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Alzara Radiant Echoes is a clear love letter to golden age JRPGs, pulling inspiration from the likes of Golden Sun and Lost Odyssey for a 3D turn-based RPG set in a Mediterranean fantasy world. Dark Souls composer Motoi Sakuraba is on board, along with Genshin Impact and Fire Emblem artist Yoshiro Ambe. And if that hadn’t already sold me already, developers Studio Camelia are also paying tribute to the best Final Fantasy game: FFIX, obviously.

Remember when Control came out and your mate Terry appeared out of nowhere to rant endlessly about how they’ve always loved brutalist architecture? Come on, Terry. No you haven’t. You spend weekends eating custard creams and watching Bake Off. You haven’t thought about brutalism since undergrad, be honest. Anyway, my version of that is Starship Troopers. As in, I’ve been waiting for a videogamey excuse to bang on about it in public for ages. Helldivers 2 is obviously as good an excuse as any, but really, I needn’t have waited so long. Official offerings like strategy game Starship Troopers: Terran Command and FPS Robocop: Rogue City aside, I reckon you can find Paul Verhoeven’s fingerprints all over games.

Graham said he wanted someone to write about Little Kitty, Big City, asked if I liked cats, at which point my soul was possessed by some kind of deep animus. "I really like cats, I just hate the internet UWU nonsense about cats," I said. "God it's awful, I can't stand it, Jesus Christ it's just an empty and terrible way to talk about cats, cats don't deserve to be the internet animal-" at which point Graham managed to interrupt and said I was exactly the person who should write about Little Kitty, Big City.

I promise, I approached Little Kitty, Big City with an open heart, because I do really like cats. But given my aversion to their babification by the internet, it may be surprising that my chief complaint about Little Kitty, Big City is that the hats in it are largely not cute enough. This is a bold claim, because there are more than 40 to collect.

Nic reckons Homeworld 3, the long-awaited spacefaring RTS, is mostly pretty good. Qualified hoorays for that, as well as for the fact that it doesn’t make especially mad demands of your hardware: besides netting a Steam Deck Playable badge from Valve, its minimum PC specs only list the likes of the Intel Core i5-6600 and Nvidia’s GTX 1060. Easily doable, for most aspiring galactic admirals.

Once a battle gets underway, however, Homeworld 3’s performance can start tanking, turning an initially smooth engagement into a more stutter-prone light show. The good news? You can more than double your framerates with a relatively small handful of graphics setting changes, even if some these (including the DLSS and FSR 2 upscalers) can be a tad inconsistent in their own right.

The characters in Read Only Memories: Neurodiver are deeply into anime. They love manga and figurines and trashy movies and horror novels. The interests of the game's creators have not so much leaked into this fictional world as they have been generously pumped in with an industrial hose. Even the visual novel's loading screens take the form of those two-second intermission panels that flash up to signal an anime's commercial break, complete with random characters announcing the game's name ("Neurodiver!"). In moments like that, the passion is endearing. But in other places, it is overwhelming. Neurodiver is obsessed with media in a way that often distracted me from the bright-eyed cyberpunk story it wants to tell.

Last week, I watched one of my favourite badminton players Kento Momota play his final match. As he stepped off court for the last time, I found myself welling up. He doesn't know me - of course he doesn't - and I don't know him. But for ten years I'd watch him at every opportunity and see him grow into one of the all-time greats. For me, his retirement wasn't only devastating in the sense he was a great ambassador for the sport: a positive soul, a good speaker, a hard worker. No, it also spelled the end of us being able to witness something impossible to replicate, a 'game' of badminton uniquely his. And for a magical two years, he had the best game in the world.

I have a couple of takes on Nico Papalia's new RPG Athenian Rhapsody, which launched on Steam yesterday and still has a demo. The first is that it's a brighter, glitzier version of Toby Fox's Undertale that looks like it belongs on Gameboy Advance - a retro parody created in GameMaker whose turn-based combat houses many an inventive minigame, and whose writing doesn't so much break the fourth wall as moonwalk along the parapet, showering the player in poop, anime tropes and off-colour mental health advice.

Wayfinder, currently a free-to-play RPG developed by Airship Syndicate, is undergoing a pretty drastic change in its upcoming Echoes patch. Right now it's a live-service game with microtransactions, but soon it'll continue as a paid co-op RPG with no in-game monetisation. And that's alongside promised tweaks to how progression works, too. Huh. It's often you see paid games go free-to-play, but this is an unexpected switcheroo.

The Sims 4 is nothing if not a teetering jenga tower of updates and add-ons and DLC packs, and the latter half of 2024 will be no exception for EA's life sim king. Yesterday saw the release of an update to the base game's swimwear, kicking off the updates teased in the recently-revealed new roadmap, Season Of Love. The roadmap video's vibe is that it and its partner saw you from across the bar and wondered if you'd be interested in joining them, and it kind of weirds me out.

I think most would agree that the artist formerly known as Twitter has never been in more need of a thermonuclear cleansing. The Musk era has transformed what was already fondly known as a hellsite into something at once more obnoxious and sadder, whether you're talking about the web3 grifters or the resurgent debate-me cryptofascists or the recommendation algorithm's perceptibly greater enthusiasm for quote-tweet flamebait.

Still, there are lights in the darkness. Yesterday, Graham pointed us towards a thread started by The End Is Nigh developer Tyler Glaiel in which he challenged other developers to "take a short break, pick a number in your code or data files, multiply it by 1000, and post the results". Other developers have heeded the call. Here's a round-up of the results that doubles as a watery echo of Alice0's (RPS in peace) old Screenshot Saturday Monday features.

Old-school FPS adventure The Explorator contains much more intense shooty violence than the adorable lizardy folk that populate it might immediately suggest. I really want to use the word ‘zany’ without irony here to describe its hand-drawn 2D style and animations, but I’m afraid that ship has long since sailed into the sun. I’ll go with ‘caffeinated’ I think. Like the Adult Swim cartoons it reminded me of, it’s got a sense of the sardonic and a penchant for violence, but still comes from a place of having recently devoured several bowls of suspiciously colorful cereal. Anyways, forget all that. I mentioned an FPS in the title, so I must assume you’re here for the violence.

Look, you've had 15 years to play that well-regarded time-bending puzzler sitting in your Steam library, staring at you this whole time. Well, now you can have another 15 years. Braid Anniversary Edition is out on Steam now, a high definition remastering of a classic indie. It got stuck in time following a few delays but it's finally defrosted now. The sharper look will appeal to pixel perfectionists, but there are also 40 new levels for serial rewinders. And - for those interested in the thought processes of designer Jonathan Blow - a bunch of developer commentary.

Do you love the smell of napalm in the morning? If so, you'll probably love the smell of Valheim's Ashlands biome, which has just launched for all players after a period of beta testing. Sadly, my computer is incapable of producing smells beyond a faint reek of encrusted pasta sauce and regret, but if it did, I imagine I'd even now be basking in the aroma of burning bone and feather, because that is what the 10 new creatures you'll meet in the Ashlands consist of, broadly. Shout-out in particular for the monster that resembles a combusting sink clog with spider legs. Very Possum-esque.

Thrones of Decay - the expansion for strategy game Total War: Warhammer 3 that finally made it viable to steamroll the old world with a doomstack of 20 tanks, just as Franz intended - just released around three weeks ago, but developers Creative Assembly are already on their third hotfix. This one is mainly aimed at re-balancing an overly demanding new grudge system for the Dwarfs that punished players for stopping to enjoy a swift pint of Bugman’s instead of constantly being on the offensive, but also includes so many other fixes it’s veering into larger patch territory.

Prison Architect 2 was delayed last month from a planned May release date until September. Now it's changing developer. Double Eleven are parting ways with publisher Paradox Interactive after nine years working on the series, and a new studio, Kokku, are taking over.

Minecraft is turning fifteen years-old and to celebrate Mojang are running fifteen days of giveaways from May 15th until May 29th. Apparently each day will offer up "a new free Character Creator item representing a different year of Minecraft history."

This also means I've been playing Minecraft for nearly fifteen years. Do I care for Character Creator items? No. Will I be signing in each day on my son's account to get him the free thing? Absolutely.

Video games must be three hours-long or infinite and nothing in between. The latest Steam event is designed to celebnrate the latter. The Endless Replayability Fest runs from now until May 20th, "celebrating games and demos you can play over and over again."

A group of former XCOM and Civilisation developers have co-founded a new studio, Midsummer Studios, who plan to “revitalise the life sim genre” with their debut release. The latter doesn’t have a title yet, and is described as “a next-gen Life Sim that emphasizes player-driven narratives, allowing communities to share memorable moments that grow out of the creativity of players themselves.” According to former XCOM and Marvel’s Midnight Suns director Jake Solomon, it’s “focused on the drama of modern life, where our players will write meaningful stories just by playing, and then share those stories with the world.”

Tucked away in a corner of 1999's Yosuka, Japan-set open world sim Shenmue there's a convenience store, or "konbini", where you can buy stuff like carrot juice, take part in raffles, and fritter away the hours listening to the shop jingle - an absolute die-cast classic of the genre in that you'll probably be humming the tune before you realise that you've even heard it. Nagai Industries founder Dima Shen has been obsessed with that unassuming Tomato Convenience Store since he was a teenager, partly for the contrast it offers to the rest of the game. "Shenmue was a really depressing game, I would say - your father is killed, it's always raining," he tells me. "But there's one kind of super-healthy place in the whole game: a convenience store!"

My evolving relationship with Vampire Therapist continues apace - much how protagonist Sam's acumen as an unlicensed therapist for the unsettled undead develops at speed. He's a vampire doing therapy for other vampires, while also undergoing therapy, as a vampire, from another therapist (who is a vampire). Vampire Therapist! I've been able to get to grips with a playable preview - I'd say I got my teeth into it, but I'm not that much of a hack fraud - which means I got to see some of the things that creative director Cyrus Nemati told me about in our interview in action. I remain optimistic that, on it's release on June 18th, Vampire Therapist can walk the tricky line it's drawn for itself.

It's balancing on a knife point of humour, the supernatural, and sincerity about mental health, the latter using real cognitive behavioural therapy (CBT; the comments the first time I wrote about Vampire Therapist revealed a lot about our readership) concepts in consultation with licensed therapists. The preview only covered Sam's first meeting with his mentor, Andromachos, and the first client Sam treats himself - a doctor called Drayne, simultaneously self-loathing and self-aggrandising - but it gave a flavour of how the game plays. Rather than a sort of janky template on how to self-therapise, as I'd feared, when you're playing Vampire Therapist it operates more as a sort of language puzzle against different types of theatre kids.

I booted up Dread Delusion and fell 30 feet to my death. This throwback first-person RPG is hazardous, and not only due to the dreamlike islands floating in the sky. My leg-snappin' plummet may be down to early access changes, causing the ground to be updated from right under my feet. Far from being a nuisance, meta-jank like this only endears me further to Dread Delusion. It is an RPG from the other side of some attic mirror, an Elder Scrolls from a parallel 2002. It has, somehow, slipped into our reality and is seeing its full release today. There are gods you can thank for this, but we dare not speak their names.

Buckle up. A bunch of players are competing to cross the finish line of a brutally difficult tower of racetracks in racing game Trackmania, with a prize pool of $30,000 waiting for the first three drivers to reach the top. The course is a huge, winding gauntlet made of pieces suspended in midair, and even expert players have fallen from their positions over 1000 times, their cars hurtling back to the bottom of the tower to start again. The top contenders are currently trying to crack a difficult spot to reach the 12th floor, at which point the course will reveal unknown territory. They seem a little tired, which is not surprising. They are 11 days into the event.

I’d like to start this review with a question: What’s the difference between overcoming a challenge and thinking “I did it!” and one that leaves you sighing “It’s over!”? I may leave little insights scattered throughout. A Paper Trail, if you will. A puzzle game named Paper Trail that has you solve discrete head-scratchers by folding the screen like a piece of paper in different ways to create new paths, I might even say, if I were trying to cram a bunch of information right at the top without breaking theme. Let’s talk about it.

The only thing I’ve stuck to regularly over the last twelve years is breathing, and I often forget to do even that. So it’s with all the awe and appreciation in the world that I dove into the demo for retro RPG Whispers In The Moss. It's been in development for twelve years, from solo dev Uncultured Games. It's set in a vaguely ancient Rome-inspired fantasy world brought to life through intricate and inventive ASCII, and scored with homages to the classics. Ah, but how does it play? You exclaim with evident interest, I assume.

Genuinely legendary game designer Ron Gilbert – whose works include the classic adventure game Monkey Island, the RTS Total Annihilation (as producer), and the term “cutscenes” – is making a new game.

The Terrible Toybox website describes it as “Classic Zelda meets Diablo meets Thimbleweed Park”, and one of the other people working on it is Elissa Black, co-designer and writer of the wonderful Objects In Space… who is also, I’ve just learned from her personal website, working on a retro 90s style turn-based spaceship command game influenced by the 1971 mainframe adaptation of Star Trek. Argh, so many good things in one article.

As promised and/or threatened, depending on your perspective, open world game Fallout 4 has gotten some new graphics tweaks and bug fixes to smooth out the bumps caused by its previous “next gen update”. The update broke a bunch of mods, delayed a few interesting overhaul projects like Fallout London, and generally made everyone shake their fists at the sky and shout “Howaaaard!” Remember folks: auteur theory unduly credits a single creative for a group effort - the dice that Todd rolls every time he decides whether or not to break the game are also clearly to blame here.

Elden Ring is already home to a lot of rotten creatures. Serpent snails that spit at you, ulcerated spirits with bark for skin, a big pair of hands. Now we know of another rotten creature who's going to join the roster when the Elden Ring: Shadow Of The Erdtree DLC drops next month: a bloke who's head would make for an excellent lottery draw.

I've played little of legendary survival sim The Long Dark, or The Short Dark, as I guess it has proven for me. I fell off the game after succumbing to my first wolf. But I've sampled enough to know that adding a "Misery Mode" to the game is sort of like upending a bucket of water over a drowning person. More misery in The Long Dark? Oh thank god, that's just what this notoriously easygoing wilderness adventure has been missing. And what's this, developers Hinterland are introducing a new predator, the Cougar, which will move into any area you're fond of and compete over territory. Finally, a bit of friction for what has previously been a stroll in the woods.

It's not all misery. In a first for The Long Dark, which has hitherto been a permadeath game that wipes your save between runs, the devs are working on an optional Cheat Death system. It's not as cheaty as it sounds, however. You can only return from the grave four times, and each time, you'll have to make unspecified trade-offs. The idea is to stop people backing up their saves and make failure more of an adventure or if you prefer, an agonisingly slow decline, rather than letting players avoid the consequences of their actions.

Greek god pulverizing simulator Hades 2 is getting its first patch "later this month", say the developers. Two things are on their to-tweak list. First, something might change about the way resource gathering tools are used (the pickaxe you use to mine silver during a run, for example). Second, and perhaps more significant, is an upcoming change to the way Melinoë's dash and sprint work. We don't know exactly what that change is but, according to Supergiant, it has something to do with your witchy batterer's "distinct style".

A while back Ubisoft revealed about a billion Assassin's Creed projects. The first of these to leap into the carefully placed haystack of release was Mirage, which I liked. Up next, it seems, is the artist formally known as Assassin's Creed: Codename Red. All we knew about red was that it would be set in feudal Japan, something fans have been clamouring for for literal years. Now we know that it's an AC game set in feudal Japan called Assassin's Creed Shadows, and it's getting an "official cinematic world premiere trailer" debut on YouTube tomorrow, at 5pm BST.

Also, because this sort of thing seems to always happen with Ubi, the placeholder text for said YouTube premiere might have accidentally leaked the release date for the game as November 15, 2024.