How time flies, eh? We were so busy putting together The RPS 100 last month (including the first ever Reader Edition), that we clean ran out of time to do another RPS Time Capsule. But fear not! Our written repository of games we've deemed worthy of saving from the eternal hell bin of the future has returned, and this time it's a good 'un. The year is 2015, folks, and cor, has there ever been a better year for video games? Of course, with only 11 slots to fill in our RPS Time Capsule, it also means we're having to say goodbye to some real gems. Come and see what's transcended to the higher plane of Capsule existence.
]]>It's been an eventful decade for PC games, and it would be hard for you to summarise everything that's happened in the medium across the past ten years. Hard for you, but a day's work for us. Below you'll find our picks for the 50 greatest games released on PC across the past decade.
]]>Over the past several weeks I have sent a lot of interesting people who work in the games industry an email containing the following scenario:
"You enter a room. The door locks behind you. From a door opposite another you enters. This other you is a perfectly identical clone, created in the exact instant you entered the room, but as every second ticks by they are creating their own distinct personhood. The doors will unlock in 90 minutes. Nobody will ever know what happens in the room. What do you do? (assume the materials you need for whatever you want to do are in the room). Please show your working, if able."
]]>I don't really know what Sable is going to involve. I'm not sure I much care, so long as it looks and sounds like this.
]]>Have You Played? is an endless stream of game retrospectives. One a day, every day, perhaps for all time.
80 Days [official site] is a great travel game. I don’t mean it’s a good game about a journey (although it is that). I mean it’s excellent to play while on a journey of your own. On a plane, ferry, train, rickety bus. Observant folks might point out the absurdity of absorbing yourself in a tiny screen and its navy facsimile of wanderlust while the real world and its sights pass you by. Well played, observant people. But sometimes you look out the porthole and it’s just 100% precipitation. What then? Read a book? Nah, go to Siberia on a steampunk blimp.
]]>I am dad, hear me whinge. Too many games, not enough spare time, for all my non-work hours are spent kissing grazed knees, explaining why you cannot eat the food in that cupboard, constructing awful Lion King dioramas out of toilet roll tubes and being terrified that the next jump from the sofa to the armchair will go fatally wrong. I'm lucky in that my job to some extent involves playing games, so by and large if there's something I really want to check out I can find a way to, but I appreciate that there are many long-time, older or otherwise time-starved readers for whom RPS is a daily tease of wondrous things they cannot play.
Now, clearly I cannot magically truncate The Witcher 3 into three hours for you, but what I can do is suggest a few games from across the length and breadth of recent PC gaming that can either be completed within a few hours or dipped into now and again without being unduly punished because you've lost your muscle-memory.
]]>With 80 Days and Sorcery, Inkle have made some of our favourite games of recent years, but Heaven's Vault [official site] might just be their greatest achievement yet. It's early days, of course, but a half hour play session at GDC has already convinced me that this science fiction adventure is a very exciting thing indeed. It's a game about exploring the past, in the future, through archaeology and translation, and it has a remarkable sense of wonder.
]]>After travelling around the world in the fantastic 80 Days and to Fantasyland in Sorcery!, Inkle have announced their next game will go into space. Heaven's Vault [official site] will see an archaeologist and her robot buddy travelling the mysterious rivers which connect moons, trying to uncover their secrets. Meet people! Chat! Solve puzzles! Translate languages! Travel an open world! Experience consequences! It sounds pret-ty great. I've a nagging suspicion that working with existing stories and worlds has kept Inkle from reaching the huge and fawning audience they deserve, so maybe this here all-new tale will do it.
]]>Wowee, isn't this a nice little surprise to help us shake off the Tuesday Wednesday blues? The latest Humble Bundle - Humble Narrative Bundle - has kicked off and, as always, the first tier is in familiar "pay what you want" format, with Steam keys costing a minimum of $1. Thing is, this particular collection's premier platform features one-time RPS Game of the Month and FMV Game of 2015 Her Story, cyberpunk retro point-and-clicker Read Only Memories, and Nina Freeman's lovely semi-autobiographical adventure Cibele. Based on those alone this is probably my favourite bundle yet, but there's more.
Inkle Studios' Sorcery! [official site] has been one of the biggest surprises to hit the iPad in recent years, not simply converting the old Steve Jackson gamebooks like most companies working in the field would have done, but completely redesigning them for the modern era. Finally, they're on their way to PC - the first two very, very soon, the second two later this year. I had a chat with studio founders Jon Ingold and Joseph Humfrey about turning a very 80s series into a shockingly modern adventure.
]]>A new game from Inkle, the studio behind the delectable choose-your-own-adventure 80 Days [official site] (and the soon-to-be-on-PC Sorcery! series), was always going to be a reason to celebrate, but news that they're making their own world and characters from scratch this time is doubly so. 80 Days was at its best when it broke away from the well-known tale of Phileas Fogg in favour of alt-history noodling and charming, surprising characterisation.
They don't have a name for the new game yet, but they have shared a few more details, including that "after four years of adapting books - interactive and otherwise - into great, interactive reading experiences, we're looking to expand outwards a little."
]]>What is the best writing in a 2015 game? The RPS Advent Calendar highlights our favourite games from throughout the year, and behind today's door is...
]]>Inkle's 80 Days [official site] was one of my favourite games of 2014 and if it had been released on PC, I'd have spent hours and hours writing about it on this here site. Last week I was moving house, a task I always find daunting even though I've rarely settled in one place for longer than a year. I'd installed the newly released PC version of 80 Days before the move and while waiting for my new broadband installation, I've been free of internet distractions and so found myself loading up Fogg's adventures at 3am on a sleepless night.
]]>80 Days [official site] has finished its journey around mobile platforms and finally arrived at its ultimate destination, the PC. If you read our review earlier this week, you might know I like it.
Back in March, long in advance of the PC version's announcement or release, I met Inkle founders Jon Ingold and Joseph Humfrey alongside 80 Days writer Meg Jayanth. They told me about adapting the spirit of Jules Verne, their responsibility to be progressive, the importance of writing games with people and dialogue, how to make players trust that their choices matter, what Phileas Fogg has in common with James T. Kirk, and what Verne might have thought had he played the game.
]]>Videogames can take you on a thousand different adventures, but few offer the thrill of travel as 80 Days does. It's a story game adaptation of Around The World In 80 Days, and it's accordingly full of exciting, exotic locations to visit, with capers to pull, revolutions to incite and derring-do to perform at many of them. Yet it's in the quiet moments that it best captures the sensation of going on a journey. For me those moments were the mathematician I met, full of hope for the future of her home country, and the air pirate who kidnapped me in northern Europe but then entrusted me with delivering something personal to her. For you, they might be very different - but wherever you go, the appeal is the same. 80 Days is full of romance, and mystery, and intimacy, and a deep, abiding sense of melancholy, because it understands that what make journeys and adventures compelling isn't only the mutinies you lead, but the people you meet along the way. It is consequently the most human game I've ever played.
Here's Wot I Think.
]]>Alice has been away this past week, and so I'd imagine is presumably playing the game of "If I swim to the other side of this loch and run away, perhaps I'll not have to return to work on Monday." The rest of us however remain on dry land and I've gathered the team to ask them what they'll be playing this weekend. Leave your own response in the comments below.
]]>80 Days [official site] was a mobile game various RPS writers have snuck mentions of in around the place whenever they could, keen to write about it. Myself, mine were mostly reminders that I really should play 80 Days after all the wonderful things I've heard about Inkle's globetrotting adventure filled with beautiful words.
Well, now we can be loud and proud, as 80 Days is out on PC. Our version is rebuilt in Unity 5, with new cities to visit, new plotlines, and many thousands of new words.
]]>If 80 Days [official site] had been released on PC last year, when it came to iOS devices and later to Android, it would have been in my top three games of the year on this platform. It's a beautifully delivered piece of interactive fiction, with deliciously evocative visuals, that puts almost every other collection of words I pored over in 2014 to shame. Inkle deserve a place alongside Failbetter in the rankings of the great literary game studios, and now they're bringing 80 Days to PC and Mac, with 30 new cities and over 150,000 new words. It's out September 29th.
]]>Hello there, best keep your distance, for I am ill. Not just 'bit of a sniffle/put a bigger pullover on, you great ninny' ill, but 'noxious substances violently erupting from everywhere' ill. My daughter started going to nursery about three months ago, and has been bringing back a delightful cocktail of viruses and bacteria ever since - it's been a relentless assault on my immune system, and while I'm oddly proud of how long it stood against this microbial siege, it has now collapsed in gruesome style.
It's OK, I don't want your pity. Unless it's a special magical form of pity that renders me instantly able to eat again. I want to talk about games.
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