Supporters

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.

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.

I went to see Civil War this weekend. I liked a bunch of it, didn't like a bunch of it. One thing I thought was very obvious is that it sanitises its titular conflict of any political context. On the one hand, I understand this as part of the theming, said almost directly into the camera by Kirsten Dunst's photojournalist character: as journalists they're there to observe, so other people ask questions. On the other hand, the civil war being between the government and the Western Forces, an alliance between California and Texas feels extremely "Republicans buy sneakers too", if you ask me.

It made me think about the Fallout TV show. One of the things I like about it is that it doesn't pretend The Brotherhood Of Steel aren't absolute mad lads (pejorative). Like, they're clearly not good news, and there isn't any attempt to make them seem like they are - just that they might seem that way from the point of view of a traumatised child being rescued from a fridge like a tiny Indiana Jones. Many of the video games I like pride themselves on offering choice to the player, but in reality they smooth over any bumps in the road to make the choices appear equal - rather than telling the player they are choosing between bad and good.

It's been a while since I snuck my diary into a column, huh?

Long-term readers might have discerned that I haven't been well for a very long time. I have various ailments, of which we all suffer, and it turns out that a mere five years of clinging on by your fingernails sometimes leads to some actual treatment for... all of them. Wild.

So while there've been a lot of interesting looking games in the shortlist lately, these last few weeks have been entirely too interesting for me personally. Piecing It Together is nothing more or less than 3D jigsaw puzzles. I've never even liked jigsaws, but it turns out that was exactly the kind of game I needed.

While trying to keep vaguely up on both games discourse and terminology over long periods of time, I frequently find myself noticing terms enter common usage, get used a bunch, then fall out of favour again. I think this is partly because games discourse is cyclical, and partly because writing and talking about the same things a lot means that when a neater phrase for something complicated pops up, it gets assimilated quickly. Mostly, though, I think it’s because of my brain doing the thing where, say, you notice a yellow car on a walk and then see dozens of them. I was going to write a car make there but I don’t know any. Uh, (looks at monitor), Asus? Do Asus do cars? The 1994 Asus Gremlin. What a ride!

I sometimes struggle with what to write about for supporter posts (a contender this week was "why does Fallout the TV show insist Walton Goggins' character is from California when he talks like Foghorn Leghorn?"). And then we got an email about a game called Ants Took My Eyeball and I was like "Man, games need good names more often." I played the Steam demo for Ants Took My Eyeball (which is a 2D action roguelite where you go into an anthill to fight ants, who took your eyeball) and I very much liked the design, weapons and idea, but not the controls so much. Not my cup of tea, but have a go of the demo. But you know what got me to play an action platformer roguelite when those games aren't really my cup of tea? That godamn name is what!

"Very little Bela Lugosi" is not a criticism I ever expected to level at a game. It's not entirely unexpected considering he's dead, but I'm still grumbling at you, Carpathian Night Starring Bela Lugosi.

It is, as it appears, an unabashed homage to Castlevania, but with none of the -vania, making it much more like the original (or the game boy ones, and possibly a few others in the series I don't know about): a straightforward, linear platform game about whipping monsters and not stepping on spikes. Ten a penny, right? But CNSBL captures it so well that it had me looking up old game boy tunes it vaguely reminded me of.

Nationalism is obviously weepingly dull, even when it’s not being genuinely harmful, but the UK does have a few special things you can’t get anywhere else. Nik Naks, for example - the only crisp without at least one inferior flavor in the multipack. If I’m even vaguely patriotic about anything, though, it’s the sort of colloquial variety for such a comparatively tiny landmass that means you can drive an hour in any direction and get in a guaranteed fistfight with a stranger over what one of these is called*:

I know some of you will quibble with the headline, so let me confirm straight away that, yes, technically Aquarist is not a game simulating being an aquarium. An aquarist is someone who builds and manages aquariums, which is your principle task in the capital A Aquarist game. It recently left early access, which is sort of unbelievable because it's very janky in the most adorable way. You can tell it was made by someone who bloody loves aquariums, but taken at face value the career mode tells a strange tale indeed. For example, you have a very unsettling father.

Ever since Lords Of The Realm, I've had a soft spot for feudalism sims. Although faux-medieval games are common, there aren't all that many about regular people and regular concerns. Even LotR was increasingly about battles and armies as it went on, rather than the unique management parts.

But in Under The Yoke, you're just a serf. You want to make something of yourself, but it's about a regular person managing his life, not some unlikely "adventurer", whatever that means. So you'll mostly be toiling, and foraging, and genuinely having way more actual skills than us superior modern folk. And despite some UI issues and rough edges, it's weirdly compelling.

As a valued RPS supporter, you’re likely aware that you possess legal ownership of the fleeting thoughts I have right before falling asleep at night. It’s actually in the T&C, right under the bit about Horace’s claim on your organs. Good news: such interruptions are plentiful, and so too will be content. Here's my latest:

Am I doomed, I asked myself, to live in wishful longing for the myriad gaming experiences I could have had if I didn’t tend to get obsessed with a few specific games, both digital and tabletop, that take up all my leisure time?

Obviously I didn’t phrase it like that. It was more like ‘whawhaohhnoo’.

Windowkill is the most inventive arcade shooter I've played for years.

It's twin-stick shooting in a tiny window that temporarily expands in that direction when you shoot its edges. You have to actively manage and maintain the play space itself for that to even be an option. Soon static monsters appear in their own isolated windows you'll have to shoot your way towards (their attacks can cross the void between), and before long there are the horrible hateful little blue bastards who sit there passively, soaking up shots and never attacking but actively pulling the edges of the window towards them.

It's a clever and great little thing and I sort of hate it as much as I like it.

So, Final Fantasy 7 Rebirth, eh? I liked it a lot. 150 hours a lot. I big cried at least twice and welled up, much like a well, many other times. As much as I’d like to wax emotional about the plot and characters in an endless lifestream-of-consciousness ramble, articles need both headlines and subjects (truly an act of conspiratorial violence targeted at my personal dadaist instincts). So, let’s talk about just the minigames, because I think they’re wonderful for all sort of reasons that might not be immediately apparent. Naturally, big spoiler potential ahead if, like me, you consider everything you haven’t experienced in the RPG game a spoiler.

I think one of OG Final Fantasy’s 7 best tricks is how it doesn’t just dish out its strangest distractions as a palette cleanser to the main meal of its action and drama, but actively works them in as an indispensable part of the menu. It also does this all without a shred of shame or self-consciousness, resulting in a cinematic video game with no inner turmoil or resentment toward either part of that equation - a characteristic I feel is suffered from by many of the games for which FF7 lead the way. Take the Gold Saucer. It’s an excuse to dick around and ride motorbikes, sure, but it’s also an essential story beat while the party takes time to relax and enjoy each other’s company away from the stress of travel and battle.

Graham wrote about WitchHand last month when the game came out. He compared it to Stacklands, and I can see where he was coming from. It's a cute, deckbuilding strategy game where you're a witch building up strength to take on some horrible void-y demon-y things. It has much higher stakes than Stacklands, but most importantly, you summon cat familiars in it, and they go 'meow!'

After its gorgeous Steam Next Fest demo last month, tiny little house builder Summerhouse has now arrived on Steam in full, launching just a couple of weeks ago on March 8th. I've been having a swell time with this over the last few days, particularly as I noodle about in the other big backdrops that weren't available in its earlier demo.

But there's been another Summerhouse development this week that has arguably delighted me even more. Solo developer Friedemann took to Xwitter on Monday to detail all the games that inspired him to make Summerhouse in the first place, and there are some really surprising, but fascinating call outs in there, including Stronghold Crusader and Sword & Sworcery. I love it when developers go in-depth about things they've seen in other games and tried to riff on in their own creations, so please, let's make this a tradition for all new game releases, yeah?

Airships have an odd place in games. They pop up as a central idea in a fair few games, but there hasn't really been a definitive one about actually piloting your own.

Passing By - A Tailwind Journey isn't aiming for that, I think, but it nonetheless captures a key part of the appeal such a game should have. It's the sense of drifting, both with the wind and with life more generally, and the stretches of not particularly much happening. But in a good way. This is a game about taking it easy, choosing to sail by the less remarkable things unless you happen to fancy stretching your legs, and having only the trust that the currents will take you where you're meant to go when they get around to it. It's not a purely vibe-based game, but you'll definitely enjoy it a lot more if you can appreciate the mood.

I usually know right away when I'm going to enjoy interactive fiction. But I don't always know why. Isle Of Maligree is a bit of an all-rounder, as pretty much every part of it is doing something right, but it's the sense that you're making your own version of its story that marks it out.

People are going missing on the island, and you've been sent to investigate. Only, it seems this isn't the first time, because some sinister magic is causing everyone to forget the whole thing ever happened. If you don't figure it out in time, you'll have to make a new character and try again. And if you're an amazing genius who figures it out on your first try... you'll want to try again anyway, to play it a different way and see what you missed. Maybe one day I'll even do it without getting stabbed.

My time with Dragon's Dogma 2 for review was neat, mainly because it's a good video game and an anecdote generator. But it reinforced one thing for me that I've increasingly come to realise about myself: I actually can't cope with character creators that let you like, tweak the finest details. I do not want to define the curls of each individual nose hair or adjust the angle of the mole on one's forehead. I'm far too indecisive for any of this! Let me roll the dice, please.

Having spent close to 40 hours hanging out with Cloud and co. on my (entirely accidental) Final Fantasy 7 Rebirth holiday last week, I've been absolutely bowled over by the sheer size and scale of its big, open world map regions. I've only seen three of them so far, out of its total of eight, but it's immediately obvious just how much of a step-up these places are compared to the dusty plains and rolling hills of the most recent Final Fantasy game to hit PC, FF15. An obvious take, perhaps, given that FF15 first came out eight years ago in 2016, but I'm sure anyone (all right, mainly me) who's ever despaired at Noctis' seeming inability to climb even the smallest hillock in front of him, or how everyone always rides right into your backside while gunning about on a chocobo, will feel some mild, tangible relief at how elegantly Rebirth has solved both of these particular problems. Not only can everyone's chocobo navigate the world seamlessly without getting tripped up on either yourself or the nearest pebble, but Cloud can also jump, leap and haul himself up crags and rocks with one easy button press.

But there are aspects of Rebirth's approach to open world adventuring that also feel distinctly underwhelming at the same time. When you look past the splendour and rich reimagining of this once flat and detail-less world, it's ultimately quite a standardised take on what modern open world games have become in recent years. There are towers that reveal more points of interest on the map; there are special monster encounters to find; summon temples to discover; and lifestream springs to analyse that also reveal more and more about your immediate surroundings. There are proper sidequests with their own multi-part story objectives, too, which is arguably where Rebirth feels most alive, but most of the activities you'll be doing between critical story missions all generally fall into the same identical categories in each region. FF15 had some of these, too, of course, but it never felt quite so formulaic in how you went about them.

In some respects, Helldivers 2 did come as a bit of surprise. Not a huge amount of marketing, no betas, and review codes didn't go out until it basically launched. Before it landed on my PC, there was a small part of me that thought it was going to be a rocky ride with severe performance issues or the like. Nope! It's easily slid into one of my favourite games of the year without question, and presumably, for the hundreds of thousands of others who've also opted into preserving democracy.

But there seems to be this sentiment that Helldivers 2's roaring success has come as a shock, so much of a shock that top execs and investors are doing YouTube thumbnail faces in boardrooms with mini-nuke explosions erupting from their heads. Should its success come as that much of a surprise, though? No, probably not.

This weekend I said one of the games I was planning to be playing was Chasing The Unseen, and I did in fact do that. It is indeed a strange, dream-like experience where you leap floaty leaps onto thin, spindly crags of rock in a sage-grey void. Rather than finding it soothing, I found it it extremely stress-making. This was the opposite experience to what I had expected.

I like a good management game, but my definition of "good" often includes words like "detailed", "complex", or "dangerously all-consuming". That doesn't mean, though, that I don't appreciate something light and simple now and then. In fact, Minami Lane might barely qualify as a management game by some standards.

There's no real pressure, no chance of failure, and its limit of a handful of levels lasting perhaps three or four hours just about taps it out. But sometimes such limitations are intentional, and exactly what you want from a game.

Readers with good memories may recall that I was delighted to see Games Incubator and PlayWay moving away from "cleaning abandoned industrial buildings" and towards "magical pets" in their sim games, when they revealed My Horse: Bonded Spirits. I played the prologue to the game today (which is about 40 minutes long) and discovered that you have to level up your horse before you can gallop. Sir: no.

I come to you with an important question today, readers. Has there ever been an actually good sewer level in a video game before? I propose to you that there has not. Sewer levels are the worst. They have always been the worst, and will always be the worst. There is no redeeming feature that can make sewer levels good, fun or enjoyable, and I come to you today saying they must stop. No more sewer levels, developers. Please. I beg you. Especially you, Star Wars: Dark Forces Remaster. You're the chief offender in this whole mess, and both my nostrils and my sanity simply cannot take it anymore.

I don't think I've fully recovered from my time with Skull And Bones, having suffered tremendously as a result of the review. There might be fun in some of its slower moments, but some of the generally positive, "It's actually quite a good game!" takes that I've seen honestly baffle me. The game is a series of long, annoying journeys, during which the most fun I had was turning my head to watch Catfish on my other monitor. MTV's show about people getting duped online was the perfect sailing companion, and perhaps, one of the only reasons I survived my brush with the live service seas.

Last night I dreamt I had to review a Dragon Age DLC. I reviewed it poorly. I thought that it should not have been marketed as main game DLC instalment when it pivoted to being a magical girl dating sim. This serves to show how unrealistic dreams can be; in my waking hours I am, of course, of the clear-eyed awareness that a magical girl dating sim is entirely in-keeping with the rest of the Dragon Age oeuvre.

I'm worried about Dragon Age. I'm worried that so much cost has been sunk, team members changed and redrafting did that it'll end up kind of a mess. But that's the pessimism talking. What I'd like to propose is that all the big game companies have a crack at something similar to Amazon's (hiliarious and abortive) attempt to officially license fan fiction, which was called Kindle Worlds.

I know this sort of thing has been said before around these parts, but in scanning through the endless reams of Steam Next Fest demos earlier this month and trying to work out what these games are and whether they're worth downloading, I truly believe it's a sentiment that's worth repeating. When I first saw the name C.A.R.D.S RPG: The Misty Battlefield appear on the Next Fest landing page, I instantly thought, 'Yes, here we go, now we're talking'.

Well, my first thought was actually, 'Gee, if only there was an easy way to know what this game's about based on just the title alone,' but that's just me being facetious. Ultimately, I have a lot of respect for this kind of naming convention, and the fact it's also being made by the Octopath Traveler developers Acquire is really just the icing on the cake.

I'm not sure exactly what I was expecting from Graven, but it still feels like it wasn't quite what I expected. That's both good and bad. It has the look of a 90s throwback FPS, the cool atmosphere and action RPG (barely RPG, really, restricted to which weapons you upgrade) combat of something from the 2000s like Rune or Dark Messiah, with a hint of a modern immersive sim. There is, I think, a better game to be made with those parts in a different arrangement. This one is only kinda good.

I've been looking back over my news pieces about artificial intelligence tools, generative image software and/or large language models and reflecting that what I really distrust about "AI" is the fact that AI is "the future". Saying that X thing is the future is de rigueur for technology marketing. It's something you hear repeatedly from videogames companies in particular, with their sequels and console generations and other chronological fixtures that form an endless staircase towards The New.

I promise I'm not trying to turn RPS into a Soggins the Frog fansite, but... If you have a) been enjoying Cobalt Core as part of RPS Game Club this month, and b) especially like it when Soggins turns up with his ship of malfunctioning missile launchers, then I implore you to make Sunshine Heavy Industries your next port of call in your Steam library. It's what the Cobalt Core devs Rocket Rat Games made first, and you can immediately see a lot of shared DNA between the two games - not least its chunky, charming pixel visuals and some crossover between its cast of characters - including our pal Soggins.

It is, I should stress, a very different game to Cobalt Core - it's a sandboxy spaceship builder with zero combat involved, for starters - but I've been playing it again this week ahead of some other Game Club-themed articles I've got cooking, and I've been having a lovely time with it. Not least because I get to spend more time with Soggins the very smug frog, all while listening to even more excellent chill tunes from Cobalt Core composer Aaron Cherof.