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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.

Mullets aren't just coming back into fashion, they're everywhere at the moment, adopted largely by lads who love draft beer and The Football. And seemingly by Mullet Mad Jack, the protagonist of a single-player roguelike FPS who would shove draft beers into the skull of a billionaire robot, then shoot him in the gonads. What I'm trying to say is, Mullet Mad Jack is fashionable and no-nonsense, which makes for a great hang if you'd like to burn some aggression once in a while.

This news post leaves me in a quandary, readers, because I will need to write a swear word for the sake of full journalistic transparency, but Google’s algorithms tend to frown on sweary articles. On the other hand, Google’s algorithms don’t like it when you spend whole intros handwringing about Google’s algorithms, either, so let’s stop, er, faffing around and speak of Doom. Id Software parent company Zenimax recently trademarked “IDKFA”, a string of letters that will be of deep significance to original Doom players, and which may therefore be evidence of an impending announcement.

Almost 14 years to the day after Rockstar’s cowboy epic Red Dead Redemption released on consoles, and coming up on five years after its sequel beat it to PC, it looks like the original Red Dead might finally get a PC release.

The last few weeks I’ve been watching quite a few YouTube videos (thanks, Evo Japan), and noticing that adverts during videos a) seem to pop up every 30 seconds or so and b) then last for an unskippable 30 to 60 seconds. My frustration with being bombarded by YouTube ads in videos for which I pay nothing to watch - meaning that I understand the necessity for ads of some kind to support creators and pay server bills - came to mind as I read about EA’s plans to explore inserting advertising into games, which I pay up to £70 a pop to play.

Deep in my heart I know that Hall of Fame-type accolades are largely just a way of dressing up a way of marketing your awards show/museum/whatever, but I also like to occasionally cast away the cynic in me and imagine a world in which this industry’s most important games and creators are rightly recognised, celebrated and preserved rather than being locked away in the vault of billion-dollar companies and left to rot. Imagine!

After rebooting Final Fantasy 7 as the trilogy of Remake, Rebirth and Really, You Went With That? (TBC), Square Enix are now planning to reboot themselves. Among the publishers’ revamped approach to making money - following a recent drop in profits, per their latest financials - is a more “aggressive” approach to bringing their games to more platforms than specific consoles (in other words, PlayStation) as exclusives, with a particular focus on “win[ning] over PC users”.

The story of Manor Lords’ soundtrack begins, as all inspiring tales do, with hunched-over late-night doom scrolling. It was pre-covid, and Pressure Cooker Studios’ composer Daniel Caleb was flicking through reddit posts when a trailer cut through the glare. He’d never heard of Manor Lords before. It looked like a new IP, but already had a huge Reddit following. Caleb loved what he saw. At that point, Pressure Cooker mainly worked on film scores, but both Caleb and fellow composer Elben Schutte had always wanted to eventually move on to bringing their storytelling from cinema to games. Even more so than film, games were the passion. Manor Lords would be perfect for them.

Like with getting fancy polyhedral dice sets full of all glitter and wool, buying and owning are two different hobbies when it comes to books. I think this has gotten worse (if that's the word?) with the increasingly popularity of BookTok, the book-centric community on TikTok. It's really mobilised young people towards reading (which is good) but in some cases drives a consumption for consumption's sake approach, where one must have read new books to talk about, one must take no breaths between reading, and one must read an astonishing number of books in the smallest amount of time possible (which I think is bad).

The former lead writer of charming super-fascist simulator Helldivers 2 is working on a strategy and tactics RPG in the vein of Nintendo and Intelligent System's Fire Emblem games, which aren't available on PC and as such, are a complete mystery to you, a lifelong desktop warrior who would sooner cut their hand off than suffer it to brush against one of those filthy Nintendo witches, I mean Switches.

To fill you in, Fire Emblem is known and sort of celebrated for being a rich ensemble fantasy story with character permadeath. Helldivers 2, meanwhile, is a game in which people are as expendable as bullets, and the storytelling is deliberately brittle because it consists largely of clownish propaganda. Put the two sets of inspirations together, and what do you get? You get a headline, that's what. Beyond that, we can only dream.

ROBOBEAT is the third one of these new-fangled rhythm FPS games I’ve played - after BPM: Bullets Per Minute and Metal: Hellsinger - and the first one I’ve actually clicked with. The concept evidently appeals to me enough to try out those other two, but I guess that I’m simply too much of a rebel-maverick-disruptor to play to the stiflingly enforced rhythms of somebody else’s drum. Something about ROBOBEAT’s roguelike shooting feels different though.

What if Scorn, but it's one that your mum got you for Christmas? That's easy, it's Necrophosis, baby. Much like Scorn, Necrophosis is also part-inspired by the dystopian surrealist works of Zdzisław Beksiński, which means lots of plucking brains out of sinewy bodies and plopping them into fleshy receptacles. There's a demo out now and while it's not outstanding, it tickled my curiosity more than I thought it would.

Back in the late 90s when all of you NORMIES were playing Diablo, I was playing a little-known Konami ARPG called Azure Dreams, which has alas never escaped PlayStation prison. It's a grid-based, upwardly mobile roguelitey dungeon crawler set in a big tower, each floor a semi-randomised maze of monsters (which you can capture), traps and pick-ups, where player and creature actions happen simultaneously.

Effort Star's Enter The Chronosphere doesn't have grids or monster capturing, that I know of, but it taps into a comparable vein of diorama-sized frantic-yet-laidback challenge, with characters, foes and projectiles frozen in time till you give a command. There's a demo on Steam as part of the platform's Endless Replayability Fest, which I encourage you to try, whether you are one of the COOL KIDS who played Azure Dreams or not.

Cheese and loyal pets (two important items on Maslow's hierarchy of needs) have been added to the co-op survival crafting game Abiotic Factor. The dairy product manifests as various suspiciously coloured cheese wheels which you can cook and eat, while loyalty comes in the form of freakish pets that can now follow your every move. The pets themselves are technically not new to Abiotic Factor, but their player-tracking behaviour is. "There is, as far as we know, no limit to how many pets can follow you at once," say the devs. Hmmm. I wonder if any scientifically minded folks will test such a hypothesis.

There aren't many ways left to put a twist on Stardew Valley, but suffixing it with "in space!" oughta do it. Little-Known Galaxy is out in a week, and currently has a demo on Steam, where you can sample many of the delights that you're used to from a Stardewlike when you're new in town: meeting the locals, growing potatoes, and tidying up the place. Also, raising alien pets, seeking out new life, and new civilisations... It all takes place on a spaceship, you see, and this has some ramifications to playing the game beyond reskinning everything to be shiny metal instead of picturesque mud. It's an intriguing proposition.

Brass-blasting rhythm game Trombone Champ honked its way into our hearts when it released in 2022. Since then, it's garnered a dedicated fanbase that have kept its spit-valve full to bursting with creations like this Final Fantasy 7 mod. Trombone Champ mods are special among rhythm games for consisting of two elements: the button-tapping composition of the song itself, and the background visuals. You honk-tap away while unicorns or giant close-ups of full English breakfasts cavort in the background. Although, if your breakfast is cavorting, you probably want to cook it a bit longer.

Some fresh astral god trivia from my accidental molar expedition a few weeks back: each of the Maw's teeth is different. Some form a fractal baleen network of crosshatched layers disappearing backward into the vanishing point; others are shaped like lockpicks, raccoon heads and semi-detached houses. This week's new game releases are no less motley and misshapen, though thankfully not quite as heavily varnished with plaque: there's something in the shop for everyone, I think.

Hello reader who is also a reader, and welcome to Booked For The Week - our Sunday feature where we ask a selection of cool industry folks questions about books! Did you know that if you cup a book over your ear you can hear the gentle ambience of a thousand seagulls screaming how Charles Bukowski is literally them fr? I cannot judge these irritating gulls. “Air And Light..." is still one of my all time favourites. This week, it's El Paso, Elsewhere developer, Hypnospace Outlaw writer, and RPS contributor Xalavier Nelson Jr! Cheers Xalavier! Mind if we have a nose at your bookshelf?

Sundays are for celebrating the fact that my washing machine now drains correctly. Before I deliberately spill beans down all my white tees just so I have an excuse to spin from dawn to dusk, popping caps off non-bio liquid like F1 champagne, let’s read this week’s best writing about games (and game related things!)

Instruments Of Destruction goes to the trouble of having a voiceover offer a preamble to each of its missions, but I don't need it. Its launch trailer knows I don't need it, as its own voiceover makes clear: "Take this vehicle, destroy those buildings. Do I really need to explain why?"

Nope! You don't. And the smashing simulator's 1.0 release is out now.

Samurai action-adventure Ghost Of Tsushima Director's Cut is due to launch on PC this coming Thursday, May 16th - but it'll be available on Steam in nearly 180 fewer countries than expected. That's because its online features will require players to sign-in to a PSN account, and PSN accounts are not available in those countries. This is effectively the same issue that recently enraged Helldivers 2 players.

Warner Bros., owners of the now-defunct Adult Swim Games publishing label, have contacted some developers about returning ownership of their game's Steam pages. The developers of both Small Radios Big Televisions and Duck Game shared the news on X yesterday. It's a seeming reversal of Warner Bros. stated policy back in March, when all Adult Swim Games seemed destined to be delisted.