Supporters (Page 2)

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.

Tracking technology isn't perfect. Actually, that's an understatement. Tracking technology has many pitfalls, including how Google Maps can be accidentally used to track people, and the fact that if you systematically turn off cookies, your internet browsing experience becomes increasingly bizarre. I am offered adverts for afro hair care products and huge bags of puppy kibble, because the algorithms no longer have any idea who I am or how many small dogs I have. And yet.

Surely this technology has reached the point where, if I open a game for the first time in several weeks, it should be able to tell I haven't played for a long time, and ask if I would like a small refresher of the controls.

I have never enjoyed those grid-based dungeon-crawling games. I dislike the very notion of dungeon-crawling in general, frankly, but the awkward juddery squareskipping rat-toucher games have always left me absolutely cold.

You will be shocked and aroused to learn that I preface with all this just so I can make an exception of Islands Of The Caliph. Does this mean she's becoming more open minded, or just that she's found a way to gripe and complain even within a recommendation? Who can say, readers.

What I can say is that I don't merely hate it less than its genremates. I think it's a bloody great little RPG, full of charm and detail that never drags it down.

When it comes to co-op shooters and most other multiplayer games, it's often the case that friendly fire is switched off by default or there are endless systems in place to make it a punishable offence. In Helldivers 2 it isn't actively encouraged, nor is it punished. Accidentally vaporising your teammate with an air strike is all a part of the campaign for democracy and freedom, a hilarious byproduct of human error. I gushed about it in my review, and cheery RPS fanzine PC Gamer wrote up a quick piece on the specific ways it eeks out silliness.

But comedy isn't just accidental in Helldivers 2, oh no. I think it encourages playground behaviour of the worst order: smacking your mates into things.

My excitement for Final Fantasy VII Rebirth went into overdrive this week. Not only did we get 20 more minutes of its gorgeous open worlds, mini-games and story nuggets to gawp over this week thanks to Sony's dedicated State Of Play stream for it, but the internet has also been awash with previews, interviews and all sorts of other Final Fantasy-shaped goodies. Honestly, it's like a second Christmas for me over here at the moment, it's great.

But one thing that really stuck out to me this week was a comment made by series producer Yoshinori Kitase in an interview with our friends at Eurogamer. When they asked him why remake Final Fantasy 7 at all, his response hit me much harder than I was expecting. He said that the original FF7 is "probably going to be always that game my dad played, and I don't want it to be that." Aside from making me crumble to dust with irrelevancy, this really got me thinking about older games, the way we play them now, and just what role remakes and remasters have in today's PC gaming landscape. So come and feel incredibly old with me as I try and get my (very jumbled and loosely-related) thoughts in order.

In survival games, I leave the building to everyone else, or I build the absolute bare minimum unless I really enjoy the world I'm in. I think that's a thing inherent in me, as I've never taken great pleasure in snapping together pieces of Lego, and would much rather earn killstreaks than decorate a back garden. For me, building in most games is laborious and predictable and does not sate my impatient brain.

But I like Neal Agarwal's Infinite Craft, a browser game where you slide words on top of each other and see if they generate something new. For instance, "water" and "fire" combine to make "steam", with what's practically infinitesimal possibilities. It is immediate, simple, and unpredictable. More games should facilitate haphazard engineering and silliness.

Every so often, there are games that come out that are made with real models. They're sometimes called "handmade" games, implying pure coders use their prehensile toes, but I really like it every time I see one because I love models. I like little versions of regular things! I just think they're neat. But it really is every so often, presumably because it takes even longer to make a tiny little man out of twigs and spit and scan him into a computer than it does to make him in the computer to start with. Cute miniature puzzle game Lumino City is ten years old, and Trüberbrook is coming up on five. And I first played a tiny snippet of Harold Halibut in 2018. Now, a larger snippet is available for everyone in the Steam Next Fest.

Harold Halibut is a sort of sci-fi, slightly retrofuturist point and click puzzle game about an undersea society on an alien planet. These people's ancestors blasted off to an ocean planet using the technology of a big science corporation and now, though they can't remember why, they're all pootling about under the water looking at fish. In this world of exaggerated sea-science nonsense, Harold stands out as a sort of beige lab handyman.

Readers, I must confess. I was watching Sony's State Of Play stream on Wednesday with a mind divided. I'd arranged with some pals to play an online board game with them that evening, and when news hit that it might actually be a reasonably big deal for us PC folks, I ambitiously thought: I can proooobably do both at the same time??? Reader, I was wrong, at least for the most part. The first 30 minutes of it was arguably fine, but then the 10-minute trailer for Death Stranding 2 arrived and I simply had to throw my hands up in defeat. I honestly did not understand what I was watching, and even several re-watches later, I'm still not 100% sure what Kojima thinks he's playing at.

But hot damn, do I love it anyway.

Oh my god, yes. I was a little hesitant to put this in the shortlist so soon after another stabby swordy duelling game (“Wait, five months? Really?” - Actually Looked It Up While Editing Sin) but goddamn. First Cut Colon Samurai Duel is great. You know those little, simple games that you try out on a whim and find yourself going, "I will absolutely play this all day unless someone stops me"? Yeah.

Not that Yakuza (or Like A Dragon as it's now called) hasn't felt comfortable in its skin over the years, but Like A Dragon: Infinite Wealth feels particularly confident. I think that's down to a lot of little improvements to its RPG systems that I mention in my review, but also two other things: a radio and trolleys.

My inbox is absolutely rammed with early Steam Next Fest demos at the moment. Honestly, did no one remember that February's Next Fest starts in, you know, February, in a week a bit's time this year? I'm all for getting a few things early to make the deluge of demos a bit more manageable to cover, but this year has just been a teensy bit insane. Now there's too many things to look at in advance, but hey, I'm making steady progress, and you've probably seen the fruits of a couple of these this week already. Next on the list is Dystopika, a toy-like sandbox citybuilder that's sort of in the same vein as the lovely Summerhouse I played earlier this week, but also lives at the exact opposite end of the mood and vibes scale. Whereas Summerhouse is about creating diddly little cute streets with sunny Mediterranean vibes, Dystopika is effectively: Build Your Own Blade Runner.

As part of my commitment to hating everything, I have a minor grudge against "idle" games. Because they're not, are they? You have to supervise them constantly, not relax and watch them grow organically while eating a sandwich and only occasionally intervening like a neglectful goddess.

Writer's Rush is sort of, sort of an idle game, I'd argue. It's a low pressure, low stakes, super light sim that takes the barest hint of the clicker and crosses it with sort of-sort of-sort of score attack, and somehow works without quite feeling like either. Because, I think, of its charmingly, intentionally daft representation of what being a novelist is like.

Punch some trees, get some logs, build a crafting bench. I'm bored of Palworld already, because it starts off the same as any other survival game. Of course it does! Here I was hoping for something a bit different - a legally distinct Pinser welcoming me into his home of angry cicada-likes - and I get another serving of derivative. Am I wrong in wanting a survival game that doesn't begin like the rest of them?

Readers with keen memories may remember that I recently self-described as being in my scented candle girlie era. I'm currently burning one called Starry Night, which is a nice fresh scent but it's nowhere near as strong as I would like. I can never find fresh scents that are as long-lingering as the fruity or woody ones. Anyway, I have been discussing my new interest (and interrupting work meetings with pretend candle unboxing videos where I tell them to like and subscribe and check out my collab with WickManiac) with the rest of the Treehouse, which prompted us to talk about the idea of gamer candles. They exist! They're just candles of lies.

I try to be open minded, you know. What usually happens is I give an adventure game a chance though they're all terrible (all of them), and I try. I really do. I made it several hours into Stasis Colon Bone Totem before getting frustra-bored and giving up. That may sound damning, but it's actually very good indeed, because usually that happens within about ten minutes. I can't say it defied my hatred of the genre as much as a The Last Express or The Cat Lady, but it had a good enough run to deserve talking about. Not least as I'm still curious about its setting.

It always breaks my heart a bit when a game I've been looking forward to for a while absolutely biffs it on arrival. Having quite enjoyed Golf Club Wasteland a few years ago (now called Golf Club Nostalgia for, I don't know, reasons), I was quite pumped when developers Demagog Studios announced not one, but two further games set in the same post-apocalyptic universe. The first to come out (albeit only on Netflix at the moment) was the turn-based strategy game Highwater (also a bit of a dud, based on the early Steam demo I played last year), but it's the second game, The Cub (out today on Steam) that has prompted this current moment of teeth-sucking sadness.

I've been playing a bit of it over the last week, and oh man, it's trying so, so hard to be like Limbo and Inside, but just... doing quite a terrible job of it all. I was looking forward to any excuse I could get to have the soothing sounds of Golf Club's dystopian Radio Nostalgia From Mars show back in my ear drums, but alas. I simply cannot hear it over the sound of my own screams of frustration.

After quite a while using the Fnatic Streak65, a 60% keyboard with Cherry brown switches, I have moved on from fruit (technically drupe, according to Google) and into a vegetable era. My Streak's brown switches became a bit loud and quite rattly, which, as someone with hearing declared by an audiologist to be so sensitive that I give myself tinnitus, started to get to me.

So I type this to you now as someone who's graduated to Kailh low profile switches, which is proving as nutritious for my finger pads as I'd imagine its leafy homophone would be. Here's hoping that there's more low profile mechanical keebs out there in a few years, as the options seem very limited at the mo.

We've all got 'em, right? The games we play to make ourselves feel better, to self soothe, the game we play over the Christmas break. My most recent one has been PowerWash Simulator, because it has clear goals in an organised list, it goes ding, it has a nice white noise... But imagine my shock when I re-installed Immortals Fenyx Rising for the somethingth time, and realised that it has been a comfort game for me all along.

This might make me a massive hypocrite. It's a big Ubisoft RPG filled stuff I complain about modern games having, notably a big map of empty space filled with busywork quests and collectibles. But I don't know what to tell you! It requires concentration but not too much, the set dressing all looks great, and it's doing all that AAA stuff with a wink and a smile, so it's sort of fine. It has fourth wall-breaking meta narration! How can I not like it!

Hello folks. It's probably officially too far into January to get away with saying Happy New Year now, but stuff it, I'll wish you a good one anyway, as well as a warm welcome back to Letter From The Editor. This month's letter can be considered very much a part two to the one I wrote in November, in which we had a sneaky peek at the behind the scenes process of putting together our annual RPS Advent Calendar (or in regular video game website speak, our big games of the year feature).

We always have a big old voting barney around November time to decide which games do or don't make the cut in our Advent Calendar (that is: we all submit top ten lists and we count up the votes afterwards), and every year lots of you try and guess which ones will make it over on the RPS Discord. Inevitably, there are only so many slots for what is always a heck of a lot of games put forward, but the key question has always been thus: who voted for what? WELL. For the first time ever, come and find out below as we reveal all.