Amazon Prime subscribers can claim 13 free games during the month of June. Well, at no extra cost to their Prime subscription, anyway. That’s on top of the recently announced extras that are available for the next few weeks, including Turnip Boy and Calico. But next month’s lineup of freebies - which includes the ever-lovely SteamWorld Dig 2, Neverwinter Nights and Autonauts - starts on June 1st, with more free games being made available every single week after that, so be sure to check back every Thursday.
]]>Thunderful have just unveiled the next game in their excellent SteamWorld series, and it's not the one we thought it was going to be. Third person action co-op adventure SteamWorld Headhunter was initially teased in November 2021, but Thunderful used their SteamWorld Telegraph: Special Broadcast this evening to talk about a very different kind of new SteamWorld game - and it looks rad as heck. It's a citybuilder, and (appropriately) it's called SteamWorld Build. I've played a bit of it already, and you can read more of my thoughts about it right here. Spoiler alert: it's a little bit good. If you just want the facts of what was announced, though, read on below.
]]>Thunderful Games have announced they're going to be holding a special SteamWorld stream next Monday January 23rd, where they'll be unveiling what's next for the series. Taking place at 9.30am PST / 5.30pm GMT, it's not clear what the SteamWorld Telegraph: Special Broadcast will entail just yet, but given we already know several SteamWorld games are in development at the moment, here's a rough guess-timate of what to expect.
]]>Tonight, Thunderful hosted a livestream of announcements, including a new SteamWorld game and a release date for The Gunk from SteamWorld's creators. They've also put a bunch of their games on sale, including giving classic platformer SteamWorld Dig 2 away for free for the next 24 hours.
]]>SteamWorld Dig 2 is a Metroidvania that sees you play as a little Steambot searching for their friend Rusty, who’s gone missing. As suspected, he’s buried somewhere underground, so it’s up to you to get digging and figure out where on earth (in earth, ha) he’s gone.
]]>[Warning: this article must be read entirely in a comedy cowboy voice]
Howdy pardner. Spittoon? Take it, we got a whole crate of them right here. Every god-fearing outlaw needs a good spittoon at their heels, as my grandmammy used to say. Hoo-wee, what a women. She was known to enjoy a strong snifter of list article, you know. Everyone who visited got a spittoon and a list article. And vidyagames be damned if I ain’t the same obliging sort as my grammy, yes sir. So here you go, friend. In anticipation of that there Desperados III, here are the 9 most desperate cowboys, cowgals, and cowbots in PC gaming. Yeehaw, I say, yee and haw.
]]>Google have now made their cloud gaming service, Stadia, completely free to anyone who has a Gmail account. That means you no longer have to buy their pricey Premiere Edition to get started, all you have to do is sign up online.
On top of that, to help keep people entertained in isolation they've made their premium subscription service, Stadia Pro, free for two months. It's basically a free trial that gives you full access to nine games, which sounds like a pretty good deal to me.
]]>Oh look, a new SteamWorld game. What a juicy, nourishing videogame fact to share with all my friends, the readers. SteamWorld Quest: The Hand Of Gilgamech is a card-based follow-up to SteamWorld Heist and the SteamWorld Digs, all very wholesome games that can actually be completed by human beings. This new one is a turn-based fantasy card game that looks a bit like undying god of games, Slay The Spire. It was announced during one of Nintendo’s state-sponsored broadcasts, because it’s coming to Switch first. But it is headed to “other platforms” as well, say the developers. And that means PC. Here’s a trailer, covered in filthy, disgusting Nintendo iconography.
]]>Red Dead Redemption 2 was made by five million people working nine day weeks, but does it have a duck that collects your discarded throwing knives? Actually, I don’t know, as it’s not on PC. But a game that does feature a magic duck, and can be played on your home computer, is the lovely Luckslinger. It’s one of eight delightful cowboy ‘em ups that you could be playing while Rockstar pretends its latest won't eventually come to PC. And the RPS Video Department has gathered them in one handy video.
]]>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."
]]>The dadification of games continues. So we’re going full Dad this week on the RPS podcast, the Electronic Wireless Show, as we’ve been asked to talk about the games we play with our children.
Alec’s daughter is excited by the unlockable characters in Rayman Legends (and she’s also strangely fascinated by Battletech). John’s son is a bit younger and likes to watch his dad diving in Abzu and Subnautica (but also manages to sneak glimpses of God of War’s quiet moments on the TV – naughty!). Brendan doesn’t have children, only a cat. She can’t stand games and thinks they are a waste of time.
]]>What happens when iron meets steam? In the real world, clothes get smooth. In the games industry, however, they react and create another entity altogether. Image & Form, the studio behind the SteamWorld games, have amalgamated with the creators of upcoming forest adventure Fe (it actually has nothing to do with the elemental notation for Iron, soz) to create Thunderful. It’s a new company altogether, co-owned by the two head honchos of its constituent studios. The two studios won’t disappear. This new, bigger one will just own them both.
]]>There's no shortage of great Metroidvanias out there these days, so to help narrow your search for what to play next, we've put together this list of the very best Metroidvania games to play on PC right now. Metroidvanias can be a little tricky to define at times. Most have big, knotty worlds to explore that often require the use of specific abilities to access its farthest corners, but while some put a greater emphasis on slow and methodical combat, others stuff every pixel with rock hard platforming challenges to test their players' mettle. We like to keep an open mind when it comes to these things, but that does mean our list of the best Metroidvanias may include the odd controversial choice or two. What's important, though, is that all of these games are brilliant, and come with our seal of approval.
]]>The calendar's doors have been opened and the games inside have been eaten. But fear not, latecomer - we've reconstructed the list in this single post for easy re-consumption. Click on to discover the best games of 2017.
]]>Oh heavens look at you, you've been bingeing on videogames again. Pumping platformers into your veins and shoving shooters into your piehole. That's fine, so have we. This week's edition of the RPS podcast, the Electronic Wireless Show, is all about binge gaming. Alec joins us to talk about chomping down on numbers-go-up alien-zapper Destiny 2, which Adam has also been gorging on. Meanwhile, I've been happily dig-dugging my way through robotic metroidvania Steamworld Dig 2, which as far as I'm concerned is far healthier and wiser.
]]>I’ve got a hookshot. Have you got a hookshot? I bet you don’t. I bet you’ve just got hands. Borrrring. Despite Steamworld Dig earning John’s admiration (so much so that he also used the comedy word “aplomb” when describing it) I had never played it. But I’m glad to have picked up its sequel, Steamworld Dig 2 [official site], in which a friendly robot called Dorothy goes looking for her uncle Rusty, the hero of the first game, in the deep mines beneath a western-style town. To get ever-deeper she has to dig, fight insects, plant bombs, and most importantly, hookshooooot.
]]>SteamWorld Dig 2 [official site], the follow-up to 2013's fab sci-fi dig-o-metroidvania-a-roguelikelike, will launch for PC on September 22nd. When developers Image & Form said the PC version would follow the console debut "a few days after", they were lying - that's only one day later. Huzzah! You pretty little liars. This is the best form of lie.
]]>This is Brendan coming to you live from the Gamer Network offices. The whole RPS team is meeting up in real life today and talking about you, the reader, behind your back. And although I'm here with them, I'd never do that. I've always been respectful of you, and I'd never call you "the fickle mass of human excrement", if that's what you've heard. Anyway, I'm just sneaking out to tell you: SteamWorld Dig: A Fistful of Dirt [official site] the colourful robot shovelling platformer that John really enjoyed, is free on Origin today. You should probably sort that out.
]]>Colourful shovel-em-up SteamWorld Dig: A Fistful of Dirt is getting a sequel, didn’t you know (you did) and the release date is now September 21, we’ve been told. But, oh no, that’s for the Nintendo Switch. SteamWorld Dig 2 [official site] will come out on Steam on the slightly vague “a few days later”. No worries, that’s still mere weeks from this particular arbitrary fraction of our temporal reality we’re calling “Monday”. Here’s a wee trailer showing off some of the pickaxing, grappling-hooking and monster-bashing.
]]>Platformer mine-'em-up SteamWorld Dig 2 [official site] was announced way back in February for the Nintendo Switch, but it’s going to be heading to PC, too, and unlike its predecessor it'll arrive "within a few days of the Nintendo Switch debut."
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