Hot (weeks) off the back of Sons Of The Forest and the Resident Evil 4 remake coming out, we're celebrating your bestest best, most favourite survival games this month. Your votes have been counted and tallied, and your accompanying words of praise and affection matched accordingly. But which game has survived to make it to the top of the pile? Come and find out as we count down your 25 favourite survival games of all time.
]]>Klei Entertainment, developers of indie hits Don't Starve and Oxygen Not Included have announced today that they've agreed for Tencent, the media conglomerate that's been doing quite a lot of buying, to purchase a majority stake in the company. Klei founders say that they will keep "full autonomy of creative and operations across all aspects of the studio".
]]>The last couple of years have been pretty good for management games, but only the select few have made the cut for our list of best management games you can play right now. If you're looking for something to sink into over the holidays, check out our picks below.
]]>There's never been a better time to get into survival games on PC, as the recent revival of the genre means Steam is now awash in some truly great games, both in early access and in full release. There are more arriving every year, too, which is why we've done the hard work for you and ranked the very best survival games to dive into today. Fair warning - there are some early access games on this list, which mean they might be a little janky early on. Give them the time they deserve, though, and you'll find they often blossom into some truly great games over subsequent updates. We've only included the very best and most complete-feeling survival games on this list, though, so you can rest assured that every game here will leave you hungry for more. It's by no means exhaustive, but it should give you a nice selection of wolf-taming, base-building, carrot-picking action to choose from.
]]>From our first years we know what it means to build. As babies we're given clacky wooden blocks and colourful Duplo bricks. We are architects long before we are capable eaters of raw carrot. If you're anything like the staff of RPS, you've not outgrown the habit of child-like town planning. Yes, building games often take a managerial approach (at least many on this list do), but a sense of play is always present. It's there when you draw out a road in Cities Skylines, just to watch it populate with toy-like traffic. When you brick up another hole in your mighty Stronghold to fend off enemy swordsmen. When you painstakingly dig a trench for water to flow in Timberborn, just like you did all those years ago on the beach, in an effort to stop the tide washing away your sandcastles. You'll find all these games and more on our list. So here you go: the best building games on PC.
]]>Science, the most difficult of the arts. We are trained from toddlerhood to respect and fear the products of scientific advancement, such as the selfie sticks or mechanical pencil. The unsurpassed boffins who create such devices are worthy of admiration. But there is one realm in which science is not such a gentle guardian of the people. That’s right, it’s videogames. In games, scientists are treacherous, evil, stupid, murderous or some genetic concoction of all the above. Here are the 9 worst scientists in PC games.
]]>Oxygen Not Included occupies a similar space to Factorio and Rimworld in my list of all-time favourite games. All three are marvellous and near-impenetrable management games, oozing with character and complexity. The key difference is that in Oxygen Not Included, it's guaranteed that you'll spend at least some of your time expunging whole pints of urine from your base before it can seep into your last remaining water reservoir.
There is no guarantee that you'll succeed.
]]>There have been a great many games like Minecraft over the past decade. Which is to be expected, because who wouldn't want to capitalise on the runaway mainstream success of the geometric giant, one of the best-selling video games of all time? Minecraft has many interesting facets about it beyond the block bashing mechanics, so we've compiled our list of the best games like it out there right now so you can scratch that familiar mining and crafting itch.
]]>Imagine a world without electricity. Horrible. What would we use to blend our smoothies? How would we know when uncle Derek hits the metal bit again in the Sunday game of Operation? Electricity has roughly one dozen uses, and yet it is in the realm of videogames when we see its most fantastical and offensive capabilities brought screaming to life. To celebrate the important role of sassy electrons in your otherwise mundane life of neutrons and - ugh - protons, here are the 8 most shocking uses of electricity in 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.
]]>Oxygen Not Included mods, it turns out, can tell you a lot about the game itself, and how phenomenal it already is. Most of the really good mods out there opt for the "making life better" route, rather than the "tonnes of new features" route like the mods of most other games. It's a testament to the brilliance of Klei and their endlessly enjoyable suffocation simulator.
But even so, I rarely play without the below Oxygen Not Included mods. This is a game I come back to time after time, and so I've spent years pouring over what new nuggets of excellence the modding community has brought out. These 12 mods are the very best ONI mods of all, and if you're looking to make your time micromanaging dupes so they don't drown in your water supply even more enjoyable, you've come to the right place!
]]>Oxygen Not Included is one of my very favourite games. And it's also just recently been released, which means a whole wave of bright-eyed players have just begun their own journey into this hilarious, beautiful, infernally complex suffocation simulator.
So, to all those players: this is the Oxygen Not Included guide that I wish I had when I was first starting out. Updated for the full release of ONI, I'll go through all the problems you'll have to solve in your first 30 cycles step by step, and show you how to use this first month to create a beautiful, elegant, and fully functional base.
]]>Hello, I'm high school sweetheart, John Walker. Welcome, if you can, to Steam Charts.
]]>Usually after the Steam summer sale horror show, the Steam Charts offer us some respite in the lull between AAA releases and allow us to celebrate the successful release of a bunch of indie games. But as you'll have noticed if you've looked at 2019, nothing follows the rules of sense and decorum any longer. So it is that last week and this, we've had charts that feature only a single recently released game.
So this week we're taking a trip!
]]>During its two year stint in Early Access, Oxygen Not Included often came close to becoming one of my major time sink games. It’s a rich simulation of the kind I adore, with an enchanting art style, a unique atmosphere, and a labyrinth of features to discover. On a gut level, I love it. But then, for every time I’ve booted it up, there have been three where my cursor hovered over the icon before flinching away, as if I’d discovered mould on a sandwich or the HMRC logo on an envelope.
Brilliant though it is, ONI is an ordeal. It’s satisfying, but it’s stressful. I’d even go so far as to say - and here I risk invoking the scorn of the Legion of Geniuses, who wait in the darkness beyond the comment section - it’s a little bit too hard. But before the swollen-minded wolves take my fingers, let me snatch back the meat and explain myself.
]]>After two years in early access, Oxygen Not Included will launch in full on May 28th, developers Klei Entertainment announced today. Oxygen is a cheerygrim space colony management sim from the mob being Don't Starve, sending teams of workers into the depths of an asteroid to mine, build, repair, fall ill, starve, go mad, and suffocate to death. I mean, ideally those last few things won't happen but... they will. Often. And in daft ways. One final early access update is coming, and Klei plan to keep tinkering with it after launch before launching into DLC and such.
]]>Klei's popular space science, management and survival sandbox Oxygen Not Included will launch out of early access late this May, almost exactly two years from its original debut. In a recent announcement on their official forums, Klei stated that the game was in the final stretch now, and there's only one update planned between now and launch. The final version of the game, while not having a specific date yet, will launch with three new biomes, new creatures, buildings and more, plus official mod support allowing players to take up the development gauntlet.
]]>Another year over, a new one just begun, which means, impossibly, even more games. But what about last year? Which were the games that most people were buying and, more importantly, playing? As is now something of a tradition, Valve have let slip a big ol' breakdown of the most successful titles released on Steam over the past twelve months.
Below is the full, hundred-strong roster, complete with links to our coverage if you want to find out more about any of the games, or simply to marvel at how much seemed to happen in the space of 52 short weeks.
]]>The relaxed mining of Steamworld Dig 2 is still satisfying my desire to burrow deep underground but today I am reminded of another (more disastrous) subterranean delight. Sci-fi management sim Oxygen Not Included [official site] has recently been given an earthy update, bringing both oil and petroleum to the cavernous underbelly of your homely asteroid. These fossil fuels are bound to be a safe source of energy for your space colony, and will not result in any of the game’s Rimworld-esque disaster cascades. However, if you are a bit of an Over-cautious Oscar, don’t worry, the developers have also added some hazmat suits.
]]>Judging by the survivalist Don’t Starve and subterranean piss manager Oxygen Not Included, Klei are very good at drawing cartoony things and then secretly planting loads of quite-good cogs and switches behind it all. It looks like they’re trying for another good ‘un. Griftlands [official site] has been announced at E3. It’s a sci-fi RPG “where everything is negotiable: money, loyalty—even morality”, says the developer. But you can see what it looks like down here.
]]>For thirty-eight long years, you people have looked to me to inform you which ten games sold best on Steam over the past week. That time is now at an end.
But evil never dies.
]]>Oxygen Not Included [official site] is a space colony management sim from Klei, the guys behind the excellent Invisible Inc. It's been in alpha since February but now it's launched on early access, and I'm intrigued.
It's got the aesthetic of Don't Starve, another Klei game, and involves building up a settlements beneath the surface of a distant planet and battling through the inevitable crises, whether that's clouds of poisonous red gas in your base or a shortage of pepper bread. A lot of it is in the style of RimWorld, except it's all side-on.
]]>Klei are the developers of Invisible, Inc., which is the best turn-based game since Chess. It stands to reason, then, that I'm always going to be interested in their releases, and Oxygen Not Included [official site] has had my interest since I first heard about it. An alpha has been sold for a while but the space colony management sim is moving to the next phase of its release, entering Early Access, on May 18th. The best way to learn about Oxygen Not Included is to look at Brendan's Premature Evaluation article, which contains very little oxygen but large quantities of piss.
]]>Every week we warp Brendan into the gaseous caverns of early access to see if he can find precious games worth playing in the gloom. This time, the subterranean space colonisation of Oxygen Not Included [official site]
Everything is covered in piss. When I branded my new space colony ‘Yellow Water Station’ I did so because I was prompted to come up with a suitable name for a settlement on the interstellar frontier. But all I could think of was how weird it is that astronauts drink their own recycled and purified urine. ‘Yellow Water Station’ was my puerile attempt at humour. I didn’t expect the new underground village I was building to accept its new moniker with such enthusiasm. Now everything is covered in piss, poisonous red gas is building up in the sleeping quarters, and there’s a dead body at the bottom of one of the aquifers.
]]>Alec is away this week. I fear that if he can't find a wifi signal on his travels he might resort to haruspicy to try and find the truths contained within the weekly Steam charts. These round-ups of the ten games with the most cumulative sales over the past week are his obsession and his curse.
This week: while the cat's away...
]]>As Old Father Time grabs his sickle and prepares to take ailing 2016 around the back of the barn for a big sleep, we're looking to the future. The mewling pup that goes by the name 2017 will come into the world soon and we must prepare ourselves for its arrival. Here at RPS, our preparations come in the form of this enormous preview feature, which contains details on more than a hundred of the exciting games that are coming our way over the next twelve months. 2016 was a good one - in the world of games at least - but, ever the optimists, we're hoping next year will be even better.
]]>Oxygen Not Included [Steam page] is smooshing together two of my favourite things: colony management simulation, and games by Klei Entertainment, the makers of Invisible, Inc. It appears to be a scifi Dungeon Keeper, or a cutesy Dwarf Fortress, or an underground RimWorld, at least as far as I can tell from the hour-long game stream embedded below.
]]>Klei's hit rate is nuts, especially when you consider that they hop genres with each game: from Mark of the Ninja's sidescrolling stealthy murderthon, to Don't Starve's topdown survivalthon, to Invisible, Inc.'s turn-based infiltratathon. Next up is the Oxygen Not Included, a space colony management sim(-thon) that was announced last night at E3.
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