Latest Articles
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Captain Morgens
When, in town building simulation Manor Lords, you erect your first manor, it feels natural to place it in the center of your humble 14th century European settlement. It presents as a locus of power, where your character avatar resides. Also, it’s right there in the title. I built mine down a side road, between oxen posts and granaries, for no real reason but free space. The more I play, the more it feels a fitting place. Not sidelined, exactly, just not especially loud. I need the taxes it brings to pay mercenaries to see off bandits, but lords - their whims and ambitions - don’t set the tone here. Parchment and seals aren’t as important as tilled earth; as winter snow, spring thaws and autumn harvests. So, despite the title, this sedate, curious, and intricate sim isn’t really about lords, nor manors. Not half as much, anyway, as it is about manure.
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Minecraft rolls out armadillo mob and rewilds biomes with eight new wolf variants
Chewier on the inside
Armadillos, the grumpy pistachio nuts of the animal kingdom, have been added to Minecraft in a recent mob update. You can brush them to harvest "scutes", the boney armour plating of the animal's back, which you can then use to craft armour for pet wolves. Speaking of wolves, this update also sees an explosion in canine diversity, with eight varieties of the wolf now appearing across different biomes. Awoooooo!
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Lords Of The Fallen's latest update adds cruel modifiers that turn it into a roguelike
One for the masochists
Lords Of The Fallen, an action RPG that was a mixture of fun and infuriating when it first launched, has received its final free update. It introduces the "Advanced Game Modifier System", which sounds like something creepy bachelors would pay an extraordinary monthly fee for. No, it doesn't provide terrible advice on how to talk to women. Instead, it allows you to customise LOTF with modifiers to turn it into a roguelike.
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No more time crime
Players that put more than two hours into pre-purchased or advanced access games will now be exempt from Steam's refund policy, says Steam, the maker of said policy and thus the final word on how it is implemented. As spotted by the Verge, this change is intended to combat a loophole where filthy time criminals could fill their stolen boots with ill-gotten fun pre-release, then get their money back.
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The Don't Starve devs' new cutesy co-cop dungeon crawler is out in early access today
Rotwood allows you and up to three friends to kill a tree
"If only you could talk to these creatures" is never more funny or true than in games like Rotwood, where you play cat people and orcs sent to biff snail worms and flies with scythes. From Klei Entertainment, the gang behind Don't Starve, Invisible Inc. and Oxygen Not Included, to name but a three of their fine games, Rotwood is out later today in early access, ready to provide co-op highjinks in a roguelike dungeon crawl that is really a forest. A forest crawl. You'll get muddy knees.
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You can now pre-register for Genshin developer's Zenless Zone Zero
It's due sometime in the first half of 2024
Zenless Zone Zero is the next action-RPG from Genshin Impact developers HoYoverse. Where Genshin is all Zelda-style pastoral greens, Zenless is an urban fantasy. It's expected to release sometime in the first half of 2024, and you can now pre-register on all platforms.
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Songs Of Conquest is a strategy-RPG with some of the most handsome pixel art around. Steam tells me I've played its Early Access release for 0.7 hours, which was long enough to know that I wanted to play more and would wait for version 1.0. I won't have to wait much longer. It's now got a May 20th release date.
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Against The Storm's 1.3 update is out now and it's one for the zoomers
Because you can zoom out further now
Against The Storm's latest update adds a a River Kelpie, a "legendary water demon" that can mesmerise villagers in your rain-slick settlements. I've been mesmerised myself by another part of the update, however: the ability to zoom out 66% further than before.
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Royale-battler Fortnite will soon allow players to hide a handful of emotes the developers concede are "sometimes used in confrontational ways". This includes the emote reported as the most-used in Fortnite's seven-year history. That's either a worrying indictment of the game's players, or a (more?) worrying indictment of universal human psychology. What is the offending animation? Well, turns out people don't like being laughed at.
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EGX and MCM Comic Con are sharing a London venue this year
A word from uncle Reedpop, who hasn't sold us off just yet
Stand by for a missive from RPS corporate parent ReedPop. Transmission begins! Ah, it's about gaming events. So, Reedpop's EGX expo and MCM Comic Con are joining forces. They'll both take place side-by-side in the ExCel London this year, on 25th-27th October.
EGX, of course, will feature a bunch of classic and upcoming games, while Comic Con is laser-targeted at our respected allies in the world of on-paper image-based storytelling with speech bubbles. EGX's headline partner is TikTok this year, which makes this a perfect nexus of entertainment artforms. All we need is a puppetshow now and possibly a semaphore stand, and the ritual will be complete.
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Innkeep satisfies my craving for a fantasy game that's just a grim drudgery simulator
Something need doing?
I'm the kind of awful person who looks at the background actors in TV shows and wonders what life is like for e.g. the old woman who sells birdfeed in Trafalgar Square in Mary Poppins when said upper-middle class domestic isn't singing about her. What fate the Warcraft grunt when he is too old to work work? It's probably pretty bad, right? Now let me slop Innkeep down in front of you like a big bowl of rat stew. Developer Daniel Burke furnished me with a little playable slice, and boy, Innkeep is a grim old time. I mean that as a compliment.
In it you run a big pub with room for a lot of grizzled adventurers, in a dog-eat-dog dark fantasy RPG sort of a world - think a roadside pub in one of the early seasons of Game Of Thrones, before everyone hated it. You do a lot of plate-spinning drudgery like cooking, cleaning, and serving, but also eavesdropping, rumourmongering, and knowing when to slip in a ribald joke as a distraction while you size up a mercenary's sword.
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Latest Horizon Forbidden West PC patch finally fixes its weirdest issue
Nvidia Reflex, you’ve bested me for the last time
Nestled within a seemingly ho-hum patch for Horizon Forbidden West’s PC edition is a change I’ve been crossing fingers and ritualistically sacrificing metal dinosaurs for since release. At last I can behold those glorious words: "Resolved performance regression when enabling Nvidia Reflex On+Boost." Finally!
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Sweet Transit is a loveable city builder for model train nerds, out of early access now
You choo choo choose me?
Afternoon, conveyor belt fans! Good news, I think I may have discovered the first genuinely cosy automation game. Attempts have been made at cosy automation and automated cosiness in the past – Satisfactory is on the sunnier side, providing you enable the right settings, and Shapez 2 has lots of rounded edges. But IDK, there’s something about the ravages of mass industry that doesn’t quite gel with zoomorphic raccoon baristas and other such wholesome trappings. Have you ever encountered a cuddly smokestack? How about a cuddly just-in-time network?
Combine cosiness with automation, and a lot of the time, you end up with some kind of macabre joke, like Palworld. Or at least so I thought before I discovered Sweet Transit, out now, which seemingly resolves everything by means of a hearty injection of trains.
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Hellish indie horror IRIS can get in the toaster and I’m sure the feeling is mutual
Actively hostile to my attempts to not put it straight in the toaster
Sometimes, I hear critics describe something as ‘actively hostile’ to the act of playing it, but with something close to admiration in their voices. I've always felt that I, too, would like to one day find an artwork that I could describe in the same way. Partly because it sounds like an interesting experience, but mainly so I could steal that line and feel like one of those elite, urbanely perceptive, multiple trouser-owning critics.
Well, today is not that day, because indie horror IRIS isn't, in fact, actively hostile towards the act of playing it. It's more a case of passive disdain. Is it a ‘good’ game? Probably not. Ah, but is it enjoyable? Buddy, not even slightly. But it is intriguing. I am intrigued, reader.
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The kissable frogs and sparky combat of Hades 2 looks set to bewitch fans
Impressions of the "technical test"
Were we to pluck up a passing stoat, or wandering pigeon, and inspect their entrails for omens as regards the quality of mythical roguelike Hades 2, we would find ourselves covered in blood and perhaps a little wiser. But I have been given strict editorial directions not to kill any more small creatures for gambling purposes. So let us instead use the semi-public "technical test" as a portentous looking glass from which to discern whether this hell-hopping sequel seems promising. Fine by me, the approach is no less stabby.
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Arise now, ye Cerim: No Rest for the Wicked’s performance updates are underway
Already running better on low-end GPUs
No Rest for the Wicked launched into early access as a bit of a fixer-upper, even by the standards of its 'buy now, play finished game later' model. The good news is that the grim action-RPG’s wonky performance is already being straightened out, with two of its three hotfixes thus far delivering a noticeable improvements, even on older graphics cards.
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The original Fallout is the perfect antidote to Fallout fever
War did change, actually
Speaking to RPS regular Jeremy Peel in a new feature about RPG design, Amazon's Fallout TV show and his time working on Pentiment and Pillars of Eternity, Obsidian's Josh Sawyer has reflected a bit on what Fallout: New Vegas owes to Black Isle and Interplay's very first Fallout from 1997. "A lot of the philosophy that I approached New Vegas with was the philosophy of Fallout 1, or how I interpreted it," Sawyer observed. "Fallout 1 was foundational for me in understanding how role-playing games should be made."
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Lethal Company gets worse as you get better
Why being dumb is good, actually
So far, my main problem with Lethal Company – this month’s RPS Game Club game – is that I’m getting better at it. I’m more efficient at clearing up scrap, less prone to fear-spasming inside out when a monster attacks, and have become wise to most of the haunted houses’ deadliest tricks. All of these, it turns out, make Lethal Company a worse game.
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ESA lawyer frets about some sort of terrifying ‘online arcade’ if preservation is made easier
ESA oppose allowing libraries to offer scholars remote access in recent hearing
Last week, a government hearing took place between representatives of the Video Game History Foundation, the Rhizome project, and the Software Preservation Network among others, with legal representation for the Entertainment Software Association (ESA) and the AACS among those in opposition. The hearing was a follow-up to the SPN petitioning the US copyright office, last year, for a DMCA exemption that would allow researchers to access games in libraries and archives. As reported by Game Developer, ESA legal representative Steve Englund said in the hearing that, currently, there’s “[no] combination of limitations [ESA members] would support to provide remote access."
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Atlus' latest showcase reveals a whole lot more
As one of the Treehouse's resident Atlus sickos, I was incredibly happy to wake up to 25-minutes of Metaphor: ReFantazio's director Katsura Hashino talking us through some new footage. We get a look at a new rural town and the activities you can get up to, like bounty hunting. Travel on your magic mech is compared to "camping", which I wasn't expecting. And there's lots of combat on show, with transitions from real-time to turn-based battles outlined in a bit more detail. Oh and it's coming out in October, which gives me plenty of time to clear my JRPG backlog before this inevitably takes over my entire existence for the foreseeable.
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Whatever the Fallout TV show does with New Vegas lore, Josh Sawyer doesn’t care: “It was never mine”
The Obsidian design director on Pillars of Eternity II burnout and living with dead projects
What’s it like to watch a smash hit TV show set in the backyard of a game you’ve made? It’s a question which Fallout: New Vegas project director Josh Sawyer is uniquely qualified to answer.
“The show really does capture the aesthetic of Fallout 4 and 76, while also feeling like it is set on the West Coast,” he says. “If you’re a fan, then you can see where the plot elements have been pulled from in previous entries. And if you’re new to it, thankfully, those plot elements are fairly straightforward. So I think it’s a good show for fans and a good show if you’re new to it, even though there’s a lot of stuff going on. I’m certainly interested to see where they’re going in the second season.”
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Cereballers is a free 2D football parody with a spark of real genius
The offside rule is the least of your problems
I often regret that I didn't get into football as a kid (note for people across the pond: football is what we call soccer in these here accursed, eternally post-imperial isles). The trouble was, all my friends liked football and I have an abiding hatred of popular things, a hatred that has obviously served me well during my later career as an online news journalist. I played hockey instead, which is the superior sport in that you get a big nasty stick, but also relatively niche because you need more equipment.
Still, I've enjoyed rediscovering football in videogames, and especially videogames that don't treat football with much respect. You may have played or at least heard of Behold The Kickmen - now, here's free downloadable Itch.io offering Cereballers to stick the boot in.
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Uncapped Games will reveal the untitled project at Summer Game Fest
The former multiplayer lead for RTS giant StarCraft 2 is working on a new real-time strategy game that he promises will mark a “paradigm shift” for the storied PC genre.
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The Fallout TV show’s popularity has blown up Nexus Mods as everyone rushes to play Fallout 4 again
And then remembers they need mods to make it worth playing
The Fallout TV show effect continues. This time, it’s popular mod site Nexus Mods on the receiving end of the double-edged Shishkebab, as its servers struggle under the weight of people rushing to play through the series again - and mod its latter entries into games worth playing, presumably.
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Starlight Games made up of veterans with credits on Resident Evil, Horizon series and more
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Uncover the Smoking Gun has you solve a murder mystery by interrogating ChatGPT-speaking suspects
AI's habit of just making stuff up apparently adds to the mystery
Well, that didn’t take long. After tech demos from the likes of Nvidia inviting us to chat with NPCs whose entire conversations are generated by AI, it looks like the first game built wholly on that controversial idea is due to arrive this year. Uncover the Smoking Gun puts its ChatGPT-powered dialogue front and centre, as the player’s detective interviews robot suspects to solve a murder case.
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You can play Rising Up in about fifteen minutes, possibly during company time
Rising Up is a free, sub-fifteen minute browser game that’s a bit like Streets of Rage, where you play a balding office worker and beat a giant scanner to death within the first 30 seconds. This, I believe, should be enough to tempt you into dunking it enthusiastically into your next break coffee, but if you need more convincing, let’s do it.
Created by E.H Jørgensen, whose credits include Homeworld: Deserts of Kharak, Rising Up is a relatively simple 3 button side scroller that has you make your way up an office building, destroying everything in your path. First, irate co-workers wield swivel chairs. Then, security join the fray. Then some sort of G-men get involved. You can punch, block, jump, and air-kick. The brawling is simple but satisfying enough, and the way office equipment violently degrades when hit is better, but this isn’t why I’m recommending the game.
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First Tales of the Shire trailer reveals a life sim set in Tolkien's most Hobbity pastures
No adventures here, please
Perhaps you are fatigued by orcs and swords. Maybe you yearn for a simple life of bucolic betterment to recover from your addiction to spicy wedding bands but still fear to stray too far from your beloved fantasy franchise. Oh look, it's Tales of the Shire, a game set in Middle-earth which features not a single ounce of stabbing nor - as far as I can tell - any gigantic spiders at all. It's a life sim about building a home in Hobbiton and keeping up with the Proudfeet. Maybe you will also get to lie around getting totally blazed on halfling reefer. Although I did not spot that in this hearthful new trailer.
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An English Haunting is still an Edwardian point-and-click Ghostbusters, and also out in May
Spooky retro adventure gets new trailer and release date!
At the end of last year I played the demo for An English Haunting and got very excited. I like horror that has a generally spooky, creeping dread vibe rather than being wall-to-wall cheap jumpscares and gore, and that sort of stuff is thin on the ground. But it'll be less so from May the 15th, cos that's when this ghosty point and click puzzle adventure is out! Hooray! The demo is still on Steam if you want a taste before then. In the meantime, the release date announcement comes with a new trailer to enjoy.
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Review: Tales Of Kenzera: Zau review: a beautifully designed yet imprecise platforming adventure
It's not time to make a change
Until I played Tales Of Kenzera: Zau I figured people had run out of ways to make original platformers, but an Afrofuturist story-in-a-story framing for a mythological platformer about healthy ways to deal with grief sure did teach me to not underestimate human creativity. I really liked a lot about Tales Of Kenzera, and got annoyed by a bunch of stuff too - and the division seems to be that a lot of the former falls on the story and design side, and the latter on the mechanical side, which I guess isn't ideal for a platformer. But still, I think it's worth persevering.