Escape rooms, those lock-in experiences where you and your group have to solve esoteric puzzles to make your way out, are designed to stretch players’ problem-solving skills in an interactive environment. Any expectations beyond just having a good time are usually tied to a theme, and the scarier escape rooms are…
Another year in the books. Or ebooks. Or TikTok. I don’t know. I’m older now so I can’t keep up with all your newfangled gizmos and bookkeeping tools. What I do know is that this year is basically over. So, we can now look at Metacritic to see what game critics collectively declared as the worst of the worst in 2022.
Hogwarts Legacy is just a couple months away and if you haven’t been paying attention, the Harry Potter spin-off isn’t messing around. The game will let players learn the series’ infamous unspeakable curses and even use them on students. A new gameplay reveal ups the ante even further though, showing off the game’s…
Professional boss baby Elon Musk has a lot of…unique ideas (his recent decision to just stop paying rent on Twitter’s office as a “cost-cutting” measure stands among them), but at least he isn’t afraid to commit to the bit. After nearly a year of Musk imagining a Valve-compatible Tesla, the electric vehicle company…
It was another banner year for role-playing games. Even as the genre beloved for dialogue choices, skill trees, and making the numbers go up gets slowly subsumed into every major blockbuster from Dying Light 2 to God of War Ragnarök, there were still plenty of standouts, both big and small.
I like annoying-sounding things, like feedback loops on Discord calls, un-WD-40’d door hinges, and small dogs who are losing their shit over the existence of reality. But not everyone likes to be annoyed while playing video games, and that’s why the developers for recently-released first-person-shooter High on Life…
ArtStation is probably the most important website on the whole internet for professional artists, especially those working in entertainment fields like video games. Most of our Fine Art links, for example, point there. Which is why the site’s continued allowance of AI-generated imagery has become a point of contention…
Anime NYC, held last month, is one of the few major events taking place this year that we haven’t had to welcome back, since it went ahead in 2021 and saw over 50,000 attendees through the turnstiles. Of course it was also one of the earliest recorded cases of the spread of the Omicron Covid variant in the United…
As a prequel to one of the most beloved video game stories of all time, It’s important that Crisis Core - Final Fantasy VII - Reunion tell its own prequel story without disrupting the thematic cohesion of the story that spawned it. Does it succeed? Mostly. Reunion excels at being a great RPG and a phenomenal remaster.…
If you own a PlayStation 4 or 5, you can view your yearly Wrap-Up starting from today. The PlayStation equivalent of Spotify Wrapped and other year-end summaries of user activity on a platform, the Wrap-Up lets Sony once again shame you for your gaming choices as it’s done in prior years. Simply go to this link and…
Pokémon Scarlet and Violet is bringing back its limited-time Charizard the Unrivaled tera raid this week on December 16. The event will last until December 18, and it’s the only way for players to catch the iconic dragon in these games as of this writing. So if you want to add Charizard to your team, you’ll have only…
I’m about four hours into High On Life and I have a migraine. It’s unfair to say that the game has given me one—I am, after all, notoriously prone to them—but it certainly isn’t helping. The brightly colored, gloopy, blobby alien worlds and incessant chatter from NPCs, enemies, and my weapons aren’t exactly a soothing…
The Block reminds me of those mini zen sand gardens, except I don't have to worry about anyone thinking I'm a stressed pretentious business executive when they look at my desk. It bills itself as the world's smallest city builder, on account of your creations stretching across singular tiles that range from a tiddly 3x3 surface area to a mighty 15x15.
It's by developer Paul Schnepf, who made minimalist skateboarding game The Ramp and worked on the lovely yet much more goal-oriented Islanders. The Block is just about making something nice-lookin'. It's out now, and cheap as chips.
It’s well documented that creativity can help quell the waves of stormy mental health seas. Hours of documentaries chronicle how artists expressed their struggles through brushstrokes, or how an actor agonised over creating an accurate character to counterbalance their imposter syndrome or anxiety. It’s unlikely many creatives have found “refuge” in a 27 year old retro game engine - but that’s exactly how Dan Douglas talks about his sprawling mod for Duke Nukem 3D.
Good news, everyone! SteelSeries' Arctis Nova 7 gaming headset is down to £104 after a 30% discount at Currys when you use code GAMING30 at checkout, marking the first major price drop for this recently-released and critically-acclaimed headset.
It’s midseason update time for Call of Duty: Modern Warfare 2 and free to play battle royale Warzone 2, with the latter’s DMZ mode now letting you swap teams if things aren’t going so well. Been taken down in Warzone 2 but none of your squadmates are around to help? Or perhaps you’re just a bit fed up of waiting for them to revive you? Well, since the Season 01 Reloaded update arrived, you now have the option to ask enemy players for help and get to join their team if they do. There’s a whole bunch more stuff in the update including the new version of the Shipment map for Modern Warfare 2 multiplayer, which you take a look at in the video below.
On the fifteenth day of the RPS Advent Calendar you open the door with some trepidation, because you've heard there's a strange series of crimes and murders on the other side. But you needn't have worried, because all the weirdo miscreants involved seem to be frozen in time for the moment.
While I procrastinate as hard as the next desk jockey, in truth I've never had the patience for Minesweeper. It doesn't have the fast pace and stunning climax of Solitaire, y'know? So what if we jazz it up by smashing in another puzzle game. Like in Minesweeper Tetris, released for free on Steam this morning, which kinda adds Tetris by making the screen slowly fill in with fresh lines of mines, challenging you to clear mines quickly. It twists my melon, man.
Yee haw, buckle up, root and also toot, for the Devil's Moon event has kicked off in Hunt Showdown. The event sees Crytek's excellent multiplayer cowboy sneak 'em up periodically set fire to big parts of each map, where you blow up creepy bleedy statues for points that unlock new weapons and traits. There's one that makes you invisible to monsters, which sounds ridiculously powerful - which is probably why the traits will only be in play until the event ends on January 15th.
It's quite sad that one of The Geoff Awards 2022 announcements I'm most excited about likely targeted me and no-one else. And that's because it 1) was a reminder, not an announcement; 2) was something to do with Call Of Duty; 3) didn't show off a great deal. Yep, it was the reminder that Call Of Duty: Modern Warfare 2 is getting its first raid very soon.
BUT, I'd argue that it should - even just a teeny weeny bit – be of interest to you. Finally, a raid is coming to a game that isn't a life investment, and that's rad.
Earlier today, it was revealed that Crisis Core - Final Fantasy VII - Reunion has a piece of artwork in it with a great big Getty Images watermark slapped across it. The eagle-eyed staff over at Kotaku posted an image of the offending painting, found in Nibelheim's ShinRa Mansion where Zack and co find themselves toward the end of the game, and having gone back in to see for myself, I can confirm that, yep, the in-game painting of John Crowther's Ludgate Circus, London, 1881 does indeed still have the watermark on it. Oops! Might want to sort that licence fee, Square Enix, or at least patch it out before Getty starts a'knockin...
Whoopsie artwork isn't the only thing hiding in Crisis Core's ShinRa Mansion, though, because down in the basement is a rather cute nod a Final Fantasy VII fav. Spoilers within, obvs.
Two weeks are down on the RPS Advent Calendar this year, and you've started to feel the call to adventure again. You thought that you'd rolled up your treasure map for good, and swabbed your last deck, but it seems like the wind is here to fill your sales once more...
Games get delayed so often that it's always a pleasure when a release date is instead moved earlier. Chop Goblins maybe takes it to an extra extreme. The 30-minute retro shooter from the developer of Dusk was due for release on January 2nd, but it's out now after being released several weeks earlier. "I was bored," explained the developer on Twitter.
As I lay in bed at 6am today, crying, I knew: it's time. They say Christmas is a season for cheer and goodwill towards all but that's not an observation, it's an imploration. Christmas can be difficult for so many reasons, and that is why we must offer people cheer and goodwill. So truly, genuinely I find great comfort and joy in Christmas Pain In Christmas Town, a novelty Christmas song by a fictional washed-up musician from 90s infobahn detective game Hypnospace Outlaw. May this music video bring you cheer too.
It’s been 17 years and a week since Brokeback Mountain happened, and indie dev Robert Yang has taken the spirit of the movie and turned it into a free to play romance visual novel. That Lonesome Valley lets you play out the relationship between two young herders working alone together out in the American wilderness. Yang gives a content warning for the game, which contains pixel art nudity and sex sequences. You can watch the first ten minutes of That Lonesome Valley below.
The strategic superheroics of Marvel’s Midnight Suns might make it a Bestest Bests winner, but tragically, it does come yoked to the dreadful 2K Launcher. A few months breaking the BioShock series on the Steam Deck, this pernicious piece of software now appears to be a major cause of Midnight Suns' stuttering issues, while seriously hobbling performance more generally.
If you're playing via Steam, I strongly suggest following the lead of the, uh, thousands of people who’ve discovered this before me by disabling the 2K Launcher entirely. I’ve just tried this out and not only did the majority of the stuttering vanish, but my average frames per second shot up by nearly 62%. 62% better performance! From nixing a launcher that serves absolutely no purpose when you’re launching from Steam anyway! Madness.
When I heard timebending roguelike shooter Returnal was actually, really, definitely coming to PC during The Game Awards last week, I wasn’t quite expecting the recommended system requirements to suggest I set aside 32GB RAM at its disposal. That’s what devs Housemarque and publisher PlayStation have listed for Returnal’s recommended system requirements though. Shush, don’t tell anyone, but I don’t have that much RAM in my machine. Doing a straw poll of RPS staff, most of us don't. Except James, who's looking very pleased with himself right now.
Teamgroup's T-Force Vulcan Z SSD isn't the most well-known drive, but it offers some pretty solid value for money - especially when the capacious 2TB model is reduced to a shade over $100 at Amazon US. That's a nice $69 reduction from its MSRP and an excellent value for a drive of this size and spec.
Another week, another great AMD CPU deal on American Ebay. This time it's on the Ryzen 7 5700X, a powerful eight-core 16-thread processor with the same basic design of the 5800X - at a significantly lower price. This model debuted at $300, but is now available for just $190 when you buy it from Antonline on Ebay.
Playing online card battlers can be a lonely life, so I was pleased to spot Marvel Snap's latest community infographic. No longer are my opponents just names on a screen: they're now names on a screen who I know have contributed to the 159 million Vibranium cards drawn during the Vibranium Forge event. It's neat to see some silly stats, even neater to see a Black Panther with a power level that tops 8 million. A normal number would be, like, 16.
You might have missed it in the Games Awards news-glut, but FromSoftware announced a new game last week. Armored Core VI: Fires Of Rubicon marks the return of the mechs they used to make before Demon's Souls set them on a different, swordier path, and IGN have just published a big interview that pokes into what bearing the Soulsbourne lineage might have on a game about flying mechs with guns and missiles.
Armored Core director (and Sekiro lead designer) Masaru Yamamura welcomed Sekiro comparisons, while FromSoftware president Hidetaka Miyazaki was keen to stress they're treating it as an Armored Core game rather than a Soulsborne game.
Football may not have come home this year, but it is coming to Call Of Duty: Warzone 2.0. A limited-time mode introduced with Season 01 Reloaded's launch on Wednesday will see two teams of three knocking a big football about on ATVs equipped with special pulse abilities, in classic Rocket League fashion.
The developers are also bringing back Mini Royale, popping up a new building in the DMZ mode, and adding a new map to the multiplayer mode that you actually need to own Modern Warfare 2 for.
Last week Elden Ring added PvP colosseums, which are a fine place to spend your time while waiting for From Software to make more sad demons for you to kill. Director Hidetaka Miyazaki has confirmed that more updates are on the way, using his Game Awards victory speech to announce that they're working on "several more things" for Elden Ring. He also mentioned he plans to "create even more interesting games", if a triumph like Elden Ring still isn't good enough for you.
Synced is an upcoming free to play third-person looter shooter developed by NeXT Studios, and is Tencent's crack at a live-service game akin to The Division. It has roguelite bits to help it stand out a touch, with the ability to command your own shiny gem pal to bash enemies. But from what I've played so far, its lack of clarity makes its grind for currencies and mod slots and whatever else a tired affair that probably won't pull you away from the bazillion other games that require a lifetime investment.
The AMD Radeon RX 7900 XT and Radeon RX 7900 XTX hark back to a simpler time – about three months ago – when graphics cards resembled graphics cards and not Coca-Cola lorries. I like getting a bajillion frames per second as much as the next PC owner, but good gravy, are the RTX 4080 and RTX 4090 a pair of oversized, ruinously expensive brutes. AMD’s two new high-end GPUs, therefore, have a golden chance to be the more modestly designed, affordable alternatives that prospective 4K players were waiting for.
When is Civilization not Civilization? When it’s Unciv, a free to play, open-source reimagining of Sid Meier’s Civilization V that’s being developed by volunteers on GitHub. After nearly three years in development and releases on Android, Linux, and through itch.io, Unciv’s now moving its units onto Steam. You'll be able to play multiplayer Unciv, but that involves using Dropbox for syncing, which isn’t free to use.
Assassin's Creed Valhalla snuck onto Steam last week, but Ubisoft say they won't be adding Steam Achievements. You can still unlock 70 of the things via Ubisoft Connect, which launches automatically when you boot the game up on Steam anyway - so the only functional difference is that your achievements won't all be in the same place. People don't love that, which is fair, but let's keep our heads now.
A class-action lawsuit against Epic Games’ Fortnite is going ahead in Quebec, more than three years after it was originally filed. CTV News report that parents of three Canadian children who regularly play Fortnite claim the game was created to be “highly addictive”, and allege the battle royale has caused their kids psychological and physical problems, along with financial issues. Although the families are seeking damages from Epic, no figure has been put on those yet. Epic has 30 days to appeal the case or it’ll go to trial.
Paper Mario-style indie RPG The Outbound Ghost has been delisted from Steam by Valve, following lead developer Conrad Grindheim issuing a statement that claimed his relationship with publisher Digerati had "dissolved". Grindheim posted a video to YouTube and Twitter that alleged the publisher’s recent business practices towards the game haven’t been “ethically correct”. Digerati later shared their own video response on Twitter, with owner Sarah Alfieri saying Digerati have been “blindsided” by Grindheim’s statement.
In this work-a-day world it can be difficult to find moments of satisfaction. Well, let the twelfth game on the RPS Advent Calendar deliver a concentrated pressure hose of satisfaction right onto your dirty driveway