett flashing V-signs on the other side.

Still, I have a certain respect for the series. There aren't many third-person sneakers like this any more, still fewer that have successfully gotten away with a protagonist who sounds like a chaddy Sam Fisher and looks like he should be cleaning toilets in Moria. So a quiet hip-hooray, then, for Blades Of Greed, which is out later in 2025. Here's a trailer.

First look at Disco Elysium "spiritual successor" Hopetown shows a painterly, gorgeous, and utterly unconvincing RPG

Nic Reuben — Fri, 07 Mar 2025 09:44:36 +0000

Longdue Games have shared the first gameplay image from Hopetown, their RPG "spiritual successor" to Disco Elysium, coming soon to Kickstarter.

First namelessly teased last October as part of The Great Disco Thrupening, then revealed last month, Hopetown was described as "merging the raw emotional depth and psychological intricacy of Disco Elysium with the philosophical richness and narrative complexity of Planescape: Torment."

Kingdom Come: Deliverance 2 is getting a Barber Mode and by golly, I hope I can actually be a barber

Edwin Evans-Thirlwell — Thu, 06 Mar 2025 17:04:00 +0000

Kingdom Come: Deliverance 2 is getting a major patch on 13th March, developers Warhorse have announced. It will enhance the bracingly mucky RPG with modding tools and a "trove of updates", including what the devs ambiguously refer to as Barber Mode. Going by the promotional image they've knocked together, this is just a selection of beards and haircuts for protagonist Henry. But it is not yet 13th March, so let us dare to dream. Let us imagine that the update will let Henry become a barber, cutting a swathe through the innumerable fringes of 15th century Bohemia.

Monster Hunter Wilds joins GeForce Now, providing a sneaky Steam Deck performance workaround

James Archer — Thu, 06 Mar 2025 16:05:52 +0000

Trying to run Monster Hunter Wilds on the Steam Deck is a futile endeavour, as is trying to run it on any other PC hardware that might variously be called cheap, old, or otherwise low-end. However, today’s arrival of the beast-stabbin’, consent-grantin’ RPG on Nvidia’s GeForce Now streaming platform does enable a sort of bodged alternative: a way to play Wilds on this most modest of handhelds, potentially at a sturdy 60fps.

Former Fable dev behind hit free Ultima-style RPG adds 100-floor megadungeon for a fiver

Edwin Evans-Thirlwell — Thu, 06 Mar 2025 15:58:40 +0000

Back in October 2023, former Bullfrog chappie and Fable developer Dene Carter sidled up out of nowhere and released Moonring, a terrific open world RPG in the Ultima tradition of top-down, tile-based bump-attacking. It had crisp neon sprites floating on seas of arcade cabinet black, an enticing mythology, elusive magic systems, procedural dungeons and dialogue based on remembering or deducing keywords. All this for free - statistically my second favourite price tag after the developer actually paying me to play the game. Which does not happen as often as you might think, you tinfoil hat-wearing scalliwags.

Now, Moonring has some DLC. It's called Moonring DLX and consists of the Egg, a 100 floor megadungeon "with the vague promise of a silly boss and a prize". Yes, the dungeon looks like an egg. Unlike Moonring and like most eggs encountered in daily life, the Egg costs money - $4.99, €4.99 or £4.29.

Monster Hunter needs a full-scale rebirth, but its contradictions are fascinating

Edwin Evans-Thirlwell — Thu, 06 Mar 2025 13:38:14 +0000

Monster Hunter Wilds is the fastest-selling game in Capcom's history. It continues to lord over the Steam charts, with peaks that might cause Counter-Strike 2 to glance momentarily down from its Olympus of user-created hats, and while people are still booting the dung out of the PC version's performance, verdicts upon the beast-punching as a whole are glowing.

To suggest that now is the time to go back to formula is probably pure contrarianism, but Wilds makes my brain itch. Building on (and hopefully not just recapping) Brendy's excellently ambivalent Monster Hunter Wilds review, I think the series is balancing on the edges of contradictions that extend throughout its design, from the combat through the user interface to the world and narrative themes. I think it's been doing that for years, in fact, but Wilds, for me, is where Monster Hunter's confusion about itself has come to a head.

Marvel 1943: Rise of Hydra's release may fall in Christmas 2025, according to the Black Panther

Edwin Evans-Thirlwell — Thu, 06 Mar 2025 13:18:55 +0000

Marvel 1943: Rise Of Hydra might release at Christmas according to Khary Payton, who voices the Black Panther in the upcoming World War 2-set action game. It's the first morsel of release info we've garnered for Rise Of Hydra since its announcement last March, which tantalised with the prospect of playing USO Show-era Steve Rogers and Azzuri, great-grandfather to the current Black Panther.

Amazon drops the outrageously fast WD Black SN850X 8TB NVMe SSD to its lowest price ever

Christian Wait — Thu, 06 Mar 2025 11:59:58 +0000

$511.78 (was $879.99)

Until Dawn Remake studio "effectively closed" following layoffs, says new report

Nic Reuben — Thu, 06 Mar 2025 11:05:10 +0000

Until Dawn Remake players are still sharing bug reports with UK developer Ballistic Moon, but there's apparently no one left to respond. “The studio has effectively closed now," one anonymous source told Insider Gaming.

An undisclosed number of layoffs were publicly announced last September, shortly before the Until Dawn remake's launch in October. According to IG's source, these amounted to "roughly 40 employees". "Around 20" developers were allegedly kept on for post-launch support until they themselves were laid off last December, leaving a handful of employees "at most" alongside studio founders. "There are no employees in public relations, marketing, or development left."

Steam fixes Monster Hunter Wilds video recording, updates note-taking feature I'd never heard of

Nic Reuben — Thu, 06 Mar 2025 09:28:21 +0000

We don't score reviews at Rock Paper Shotgun. Some might tell you this is because we view numeric scores as stifling oversimplifications of the wonderful, strange, and personal experiences videogames can offer, but it's really because the refurbished work keyboards we're assigned when hired all have their number keys gummed up with Marmite and none of us want to touch them.

Here's a 25-year-old demo for Big Brother, the 1984 video game sequel they never made

Edwin Evans-Thirlwell — Wed, 05 Mar 2025 16:18:38 +0000

It's been a lifetime since I read George Orwell's 1984 - a tale of mass surveillance, indoctrination and repression nowadays invoked to describe everything from Trump's Twitter ban to Pizza Express telling you that jelly-beans aren't a topping - but I will always remember how it combined role-playing with adventure gaming and brought the "detail of Riven into the real-time world of Quake". Oh, forgive me, I'm actually remembering Big Brother, a video game sequel to Orwell's book, which I have never played, because it never made it to shelves.

Online sleuths have just dug up and published an ancient E3 demo for this mysterious game. Here it be, and here be some footage for any unpersons concerned that downloading the files might get them shipped off to a joycamp by thinkpol.

GTA 5's free Enhanced PC update spoiled by missing in-game text chat, but it may only be temporary

Edwin Evans-Thirlwell — Wed, 05 Mar 2025 12:47:34 +0000

Grand Theft Auto 5 on PC has been updated with a new Enhanced version, bundling in a range of tune-ups such as ray-traced graphics and support for AMD FSR and NVIDIA DLSS, new features for GTA Online, and a heaping helping of swankmobiles for your fleet of GTA cars. Existing GTA 5 story mode and GTA Online progress will carry over, and it’s all free to people who own the old version of GTA 5, which is now known as the Legacy version on Steam.

Nvidia’s RTX 5070 Founders Editions will be a few weeks late, as punters and sellers brace for launch day shortages

James Archer — Wed, 05 Mar 2025 11:13:17 +0000

The GeForce RTX 5070 is out today, at least on paper. Yet despite having already slipped from its original February release plan, the RTX 5070 looks set to launch directly into the same stock shortage problems that have been causing frowny faces all around the rest of the RTX 50 series graphics cards – and, while you’ll still be able to try your luck with most of the GPU’s board partner variants, the one version you definitely won’t be buying today is Nvidia’s own Founders Edition.

Do you remember zombie apocalypse MMO Urban Dead? It's shutting down after nearly 20 years

Brendan Caldwell — Wed, 05 Mar 2025 11:01:12 +0000

A long-running zombie MMORPG you can play in your internet browser is shutting down next week, after almost 20 years of plank-smashing and supermarket looting. Urban Dead is closing down because a new UK law threatens hefty fines for online services (including games) that don't follow age restriction rules and other guidelines. It looks like making the game compliant with that law would be too much work for the solo web developer who's been keeping the apocalyptic servers going for this long.

The Way Of The Tray is a manic Ghibli-inspired waiter simulator

Nic Reuben — Wed, 05 Mar 2025 09:46:30 +0000

A healthy pinch of my motivation for writing about waiter simulation plate em' up The Way Of The Tray is so I can read your hospitality job horror stories in the comments, but I do love the energy here. It's a breathless, colourful (actual) plate-spinner that has you serve mythical dishes in the daily grind for tips from Yokai customers. You'll then invest those tips back into waiter skills and restaurant upgrades, or at least whatever petty cash is left over from paying rent.

In the midst of Civilization 7 UI woes, Firaxis hire prolific modder

Nic Reuben — Wed, 05 Mar 2025 09:33:36 +0000

Civilisation VII studio Firaxis have welcomed prolific modder Sukritact on board as a tech artist, announcing the news in the grand strategy game's Discord. Sukritact has a storied Steam workshop history of Civilisation VI mods dating back to 2017. These range from fully-animated wonders to rebalances, and their recent 'Sukritact's Simple UI Adjustments' has been going down well with Civ 7 players.

Here's an Animal Crossing hideout for your Assassin's Creed Shadows

Nic Reuben — Wed, 05 Mar 2025 09:29:58 +0000

A new blogvert for Assassin's Creed Shadows' hideout customisation appeared yesterday, just when you thought it was safe to play another open world game following the merciless time vacuum that was Like a Dragon: Infinite Wealth's Dondoko Island.

The hideout is an acre of "fully customisable" land for Naoe and Yasuke to visit for a breather. Once there, you can pop down buildings, shrubbery, animals, and decorations. The blog also specifies the placement of "mossy rocks". No other types though. Moss or piss off.

The scripts for Suikoden I & II HD Remaster are very different from the original RPGs

Nic Reuben — Wed, 05 Mar 2025 08:00:00 +0000

Suikoden I & II HD Remaster is out tomorrow. I'll have a review up soon, but I wanted to post some quick thoughts on the new translation.

“For the original games, the size of the dialogue box was quite small and there wasn’t a lot that we could fit in there," producer Yasuo Daikai told IGN back in 2022. "Japanese is a language that can say a lot in a very short amount of space, but for English and other languages, you need a lot of space to say the same thing usually. So in this game we have expanded the size of those dialogue boxes, and that has let us retool and work on the localization to get us more in tune with the Japanese script,"

Moadra is Metroid but you're the Predator

Edwin Evans-Thirlwell — Tue, 04 Mar 2025 18:44:07 +0000

Every now and then we publish a round-up of game or demo recommendations, and all you regular readers dutifully fill the comments with recommendations of your own. FOOLS. Our round-ups are, of course, a devious trap for your curiosity and connoisseurship, designed to save us the labour of discovering good games for ourselves. You know in Batman Forever when Jim Carrey uses Riddler TV to steal everybody's IQs? Well picture me doing that, except that I am not wearing tight green pyjamas (unless you want to picture me that way - no offence taken) and I am actually filling my skull with everything you ever knew about, in Moadra's case, manky Super Metroid clones.

Monolith's co-founder wants to reboot Condemned, but says "please have ZERO expectations"

Edwin Evans-Thirlwell — Tue, 04 Mar 2025 17:53:24 +0000

Monolith Productions co-founder Jace Hall has expressed a strong interest in remaking rancid horror game Condemned: Criminal Origins and its sequel, Condemned 2: Bloodshot. It's not entirely clear how he'd do this, given that Monolith no longer exists even as a brand name, following cuts at parent company Warner Bros Interactive Entertainment, and that Hall himself doesn't seem to be directly involved with game development or publishing these days. That said, he is the sole current owner of the Condemned intellectual property. So if a remake is going to happen, it'll need to happen through him.

Split Fiction review

Nic Reuben — Tue, 04 Mar 2025 16:51:16 +0000

Brendan: Hello, Nic.

Nic: Brendy! Why are you here, in my review? What is this, some kind of Split Fiction? Some kind of co-op adventure by Hazelight? Fine, since you're here: what's the best bit of Split Fiction, Brendy?

Brendan: We were escaping sci-fi gunships on the back of a stolen motorcycle. You must have felt cool steering us between missiles and gunfire. I could see none of that. I was too focused on clicking the "accept" box on a Terms and Conditions screen. Our ill-gotten bike's futuristic security had kicked in, you see, and it was my job to disable its self-destruct protocol by phone. You were driving fast and jumping between skyscrapers while I was wrestling with captcha after captcha to stop us from exploding. I laughed the whole time.

New Civilization 7 update adds a confusing Natural Wonder plus tweaks to the UI, AI and Age mechanics

Edwin Evans-Thirlwell — Tue, 04 Mar 2025 16:43:19 +0000

Sid Meier's Civilization VII has a new Sid Meier's game update that makes changes to Sid Meier's user interface, leader AI, Age mechanics, Mementos and naval unit handling. Developers Firaxis have also stirred in a free bonus Natural Wonder, Sid Meier's Bermuda Triangle.

Leaving aside for the moment the on-going arguments about whether (Sid Meier's - OK, enough of that now) Civilization 7 is an unambiguous low point for the series, or yet another flawed 4X strategy sim that will find its feet via post-launch updates, I love the idea of a Bermuda Triangle just popping up in my simulation, like a black hole spawning in my fridge. I hope it works as in legends about the real-life Bermuda Triangle (or in the previous Civilization 6), with whole armies and fleets getting swallowed up in transit and/or scattered across the globe at random.

Fantasy beat 'em up Absolum brings a roguelike's rinse and repeat formula to the arcade brawler

Brendan Caldwell — Tue, 04 Mar 2025 16:00:00 +0000

When you die in Absolum, you are literally reborn from the glowing womb of a giant pregnant lady. This is not how beat 'em ups normally go. The newly announced left-to-right puncher from the developers of Streets Of Rage 4 plans to inject a bunch of roguelike fungus into the bulging musculature of the classic arcade brawler, then dress it in a big fantasy frog suit that's been handcrafted by a traditional animation studio. It's a tight squeeze, but having played an hour of a preview build, it certainly looks the part. Although I order you never to use the term "rogue 'em up" to describe it, an explosively upsetting term publisher Dotemu has cheekily tried to invent.

Being authorised to hunt in Monster Hunter Wilds is a kink

Edwin Evans-Thirlwell — Tue, 04 Mar 2025 15:52:28 +0000

A kink is a twist in a rope, an unconventional sexual or non-sexual practice, a spasm, a bend that might interfere with smooth operation, an eccentricity, a source of pleasure and revulsion. A kink can be anything, as long as it's not the done thing. Monster Hunter Wilds, meanwhile, is a game in which you hunt monsters in the wilds. One of the story campaign's odder beats is that you must continually seek permission to slaughter the creatures (and turn them into weapons and gear) from the ostensibly conservation-minded Monster Hunting guild. Specifically, you'll need the blessing of your fresh-faced escort, Alma.

Studio known for anti-capitalist games shut down by their publisher just two weeks before their newest game comes out

Brendan Caldwell — Tue, 04 Mar 2025 11:46:45 +0000

The developers of workplace comedy Say No! More and anti-establishment roguelike Reignbreaker are closing down, and the news comes just two weeks before their final punky action game is due to come out. Studio Fizbin has been struck by ongoing cuts at their parent company Thunderful, they say, and despite pitching follow-up projects to work on after Reignbreaker's release, none of those will go ahead. Which means they'll be winding down at the exact moment you'd hope they'd be celebrating a payoff from years of work.

Sure, why not: here's a Monster Hunter Wilds mod to make your Palico very large

Nic Reuben — Tue, 04 Mar 2025 10:05:24 +0000

There comes a time in every cat owner's life where they must ask themselves: how large would this creature need to be before it attempted to bat me around like a catnip mouse? I suspect the answer is "only as large as it needed to be", so it's fortunate that Monster Hunter Wilds' Palicoes are apparently bred for helpfulness. Is installing a mod to the action game that makes them tall as humans a form of gene splicing? Don't worry, hunter. Gene splicing is how nature heals itself.

Our favourite demos from Steam Next Fest Winter 2025

RPS — Mon, 03 Mar 2025 16:06:35 +0000

Another Steam Next Fest is drawing to a close, having had to compete with Monster Hunter Wilds for PC-beholding eyeballs – yet losing none of its knack for highlighting interesting and offbeat games set for future release. A quick dangle of our indie demo astrolabe indicates we’re a few months off the next Next Fest, though at the time of posting, there are still a couple of precious hours to download and try out the best samplers that this wintery showcase has to offer. Here are our favourites from the past week, and if you’ve played something you think deserves some more attention, why not share it in the comments?

GTA 6 developers buy L.A. Noire director's studio, rename it Rockstar Australia

Edwin Evans-Thirlwell — Mon, 03 Mar 2025 15:33:13 +0000

GTA 6 developers Rockstar Games have announced the acquisition of Video Games Deluxe, the Sydney-based team who collaborated with them on the 2017 re-release of L.A. Noire, virtual reality spin-off L.A. Noire: The VR Case Files and, most recently, post-launch updates for Grove Street's Grand Theft Auto: The Trilogy - The Definitive Edition. The studio will now be known as (drum roll please) Rockstar Australia.

First Monster Hunter Wilds updates fix a progress-blocking bug, but not the dodgy PC performance

Edwin Evans-Thirlwell — Mon, 03 Mar 2025 12:01:33 +0000

Monster Hunter Wilds has been racking up the skulls, attracting well over a million simultaneous Steam players this weekend despite a mixed player reaction, with particular scorn reserved for its technical performance.

Now begins the process of patching the behemoth to address some player-reported problems with certain quests. Patching is sort of like slaughtering a Monster in reverse: sewing on horns and tails rather than chopping them off, re-embowelling the shackled form of the creature so that it can gallop across the plains, monstrous and free.

Space Marine 2 devs push back on calls for a difficulty mode above Absolute - "we are almost at our limit"

Edwin Evans-Thirlwell — Mon, 03 Mar 2025 11:12:21 +0000

Warhammer 40,000: Space Marine 2 developers Saber Interactive are pushing back on player calls to add an even-harder difficulty mode, following the introduction of an Absolute difficulty setting this spring via game update.

Apparently, some of you muscleheads have been finding Absolute "a bit easy", or at least, not enough of a shake-up from the preceding Lethal difficulty. Saber are open to suggestions, here, but game director Dmitriy Grigorenko also reckons that "we are almost at our limit in terms of how we can make the game harder without making it unfair and not fun".

The Maw: what's new in PC games this week?

Edwin Evans-Thirlwell — Mon, 03 Mar 2025 09:32:32 +0000

Good morrow to ye, stranger! This week's new PC game round-up is jam-packed indeed - absolutely sardine-canned. So let's skip the customary preamble about the Maw's digestive habits and proceed directly to the banqueting table.

I finally found a reasonably priced RTX 5080 pre-built gaming PC: Alienware Aura R16 for under $2400

Christian Wait — Mon, 03 Mar 2025 09:32:21 +0000

If you’ve been trying to buy an RTX 5080, you already know it’s nearly impossible to find. Nvidia’s new GPU has been selling out instantly, with standalone cards unavailable or listed at outrageous resale prices. That’s why this deal from Dell is worth a look. The Alienware Aurora R16 gaming PC includes an RTX 5080 for just $2,399.99 right now.

Zachtronics designers return with a new puzzler set in 1980s Tokyo

Brendan Caldwell — Mon, 03 Mar 2025 09:10:32 +0000

Lubricate your brain with some pure Omega-3 oils, a new puzzle game from the makers of Opus Magnum and Eliza has been announced. Kaizen: A Factory Story will be an "open-ended puzzle automation game from the original Zachtronics team, set in 1980s Japan" in which you'll build toy robots, computers, TVs, and... katsu curry? Well, why not. Although the studio behind this engineer 'em up is technically new, the main designers - Zach Barth and Matthew Seiji Burns - are the same folks who brought you Exapunks, TIS-100, and Shenzhen I/O. This, my friends, is very good news.

What's on your bookshelf?: The Norwood Suite and Betrayal At Club Low's Cosmo D

Nic Reuben — Sun, 02 Mar 2025 16:00:00 +0000

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! "Nic, you selfless paragon. You champion of the people. You prince among men. I can't believe you put your favourite column on pause for several weeks to let me finish my book!". Please. I'm sure you would have done the same, were you also a dashing genius with a moustache powerful enough to crack the pyramids.

To ring in the resurrection with style, it's The Norwood Suite, Betrayal At Club Low, and Moves Of The Diamond Hand's Cosmo D! Cheers Cosmo! Mind if we have a nose at your bookshelf?

The Sunday Papers

Graham Smith — Sun, 02 Mar 2025 11:00:00 +0000

Sundays are for asking for forgiveness, since I missed Sunday Papers entirely last weekend. Alas, I was stricken by a deep malaise, but I return now with renewed vigour and another roundup of links to good writing from across the web. Some of the good writing is even about games this time.

For the LA Review Of Books, Celine Nguyen reviewed Building SimCity, Chaim Gingold's book about the creation of SimCity.

What are we all playing this weekend?

Ollie Toms — Sat, 01 Mar 2025 08:00:00 +0000

Thank you all for your wonderful soundtrack suggestions earlier this week! I'll be gleefully ploughing my way through them over the coming workdays. But now isn't the time for that! Weekends are for the playing, not the listening of the playing!

Here's what we're all clicking on this weekend.

IGN Live is coming back this June for a multi-day event and livestream

Graham Smith — Fri, 28 Feb 2025 20:45:00 +0000

RPS's corporate daddy has announced that IGN Live is returning this June. The in-person event aims to fill the void left by E3, with playable demos in LA and livestreams of game reveals and panels for those who can't attend.

Islanders: New Shores is the follow-up to 2019's gentlest town-builder

Edwin Evans-Thirlwell — Fri, 28 Feb 2025 20:00:00 +0000

Coatsink have announced a sequel to Islanders, their pastelcore seaside town-arranger, which was the last game Alec Meer ever reviewed for RPS. Until he reviewed Kentucky Route Zero: Act V, a year or so later. If I didn't know better, I'd say Alec had planned that deliberately to screw me up. But I'll forgive him because the KRZ review is very good and thoughtful, and also because the first trailer for Islanders: New Shores is extremely calming. Here you go.

You'll need to pay to edit your Monster Hunter Wilds character beyond the first free redo

Edwin Evans-Thirlwell — Fri, 28 Feb 2025 17:03:20 +0000

How long do you tend to spend creating a character in a video game? The correct answer is three hours. Four hours if it's a Bethesda game, because creating a character in a Bethesda game is like rewinding the Raiders Of The Lost Ark face-melting scene while shooting at your TV with Homer Simpson's Make-Up Gun. It takes patience to extract beauty or even just plain inoffensiveness from the Creation Engine's sticky coils.

Hang on, why am I being mean to Bethesda? I should be directing my snide remarks at Capcom. It turns out the scalliwags want you to pay a small fee to edit your Monster Hunter Wilds character's voice, face and body structure more than once - so if you're buying today, you might want to spend a few more hours perfecting that Hunter physique at start-up.

How do you turn an ant nest into a factory? A chat with the makers of Microtopia

Edwin Evans-Thirlwell — Fri, 28 Feb 2025 16:35:25 +0000

Last weekend, as Monster Hunter Wilds bore down on us like a stampeding wildebeest, my eye was caught by furtive movements in the leaves underfoot. Behold the creepy extravagance of Microtopia, a strange and engrossing factory builder in which your factories are run by cyborg ants.

Created by Netherlands-based Cordyceps Collective, it gives you landscapes of buglike diodes scuttling about on pin connectors, harvesting bolts and other scrap for a queen who resembles a pregnant clump of capacitors. Insect strategy games are startlingly abundant right now, but Microtopia goes a little further than many both in its eerie Darwinian presentation, and in trying to portray how ant colonies "think" while meeting expectations for management sims.

Total War: Warhammer 3's rework of the Kislev faction looks promising, as do Cathay's grenadiers

Nic Reuben — Fri, 28 Feb 2025 16:21:48 +0000

Playing Total War: Warhammer 3's Kislev campaign on release was one of the best storified strategy game times I've had in years, launch issues be thrice-damned, triple cooked, and three times a lady. But the Slavic bulwark against stinky, angry, tricksy and horny invaders has lost some lustre since. The details in Creative Assembly's latest blog are still a work in progress, but give a solid idea of how Kislev as a faction are changing in a patch due mid-March.

The AMD Radeon RX 9070 series prices look good, assuming they hold

James Archer — Fri, 28 Feb 2025 16:18:03 +0000

AMD have finally confirmed pricing, dating, and specs-ing for their first RDNA 4 graphics cards. The Radeon RX 9070 and RX 9070 XT will be out on March 6th, and start from $549 and $599 respectively. While these are still relatively fat stacks o' cash, AMD say they’ll compete with Nvidia’s RTX 5070 and RTX 5070 Ti – and considering the latter is supposed to start at $749, with most models currently going for above $800, that could make for a tasty undercutting.

Monster Hunter Wilds’ listless performance and frame gen misuse plant an oversized axe in the carapace of good PC tech

James Archer — Fri, 28 Feb 2025 14:26:24 +0000

In hindsight, we probably should have taken Monster Hunter Wilds’ earlier benchmark tool release as more of a warning. The actual game is every bit the graphics card torture device that standalone tool suggested it might be, and while it doesn’t make DLSS 3/FSR 3 frame generation mandatory per se, it clearly intends to misappropriate these features, forcing them to act as performance crutches they were never designed as.

What makes this particularly headshakey is that Wilds’ PC version is, initially, quite sympathetic to the format: besides a full set of DLSS/FSR/XeSS upscalers, an unlocked framerate option, Nvidia Reflex support and the like, its thirty-odd individual quality options hint at the finest of fine-tuning possibilities. Yet these, too, aren’t really fit for purpose, with only minor differences in how the highest and lowest settings perform.

Look, 4 new games that are NOT Monster Hunter Wilds

Brendan Caldwell — Fri, 28 Feb 2025 11:48:43 +0000

The dust on the yesterday's horizon has become today's stampede. Monster Hunter Wilds has launched and we are all choking on up-kicked sand. So far the action game has hit a peak of 987,000 players on Steam and all my news feeds are nothing but Rathalos screams. This is what we call a "big 'un".

But what trembling critters are eking out an existence in the disturbed ground beneath Capcom's feet? Other games still exist, and some are just unlucky enough to step out of their bolthole the same moment a much scarier freak is on the prowl. Here are 4 games that just released which may be worth a look if you have no time for big beasties.