Minecraft is the best PC game, according to me and the RPS staff who dare not cross me. I played it for three hours today and, among the many build challenges and adventures, a small story formed around a baby pig. We named him Porky, we caged him as our pet, and in an unfortunate accident, we watched as he fell to his death from the sky island that was our home. RPS in peace, Porky.
How many befriended pigs like Porky have there been across the last several hundred hours of play? I'm not sure - dozens, hundreds - but soon such pigs might have a new form. After 15 years, Mojang are adding new types of pig to Minecraft.
]]>Terrible news! Santa ignored all my letters asking for 2025 to be a year when no new videogames came out so I could catch up on everything I missed from the past several years. In fact, it seems like maybe someone else might have sent him a letter asking for there to be more big games coming than ever.
]]>Original Fallout designer Tim Cain, also known for co-directing The Outer Worlds at Obsidian, has published a video responding to a player's question about why violence is the "default" path in so many big budget RPGs. That's specifically RPGs with "AAA" budgets, whatever AAA means these days. Cain is, of course, well aware that there are many RPGs from smaller teams that "evolve past the paradigm of violence being the default way in which the player interacts with the world", and that there are plenty of puzzle games, adventure games and the like in which there is no violence at all.
]]>What difficulty are you on, Doom CAPTCHA? I want to know because I need to know how bad to feel about myself. Six times I’ve tried to pass your FPS test by killing three monsters to prove I’m human. Six times I’ve failed. For thousands of years, people have asked what it means to be human. It turns out it was never a philosophical issue after all. It was, I’m gutted to report, a skill issue all along.
]]>My Selection Box picks are of three games that I did not vote for in the Advent Calendar. Two of them didn't come out this year, which is an easy disqualification, but the reality is that I also don't think any of them truly deserve a place in one of those hallowed chambers.
Yet all three are games that in some way defined my year, and I feel affection for each of them. Let me explain why.
]]>Unlike a lot of the team I'd imagine, my opinion is this: I thought the year was quite middling for games. Or at least, it was middling for my own personal taste, which is quite unsavoury at the best of times. Most of my best picks made it into the calendar proper, but a couple didn't. One I hadn't even played properly until after the vote, and the other? The other is a flawed pick, but one that I couldn't stop thinking about.
Anyway, hope you all have a restful Xmas folks and a cracking new year. I hope Santa bought you some nice warm socks or a chocolate orange so dense, you could tee it off at your local golf club.
]]>I'm a sucker for a good first-person runabout. I don't need to shoot, but it's sometimes nice to get a sword, or a big whip. As long as I get to be immersed in an adventure. I think that's the big theme of my selection box: being grounded within my player character. I want to feel what it's like to hike through canyons with too much sellable loot in my backpack. I want to park my soul in the head of a scared Scotsman way out of his depth, hundreds of miles from shore. The closer I can comfortably fit in my character's shoes, the more I seem to buy into the world they inhabit. Even if that world is constantly glowing a magnificent crimson.
]]>My selection box isn't really a selection box. It's a tray of barely-nibbled leftovers, hastily lifted from my Steam backlog. One of the disadvantages of being news editor, you see, is that I have developed a goldfish-grade attention span. In my hectic pursuit of the next scoop, or the next Elden Ring update changelog, I snatch and cast aside game demos like a pickpocket speedrunning the checkout line at Harvey Nichols. I'm dimly aware that some of these cast-aside games are Very Good. A few might even deserve to be played for longer than 30 minutes. I feel immensely guilty about that. Perhaps a little... existential, too. I have measured out my life in tutorial levels.
So! Rather than digging out three of the games I've actually completed this year, such as The Crush House, Death Of A Wish and Mask Quest, I'm going to gamble on recommending a few I've barely scratched, but which sure feel excellent and have attracted a positive critical consensus. If I am false in this assessment, may Horace the Endless Bear bite my head off for my impudence. Let's begin.
]]>Steam sales aren't the drop-everything-and-grab-yer-wallet events they used to be, according to you lot. The Winter sale that began yesterday is almost identical to the Autumn sale that ended just two weeks ago, for example. But you can still find one or two gifts if you bore deep enough into the ice. Me? I'm only interested in one thing. How many of these games are snowy and chilly enough to induce wonderful hypothermia? I'm on a frostbitten quest to find out. Here are the most winter-iest games you can pick up for cheap.
]]>At 9 years old, in the plastic seats of a Sega Rally arcade machine, I quickly learned that "automatic" is better than "manual" without understanding why. And now I know: changing gears is a fucking chore. This year, in my mid-thirties, I finally learned to drive. And weirdly, a racing game about destroying clapped-out old bangers helped me along. Thank you Wreckfest, for all the bottled road rage you allowed me to unleash.
]]>Squeezing through the advent calendar window into a sodden glade of flower and coral, you spy a curious organism on a ledge in the shadows. It’s a video game of some description, though it looks like a squirrel, with frantic white eyes. What’s it doing? Ah, whoops, you’ve startled it. Better follow it offscreen.
]]>I’m quite smitten by the Nintendo DS stylings and traditional roguelike charms of Shiren the Wanderer: The Mystery Dungeon Of Serpentcoil Island, but I’m having real trouble summoning up the motivation to repeatedly grind through its opening levels to get to the interesting stuff. Early stages soon lose any real sense of surprise, and later ones can feel low on real agency. I want a new roguelike run to feel vital and verdant; heady with grand plans and plan-shattering twists. But by having randomness influence each run so significantly, Mystery Dungeon feels fickle instead of emergent - less than the sum of some incredibly novel and creative parts.
]]>Today's door is shimmering and promises dark magics within. It's an unlikely marriage of big budget publisher and a genre beloved most by smaller development teams. What mastery will unlock the door and expose the vast arenas within? Why, clicking to read more, of course.
]]>Nightdive, you done good. The Thing: Remastered is an ultra-sharp and commendably playable update to a game that history will remember as ‘actually a pretty good pick at Choices when you really just popped in to get some Revels but got embarrassed when the till staffer said “is that everything?” in a tone that could have been neutral but equally could have been a damning indictment of your character’.
I’m being slightly facetious here, of course. History actually remembers Computer Artworks’s 2002 shooty horror game for how incredibly ambitious and conceptually inventive its proto-sus social squad system was. In homage to the body-snatching alien paranoia of Carpenter’s 1982 horror classic, The Thing tasks you with not just assembling and directing a squad, but keeping them from breaking down or turning on you - in fear you might be hosting the titular molecular stowaway.
]]>Developed by Mistwalker, a studio founded by Final Fantasy dad Hironobu Sakaguchi, Fantasian was originally released on Apple Arcade in 2021 and locked within the big fruit's exclusivity cage. Now, though, Mistwalker and Square Enix have come together to re-release the RPG for us PC heads, calling it Fantasian Neo Dimension. It's actually out today, too, if you're interested in an interdimensional journey to reclaim some lost memories.
]]>Various games in the Shiren The Wanderer (and Mystery Dungeon) series have been recommended to me over and over, but I've yet to play any of them. I likely won't play the next, either. Shiren The Wanderer: The Mystery Dungeon Of Serpentcoil Island is headed to PC via Steam soon.
]]>Two theme parks are being planned based on Minecraft. Mojang are partnering with Merlin Entertainments to open the destinations, including rides, hotel rooms and shops, in the UK and US in 2026 and 2027. Merlin are the operator of existing theme parks and attractions including Alton Towers, Legoland, Sea Life, and Madame Tussauds.
]]>On 11th October 2024, three video game studios announced themselves near-simultaneously as the creators of “spiritual successors” to ZA/UM’s mournful Marxist RPG Disco Elysium. First came Longdue, a conspicuously corporate operator who are making an untitled “psychogeographic RPG”. Dark Math Games followed around lunchtime - they’re making a sexy Antarctic ski resort mystery called XXX Nightshift. Finally, there was Summer Eternal, the mouthiest and Marxiest of the lot, who have set themselves up as a workers co-operative and have yet to announce a specific project.
]]>I am a very casual enjoyer of Metal Slug games. I've never actually paid for one of these side-scrolling shoot 'em ups, except for all the countless coins I happily pumped into arcade machines as a child. To this day, if I see a rare glittering cabinet running one of these crunchy shmups, I will go ham for twenty or thirty minutes, and walk away satisfied that I have seen a lot of very good pixels. These games, I am convinced, were never really designed to be completed, but to be played exactly like this, as a coin-gobbling invitation to become a bandana-wearing sisyphus, a tiny Rambo pushing a bouncy, juddering tank up a hill occupied by cartoon nazis. You die a bunch and say: "ah, that was good."
So what happens when you rearrange the molecules of this run and/or gun 'em up into an isometric turn-based strategy game? You get Metal Slug Tactics, an off-kilter nod to Into The Breach and other grid-based turn-takers, but secretly housing the aggressive notions of an unhinged pyromaniac. You still die a lot. And you still walk away feeling fairly happy about it.
]]>Good morning, how about a nice big bowl of your favourite breakfast cereal: Corporate Consolidation? Sony are in talks to buy Kadokawa, the parent company of Elden Ring developer From Software. Sony is eyeing up the company as a hefty snack because they want the various manga and anime owned by Kadokawa, according to a report by Reuters. But also because they want all the tasty games owned by them too, such as the Danganronpa series, the Octopath Traveler games, and the biggest corn flake of them all, the Dark Souls series.
]]>Thunderful Games, the developers and publishers that make the colourful SteamWorld series of games, have announced a hefty number of layoffs at the company, with anywhere between 80-100 people losing their jobs. It's part of a "restructuring" that'll also see an unspecified number of game projects cancelled, said the company in a press release yesterday. As if this is not dispiriting enough, they also say it's an intentional move that'll see them making fewer games of their own and instead publishing more work by other developers.
]]>Correction: A previous version of this article implied that Tequila Works were the developers of The Sexy Brutale. In fact, it was originally developed by Cavalier Game Studios. Tequila Works are the publishers of the game and are also listed as "co-developers" on Steam. Very sorry for the mistake!
Original article: The studio behind sunny third-person adventure Rime has filed for insolvency, with the heads of the studio quitting their roles. Tequila Works had their funding from Tencent pulled at some point, according to Eurogamer Spain, leaving the company without an important flow of cash. Which may explain why they cancelled a game last month and laid off some of their workers. It now looks like that was just the first sign of a more serious problem which has sadly resulted in the dissolution of the studio.
]]>My strongest and most enduring memory of Grand Theft Auto will always be creasing into complete hysterics watching my mate pile into a crumpled police officer with a wooden baseball bat in GTA 3 after school one time. Young’uns these days just don’t appreciate how revolutionary it was to be able to hit a cop with a thing after he’d already fallen over. Suffice it to say I’ve got good memories of the open world series’ nascent forays into 3D, though never enough to tempt me into revisiting them, especially given the poor reception to Grand Theft Auto: The Trilogy - The Definitive Edition. I can sympathise. I’m annoyed just having to type a colon and a dash in the same game name.
If you’re in a similarly non-fussed position (I will never not be annoyed that ‘nonplussed’ doesn’t mean what it sounds like it should mean) I can’t imagine a lighting update that’s been available on the mobile versions for a while is enough to tempt you back. But what is a reporter's job if not pathetically treading water between chunklets of Grand Theft Auto news, upon the publishing of which Graham presses the button to release the nutritious pellets on which we all wholly subsist? I hope he doesn’t read that last sentence. I don’t get my pellet if the syntax becomes too convoluted. Moving swiftly on.
]]>The developers of hero shooter Overwatch 2 must have dropped a box full of old photographs while clearing the attic, spilling old snapshots of Route 66 onto the floor and getting snared in a nostalgic daze. The game is launching a "Classic" mode today that will let you play the first-person payload pusher as it (mostly) was back in 2016 when the first Overwatch launched. That means 6v6 fights, the original abilities of its heroes, and no limits to stop the entire team picking the same character.
]]>Nostalgia, when you think about it, is bollocks. There has never been a better time than right this second – averaged out, and despite repeated attempts to the contrary, humanity has never been healthier, freer, or more enlightened by knowledge. It’s true of games too. For every by-committee platter of passionless map markers, there are thousands of more personal, more creative, more interesting works, all adding to the decades' worth of great stuff we can still play today.
What isn’t bollocks is the emotional pull that nostalgia, for all its lack of cold, hard reason, still manages to wield inside our warm, squishy brains. Hence, the centrepiece of Apex Legends’ Season 23 update is a mode that recreates the battle royale FPS as it was back in 2019, defaulting back to the original map and weapon arsenal while cutting the 26-strong legend roster to the earliest ten. It’s a Fortnite-style rolling back of the clock, and a passably enjoyable one, but also a reminder that the good old days weren’t always that good.
]]>Back in the mists of 2021, No Man's Sky revealed its very own Normandy SR1 space frigate. "The Normandy in No Man's Sky?" you cry. "Why, that's a Mass Effect vessel. Some mistake here surely?" 1) My name's not Shirley, and 2) Indeed it is a Mass Effect ship, but HelloGames struck a time-limited deal with BioWare to create a version for their own space sim.
"Blast, if only I'd noticed this at the time and acquired one," you mourn. "Ah, so many years I have wasted." Be of good cheer, my friend, for No Man's Sky has a Normandy once again, just in time for the latest N7 Day of assorted Mass Effect celebrations. For the next two weeks, you'll be able to get a-hold of it by way of a revised version of 2021's Beachhead Expedition. Tray-tray, away!
]]>I would never have predicted there'd be an isometric tactics game based on run-and-gun series Metal Slug, yet here Metal Slug Tactics is, and I am here for it. We've been following its development for a while but it's out now on Steam, and seemingly as strong as its demo suggested.
]]>Back in the misty reaches of time (March) popular farming sim Stardew Valley got a big update that added more pets to the game (it also let you drink mayonaise but let's not get sidetracked). Those new cats, dogs, and turtles had the cute distinction of being able to wear hats, should you choose to kit your wee friends out. Now, following many months of smaller updates to the game, it seems those hats are causing a problem. "[If] you are experiencing performance issues in Stardew Valley 1.6, remove all hats from pets," said creator Eric Barone in a xeet. When asked the lore-accurate cause of this problem, he blamed: "a strange rash".
]]>The Elder Scrolls: Legends, the free-to-play card game set in Bethesda's fantasy world, has been removed from sale on Steam. Its servers will shut down for good on January 30th, 2025, after which it will no longer be playable. The closure comes five years after the game was last updated.
]]>The Steam Deck is something of a talisman for gaming on Linux, its popularity and penguin-powered SteamOS having almost singlehandedly dragged it past MacOS as the second-most-used operating system among Steam users. Sadly, this also means the Valve handheld is the primary casualty when developers decide to stop bothering with Linux support, as Respawn Entertainment have decided to do for Apex Legends.
]]>I never completed the original Red Dead Redemption, but not for the usual reasons of being terrible at the game, or thinking that open worlds are too big and boring these days and I just want to lie down forever and watch anime. I never finished it because my Xbox 360 version was not, in practice, an open world game, but a lonely farm at the bottom of a vortex of butchered spacetime. In the prologue, reformed outlaw John Marston confronts an old bandit acquaintance and gets himself roundly shot to bits. He’s rescued by local rancher Bonnie MacFarlane, who nurses him back to health and gives him a few odd jobs to warm him up for the next plot point.
]]>If I am ever murdered, please do not ask Max Caulfield to investigate. I've already written our review for Life Is Strange: Double Exposure, in which I celebrated the touching moments of Max's return to the series, and lamented the clunky plot that she finds herself in. In this adventure game, you're looking into the killing of a close friend, shot by an unknown assailant. You hop between two dimensions to solve the case - one world in which your pal still lives and the other in which she's dead. Unfortunately for the murder victim, you play a bona fide hot mess who could not perform a cross examination if she were standing in front of a crucifix with a magnifying glass.
]]>What Remains Of Edith Finch is a very upsetting collection of interactive short stories about the brief, tragic lives of a cursed family who live in a monstrous treehouse. It's also a wonderful show of experimentation, switching genres from story to story - one minute you're a playable bestiary on shuffle, the next you're beheading fish in a cannery as the worktable disappears beneath your scrolling daydreams. The developer's next project seems to be pursuing a similar balance of whimsy and darkness. It's another anthology experience, which casts you as a field biologist studying "the strangeness of organic life". Also, chicken-legged houses.
]]>You can feel two ways about something at the same time. The feuding academics of Life Is Strange: Double Exposure might call this "emotional superposition". But the word "ambivalent" already exists. So let's say I'm ambivalent about this new adventure featuring Max Caulfield, the returning hero of Life Is Strange, and time-travelling photographer whose powers have resurfaced after years of off-screen atrophy. I've been deeply moved by individual scenes in this sequel. By the end I was sorry to leave its characters behind. At the same time (please now imagine my face is splitting into a second, colour-washed expression with wobbly VFX) I am relieved it's over, so I don't have to deal with the inconsistent behaviour of those characters, the flimsy plot, and a convoluted approach to murder mystery.
]]>Ys X: Nordics launched in Japan last year to some critical acclaim, and it has now made its way both west and onto PC. The PC version has a bunch of graphical upgrades and keyboard support, but also - unlike predecessor Ys IX: Monstrum Nox which got co-op as a cheeky post-launch bonus on PC - Ys X: Nordics has local co-op from day one.
]]>Cities: Skylines received its final piece of DLC last May, as developers Colossal Order shifted their focus to its sequel, Cities: Skylines 2. Eighteen months and the release of Cities: Skylines 2 later... Cities: Skylines 1 is getting new DLC again.
The "Mountain Village" creator pack add 45 new buildings designed to help you construct quaint and picturesque destinations.
]]>Look up major events in 2011 and there's some world-changing stuff... and some not so world-changing stuff. Shadows Of The Damned's Xbox 360/PS3 release may slip into either camp, depending on whether you liked it back in the day or not. It's a third-person action adventure where two famous video game folks joined forces: No More Heroes' Suda51 and Resident Evil's Shinji Mikami. And to my knowledge, it's considered a bit of a cult classic.
So, having played Shadows of the Damned: Hella Remastered after never experiencing the original, do I think it's any good? If you were a fan of the OG, there's no doubt you'll like it. If you're coming in as a newbie, I think it's refreshing in the sense it's a trim throwback with some interesting ideas and middling-to-good execution. But its whole schtick isn't only a product of its time - it's actually downright yucky.
]]>Minecraft's Bundles Of Bravery update has been out for a day or so and I have already created and lost several hardcore mode worlds. I'm having a lovely time.
]]>"Move over Hollow Knight," declared Katharine (RPS in peace) in our Prince Of Persia: The Lost Crown review, summarising this freshly-honed hunk of POP art as "a deep and challenging Metroid-like with some of the best platforming this side of Moon's Ori games." Sadly, for all the plaudits, the game doesn't seem to have earned sufficient megabucks to justify keeping its development team together. Earlier this week, French journalist Gautoz reported that Ubisoft had disbanded The Lost Crown's core dev team after turning down proposals for a sequel and further expansions. Speaking to RPS this morning, Ubisoft have confirmed that "most" of the Lost Crown's dev team have moved onto other projects, while noting that there have been no layoffs as a result.
]]>When I was little, I really liked what I saw of Shin chan, even if it was just largely flashes of his bare arse on Japanese TV. He seemed mischievous, a bit of a menace, and part of a fun family dynamic. Flash forward to now and I can only describe the lad as… jarring. At least, I think he's an odd flag-bearer for a series of games where you live out a nostalgic, Japanese summer in the countryside.
And I think it's doubly weird that Shin chan: Shiro And The Coal Town opts for a collectathon approach, that doesn't necessarily make the act of living out a Cicada Summer all that mesmerising. But, and this is a big but: I can't stop thinking about it. Of all the games of 2024, Coal Town may have left the biggest impression on me. In a way, I hope it does for you, too.
]]>Following their remasters of Star Wars: Dark Forces and PO’ed, the sickos at Nightdive have done it again, this time with 1995 FPS Killing Time. Despite being one of the eight people in the world with a 3DO in the house, I missed this one the first time around. Let’s learn about it together. Best start with the trailer.
]]>A spiritual successor to Studio ZA/UM’s RPG Disco Elysium is currently in development at the newly-formed Longdue. It's set in a world “conceived by the leads” of the canceled sequel.
A representative of Longdue told us that "the studio isn't ready to talk about specific names at the moment beyond the people mentioned in the press release, but they are looking forward to sharing more about the game and the studio in the future". They did, however, confirm that Disco Elysium's lead writer and designer Robert Kurvitz and art director Aleksander Rostov are not involved.
]]>I will not lie to you, gentle reader. When I first laid eyes on Secret Door's Sunderfolk, while lurking to the rear of a gaggle of journomancers at a preview event last week, I let out an ostentatious sigh. Fortunately, I still mask up to preview events, and am thus free to adopt all kinds of snotty facial expressions without being set upon by burly PRs and shoved into the minifridge for later disposal. To sum it up, Sunderfolk is a hex and turn-based 2-4 player digital boardgame with fantasy animal characters and deckbuilding elements, reminiscent of Gloomhaven. Conceived during the pandemic lockdowns as a way to "bring back game night", but without the traditional 30-minute unboxing ritual, it's played on the big screen but controlled using a dedicated smartphone app, with players stroking and swiping to move characters and play cards.
]]>It’s always vaguely reassuring to see your own card mentioned by name in the recommended specs for a new release - even if that new release is just a slightly pomaded-up version of 14-year-old open world console game Red Dead Redemption. I could write a laborious metaphor about someone coming looking for me in a saloon using whatever that literary technique that Irvine Welsh does is called where you spell out the accents, but I won’t bother. I simply do not have another tarnation in me. Perhaps a root. Don’t even talk to me about a toot. Here’s the specs, as per the Steam page.
]]>Swedish video game publishers Thunderful are selling some steam, which is terrific news for those of us who don't live near saunas and are thus cruelly deprived of their widely-accepted health and wellness benefits, which date all the way back to the ancient Mayans. Oh wait, I read the press release wrong. Thunderful are actually having a Steam sale, with up to 90% off such well-regarded games as Laika: Aged Through Blood, Swordship, Viewfinder and, just to confuse me further, several SteamWorld games.
]]>One of the games industry's worst-kept secrets, the PC version of Red Dead Redemption, is a worst-kept secret no longer. After an unconscionable period of leakage, Rockstar have at last confirmed the open world port, together with a PC version of its Undead Nightmare expansion - they're coming to Rockstar Store, Steam and the Epic Games Store on October 29th 2024. Picture craggy old John Marston riding into town at sunset, whooping and firing six-shooters at the clouds. Actually, don't picture anything - that's what videos are for! Find the announcement trailer below.
]]>Why yes, that was a micro change in air density you just noticed on your motion tracker. Ten years since the release of horror adaptation Alien Isolation, Creative Assembly have announced that they're making a sequel.
]]>Epic Games laid off over 800 people a year ago, following what CEO Tim Sweeney confessed was an "unrealistic" period of investment designed to "grow Fortnite as a metaverse-inspired ecosystem for creators". Now, it's time to start talking about brighter, metaversal tomorrows and hopefully, not do the whole thing all over again. Epic have detailed early plans for Unreal Engine 6, which Sweeney says will combine Unreal Engine with Fortnite's easy-to-use Unreal Editor to create a gigantic, "interoperable" metaverse platform that lets developers sell stuff that can seamlessly be transferred to other games, whether they run on Unreal Engine or not. Stealth blockchain post? Genuinely, I can neither confirm nor deny.
]]>Looking for more information about the Minecraft Pale Garden biome? The 2024 Minecraft showcase offered more details on the next Bundles Of Bravery update and a later update set to feature the new Pale Garden biome in Minecraft.
This biome comes with a new mob, wood block, moss variant and more. To see what The Pale Garden biome has to offer and when we can expect it to release, read below.
]]>Wondering what's included in the Minecraft Bundles Of Bravery update? Thanks to the annual Minecraft showcase, we know of a new Minecraft game mode due within the "next few months". This update is called the Bundles Of Bravery and will offer a new hardcore mode to Bedrock editions of the game as well as Bundles.
See below for our full rundown of everything included in the Minecraft Bundles Of Bravery update.
]]>Looking for more information about The Creaking in Minecraft? The Creaking is a new mob, due to be added to Minecraft along with The Pale Garden biome, sometime after the Bundles Of Bravery update.
This creepy fellow is reminiscent of The Weeping Angels from Doctor Who. Like them, The Creaking can only move when the player looks away from it. The Creaking are masters of disguise and fit right into the grey thickets and hanging moss of The Pale Garden.
For more information about this new mob and how to defeat it in-game, read our full Creaking rundown below.
]]>Want to know more about Minecraft Bundles? Thanks to the Minecraft 2024 Live, we got a glimpse into several new features due to be added to Minecraft. One such feature is Bundles.
Bundles will be part of the 'Bundles Of Bravery' update along with a hardcore mode for Bedrock players. Bundles are a new way to carry loot and free up inventory space when on a mining expedition. For more information on Bundles in Minecraft, see our full explainer below.
]]>Mojang want to release smaller updates more frequently for Minecraft, instead of one major update each summer. This evening's Minecraft Live stream detailed the Bravery And Bundles update, coming next, but also another update to follow in the next few months. A creepy update.
It doesn't have a name yet, but it'll add The Pale Garden, a new biome of eerie, grey trees and hanging moss that's quiet during the day, but which at night is inhabited by a new mob, the Creaking.
]]>Minecraft's yearly showcase stream took place this evening. As part of the show, Mojang showed off some of the future updates coming to the game. First up: the Bundles Of Bravery update, which will add a proper hardcore mode to Bedrock Edition, as well as bundles, which will allow you to carry more items in your inventory when out adventuring.
]]>The mad lads at Square Enix have released a demo for their remake of 90s RPG Romancing SaGa 2: Revenge Of The Seven, in which you play a whole dynasty of customisable protagonists fighting vengeful ancient heroes. It’s a turn-based battler with an empire-building component in which you play as several emperors in succession, passing on abilities and knowledge to your heir. In what I consider to be a poetic complementary flourish, you can also pass on save data from the demo to the full game. Look, this is what counts as “poetic” just before lunch on a Thursday.
]]>I don't think I'm going out on a limb by saying that Ubisoft's best game of this year won't be Star Wars Outlaws or the as-yet unreleased Assassin's Creed Shadows, it'll be Prince Of Persia: The Lost Crown. The sidescrolling metroidvania is a rich, expansive, and surprisingly challenging take on a genre typically dominated by indies, and it's precisely the kind of game I wish mega-publishers produced more.
It's also now got a story expansion, Mask Of Darkness, which came out yesterday.
]]>It's been long suspected (if not officially confirmed) that the first Red Dead Redemption will be getting a PC remaster some time in the near future. We've already seen a description for the PC version appear briefly on the PlayStation store (of all places). And earlier this year a snoopy fan of the studio who monitors the backend of Rockstar's launcher found similar game descriptions buried amid metadata. Yesterday, that same practice yielded yet another clue - the game's Steam app number.
]]>I started playing and enjoying battle royale wizarding sim Spellbreak just in time for Spellbreak to get shut down. Developers Proletariat, Inc announced plans to yank the servers back in August 2022 in the course of being acquired by Activision Blizzard, bringing an end to many happy hours spent skating on conjured ice ramps and hurling boulders around like bunny rabbits. Yes, I am the kind of wizard who hurls a bunny rabbit, if there are no boulders to spare.
Happily, it transpires that Proletariat have resurrected their creation and handed it over to posterity in the shape of a free standalone Community Version, available on Itch.io. You’ll need to host your own server or join another group if you want to play multiplayer, but all the same, this is a lovely gift and one I’m delighted to transmit unto you, the active and efficient Magenauts of Rockus Paperus Shottegonne.
]]>Goichi 'Suda51' Suda - of No More Heroes and Killer7 fame - reckons a focus on Metacritic scores is bad for creativity. Speaking to GI.biz recently alongside survival horror genre maker-upper Shinji Mikami, Suda expressed his frustrations with the review aggregator platform’s cultural cache.
"Everybody pays too much attention to and cares too much about Metacritic scores. It's gotten to the point where there's almost a set formula – if you want to get a high Metacritic score, this is how you make the game," Suda51 told Gi.biz.
]]>Tales Of The Shire: A The Lord Of The Rings Game has been delayed into early 2025. The cosy life sim set in the home of the hobbits had initially been aiming for a late 2024 release, but developers Weta Workshop Game Studio announced they need more time.
]]>I could have described the multiplayer racing game Faaast Penguin a lot of ways. It is Fall Guys meets Snowboard Kids. It is Diddy Kong Racing but all the courses are water slides. It's Cool Runnings but there are 40 penguins instead of four Jamaicans. Okay, that last one is a bit of a stretch. But basically, yes, this brightly coloured free-to-play knockout racer feels like that one Super Mario 64 level where you race the big penguin down a slide, only this time there are a ton of other players trying to beat you to the secret shortcut. It's coming out next week.
]]>Steam’s family sharing feature Steam Families is now available to everyone on the platform, letting up to six total people share games from a single library, with each individual having access to their own saved games, achievements, and workshop files.
This means that, yes, when you all sit down together in the evening, you can enjoy a hearty family meal in the knowledge that between you, you technically own six copies of the Cities Skylines Big Butt Skinner Balloon.
Each person on the account will have one of two roles: adult or child. Adults can manage parental controls, set hourly or daily playtime limits, approve purchase requests, and control store access. Valve appear very proud of making it easier for parents to spend money, streamlining the “time-consuming” task of buying games for their kids.
]]>If there's one thing I've heard from Minecraft modders when I've asked for their thoughts on the future of Minecraft, it's some variation on "fewer updates, please". This might seem unreasonable if you're not into modding, but the price of updating a game is often that you break any mods designed for it. Hence, the parts of Minecraft's history many seasoned Minecraft modders - together with server owners and pro mapmakers - remember most fondly are the longer lulls between updates.
]]>When Warner Bros released a fairly abysmal trailer for the Minecraft Movie last week, there could be only one possible result: the game's legions of fan filmmakers, modders, texture pack creators, and garden-variety players would attempt to upstage it. That process begins with the speedy release of several fan reworkings of the trailer that use something like vanilla Minecraft graphics, rather than the original, unholy fusion of LB Photo Realism and Jack Black. This'll teach Johnny Hollywood to run his grubby hands all over our beloved Creepers, eh.
]]>The Gearbox developers working on Risk Of Rain 2 have released a patch for its poorly received expansion, Seekers Of The Storm. The recent DLC for the action roguelike came out of the oven a little doughy, with enough game-breaking bugs to thoroughly upset some fans. Including one bug that sometimes made the game's final boss accidentally invincible. Ah. Yesterday's patch seems to target the worst of these bugs, and the dev team promise there are more fixes are to come.
]]>Pssst. You into hardcore 2D platformers? And do you like lil' green guys, just like, gooby wooby lookin' orbs of green? Then I present to you Gimmick! 2, which has an unexpected exclamation point before the "2" and all of the above. It's out now and will no doubt please fans who've been waiting years for a sequel to the original Gimmick!, and possibly other platform enthusiasts who are after a decidedly different style of gap-hopper.
]]>Full disclosure: I hadn't heard of Bakeru until Graham mentioned it to me. Graham always has his hands on the video game pulse, gliding them over Xwitter or Steam or wherever and waiting for that "ker kun, ker kun" of a new Cool Thing. And that cool thing is Bakeru, described by its Steam page as "Japan-esque", but is in actual fact, very Japanese. I mean, you travel around 47 Japanese prefectures as a metamorphing tanuki who bashes evilness with his taiko drum sticks. Come on.
What I hadn't suspected was Bakeru's chops not only as a platformer, but as a means to increase your chances at success in pub quizzes. The game is a certified trivia Tardis, where you'll learn all sorts about Japanese culture as well as just like, the colour sepia being a genus of cuttlefish.
]]>Back in July, No Man's Sky reached version 5.0 with the Worlds update, which refreshed its planetary generation to introduce more variety alongside more detailed water, clouds, and weather. We didn't write about it at the time, because I suppose re-writing the very fabric of the galaxy seemed small-time.
Today's new update, however, adds fishing, and I can't not write about that.
]]>Hopoo Games, the studio who made chewy roguelike Risk Of Rain and its moreish 3D sequel Risk Of Rain 2, are shutting up shop and taking jobs at Valve. They're no longer working on a previously unannounced game called "Snail", say the developers on Xitter. Instead, the studio co-founders Paul Morse and Duncan Drummond (plus "many other talented members") are taking up game development roles with the Steam owners.
]]>Risk of Rain 2: Seekers of the Storm released last Tuesday, and hasn’t gone down too well with fans of the co-op roguelite. How not well, you ask? To shreds, I say - it’s currently sitting at 79% ‘mostly negative’ rating on Steam. Among the chief complaints are…uh, everything, it looks like. The DLC is reportedly so bug-ridden that it’s taken many of the base game’s core systems down with it.
Gearbox - who acquired Risk Of Rain from Hopoo Games in 2022 - have since put out a blog with a list of known issues they’re targeting, and encourage players to keep submitting bug reports. Among the listed issues are a boss named Mithrix becoming invincible (“definitely not intentional”), and “an issue that allowed players to get stuck while smelling the flowers”.
]]>Here’s one we missed from this week’s release round-up, possibly because Konami appear to have given it precisely zero promotion: the Castlevania Dominus Collection, a four-game bundle spanning PC ports of three well-regarded DS Castlevanias, plus a redesigned version of Castlevania Haunted Castle, the first Castlevania game to grace an arcade machine. It’ll set you back $25, £20 or €25, and my drive-by analysis of the trailer below is that they've done a decent job with the ports.
]]>I find it bizarre that people still really like Crash Bandicoot games in this, the year 2024, two decades after the decline of the platform mascot warz. I have ample nostalgia for the old marsupial myself, with his second Naughty Dog-developed outing being a particular obsession, but come now, we're all about deckbuilders, soulsliking and battle royale nowadays, right?
Still, I'll admit to a twinge of disappointment after reading that a Crash Bandicoot 5 was once in development at Crash 4: It's About Time developers Toys For Bob, and might have featured an interdimensional team-up with one of Crash's old rivals. No, not Mario.
]]>Earlier today, old man James wagged a finger at us all sternly for not writing about Atomfall before. My turn to puff out my cheeks and look not angry, just disappointed: why haven't we covered The Stone Of Madness prior to the below Gamescom 2024 story trailer? I mean, it's only a real-time tactical stealth game set in a cursed 18th century Jesuit monastery, developed by the people behind gorgeously gross metroidvania Blasphemous. It's only got isometric art inspired by Goya and a sanity/trauma system redolent of Darkest Dungeon. Sounds like an automatic RPS write-up to me.
]]>I've yet to discover a SteamWorld game I don't like. Whether plundering the earth in SteamWorld Dig 2 or mucking about with magic in SteamWorld Quest, these are solid and approachable adventures that enthusiastically embrace whatever theme the developers have decided upon. Cowboys? Sure. Wizards? Why not. It barely matters, as long as it results in some good puns. As a studio, Thunderful have a reputation for hopping from one style of game to the next, boiling entire genres down to their essence, and reconstituting them with competence and style to exist within a now-familiar steampunk world of colourful pals and Saturday morning cartoon jokes. The studio is a perpetual notion machine. Yes, with SteamWorld Heist 2, they're revisiting the sci-fi bullet-bouncing of their 2016 tactics game SteamWorld Heist, but they're also introducing significant changes to create a compulsive XCOM-like full of sea-faring submariners that may be their best work yet, even against a back catalogue of blinders.
]]>I genuinely don't like sucker-punching video games the second they're announced, but playing Glowmade's King Of Meat is three hours of my life I won't get back, and every second I spend writing about it extends that total, dragging me closer to a regretful demise. Here's the stuff I'm more positive about: buried at the core of this spurting interactive snarkfest there is a moderately OK third-person dungeon-crawler for groups of up to four.
]]>One of the best roguelikes on PC is getting a farewell of sorts this week. Twitchy slashfest Dead Cells received its final major update, introducing new enemies, fresh weapons, and a few mutations. Unfortunately, all this new stuff is very cursed. In other words, it all toys with the game's "curse" status effect, a hex that causes you to be killed if you take even a single hit. You'll probably die a few times as a result of this update, which in some ways is a fitting finalé for this fast-paced jar smasher of a game. You can see the new features in the trailer below.
]]>There you are, rambling through the woods of Interactive Entertainment with an empty pack and a spring in your step. Here I am, lying in wait behind a tree. Wham! Bam! You reel back in consternation as I bounce into the path and clobber you with a sack containing no less than eight venerable RPGs, from Baldur's Gate to Warhammer 40,000: Rogue's Trader - well over a thousand hours worth of dungeons, dragons, dicerolls, dwarven shopkeepers and many other things I refuse to spend time alliterating, all of which will (currently) set you back just £32.07.
Were you planning to spend this weekend playing some cute two-hour artgame sideshow, without any levelling at all? Shut up, you DOLT. You will play what the nice journalist tells you to play! Best lay in extra caffeine tablets, because it's going to take you till Monday just to get through the character creators alone.
]]>The mountain biking of Lonely Mountains: Downhill was sometimes a relaxing ride down gentle slopes, and at other times a hairy hurtle down declivitous cliffs. Alongside the likes of the Descenders and Riders Republic, it offered a more laid-back game, open to furious time trialling but always remembering to let you stop and appreciate the view. Both the stakes and the poly count were low. Happy news then, that it is getting a snowy sequel. In Lonely Mountains: Snow Riders you'll be swapping your bike for a pair of skis, and you'll be able to barrel down the mountainside with friends in co-op.
]]>Vroom vroom. That is the sound of 11 rivals revving their engines as they blink the sweat out of their eyes and exhale years of self-doubt from their lungs. Today is their day. We have lined up these racing games on a starting grid and are interested to see how things shake out. Will the realism-obsessed driving sims take the lead with their sublime physics engines? Might the futuristic combat racers simply destroy the opposition with explosive rockets? Or perhaps a nippy arcade crowd-pleaser will soar to the finish line, propelled by the sound of roaring cheers. It's all to play for here at our incredibly messed-up grand prix with a worrying lack of rules or regulation. Start your engines, everyone, these are the 11 best racing games on PC. 3! 2! 1! ...
]]>Among the many, Gigery beauties of 2014's Alien: Isolation is that you save using an in-game, wall-mounted Emergency Phone - a maddeningly analog process of slotting a keycard into the machine and waiting for three beeps. Doing this requires you to stand upright in full view, with your back turned upon an entire space station's worth of shiny domed technology and guttural industrial noises. Delightful!
Amongst the players harrowed and compelled by this fixture is Fede Álvarez, director of the 2013 Evil Dead remake, 2016's Don't Breathe and, most recently Alien: Romulus - the seventh and avowedly "back to basics" Alien movie. Isolation is the Alien experience that convinced Álvarez the Alien could still be scary, after decades of milking the creature's dugs for spin-off movies and making it share a screen with the Predator, the Pepsi Max to Alien's Dom Pérignon 1921. In possibly self-defeating homage to Creative Assembly's work, he's filled the movie with Emergency Telephones, turning them into a straightforward-sounding form of foreshadowing.
]]>Well, root my toots. Unless you’re Australian, in which case don't do that. Just enjoy the now very much confirmed-looking release of the original Red Dead Redemption on PC. That’s according to a listing on the PlayStation Store, which contains the currently inaccurate but tantalising phrase “now on PC for the first time ever.”
]]>Last week, Bethesda released a remastered edition of Doom and Doom II on Steam, with lots of extra episodes and improvements. One of these new features is a built-in browser for mods, and support for many existing mods that previously required a different version of the game. Basically, lots of good fan-made mods are now playable on the Steam version of ye olde Doom. That's neat! Ah, but there is some demon excrement on the health pack, so to speak. The mod browser lacks moderation and lets people upload the work of others with their own name pinned as the author. That's prompted one level designer to call it "a massive breach of trust and violation of norms the Doom community has done its best to hold to for those 30 years."
]]>Did The Gentlebros come up with the pun "Pi-Rats" and then work backwards from there in deciding that Cat Quest 3 should be pirate themed? Or was "Purr-ibean" the initiating pun? I feel that the action-RPG sequel had to begin with one of wordplay or another, given that its Steam page boasts that it also has "furr-ocious spells" and "gla-meow-rous costumes".
It's also claws-out now on Steam, which has me feline fine.
]]>I've never learned to drive, but every so often a well-meaning friend tells me I'd be good at it, because 'look, Edwin, you play all those driving games, surely they've taught you the basics'. Friend, here is what driving games have taught me: traffic lights are there for regional flavour; drifting is the same thing as cornering; other cars exist to serve as bumper cushions when overshooting a turn. Certainly, nobody wants a guy whose ideas about automobiles come from 2018's Wreckfest to be involved in the school run. On which note: THQ Nordic have just announced Wreckfest 2 - a fresh helping of destruction derby with fancified visuals and newly animate drivers who flinch and gesticulate when other drivers smash into them. Witness the carnage in the announcement trailer below.
]]>Hey, remember that 2017 roguelike called Midboss? Or that 2020 platformer called Super Bernie World, where you attempt to transform the US as a retro-fied Bernie Sanders? Yes or no, Kitsune Games have put out some good stuff in the past, and now they're back with a Super Bernie World followup: Kitsune Tails. Again, it's a Super Mario-inspired platformer, but this time it's a wonderfully queer rescue mission inspired by Japanese mythology in a way that's cutesy and colourful. And it's out today!
]]>I don't think I'm capable of rivalling Nic's enthusiasm for Promise Mascot Agency, the new open world game from Paradise Killer devs Kaizen Game Works, so I'll settle for saying "EEEEE". The developers have just released a nine-minute explainer video, which teems with scenes of gimp suits, winged vans, rocket-propelled pinkies, vicious card battles against small excited dogs, and a surprisingly in-depth management component. There are bits that make me think of Batman: Arkham City, and bits that make me think of Pathologic, and bits that make me think of Yakuza - a combination fit to burst the brain. Quick, before your brain bursts, watch the video for yourself below.
]]>Overwatch 2 director Aaron Keller has posted a lengthy blog on Steam about the transition from 6v6 player matches in the first Overwatch to 5v5 in the poorly received free-to-play sequel. It's a juicy read for armchair designers and lapsed Overwatchers like myself, packing in analysis of class roles and the shift from the free choice of heroes to single hero picks and enforced team compositions.
In broad strokes, Keller summarises how the Overwatch experience has drifted away from "player freedom and creativity in order to create a more balanced, consistent and competitive experience for players". It's possible, however, that Overwatch 2 will swing back in the other direction, as Blizzard are now "exploring how we can test different forms of 6v6 in the game to gauge the results", with a view to restoring some of the joyful chaos that saw entire teams of Reinhardts charging the objective in formation.
]]>A time capsule is a boxful of objects from today's world, buried or otherwise hidden away so that people from the future can rediscover and understand current Hot Trends such as wearing mismatched socks or electing washed-up businessmen with fascist tendencies. Unless, that is, it's a time capsule in sci-fi ocean survival game Subnautica, in which case it contains: THE FUTURE. Developers Unknown Worlds have been sneaking pictures of the forthcoming Subnautica 2 into the original game's time capsules, offering glimpses of its flora and fauna.
]]>The story of Mortal Kombat games in recent years has been a mish-mash of double-crosses, weird friendships, and alternate dimension wobbles. They often feel like a casualty of Marvel movie bloat. Mortal Kombat 1 was marketed as a "reboot", for example, but is really just a continuation of previous nonsense, with developers NetherRealm saying "I don't know, stick a multiverse in it." Yet from that multiverse now arrives another bad guy, bringing new story chapters for the fighting game's first big expansion, as well as extra characters like the liquid metal murderer from Terminator 2, a Conan of the barbarian persuasion, and the masked killer of the Scream movies.
]]>I keep seeing those adverts for that Ray-Ban and Meta collaboration, where like, they're smart glasses that let you browse the web with your eyes? Anyway, yeah, they don't appeal to me at all. Not as much as "Dateviator" glasses, which come courtesy of Sassy Chap Games and their upcoming dating sim Date Everything! As the title suggests: you date everything, from kitchen sponges to lampshades, as they morph into absolute fitties once you've donned the special specs. It looks incredibly dumb but in the best possible way.
]]>Apex Legends developers Respawn Entertainment have announced that poorly-received plans to overhaul the battle royale's Premium Battle Pass will be partially walked back. Most crucially, the new passes – set to launch alongside the upcoming Season 22 in August – will no longer be sold exclusively for real-world cash; as with previous BPs, players will still be able to buy them with accumulated in-game currency.
]]>Arranger is a puzzle game about moving, in both metaphorical and literal senses. Movement is the entire basis for the puzzles in Arranger, and is hard to explain without showing you (if you're able to watch the trailer that will be helpful). The world of Arranger is divided into a grid, and you don't move the main character, feisty misfit kid Jemma, across the squares. Rather, imagine that the row or column Jemma is on becomes a travelator, and you control the direction and speed of it. Jemma stands still and you move the ground, and anything on it left, right, up or down - like How To Say Goodbye but with more squares. It's one of those things that makes sense when you're doing it, trust me.
]]>Steve Sinclair, CEO of Warframe studio Digital Extremes, reckons publishers should give live service games more time to find their footing, and not see dodgy release periods as a "make or break" indicator of a game’s success. "It comes out, doesn’t work and they throw it away," Sinclair told VGC.
]]>Devolver have just announced Forestrike, a 2D kung-fu game where you're not smashing buttons in a beat 'em up format. Instead, you use your supernatural time-bending abilities to tactically dispatch goons in a roguelike bash through increasingly difficult levels. It looks like a mixture of things: Sifu, Katana Zero, Aesthetically Cool Stuff In General.
]]>Here is an incomplete list of people, creatures or things that susceptible Terrans have glimpsed in the surface of the Moon: an old man, a rabbit, a crow, a moose, a toad, and King Mohamed V of Morocco. The technical term for this is "lunar pareidolia", which would have been a good alternative title for To The Stars, a spooky and spry "planet-hopping" strategy game in which the planets pout and grimace at you constantly, like a nestful of horrible baby sparrows.
]]>An Unreal Engine developer has got classic Doom running in Fortnite, in a manner of speaking broad enough to justify a series of headlines about it, including my own. Jackson Clayton honoured the proud tradition of getting the 1993 FPS to run on things where no Doom should be by porting classic opening stage E1M1, via level editor Ultimate Doom Builder, into Fortnite’s Unreal editor as a 3D model. Welcome, newcomer Fortnite, to the vaunted halls currently occupied by gut bacteria, jar-grown rat neurons, lawnmowers, teletext, electric toothbrushes, Windows notepad (sort of), and a pregnancy test.
]]>Ever since the hat was invented by Valve Corporation in 2009, mankind has grappled with questions of fairness, worthiness, and pride – at least as they pertain to microtransations in free-to-play games. Shooty battle royale Apex Legends is the latest to posit an answer, that being "the Battle Pass should cost more money".
]]>Can you believe we didn't have a best JRPG list until now? Baffling. To be fair we did once tackle this topic with a preliminary blast of recommendations for those completely new to the genre. We also have a few familiar fantasys in our list of the 50 best RPGs on PC. But until now we haven't addressed the genre in its own right. In an act of contrition, we offer you this: our list of the best JRPGs you can play on PC this year, according to our own tastes.
]]>It’s been a good while since we last got a proper Transformers video game, with the four years since the XCOM-ish Transformers: Battlegrounds in 2020 only seeing long-in-the-works MMO Transformers Online finally biting the dust. That’s about to change, with the reveal of a curious new combination of racer and roguelike starring the robots in disguise.
]]>We've all seen it. The little spinning symbol cautioning players against impatient acts of powering down. "Don't turn off your system when this symbol is displayed," goes the message seen often while booting up a game (or some other version of these words). The implication is clear. The saving process is delicate and if you interrupt this invisible ritual the data that's being written to some folder deep in your PC's innards will become corrupted, wrecked, banjaxed. You will lose all your progress, all your precious swords and accomplishments.
But is this true? How likely are you to really suffer a catastrophic loss of shotgun shells? To find out, I decided to spend a very annoying afternoon of turning my gaming rig off and on again during multiple games. Was this a good idea? I don't know. I'm a gamer, not an ideas man.
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