"We are a people who honour democracy," said the dog, scratching himself. "Per our custom, you may drink of our fresh water." The dog was called Senator Umeshefaat, and he was very civil, even if he was shedding his black and white fur everywhere. We spoke in his home village at dawn. Later, I examined the senator's personal history more thoroughly and discovered he was "hated by bears for cooking them a rancid meal." I suppose every politician has their enemies.
That Caves Of Qud creates fun anecdotes out of simple encounters shouldn't be a surprise. It has had 15 years of early access to establish itself as a small-but-mighty story generating roguelike of repute (there's a reason it sits deservedly side-by-side with Dwarf Fortress in the same publishing house). After creating many characters, and dying and dying and dying again, I understand why it grips the brain with such fierce glee. It is a machine of grand imagination and adventuresome comedy. A deceptively powerful RPG that isn't half as obtuse to newcomers as the screenshots make it out to be. Qud's low-res bark is just a complement to its bite.
]]>While Mechabellum’s disparate roster of roast ’em riddle ‘em robots might initially seem to lack the characterful coherence of a writhing Zerg ecosystem or ancient Greek phalanx, this strategy autobattler’s array of lumbering tanks, hulking automata, and zippy fliers do share a common thread: each one of them has the potential to be either the most terrifying nuisance on the field, or to instantly crumble like a soggy strudel in an angry washing machine. With each mech able to become another mech's worse nightmare, it becomes a game about stretching tight budgets to balance reactive counters with devastating offensives; about identifying the butterfly wings that can send tornados through your opponent’s ranks. It’s about the moments that eat up the hours like nothing else.
]]>It’s tempting to frame Straftat as a throwback to an older, better time for the multiplayer FPS, when the lingo was coded in frags and gibs and sucking it down, when satisfaction was drawn entirely from performance rather than some convoluted, artificial system of progression. Not only would this be inaccurate, but it would also do a disservice to what Straftat truly is, namely a wild overcorrection in response to the direction of modern multiplayer gunfests, one that careens straight through retro stations to arrive somewhere new and exciting.
]]>Like a samurai poised patiently for an opening in their opponent’s defences, Shogun Showdown understands that focus and finesse are the means to delivering an impactful blow. This rare roguelike distils the genre down to its purest components, all in favour of amplifying its dizzying combat that plays gracefully with the concepts of positioning and patience. Highly refined, stylish and complex, Shogun Showdown is a delight.
]]>For years, a dangerous and charismatic game has evaded the grasp of many designers. Some say it doesn't exist, that no publisher would ever back it. I'm talking about the one city block RPG that Warren Spector has often mentioned. Sure, we've seen a few usual suspects already - Deus Ex Mankind Divided, Disco Elysium, even Else: Heart.Break - they all grimace in the line-up but nothing ever sticks. Now, out of the gloom of indie development, comes another perp ready to have his mugshot taken. Shadows Of Doubt is an open world detective sim that comes perilously close to being our guy. Its clothes, stature, gait, and fingerprints match the description of what Spector often describes. And yet, if you tilt your head, something is just a little off. The game isn't confined to one block. It's not an RPG precisely. And its simulation has plenty of bugs, jank, and unintentional comedy. But after all this time, in the absence of a smoking gun, shouldn't we just put this guy in the slammer and call the case closed? I say yes, let's. Officers! Arrest this game, it's brilliant.
]]>I am lost in my own factory. From every direction, every angle, conveyor belts and smelters and assemblers obscure my senses and envelop my being. Twenty hours ago I placed my first manufacturer somewhere around here. Back then it represented the state of the art, hatching me a pristine batch of 1.25 computers every minute - now I’ve forgotten where I put the damn thing, after delving into my factory’s guts to hook that piddly yet still useful batch of old relics up to my main production line. I’m building supercomputers now, and the many manufacturers that make those are hungry.
Something is always hungry in Satisfactory, and that hunger pulls you from task to task in a near-seamless and frankly beautiful daze of ever-escalating industry. It is mesmerising and it is fearsome, and after five years of early access it’s finally complete.
]]>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.
]]>Tactical Breach Wizards is a tactics game for people that don’t like tactics games. Magically, it’s also a tactics game for people who love them like nothing else. It’s permissive and demanding; playful and tense. Its globe-spanning plot covers conspiracies, PMCs, and brutal theocratic dictatorships. It also features a traffic-summoning warlock named Steve wearing a hi-vis robe. It’s finding that one absolutely, perfectly ridiculous XCOM turn, every turn…and at the same time knowing it’s absolutely, perfectly fine if you don’t. In short: it’s one of the most enjoyable tactics games I’ve ever played, and the only tactics game with a pyromancer so rubbish he relies on making his enemies pass out from heatstroke.
]]>Usually when a game makes me want to stop playing and go outside it’s a bad sign, but with Dungeons of Hinterberg it’s different. It’s an action RPG that made me pine for the outdoors and want to be whisked away from all my responsibilities and just exist for a bit. Each time I would finish playing I’d be thinking about my next getaway, and although dungeon delving wouldn’t be on my holiday itinerary Dungeons of Hinterberg is making me think twice.
]]>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.
]]>Chaos and comedy. Death and rebirth. Luck and, uh, running out of luck. A good roguelike doesn't treat the player like other games do. Roguelikes won't guide you helpfully along a path, or let you cinematically snatch victory from the jaws of defeat. They're more likely to dangle you deep between the jaws of defeat and fumble the rope until you go sliding down defeat's hungry gullet. This is their beauty, and it's a part of why we keep coming back for another go. Next time everything will go right. Next time you'll find the right pair of poison-proof loafers, the perfect co-pilot for your spaceship, a stash of stronger, better ropes. Next time.
Here's our list of the 19 best roguelikes on PC you can play in 2024.
]]>If nothing else, Workers & Resources Colon Soviet Republic will give anyone an appreciation of the incredible complexity and difficulty of building and maintaining a city. On another day I might call it the first ever city building game.
Even a Settlers or Factorio cannot match its extreme focus on logistical simulation. It isn't realism for its own sake (look no further than the automated vehicles and the ludicrous citizen behaviour to refute that), but a fundamentally different interpretation of what city building means. It's about co-ordinating all your pieces so they'll be in the right place to support each other, and how the whole is all that matters, but that whole will fail if you don't organise its parts. It is… a lot. It's too much at times. But if you have those times, it will occupy them like nothing else.
]]>Hauntii sets the scene with a rather magical opening sequence. A beam of light shoots out of a mysterious planet and a zoom in reveals the beam to be an asteroid, but not just any asteroid: a crystal shaped like a teardrop, with a little ghost nestled inside. You awaken as this little ghost, who it turns out, has crash landed in Eternity (and who, it turns out, is called Hauntii). Soon you bump into a ghostly girl, who guides you to a tower that thrusts you both up to a higher plane - but though she ascends, you're dragged back to the bottom at the last moment by some netherworldly chains. And so, as Hauntii you travel through Eternity to discover who that girl was and, ultimately, how to ascend to those heavenly skies yourself.
]]>Computers have always been animal wells, in a sense. They're havens for creatures of many shapes and degrees of literalness, all the way down to the metal. As in ecologies at large, the most abundant and widespread are probably the bugs, beginning with the moth that flew into that Harvard Mark II in 1947 and ending with the teeming contents of the average free-to-play changelog. A little further up the food chain we find "worms", like the Creeper that once invaded the ARPANET, and "gophers", a directory/client system written in 1991 for the University of Minnesota. There are computer animals spawned by branding - foxes of fire and twittering birds and the anonymous beasts that haunt the margins of Google documents. There are computer animals that are implied by the verbs we use in computing - take "browser", derived from the old French word for nibbling at buds and sprouts, which suggests that all modern internet searches are innately herbivorous.
]]>Botany Manor is a game that seems calculated to make me sit up on alert like a meerkat, or crash through a wall yelling like that sentient jug mascot (I am not from America, I just know he exists). It's a puzzle game about growing plants. Holy Strange Horticulture, Batman! But Botany Manor is much less eldritch, and much more gentle historical feel-good movie starring Emma Thompson in the lead role. That role - which in this case is played by you in first person rather than La Thompson - is of Arabella Greene, a retired botanist who, thank God, is the childless inheritor of a huge manor and ancestral wealth, and so is able to spend the sunny days of 1890 pottering around the house and grounds researching weird, slightly fantastical plants almost wholly untroubled. So in this respect it is also a fantasy game. It's quite delightful, which is the sort of phrase I am confident Arabella would use.
]]>Like the good works of Calvin Klein, these genes come pre-distressed. Geneforge 2 - Infestation is fresh from the rack, yet looks and functions like the CRPGs of the late 1990s. Where most isometric throwbacks these days offer a forced perspective over 3D scenes, Geneforge 2 is the real deal - its flat character sprites gliding across tiled backgrounds, with the elegant shuffle of Shōgun-era ladies-in-waiting.
This look is less a nostalgic affectation than it is simply practical. Geneforge 2, like all of Jeff Vogel’s games, was made in the spare bedroom of his Seattle home with the help of his wife, Mariann Krizsan - plus a handful of artists spread more broadly. It’s the latest in a long line of low-budget Spiderweb Software RPGs to achieve sprawling scale and reactivity by leaning on cost-effective and old-fashioned production values. Here there is no voice acting, nor any ambient noise that cannot be sourced from royalty-free soundbanks. In pastoral areas of the map, the impression of grazing livestock is conveyed entirely through a free sound effect called ‘Eating a rusk.wav’.
]]>Just when you thought it was safe to go back to the post-apocalyptic wilderness, the giant dinosaur robots return. In fact, they never left! Go-gettin', arrow-shootin' warrior Aloy managed to delay the end of the world in Horizon Zero Dawn, but the death train is still chugging along to all life on Earth station via a (currently resonant) eco-disaster. In Horizon Forbidden West it's because the AI created to heal the planet from the prior extinction event caused by humans isn't working properly. Gaia, said AI, has been turned off and split into different parts, so yours and Aloy's job sequel is to, firstly, reboot Gaia, and secondly collect all these subordinate functions. But nobody turned off the making robots button, which means this action RPG in a massive open-world still involves fighting rocket-launcher T-rexes. It'll shock no one that this makes for a very good video game.
]]>There's a particular boss encounter in Balatro that always feels like it's cheating a bit. In this mesmerising poker roguelike, each stage is made up of three blinds - small, big and boss - with the blind essentially being a high score you have to hit by playing different kinds of poker hands - your traditional flushes, straights, pairs and so on. Each hand has its own number of chips and multiplier bonuses associated with it, and Balatro's whole deal is about shuffling closer to victory by making the most of the cards you're dealt. While some blinds are tiny, stretching to just 300 or 450 early on in a run, they quickly start ramping up into the tens of thousands as each successfully defeated boss blind ups the ante and the accompanying stakes. Reach an ante of eight, and bingo, you've won a run of Balatro.
The boss blind I keep coming a cropper with, though, is The Flint. This sucker not only halves a hand's chip score, but it also cuts its multiplier in two as well, and I've yet to figure out exactly how to defeat it. Sometimes it appears with a blind of just 600, but other times it's been an enormous 22,000. In fairness, all bosses have little tricks like this. Some will debuff certain card suites, making them useless in your overall score count. Others may only let you play one hand type the entire match, while the cheeky Tooth will deduct you $1 for every card used. But Balatro isn't simply about beating the odds with smart and intelligent card plays. It's about bending, twisting and abusing those odds to your will - also through smart and intelligent card plays. Cheating isn't just encouraged in Balatro. It's damn near mandatory, and it's all thanks to the brilliantly conceived joker cards that give the game its Latin-based name.
]]>Helldivers 2 is a third-person co-op shooter that's centred as much around action as it is comedy. Gigantic insects and red-eyed robots threaten the sanctity of Super Earth and, frankly, this isn't on. As a Helldiver, you must team up with your compatriots and pulverise these menaces for freedom (a shoulder-mounted laser cannon) and democracy (an aerial bombardment). Seriousness is reserved for the act of extermination, which adds tactility to the familiar motions of a shooter, making for horde management that promotes efficiency and frequent lapses of judgement in equal measure. Helldivers 2 is a slapstick masterpiece.
]]>"Banishers took a while to kick in," I wrote in the RPS group chat last week, "but I fought a monster made of angry witch-hunting jam last night." It was a pivotal boss fight about half way through Don't Nod's ghost hunting action-adventure RPG Banishers: Ghosts Of New Eden, and typical of the over-the-top, slightly ridiculous, but entirely earnest drama of the game that joyfully pulls you along. Don't Nod - who I am starting to suspect make their magic teen angsthologies to fund their real passion for "grimdark grown-up fantasy that you sort of suspect should be a book series" - have followed up 2018's third-person action effort Vampyr with this new semi-epic.
Banishers has a lot in common with the interwar bloodsucker, including methodical investigations and stacking moral choices, but is a much more accomplished effort. Banishers combines a sweeping, tragic love story with some very decent swashbuckling, shooting possessed skeletons in the face, and being disappointed at Puritans. A perfect game, some may say. I'd elevator-pitch it to you as a sort of goth Uncharted where you find-and-replace "treasure" with "ghosts".
]]>Yakuza: Like A Dragon was a brilliant foray into turn-based chaos, but some of its RPG elements didn't quite lead anywhere. Well, in swaggers the frankly ginormous Like A Dragon: Infinite Wealth to tie off the loose ends and give us a follow-up that links all the best bits of Yakuza into a far more satisfying reward loop. Some of the refinements make for superb silliness, while others are a bit eh - not everything is perfect. But spending time with Ichiban and his pals in the sun-soaked Hawaii and beyond is the real treat. It's a wonderful, happy JRPG and it will never fail to brighten my day. Thank goodness for Yakuza.
]]>As Prince Of Persia subtitles go, The Lost Crown is certainly an evocative one. It conjures up images of forgotten pasts being rediscovered, of wrongs being righted, and power being restored to its rightful balance. They're all promises that Ubisoft Montpellier capably deliver on over the course of its neatly plotted story, and often in more ways than one. But after flinging its hero warrior Sargon around the monster-filled streets of its Mount Qaf citadel for the better part of 20 hours, I'd also like to proffer the following alternatives: Pit Of A Thousand Spikes; The Eternal Death Wheels Of Spinning Blades; or maybe just simply Traps: The Game. These are perhaps more accurate descriptions of the challenges you'll face in The Lost Crown, as Mount Qaf is not a place you're allowed to tread lightly. Death stalks every corner, but that's precisely what makes this dextrously designed Metroid-like such a thrilling platformer. Put away your prejudices, because this is easily the equal of both Moon Studios' pair of Ori games, Hollow Knight and its Metroid genre namesakes.
]]>Cor, there's been a lot of games this year, haven't there? While I've only slapped one Bestest Best badge down in 2023 (woe is me), our lovely freelancers, current RPSers, and former RPSers have done a whole lot more badge-slapping. A grand total of 26 Bestest Bests have graced our monitors this year, which makes it three more than last year's Bestest Best round-up. And I'd say it's a nice mixture of big budget open worlders, puzzle gems, and indie delights that make up our roster for 2023, too.
So yeah, I'd encourage you to have a flick through the list below and see if there's anything you can add to the wishlist. Even as the person with "Reviews" in their job title, I can confirm I literally have loads of these Bestest Bests in my backlog. I will endeavour to play a handful over this Christmas break on my Steam Deck, maybe combining the experience with a nibble on a mince pie. Anyway, enjoy! And Merry Reviewsmas!
]]>At last, every door on the RPS Advent Calendar has been ripped open, leaving nothing but foil wrapper remnants, and the odd pixel crumb of the digital delights once contained within them. But that doesn't festivities are over! Like a Boxing Day bubble and squeak, we've gathered together all of our favourite games of the year once again, this time in one handy location. If you've been following along with our Advent goings-on, you'll already know what our game of the year picks are for 2023, but just in case you missed them, here's the list in full. Enjoy!
]]>Following two years in early access, roguelite citybuilder Against The Storm has finally reached its 1.0 milestone. It’s a combination of genres that seem to pair together as naturally as sausages and strawberry jam. Don’t get me wrong, I’m a fan of both of these things as separate entities, but together? My assumption was that they would prove too strange to stomach, but much like the cursed pork and berry snack that became a staple of my university diet, the result is a thrilling concoction that delights the palette. I’ll say it right up top: Against The Storm is one of this year’s best.
]]>Early on in The Talos Principle 2, one of your soon-to-be robot pals says to you with a completely straight face, "We're here to solve this puzzle, not to discuss philosophy." I can almost see Croteam's writing team now, chuckling inwardly to themselves as they do a big silent wink to camera from behind the robot's eyes. You're not fooling me, Croteam. I'm here to solve puzzles and discuss philosophy, and I know you are too. You can't stop talking about philosophy in this game, and frankly, I wouldn't have it any other way.
Millenia may have passed since the events of The Talos Principle, but the problems faced by this new society of advanced robo-humans (of which you are number 1000 to be 'born' into this world) still feel all too relevant to the issues posed by the lives we're living today: what is the price of progress? Will we ignore the mistakes of the past and push the world toward irreparable destruction? And why have cats remained loyal to this new race of robo-people, cementing their status as the superior future pet, when dogs have devolved back into vicious wolves? There are some puzzles too, I guess. Those are pretty great as well.
]]>Jusant is all show, no tell, which is a bold swing. Video game characters aren't often big on show don't tell in 2023. A lot of them have been cursed by their creators to narrate everything they do, as they do it, incase the meatsacks controlling them are unable to parse even one second of what is happening on screen without direction. I love HZD's Aloy, but does she ever just stream-of-consciousness her way through life.
In contrast, the nameless protagonist in Don't Nod's new climbing puzzle adventure (what even are genres?) is also silent. There are no other NPCs. You are climbing up through the ruins of an old civilisation. As such, Jusant relies on the devs having crafted an understandable world that you can barely interact with, aside from painstakingly climbing across it like a spidery archaeologist. You've got to have faith in your environmental storytelling if you're making a game like that. And Don't Nod have nailed it.
]]>Being as much of an insufferable, online-but-ultimately-in-quite-a-basic-way person as I am, I'm a Junji Ito girlie. The horror manga artist has an immediately recognisable style that intersects detailed, line heavy art with strange and upsetting concepts, and some of his short stories have acquired a sort of semi-memetic status ("This is my hole! It was made for me!"). If you're at all familiar with Junji Ito's work you will look at unforgiving almost-text-adventure World Of Horror and go "Huh, that's inspired by Junji Ito."
This isn't just because it looks like his work but rendered in MSPaint, or because it contains, just, direct references to it, but because of the whole vibe. You encounter face-sloughing-off kinds of monsters and vengeful spirits inspired by Japanese folkloric yokai, but also weirdo janitors doing stuff like turning the swim team into mermaids in a kind of pervier version of Tusk. At the same time, there's a streak of the Lovecraftian in play to keep it nice and legally distinct, as each self-contained run at the titular world is an attempt to save your town from destruction at the hands of an Old God (they earn the leaden thud of the capital letters). You will fail a lot. But isn't failure part of the fun!? Imagine that enthusiastic question as a big spoonful of marmite popped into your mouth.
]]>Let me put you at ease. Endless Dungeon is a very splashy, confidently clever roguelike about spannering turrets, hosing bullets, and popping bugs like angry little pimples. It sounds disgusting when I type it out loud like that, so let's pivot to the reliable food analogy. It is a delicious game, a hearty stew. A tasty one-more-go-er, perfectly suited to serving up in these dreary autumn months. There. Now that you've been pacified by the imagery of a steaming bowl of pleasing dungeon gumbo, you will forgive the 400 words I have written below about doors.
]]>Even if you're not running after members of the royal family with a camera strapped to your big posh noggin, I think basically everyone loves trains, being as they are big magical people movers that can chugga-chug you over an entire country. And not just people! As represented in the lovely voxel maps of puzzle game Station To Station, trains carry freight. Cheese, furniture, steel girders - everything a growing city needs! Laying the rails that connect all of your production chains is, as the UK government will no doubt be quick to tell you, an often-complex affair. But when you get it right in Station To Station you're rewarded by an already beautiful game becoming prettier.
]]>Cocoon is a puzzler where worlds are contained within orbs, and it's your job to unpick puzzles with your ability to hop in and out of them, as well as carry them on your back. While it might sound complex, the worlds these orbs contain steer you carefully towards a clear goal every time: solve the problem, then grab your orb on the way out. Before you know it, you're carrying orbs within orbs and you're unravelling a cosmic mystery where the floor might be a biomechanical stingray or the path forward a spinal cord composed of ferns. I am convinced everyone should spring to action and hoist an orb on their shoulders. I couldn't put mine down.
]]>Cyberpunk 2077's triumph was that it offered a sprawling story, dozens of hours long, which cohered around just a small number of themes. Or maybe even a single thesis: that the cynical, defensive, self-centred voice in your head - personified by ancient, soul-trapped, anarcho-rockstar Johnny Silverhand - offered only a literal dead-end, and that real rebellion in the face of a messed-up world lay in helping friends. It was Frank Capra with robot arms and samurai swords, and I ate it up.
V doesn't go to Washington in Phantom Liberty, but Washington comes to her. CD Projekt Red's major expansion to the first-person RPG opens up a new district and a new cast of characters, including the President of the New United States and an aging sleeper spy played by Idris Elba. The themes remain the same, but the thesis is being tested: how can you help your friends if you don't know who they are, and if their goals are mutually exclusive?
]]>It's hard to know where to start with Six Ages 2 Colon Lights Going Out. The initial uncertainty and esoteric nature of its world has always been the series' biggest problem, as it appears to demand a lot of foreknowledge to play. But rather than memorising facts and (ugh) "lore", it's a series that encourages a different mindset to pretty much any other game. These games are about culture and myth, and how both interact and change over time.
It's harder, though, to write about this entry without just repeating myself. It is a Part Two of a planned three, thus much the same as before, yet different in some interesting, but esoteric ways. Do I try to convince the unfamiliar, detail those differences for fans, or try to cover both and succeed in neither?
]]>Winding back the clock to rewrite past mistakes is a core stratagem of any Mimimi game. Baldur's Gate 3 might have rekindled the debate about save-scumming over in RPG circles, but in the stealth strategy arena where Mimimi operate, reaching for the F5 and F8 keys to quick load a previous save is as natural as swapping between your party members on 123, or activating their unique abilities to clobber all manner of unsuspecting guards on the back of the head with ASD and F.
In their latest real-time tactics-me-do Shadow Gambit: The Cursed Crew, however, the act of quick saving has been woven directly into the language of the game, presented not as cold, hard button commands, but as 'captured memories' that your magical ghost ship The Red Marley is able to unleash to make sure your supernatural pirate crew don't get caught or die (again) on the job.
]]>It's possible you've already played some of Baldur's Gate 3, with Larian Studios having had their massive fantasy RPG in a successful early access for just under three years. It's very good. But if you're one of the many who haven't, the premise is thus: an ancient evil has, as ancient evil is wont to do, arisen once more to threaten the great walled city of Baldur's Gate, and by extension the surrounds, and by further extension the world and all the deep gnomes, elves and sexy demon wizards therein. Through happenstance and literal brainworms, you and the band of strange adventurers you meet in the first act are the only ones who can save the day. Don't worry, you don't need to remember or have played Baldur's Gate 1 or 2. So. Off you go, then.
]]>As people of a certain age will know, the current, slow-moving death of Twitter is nothing we haven't seen before. Most of us who were knocking around the internet in the early 00s will have at least one online gravestone in the closet somewhere, whether it's a long abandoned LiveJournal or MySpace page, or an old internet forum that sadly doesn't exist anymore (RPS in peace). But for the citizens of Videoverse, an online community that's part and parcel of the soon to be defunct 1-bit video games console the Kinmoku Shark, this sense of an ending is something that many of them aren't equipped to deal with, least of all teenager Emmett, who's just discovered the fan page for his favourite video game, Feudal Fantasy.
As he deals with the prospect of having to bid farewell to friends old and new, including the mysterious but talented fan artist Vivi, Videoverse taps into a potent and nostalgic melancholy. It's a love letter to the early internet at its rose-tinted best, and to the lost, formative spaces that brought so many like-minded individuals together and gave them a sense of purpose. Yes, there are trolls spoiling everyone's fun, and yes, there's a hint of something more nefarious going on underneath Videoverse's source code. But another Hypnospace Outlaw this is not. Rather, this is a proto-internet tale that's all about the friendships we form online, and the bonds that carry us forward when real-life relationships just don't cut it anymore.
]]>I can't remember the last time I struggled so much to get through a game.
You misunderstand. I'm not saying ΔV: Rings Of Saturn is a chore or grind. I found it hard because any time I boot it up, I can get lost for hours just playing it. Not trying to win, not following the story, not looking for (ugh) "progression". Just mining, exploring, idly drifting through the void. It is a game I don't want to exhaust because I'm enjoying it too much. I went back in "for a quick dive" twice during this intro.
It doesn't have Content. It's not one of those compulsive, manipulative forever games. You could barge efficiently through it, finding probably all its secrets and items as fast as possible. That wouldn't be wrong, exactly, but it's missing the point: this is a game to be savoured, not consumed.
]]>Remnant II has a lot of moments that will make you say things not appropriate for children’s ears. Then again, given the mild horror themes in many of the levels and the general terror the excellent enemy design invokes, you probably shouldn’t be playing it around kids in the first place. As a fan of this sequel’s predecessor, Remnant: From The Ashes, I had my hopes set unreasonably high, and not only has Remnant II completely met my expectations, but it also kept messing around with what I thought I should be expecting. It left me in a constant state of awe. This is a furiously ambitious follow-up and has everything I could have ever wanted.
]]>I never thought I'd hear the words 'roguelite' and 'Minesweeper' together in the same sentence but here we are. Let's! Revolution! is a joyous mix of both Minesweeper and a roguelite, tasking players with hunting down a deliciously repugnant king through a series of increasingly complex tile maps to enact their titular coup. With all tiles facing down on arrival, you'll need to hop from square to square to flip them over and reveal the king's hiding place before progressing to the next level. But with several of his royal agents stalking the roads and highways, you'll need to choose your route carefully, making good use of your character's unique set of skills to arrive at your final destination of Beebom City. That, and employing a bit of the old Minesweeper noggin, of course.
You see, tiles come in two types in Let's! Revolution! The aforementioned road tiles, and surrounding landscape tiles. The latter all have numbers denoting how many road tiles surround it, giving you just enough information to build up a picture of where the road (and the king's lackeys) might be lurking. Take care, though. This lot are a tricksy bunch, and can quite quickly overwhelm if they're revealed too soon and all at once. That's Let's! Revolution! in a nutshell, at least, but the real joy of this run-based rogue comes from its gorgeous presentation and its brilliantly conceived character classes that twist and mould its basic building blocks into fresh new forms each and every time. It's great fun, and I can't get enough of it.
]]>In Viewfinder, you solve puzzles by figuring out the right way of looking at things, and you do that here by both physically moving around its abstract 3D spaces, and by mentally wrapping your brain around its mind-bending rule set. Perspective is key because here's the thing: this is a world where you can bring photos to life, the 2D image becoming a 3D reality when you place it within the puzzle world.
It's an incredible hook and one which I've never seen in a puzzle game before. There are echoes of The Witness, Gorogoa, and Superliminal here, but Viewfinder's dizzyingly mind-melting puzzles are still very much its own. It impresses from the get-go and continues to pull tricks out of its silky tophat right until the end of its four hour run time. It's compact, brilliant, and one of the best puzzle games of 2023.
]]>Over a decade on from its Nintendo DS release, there's still nothing quite like Ghost Trick. In this smart murder mystery detective game from the creator of Ace Attorney, you play the recently deceased amnesiac Sissel as he attempts to piece together his own demise. Who killed him? And why? And what's the deal with these newfound powers he has to turn back time and manipulate inanimate objects in his vicinity? That definitely wasn't in the ghostbusting 101 manual. Alas, he doesn't have long to find out, as he'll cross over to the afterlife in the morning. Thus begins a frantic night of whodunnit puzzling at its finest, with director Shu Takumi showing us exactly what he's made of outside the courtroom dramas he built his name on.
]]>Sometime before SHODAN’s ethical constraints were removed and the rogue AI set about converting the people of Citadel Station into cyborgs, a researcher named Stacy Everson found a smoking gun hidden among the blinking servers of the spaceship’s library. Not an assault rifle or mini-pistol, but a decades-old email chain between her TriOptimum bosses and a psychologist named Jeffrey Hammer. In the early stages of Citadel’s construction, Hammer suggested that each level of the station be designed in such a way as to induce stress and anxiety, so that experts could study their impact on the human psyche during space travel.
“I always knew something was off about this place!”, wrote Stacy to a colleague. “We are just rats in a maze.”
]]>Our list of the best open world games on PC is for those who look at a forest and think about seeing what's in the middle. For the players who really do want to climb that mountain. Sure, the size of games these days means in some sense they all have an open world, but here we're leaning in to those games that want you to adventure, where the onus is on exploring and seeing what you find. These are the games where part of the destination really is the journey, and you can tell the devs wanted you to stop and look around every so often to see what you could find. They might not be for everyone, but if you're the sort of person who likes getting lost in a game for a long time, then these open world games will help you do that.
]]>The Legend Of Zelda has always been one of my personal favourite series over the years, but being a Nintendo game, it's obviously never graced the PC in any kind of official capacity. But while we may never get to play a mainline Zelda game on PC, there's no denying it's inspired countless other developers to have a stab at it themselves, hence why we've put together this list of the best PC games like Zelda you can play right now. Whether you're looking to scratch that Tears Of The Kingdom itch or get stuck into something more retro-facing like A Link To The Past, we've got you covered. These are the best Zelda-likes on PC we'd recommend playing today.
]]>Something terrible lurks beneath the waves in Dredge. Actually, scratch that. There are a lot of terrible things that call the oceans of The Marrows home in this melancholy fishing adventure, but what they are, I couldn't possibly tell you. In all my hours sailing these cursed waters, I've only ever seen brief flashes of them - their ungodly, slippery masses, long spiny fins, and a dozen different combinations of glowing eyes, teeth and tentacles. They're forever fading in and out of view, cloaked by the thick fog that blankets the sea every evening. Sometimes your ship lights will catch them for a split second before they slip away, or maybe you'll only hear them hurtling toward you, with a scream of a jet engine and a maw that's white hot, ready for gnashing your flimsy wooden carcass into sawdust.
It's unnerving, being out at sea after dark, but that's the time when the rarest and most vile catches raise their scaly heads. So the question becomes: are you willing to risk your own sanity for the sake of a quick buck? Or are you too afraid of what you'll find in Davy Jones' locker? In Dredge, the answer is always yes. Yes, you will be frightened of what's out there, whether it's real or born from your own fearful imaginings, but you'll sputter out into the darkness regardless, because the allure of this supernatural fishing sim is just too good to resist.
]]>After playing a short snippet of Tchia back in January for a preview, I had complete faith that developers Awaceb would deliver on their promises for their open-world adventure. Tchia’s island is a marvel to behold. Not only is it gorgeous, but it’s bursting with things to do: sailing, climbing, totem carving, gliding, pearl diving, sharpshooting, tree hopping, treasure hunting - the list goes on and on.
Not only that, but there’s a 10-hour story to follow, quests to complete, and baddies to tussle with. It's a lot, but Awaceb seem to take it all in their stride. Never once does Tchia feel like it’s bursting at the seams; its balance of activities, exploration and story make it feel perfectly whole. The game's incredible scope doesn't feel like the debut of a nine-person team, but astonishingly, it is. We've had a good run of Bestest Bests on RPS this month, and I'm more than happy to extend it because Tchia is an absolute triumph.
]]>In the run-up to its original 2005 release, Capcom was refreshingly - and publicly - clear about their intentions for Resident Evil 4. Feeling that the classic fixed-camera formula that had seen the series thrive during the 90s had grown stale, this follow-up was to be a total reinvention of survival horror as a concept. Something fresh. Dynamic. Exciting. The slate was wiped completely clean, and from that blank canvas, something exceptional was created. A game that not only redefined the franchise, but third-person action games as a whole.
For eighteen tumultuous years, Capcom has tried to surpass the success of Resident Evil 4. The fifth and sixth entries doubled down on the action to mixed results, while seven and eight focused on scares as seen from a first-person viewpoint. Meanwhile, 2019’s Resident Evil 2 remake looked to the past for its inspiration, delivering a masterful retread that blended responsive third-person combat with the exquisite production values of the series’ more modern titles. But with the release of Resident Evil 4 remake, Resident Evil has finally come full circle. Whereas the original release was a rejection of the games that came before, this remake is instead a celebration of where the series went next. Action-focused combat. Photo-realistic environments. Gooey monsters, hammy characters, ridiculous storylines. What better way to remake the highest peak of the series, than to build it upon the foundations of the very games it went on to inspire? Resident Evil 4 is a rambunctious thrill ride that is as good - if not, dare I say it, a bit better - than the original game.
]]>Heed my words, dear reader: Paranormasight: The Seven Mysteries of Honjo is best played if you go in knowing nothing about it. Zilch, zero, nada. Its twists and turns from the get-go have my brain doing mental gymnastics, not just in the game but in trying to figure out how to write around them for this review. I’m not going to spoil everything, but keeping your expectations completley wide open lets Paranormasight snake right on in and surprise you when you least expect it to.
Here’s a quick elevator pitch: Paranormasight is a Squeenix-developed horror mystery visual novel about deadly rituals, ghost stories, curses, and the occult. Its subversive approach to classic visual novel staples make its puzzles feel smart and its horror scares hit hard. If you’re a fan of the thrills found in the Danganronpa and Zero Escape games, Paranormasight is like a bite-sized version of those two behemoths. It’s short, smart, and will keep you on your toes until the end.
So yeah, if that sounds like your thing, then have at it. From here on in, I'm going to be gabbing abut it in-depth.
]]>As video game time loops go, The Wreck's endlessly repeating car crash has to be one of the worst fates to get stuck in. Sure, it's not quite as bad as 'death by exploding sun' in Outer Wilds, say, but when each crash is also accompanied by heroine Junon reliving a harrowing memory from her past that she'll need to sort through and analyse before she's able to (quite literally) move on with her life, I reckon that one-two punch of sudden physical trauma and deep, emotional soul-bearing is probably just about on par with having skin and muscle seared off your own bones by a honking great supernova. You know, figuratively speaking.
]]>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.
]]>The last thing you need when you’ve just crash-landed on an unknown planet teeming with predatory wildlife is to discover you’re also stuck in a time loop. But that’s the fate of deep-space astronaut Selene in Returnal, when she ditches her single-seater vessel on a remote rock called Atropos. Each time she falls foul of the local fauna, she pops back into existence right next to her broken ship, with no obvious means of escape. Forget Aliens vs Predator, this is Aliens vs Groundhog Day.
But what a day it is, as Returnal combines a best-in-class third-person shooter with a deep dive into the psychology of its protagonist. Selene’s journey into Atropos, through a thick jungle, a burning vermilion desert and beyond, sends her circling through a smorgasbord of emotions – from confusion to hope, despair to determination. And so often, her mood dovetails with your own highs and lows of elation and frustration, until every part of Returnal encases you in its loop.
]]>Season: A Letter To The Future begins with a goodbye. You wander around your home for the last time, choosing five objects which inspire deep memories that spur each of the five senses. You then place them into a cauldron one by one, your mother keeping a watchful eye. The ritual comes to an end and the result is a small glowing pendant that will protect you from the dangers of the outside world. “You must promise me never to take the pendant off,” your mother says. The Goodbye ritual is finished, and you leave, knowing you’ll never see your mother or your hometown ever again, all as the prophecy foretold.
It’s a fantastic - if sad - start to Season, and gets straight to the heart of the adventure ahead of you. This is a world where prayers, rituals, and prophecies hold great weight, and where you'll be exploring the fragility and fickleness of memory. Underpinning everything is a deeply profound sense of melancholy - and here I was expecting some relaxing two-wheeling through lovely-looking landscapes. Well, turns out Season is a lot more than a pretty travelogue.
]]>Indonesian studio Mojiken have been making games for years. Most of them are less than an hour long. They're short, punchy adventures and cover everything from digital fortune tellers, violin-playing owl-men, and poetic folktales about potato-shaped forest creatures.
A Space For The Unbound is Mojiken’s first 'big' release in that sense, clocking in at around nine-ish hours. What begins as a YA coming-of-age tale about a small-town romance quickly gains remarkable momentum, and suddenly you’re dealing with supernatural teens trying to desperately stop a world-ending calamity. Part sci-fi drama, part high school romance, A Space For The Unbound manages to have incredible weight and grandeur while also being poignant, sweet, and honest at the same time. It's a triumph.
]]>Who among us hasn't wished to be a cool hacker from the movies, like Hugh Jackman in Swordfish (a classic)? In real life hacking things is apparently quite dangerous and hard, but in video games we can crack the system and mutter "I'm in" under our breath as often as we want. Naturally, there have been some fabulous hacking games on PC over the years, and we've collected what we think are the cream of the crop of the best hacking games to play on PC right now.
]]>I've been looking back over an entire year of RPS reviews and, well, we've written a lot. Over the past twelve months, the RPS treehouse and our merry band of freelancers have reviewed 168 games in total - and that includes early access reviews, PC-port reviews, group reviews, reviews-in-progresses, and your common or garden fully-fledged reviews. 168! Damn. Even though game releases are still suffering from pandemic pushbacks, 2022 has been a busy year for games. There wasn't a huge number of big name releases - although the ones that did come out were plenty big enough - but, as always, we've had a wealth of wonderful indies releasing all year round, and we scooped up as many of them as we could.
Out of all the games we’ve given any kind of review treatment throughout the year, only a handful of them recieved RPS’s coveted Bestest Best badge; just 23, to be exact. I've gathered them all in one big round-up bundle below (there are round-ups of our favourite bits from other sections of the site, too), and they make a great collection of games. Have a scroll and click on any that take your fancy for the full review. Enjoy!
]]>Hello! VidBud Liam here. You may recognise me from those videos that autoplay on every page. Or not. It depends on how quickly you scroll past, I suppose.
I joined team Arpus all the way back in February, and to say the last 11 months have been a whirlwind is a bit of an understatement. In less than a year I’ve made just under 90 videos covering a wide range of topics from major releases to international gaming events and brand-new hardware. My first year at RPS has been busy, basically. So when Katharine asked me to pull together a few of my personal highlights, I was kind of stumped. It's hard to pick favourites! It's even harder to celebrate my own achievements, but that's beside the point.
]]>With all the doors on our RPS Advent Calendar well and truly busted open for 2022 now, we thought it was high time to gather all of our favourite games of the year together in one handy location. If you've been diligently scoffing our Advent treats throughout December, then you'll already know what our game of the year picks are for 2022, but just in case you missed them or want to go through them one final time, we've got 'em all right here for you in our definitive Games Of The Year list. Enjoy!
]]>At some point recently, Crocs became cool. And as someone who grew up in the "Crocs are for dweebs" era, this makes little sense to me. Crocs? Cool? These sillies must be mistaken. Thankfully, after a couple of weeks with Lil Gator Game, I finally get it. All these people weren't talking about the shoe, of course! They were talking about Lil Gator Game, which features the most loveable croc of all (please don't lecture me on the difference between alligators and crocodiles, I love them both equally).
]]>For the last ten years, the XCOM designers at Firaxis have traded in 'if's and 'maybe's. If this shot lands, then maybe I can pull off this carefully calculated plan I’m brewing. It's exactly the kind of taut, knife-edge tension we've come to love and expect from their turn-based strategy games, but Marvel's Midnight Suns takes a different approach. As the titular demon hunters join forces with some famous Avengers faces to take down the evil sorceress Lilith and Marvel mega villain Chthon, there's never any question about whether your moves will or won't work here. You're playing as the world's most powerful superheroes. Of course, they’re going to work. And forget about cowering behind knee-high cover walls, too, because if you're not already bulletproof, you've certainly got the reflexes and supercharged muscle mass to soak up anything Lilith’s Hydra minions are going to chuck at you.
Question is, by tipping the power scales in your favour like this, do you risk destroying that delicate balance of risk and reward? At first glance, it's easy to think a more reliable set of heroes would end up dulling what made Firaxis' XCOM games so special, but the result is something equally thrilling. Given how the Marvel machine has drawn in and chewed up so much singular creative talent in the wider MCUniverse, Firaxis emerging with their cred intact is nothing short of extraordinary. Not only have they endured their radioactive spider bite, they've come out bigger and better for it, creating not only the best Marvel game I've played, but one of the best superhero games full stop.
]]>Just when I thought I had my top 10 games of 2022 sorted, Obsidian release Pentiment, forcing me to shred my former list and grab my quill and ink for a rewrite. It’s an odd pairing on paper - a detective thriller about a string of grisly murders set in the quaint countryside of 16th-century Bavaria - but, surprisingly, this coupling is a match made in heaven.
Its captivating story of conspiracy and murder is as rich and dense as its setting, and it's clearly made by a passionate team who have a deep love for the period. Playing Pentiment feels like riffling through the painterly pages of a medieval manuscript, but instead of finding the written gospel of saints and sinners, there are tales of angry farmers, greedy landowners, church scandals, religious turmoil, and murder. Fundamentally though, it's a historical tale about faith and truth, and the lengths that people are willing to go to preserve them.
]]>As Replika Elster, Signalis will force you to untangle a mess of writhing flesh and malfunctioning memories to separate dream from lived experience. So, in keeping with dream logic: You’ve played Signalis before, and you’ve never played anything like it. It lovingly adopts the trappings of PS1-era survival horror, and more importantly, it fully understands why those systems, aesthetics, tropes, and technical limits are so engaging. But it also presents and explores love and loss, freedom and manipulation, fear and trauma, in its own cruelly captivating way. It’s strange and familiar, gorgeous and horrible. It’s an absolute banger of a videogame, made all the more impressive by its indiest of indies price tag and two-person dev team.
Fundamentally, it's a love story. Things go bad for space technician Elster, but she made a promise she intends to keep. We’ll get back to this later. First up: Signalis excels at capturing the essence of survival horror - those juxtaposed feelings of possibility and unease that hit you entering a long hallway, flanked by doors, only to find all but two locked or malfunctioning. You’ll be back here soon enough, you know that. Probably with a new key. Maybe with a new gun. But there’s also a good chance things will have…changed, by then. A floor tile might reveal new horrors. You might have spent your last bullet. So, left or right? Or maybe back? You can only carry six items, after all.
]]>Saturnalia isn't a terribly long game, but it has spent much longer occupying my thoughts. Any time in the past couple of weeks that my friends and colleagues thought they were talking to me, they were in fact talking to an exquisite Italian neon-folk horror game wearing my skin and looking out of the eye-holes in my skull. On at least one occasion I lay in bed at 3am, sweaty and frozen in half-asleep fear, because I thought I'd heard a strange rattling noise...
In fact it was not stillness, but the panic-sprint into darkness that became my main and oft-unsuccessful tactic whenever I heard the creature of Gravoi. Gravoi itself is a small but inconveniently maze-like fictional Sardinian town, host to a yearly folk festival that, every so often, involves the unwary being carried off and killed by a... something. Unfortunately, four very unwary outsiders - rendered outsiders for a variety of reasons, whether they're locals or not - find themselves having to survive the night of this festival, armed with things like matches, firecrackers and a polaroid camera.
]]>Welcome to Part Two of The RPS 100, our annual countdown of our favourite PC games from across the ages. Earlier in the week, we ranked our favourite games from 100-51, which you can find over in Part One of this year's list. But now we're here for the main event, counting down our top 50 games all the way to number one. Come and join us for the final stretch.
]]>Welcome to the 2022 edition of The RPS 100, our annual countdown of our favourite PC games of all time. This is the second time the RPS Treehouse has gathered together to hash out our collective Bestest Bests from across the ages, and lemme tell you, this year's list has seen tons of movement compared to last year's ranking. Not only are there buckets of new entries, but there's been plenty of upward and downward shuffling of old favourites, too. So come on in and find out what's made the cut.
]]>Our undercover man has been compromised and you've mere hours to extract him from a nightclub using every tool in your agent's toolbox: deception, wisecracks, dancing, drinking puddle water, and baking pizza. That's Betrayal At Club Low, the latest game from Cosmo D, set in the same strange city as Off-Peak, The Norwood Suite, and Tales From Off-Peak City. This time, it's an honest-to-goodness RPG, full of skill checks, strange solutions, multiple endings, and so very many dice. And it's great. And it has a demo.
]]>A bright sun heralds the start of day 37 for CultPaperShotgun. Katharine wakes up and immediately sets to work cleaning up the mountains of poop and vomit puddles left over from the previous night's revelries. As she works, she spies her good friend Alice B harvesting cauliflowers from the cult's garden, trying to keep as far as possible away from the (now slightly rotting) corpse of Graham that lays nearby. A cluster of other followers are busy dancing around a shrine in the centre of the village, but they all stop to witness a fight between the two oldest members of the cult - Alice0 and Liam. Ritual combat of the elderly is a staple of CultPaperShotgun, and as Alice0 delivers the final blow to an ailing Liam, cries of euphoria reverberate about the camp as his spirit (and chunks of flesh) are donated to the cause.
Where am I in all this, you ask? I, the Lamb, the glorious leader of our cult, the holy vessel of Death itself, and the sworn enemy of the Bishops of the Old Faith that are destined soon to die by my blade? I'm kicking back at a nearby camp, enjoying a spot of fishing and a friendly game of Knucklebones.
This, friends, is Cult Of The Lamb. And it is excellent.
]]>Earlier this month, RPS turned 15 years old, so it only seemed right that this month's Time Capsule entry should be the year of our birth: 2007. Looking back, it was a good year for PC gaming, with the release of Valve's Orange Box alone giving us three new stone-cold classics to enjoy. But what other games from the year of our Horace deserve to be preserved and saved above everything else? Find out which games made the cut below.
]]>Cats are masters of their domain. As an owner of two tortoiseshells myself, they've unlocked routes in our house I never knew existed, using the tiny lip of our fridge as a gateway to the top of our kitchen cupboards, bed frames as launch pads to the middle bar of our sash windows (not even the actual window sill, those daft beasts), and don't even get me started on how they managed to get onto the top of our 2cm wide shower rail that one time.
Stray, BlueTwelve Studio's cat 'em up explorathon, puts you in the paws of a similarly savvy feline protagonist. The cat itself is a marvel of digital observation, fully inhabiting all of the best cat-isms I know and love. You can scratch the backs of sofas and knead and shred carpets with alternate squeezes of the trigger buttons, meow at will, lap from dripping water bowls, topple piles of carefully stacked books and push paint cans off the edge of ledges - and, if you leave them idle long enough, they'll stretch and catch flies too tiny to be caught by the human eye. You can also play a mean game of billiards, much to the annoyance of the local robots. I wouldn't go as far as saying it loosened my jaw quite as much as when I first set eyes on Trico from The Last Guardian, all told, but I reckon if BlueTwelve had the same kind of budget and scale as GenDesign and Sony's Japan Studio did back then, then Stray's cat would be every bit the equal of that famous cat-bird-chimera.
]]>Against all possible odds, we're officially halfway through 2022. What a year it's been so far! After one of the busiest starts to the gaming calendar in recent memory (looking at you, Elden Ring), my backlog is barely keeping it together right now. I've started so many things on as many different services that just keeping track of what I've played when is fast becoming a second job. If you, too, have been feeling overwhelmed by the sheer number of new and exciting releases coming out, then why not have a gander at this freshly compiled list of all our favourite games from the year so far? Maybe you'll find something that will similarly catch your eye, just as it's done ours. I'll warn you now, though. It's a big list.
]]>Every month I throw half a dozen broken shovels at the sleeping forms lying around the RPS treehouse floor. I demand they dig a new hole for the monthly RPS Time Capsule of games we'd like to save from a certain year, and usually it isn't a problem. This time, however, the staff complained a lot about the year choice: it's 2005, baby, and they struggled. I'm okay with it though, because we ended up with a lot of cool abandonware and interesting choices I couldn't have predicted. Especially because, since I got to the Time Capsule first, I got to stuff in the most obvious choice.
]]>So, you went and flubbed a Reservoir Dogs type of deal, and now you’re a dead’un. As if that wasn’t bad enough, it turns out that Heaven is a corrupt bureaucracy that’s absolutely stuffed with shadowy demons and talking cats. Those demons become your problem when god decides to give you a chance to earn your place in Heaven by committing murder - stylish, speedrunning, parkouring demon murder. It’s perdition with extra steps, then, but is it any fun? Dear reader, Neon White kicks ass.
The game opens with an extremely anime narrative sequence and we’re introduced to the lovable (and less so) doofuses we’ll be shooting up paradise with. This is where most folks will stop and squee at the fact that player character Neon White is voiced by the incomparable Steve Blum, perhaps known best for his role as sonorous space cowboy Spike Spiegel in Cowboy Bebop. White is joined by his fellow demon-slaying Neons including Yellow (best boy), Violet (sucks), Red (mysterious), and Green (bad guy).
]]>Friends and loved ones will agree, I have big “background character” energy. If I lived in the Star Wars universe, I wouldn’t be a Jedi or a Sith inquisitor. I wouldn’t even be one of those rebels who wear the long funny bike helmets. There would be no “Liam: A Star Wars Story” premiering on Disney+. Instead, I'd be the guy who changes the bedding at a grungy BnB on Tatooine. I would spend my days just sort of vibing on the fringes of all the excitement, blissfully unaware of the very important adventures occurring in a galaxy very-very-close-actually.
Maybe this is why Hardspace: Shipbreaker appeals to me so much. As a cutter, a nameless employee of the LYNX Corporation, you’re about as important to this particular vision of the future as the lad who polishes the floors on the Death Star. You are a nobody. But Shipbreaker relishes in how much that still makes you somebody.
]]>Gather round the fire, rogue likers and roguelike likers. In a moment of high folly, perhaps hubris, Unexplored 2 has arrived to these lands to preach the benefits of novelty and moreish dungeon delving. This is a chonker of a roguelike RPG, in which long-held assumptions about how the genre ought to be designed are thrown away, while others are strictly obeyed. The designers of this colourful 'splorer have rubbed their chins and decided to see what our beloved randomly generated death tales would look like without two sacred cows: money and meters. Folks, it looks kinda good.
]]>A bit later than planned, but we're back once again for another edition of The RPS Time Capsule, in which the RPS Treehouse undergoes a collective mind-melting experiment to pick their favourite, bestest best games from a specific year to be preserved and saved until the end of time. This month, we've shifted our game preservation gaze to 2009, so read on below to find out which games made the cut, and which have been cast off into the eternal games bin.
]]>I've never been one for playing aggressively in turn-based tactics games. I will hug and skulk between half and full height walls like nobody's business, creeping up the map inch by inch lest one of my precious party members accidentally sets off an entire warren of alien nasties by blundering too far ahead or, heaven forbid, one of them gets nicked by a stray bit of shrapnel. To say I'm overprotective is an understatement.
Thankfully, the Grey Knights in Warhammer 40K: Chaos Gate - Daemonhunters are made of sterner stuff. I mean, just look at these brutes. They're enormous. Even the Gears Of War lads would be jealous of the kind of muscle these big robo boys are packing, I'm telling you now. They're by no means invincible, of course, but they can hold their own out of cover, and pick themselves back up again when your best laid plans inevitably start going down the drain. It may not be my most natural style of tactical manoeuvring, but man alive is it liberating.
]]>Until last year, the idea of having a 'forever game' never really clicked with me. I'm too old and thin-skinned to enjoy the competitive nature of most online FPS games, and rallying together a regular squad of buddies to tackle the world of games as a service always seemed too much like hard work. Heck, even the allure of daily challenges in some of my favourite single-player games has never quite hooked me in the same way I've seen them take hold in friends and family. But with Dorfromantik, the chill, pastoral village builder from Toukana Interactive, I finally understand the journey towards that mythic 'forever' status.
]]>Turbo Overkill is a retro-inspired FPS that's still in early access but already feels complete. Not in the sense that is has nothing left to give, but that it feels ready to give even more. It's a rip-roaring blast through a cyberscape that doubles as a skatepark for your chainsaw leg. And amidst the sick grinds and spilling of guts you're drip fed weapons and power-ups that only serve to keep the momentum ticking over. You won't concentrate on anything harder in your lifetime. That's a guarantee.
]]>Welcome back to the third edition of The RPS Time Capsule, a monthly feature in which the RPS Treehouse puts their hivemind together to pick their favourite, bestest best games from a specific year to be preserved until the end of time. In the spirit of keeping you on your toes, this time we've set our sights on the best games from 2014. Which games will make the cut and ascend to the realms of the PC gaming elite? Find out below.
]]>“Graveyard’s full,” says Timothy Hall, the man prodding the bones of the piano at the saloon in Grackle. It’s a concise expression of everything the town’s been through: the rampaging bandits, the cannibal kidnappings, the swirling tornados. Filling the graveyard has been a solemn bid for order in the wake of so much chaos.
It’s not that way in Bripton, the next town over. The graveyard there is uncannily empty, save for a similarly bare tree. But you can change that, should you so choose: shoot up the bank or fight a duel and, the next time you return to that settlement, new plots will have appeared for every life snuffed out. Weird West even suggests you head to the local cemetery to loot any bodies you’ve missed - though its reputational system implies you should ensure nobody’s watching first.
]]>The four-sided heroes of Patrick's Parabox and Wilmot's Warehouse would be great friends, I think. They both specialise in the placement and movement of boxes, and they both share the same cheery disposition. Sure, Patrick may not have the same pointy nose or cheeky smile of his mate Wilmot, but the way his eyes rove from side to side as he wiggles to the beat of Priscilla Snow's meditative and upbeat electronic soundtrack is surely a sign of someone who is truly in love with what they do.
If anything, I reckon Wilmot would be a wee bit jealous of Patrick. You see, in Patrick's line of work, his cubes contain multitudes, to misquote that famous Walt Whitman line. As long as they're resting against a hard surface, cubes can be packed into other cubes in Patrick's Parabox like a stack of matryoshka dolls. They can also be unpacked in the same way, allowing him to navigate the tight constraints of his respective puzzle arenas with surprising dexterity. It's like he's discovered the TARDIS of sokoban-style cube-pushing, if you will, and cor, just imagine what Wilmot could do with such technology. That warehouse would be immaculate.
]]>When Katharine told me about this idea to take a look at RPS Advent Calendar winners of years past, I thought it was a good idea. But when she said she wanted me to do the first one, and that the first GOTY awarded on RPS was 2007's Portal, I almost laughed. Does Portal hold up? Why even bother asking? Shut this whole article down. Of course it holds up. It's Portal.
Of course, conventional bait-and-switch writing would dictate that this is the point where I tell you that, aha, after playing Portal again in the blinding light of 2022 it's actually a heap of rubbish, such as could only otherwise be found on the streets on day ten of a two week bin-lorry strike. But obviously that is not the case, because we're talking about Portal. If anything it's even better than I remember. Like. It's fuckin' Portal.
]]>Welcome back to the second edition of The RPS Time Capsule, a monthly feature in which the RPS Treehouse gathers round a small tiny shoebox to stick their favourite, bestest best games into from a specific year to preserve until the end of time. The first time capsule we dropkicked into space was all about the best games from 2010. This time, we're excavating the best games from 2004. Which games will make the cut, and which ones will be consigned to the all-consuming digital super bin? Find out below.
]]>For a moment, pretend you're an examiner marking FromSoftware games. Get that red biro ready. "Tried jumping, didn't work", you might pop by Dark Souls. "Nothing but grief here", you mark by Bloodborne. "Time for crab", you scribble across each one in a mad frenzy. You are so tired of the crabs. They aren't the most encouraging games, to say the least.
But Elden Ring is different. Yes, it's an action-RPG that retains Souls' difficulty, but it's one that expands their labyrinthine worlds with a single offering that's dizzying in its scope. Perhaps most importantly, it's a world that encourages you to explore and wants you to win, even if its way of showing it is with a massive rock troll that wants to cave your face in. What Elden Ring provides is an adventure unlike anything else or anyone else's. An unmissable jaunt through one of, if not the most impressive open world to date. "Visions of joy" sums it up nicely.
]]>The first FAR game, Lone Sails, was an unexpected wonder full of novelty and invention within the confines of a little cinematic platformer. As with the previous entry, FAR: Changing Tides tasks you with scurrying around a hulking vessel to manage the various contraptions that keep it moving. Only this time, instead of a strange land sail-train, you've a slightly more conventional submersible house boat.
]]>As far back as I can remember, I always wanted to be Jackie Chan. Not the actual guy, but the version of him in those movies, where he could clear out entire rooms using luck, martial arts and whatever he had within arm’s reach. Well, with Sifu, my childhood dream is now a reality. You don’t need to be a kung fu film fanatic to appreciate this action game, though. It’s not a tired bundle of tropes packaged together with an ironic detachment. It’s a passionate celebration of what makes the genre so good. It looks at the classics, then the modern descendants of that style, and finally puts its own unique twist on the whole thing.
]]>So good it will give you blisters. It's a sentence you might read in a glossy 1990s PlayStation magazine ad. "So good it will give you blisters," it says of the latest polygonal bloodsport, with a wired controller hanging from a ceiling, covered in gore. The hyperbole of a generation, a distortion of edgy marketing either aped or mocked by today's advertising sophisticates. You get blisters from walking up hills, not video games. In the forensically sucky cyberpresent of 2022, there is no place for such exaggeration.
OlliOlli World is so good it will give you blisters. I know because I got one.
]]>Welcome to The RPS Time Capsule, a new monthly feature we're putting together where every member of the RPS editorial team picks their favourite, bestest best game from a specific year and tells us why that game above all else deserves to be preserved in our freshly minted time pod. It might be that it's the best example of its genre, or it contains a valuable lesson for future generations. This month, we're travelling back to rescue eight games from 2010, and cor, what a good year that was. Too bad almost all of them will end up in the lava bin by the time we're done.
]]>Ah, to be good with plants. Apparently it was a thing, wasn't it, that my generation all got into house plants, especially during lockdown. A friend of mine has a positively ebullient front room full of lush, green darlings that have names like Hercules. My brother-in-law, absent any real space, has mounted glass spheres of water on his wall and grows little flowers and trailing vines from them. I, on the other hand, am a plant killer. Apart from in Strange Horticulture, when I run a spooky and ethereal plant shop in a town called Undermere, in an alternate-universe version of The Lake District. There, my plants are happy and weird, and with them I can save the world.
]]>In the eight year gap between 2010's more conventional sexy gore fest God Of War 3 and this new and improved action-dadventure God Of War, the angry Ancient Greek warboy Kratos handed in his god-killing badge and gun to live in Norse mythology's woods with his wife Faye and their son Atreus. When Faye dies, Kratos & Son go on a journey to scatter her ashes from the top of a mountain. This becomes a micro rumination on familial relationships, a macro world-saving epic of legendary proportions, and a hack and slash fest that'll have you grinning from ear to ear. On balance, then, I am Team Fridge Faye.
I played this God Of War on its previously exclusive release on PlayStation in 2018, and it lived in my memory as a 70 hour poetic battle between gods and monsters. Revisiting it again on PC, it turns out that it's actually only about 20 hours long, but it looms so large as an experience that turning it off at the end feels like stumbling into daylight, having spent many weeks in a firelit, sweaty hunting lodge in a Norwegian pine forest, slamming mead and singing songs about warriors tearing goats in two. There are a lot of big warriors in God Of War. There are a lot of very big things in it in general: statues, dragons, big angry rocks. And a big man, because the titular Kratos, as a yardstick to measure size, is already incongruously big, just so many sacks of salted beef held together by leather armour.
]]>After the roaring success of Monster Hunter: World back in 2018, the idea that the next big PC entry in Capcom's dino pants craft 'em up is a game that originally started life on the Nintendo Switch is bound to ruffle a few feathers. But far from being a step down from World, Monster Hunter Rise is every bit its equal - and Capcom's stellar work with this PC port has given it a much-needed buff and polish to really make it shine. Not only does Rise offer the same seamless and expansive environments as World, but it also adds a few new twists to make tracking down its titular titans even more enjoyable.
]]>Final Fantasy VII Remake certainly knows how to make a good first impression. The original's bombing mission sequence, which sees Cloud and co. blow up a planet-killing mako reactor in the industrialised hellhole of Midgar's city centre, was already one of the Final Fantasy series' best openers, but here we get to really luxuriate in every last detail of its twenty-four-year glow-up. Director Tetsuya Nomura may have a reputation for excess in JRPG circles (both in his tangled storylines and his passion for buckles and belts), but in FF7R that tendency toward indulgence has been applied with deadly, laser-like precision.
]]>Nerves have been sufficiently jangled as of late, not least thanks to the slew of action packed games that have landed in recent months. I crave an altogether more sedate beginning to next year, and so my mind turns to games in which violence, reflex or any other kind of unblinking attentiveness takes a back seat.
]]>I am not great at keeping my mind palace organised. I don't even have a mind palace. If my mind were any kind of structure it would be a Lego creative box of randomly mixed bricks. Thus, like an advanced robot, I store my memory outside my body in the form of daily to-do lists that I write up every morning. Wytchwood is a to-do list game, with each item cascading into a sub-list of more things to be ticked off. The difference is, in real life, my daily to-do list only includes 'make shiny lure to catch an elf and steal its shoes' on Tuesdays.
]]>Games are increasingly expensive, but there are still plenty of great experiences to be had without paying a single penny for them, just like the ones you'll find below in our list of the best free PC games you can play right now. From newer releases to old-timey classics, our unordered list is packed with the best free PC games available.
]]>Welcome to Part Two of The RPS 100, our brand-new annual countdown of our favourite PC games of all time. Hopefully, you've just read Part One, where we counted down numbers 100-51. Here, we're into the final stretch, ranking numbers 50 to our ultimate Bestest Best at number 1.
]]>Welcome to The RPS 100, our brand-new annual countdown of our favourite PC games of all time. We've wanted to do a big top 100 list like this for some time now. In fact, we first started compiling this list about a year ago, although for reasons that will forever remain a mystery, it's taken us until now to actually wrangle it into shape. At long last, here we are.
]]>It is a truth universally acknowledged (like the status of single men in possession of large fortunes viz. wanting wives) that moving house is one of the worst things to undertake in adult life. And you have to undertake it several times! The packing, the unpacking, the stuffing of old newspaper in gaps between fragile plates: it's all hell. And comes with the creeping realisation that your life has as much meaning as can be physically stuffed into a few cardboard boxes.
An extra special high-five, then, to Unpacking, which not only makes this stressful event a delightful puzzle, but also demonstrates that your life and things actually have incredible meaning.
]]>You could argue Playground Games have just made essentially the same game at least three times in a row with Forza Horizon now, but while every previous edition had a few things you could point at to show how it was imperfect, you can’t do that here. Forza Horizon 5 is as close to flawless as any racer has ever come. For this level of quality to successfully cover such a massive and ambitious game world is a monumental achievement and should be celebrated with some kind of festival. A festival of driv… OK, yes, you should celebrate by playing it. That’ll do just fine.
]]>Gloomhaven’s scoundrel has a custom animation for her flintlock pistol, and I am still jazzed about it. Releasing today in full after lurking in early access for the last two years, there are 17 classes in this digital adaptation of Cephalofair’s tabletop legacy dungeon crawler, hereafter referred to as ‘Tablehaven’. Each class, from psychic rodent Mindthief to basalt shithouse Cragheart, has around 30 ability cards each. And Flaming Fowl, alongside offering Tablehaven’s entire branching campaign, map editors, and a digi-only ‘Guildmaster’ campaign, have animated this single flintlock shot. It’s almost opulent.
All right, so I probably won’t use it much. Five damage at range four is a belter, but that burn hurts for a single target ability. I’ll be smiling when I do, though. Grinning as the scoundrel whips the silver pistol from her hip and deletes a cultist just before he summons a skeleton. Just as I’ve been grinning at these detailed, cel-shaded dungeons and grimy sewers, or the spoken narration before each quest. All Gloomhaven needed to do was not get in Tablehaven’s way too much. Accuracy and usability would have been just fine. But there’s enough passion and pizzaz in this wonderful package that a part of me wishes I was new here, just so I could be surprised all over again.
]]>Be afraid. Inscryption is both a love letter to card games and a twisted, jocular caricature of their numerical excess. It had me grinning ear to ear, sometimes nervously, sometimes with the joy of someone who simply loves thumbing through new cards, even when a rustic antagonist with big hands is reaching for my throat. This is not your average deckbuilder. It's a card game with an escape room built on top, and other sinister secrets buried beneath. The depth of its rabbit hole isn't apparent at first. It starts off as a familiar card battler, if a little darkly themed. You are in a cabin, playing cards against a face shrouded in darkness. It seems like Slay The Spire or Hand Of Fate.
Then the cards start talking.
]]>
