Whether you like to visit space, indulge in an RPGs or a grand adventure, get spooked by horror or get uber techy with hacking, the chances are that there's also a puzzle game for you - hence our list of the best puzzle games on PC. The queen genre straddles many others, so our list of the 25 best puzzle games has all that we just mentioned and more. Take a look to find a new favourite puzzle game today.
]]>I'm not a very big enjoyer of horror games. On the very rare occasion that I do boot up a horror game, a chemical change seems to occur in my body. The part of my brain responsible for going "holy mother of hell get me away from this scary thing" is dampened. I expect to be scared, and therefore I'm more resilient to said scariness. I might just not be very good at getting into the horror games mindset. My brain is too busy battening down all the hatches and readying the engines of war against the oncoming spookies and ghosties.
The times I've been most scared playing a game are when I don't expect to be scared. And what better way to lull myself into a false sense of security this Halloween than to play an otherwise not-so-scary game, with just one particularly horror-esque moment?
]]>As per usual, I'm here to tell you about a new quart of game juice being loaded into the Game Pass tube. As per usual, I'm going to frame these games as alternately new indie games with potential and mid-tier blockbusters you (probably) never got around to. What's different this time is that there's also an all-time classic on the list.
]]>In the giant jumbled word cloud of all my qualities and traits, I'm willing to bet that "pluviophile" would be one of the biggest words. I adore rain. Whenever it starts, I tend to drop whatever I'm doing - work, dishes, significant other - and I'll be out frolicking in the downpour before they've hit the floor.
Because I love rain so much, I hold games to an almost unfair standard when it comes to the simulation of precipitation. How in the world can a videogame come close to emulating that wonderful, transcendental feeling of being outside in the middle of a thunderstorm? The answer is, it can't. Games have to rely on other things, like textures, sounds, and clever little animations to really sell the idea of being out amongst the H₂s and the Os.
The time has come, fellow pluviophiles. It's time to grade the very best rain that PC gaming has to offer. Below you'll find our eight worthy contenders. Each has been chosen for their spectacular rendition of one of nature's greatest phenomena. Each one shall be marked according to my patented and cutting-edge WIPERS grading system for digital rain. So drop what you're doing. It's time to frolick. No umbrella required.
]]>Is there anything scarier than buying products at below the recommended retail price? Almost certainly, which is why I'd hesitate to call the Epic Games Store Halloween Sale particularly spooky. It is, however, taking a massive knife to game prices across the platform, with some pretty hefty discounts of up to 80% going on a number of range of fantastic games until the sale wraps on November 3rd.
]]>The biggest names in platforming used to live only on console, but it's on PC now that the genre is thriving. Indies have taken the simple ingredients and spun them off in umpteen directions (but still normally from left to right). Below you'll find a collection of the very best platform games on PC - including puzzle platformers, physics platformers, platformers with roguelike elements, and platformers about absolutely nothing but pixel-perfect jumping.
]]>"Inside does insert some big ideas into its slender and sinister frame, but that's not why I loved it – it's the execution of the big, broad, b-movie elements that I adored," our former Adam (RPS in peace) said when we called Inside one of 2016's best games.
"It's a tricky platform game, with a beautifully melancholy story, and enough creativity on show to give me strength even when the going got so tough I almost lost hope," Adam (again) said in our Celeste review in 2018.
Good pair of platformers, those, and quite different. Good news too: both are currently free for keepsies on the Epic Games Store.
]]>I’ve been playing the endless Assassin's Creed Origins, a game so gargantuan that the time on my save file lasts longer than Ancient Egyptian civilization did. This is a revenge mission stripped of all urgency by the simple fact of being five million hours long. Whatever big bad awaits at the end can rest easy knowing there are 800 fortresses to clear out before I reach him. Fearing a loss of sanity, I needed to remind myself of what progress actually felt like, so here are ten games you can see from start to finish in a more reasonable three hours.
]]>Playdead is working on their follow-up to the bleak puzzle nightmare Inside, and while the wait will certainly be worth our time, the desire to know terrible delights are coming our way is certainly eating away at us. The team has released two images so far, giving us a glimpse at a snowy world that doesn't have our best interests in mind. Also, maybe we're not a little boy this time? Playdead is stepping way outside their comfort zone on this one.
]]>Don't tell John, but Playdead's adventur-o-puzzle Inside, with its abyss-black humour and boundlessly wicked imagination, is quietly one of my favourite games of the past few years. So much so that I seriously flirted with the idea of ordering its $375 special edition, before remembering the physical possessions are a burden, unless of course they're plastic robots. Much has been made of the fact that Playdead have partnered with Realdoll, purveyors of high-priced, dead-eyed, cold-fleshed silicon sex puppets, for the so-far mysterious contents of the box.
I'm going to go out on a limb and guess that no orifices are involved - but an awful lot of, well, limbs are.
]]>Have You Played? is an endless stream of game retrospectives. One a day, every day, perhaps for all time.
Inside [official site] is a masterpiece.
]]>What sound drips forth from the audio tubes? It's just the latest RPS podcast, the Electronic Wireless Show. Our topic this week is: "which TV show deserves a good videogame adaptation?" Maybe you feel Gordon Ramsay's Kitchen Whatever could make a good survival game? Or perhaps The Handmaid's Tale could be a great FPS? Probably not. Graham is convinced that road trip anime Kino's Journey is a contender, while I'm yearning for a good The Wire or Wolf Hall game full of intrigue and politicking.
Meanwhile, Graham caught up with the sad boy brigade and played Limbo follow-up Inside, while I've been hunkering down in the top-down persistent multiplayer war of Foxhole. It's just us two this week because Adam is gone and Pip has been possessed by a flu demon that makes her voice sound like it's trapped in hell.
]]>In development for quite a while, Black The Fall [official site] meandered through Early Access (then removed), Kickstarter, and Square Enix's Collective indie publishing label. And today it's finally out. But can it survive its inevitable comparisons to Limbo and Inside? Here's wot I think:
]]>This is The Mechanic, where Alex Wiltshire invites developers to discuss the inner workings of their games. This time, Inside [official site].
Playdead don’t design games in the same way that other studios do. They’re the result of a process where nothing is written down. There’s no script and no design document. No member of the team owns any aspect of what they make and what will go into the final game. Everything is up for change.
From that creative anarchy rose Inside, a game of the leanest pacing and most intricate staging, and entirely wordless. Story and play are entirely communicated through its meticulously constructed environments, which spin subtle mystery and challenge with spare details - a chainlink fence, a hanging rope - created through five years of constant iteration.
This is how they were made.
]]>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.
]]>Eerie puzzle platformer Inside [official site] has nabbed four awards as the winners of this year’s videogame BAFTAs were announced at the annual ceremony in London. Firewatch and Overcooked were also lathered with attention, winning two awards each. But some skinny bum in a dirty shirt called ‘Nathan’ took home the Best Game award for something called Uncharted 4, which is, like, probably not even that cool, chuh.
]]>Although the Britain of tomorrow will be merely the county of Kent surrounded by 100-foot high razor wire, I am confident that the BAFTAs will endure forever. Long-established and highly coveted by the black tie crowd, they're one of those award shows which tend to reward the already successful, which can make them rather safe and predictable. Still, bar a deluge for PS4 system-seller Uncharted 4, this year's crop of nominations isn't quite as staid as it might have been.
The darkly delicious platform adventure Inside [official site] is the PC title that scores the most winks. I can get behind that (though John very much would not), but it's good to see the likes of ABZU, Stardew Valley, EVE Online and Hitman nominated, alongside the more predictable likes of Dishonored 2, Firewatch and Overwatch. Mind you, I think pretty much every game that pierced public consciousness last year has some kind of nod here.
]]>Playdead, the Danish studio behind grimdark puzzle-platformers Limbo and Inside, have shared a sneaky image from their next game. It seems to show a pilot or spaceman wearing a deployed parachute watching a fiery crash and, well, I won't assumptively declare the game will following the Limside model but with a picture like that I could certainly believe it.
]]>And so this cosmic dance begins anew. The finalists for the Independent Games Festival awards 2017 have been announced. Out of 650 games examined by the giant gang of 340 judges, a final 30 have been selected for a bunch of categories. There’s plenty of familiar names among them, including Inside, Stardew Valley, Virginia, Hyper Light Drifter and Event[0]. But also some other boyos worth giving some attention. Come on over here and let’s take a look at them all.
]]>What is the best dystopia of 2016, the official year of the dystopia? The RPS Advent Calendar highlights our favourite games of the year, daily, and behind today's door is...
]]>A demo of Playdead's grimpretty puzzle-platformer Inside [official site] is now out. Given that John found their follow-up to Limbo a bit empty but Pip adored its animation and Alec enjoyed its dark comedy, you may have been waiting for the official centralised verdict of the RPS Advent Calendar. Our word is, of course, law but I suppose it's fine if you start forming your own opinions as a warm-up for the forthcoming judgment. Oh, and if you'd been holding out for a DRM-free release, you'll be glad to hear it now has one.
]]>Aside from starting a new tradition of unusually-named Steam Awards, Valve have also pulled out their worn and adored bargain bucket and have begun to fill it with games you’ll enthusiastically buy and probably never play. Yes, it's their Autumn Sale. In the streets, the apocalyptic jockeying for TVs and blenders has started. The moon has turned blood red. And I looked and behold a pale horse, and his name that sat on him was Black Friday, and sales followed with him.
]]>Sounds and music for Inside [official site] were recorded through a real human skull.
Vibrations rattled the skull so much that its teeth fell out.
No one's saying whose skull it is/was.
]]>Phew, finally we get some new names in the Steam top 10 (previous weeks here'n'that), after the chokehold of the Steam Summer Sale is loosened. I did not expect that number 1, but I really did not expect that number 10.
]]>There's been a lot of talk about INSIDE's [official site] beauty and poignancy, and I don't disagree with any of that, but my own appreciation of it was for another reason. I thought it was bloody funny, in the malevolent manner of Evil Dead 2 or Braindead. Inside is a horror videogame, yes, but it's also an extremely cheeky videogame. N.B. here be FULL SPOILERS.
]]>I finished Inside [official site] recently and then started reading about it to see what other people had to say. One of the things they had to say was a discussion of a secret ending which I then resolved to seek out - here's how that went and how you can do it too...
]]>I've just finished Inside [official site] - I really enjoyed it. It's a kind of macabre vignette with a lot of shared DNA from Playdead's previous game, Limbo. It also reminded me of the few minutes I played of Black The Fall at a previous Rezzed in terms of dystopian setting, palette and some of the control mechanisms so I'll be curious to see where they differ when that game is released. BUT while playing, the thing about Inside I kept coming back to/being distracted by/being entranced by was the animations.
There were so many little touches, little looks, little variations in movement when it came to the main character that I wanted to make sure we flagged them up in a post with the help of gifs.
]]>Not much moving, not much shaking in last week's top ten best-sellers, as the after-effects of the Steam sale are still felt and, without many major new releases or breakout hits, there's that creeping sense of PC games in 2016 returning to business as usual. HERE COMETH THE BRANDS. We do get one new entry though, and it's a pretty one.
]]>I can't deny that I've heard some of the fuss being made about INSIDE's [official site] console release last week. I haven't read any reviews, knowing I was going to be reviewing this myself once PC code came in, but I couldn't help picking up that people were excited. So I was excited. I rather loved Limbo. I've been anticipating this. You can hear the but coming, can't you? Yeah, but, I don't love INSIDE. In fact, I'm not sure what there is about it for anyone to love. It feels like an empty, procedural, albeit often beautiful platform game with not a single original idea in its belt. Here's wot I think:
]]>Limbo [official site] is a gloomy platform game with giant spiders and sparks of electricity haunting the night. It led to my favourite RPS phrase, when John and Kieron shouted at each other about the game. That phrase is "Rick Dangerous for Goths". I'm on the fence when it comes to Limbo (being on the fence is a bit like being in Limbo) but I'd definitely recommend you try it for yourself. It's free on Steam today and tomorrow, to celebrate the upcoming release of the studio's follow-up, Inside.
]]>Darkly-darkly platformer Limbo split opinion around these parts when it was released back in 2010, with John loving it and Kieron thinking it was Rick Dangerous for goths. Maybe they were both right? Anyway, now PlayDead's long-awaited follow-up Inside [official site] is due to arrive imminently, and there's a new teasing teaser trailer below.
]]>Limbo was a darkly atmospheric platform game which, depending on who you ask, was either a playfully morbid exploratory adventure or cruelly-designed Rick Dangerous for Goths. (I didn't mind the trial and error). If you were a fan though, you might be excited to know that developers Playdead Games have announced their new game, Inside, and it seems to be similarly about putting a small child in desaturated peril.
Here's the morbid part: it's currently only confirmed for XBox.
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