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Hoo-eee! The sequel to the rootinest-tootinest gassiest-guzzlingiest racecar rasslin' game is launching into early access in March this year. Wreckfest 2 is the follow-up to smashing racer Wreckfest, which came out in 2018 but which I only discovered last year while listing our best racing games. My friends, it got on the list. Developers Bugbear say they have "overhauled its physics engine to deliver the most intense crashes, deeper component damage, and absolute vehicular mayhem." We can see a little bit of that in a new trailer below, which also gives us an exact early access release date.

I don't end up covering as many classic point and click adventures as I'd like on RPS. That's a real shame, because every time I play a good one, I'm reminded how much magic the genre still has. Developer Blyts (Kelvin And The Infamous Machine) was kind enough to send me over a key for Slender Threads, which is out this Friday. My opinion as a complete non-expert on the genre? Yep, this one's absolutely worth a look.

Call me a cynic if you must, but I'm generally sceptical when someone claims to be "the greatest swordsman of all demons". It's the sort of boast most demon swordsman like to trot out, in my experience. And yet! I have to admit that this Gogandantess lad has a real flourish to him. He's going places, I reckon. Chief among those places being PC at some point in 2025, and he's bringing the rest of Onimusha 2: Samurai's Destiny with him. Catch him showing off in the below trailer.

Warhorse's medieval muck-o-rama Kingdom Come: Deliverance 2 launches today. It's an engrossing RPG, despite developer co-founder Dan Vávra's tendency to throw his weight behind alt-right harassment campaigns. Also, a relatively bug-free one.

In the course of my 51 hours as reviewer, I've encountered only a smattering of more significant technical issues. Firstly, some heavy slowdown while roaming Trosky Castle, the centerpiece of the opening Bohemian Paradise region, which I resolved by quitting and reloading. Secondly, a mildly terrifying moment in a dugout when a wounded soldier I was supposed to be treating struck a T-pose, as though afflicted by lightning early onset arthritis. And thirdly a repeated crash bug which I feel warrants its own article given that, together with Deliverance 2's eccentric saving system, it cost me several hours of progress.

Several hours in, it’s become apparent that I lack the patience for much of Kingdom Come: Deliverance 2’s much-publicised historical accuracies, like needing to bathe yourself every six minutes or how 15th century Bohemians can take several consecutive sword swings to the neck without dying. Ah well! If you’re going to play it, know that it’s also a decent performer on PC – despite the almost threatening tone of its recommended system requirements – and, as far as I can see, isn’t anywhere near as bug-prone as the infamously unstable original.

Dell’s new Alienware Area-51 Gaming Desktop lineup has landed, and if you're struggling to find a Nvidia 50 series, or you just want an all in one PC gaming package at (albeit large) simple fee, then this could be the way to go.

If, like me, you failed and failed and failed to get a decent score in arcadey reaction game Super Hexagon, then take solace in this: there are a bunch of other games by the same developer you can fail at. Terry Cavanagh, also the maker of VVVVVV and Dicey Dungeons, is releasing a collection of his freeware bits and bobs on Steam next week, called simply Terry's Other Games. Looking at the games included, it summons a nostalgic giggle just to see just how many of Terry's short games have been intriguing enough to grab the eye of an RPS writer over the years. I mean it literally. One game is called Grab Them By The Eyes.

Peter Akemann - co-founder of Call Of Duty's Treyarch and recent president of The Walking Dead: Saints & Sinners studio Skydance Interactive - has pleaded guilty to crashing a drone into a firefighting plane assisting with the recent LA wildfires. The crash, which grounded the plane by damaging its left wing, occurred after Akemann ignored temporary drone restrictions in order to survey the Palisades fires before losing control. Thanks, Eurogamer. For first noticing the case, I mean. I'm not blaming Eurogamer for the drone crash. Not this one, anyway.

The drone was traced back to Akemann, who has agreed to plead guilty to one count of unsafe operation of an unmanned aircraft. That's a misdemeanour that usually carries up to one year prison time, but he's "hoping to escape the prison term in exchange for 150 hours of community service in support of wildfire relief and the approximately $65,000 USD it cost to repair the plane," write Eurogamer, as part of a plea agreement.

Alice Bee (RPS in peace) covered the announcement for Forgotlings back in 2023. It's a metroidvania by ThroughLine Games, them behind Forgotton Anne - one of my favourites from 2018. Forgotlings, however, managed to completely slip by me until I recently noticed it had a Steam demo. This is such good news I've basically forgiven them for doubling down on the funky spelling.

I was initially sceptical that we'd be seeing dark fantasy strategy RPG Whispers Of The Eyeless any time soon. I follow the game's creator Venris on YouTube. He's co-developing this with Evil Gingerbread Studio but his other big project is the Total War: Warhammer III overhaul mod SFO, and it seems barely a month passes without some huge update to that. Venris once told me he mods for around "eight to 12 hours a day", though, so I suppose I shouldn't be surprised that this cult-shepherding roguelite is now available in Steam early access. Edwin described it as "Darkest Dungeon, but you're running the dungeon". That's better than anything I could come up with, so let's stick with that.

I'm just so tired, man. Is this a dare? Because I'm basically taking the bait just by writing about it, aren't I? "The last carrier bag you’ll ever need," begins the description of this tribute to the plastic bag Disco Elysium's protagonist uses to collect bottles to exchange for cash at Martinet's local off-licence. "Frittte brings reassurance that the bag will serve your everyday needs on the toughest streets."

This nod to people whose main takeaway from Fight Club was how rad Brad Pitt's taste in shirts was is being sold by ZA/UM's collobrative merch store with company Atelier. They've previously put out things like a replica of Kim Kitsuragi's jacket. I'm not going to link them, as a pathetic act of rebellion.

As the man who couldn't afford an ambulance to get the gash on his head sewn up once said, let's try and keep an open mind about this. The bag's Dyneema fabric "is up to 15x stronger than steel on a weight-for-weight basis and provides the highest tear and tensile strength of any competing materials".

I had trouble sleeping last night, due to a combination of press trip excitement, chugging too many complimentary coffees, and my hotel room being opposite a strange, insistently symmetrical building that reared over my dreams like Sauron’s penthouse. So to settle my nerves, I got up and played a game about being a horrible tree. Just the worst tree. A total shit of a tree. That game was Roots Devour - and great news, if you’re having trouble sleeping you can play it too, for there is a demo in the wilds.

Watch out for that falling breezeblock! It's about to-- ah, too late, you've been donked. A clip of loud wreckage, gunfire, and bazooka'd buildings has fallen dustily into our lap via a promotional video for Battlefield 6 (or whatever the developers plan to call the next of these large-scale first-person shooters). Mostly, it's a lot of producers talking a big game about "levelling up" the "core experience", which seems to remain blasting a building you don't like with a rocket-propelled grenade. We can tell from the final 10 seconds of the video, which show some of the game's actual running and/or gunning.

The battle for medieval Bohemia is about to kick off again with Kingdom Come: Deliverance 2, launching on February 4, 2025. Fanatical has a cracking preorder deal that saves you some coin while guaranteeing your Steam key will be delivered on or before release day. No nonsense, no delays, just instant access to swords, shields, and questionable 15th-century hygiene.

Once upon a time, Alice B (RPS in peace) was frustrated that the villagers in Early Access medieval townbuilder Foundation would not eat their bread and were furiously starving. Then it turned out Alice was the one starving them. Hoho! Pure japes.

Five years later, Foundation has just hit 1.0.

After several hours of battles, sieges, imprisonment and torture in Kingdom Come: Deliverance 2, a groggy Henry of Skalitz is woken by a servant girl in a castle outside Kuttenberg. She greets him like a nobleman. I have Henry push back. He's a blacksmith's son. He might have some blue blood care of his biological father, but he grew up in the soot and clamour of the forge. The girl nervously insists, however: Henry must be from the upper crust, or he wouldn't have been welcomed and feasted by the lord of the estate. He wouldn't be lying in his very own chamber with its very own hole for shitting in - and in any case, it's more than her job's worth to treat him otherwise. In a timid, not quite spiteful show of reverse class policing, she refuses to end the dialogue until she's dismissed in a manner befitting her station.

Minecraft recently dropped pig variants into beta, giving porkly variants in cold and warm climates. The other barnyard animals were presumably breighing and neighing from the neglect, but here comes a solution: cows are getting cold cow and warm cow variants, too.

There was a moment in gaming history when it looked like all games would succumb to the dullest colours imaginable: brown and grey. Resident Evil 4, Fallout 3, Gears Of War - all bleary examples of a grubby visual style. This peaked in Clive Barker's Jericho, a shooter so desaturated it felt like the colour settings on your monitor were banjaxed. I have heard this called "the piss filter" and generally lamented in industry circles. But it was always a puposeful choice, intended to add some grittiness to the world. And there's at least one developer who is reviving "smeared dirt" as an art direction. As Time Surrenders is a very brown stealth game that takes a lot of inspiration from Metal Gear Solid V.

Friendly skateboarding game OlliOlli World and its rollerskating gun friend Rollerdrome have been delisted on Steam for unknown reasons. If you go to the store page for OlliOlli World, you'll currently see the classic delisted message: "Notice: OlliOlli World is no longer available on the Steam store." The same thing appears on the Rollerdrome page. No, we're not sure why.

Get ye to the walls, pikefolk of PC gaming. We've had a languid and fattening winter with a quiet game arriving here and there to peddle its wares. But the calm times are coming to an end. The big releases now march towards us in droves. But they do not know what lies waiting for them in the moat. The slick scales of the Maw surface in the moonlight, groaning, waiting, sick with hunger for fresh releases. The battle is yet to start, but we will upturn the chumbucket of news into the water below. Feed it, for heavens sake. FEED THE MAW!

Sundays are for walking the dog, cleaning the flat, and playing Dune Imperium - always. I might also try to self-host a Minecraft Java server, though. Let's first roundup some of the week's best writing about video games.

Alice Bell, with whom you may be familiar, asked on Eurogamer: can a Steam profile be a real memorial for a lost life?

I wonder if there's a Rorschach test specifically tailed for games. So one person can look at it and see a blocky Minecraft village, another sees Illidan's face, and a third sees the concept of Inland Empire. Someone should make this a thing.

Not us though, we're too busy playing games, or doing other things that are less interesting than playing games. Here's what we're all clicking on this weekend!

As rumoured, The Sims 1 and The Sims 2 have returned to (official) PC stores. Kindly Uncle EA has taken a break from his busy layoff schedule to rustle up a pair of Legacy collections that include a bunch of old expansions. It's the very first time the original Sims has graced a digital retail platform, I believe - it was first released in 2000, back when people used to access the internet using smoke signals and semaphore. Anyway, here's the reveal trailer.

Nvidia DLSS 4 has launched under not-terribly-happy circumstances. It’s a mostly AI-powered technology at a time when mistrust in artificial intelligence, fuelled by underbaked applications and anti-creative policies, is at all-time high – not to mention how the new GeForce GPUs it’s released alongside, the RTX 5080 and RTX 5090, have immediately entered 2020-style stock shortage purgatory.

However, having tried it out in a few different games, I suspect time will prove kinder to DLSS 4 than the RTX 50 series launch has been. It is, in fact, a rather nifty collection of upscaling improvements that can help out older graphics cards as readily as the very newest, while building on DLSS 3’s frame generation tool with Multi Frame Generation (MFG) to send visual smoothness skyrocketing. If you care even the slightest iota for how your PC performs in modern games, DLSS 4 demands your attention.

Here, then, I’ll break down DLSS 4’s various tricks and components, looking at how they really affect performance – and whether it’s worth upgrading your rig to maximise compatibility with it.

Warner Bros' licensed free-to-play fighting game MultiVersus - aka, the one where Velma Dinkley and Arya Stark can team up to kick Superman's face in - will no longer be playable online as of 30th May. It'll be pulled from Steam, the Epic Games Store and the PlayStation and Xbox stores at the end of its next season, though you'll still be able to get your fill of Bugs Bunny bashing offline against either friends or bots.

The post-launch update and DLC schedule for Sid Meier's Civilization VII slightly discombobulates me, because the image above is weirdly reminiscent of Civ 7's own historical Age progression screens. But that uncanny similarity also pleases me, because I can now do the intro joke "all roadmaps lead to Rome".*

In case you missed it, the new 4X strategy jobbo is out 11th February. Developers Firaxis have now sketched out plans for updating it, which extend from the usual balancing and bug fixes to a variety of new map types, possible multiplayer features and Age settings.

Last week, Brendy covered a video essay dissecting Heavy Rain through the under-explored lens of eroded urinal cakes. It's a Pulitzer Piss Prize worthy piece of entertainment that instantly shot creator Allie Meowy up my list of faves. I chased it straight after with another of hers: Investigating A Forgotten Edward Snowden Quote - nominally about the NSA whistleblower's assertion in a 2003 Ars Technica forum post that "some Hentai games are very good", but actually far more labyrinthine and human than just that.

It's here I discovered that Snowden had also once written a colorful 500 word review of Remedy's Max Payne 2 on those same forums in 2003 under his pseudonym TheTrueHOOHA. He enjoyed the writing so much he said he'd like to have "the most grammatically correct sex possible" with Sam Lake. He calls the final boss a "toothy little cockgoblin".

So, in case Mr Snowden ever fancied getting back into The Biz - which is how we on the inside refer to games journalism at those parties where we all spin around on our free Cyberpunk 2077 gamer chairs with those Halo 2 condoms on our heads - I figured I'd offer some helpful feedback. For clarity, I'll refer to to Edward Snowden as "Ed". I'll also mark my own suggestions with "Ed", as in "editor", to clear up any confusion.

The creator of frying pan simulator Arctic Eggs is working on a fishing game that I am certain will replicate the act of angling in an entirely ordinary and accurate fashion. Its approach to hooks, lines, and sinkers will combine the fishing from Animal Crossing, Sega Bass Fishing, and Webfishing, says developer The Water Museum in a post on Bluesky. It may have a splash of Dredge when it comes to inventory management too. Oh, also, a strange man might imply you are "disappointing someone". Nothing to worry about. And the ocean may or may not turn completely red. These decisions have not been finalised. Everything is okay. It is possible the fish are safe to eat.

Hidden away on NASA's Golden Record, an interstellar archive of music, image and sound, there is a recording of a poem by Charles Baudelaire, Élévation, which describes the astral ascent of the soul. Well, part of a poem. Both to free up room on the disc and perhaps, to edit out "the vast sorrows and all the vexations" of the second half, only the first two stanzas appear. The recording in fact ends halfway through a line, which conjures up an intriguing problem for the listener, inasmuch as the thwarted rhyme scheme reveals that the piece is incomplete. A poetically-minded alien might be tempted to fill in the gap. A fancier alien who took a module in postmodernism might hail the poetics of the fragment. A resolutely practical alien who thinks poetry is for losers might read the whole thing, instead, as a set of incoherent navigational prompts, made up of loose prepositions - au-dessus, au-dessus, par delà, par delà.

Mandragora: Whispers Of The Witch Tree is a 2.5D Soulsvania from Primal Game Studio, in which you electrify, bisect or incinerate handsome, ravening night creatures in a world of heaped skulls and burning spires. Yes, I'm well aware that "2.5D" and "Soulsvania" are nonsense words, woven by pestilent market forces. Samuel Johnson is turning in his grave, I expect. He has risen from his grave and equipped himself with an ironbound dictionary and is even now making his way through the layers of the English language, hellbent on slaughtering every 'vania yet coined.

But never mind Samuel. Oversized rodents and spiders aside, Mandragora is notable for being written by Brian Mitsoda, writer of the original Vampire: The Masquerade - Bloodlines and the former narrative lead for its sequel at Hardsuit Labs, which lives on in the hands of The Chinese Room. Primal have just announced a release date - 17th April. Here's a trailer.