The enigmatic system of Outer Wilds is packed with scary things you wouldn’t want running around in real life: spine-tingling cosmic anglerfish, endless time loops, and a bunch of existential dread. (Oh, wait a minute.) Although, the spacefaring adventure has at least one tool that would be handy in everyday situations: the translator. One Redditor has thankfully recreated a functional version of the translator and this clip shows the delightfully faithful tool.
]]>Last time, you decided that ground pound attacks are better than reloads dumping unspent ammo. 60% against 40%, that one, which is a satisfying outcome. Chunky disagreement but a clear outcome. This week, I ask you to think carefully about two quite different cycles, one repeating and one resuming. What's better: time loops, or resuming interrupted reloads?
]]>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.
]]>If you prefer Earth be but a blue marble alone in the void, two of the latest Game Pass additions might tickle your spacefancy. Microsoft's subscription service today adds BioWare's remastered Mass Effect Legendary Edition trilogy as well as the beautiful clockwork mystery Outer Wilds, which was our favourite game of 2019. The cooperative and chaotic first-person firefighting game Embr hit Game Pass today too but that has, like, gravity? So passé.
]]>Echoes Of The Eye, the new expansion for Outer Wilds, is out... now! And I’d like to congratulate Mobius Digital and Annapurna on just how little promoting their promotional campaign did. The reveal trailer did anything but, showing us the familiar solar system of Outer Wilds, only with the beginning of an eclipse followed by shots of murky caves and forests. And take a look at the official screenshots used in this article: obscured to the point of ugliness. Here’s a team so determined to keep their secrets they’d rather present the game in an unflattering light. It was worth it.
]]>So, the main point of discussion on this week's podcast is the Outer Wilds: Echoes Of The Eye DLC. Talking about it is tricky, because saying pretty much anything about it feels spoiler-y. Christ, I'm trying to be careful writing this blurb in case I say something that I shouldn't. But, somehow, I think we managed to talk about it, without talking about it. Know what I mean?
]]>Annapurna really stretched the limits of notE3 by putting on their inaugural showcase so late in the day, but I’m glad they did. They showed off a lot of cool things, like Neon White and Stray. We even got the briefest of looks at the upcoming Outer Wilds DLC.
]]>Mobius Digital's excellent space exploration game Outer Wilds is getting an expansion. Announced during Annapurna Interactive's NotE3 showcase, Echoes Of The Eye is set to release on September 28th. While the devs say it will be involved in the game's existing narrative, they're keeping quiet on what exactly we'll be getting up to. But, judging from the name, it likely has something to do with Eye Of The Universe, a mysterious object in the solar system that you spend most of your time in Outer Wilds trying to reach.
]]>The sun has fallen into darkness as Annapurna Interactive and Mobius drop their Outer Wilds: Echoes Of The Eye DLC Trailer. Coming to Steam and the Epic Games Store on 28 September 2021.
]]>Tonight, Annapurna Interactive held their very first E3-like showcase, showing off loads of games they're publishing over the next year or so, as well as revealing new developers they're working with. We saw new gameplay for Stray, Neon White, Skin Deep, and a very special announcement from Outer Wilds developers Mobius Digital about a cryptic new expansion.
If you missed the stream, read on, because we've made a big list of everything that happened at the Annapurna Interactive Showcase.
]]>I've been thinking a lot about video game recommendations recently. Specifically, things like, "What game would you recommend to someone who's never played a video game before?" and, "What kind of games would you recommend to people who read a lot but don't necessarily play games very much?" My answer to both questions would probably be What Remains Of Edith Finch in the first instance, mostly because it has a really good story and its controls aren't too intimidating. But this week I realised I rarely think about the inverse of that last question: "What books would you recommend to people who play lots of video games but don't have much time for reading?"
Happily, I now have two solid answers, and they both come from the highly talented Stuart Turton: "The Seven Deaths Of Evelyn Hardcastle" for fans of Outer Wilds, The Sexy Brutale and Agatha Christie-style murder mysteries, and The Devil In The Dark Water for The Return Of The Obra Dinn likers.
]]>I don't need to remind you how good Outer Wilds was. Two years ago, everyone was raving about the 22-minute time loop. The most incredible video games website in the world even declared it the bestest best game of the year.
]]>It looks like the time-looping space exploration game Outer Wilds might be getting a DLC, because something named Outer Wilds - Echoes Of The Eye has popped up in Steam's records. This little leak was circulated on Twitter last night, and rather than simply ignoring the rumour, the game's publisher Annapurna Interactive shared the tweet and added a cheeky eye emoji. It's not exactly a confirmation that a DLC is happening, but it's certainly not a denial either.
]]>Happy Star Wars: Squadrons day, internet. I have nothing to offer but the sneer of a veteran Elite Dangerous pilot. A disdainful scoff as you vroomify your engines in the docking bay, click-clacking your flight checks in the seat of some dusty Y-wing, some classless X-Wing, some bogus B-wing. Who do you think you are? Sitting there in the pilot’s seat of that garish tin can. Only an exponent of the foulest incorrectitudes would indulge a shipyard with all the basic-ass nomenclature of an episode of Sesame Street. Here, you fripperist, you child, gaze upon the true list of the 9 best spaceships in games.
]]>For the past two years, I have confused the name Outer Wilds with The Outer Worlds. I will say one space game's name when I mean the other. I will expand one name into 'The Outer Wilds' and trim the other to 'Outer Worlds'. I will trip and combined the two into 'Outer Woilds'. I hate this. AND NOW, Outer Wilds writer Kelsey Beachum has declared she wrote for the newly-announced The Outer Worlds DLC, Peril On Gorgon. This is too much.
]]>The celestial bodies have spoken. Outer Wilds' interstellar time-loop has reset once more - and this time, Epic exclusivity has been removed from the galactic equation. After making the announcement back in March, Mobius Digital's clockwork solar system arrived on Steam today - leaving you with no excuse for not picking up the RPS crew's favourite folksy space romp.
]]>Over here in PC land we normally wouldn't get to write about Nintendo's cutesy island life sim, Animal Crossing, but I've found a wonderful reason to bring it before your eyes today. Animal Crossing: New Horizons lets you design all manner of lovely clothing items and pictures for you to display somewhere in your town, and players have been using it to create outfits inspired by PC games like Sea Of Thieves, Sayonara Wild Hearts and, of course, Doom: Eternal.
]]>Hey, you, have you been sleeping on our favourite game of last year because you didn't want to shop at the Epic Games Store? Friendo, you can now set a date for your adventure into Outer Wilds: June 18th. That's the Steam release date for the fascinating sci-fi puzzle sandbox, publishers Annapurna announced today. Outer Wilds is a time-looping investigation into a solar system where the sun goes supernova every 22 minutes, a black hole lies at the heart of a planet, and all sorts of strange things are whizzing around. It's a special place.
]]>Video games are great at transporting us to different worlds, but none capture that feeling quite so perfectly as intergalactic space games - and 2023 looks set to be one of the biggest years for space games yet, with the launch of Starfield, Homeworld 3 and more all on the horizon. But what games have gone before them and staked their claim already on the dusty planet surface known as 'Best Space Games'? We reveal all below, with our carefully curated list of all the best space games you can play on PC right now. Whether you're a budding space cruiser captain, a wannabe space conqueror or an intrepid space-faring explorer, there's a space game for you.
]]>If it's not baroque, don't fix it. Little architecture joke for you there, just to kick off a dry topic with a giggle. You see, appreciating architecture is for people in beige cardigans. Folks who subscribe to magazines printed on paper so thick you can still calculate the tree’s age. You know the type I mean. Spectacled couples with non-Ikea coffee tables. Thirty-year-olds. People like you! Here are 11 examples of very satisfying architecture in PC games.
]]>2019 was a great year for PC games - aren't they all? - but you might not yet know what the very best PC games of 2019 were. Let us help you.
]]>And with that we are another year closer to the eagerly anticipated cooling of all matter. You may have read that the concept of weeks, months and years is the culmination of humanity’s collective understanding of a complicated astronomical pattern. It's an interesting take. However, the correct hypothesis was posited by your stoner housemate Jed from university. “Time is, like, a construct,” he said, with the deep wisdom and clarity only three tins of San Miguel can deliver. “The Chinese have a totally different calendar, y’know. Do you want to order takeaway?”
So let’s chronicle games about time, specifically those that prove the passing of years is nothing but a directionless tumble through the jelly-like substance of spacetime. Here are 9 games about time travel. But which of them would you undo?
]]>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.
]]>Brittle Hollow is a doomed planet. For a start, in about 22 minutes’ time, it’s going to be destroyed, along with the rest of Outer Wilds’ solar system. And also, up until that apocalypse, Brittle Hollow will also endure constant bombardment by meteors, which will smash away great crystalline chunks of its frigid surface, so that they fall away into the black hole at the planet’s centre.
“That place is ridiculous,” Outer Wilds creative director Alex Beachum tells me. “Brittle Hollow was the last place we finalised, for what are probably obvious reasons.” He and his team had to get an entire planet to fall apart, perhaps while players are standing on it, and perhaps if they’re tearing through space on the the other side of the system. Outer Wilds is a game in which epic-scale events happen on a minute-by-minute basis, and Brittle Hollow was its greatest test.
]]>I have been skittering around Outer Wilds like one of those birds who lives on a rhino's back and survives by eating rhino dandruff (I have watched both series of Planet Earth). I haven't been able to sit and play it in big sessions, but I've been picking at it and finding interesting morsels, making a bit more progress each time. I'd be making more progress if I didn't keep going back to the Dark Bramble.
Spoilers follow. You should play Outer Wilds first. You should play Outer Wilds anyway.
]]>Rural life is disgusting. All those shrubs and trees, how awful. You should pack your checkered pouch and head into the big smoke. The shining cities of videogameland are calling to you, and the team of the RPS podcast, the Electronic Wireless Show, will be there to help you get settled in to your disgusting, overpriced flat no matter which giant urban maze you choose. Trust us, life is so much better in the city.
Ignore the rats. You'll get used to them.
]]>Summer. The heat age. Scorch season. Spring's hangover. It's the mid-point of the year and you know what that means. No, not "mojito time", Geoff, put those away. It's time we told you what the best games of the year are so far. There are quite a lot of them. Just look how many videogames have escaped from their developers in the past six months and are now running amok through the blistering streets, getting stuck in the melting tarmac, like ants in jam. It's unsanitary. So allow us to round up these unruly games and trap them in a handy list. Here are our favourite sword swingers and space 'splorers so far this year (and a couple of DLCs for good measure).
Okay, Geoff, now bring the mojitos.
]]>Outer Wilds is an incredible game. Uncovering snippet after snippet of information that all feed together into a phenomenal story. Puzzling through an area that cleverly teaches you how to [redacted]. The feeling of stumbling into an area and realising it’s a [redacted] full of haunting messages left behind by [redacted]. Taking the time to sit back, roast marshmallows, and meditate with [redacted].
It’s also somewhat difficult to talk about without spoilers, and extremely worth going into unspoiled. So please, go and play it, and then come back and let me tell you about how I mostly spend the game delighting in being hurled into space.
]]>E3 is getting started this weekend, otherwise known as the Encredible Electricity Experience, or sometimes simply “Hellweek”. It’s a very busy and exciting time to be a videogame liker, but you might need some help. Allow the RPS podcast, the Electronic Wireless Show, to be your digital sherpa through this storm of fictional bullets and lightsabers. Let’s talk about what we’re looking forward to seeing, and the games that probably won’t appear (but that we wish would).
]]>After watching with an astronomer's practised, patient curiosity for over six years, Mobius Digital have finally launched their grand-yet-personal space adventure, Outer Wilds. Judging by the excited warbling I hear from the RPS treehouse and beyond, it's rather special. A grand but short space adventure (extended by time-loops), set in and around a series of tiny but detailed worlds full of strange and likeable people and puzzles to solve. Below, RPS video lad Matthew Castle shares his thoughts on the game. Plus, thanks to Epic's big sale, the game is half price until June 13th.
]]>What’s that on the horizon? It’s glowing, and it’s emanating a faint noise. Like three people talking about videogames on some sort of audio record. Hoist the sails, listeners, we’re going over there on a voyage of discovery. And if this turns out to be another damn Electronic Wireless Show about sport you are entirely at liberty to mutiny. Heave!
]]>For a story about everyone dying, Outer Wilds is full of enthusiasm and hope. You’re a space pilot sitting by a campfire next to your spaceship, and you have 20 minutes to explore the solar system, before the sun explodes in a white-hot ball. But with that supernova you are reborn into a seemingly endless cycle. You are sent back in time to the campfire, for another 20 minutes of exploring, then another and another. It’s Groundhog Day in an astronaut’s suit. But it is also a learning game, generous of spirit, playful and encouraging. It taps into all those Carl Saganisms that make us look at the night sky and nod enthusiastically at the Big Dipper. Overflowing with a toyish love of astronomy and physics, it jettisons stuffy formulae for adventures on dangerous planets full of sand, and one-way trips to icy comets hurtling around the sun. We don’t do star ratings on RPS, but if we did I’d give Outer Wilds a small galaxy.
]]>Outer Wilds - not to be confused with The Outer Worlds - finally has a release date after yonks in development. Mobius Digital say it's landing next Thursday, May 30th. I'm a bit excited for this one, as I've had an eye on it ever since its early days as a short, free proof-of-concept demo in 2013. It's your first day as a low-budget space explorer, but it'll be a long one as it's also the day your miniature-scale solar system collapses and gets sucked through a time warp. So it's off repeatedly planet-hopping in your janky little spacecraft, in search of a way to break the cycle. See the launch trailer below.
]]>My spaceship has taken off. This ought to be cause for celebration, a moment that engenders cheers from mission control. Except there's a problem: I’m not in the cockpit. I’d been looking at the ship’s log in the back and considering my next journey when suddenly the whole ship just rose up. “Oh no,” I say, as the sensation of free fall kicks in. “No no no no no.” I run back to the cockpit and look around. The ground outside is still there, the trees and the grass. This is odd, because it’s also pitch black - we’re definitely in space. This is when I realise: My ship didn’t take off. The entire island did.
This is space exploration game Outer Wilds. And I have no time to understand how the whole island on which I've parked has been launched into space, because it’s already falling back down. I need to take off, right now.
]]>During this year’s E3, I saw the largest screen I’d ever witnessed, folded around the corner of a building like a giant piece of glowing paper. It told me to buy Nike. LA is already the neon futuretown of California, never mind Night City. But I didn’t just see ads for shoes at the LA convention centre, I saw a lot of games too. From the bustling streets of Cyberpunk 2077 to the twisting tornadoes of Just Cause 4. From the crumbling Capitol of The Division 2 to the clumsy motorcycling of Trials Rising. Here are my highlights from the game industry’s annual festival of bullets and colour, the sci-fi dystopia that was with us all along.
]]>Do you remember Outer Wilds? If you've forgotten, that's understandable - the last time we saw anything concrete about this miniature-scale game of space exploration in a solar system mere minutes from destruction, it was three full years ago.
Between now and then, all we've seen was a brief confirmation that the game (which first surfaced as a prototype demo in 2013) was officially in full-time development, followed by a whole lot of radio silence. We were starting to worry if the game hadn't gotten lost out there, but it's back on our radars now with a release window and a flashy new trailer.
]]>I've just checked and we first posted about Outer Wilds [official site], a lovely space exploration game created by Alex Beachum, about two years ago. Since then it's gone on to catch the eye of many others, including the 2015 IGF judges where it scooped the Excellence in Design prize. Returning to the site to see how Outer Wilds was faring I see that it's now being worked on full-time. Hurrah!
]]>After catching up with the 2015 IGF winners news I spent my lunchtime playing the downloadable build of Outer Wilds from the official website. It's the alpha build so I'm not sure how it would measure up to a current build but it's been one of those lovely unexpected discoveries and almost made me forget my sandwich.
]]>Winners have won, partiers have partied, and another year's Independent Game Festival awards are done. It was a less predictable list of finalists this year than in recent times, and in turn the winners weren't ones you could spot a mile off or who'd already won in years past. I'm happy about that, though it does leave me in the mildly awkward situation of not having played most of the winners yet.
Sci-fi exploration title Outer Wilds (which we've only ever mentioned here, more fool us) proved to be the festival darling of 2015, taking home both the Grand Prize and the Excellence In Design award. while This War Of Mine also wandered off with a gong. The full list is below, you'll be unsurprised to hear.
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