January 2023

If you're looking for one of the very fastest gaming SSDs, Corsair's MP600 Pro LPX is a top contender. Today, the 2TB model of the MP600 Pro LPX is down to £200 on Amazon, more than £50 below its launch price and £30 below its usual price - making it a nice time to grab a super-fast SSD upgrade for your PC (or even PS5).

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Wizards Of The Coast, the owners of the Dungeons & Dragons IP, have cancelled at least five unannounced games, according to a report from Bloomberg. In a statement, the company say they’re still committed to video games and that they want to “focus on games which are strategically aligned with developing our existing brands.” Fewer than 15 people have lost their jobs as a result, although Bloomberg report that they’ll be able to reapply for new positions within the company.

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Intel's Core i5 13400F processor was just announced, but thanks to a discount code at TechNextDay you can pick up this brand new CPU for just a shade over £200 compared to £228 on Amazon UK. That's a solid price for a 10-core CPU capable of boosting to 4.6GHz, with more cache and turbo power available to it than last year's 12400F. To get this reduced price, use code TND-10 at the checkout.

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The problem with publicly voted video game awards is that a straight popularity contest overwhelmingly favours games with large marketing budgets and online communities. That's why there are few surprises among the winners of this year's Steam Awards, which were announced today.

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In December 2022, quality assurance workers at ZeniMax announced their intention to form a union. The 300 QA workers have now voted "overwhelmingly" to unionise and the union has been voluntarily recognised by ZeniMax owners Microsoft, making ZeniMax Workers United the largest union in the games industry.

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Open world island survival game Stranded Deep has arrived on Game Pass, while five other games have been announced as leaving the service on January 15th. The leavers are The Anucrusis, Nobody Saves The World, Trigger Happy Havoc, Windjammers 2, and Pupperazi.

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Hitman 3 will be renamed Hitman World Of Assassination, and Hitman 1 and 2 will be delisted from sale. These changes are Io Interactive's solution to the currently messy process of buying Hitman games or working out what you already own. From January 26th, when these changes take effect, there will be just two Hitman packages for sale. This might mean that you're getting some existing content for free, and it will mean that future DLC purchases should cost less.

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With a March release window already locked in, we won’t need to wait much longer to experience developer Nightdive’s System Shock remake. The 1994 immersive sim is receiving more than just a facelift, though, as Nightdive have released more new clips of the game in action over on their Kickstarter blog. Nightdive’s first blog post of the year gives us fresh looks at the game’s enemy variants, visual updates, and most importantly, its bloody cool dismemberment system.

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Bethesda Game Studios seem to have recommitted to a “first half of 2023” release window for their long-awaited sci-fi RPG Starfield. Per VGC, this info comes from a Bethesda support site that went live earlier this month. There are three other questions/answers about the game on the site, but no new info - which isn't weird considering, y’know, the game’s not actually out yet - aside from the message “Starfield arrives exclusively on Xbox Series X|S and PC in the first half of 2023.”

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In a New Year’s message, Square Enix’s CEO Yosuke Matsuda reaffirmed the company’s focus on blockchain technology with “multiple blockchain games based on original IPs under development” despite the public backlash against the initiative. This echoes Matsuda’s New Year’s message from last January, where the company first expressed its enthusiasm for an NFT-fueled, metaverse future. More recently, Squeenix partnered with the “environmentally friendly” blockchain firm Oasys, probably to sidestep potential controversies about, y'know, the environmental impact of the technology.

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Developer panstasz have announced that their Junji Ito-inspired indie game World Of Horror is leaving early access this summer alongside a console release. Development on the horror game goes back to at least 2017 when Alice0 managed to go hands-on with an early prototype before it entered early access in February 2020.

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WD's D10 game drive, available in a massive 12TB capacity, is on sale at the official WD UK store. To get the discounted price, use code EXTRA10 to get this refurbished WD_Black D10 Game Drive for £180 - more than £200 off its UK RRP.

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The Samsung 990 Pro is the fastest SSD we've ever tested - and now the 2TB model is discounted. This debuted at £284, but now has dropped to £240, a historic low price for this record-setting drive that pushes to the limits of the PCIe 4.0 spec.

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Oh. OK. I guess it’s time for me to publicly confess which games I voted for in this year’s advent calendar but that didn't get it, and without the usual protection of anonymity granted by group lists. Listen: please don’t judge me. I just want to say that up top before you find out where I live and start sending me pizzas or something. I am fallible. You cut me, I bleed red. I put my bread in the toaster one slice at a time.

Anyway, with that out the way, here’s a list of things I liked this year that no one else at RPS had a chance to play, or in one case just thought was total ass.

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These honourable mentions lists are a lovely little wrap up of games we couldn't squeeze into the 2022 Advent Calendar, and mine is also a useful reminder that I didn't just spend the entire year playing Elden Ring. Lots of time was spent as a lowly tarnished, getting smacked around by big fucken madlads with a dragon for an arm, sure. But I also got lost in a thrilling narrative adventure, laughed at flatulent renditions of our national anthem, swept up loot in Al Mazrah, and became enamoured with a lil gator. Here's to 2022, everyone.

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A little known fact is that all of the RPS staff are complex clockwork automata, designed and built by a little gnome with the kind of inch-thick glasses that make your eyes look comically large. We're each powered by a spell that lasts but 12 months, so every Christmas we fall over like sad marionettes. The gnome has to spend a couple of weeks trekking up a mountain to see the fairy who can recast the spells on us. You can help fund his sled dogs and provisions by becoming a member of the RPS supporter program. While he's away, we've prepared some Christmas Crackers for you.

Time to enjoy your lovely joke!

Q. What is Long John Silver's favourite open-world horror game?

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Cult Of The Lamb will get a "free major content update" sometime in 2023, which will focus on adding "depth, difficulty, accessibility and quality of life". Specifically, it's adding a new heavy attack for every single weapon in the game.

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Valve launched the Steam Deck Verified system to make it easy for folks to spot what games on their digital store would work with their handheld gaming PC. As we careen into the new year, there are now over 7000 games marked as "playable" or better on Steam Deck.

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RPS apparently never met a detective game it didn't like. There are six on our list of the best games of 2022, for example. If the glowing praise of the team here convinced you to try Chinatown Detective Agency or The Case Of The Golden Idol, then you might want to wait a little while longer before buying them. One of next year's genre-specific Steam sales will be the Steam Mystery Fest, running from February 20th-27th.

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2022 is ready to drop from the calendar, revealing the unblemished pages of 2023 beneath. There's a small chance you're spending the next several hours at a bacchanalian rager, but I'd bet that you're not. You're more likely enjoying a few hours of peace and quiet after a week with family and wishing Jools would hurry the whole thing along.

That sounds like a perfect time to peruse your gaming library and wonder what you could play. Look at all those games you haven't got round to yet! Maybe 2023 should be the year you really commit to learning Dwarf Fortress, now the Steam version is out. Maybe this is the year you finally give an MMO a try or see your first JRPG to completion. Or maybe this year you're going to uninstall your backlog in its entirety and just accept you're only ever going to play Spelunky from now on.

What are your gaming ambitions for 2023? Tell us in the comments below.

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As both a parent and the resident news lad here, I probably spend way more time talking and writing about games than getting hundreds of hours to actually play them. While most of the games I've snuck the odd minutes with – I hesitate to say hours – made it onto our Advent Calendar for Horace’s approval, the three below were a few that made me and my family smile at different points throughout 2022. Roll on 2023 - and even more games.

Possibly my most magical Christmas as a kid was in 1997, aged 12. I got a Saturn and an issue of the UK’s Official Sega Saturn Magazine that had a Christmas NiGHTS Into Dreams disc on the cover. I reckon that it was my favourite, most unabashedly fun time for gaming ever (outside my decades fiddling around on PC, obvs). Indie platformer Lunistice is a blatant love letter to the 32-bit era, and the kind of game that largely skipped the poor old Saturn.

You guide Hana the Tanuki about as she dreams, aiming to get her to the Moon. Hana properly speeds along, bouncing and spinning her tail to thwack enemies with a lovely splat effect. Devs A Grumpy Fox have really nailed the classic 90s platformer vibe, thanks to all the different dreamworlds that Hana gets to careen through. Don’t expect something open-world like Sonic Frontiers, because Lunistice is deliberately meant to be a linear, short experience. Good grief, could we use more of those.

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I didn't play as many games as I wanted to this year - but then I say that every single year and will probably continue to do so until the end of time (I assume at some point my consciousness will be uploaded into an immortal robot that will exist until the heat death of the universe, and that robot will still be doing previews). Like everyone else who has written their selection box, my top picks made it onto the Advent Calendar this year. But some didn't! Here are but a three of them.

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A little known fact is that all of the RPS staff are complex clockwork automata, designed and built by a little gnome with the kind of inch-thick glasses that make your eyes look comically large. We're each powered by a spell that lasts but 12 months, so every Christmas we fall over like sad marionettes. The gnome has to spend a couple of weeks trekking up a mountain to see the fairy who can recast the spells on us. You can help fund his sled dogs and provisions by becoming a member of the RPS supporter program. While he's away, we've prepared some Christmas Crackers for you.

Time to enjoy your lovely joke!

Q. What goes great with Cult Of The Lamb?

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The Sennheiser HD 599 SE has been one of my favourite pairs of headphones for a long time, with its open-back design, neutral sound signature and comfy velour earpads combining into one of the best affordable headsets for critical listening and gaming in my book. These headphones normally hover around £100 to £180, but today they've dropped to a near-all-time-low: £87 at Amazon UK.

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The Samsung 980 Pro, a 'PCIe 4.0 SSD speed demon' with 'absolutely barnstorming... read and write performance' and a former 'fastest PCIe 4.0 SSD' pick has been reduced over at Amazon UK. There, you can pick up the 1TB model for £98, and it's even the premium version that includes a high-grade heatsink preinstalled.

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It's been a weird year at RPS for me. After eight years as news editor, I started the nebulous new role of associate editor. This brought a broad mandate to cover indie games and PC Game Pass and to do, like, whatever else I think might be fun or good. It has been weird to not clock in and just Do News, and to have responsibility only over myself. This freedom has felt great when I've had ideas, and terrible when I've not. I'm still feeling it out, settling in, and making mistakes, but I'm quite enjoying myself. Hopefully you have enjoyed some of it too. Here are a few of my favourite things I've written this year!

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I confess: I usually did my damndest to rig the RPS Advent Calendar vote. When every year has so many more than 24 good games, I always tried to tactically vote and reshuffle points to wedge in a few wee great games I knew not many people had played. But with a change to voting procedure this year, I simply couldn't get some games on our list. So, here are the games I would've slammed into our advent calendar if I were still allowed to cheat, along with some that simply didn't quite make the cut.

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A little known fact is that all of the RPS staff are complex clockwork automata, designed and built by a little gnome with the kind of inch-thick glasses that make your eyes look comically large. We're each powered by a spell that lasts but 12 months, so every Christmas we fall over like sad marionettes. The gnome has to spend a couple of weeks trekking up a mountain to see the fairy who can recast the spells on us. You can help fund his sled dogs and provisions by becoming a member of the RPS supporter program. While he's away, we've prepared some Christmas Crackers for you.

Time to enjoy your lovely joke!

Someone stole all the PSU cables out of my PC

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AMD's Ryzen 5600X was a favourite of value-oriented gamers when it debuted in late 2020 - to say nothing of RPS head big honcho Katharine - so unsurprisingly AMD followed it up with an even cheaper model, the 5600, about a year later. This non-X variant performs more or less identically, with a slightly low rated boost clock that translates into one or two percent worse performance in CPU-limited scenarios. Given the fact that the 5600 is £13 cheaper on Amazon right now, we'd recommend it over the X any time.

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Sabrent's Rocket PCIe 4.0 SSD is one of best cheap PCIe 4.0 SSDs that doesn't cut corners in terms of NAND type (it's TLC, rather than the cheaper QLC) and cache (it's got a DRAM cache). This makes it a good performer even in sustained write scenarios, as you might encounter in video editing and the like, while its good random read/write speeds are good for gaming. Sabrent has discounted the drive to £77.99 on Amazon UK, which is a good price for this level of performance.

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Last week, developer David Moralejo Sánchez released Outpath: First Journey, a free "prologue chapter" for a first-person mix of clicker and crafting due in 2023. As of right now, it has an "overwhelmingly positive" rating on Steam and over 700 reviews.

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S.T.A.L.K.E.R. 2 development has continued even during Russia's invasion of Ukraine, where developers GSC Game World are based. Now there's a new trailer which shows combat against humans and mutants, scavenging in the Zone, comforting inventory management, and dialogue from several high-strung NPCs.

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Staff at another Activision Blizzard studio have formed a union. Proletariat, the developers of Spellbreak, was bought by Blizzard in June and put to work on World Of Warcraft: Dragonflight. Now staff have formed a union with the Communication Workers Of America (CWA) and are asking Activision Blizzard to voluntarily recognise it.

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The Epic Games Store's festive season of freebies has drawn to a close. The Epic Games Store's weekly freebies have therefore resumed. Right now and until January 5th you can grab Dishonored: Definitive Edition for free, which includes Arkane's first-person stealth playground and all its expansions.

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