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Creation is an act of kindness. One person sloughs off a piece of themselves, shapes it, wraps it, and sends it out into the world in the hope that it might mean something to someone else. Other people do this for us all the time and mostly we don't even notice. The work is unseen and unremarked upon even as, through repetition, we come to depend upon it. Until, one day, that light that they shine can't be seen. Maybe you left home, or maybe they did, but now it's your turn to perform such acts of kindness. To carry the tradition forward for others - and for yourself.

Friends, it's time to play Skeal.

Infamous evolutionary flop Spore, for all its flaws, still had a lot of magic to it. It was fun to design your weird creatures, to watch them try to walk, and - in principle - to turn your humble creations into a spacefaring species.

Curiosmos is a very different game, but it has a little of the same appeal. It's a galactic playground in which you smash meteors together to make planets, then tinker with the ecosystems of those planets to make life and watch that life evolve. All while a hungry black hole lingers nearby, eager to consume everything you have created. There's an explanatory video below.

Hyper Light Breaker is a prequel to the excellent topdown action-RPG from 2016, Hyper Light Drifter. The differences are myriad, given that Breaker is also 3D, open world, co-op and a roguelite. It also now has a release date for its launch into Steam Early Access: January 14th, 2025.

One of video game's greatest pleasures is being able to shoot bits off an enemy and then append them to yourself. TankHead gets it. It's about steering a tank through a desolate sci-fi landscape, blasting similar tank and mecha enemies to bits, then scavenging them for parts using a drone.

It's been in quiet development for years, but it got a big reveal during tonight's Day Of The Devs stream. It was also released during tonight's Day Of The Devs stream, so you can buy it from the Epic Games Store now.

Back when I played Path Of Exile 2 at Summer Games Fest, I fought a cave-dwelling boss who summoned hordes of grotty subterranean wildlife to swamp me. Fortunately, I was rolling a Witch - perhaps the best beginner POE2 class - so I could summon an army of skeletons in response. A similar horde vs horde encounter is underway at POE 2 developers Grinding Gear Games. The game launched in early access over the weekend, and has already drawn so many players that the developers are emergency-hiring additional staff to cope with the waves of support emails.

In "non-violent and poetic" 2D platformer Symphonia, you're an extremely fancy violinist exploring a realm of musical machines, where gas lanterns kindle fitfully as you approach, crotchets adorn vast cogwheels, and reams of what I really hope isn't actual catgut feed through titanic pegboxes overhead. Sampling the demo, I was immediately enflamed by the orchestral score and placed in a mood of white-gloved sophistication only slightly spoiled by the familiarity of the underlying platform moveset, and by my repeatedly falling into pits.

When I were a lad, you’d open an advent calendar and get a piece of chocolate shaped like a bell with an aftertaste so rancid you’d wish you’d eaten the little cardboard window instead. And you’d bloody well make do, too. Not these days. Now, you get a squadron of tiny automata with drills for noses that burrow through your battle lines and utterly wreck your vulnerable missile launchers. Country’s gone to the tiny robot dogs, I tell you!

First covered by Alice O (RPS in peace) in 2017, Short Trip was a chill hand-drawn game about driving a tram through a mountain populated by cats. Back then, it was only available as a free-to-play browser or itch.io experience. Seven years later, though, and on this very day, it's out on Steam. Not only that, it's arriving with all the tramming of the original, with an added "scheduled mode" that adds more charm to an already lovely game.

Ever wondered what the intro cutscene to Legacy Of Kain: Soul Reaver would sound like voiced by Solid Snake actor David Hayter? Quite specific of you, but a new documentary from Noclip might just have what you’re looking for. The Past, Present & Future of Soul Reaver interviews key developers from the action adventure game, and about halfway through host Danny O’ Dwyer gets hold of some archive materials, including old audition tapes. These include Mark Hamill reading for Janos Audren, and Jennifer Hale for Ariel.

The biggest treat, of course, is hearing Hayter read for Raziel, especially as it’s that excellent opening monologue. You’ll find the video below, with Hayter around 37:30.

The Steam Deck OLED has joined Valve’s Certified Refurbished programme, offering a much cheaper way of getting your hands on the best handheld PC around. Provided you don’t mind it being in someone else’s first, anyway. As with official refurbs of the original Steam Deck, "certified" Steam Deck OLEDs are formerly-broken models that have been returned to Valve, fixed up and tested in-house, then put back on the market at steep discounts. You’re looking at £389/$439 for the 512GB spec and £459/$519 for 1TB, down from £479/$549 and £569/$649 respectively.

Bulletstorm, Painkiller and Outriders developers People Can Fly are "suspending or parting ways" with over 120 people, shelving one video game project, downsizing another, and "restructuring some of our support teams" in the face of market turmoil.

I am a Winter baby. My birthday is very close to Christmas, and so you’d think this might make me immune to the serotonin-sapping effects of the greyest season in a “I was born of the cold. Moulded by it” kind of way. No such luck, I’m afraid. So, since there’s only so many Vitamin D supplements and delightfully festive lunchtime Gin and Tonics one can consume, I figured I’d ask: what are your favourite comfort games for the bleaker months? The special places you can always rely on for an escape when the weather outside is frightful, and the Cosy Fireplace Ambience 4K (10 hours) keeps getting interrupted by adverts for crypto scammers and War Thunder.

While it’s always worth starting a new game of Cyberpunk 2077 just to hear Judy say "his own choomba shot him!" for the thirtieth time, there’s now a slightly more tangible reason to start a new journey into Night City’s open world. Update 2.2 went live yesterday, bringing with it a host of fixes, as well as some deeper customisation options for both your character and vehicles. The base game is also 55% off on Steam until the 18th of December, with the Phantom Liberty expansion at 20% off, or both in a 48% off bundle. Cyberpunk is on sale often enough, although these current discounts line up with the cheapest it's ever been on Steam. Again: worth it for the line.

It seems as if every "wholesome" game is either a Stardewlike or a Animal Crossingbut. Little Rocket Lab? Stardewlike. Piece By Piece? Animal Crossingbut. To be more specific, it's Animal Crossing but your chibi fox protagonist is specifically running a shop, mending and painting objects to sell while maintaining cleanliness and the plants outside. If you can't get enough of upcycling in Trash Goblin, here's one more for you.

Ooh, this feels like the biggest news out of this evening's Wholesome Snack showcase: nourishing photography adventure Toem is getting a sequel, appropriately called Toem 2. It looks to follow much of what made the first so well liked, including its pocket-sized black-and-white worlds in which you wander about, snapping photos and helping the locals.

Pity the "relaxing" games which set out to blanket their players in a wholesome fog. These minimalist or slight experiences set their stall against the mainstream philosophy of video game design focused on action, rules, clear progression, and often violence. So it is with Naiad, a sometimes pleasant swim down a river in which you sing to make flowers grow and discover poems by interacting with birds, bees, butterflies and other fauna.

Yet here's the cause of my pity. All those other games, with their decisive action, systemic consequence, and neck-snapping: I was playing those to relax, too. Why else would I have snapped all those necks? Being shorn of base pleasures does not make Naiad a restorative oasis amid a desert of stressful video games, and it doesn't make it more relaxing than its peers. In fact, it makes for an experience that left me restless, even a little anxious, when it made me feel anything at all.

Stardew Factory? Factory Valley? Whichever it is, Little Rocket Lab is a factory-builder about efficiently placing conveyors and robot arms, and is drawn in the warm, pixel art small-town of a Stardew-like. That sounds like a fitting combination, although it does mean you're building a NASA-sized rocketship on the outskirts of your quaint hometown. That can't be good for noise pollution. There's an announcement trailer below.

Duck Detective's first case was The Secret Salami, which paired its cosy mystery about stolen lunches with a protagonist whose divorce and destitution were played entirely straight despite his being a duck. The results were seemingly delightful, and here comes a sequel.

Duck Detective: The Ghost Of Glamping will offer a further 2-3 hours of mystery-solving and is aiming for release in 2025.

Marvel Rivals, the free-to-play hero shooter from NetEase, launched late last week and is exceedingly popular. It's currently fourth on the Steam daily most played, right between Path Of Exile 2 and the evergreen Grand Theft Auto 5. I think there are three reasons for this enthusiasm: 1) it's free-to-play with the usual comet's tail of microtransactables 2) it's third-person Overwatch with Marvel characters, a straightforwardly enticing licensing sandwich, and 3) people want to have sex with a larger-than-usual proportion of the cast and especially awful tongue-monster Venom, who has a good butt in this one. No, I'm not going to share pictures. You'll have to google that filth yourself.

But perhaps you are a sophisticated soul who has no time for such salacious nonsense. You're more interested in hearing how they're patching the thing. Enough with the butts already, dang it - this is a new multiplayer game so there must, of course, be patches! Fair enough: here's what NetEase are changing or fixing in the first major update, out now.

I feel guilty about repeatedly comparing Nebulous: Fleet Command to Homeworld, inasmuch as it's an appalling bait-and-switch. It's like offering somebody a cake that is actually a cunningly painted hunk of torpedo fuselage. It's like offering to shake hands while wearing one of those comedy hand buzzers - except that the hand buzzer is an intricate simulation of zero-G physics, missile behaviours and comms jamming, featuring spacecraft with proper internal layouts that require you to think hard about attitude control if you don't want, say, your engines to become Swiss cheese about 90 seconds before you need to retreat from combat.

Being a "true" 3D real-time space strategy game, Nebulous looks and sounds a lot like Homeworld on the surface, but it's nothing like as straightforward. It is systems within systems. It is a game in which you can, theoretically, plot the path of a single guided munition through an asteroid field, so as to catch an enemy cruiser in the back. I barely understand how to make a ship fire on another ship, using plain old armour-piercing shells, and now they're threatening to add carriers, fighters and bombers. Customisable ones! The humanity. Here's a trailer.

Gorbad Ironclaw, the new orc warboss in Total War: Warhammer III Omens Of Destruction, has three unique skill tree buffs, which are named as follows: ’boyz to da front, ‘shootaz to da back’, and ‘riderz on da flanks’.

I love this, because it suggests this most renowned of Orcish tacticians is at tip two of a Ten Total War Tips For Beginners video, and he’s already a legend among his kind for it.

I support his fame. Game director Rich Aldridge told me that designing for roleplaying potential had been a priority recently, and it’s something I’ve definitely noticed in the past few expansions. There’s been an uptick in hero and lord traits that reward themed army composition rather than just stacking the biggest monster you can get your hands on. It’s an approach to game design in general that I can get behind, similar to the aging wisdom about reframing punishments as rewards - World Of Warcraft’s rested bonus being the primo example. Twarhammer hasn’t nerfed Doomstacks, it’s just focused on offering lots of more exciting options.

The demo for SNØ: Ultimate Freeriding isn't that new. It actually came out in September, but I'm filing it under the secret best unspoken RPS site category of "News (To Me)", a whizcrack piece of web 3.0 technology that allows us to travel back in time and 'announce' things that don't seem any less noteworthy for their advancing age.

If you think that's a desperately cavalier and confusing way to run a news section, I can only suggest that you email a complaint to our news editor. Spoilers: our news editor is me, and I have already thrown your complaint in the bin. Mate, I don't tell you how to do your job, but I'd be more than happy to, if you let me know what it is. Anyway, what were we talking about. Oh yeah, skiiing!

London Gatwick Airport is a rare shade of brown, known to neither science nor art. A brown that doesn’t appear on the light spectrum. No easel contains it. It is a dusty brown, a damp brown, a hot and earthy brown that hums with the stinging malodour of disturbed ancient moss where once old forests stood. Descending into Gatwick’s cloying brown from 33,000 feet is like flying under and up Gandalf’s wretched cloak and landing in one of the several horrible little magic pouches he keeps by his balls.

Microsoft Flight Simulator 2024 captures Gatwick’s brown perfectly. Next to the stupefying natural beauty of Yosemite, the imposing imperial skyscrapers of the Manhattan skyline and the surging majesty of the Alpine peaks, this local rot-tinged patch of West Sussex is the most impressively realistic depiction of a place I have seen in a game.

Among my last-resort tactics for generating precious PC gaming news is to go on holiday - for as sure as toast lands buttered side down while cats always land on their feet, as sure as the number 13 breeds calamity and Star Citizen committing to a release date guarantees a delay, myself going on holiday will always, somehow, conjure a big story from the crevices. It's basic physics. In this case, I was on holiday from Friday through Monday, and this fact and this fact alone appears to have coaxed some toy manufacturer into taking the internet's most cherished indie gaming platform offline by means of a "bogus" phishing report, sent by "AI-powered" brand protection software.

The situation has now been resolved, thankfully, and you can access Itch.io as normal, but I will never pass up the opportunity to cast shade on Funko Pop, whose NFT-garlanded bobbleheads I hate as I do veruccas and forest fires. So here's a quick recap if you, too, missed the drama.

Goblin-hitting bonanza Path Of Exile 2 launched into early access last weekend and the devs Grinding Gear Games have dropped some big patch notes that outline some things they've updated already, or things they plan on updating in a future patch. Things like dodge-rolling, checkpoints, items, currencies, and other stuff I can't list here because the intro to this article would expand and pop into a flurry of common rarity boots and bones, maybe with the odd purple rarity sword mixed in.

Today’s advent calendar pick is one of 2024’s finest games we missed. It troubles our dreams and waking moments alike. It mushrooms in our peripheral vision and drifts towards us as we batter out advent calendar posts, hoping we can finish writing and beat a tactical withdrawal to the kitchen before the accusatory phantom overwhelms us. It’s a game about sin and projectile patterns and llamas. It’s...

I’ve got a strange relationship with the stealth sandbox murderbox that is Hitman: World of Assassination. If you were to ask me to list my favourite games, the latest Hitman trilogy would be in the top five, no question. And yet, I must have gotten intimidated at some point with the amount of new updates and all the spiffy unlockable suits I was missing out on, and just haven’t touched it in a couple of years now. Is the appearance of Jean-Claude Van Damme as the game’s newest elusive target enough to reel me back in? I'm not sure, but I will say that I doubt Sean Bean can stretch his legs like that, even with the legendary flexibility offered by O2's famously variable plans. Here’s a trailer.

If we follow Marshall McLuhan’s ideas about technology being an extension of the body, then the copy and paste keyboard shortcuts are my equivalent of a trip to one of Cyberpunk 2077’s ripperdocs. In the writing of this single article, I will use them for links, HTML code, and other ephemera. I even copied McLuhan’s name across from a different tab, which I’m sure he’d appreciate/be horrified by. I love those shortcuts. I need them. They are the wind beneath my wings, and the crud buildup beneath the bottom left of my keyboard.

I cannot say how the first tailor to gaze upon a sewing machine felt, nor the first egg-abacus attendant to behold the sorcerous ticking of the automated egg timer. But I think now that when they saw those things, they were afraid. As I am afraid now.

I’m quite smitten by the Nintendo DS stylings and traditional roguelike charms of Shiren the Wanderer: The Mystery Dungeon Of Serpentcoil Island, but I’m having real trouble summoning up the motivation to repeatedly grind through its opening levels to get to the interesting stuff. Early stages soon lose any real sense of surprise, and later ones can feel low on real agency. I want a new roguelike run to feel vital and verdant; heady with grand plans and plan-shattering twists. But by having randomness influence each run so significantly, Mystery Dungeon feels fickle instead of emergent - less than the sum of some incredibly novel and creative parts.

Indiana Jones and the Great Circle isn’t just good. It’s excellent. If you’re excited about playing the game on launch day (or beyond) and want to get the best deal possible, then look no further.