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Sometimes there’s a game that’s just a delight to write about, however you slice it. That’s how I feel about getting to tell you about Oyster Wars, a platforming game that melds the fluid movement of Celeste with the puzzle dungeons and hookshot traversal of Zelda. Oh, and top of that it’s about rebelling against capitalism via oyster farming - and it’s made by a real-life oyster farmer. Let’s get into this package of joys.

Historical strategy sim Manor Lords - which budding feudal despot Nic Reuben has deemed "a sturdy and immersive builder that feels incomplete yet alive with promise" - is now available on Steam, the Epic Games Store, Microsoft Store and GOG. It was Steam's most wishlisted game before launch, and it's so popular right now that Steam's servers are struggling to keep up: there's an official developer post on the game's Steam forum warning that "the store is overwhelmed from all the people buying, it may take a couple tries for a bit while things calm down".

Hurtling along on top of a train full of goons in Phantom Fury you will see another rushing train pulling up at matching speed, inviting you to hop from one to the other. A helicopter will soon join the fray. Many things will soon explode, and you will take a short break from the minigunning to calmly physics some boxes into a set of steps with a crane. This FPS is not so much writing a love letter to a bygone era of noughties shooters, as it is standing underneath the window of its respected elders earnestly serenading them with a busted old keytar from the attic. There are bum notes and the singing voice is not exactly boy-band beautiful, but the love is unmistakably there. And, hey, singing is hard.

Although Corsair isn't included in our current best gaming SSDs guide, their compact form factor SSDs, including the MP600 Mini, are probably some of the best M.2 2230 SSDs on the market to pair with your Steam Deck gaming console.

The 1TB Corsair MP600 Mini SSD has already seen quite a few discounts since its release in late 2023, including during this year's Amazon Spring Sale. In the UK, Amazon has once again shaved some money off, knocking its price down to just £69.98. That's a saving of £28.54.

It's also on sale in the US, but not for its cheapest price. If you urgently wanted to grab one though, you can do so for a still fairly reasonable price of $84.99 from Amazon's US storefront (was $114.99). But just know it has reached low prices of $70 in the past so it may be worth waiting for a big sale like Amazon Prime Day to get it for even cheaper.

While playing Manor Lords for review, I kept making mental notes to spend time watching the individual routes its villagers and beasts take each day. It’s one of those interestingly granular games that actually becomes more so by remaining a bit mysterious in ways I’m sure will annoy some, so I reasoned some people-watching would be illuminating. And by people, I mean oxen.

Tucked away in the corner of this year's Day Of The Devs at GDC I discovered a lavish, strangely unattended action-RPG, in which austerely beautiful young women in elaborate skirts kick the bejazus out of each other on fields of whirling flowers. That game was Aikode, the work of Spanish solo developer Ace.

I don’t want to strike sweaty terror into anyone’s gentle hearts here, but I’m beginning to suspect lately that the friendly clown emojis I keep seeing as reactions to Steam user reviews aren’t actually a colorful kudos to the writer for being a chucklesome and whimsical individual. I’m starting to fear, actually, that this one icon of a behatted japester may have been widely adopted as an oddly hostile way to single out dissenting opinions, rapidly accelerating the Steam reviews’ grisly metamorphosis into something that more resembles a clout-farming social app than anything with pretensions towards facilitating helpfulness or self expression.

Lethal Company is a fun game but I know what you're thinking: it lacks feline energy. Whilst the simplistic game loop of collecting scrap on monster-infested moons and selling it to an equally monstrous company is enjoyable at first, it can get old pretty fast. As both Alice and James have attested with their experiences of this month's RPS Game Club pick, Lethal Company is a game that lacks a certain direction the more you play. I soon found myself settling into an existential crisis, reminiscent of my tumultuous stint in retail. A recurring thought back then was why bother stacking shelves, only to have someone buy the products and make me re-stack them again?

In the vain hopes of gaining a higher purpose in Lethal Company, I stumbled across the 'Needy Cats' mod. Essentially this mod adds a variety of cats to your game that will wander around the facilities and yelp for attention.

Perhaps I'm just a glutton for heartbreak, but I decided that the game needed a galactic sanctuary full of adorable balls of floof. I hearkened back to my time playing Stray, the adorable cat adventure set in a post-apocalypse where humanity was all but wiped out. Could this be the prequel to Lethal Company? What if all Apocalypse games share the same universe, all orchestrated by The Company secretly pulling the strings of fate? Or maybe I just wanted to look at cute cats instead of terrifying mannequin monsters. Either way, the cats needed help. What follows is a diary log of my adventures which soon lead to increasing madness and ultimately, disaster.

It's finally time for this month's RPS Game Club live blog. This April, we've been tackling the comedy-horror Lethal Company. Whilst some of us have enjoyed the nonsensical hijinks Lethal Company can offer, others have been less enthused with the progression system and prefer the shiny newbie experience.

We've had some good chat on the matter. Although, I've mostly been preoccupied by the various hardworking monsters in the game. Now, it's your turn to hit us with your questions (or your shovels). Let's chat about all things Lethal Company, today (April 26th) at 4pm BST.

Great was the consternation of singleplayer horror likers at the popularity of Lethal Company, a landmark creepfest and satire of corporate piecework that is best enjoyed in groups of four. When will developer Zeekerss give us a proper singleplayer campaign mode, the loners of the gaming community wondered, peering from their boltholes and eyries. A Lethal Sole Trader, as it were - or failing that, how about some bot support? Well, this particular monkeypaw finger has curled. It curled about four years ago, actually, when Zeekerss released singleplayer-only horror compilation It Steals.

I've been playing It Steals (available on Itch and Steam for £4 or $5) as part of our latest Lethal Company-dedicated Game Club, and let me tell you, it makes Lethal Company look positively, er, Nonlethal. There are many points of comparison between games, but while Lethal Company is geared more obviously for laughs, with its whoopie cushions and ReactionTube-friendly co-op mechanics, It Creeps just wants to scare you shitless. It's also brilliant.

James made the observation that Lethal Company, a co-op game about being haunted space binmen, and this month's pick for the RPS Game Club, gets less fun the better you are at it. This is true! It's also janky, and the RNG on the weird, warren-like buildings prompted me to ask "Who designed this? What is this for? What kind of office is this??" out loud, as I faced yet another dead end full of pipes. And yet! There's something about it that endears me to it far more than other similar games like Phasmophobia. Games like this all largely rely on you making your own fun with the tools they provide, but I think we should give the Lethal Company devs props for their tools, because they are weird and make no sense, and allow for some fantastic slapstick.

Mayors in RPG games are rarely given the spotlight. They're mostly just there to give you an early quest involving goat banditry or windmill rats or some such other domestic drudgery. Or, in the case of Tristram’s mayor in Diablo, to fret behind the scenes about how to properly fit considerable cathedral repairs into this month’s budget. Well, no more must this valuable civil servant hide behind balance sheets, occasionally popping out to cut a big ribbon in celebration of a nearby mausoleum being turned into a Wetherspoons. Tristam is a 72 hour Ludum Dare project where you play as said town’s mayor. And this time: It’s ceremonial!

Left-handed Counter-Strike 2 players, time to raise that left hand in what could be interpreted as a celebration. In the game's latest update, Valve have added the ability to swap from the default right-handed viewmodel to a left-handed one. There's also an update to the buy menu, making it easier to track your bank account and grab weapons your mates have dropped. Alongside further UI improvements for grenade line-ups, and a tweak to the Active Duty map pool.

Eco-conscious village builder The Wandering Village sees you raising a settlement on the back of a huge wandering creature called Onbu. For the most part, you live in a symbiotic relationship with this gentle giant, as your villagers keep the gargantuan trundlesaur healthy while being ferried about on its back. Awww. Well, the wholesome city-builder now lets you feed villagers to the creature and start a cult in the great devourer's name. Okay. Why not?

Escape From Tarkov, the extraction FPS from developer Battlestate, recently put up a new Unheard edition of the game for pre-order, and tarkov escapers aren't happy about it. The price for this bundle - which includes a new mode, a bigger stash, and assorted gubbins - comes in at $250, or around two actual hundred actual pounds, but the price alone isn’t necessarily what’s got a section of the player base so tarked-off that a few of them are even loudly considering a lawsuit.

The actual issue is twofold: the edition is being called pay-to-win, and is also the only way to access said new PvE co-op mode, despite players previously shelling out notable nuggets for what was pitched as access to "all subsequent DLCs" as part of the now-delisted Edge of Darkness edition.

Manor Lords is obviously this week's big survival-citybuilder game release, but I suspect Diluvian Winds is more my pace. It's a "relaxing management game" about building a town for anthropomorphic animals around the foot of a lighthouse, although exactly how relaxing will depend on your ability to prepare for tsunamis and other weather emergencies which can strike and destroy your buildings. It's out now.

We haven't written much about Korean MMO ArcheAge since reviewing it nine years ago, and there won't be many future opportunities to write about it, either. Its developers have announced that its European and North American servers will shut down on June 27th.

People Can Fly, the developers of Bulletstorm and Outriders, have cancelled development of a co-op action RPG codenamed Project Dagger. The Polish company informed investors of the decision to cancel the game, which was initially to be published by Take-Two, earlier this month.

BlizzCon, Blizzard's annual get-together for fans of their games, was halted by the pandemic in 2020 and only returned as a physical event last year. One year later, it is cancelled again, Blizzard have announced.

I never expected to feel genuine affection for Dr Robotnik, whose various level-ending wrecking balls and spiked doodads have killed me a million times over, but here I am sobbing like a banshee over the release of Dr Robotnik's Ring Racers, a free Mario Kart-alike created by Kart Krew, the fangamer team behind Sonic Robo Blast 2 Kart, using the Doom Legacy source port.

This week saw the first (small) look at the new and upcoming Hobbit-themed cosy life sim Tales Of The Shire, plus the news that Embracer group is splitting into three, including a Middle-earth And Friends group. We thus use this as an excuse to spend some time talking about The Lord Of The Rings games we'd like to see, plus our favourite Rings games from days gone by (and also Gollum, and also we do impressions of Gollum).

Nate has been playing an impressive number of games, including one that did not allow him to invent the stick and therefore hampered his progress. We also talk about AI NPCs again, because one of them tried to get James drunk. Plus: some lovely recommendations to round off your weekly pod (one of them is a long life meat product).

The announcement trailer for Lost Legions opens with a Roman Emperor bellowing “GIVE ME BACK MY LEGIONS” like a kid who’s just had his pudding taken away. I'd just had a big swig of coffee before watching, and was instantly swept off by visions of an apoplectic Roman bigwig rampaging through the forests of darkest Germania, gluing abducted legionnaires together into a sort of Octavian katamari... and then they revealed that it’s another open world survival game, with no less than two trailer beats dedicated to the act of hacking down a tree.

I mean no disrespect to developers Tarock Interactive - they're not to blame for my addled imagination - but there are many open world survival games and as a weary Ed Thorn recently noted, the majority are heavily frontloaded with wilderness carpentry. I don’t think survival games should emphasise wood-chopping in their announcement footage. It's like doing a Call of Duty montage of people getting shot three seconds from spawn. Still, if there's no katamari mechanic, the idea of raising a small army of mostly AI-controlled Roman soldiers behind enemy lines has a certain charm. Without further ado, here’s the trailer.

I think the stronger your interest in white goods becomes, that's how you know you're transitioning from a youngster to a slightly oldster. The first thing I did recently when I stepped into my friend's house was compliment him on his new washing machine. "A Samsung! Nice dials on this, eh?", I said as I twisted the dial and it pleasantly bumped from mixed to delicate wash. What can I say? I appreciate the mundane and the useful.

And from the times I've played Lethal Company, I've come to think it's also a game about appreciating the mundane, too.

The best microSD cards for the Steam Deck have been largely unchanged for most of the Valve’s handheld life – maybe they’re just that good? Not that there’s a million new storage cards vying for attention every week, but at least you can have yourself one of these tried, tested, and trusted microSDs without the fear of imminent planned obsolescence. In fact, they’re pretty much the first accessory any new owner should add to their portable PC, ahead of even the best Steam Deck cases and docking stations.

Pine: A Story Of Loss, which stars a bereaved woodworker and thus may be a play on the double meaning of ‘pine’, is a gorgeously animated interactive fiction game that sees you performing farming chores and wordlessly reminiscing upon cherished memories. It’s short - designed to be played in a couple of sittings - and while the fiction is the focus here, you’ll spend time gardening and whittling in bespoke minigames as you find out more about the woodworker’s relationship. The publisher describes it thusly:

As each season changes, the woodworker must prepare for what’s to come. Tasks such as collecting water, thatching the roof, or planting crops each bring back vivid memories of his wife. Desperate to not let her memory disappear, the woodworker captures these moments in beautiful wood carvings. Yet, while each one is a promise to her memory, they soon become a dangerous obsession.

As genre mash-ups go, I didn't see this coming. But maybe I should have, knowing how once things like battle royales pop off, they will always spawn curious mutations. Inferni: Hope And Fear is one of these curiosities, being an online co-op, deckbuilding, battle royale, with a 90s theme.

To keep the ball rolling with this month's Game Club pick, we're asking what you, the readers, think of Lethal Company?

By now, I can confidently say that the RPS team are scrap collecting experts and can easily meet the quota set by the enigmatic Company. Much to James' chagrin, who prefers the chaos of being objectively 'bad' at the game. So confident was I in our abilities after our co-op sesh, that I dove into a solo game. Cue immediate death by a vengeful face-hugging bug. I'm expecting my first round of xenomorph child maintenance fees any day now.

With our blog chat scheduled for Friday 26th April, 4 PM GMT, here are a few conversation prompts we've gathered ahead of time. Tell us your thoughts in the comments and shoot any questions our way too. We hope to see you there!

Fallout 4's "next generation" update goes live today. Timed to capitalise on the Fallout TV show's mad popularity, it'll encumber the 2015-released open world wasteland RPG with widescreen and ultra-widescreen support, Creation Kit fixes, and a "variety of quest updates" across Steam, Microsoft Store and GOG. There will be new items for the Creation Club, including the Makeshift Weapon Pack, which lets you blast people with a piggy bank like Elon Musk, and a new quest, Echoes Of The Past, in which you try to "stop The Enclave from spreading their dangerous ideology and gaining a foothold in the Commonwealth".

They're also bringing the game to the Epic Games Store and upgrading it to Steam Deck Verified status. Such days of bounty we do live through, but beware - it's possible the update will break existing Fallout 4 mods, which will be a problem for the very large numbers of you who've been downloading mods after watching the show. Indeed, the possibility of today's update messing with mods has already seen the creators of the promising Fallout: London delay release to assess the damage. If you're similarly concerned, you might want to disable auto-updates right now.

Most of my time in Lethal Company is full of tomfoolery, panicking, and ultimately letting the quota down. As I run back and forth from the ship, only able to carry four things at a time in my puny arms, I frequently see the various monster inhabitants of the game excelling at pretty much everything. The Forest Keeper has brawny strength and can travel across the map in a blink of an eye, the Eyeless Dogs can sniff out an intruder in next to no time and The Butler has dedicated his life to maintaining a mansion even after the owners have long since gone.

This had me thinking - surely the various monster inhabitants of Lethal Company would make for a much better worker than myself?

Sure, most of them are ravenous killing machines - but that fits with the core values of The Company. After all, most of your time spent in the game will be collecting scrap on distant moons to meet an arbitrary quota set by The Company. You'll then feed your pilfered belongings to the insatiable maw of a tentacled horror (otherwise known as the boss). You may be able to sympathise depending on your occupation.

So, if the monsters in Lethal Company were given the chance to work for said company, which of them would make it as an employee of the month and which would crash and burn harder than me getting thrown from the airlock five times in a row?

Join me as I peruse the CV's of my favourite monsters in Lethal Company (as far as I know only half of them have opposable thumbs) and advocate for which of them should be my replacement as The Company's new hire. After all, once this month's Games Club is finished I'm not sure they'll even let me back on the ship.

The closest I have come to having any interest in sport is when I got really into reading about football hooligans, or like, Blood Bowl, but I do absolutely recognise the romance of it all. SUDDEN DEATH is a delicious free slice of playable art-pie that celebrates that romance. It is - says dev Cécile, who co-made the project with Nat Pussy and MOTHER GOOSE for collective Domino Club - “a game about love and sports. it's gay, it's very australian, and it's great.” You can tell it’s Australian quickly, because people call chips ‘chippies’, which makes me chuffed.