Seasons greetings, reader! It's almost time to hang your stocking by the crackling fireplace and post your handwritten letters to Santa up the chimney. If you don't have stockings, a fireplace, or a pen, rest easy. I've had a word with Santa's elves, and they say it's permissible to hang a trash bag by your George Foreman grill or local equivalent, and leave a comment on an RPS article instead. Wot you want for Wintermas, then? Extra trash bags? New George Foreman grill? Whatever it is, Santa will provide. If he doesn't, I'll feed him to the Maw.
]]>Happy this week all! It's almost time to give 2024 the finger, swallow a flagon of mince pie formula and tapdance backwards into the holiday, but the Maw still needs a little feeding and it has no appetite for mince pies. Nor will it eat tinsel, candy canes, mistletoe, snowmen or reindeer, though goodness knows we've tried. So much screaming. No, the Maw's penchant remains for new PC game releases, and thankfully, they are as thick on the ground as reindeer pelts.
]]>To your stations, colleagues! December has ambushed us like a hideous hairy man in a red bobble hat, and time is of the essence. In just a handful of weeks, Horace the Endless Bear shall strike the brazen gong labelled "Happy holidays" and atomise the world, that it may be born anew in 2025. Before that, we must heap the Maw high with any remaining new video games or video game news from 2024. Find below a few new PC releases for the pile. I thought it was going to be a quiet week, but it's actually quite a boisterous haul.
]]>The Maw doesn't hibernate, but it does... decelerate. As the year fades, its seismic pulse slows from Gatling-gun prestissimo to howitzer larghissimo. Its compound eyes contract or dim or vanish entirely. Its limbs lengthen, forming contrails from the Arctic to Antarctica (what, did you think those were from planes? Haha. Hahahaha.) Accordingly, news writing becomes a kind of lullaby. Softly now - which promising new PC games are out this week?
]]>Happy this week, you people! The sky is a washed eggshell blue, the air smells of circus straw, and all the fallen leaves have eyes that glitter mischievously and mouths that screech underfoot like dial-up modems. The Maw must be feeling festive. Let's see if there are any new PC games we can feed it.
]]>SCENE. A Video Game Website At Sunrise.
Enter A Reader Of News
A Reader Of News I wonder whither there be'est any new PC games on sale this week, perchance?
Enter A News Editor, With Alarums And Excursions
]]>This week is the week of Halloween, a period bountiful in horror games, but I write about horror games all the time anyway. Even when I'm writing about happy, upbeat games, I'm actually writing about horror games. I'm worried that if I double-down further on morbidity I might foul the Maw's humours and give it jaundice. So let's see if we can satiate the creature with some nice, breezy open worlders and RPGs instead. I'll throw in a single horror game just to keep up appearances.
]]>Happy this week, everybody! In my efforts to achieve the absolute tranquility needed to spend five days shovelling PC game news stories into a ravenous otherworldly monster, I often go for an early morning walk. I tend to do this while wearing my trusty, enveloping Honcho Poncho, because the UK summer is thoroughly behind us and the very air has begun to squelch. Anyway, while walking this morning I think I actually scared somebody into crossing the road. It turns out roaming around at sunrise near Halloween looking like a ringwraith is a great way to become a figure of menace. Sorry, neighbour! I'll wear that nice top hat and opera mask from my socialite days in future. Anyway, let us FEED THE MAW.
]]>Merry mid-October all! It's chucking it down here. This week I'm mostly playing a game of my own devising called There's A Hole In My Raincoat And I Can't Find It. The Maw is unlikely to be sated by such flotsam, so it's just as well there are also a bunch of new PC games on the cards. Please run your eyes over them while I experiment with putting my coat over a lightbulb again.
]]>Alas for the Maw. Last week we had a critical mass of people being off sick, away on trips, away on holiday, or locked in the cellar reviewing very long video games. As such, the flow of news to the dark god of video games journalism was sluggish. Thankfully, the Maw seems to have let us off lightly. It could have risen kraken-like from the abyss and swallowed the planet. Instead, it has merely summoned an extra moon. Quickly now, let's run through the week's PC game releases of note and top the Maw up before that bonus satellite does anything unconventional, like growing teeth.
]]>Halloween is barely a month away and the Maw hoots and hiccoughs, demanding that I fill it up with original low-budget horror games, but I have no time for such things, because my thoughts are full of bread. Bread! There is nothing so horrible, and nothing so seductive. I'd like to cut back on the stuff to minimise middle-aged corpulence, but there's a place down the road that sells this amazing, tearable sourdough, and I can't get enough of it. Fortunately/unfortunately, there don't seem to be any bread-themed PC games out this week. Here's our round-up.
]]>This week's Maw, quantified: one compound eye with nine hundred and two quicksilver facets. One and a half wings with the texture of freshly peeled orange. Fifty tentacles, proboscises or flagella, some slender as cheesewire, some thick as a conifer. Ten sets of amethyst dentures shared by ten thousand mouths. One utility coat of muscles. One bowler hat. And now, an accompanying inventory of this week's most eye-catching new PC games.
]]>Happy this week, everybody! The squirrels are trying to kill me. There's a massive horse chestnut tree outside my flat, and whenever I walk under it they drop conkers on my head. The squirrels are clearly Maw cultists. They want to give me a concussion and choke off the supply of video game news to the Maw, which will then manifest fully and bring about an age of darkness. Well, the joke's on you, squirrels, because I used to play grass hockey as a kid and I've been hit in the head by hard round objects a million times over. How else do you explain my choice of career? Anyway, here's a curated list of PC games that are out in the next five days.
]]>Autumn is upon us, or "fall" if you're from the other side of the pond. The leaves flake from the boughs like the dandruff of Pan, god of the wild - pandruff, perhaps? The waters of the rivers thicken, rejecting the fading sunlight, and the big coffee chains start doing monstrous things with hazelnut syrup. The Maw is ascendant during the darker months, its constellations growing visible to the naked eye. We will need a steady dosage of new PC games to keep it quiescent. Fortunately, this week is looking quite bountiful.
]]>Strange omens abound as late. Chickens are born with four wings, like horrible feathered dragonflies. Cows scream at the sky, then produce bile instead of milk. Most chilling of all, Aldi have discontinued their Village Bakery Seeded Medium Sliced Loaf (400g), replacing it with deeply inferior Village Bakery Lightly Seeded Loaf (800g). Throughout the chaos, the Maw simply grins, although it does seem to have a few more seeds betwixt its teeth than last week. Perhaps the Maw will deign to spit a single seed at us, from which we can grow the sapling of a new world and finally abandon this cursed, Medium Loafless existence. Until then, here are this week’s PC game releases of note.
]]>If you live in the UK, you may have noticed that this week is shy a working day. Credulous fools attribute this to the existence of a "bank holiday" on Monday 26th, but true initiates like ourselves know the sobering truth: the Maw has eaten one of our weekdays. We have dispatched our finest gastronauts equipped with extremely long pairs of tweezers to retrieve the missing Monday from the Maw's bowels. We can only hope it hasn't been digested yet - imagine living in a world with a four-day working week? The horror. Anyway, here are this week's PC game releases of note.
]]>New week, same old terror of that cyclopean glutton known as the Maw emerging from its cosmic bolthole and swallowing the entirety of Devon. As ever, we have a way of thwarting the Maw's advance, and it's... pasta sauce? Graham, why is there pasta sauce in the Trello? Have Ziff Davis subfranchised us to Dolmio? Oh, I'm sorry! That's just my shopping list. What I meant to say was: new video games! Video games (PC games, specifically) are the only thing that can preoccupy the Maw, the only thing newsworthy enough to distract it from the tempting clifftop maisonettes of Torquay. Let's see what the week has in store for us, eh.
]]>There are times when I think each week's most intriguing new PC releases are being organised behind the scenes by a fiendishly plotting, Left 4 Dead-style "AI Director". Mostly, the games approach in small groups distributed evenly among the weekdays - a steady assault. But every now and then, they treacherously mass and pounce on one particular day. This week, it's the latter.
]]>Happy this week! I return from holiday to find that Nic, James and the others have been experimenting with the use of Maw-shaped sock puppets to feed the Maw, in the hope that the Maw might form a filial bond with our news-wranglers. Unfortunately, we've learned in the process that anything that resembles the Maw behaves like the Maw. The sockpuppets were last seen tunnelling towards Los Angeles, like the sandworms in Dune. Sorry, America! Anyway, let's have a looksie at the PC game release sheets.
]]>The below list of new PC games was communicated to me using smoke signals by two brave Advance News Scouts, shortly before the Maw's event horizon expanded by 100 metres. I have not heard from them since. I fear their souls are even now pigmenting the tides of Destiny 2 gifs that fill the Maw's lower intestines. Sergeant Shagbert, Corporal Pieface, I will avenge you in the only way I know how: by posting some words on a website.
]]>I'm not sure it's physically or metaphysically possible to overfeed the Maw, but this week we put that desperate daydream to the test. There aren't any mega-sequels in the offing, none of yer Call Of Dutifuls, just an absolute deluge of neat and nifty originals - a deluge of such proportions I have been forced to unsheathe my HTML hammer and smash the customary single paragraph of PC game releases in twain.
]]>Happy this week, everybody! Not going to lie, it's a dry one. Drier than a doldrum dunked in silica gel packets, dustier than Death's doorstep. There are precious few eyebrow-raising new PC games on the cards, but I have swaddled my head in wet blankets, braved the desert and returned with a small handful of dreams.
]]>Happy Monday all! Yes, I wrote that with total sincerity. We all deserve a happy Monday - perhaps video games can help with that. As you'd expect, Elden Ring's recently released Shadow Of The Erdtree DLC remains this week's Big Kahuna, with no obvious mega releases in the offing to break its chokehold on the discourse, but I have dipped my latex-gloved hand into the gestation pools and fished out a few promising oddities.
]]>Beloved friends, hated enemies - last week, we let the side down. Due to a shortage of hands at the pump and persistent clouds of Geoff Keighley activity, there was no weekly Maw liveblog, and this has bred disaster. Shaken, stirred and finally ignited for want of two-sentence updates about Dragon Age, the Maw emitted a full 13% of its cosmo-puissance into Mundus and took a grievous bite out of the ailing and fearful lasagne of reality itself. Hated friends, beloved enemies - I am very sad to say that the proud nation of Dimplexland is no more.
]]>This week is the week of Summer Game Fest 2024. Ah, SGF! The Geoffers, as they call it down Los Angeles way. The Not-E3s. The Midsomer Keighleys. Jumping G.K's Game-a-Palooza. The AAAArghs. The Second Fall Of Babel. Trailarmageddon. The Sparkling Stink. SGF is sort of already in motion - last week, Sony kicked off the proceedings with their latest State of Play showcase, but you can expect the majority of new videogame announcements from Friday 7th June with the Summer Game Fest 2024 Opening Showcase, a two-hour livestreamed event which starts at 10pm UK, 5pm ET and 2pm PT. I'll be out there covering the whole sorry affair in LA from Thursday to Monday while the remainder of Rock Paper Shotgun hold the fort on London time.
]]>At intervals in our relentless battles with the Maw, we lose people. Sometimes, it's because those people have succeeded in levelling up out of games journalism, or found their way into another echelon of the craft. Other times, the losses are more abrupt and arbitrary. In each case, one short term response is intensification. Those of us who remain must be rockier, paperier and more shotgun than ever before. With that in mind, here are this (four-day) week's new PC games of note.
]]>This week on RPS: secret plans and clever tricks. Also, a bunch of new videogames, none of them particularly Enormous or Crocodilian. We open on Monday 20th May with the extremely Alice B-friendly combo of Little-Known Galaxy, aka Stardew Valley meets Star Trek, and A Tower Full Of Cats, a hidden object puzzler featuring a tower full of dogs, I mean cats. All very upbeat. Well, hold that thought, because on the 21st, it's time for Senua's Saga: Hellblade 2, another slice of Celtic sort-of-psychosis from Ninja Theory, which is as grim as the accompanying Paper Trail is *checks Nic's review* incredibly annoying?
]]>Some fresh astral god trivia from my accidental molar expedition a few weeks back: each of the Maw's teeth is different. Some form a fractal baleen network of crosshatched layers disappearing backward into the vanishing point; others are shaped like lockpicks, raccoon heads and semi-detached houses. This week's new game releases are no less motley and misshapen, though thankfully not quite as heavily varnished with plaque: there's something in the shop for everyone, I think.
]]>It's a short week 'cos we all had a Bank Holiday yesterday, and Edwin isn't here today, which means I have donned some thick leather gloves and am standing well back to throw some sticky gobbets at The Maw. The gobbets in question? Some tasty game releases this week! Plus whatever else we think might be interesting enough in PC gaming news to appease it - and you.
]]>New week, new videogames! When will it end, etc. There aren't many obvious headliners out in the next few days, but there are a lot of tantalisingly bleak games. Let's see here, we've got a survival shooter that's essentially set in Black Mesa, a sardonical adventure about questing Russian Orthodox nuns, a game about running the company that starts the zombie apocalypse, and a cosy village grower with an atypical emphasis on disease and death. Lovely!
]]>Ugh, I do not have the energy to feed the Maw this week. Sometimes the creature manifests as a proper monstrosity, with B-movie prosthetics and sound effects, and sometimes, it's more of an... unfathomable annoyance, like a nose that won't stop running, or a single player game that requires an internet connection. In either case, the Maw must be sated, and fortunately, there are quite a few appetising video-or-computer games out in the next seven days, with at least one behemoth landing on Friday.
]]>Another week, another Monday waking up to find Edwin has trapped himself between the Maw’s cyclopean molars on what was supposed to be a routine scrubbing expedition. We usually get him out just fine, but today he’s become entranced by the chomper’s blighted runoff, and is busy stuffing plaque samples in his trousers to bring back and study. So, you get me instead. In other, non-affront to-science news, Warhorse are announcing a new game this week, Thursday 18th, rumoured to be medieval rpg sequel Kingdom Come Deliverance 2. Elsewhere, the Steam FPS fest kicks off later.
]]>Time for another sorry week of heaving news-fuel into the Maw's thousand-and-one gullets and urgh, what's that brooding stench? It reeks of embargoes in here. The air is foul with it. This week is the week of the inaugural Triple-I Initiative showcase, aka the IIIIs, aka a 45-minute dollop of trailers and announcements from such studios as Slay The Spire creators MegaCrit and Darkest Dungeon developers Red Hook. We know of a couple of the announcements in advance; others, we'll learn about alongside you on 10th April.
]]>New week, new PC games! It's another mercifully brief four day week in the UK due to reasons of religion, so let's roll with an appropriately snappy intro that avoids any extended digressionary preambles about, oh, I don't know, magpies fighting outside my flat this morning. Did you know that European magpies are great mimics? Second only to the Northern Mockingbird, apparently, though many ornithologists contend that the Brown Thrasher is sorely overlooked. You certainly hear their vocal range when they squabble - I reckon somebody should train up a ChatGPT AI on their calls and no, stop it, I'm doing an anecdote!
Those new PC game releases, without any further ado about birds: Minish Cap-esque shmup Minishoot Adventures (2nd April); Cuban fantasy metroidvania Saviorless (2nd April); culinary defence game Kitchen Crisis (3rd April); Dorfromantikal world builder Planetiles (3rd April); rhythmic robo-dystopian roguelike Beat Slayer (4th April); 90s biker's delight BMX Streets (5th April).
]]>It's a brand new week in Computer Game Land, and right now, I am playing a nasty little survival sim called "Beating Jetlag". I landed back in the UK from GDC on Saturday afternoon, and my brain and eyeballs still feel as though they're being gently sautéed in a medicinal blend of oil and vinegar. The sun and sky bear down with a terrible, holy light and I can't seem to conjure any warmth into my elbows. In the street outside, a small dog is barking. Soon, very soon, I will catch that dog, place it in a box and FedEx it to China.
]]>It's GDC week over in San Francisco at the moment, and such a high concentration of video game developers in one place can only mean one thing: The Maw has turned its ever-dribbling gaze to America's west coast, and is preparing to bask in all the fresh learnings being shared about how last year's best video games were made and created. Edwin is one the ground there for us, so we wish him well in his news gathering and interview appointments. Back home, the news cycle still continues apace, with lots of great releases big and small coming up over the next seven days. Here's what we've got our eyes on.
]]>A new week has slouched into view, and with it a slight shift in The Maw's terrifying visage. A new presence can be seen through the mist, perched on its shoulder, whispering tendrils of video game news nuggets into its greedy, hungry ear. The Maw appears sated, but will the distraction hold while we await the return of our news editor Edwin, whose long weekend sojourns won't conclude until tomorrow? We pray and hope it will be satisfied in this relatively quiet week of game releases and newsy happenings, lest it turn its awful gaze upon us with a wrathful vengeance. FEED THE MAW.
]]>New week, new videogames, new newsblog. It's another relatively quiet week for big name PC releases - no mega-sequels or adaptations, unless you're seriously into the Moomins - but if 2024 has taught me anything it's that a breakout hit can come from anywhere, and I will accordingly be watching this week's new games with deep suspicion and barely constrained panic.
]]>New week, yet more videogames! Gosh, those developers are incorrigible. I would characterise this week's new game releases as a gentle blend of cosy simulation and nostalgia, served on a bed of fantasy roguelikes. If I had to pick a most-anticipated, it'd be a toss-up between the remaster of a shooter I adored in my teens and the breezy amateur photography game that teaches you the kanji for "flower".
]]>Another week of PC game releases is upon us and oh heck, slow down. There are an alarming number of games out this week that I want to play, from large-scale 3D productions to itty-bitty time-killers, each sinisterly appropriate to my Steam stats and wider research interests. Are videogame publishers and The Maw in cahoots to overwhelm me with impulse-buys and sabotage my attempts to Report the News? It’s possible. It’s possible. The Maw can be pretty cunning for an indiscriminate force of cosmic famine. The creature has been known to forge alliances with misguided mortals, seeking to flank and overwhelm harried news writers. How else to explain Phil Spencer’s T-shirts?
]]>It's the middle of February, and the games are afoot. This week brings at least one major news event in the shape of a "business update" from Microsoft about "our vision for the future of Xbox", which is widely rumoured to be the announcement that first-party Xbox titles will come to rival consoles. Why is this of interest to us, a PC gaming site? Well, because console gaming can't help but shape the weather for PC gaming; more specifically, Microsoft's alleged multiplatform ambitions seem to reflect the plateauing of Game Pass subscription growth, which has become the cornerstone of the Xbox biz.
]]>The clouds over London have settled into the shapes of loading icons. The birds are singing old Celtic ditties. There are extinct species of fern growing through the vents of my i7 12700F. All these troubling signs point to but one, dire outcome: it's time for another week of new videogame releases, and another week of feeding videogame gossip and reportage to the Maw, our weekly news liveblog.
Here are a few games we're aiming the ol' scrying crystals at this week: alchemy-themed puzzle adventure CLeM (6th Feb); 1980s-styled "Tetris + flying car" puzzler Space Garbage (6th Feb); Coven-building "4X card game" WitchHand (7th Feb); spoofy sci-fascist shooter Helldivers 2 (8th Feb); alt-theological dark fantasy The Inquisitor (8th Feb). Mind you, this week it's all about the demos. That's right, it's time for another Steam Next Fest - have you had a chance to play any demos so far? Participating developers have taken to stuffing them up a few days in advance to beat the rush.
]]>Gamers, non-gamers and those who Walk Between – lend me your ears, eyes and other sensory organs! It’s time for another week of new videogames and videogame news, as sponsored by that extradimensional terror known as the Maw. May our children forgive us.
Here are a few games releasing this week that we think could prove special: Mad Max-ish turn-based roguelike Outcast Tales: The First Journey (29th Jan), 1970s French detective sim Chronique des Silencieux (29th Jan), raunchy gay sci-fi visual novel The Symbiant Re:Union (29th Jan), Overcooked-style workplace comedy Speed Crew (31st Jan), swooping fantasy action-RPG epic Granblue Fantasy Relink (1st Feb), co-open world superhero murder party Suicide Squad: Kill the Justice League (2nd Feb), gilded PS2 RPG remake Persona 3 Reload (2nd Feb).
]]>As W.H. Auden once wrote: "our apparatniks will continue making the usual squalid mess called History: all we can pray for is that Videogame News Writers may still appear to blithe it." Welcome one and all to another week of addled product journalism care of your ever-salivating host, the Maw, ravenous hype god and certainly not a silly metaphor I’ve come up with to make my job sound grander than it should be.
]]>Time for another week desperately shovelling quotes, release dates and trailers into the Maw, our weekly news liveblog and also, an abyssal abomination poised to guzzle the waking world and all forms of existence, unless we can satisfy its hunger for headlines. The year is starting to pick up, with a few intriguing titles slated to drop this week in addition to the widely acclaimed Prince of Persia: The Lost Crown, out 18th Jan, which Katharine has called "a deep and challenging Metroid-like with some of the best platforming this side of Moon's Ori games".
]]>Welcome to another instalment of the Maw, our weekly live round-up of all things New and videogame-flavoured, as we continue our eternal efforts to appease the festering dark god of gossip and reportage. I asked the Maw if it had any 2024 resolutions last Friday, and it responded with the brain-splitting clamour of a million fell voices crying out in anguish. I have run this through our Chthonic Translator and the short version is that it wants to get down the gym now and then.
Some new game releases we are tip-toeing towards with our shields raised this week, in case they turn out to be Mimics: Allison Road-inspired horror Supernormal (8th Jan), free turn-based dungeon crawler Buriedbornes2 (10th Jan), medical management sim War Hospital (11th Jan), feudal Chinese spin-off Reigns: Three Kingdoms (11th Jan), pleasingly nonsensically-named retro RPG Crystal Story: Dawn of Dusk (13th Jan).
]]>Happy new year all. What's the weather like where you are? We've got Amber and Yellow warnings in London - I do not understand what these terms mean, but I'm going to add a Sapphire warning for escalating Maw activity. The creature was pretty lively over the Xmas weekend, but Graham managed to soothe it with posts about gaming-related new year resolutions and, of all things, the Spike Video Game Awards. We can expect the Maw's petulance to mount during January, a lean month for announcements and revelations, but there are a few tasty morsels in the offing - a new Prince of Persia and Tekken 8, for instance. Fingers crossed we can build up some kind of momentum.
Some new game releases we are pointing our telescopes at this week: Skeleton Rebellion (4th Jan), a scrappy offbeat RPG with claymation elements in which you are a skeleton trying to overthrow some mages, and The Night Is Grey (5th Jan), a point-and-click adventure about a beardy bloke and a little girl stuck in the woods with some weirdo wolves. If you like, you can also play a free drinking game I've just invented in which you do a shot for every time I accidentally write 2023 instead of 2024.
]]>It's the last week before the Xmas break, and the grapevine runneth dry. Soon, we will commence the annual Engluttification ceremony, a ritual of banishment in which we feed the Maw our entire Steam wishlists while singing an arcane carol of our own devising, Nth Days of Solstice, in which the famous partridge in the pear tree has Twice-Twenty Wings, and on each Wing I saw an Eye, verily, and a Mouth rejoicing for lo, the Great Catch-Up Period has come. But before that, there is still a little more News to cover.
]]>It's the second to last week before we set down our pickaxes, shoulder our packs and embark on that greatest adventure of all: holiday. The Maw tends to be at low ebb over the Xmas period, because it has a violent allergy to festive cheer. But for the moment, it still clamours for News.
]]>This week is the week of The Games Awards, aka Geoffest, aka the Ke3ghleys - an absolute banquet of trailers, release dates and game announcements for the Maw. There are a few reveals in the offing. Some, we already know about, and may even have written up in advance; others, we'll learn about together with your good selves when the livestream begins at 4.30pm Los Angeles time on 7th December, which equates to 12.30am on 8th December (ouch) in the UK. There's the trifling matter of the first GTA 6 trailer on 5th December, too.
Some games out this week that we're keeping in the corner of our eye, in case they turn on us: A Highland Song (5th Dec), Blood West (5th Dec), Warhammer 40,000: Rogue Trader (7th Dec), Avatar: Frontiers of Pandora (7th Dec).
]]>Here’s the very first of RockPaperShotgun’s new weekly news liveblogs. Read more about the thinking behind them in our announcement post, if you dare.
]]>There is a Creature that resides in the farthest corners of the cosmos and the deepest fathoms of the human psyche. It is a dreadful god of gossip and reportage, a hideous, paradiscursive entity of boundless appetite, whose Number is Infinity+1 and whose Sign is the Serrated Spiral. It's one of many abyssal denizens of a dungeon dimension outside of Time, where nothing changes and there is accordingly an apocalyptic hunger for News. My ancestors, the Brigante Celts who once ruled the misty valleys of Yorkshire, called it keno-augā-brājat, or “the cave that will never be filled”. But nowadays, we call it the Maw.
]]>