Everyone is playing Temtem, but no-one is saying it: they are clearly edible. But which of these visibly delicious sweets is the best for you?
After analysis of internal business and laboratory notes, several interviews, and much research in the field, I'm pleased to present our first ever Temtem flavour guide.
]]>Temtem's early access release doesn't wrap up with a nice, warm hug offering clarity and closure. Instead it leaves you on a literal cliffhanger, hook-slinging your way from precipice to precipice on the way to the sweltering savannahs of Kisiwa, a to-be-released island apparently teeming with political unrest and Earth Temtems.
I'm not frustrated that the game doesn't currently have a more concrete conclusion. Temtem signs off with carefully selected vignettes designed to show what the game has to offer in the long run: a vivid, vibrant world that will keep expanding.
]]>We're a bit late with this month's Can't Stop Playing, because we couldn't decide. But after some discussion, there is one clear answer. Temtem, the new PC game where you catch small monsters and battle them in teams, has taken over our office this past while.
]]>In one of the dark, combative corners of my mind there's been a post brewing for years now about how levels are wrong and bad and hold back far too many RPGs. It wasn't really until playing Wildermyth that I could put forward a strong enough game to prove it, though.
I've played a lot of it over the last couple of months. I remember specific battles, plot twists, and the name and memorable moments of a dozen of my characters. But I have no idea what level any of them were.
]]>It's good to know that the rest of RPS will play anything if I call them "cowards" enough. Kicking off 2020 with a strong start, the game we Can't Stop Playing this January is Wildermyth.
Three farmers defend their village from invading monsters. They go on to travel the land, looking for the source of the invasion. It's difficult not to boil it down to that, and that is very deliberate. This wonderful turn-based drama mine is proof that the power of a story is in its telling, not its base elements.
]]>Writing guides about a game usually means playing a rather disgusting number of hours of said game every day, until the sight of it compels you to dry-heave over a keyboard whose WASD keys have long since worn away. I remember, for example, a point where I realised that Star Wars Jedi: Fallen Order had been out for 100 hours, and I'd spent 60 of those hours playing it. That was taking it a bit far even for me.
I was fully expecting the dry-heaves to begin at any moment. But they never came. I continued to slide down the slides, to climb up the climbs, to beat up the local fauna with the power of ancient religion on my side. And somehow, despite all the bugs and flaws the game was throwing at me, I remained steadfast in my enjoyment of it. How did I do it? Well, I'd like to explore that with you awhile, if that's alright.
]]>The Star War is the only thing I have been playing outside of work for weeks now. I am becoming intimately familiar with its workings: the push and pull combat, and also of the Force Push and Force Pull powers. It is a brilliant game that I love, but that I also find full of contradictions. Here are my five best and worst things about Star Wars Jedi: Fallen Order. The twist is that each thing is both a best AND a worst! Haha!
]]>Let's not pretend that Star Wars isn't good. Answer me this: if Star Wars isn't good, how come they got away with having BB-8 branded oranges?? Less reliably good are the official Star Wars video games. Despite throwing out some absolute bangers in the LucasArts days, or stone cold classics like Knights Of The Old Republic giving us big Force energy, the more recent quality has been varied. One could even say scandalous.
But what is this? A new single player Star Wars game? Lightsaber battles where you have to block, parry, and break your opponents guard? Levels that have an almost roguelike approach? Shorcuts and hidden secrets? And - gasp - a small robit friend? Jedi: Fallen Order, I think you and I can talk.
]]>In the yard below, a corpse hangs from a pine tree.
It is my failure and my shame for all to see, rotting in plain sight.
Martainaise, the broken-down home of Disco Elysium’s broken-down police story, is an excoriating light shone not just upon its broken-down policeman, but also upon me, and my failure to be the person I thought I was. It is my mid-life crisis writ in grey rainfall, my dread realisation that death is coming and I’m not who I ever meant to be.
In the yard below, a corpse hangs from a pine tree. Decaying in the rain. It’s been there for days. Everyone sees it, no-one mentions it.
]]>The first proper obstacle in amnesiac police RPG Disco Elysium, if you don’t count your ceiling fan, is a small child who has taken a lot of speed. He stands outside your hotel, chucking stones at your corpse. Your case’s corpse. The one you need to investigate. This won’t do.
]]>So Disco Elysium is an RPG, yes? And you have to solve a murder, because you're a cop. Except you also can't remember anything whatsoever, including your own name or where you badge and gun are (how are you supposed to hand them over to your chief when you break the rules to get results??) or even, initially, that you're a cop.
This creates the blank slate, on which you can paint the kind of cop you are. Blank ish, anyway -- you're still a middle aged, overweight, late stage alcoholic man, but by gosh you can choose how that man solves crimes and views the world. At EGX this year, developers Helen Hindpere and Robert Kurvitz talked about how they wanted people to really get into the role play -- to buy a pack of cigarettes, and smoke one every day in the same place at the same time, because that's a ritual their character has. I developed a ritual. But it wasn't as cool as smoking a lone cigarette, gazing off into the distance with a thousand yard stare. My obsession was not philosophical or well thought out, and it didn't even really make sense. But let me tell you about my cockroaches.
]]>Don't come any closer, pal. I've got a gun. Oh wait, maybe I don't, because I pawned it when I was extremely drunk, and I didn't do a deal with the corrupt union boss to get it back. Oh dear, now a voice in my head that says it's Electrochemistry is trying to convince me to get drunk. I must be in bleak but lovely RPG Disco Elysium.
]]>Castle Shotgun has been ringing with the sound of spells, explosions, and squelching purple monsters thank to the chaotic mountain-delving nightmare that is Noita
It is, of course, a game that we Can't Stop Playing this month. It's also a roguelike. You get one save, and once you're dead, that's it and you start again from the beginning with a new level. Well, you do. Me, though? I have saved games. I will always have saved games. I will copy and paste the entire game if necessary. I will never be stopped.
]]>Noita is a big firework show, where the fireworks are heaps of gunpowder, exploding barrels of acid. The acid turns into steam in the heat of the blast and rises to condense on the cold cave roof, eventually falling back down as acid rain. Argh. This is a very dangerous firework show.
In this roguelike spellslinger where you play as a flying witch, every pixel is simulated, and can interact with every other pixel that ends up near it. Usually, these interactions result in spectacular death. They are, each of them, a tiny square of potential horror, and you help them along the road to disaster with spells that conjure many and varied effects. The game recently got experimental mod support, but I play the vanilla version and I am very bad at it. I've never even gotten past the fourth area. But Noita is so well designed that it's mad fun even when you're abjectly, embarrassingly awful at it. Here are some gifs to support that.
]]>Noita is a game about searching for a good death. This is the conclusion I've come to after two weeks of playing it each day. I try and I die and I try again, and when I stop for the evening, it's not because I've reached further than ever before. It's because I have crafted a suitably satisfactory demise.
]]>"Ants. Cover them in ants." The RPS treehouse is gathered around my screen, where several dozen stickmen are currently duking it out in a blank 2D void. This is not nearly violent enough for Sin, who has seen the Ant button. I obligingly sweep my mouse across the screen, summoning a haze of insects. Some of the stickmen jump into them, and get stuck there. "They're suspended in the ants!", I cry. "They're suspended in the ants!", cries Sin. Then she sees the button for Acid.
We're poking at Powder Game, also known as Dust. It's a 'simple' simulation where you conjure different elements and watch them interact, and I remember mucking about with it back in my school days. Little did I then know that such "falling sand" games would one day inspire Nolla Games to make Noita, their platforming roguelike where "every pixel is simulated" - but experiments have more serious consequences.
]]>Noita might have come from an alternate universe: one in which we harnessed the forward progress of computer power not to render 3D polygons and open worlds, but to apply greater degrees of simulation to the pixels of a Lemmings or Worms-style 2D world. It's a roguelike in which 'every pixel is simulated', which in reality means that wood burns one pixel at a time, rivers of lava and slime re-route as you blast away the ground beneath them, and enemies spray the level with their toxic innards like they're a waterbed stuck with a fork.
It's a game in which you might get buried under a sticky, pink ooze, until you suffocate. Much as we are all being suffocated all the time by the foamy gush of new games. Can't Stop Playing is our monthly attempt to pick out one particularly interesting game among the flotsam and raise it above the others, and this month it's Noita.
]]>Alice Bee: Hello Brendy and Nate! We're here to discuss what we ultimately think of Wilmot's Warehouse, our Can't Stop Playing for the month of September. Next week we will choose a brand new game, so as a final tribute we are here to deliver an RPS Verdict for the sweet organise-a-warehouse 'em up that is Wilmot.
We'd been planning to do this verdict chat on Wilmot's Warehouse for a while, but unfortunately one of you broke your collarbone, one of you got "a bit" of sepsis. As your line manager, I'm really impressed at your dedication, because you have both definitely, 100% genuinely turned up to still do this article with me. Nate, you reviewed doubyou's doubleyou for us, so why don't you kick us off here?
]]>You might not be surprised to learn that Wilmot’s Warehouse, the charming object-categorisation game we’ve been banging on about this month, was inspired by (wait for it) working in a warehouse. Co-creator Richard Hogg worked in warehouses for Asda and Boots in his teens, before moving on to work for a film stills library after graduating. “I loved that job,” he recalls, wistfully. “In fact, if it hadn’t been for a bunch of bastards from [name of professional services firm redacted] coming in and deciding I was surplus to requirements, there’s good odds I’d still be there.”
]]>You are handed a box. Inside, another hour of ceaseless chatter from three folks on the RPS podcast, the Electronic Wireless Show. Oh no, where re you supposed to put this? Maybe it should go next to the knives in the "dangerous items" pile. Or you could store it beside the tennis rackets in "hobby equipment". Oh hell, let's just make a whole new category for it: "things to listen to in the car".
Can you guess what our special Can't Stop Playing podcast is this month? Yes, it's minimalist sort 'em up Wilmot's Warehouse.
]]>Could you pass me that block of cheese? No, the other one, the blue one. No, that's a slice of cake. The chee-- oh, for heaven's sake, I'll get it myself. Honestly, you shouldn't be playing sorting simulator Wilmot's Warehouse with an attitude like that. You're clearly not enthusiastic about the minimalist pile 'em up we can't stop playing. Maybe a few of its motivational posters will change your mind.
]]>For the first three and a half billion years of its history, life on earth was fairly dull. It was, essentially, a load of little blobs mucking around in a great big sea. But then, five hundred million years ago, the Cambrian Explosion happened. Despite its name, it was not a sick wrestling move, but a sudden evolutionary riot, in which life diversified into a bewildering array of new and complex forms. These new creatures competed, and the winners - vertebrates, arthropods, molluscs and a bunch of worms - set the blueprint for every animal that existed thereafter. That’s the nature we’re familiar with; endless variations, but all on a surprisingly limited set of themes. And it’s great. But sometimes, just sometimes, you look at the sea and wonder what would be in it, if a different set of animals had ended up winning that primordial arms race.
Wilmot’s Warehouse gives me that feeling. Admittedly, it has absolutely nothing to do with the history of life on earth (although my warehouse does contain both dinosaurs and mammoths). It does, however, give me the feeling that I’m playing something from an alternate universe where the fundamental tenets of videogames evolved very differently indeed. And whatever universe he hails from, Wilmot is a bloody lovely ambassador.
]]>Time, once again, to reveal our Can't Stop Playing for this month. The announcement is coming a bit late because we had some trouble deciding for September, but then we looked at what we'd been writing about and, shockingly, playing, and there was really only one option. Who could have thought that pushing boxes around a black room would have us so completely in its grasp. Yes, it is of course the never-ending re-categorisation of Wilmot's Warehouse that we can't stop playing this time.
]]>I don't think we ever see the extent of Wilmot's horror. He's a square in charge of a warehouse, single-handedly responsible for storing and serving up hundreds of amorphous objects. We, the player, only see those objects from the top-down, a step removed from the abject terror of categorising off-colour melon slices that simultaneously resemble 50% of an egg. Maybe reality is less blurry from his perspective, but I doubt it. Wilmot's Warehouse is a world of raw pictorial language, and an ingenious platform to explore how language works in our own world.
]]>If you do not understand the low-key cerebral pleasure of inventory management, then what are you even doing playing videogames? Get out. Everyone else, welcome to Wilmot's Warehouse. A whole game about fiddling with your inventory and wrestling for space amid piles of bananas and hair dryers. It's basically a giant version of that suitcase in Resident Evil 4 that holds all of Leon Kennedy's eggs. It can be stressful at times, but there is one feature that makes all the box-stacking labour worth it. After a while, you get the chance to watch a timelapse of your warehouse, from the minute you began work, to the latest moment of perfectly formed rows of boxing gloves. It is glorious.
]]>Four weeks ago, in the disgusting heat of old August, we told you we can’t stop playing the chaos-fuelled micro-muckabout Streets Of Rogue. And since then we've not stopped banging on about it. It's sort of embarrassing. We spoke to its creator, we praised its tabletop-ish freedom, and we enjoyed having a totally normal one. But listen, we’ve got to move on. It turns out we actually can stop playing this gangster-blasting chimp sim. But not before we deliver a final verdict.
]]>Friends are the worst. One minute they’re stuffing delicious bananas in your mouth to heal your wounds, the next they’re flailing at your head with a police truncheon. But what would life be without some friendly fractures to the skull? In Streets Of Rogue, the anarchic roguelite we can’t stop playing, you can still harm your fellow players in co-op mode. That means lots of accidental pal-murdering.
But that’s not how you should play this with friends. You should do it like we did, with a plan. There are a lot of characters in the game, each with their own abilities, so you can easily build a crew of delightful degenerates. Here are some co-op recipes we came up with, guaranteed to provide a good time.
]]>Streets Of Rogue is a tiny Deus Ex about being stupid. It’s good. If you haven’t heard us shouting about this teeny-yet-turbulent roguelite, then you haven’t been paying attention. To add to the cacophony, I spoke to its creator, Matt Dabrowski, about troublesome bodysnatchers, rampaging giants, vague sequel plans, and how he went about brute-forcing as many silly ideas as possible into a tiny toy city.
"If I have a cool idea,” he says, “I'm going to try to find some way to get it in there."
]]>Streets Of Rogue is a chaotic playground of cunning tricks, slapstick violence, and endless, endless laughter. We've been playing it together muchly here lately, in fact you could say we Can't Stop Playing it.
An important feature we've not discussed yet is the custom character creator. This lets you combine the wacky traits and abilities from other characters to make your own little pixel person. It is brilliant. Streets Of Rogue wants you to have fun, to the extent that there's little to stop you from, oh, I don't know, recreating characters from your favourite novels and films. Let's see how that went.
]]>I love Streets Of Rogue. Loads of us here at Rock Paper Shotgun do, it's why we Can't Stop Playing it. I wanted to dig a little into why I enjoy it as much as I do, and I think a really good way of communicating why is comparing it to rules-light tabletop RPGs.
]]>You may have already seen us bellowing about Streets Of Rogue, the tiny but flavourful immersive sim full of chaos and angry gorillas. That’s because we can’t stop playing it. This week, the pod squad are gathering to chat about why they think it’s so bloomin’ good. But also their favourite characters in the game, from a drug-addicted investment banker to a tiny naked body snatcher.
]]>Ah, these familiar, everyday streets. It's a comfort that Streets of Rogue’s city and its many mundane simulated districts are so utterly ordinary. You can keep your Farming Simulators and your Solitaires. It's here that videogames truly reflect our simple reality.
For example, that time four giant gorillas crushed the entire city into dust.
]]>I hope you like shenanigans. Or at least antics, or capers. Streets Of Rogue is about all those. It’s an anarchic roguelike about ascending a tower block while everything around you erupts in a comedy sci-fi riot. It’s like that Dredd film, but instead of credits as the city’s currency, there are chicken nuggets. It’s also the first game to get our Can’t Stop Playing stamp. This is basically our way of saying "this game has us in its thrall, and you should join us". You’ll see more articles about the silly top-down street fights and pixel drug-huffing of this game in the days to come, all marked with the Can’t Stop Playing tag. But for now, let’s just celebrate what makes Streets Of Rogue deserving of your hard-earned McNugs.
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