Supporters (Page 3)

Readers, I have good news and bad news. Good news. My mum got me an incredible hot chocolate maker for Christmas this year, as well as a jumbo-sized box of grated chocolate sachets to use with it. It is, quite honestly, one of the best presents she's ever given me, and it now means I can have perfect hot chocolate, practically on tap, in as little as three minutes. Hotel Chocolat's Velvetiser, you're an absolute beauty. Honestly, it is so much better than anything I could make, or have made, myself. It's fast, easy, wonderfully smooth and properly delicious hot chocolate. Crucially, the machine itself is also dead simple to clean. Gone are the days I have to worry about washing up a pan of semi-encrusted milk afterwards, or faffing about with how many teaspoons of hot chocolate powder to plonk in because I accidentally coughed and sent half of it flying all over the counter.

Bad news. This recent revelation of such effortless, technological ease has instantly kneecapped any excitement or desire I might have had for Kitfox Games' new tea brewing sim they announced at the tail end of last year, or indeed any other kind of drink-based simulation game (of which there seem to be an increasing number of these days). Whereas before I might have revelled in the step-by-step process of making a perfect hot drink, I have now been fully converted to the ways of instant button pressing and time-saving efficiency. After all, why dwell on the manual minutiae when machinery is king?

Kainga Colon Seeds of Civilization is one of many, many games that I didn't get on with for some reason or other in early access, and has subsequently sat in my pile long past a 1.0 release, neglected and generating a vague guilt. It's come some way since, but its edges are still a little rough, with (usually) minor bugs and limited feedback wrapped up in a design that's influenced, of course, by that vague shimmering ghost of Rogue (and thus is innately bad and you're all just wrong). So yeah, it kinda has problems.

But I like it. Weird, huh?

I reached the Elden Ring exhaustion point a couple of years ago… and I still don't think I've climbed out of my slump. Yes, I gave the game a Bestest Best badge that I stand by, but I also think it's one of FromSoftware's most taxing soulslike creations. It's so colossal that, by the end of my adventure, I'd had enough of the umpteenth boss. I wanted rid.

With talk of Elden Ring's Shadow Of The Erdtree DLC spinning up as 2024 begins, I've assessed my feelings and come to the conclusion that I'm not as excited as I would've been had the game and its DLC somehow existed a few years ago. To be honest with you, part of me hopes it just ends up being a roguelike. That way I might actually get into it.

Earlier this week, I shared a Tweet, or X post or whatever, that was a Twitter Film Guy being like, "It's a burden talking to people about my passion, movies, because I think about them on a fundamentally different level". Like, okay, Scorsese, you can say you didn't really like Murder Mystery 2, the normies won't chase you out of town with pitchforks. You know what actually is a burden? Your passions being watching hours of anti-multi-level marketing (MLM) YouTube videos, which is the content hole I fell down over the Christmas break. Your weird uncles have at least seen a film before, but it's not like I can turn to my mum and ask her if she thinks the weird Monat Christians are worse than the Seint make-up TikTok girlies without explaining almost every word in the sentence.

Anyway. My point is: someone should make an MLM simulation game.

Over the Christmas holidays, I had very good intentions to finally tackle some of the big games from 2023. I still haven't played Resident Evil 4, System Shock, very much of Baldur's Gate 3 or Assassin's Creed Mirage, and I really wanted to play a bit of Avatar: Frontiers Of Pandora. You know, just for a little look after the quite interesting preview I did back in October. Admittedly, I wasn't anywhere near my PC for at least one of the two weeks I had off, as I was away doing the inevitable family roulette of Christmas visiting. I also knew that, even if I had spent the whole time at home, there would be no way I'd finish or get through all of them. I knew I was sort of setting myself up to fail, but as I said. Good intentions. I did have my Steam Deck with me, after all, and even went to the trouble of loading it up with around 50 games, including some of those biggies that I have on Steam.

What did I actually end up playing though? Teeny games. Six of 'em, which were all four to six hours long. And some of them I didn't even enjoy very much! Why? Why do I do this? In some respects I'm pleased I managed to clear a bit more of my backlog, but man alive, I always fall into exactly the same trap. I play the shorties, and always leave the biggies, like I'm allergic to anything over four hours - and I don't like it.

Much as I enjoyed Spellcaster University, I was surprised it was so successful. Its dependency on randomly assigning you buildings differentiated it from the kind of full management game I'd expected, and which I assumed most people would want.

Happily, I was wrong: it did fine. Happilyer still, Mind Over Magic is here (though in early access) to provide a somewhat more traditional design, and it's already compelling enough to turn my quick test into a seven hour delve.

I watched Studio Ghibli's latest film The Boy And The Heron the other day, having gone in basically blind. I knew it would be the case, but I left the cinema and said to my mate, "I don't really know what just happened but what happened was great". It was a lot of things! A visual feast. Surprisingly goofy. Unsettling. But above all, a challenge. We walked back to our cars and tried - my mate was thrilled to have identified who Dave Bautista likely voiced in the dub (we watched sub) - to unpack what we saw.

Since then, we've listened to podcasts, read interviews, and engaged in some back and forth. It's all brought me back to my uni days, where Dark Souls made me get my shovel out for the first time and mine the internet for meaning. Much like Souls, Ghibli's latest only expands as you reflect on it.

In 2024, I am learning to do cryptic crosswords. Last year I complained about Puzzmo's crossword clues being very US-centric and Excors commented that US and UK puzzles seem very different, both in their form and in the fact that UK crosswords are often crytpic. Which is true! Often if you see a "quick crossword" in a UK paper that means "crossword with clues that are general knowledge questions and not an archaic set of riddles - you know, for if you're waiting for the kettle to boil, or are an idiot". So I decided to look into how you actually do cryptics. It's way harder than I thought, but at the same time I did not realise it's just smug puns.

Bahnsen Knights knows what not to tell you. Its world is largely a mystery, because all that matters is the situation its protagonist Boulder is stuck way, way too deep in. Everything feels like it's about to come to a head somehow, even though you have very little idea what's going on.

Its world could almost be a post-apocalypse one, a feeling that persists even though it's unclear how true it is, how much is ambient cult brainwashing, and how much just the result of Boulder starting to lose himself after being undercover for far too long.

My Steam Wrapped listed Baldur's Gate 3 and Vampire Survivors as my top two games of 2023. If Epic Games and my Switch were involved, Fortnite and Persona 5 Royal would've absolutely been included in the lineup, too. Motivation has lain mostly in co-op capers with friends, hangs with virtual pals, or in the battle royale-verse. Otherwise, nothing has truly given me the itch.

But I think 2024 could be a big one for me. Not only are a number of upcoming RPGs right up my alley, they align with new and existing motivations: hangs with pals and Japanese language learning. For the first time, I'm excited to embrace the grind both in-game and outside of it.

I don't look for Christmas games. Partly because they're basically all terrible, and partly because of how tiresome it is when everything is saturated with the same theme wherever you look. But Ebenezer And The Invisible World is about helping Scrooge run around London bashing capitalists and other evil spirits with his cane, and summoning friendly ghosts to prevent Caspar Malthus from genociding the working class. I simply could not find out what the hell was going on there.

Turns out, it's kinda good. But it has too many problems to reach much beyond that.

It's always saddened me that Simogo's brilliant text-based adventure Device 6 has been trapped on iOS-only devices since it first came out... ten years ago? Hell's bells, now I feel old. If you're unfamiliar with it, it's about a girl named Anna who must escape from a mysterious island, but the whole game is presented like you're reading a book - only one that you can click on and prod with your fingers to reveal new puzzles within that text. It's very clever, especially when it occasionally asks you to rotate your device to navigate parts of its game worlds - there's an excellent bit with stairs that I won't spoil, but seriously, if you haven't played Device 6 and you own an iOS device, go and download it now.

Once you've done that, you should also have a look this year's Delete After Reading, which does a very good impression of it for us folks on PC, hiding smart, tactile text puzzles inside its interactive spy thriller.

For an informed, insightful take on E3's end, please go and read Alice0's piece on why she misses it because it only lasted a week, not months. Here, you'll find markedly less insight, but a more personal take on why my E3s lay, largely, with others. More than anything, I'll miss E3 because I liked watching the original Gametrailers crew react to it live. And I liked watching them form Easy Allies once GT closed and continue the tradition, suiting up and completely losing it to the big reveals.

RPGs are among the trickiest candidates for any kind of coverage where you can't basically book a week off to do little else, but I've had my eye on Colony Ship for a while. After a too-soon dabble in early access, I was already intrigued by its setting. You'll never guess.

It's a welcome change from dusty radiation or goddamn elves again, and the RPG structure feels flexible and fairly responsive to your actions even before you start picking sides and ideologies. It hasn't quite stolen my heart, but it may well steal some of my christmas.

Okay, okay, I know the last two of these have only been fairly lukewarm interpretations of what I'd normally consider 'good', but listen, this is the real deal folks. Roto Force is excellent, and comes with a hearty recommendation for both twin-stick shmuppers and, you know, cool people in general. It's also an excellent Steam Deck game.

Rockstar has released a 90-second GTA 6 trailer! Wowee! No seriously, ignoring my cynicism for a second, it does look really impressive. As I mentioned in our RPS reacts piece, I'm genuinely excited by the prospect of a renewed Vice City and you bet I'll be there for the inevitable five-minute narrated trailer that begins with a person saying, "Welcome to Vice City".

There's no doubt Vice City is going to be dense and chaotic, going by all the twerking and the social media parodies of real life Florida folks. But really, I do hope that Rockstar doesn't just reserve next-gen's horsepower for wildness. I want some peace, some quiet, some innocuous suburbs to laze around in. That would be nice.

Once in a while I have to figure out how to recommend a game I know I'm never going to touch again. Orten Was The Case is an adventure game, which triggers a reflexive "ugh", and it's a big elaborate puzzle, which I have limited patience for, and it's a time-loop game, making it a cool and well-realised concept that happens to be a poor fit for my scattered brain. I wish I enjoyed it as much as some of you will, because it's clearly a bit special.

With apologies to Bithell Games for the two-in-a-row smackdown of games they released this year, the next entry on my list of good things that didn't quite make my personal GOTY rankings in 2023 is none other than The Banished Vault. I'll put my hands up here - I really did intend to review this one properly when it came out back in July, and I regret never quite getting round to it. Time, as ever, escaped me in the run-up to Gamescom, but it was also one of the first games in a while where I felt I wasn't quite equipped to do it justice.

One of my favourite game experiences is basically anything that makes me go "what is happening?" in the right combination of bewilderment and joy.

Little Goody Two Shoes is a life simulator adventure dating game hybrid full of secrets and mutually exclusive options that encourage replays. Going into it blind definitely heightened the sense of enjoyable confusion, and the joy of gradually going from "is... is this gay?" to "oh this is super gay" and "is this a game about hiding secret gay relationships from the backwards villagers" to "oh this is totally about being secretly gay and also automatically covering for a witch because these people can eat it".

This year's Call Of Duty entry is Call Of Duty: Modern Warfare 3, but it's actually the second Modern Warfare 3 because the first Modern Warfare 3 came out in 2011. In my multiplayer review, I say that it preys on nostalgia, because it does! The game's multiplayer schtick is all about bringing back classic maps to act as a smokescreen for a lack of direction. At least, that's what I think.

I find all this nostalgia stuff interesting, mainly because it's coincided with three other events in my own personal timeline (Chapter 29 Season 11, you could say): A League Of Legends pro-player called Faker, the resurgence of a badminton star, and Fortnite's own OG event. The thing that separates them all from COD? A plan.

In the death throes of last December, I wrote about all the games I wanted to review in 2022 but eventually ran out of time for when we finally packed up the Treehouse for Christmas and took our annual turkey nap. It was quite a long list, all things considered, I will probably still end up making another one by the time this year's annual meat snooze rolls around, too. 2023 has arguably been stuffed with even more good games than we had last year, and I will be the first to admit that my eyes are, indeed, frequently too big for what I can feasibly hope to play in any given month.

But I also thought it would also be fun to get ahead of the game slightly by turning some of my remaining supporter posts for the year into a kind of extended I'M SORRY: 2023 Edition series, talking about games I have actually liked and played, but which a) didn't end up making it onto my personal GOTY list (just to keep you Advent Calender guessing gamers on your toes), and b) we also weren't able to review on the site, either due to lack of time, code or, well, no, it's really just time. Time is our eternal enemy. And the first game I'd like to talk about is Tron: Identity.

I've a bit of a soft spot for a good frozen outdoors setting. Sure, they can be a bit one note visually, but considering that even a doghole like London looks beautiful in the snow, it can be a strong note.

Kona 2 Colon Brume's snowy post-blizzard setup makes pretty good on the promise, and also smartly contrasts those stark snowbanks and deadly cold forests with the traditional cramped, dark indoors of many a horror game. I suspect I'd have enjoyed it less had it started with the latter, and truth be told, I'm not sure it's quite my thing overall. But it's held my attention so far, which most of its peers don't.

Reader, I have a confession to make. I have tried long and hard to like adorable citybuilder Townscaper, but I just cannot muster much affection for it. I love how it looks, I love what it does, and I will endlessly admire how its little multi-coloured building bricks morph and shift, smooshed together in far more creative ways than I could ever manage myself. But when presented with a blank canvas and no direction on what to do with said multi-coloured building bricks, my mind seizes up and straight up refuses to extract any joy from it. It's a feeling I fear will apply to the equally charming Tiny Glade when that eventually comes out as well, based on the very lovely GIFs I've seen of it so far, and honestly, there are times when I worry my brain is just a teeny bit broken and I have lost the ability to find joy in what are clearly very joyful little creations.

But then I play games like Pile Up!, a micro citybuilder that's very much in the same vein as Townscaper, and realise, oh no, I do just need some objectives and structure to my game playing for everything to be fine again.

As a staunch Nintendo head in the early console days, I would say my affection for PS1-era games is... present, but not particularly palpable. For me, the PlayStation One was mostly a machine to play Final Fantasies VII through IX on, and not much else (it was a very belated and cheap second-hand purchase, I should note, and games were still sufficiently expensive back then that maintaining two healthy game libraries for both the family N64 and my new Squall box was nigh on impossible). Nevertheless, I've been increasingly fascinated by the revival of PS1-era games in recent years, and it's been interesting to see which modern games have been "demade" in this style - see Bloodborne PSX - and which ones have made it their own from the off - see Signalis, Heartworm, and many others.

Crow Country is the latest game I've seen to take up the PSX mantle, and it combines the chunkiness of Final Fantasy VII-style character models with the grimy survival horror of something like Resident Evil to brilliant effect. Made by SFB Games, the same devs wot made the also excellent Tangle Tower, it's currently got a very good demo up on Steam at the moment, and it's got me thinking: what do you like most about PS1-era games on PC, and which ones are your all-time favs?

Hello folks. I know we've barely broken out of spooky season, but over in the RPS Treehouse we're rapidly preparing to warm up our vocal chords and bellow "It's CHRIIIIIIIISTMASSSSSS" from the rooftops in the spirit of Slade's seasonal epic. That's right. Advent Calendar season is upon us, and we'll be voting for our favourite games of the year very shortly. So I thought I'd use this month's Letter From The Editor to give you a little behind the scenes glimpse of how we'll be doing this in the coming weeks, and how we generally go about putting it all together every year.

In 2021, Twitter user Thomas Violence, an Australian podcaster who was working in a bar at the time, recounted that a 19-year-old had asked for a refund on their drink because they realised they were too drunk already. One of the early replies was an "ummm actually," pointing out that you had to be 21 to buy booze in most states, and Thomas Violence responded "I'm one of the dozens of people worldwide that live in a country that's not America". I am reminded of this tweet a lot, and I am reminded of it whenever I log on to Puzzmo, a new daily browser-based puzzle service from Orta Therox and Zach "Zach Gage" Gage.

Puzzmo is great, and currently in a sort of gradually expanding beta where you can sign up to get a chance to be sent a log-in, or existing users can give two friends a log-in (I have used mine already, sorry). Every day you get a few different puzzles, with a subscription model offering bonus puzzles. I've not subbed because I'm just not built for anagram puzzles and I do not understand chess, which form about half of the daily offering, but I enjoy doing the daily fliparts and crosswords a lot. Except. The crosswords always have clues that are very specific to the USA.

Readers, I must tell you something. If you're currently playing Alan Wake 2 and haven't continued with Alan's part of the story after reaching the point where you can switch between him and Saga, STOP WHAT YOU'RE DOING IMMEDIATELY.

I know Saga's an infinitely better hang than Alan, but trust me on this. You are ignoring what is arguably the best 15 minutes of video game you'll play all year. Don't make the same mistake I did and play as Saga for 20 hours, only to realise that this utter masterpiece of a level was sitting here the entire time. Do the right thing. Continue Alan's story. You won't regret it (and spoilers to follow below, obvs).

What a great little thing. You've surely seen a hundred post-Minecraft games about building a base to smelt iron to build a base, and probably even thought to yourself that they look entirely fine but kind of... redundant? There's only so many times you can walk back and forth from a cave to a forge.

But what if instead of trudging around a grey cave, you were driving a big drilling machine instead? It's so simple, and yet it makes all the difference in GeoDepths.

I've many a Halloweeny game to recommend to you (Saturnalia, Hob's Barrow, Wytchwood, World Of Horror and even, I suppose, Alan Wake 2, although I'm sort of enjoying it in the wrong way to think of it as a Halloween apropos game) but I'm short on recommendations for myself. I rarely replay games, let alone horror games, which are often one-and-done sorts of things - though I do, of course, enter the Pumpkin Carving Festival every year.

I want something that has a general air of spookiness without being a jumpscare frightfest. If I hadn't played The Tartarus Key already I'd be playing that, is what I'm saying. But the other day I played the demo for An English Haunting and it's exactly what I want. It's just not going to be out for a while. Rats!

I lost my way with Lunacid last year, early on after stumbling through a small warren of spongey enemies. Trying it again this week rewarded my patience and taught me that I'd had the tool I needed all along, but dismissed them because it didn't work immediately. Playing beyond that has elevated it from "not my thing but I should cover it because it's someone else's" to "wait, this might be my thing? Damn it".