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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.

Animals scare the shit out of me in the sense that I regularly find myself contemplating the sheer collective terror and pain occurring on the planet in any given ten second stretch as wild creatures hunt and gnaw and tear and paralyse and suck the fluids proboscishly from one another. I think Robin Williams said something similar in Jumanji and maybe also Schopenhauer in Jumanji 2 but this is a real and regular thought I have.

On the other hand, they also bring me quite a lot of joy each day both in the local (my cat, the dainty gremlin, her majesty shits-on-keyboard) and global sense.

I don't think Glitchpunk is capital-G Good. I don't even know if it's okay. It's showing several signs of not feeling very well, and I went back and forth several times on whether or not to send it over to talk to you.

It is, in a word, an intentional throwback to GTA 2. Drive to phones, do jobs for (noticeably less juvenile) colourful characters for cash and reputation change across three vying gangs. For a fresh spin, you're an android now, able to install special power doodads and do a hacking on some obstacles and people, Watch Underscore Dogs style. Which winds up less exciting than it was probably dreaming of, before cruel reality set in, and it had to settle for being sort of fun, in a janky, mildly masochistic way.

A long time ago there was a plague, and I have deleted 23 variations on the bitter, accusatory end of this sentence.

Wouldn't it be a jolly time to gather the dead from the streets, haul them to the graveyard, and bury them for what seems like relatively good money? Gosh, the government even provide a cart for free. In Plague Colon London 1665, you might be better protected proportionate to contemporary medical knowledge than BUT ANYWAY HO HO LAUGHTER GUFFAW.

Counter-intuitively, this is, if not quite jolly, a satisfying job simulation with a strong but unintrusive narrative and a slightly primitive low-fi charm.

Cyberpunk 2077’s scanner was a brilliant idea I wanted more from. I would happily sacrifice every traced ray outside the Afterlife bar to voyeur more deeply into the lives of Night City passers-by. I don’t think that’s how development works but I’d do it. I’d un-trace those rays so hard. Some of the game's best writing is in those short text messages fixers send you before gigs and I always wanted that extra layer of microfiction. As it exists now, the scanner tells you someone’s name, affiliation, crimes they're wanted for, and some truly, heinously boring wasted real-estate like "8% resistant to poison". What a shitty eulogy that would make.

Metroid-style platformers are common enough now to be a little tiring when you're a weirdo who pays too much attention to all the wrong things. In a year that included the excellent Biomorph, it's been difficult to give many a fair shake of the ol' scoutstick. There are more sprawling, more ambitious, more challenging contenders, but frankly, those often exhaust me.

Instead, lately I have been rather taken with the simpler, condensed, slower-paced cartoon planet exploring and befriending of Goodboy Galaxy.

As someone who is into games and works in the games industry, I desire that games push forward and try new things. And it's easy for my vision to narrow, as the nature of my work requires analysis of your indies and your blockbusters. My peers have takes. I have to have takes. I am surrounded by thoughtful writing and criticism here (well, most of the time).

Cut to my normie friend passing me the controller in Call Of Duty: Blacks Ops 6's campaign. It is out of sheer frustration that he's done so, because he simply doesn't have time for a stealth mission. He is angry that the game requires him to be patient and think, instead of waving him into a series of tunnels where soldiers will run at him, and he, a blender, will pulp them into oblivion. I haven't had my eyes opened in such a manner before.

I’m not entirely sure why I’ve never encountered one of Freewrite’s handsome but insultingly priced digital typewriters until this week. Having discovered them, I’m actually more surprised that there appear to be no real alternatives. Is there a patent here I’m missing? They have the vibe of a failed Nintendo peripheral - the sort of thing you’d find several of at any car boot sale. But no! My choices are either an old AlphaSmart with encrusted McDonalds cheese on the battery case, or a remortgage. I don’t trust you, Freewrite. I might have trusted you if you sold the premium version of a widely available product, but this feels vaguely sinister. Also, you said Hemingway was "the most iconic literary personality of the last century" - an accolade that rightfully belongs to Mary Rayner and her ketchup pigs.

Falsely accusing you of witchcraft, the crooked villagers burn you to death, inadvertently making you a witch. They compound this error by leaving an axe and several firearms unguarded, and further still by being made of delicious healing organs that, if consumed in great enough quantities, let you to spit acid like in Left ("for" - Not Letting It Go Ed) Dead.

Coven is a wonderfully pitched horror FPS. Dark and violent but too cartoonish to feel exploitative, edgy, or truly sadistic. Dramatic enough to motivate without being over-serious. Playful and excessive, but not quite camp. I was not expecting to enjoy this so much.

I have no nostalgia for the anime cartoon mangas. The few I eventually watched after school people insisted on their greatness were mostly terrible, and I generally consigned them to that bin of arbitrary things people assume you must like if you like games.

Rogue Flight isn't an exercise in nostalgia though. More knowledgeable anime sufferers may discern specific influences, but even I can identify a particular vibe that spacey 80s/90s animation sometimes carried. Action and explosions and agile ships doing dramatic turns, yes, but also a faint melancholy, and exactly the right, light touch of drama. And nobody even screams at each other, or stops mid-fight to cry about their dad, or becomes sexually obsessed with the blandest boy in history. It's as if they know what was good and what was bad, instead of copying everything wholesale? Weird.

Colony sims can be a little tricky to write about. Whether or not they grab me seems to come down to some unusual design details, or a vague sense of vibes. Goblin Camp has a bit of the first, but mostly I like it because it feels effortless. Not in a hollow or trivial sense, but in its lack of annoyances or hostility.

It's instantly familiar. Your mythical creatures build houses, catch fish, make tools and plant seeds. Animals and monsters occasionally pop in for a spirited debate on the merits of being eaten. You attract more residents, you don't bother to build a graveyard, you want to make nice clothes but it takes too many steps and feels like a waste of space. But I like it. I had to figure things out, but there were obvious possibilities, and room to be imperfect without everything collapsing. And there are hints of something more.

Oh, you like horrible metal do you. Oh, there are demons are there. Oh there's lots of gore and sadism is there. Yeah that's definitely why Doom was good, and also I can't just play Doom today for free very easily.

I usually scroll past this type of game. Caesar's Revenge is gory, sprinty Doom-style FPS with a metal soundtrack, but the premise was just silly enough to get me. Caesar probably had it coming, but so did the senators, and it turns out that resurrecting to kill them one by one is a pretty good laugh. Two wrongs make a right, probably.

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.

I often like to think of the winds of magic in Total War Warhammer 3, in terms of its more mundane strategic application, as 'mistake juice'. It’s not really a liquid, although it is contained inside a glass ball. So, juice it is. More juice should be sold in orbs, also. Maybe in pubs, too. “Just popping down the Sheep And Cabbage for a swift orb” has a nice ring to it. Is an orb still an orb if there’s a drinking hole in it? Does that shatter the sanctity of the orb? Will this incur the wrath of the orb police? So many questions. Nothing can be simple, least of all orbs.

A pirate must acquire gold to become a pirate worth the name, and so there’s nothing so perfectly Guybrush Threepwood as the first real treasure he acquires being a gold tooth stolen from an aging chicken restaurant owner. My vague awareness of The Curse Of Monkey Island’s place in history tells me it’s generally not as well regarded as its predecessors, but it holds a special place in my wooden heart, and this one puzzle always sticks with me. It’s very colorful, for one, and it’s also the first real bastard when you play the game again in the harder ‘Mega Monkey’ mode.

9-Bit Armies: A Bit Too Far is, I fear, one of those games I'll have to figure out exactly how I feel about by writing about it and seeing what happens. You can tell just by looking that it's visually striking, all high definition yet tiny, colourful buildings and units that people use the word "voxel" about when we're pretending anyone knows what those are. It's a Good Thing.

It's also a deliberate throwback to the original RTS days, with harvesters effectively collecting cash from fixed map points, and a very Command & Conquer building/training panel with unit portraits and spinning progress dials. It's pretty faithful, and stops short of slavishly cloning. This is, I suppose, a good thing. Still, I'm not sure whether my lukewarm feelings are because it's doing something wrong, or I'm just not that interested in doing all that mid-late 90s stuff again.

I have the small luxury of a chaotic brain and access to enough games that I can install a heap, then weeks later start playing them with no idea what they are. It's the best way of approaching Minds Beneath Us, as it adds further uncertainty and intrigue to its already compelling mysteries.

It is, I suppose, interactive fiction. With little context and no specific goal, you're thrust into control of a man in a near-future city, and must get through his daily life while figuring out what exactly you are and what to do about it.

It's very, very good.

Here is a take on The Matrix that may be controversial or not. I don’t know, because I’ve never heard anyone complain about it but me: Neo looks stupid when he flies. There is probably something to be said about pop culture archetypes and the collective unconscious and why it’s actually good and clever that Neo flies like Superman, but I do not care. Consider me a pioneer of petty gripes about 20 year old films. Even in a movie awash with trench coats and sunglasses, it is too much cool.

It took me a while to work out why, of all the overly cool, deliberately stupid things that happen in The Matrix, Neo flying is the one that takes me out of the films. My conclusion is this: it is not just cool, it is slick. Slick like crude oil is slick. Frictionless. Lacking any physical relation to the world around it. I do not know the exact thought process behind why Control’s hero Jesse flies the way she does upon discovering the altered Benicoff TV item, but I would not be surprised if someone pulled up a video of Neo flying in the Matrix and just said: “Not like that. Do the exact opposite of whatever he’s doing”.

Admittedly, I haven't played as much Windblown as I'd like. It's a new roguelike by the folks at Motion Twin, where you play as a chubby animal with a sword and you bash machines on slices of earth suspended in the sky. I'm basically waiting for a friend of mine to get a copy and then we can hop into online co-op together, which is the way it's meant to be played.

This slight meander is to say that my limited time with Windblown has produced a powerful thought: the dash is sublime. Or rather, the dash is sublime because it's basically a blink, not a dash. Or rather, the dash is sublime because you can just spam it like nothing else.

Scarcely does a single game object carry the torch for one of the fundamental pillars of entire genre both as parabolically and literally as Leon’s knife in Resident 4 Remake, and never has there been an object that so entirely represents its game's reinvention of said genre.

To wit: Leon’s knife is uniquely Resident Evil because it translates survival horror’s resource scarcity into a single, pocket-friendly weapon, and it is uniquely Resident Evil 4 because it is fucking stupid.

As the year slowly draws to a close, I recently contemplated what my game of the year candidates might be. What's happened, dear reader, is something rather unexpected: I've struggled. Normally it's easy! Inscryption and Vampire Survivors were up there immediately over the last however many years. This year? This year feels like a weird one.

Ultimately, a lot of the games I thought might be up there, like Dragon's Dogma 2 and Metaphor: ReFantazio, haven't burrowed into my subconscious like I'd envisaged. Instead, my candidates (besides the obvious LAD: Infinite Wealth because, well, you know me) are those I've found aren't particularly Edders. Some of them have frustrated and one of them is, currently, a broken mess.

If I could choose how you consume Rock Paper Shotgun, I'd say that you should visit the homepage or /latest and then open each individual story in a new tab. Then, as you read each story, you should open every other internal link you see, and keep going, travelling further and further into our labyrinthine archive, stopping only occasionally to sleep. Your pageviews, they sustain us.

Second best would be that you use an RSS reader and plug our RSS feed into it.

In an episode of the sadly defunct Ideas Channel entitled “A History of Pizza in 8 slices”, host Mike Rugnetta makes two devastatingly potent observations about pizza that have stuck with me since. The first of these is the idea that takeaway pizza, pre-sliced in its grease-freckled box, is pizza at its most ontologically ‘real’; while we may rightfully scorn the Large Mac as a simulacrum of a homemade burger, even the lowliest of “Papa” John Schnatter’s pepperoni n’ racism pies represents a more authentic pizza experience than a considerably more delicious DIY alternative.

This here Object-ive Review is the first in what I aim to make a supporters-only series in which I take a look at small, unique, or specific game objects, and talk about them in more detail than is likely sensible or interesting. Or, at least, use those objects as a springboard to write about personal experiences with games in ways that might not otherwise occur to me.

Much like the danger of continuing to take ecstasy at the weekends well into your late thirties in a vain attempt to recapture the euphoric bliss of the single, spectacular night in which you once accidentally enjoyed yourself multiple decades ago, my own Soulsian undead curse is an eternal, fruitless odyssey to reignite the same cold flames of dreadful trepidation I felt when first taking the elevator from Dark Souls’ Firelink Shrine down to the mournful grief-pit that is the New Londo Ruins.

I've been nose-ing up a fragrance for a while now. I've owned some cheaper smellies in the past (they can be brilliant, no hate to the budget options), but I find those I've owned don't really linger for longer than, like, a couple of hours. I'm after a more expensive whiffo, something that I can pop on for special occasions (when a new Yakuza launches) and feel more confident while simultaneously perking up people's nasal cavities.

Having recently fallen down the YouTube and general research rabbithole, I've come to realise that video game review formats are all wrong. We should treat them just like scent reviewers treat bottles of Y'ur Momme De Intense. The new Assassin's Creed Shadows? Like a walk through a mossy forest, except there's a bit of pine cone stuck in your shoe and it's jabbing you in the heel.

Hello. Long time, no write. Last time we published a 'Letter From The Editor', I was RPS's gnarled grandad, my attention split across several websites. As of a couple of weeks ago, that's no longer the case. I am once again solely focused on Rock Paper Shotgun, in a way I haven't been since 2021.

So what does this mean?

I…don’t know how this happened. Really, I don’t. The last pvp game I spent more than a few casual hours on was, without exaggeration, Halo 3. I have spent almost 20 in strategy autobattler Mechabellum since Sunday, exclusively 1v1-ing strangers. What’s scarier is that I even win sometimes. I'm vaguely aware that autobattlers have been a thing for a minute already, but I think this might be the evolution of the RTS I’ve been waiting for? It certainly feels like everything I’ve ever wanted from competitive RTS, minus needing to have any sort of reaction speed whatsoever. It is turbo crack, I tell you. Nay, it a thousand flame mechs laying waste to turbo crack city.

One thing I didn't touch on much in my Metaphor: ReFantazio review was its real-time combat: your ability to deck monsters out in the field without having to enter into a turn-based affair. So here I am, with some more thoughts on it. Namely, that I'd rather it arrives in the inevitable Persona 6, or otherwise in a renewed state. I don't think it's all that good, really.

Take any Tim Rogers clip, and they'll be at least one quote there that has helped me understand games in new and exciting ways, but one I think about often is from his Final Fantasy 7 Remake review that goes something along the lines of “we weren’t JRPG fans - we were fans of games with more". For console players in the 90’s, JRPGs were where the big stories and big places lived. If you wanted to explore worlds that felt like worlds and meet huge casts of excellent weirdos, you were almost a JRPG fan by accident.

Many of what I’d nostalgically describe as my favourite games are JRPGs, but with the exception of Valkyria Chronicles and Ichiban’s Like A Dragon games, none of them are newer than 25 years old. This suggests to me that at least one of things I want from a game is an experience that I could once only get from JRPGs, but is now more democratised, either through design nous or technology or just more writers that feel able to tell more ambitious stories to audiences they’re confident will be receptive.

Every month, I receive a paycheck for writing about games on the internet, and while it is has never been stated outright, I must assume that this acts as implicit confirmation that all my takes about videogames are bulletproof. I wrote about Space Marine 2 a few weeks ago, and while my opinions were correct at the time, they have since changed. Again: this is not contradiction. I was 100% correct at the time of writing - I’m simply more correct now.