January 2023

I did not expect the next game from The Lion's Song devs Mi'pu'mi Games to be a turn-based tactical folktale, but cor, Howl sure does tick a heck of a lot of boxes for me. Due out later this year, you play a deaf hero in search of a cure to a sinister 'howling plague' that's devastated the land around you and turned all its inhabitants into blood-thirsty beasts - and having played its first chapter last week, its combination of tight planning, grid-based shoving and limited ammo a la Into The Breach is very, very moreish indeed. Definitely one to watch for strategy game fans.

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At a time when LucasArts was cheerfully mocking rival developer Sierra's fondness for punishing players with game overs you could trigger at the drop of a hat, Sierra themselves seemed intent to double down. In Gabriel Knight: Sins of the Fathers, not only can the titular protagonist suffer a variety of gruesome fates if you so much as put a foot wrong, but there's a point where you can soft-lock the entire game by failing to pick up an easily missable single snake scale from a busy crime scene — and you won't even know you did anything wrong for several in-game days. I'm not 100% sure this wasn't an oversight on the part of the developers, but at the same time, that's exactly the sort of shit that Sierra liked to pull.

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Minecraft players are a creative bunch, that’s undeniable, but someone decided to spend more than three months planning out the whole of Toto’s 1982 classic song Africa using the game’s note and command blocks. Stacinator has shared their efforts on YouTube and the Minecraft subreddit for all to see. I'd encourage you to have a watch of the full Minecraft Africa video, and wonder why Toto’s only other famous tune is Rosanna.

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It’s not every day you see a developer announce their game’s release window by showing a stop-motion bunny building a new PC to play it, but that’s exactly what the team behind upcoming soulslike Black Myth: Wukong have done. A new short film themed around Chinese New Year that's been shared by devs Game Science Studio sees a young lagomorphic enthusiast scuppered by their out of date computer, and also shows a wee bit of Black Myth: Wukong in action too. You can watch the l’il rabbit growing increasingly frustrated below.

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The US Federal Trade Commision has already committed to blocking Microsoft's $69 billion Activision-Blizzard buyout, so now it's the EU's turn to kick up a fuss. The EU's antitrust watchdog is nearing the end of a 90-day probe into whether Microsoft's buyout violates antitrust laws, and they're reportedly about to serve up a charge sheet that lays out all their beef. As with those of the FTC and other regulators, their objections are likely to centre on the likelihood of Microsoft saddling Call Of Duty with Xbox or Gamepass exclusivity.

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Have you ever been in a relationship with somebody who surprised you in all the right ways at the beginning, but eventually frustrated and disappointed you so deeply that it all ended in a messy breakup? Farlanders is my messy breakup.

It's a space colony city builder with a puzzle game mentality - and set on Mars to make things even more enticing. The best part of Farlanders is its story, and while it’s not quite a full-blown commentary on colonialism, it examines what you’re doing and why you’re doing it with a self-awareness that I did not expect at all. That being said, annoying difficulty curves, awkward terraforming, and frustrating progression systems stop this space colony sim from really taking off. A graph charting my enjoyment over time would look like a child’s drawing of a mountain.

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Free to play fantasy MMO RPG Lost Ark got a bit too happy with its banhammer over the weekend, with lapsed players taking to the game’s Steam page to complain that they’d been banned for no reason other than inactivity. Players, or at least former players, of Lost Ark left more than 1300 negative reviews of the game on Saturday, and more than 1000 on Sunday. They claimed they’d received bans that appeared on their Steam profile without actually logging into the game recently.

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HBO's The Last Of Us TV adaptation is finally out on UK tellyboxes via Sky/Now TV today, and judging by early critic reviews, it's meant to be pretty all right! You know, as video game TV shows go. I've yet to sit down and watch it myself, but I'll probably be doing so this evening to see what's what.

A question I've been pondering in the run-up to The Last Of Us' TV debut, however, is this: if I watch the TV show now, will I really be bothered to actually sit down and play Part 1 when it finally comes to Steam at the beginning of March? 'Cause I sure don't have time (or the inclination) to do both. I think that might be too much The Last Of Us... But what about you, readers? Will you be tuning in, or waiting to play it on PC? Or both! Tell us in the comments below.

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Every weekend, indie devs show off current work on Twitter's #screenshotsaturday tag. And every Monday, I bring you a selection of these snaps and clips. This week, my eye has been caught by a pleasing assortment of zippy and dramatic movements—hoverboards, airdashes, grappling hooks—but also some cute, weird, interesting, and uh I guess hypothetically erotic indies games. Come have a look!

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The team of modders working to bring The Elder Scrolls IV: Oblivion into Skyrim has updated us with a new trailer, announcing that they’re targeting 2025 to launch the Skyblivion project. By that point, volunteers will have been hammering away on Skyblivion for 13 years. If you remember what you were doing 13 years ago then you’ve got a better memory than I do. Watch the latest and rather snazzy trailer for Skyblivion below, and wonder whether Emperor Uriel Septim VII sounds more like Patrick Stewart or Sean Connery.

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Wintry speedrunning festival Awesome Games Done Quick 2023 finished yesterday, with runners managing to land $2,642,493 (£2,162,774) of donations in aid of Prevent Cancer. GDQ announced the $2.6 million figure on Twitter after the event concluded, and thanked all the runners and those who’d donated.

A number of speedruns throughout the week-long event smashed world records for their respective games and categories too, including PC runs of Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles: Shredder’s Revenge and my own personal GOTY from 2022, PowerWash Simulator. You can watch the AGDQ 2023’s record-setting No Soap PowerWash Simulator run below, and weep into your coffee at the sheer cleaning ability on display.

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Sundays are for angling your umbrella so the wind doesn't turn it inside out. Before you duck, let's read this week's best writing about games (and game related things).

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When it was released on January 14th 2003, SimCity 4 had its problems. Its huge cities would chug on even decent PCs, for one, and its traffic simulation seemed outright broken.

Twenty years later - thanks to faster PCs, the Rush Hour expansion, and a huge modding community - SimCity 4 is the best of all SimCity games. If what you care about is simulation, scale, variety, and the beauty of urban sprawl, it's also the best citybuilder.

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Against The Storm provided some of the most fun I had playing a citybuilder last year. That was in part because, despite being set in a dark fantasy world in which you must satisfy an unyielding Queen, and despite being in early access, it's remarkably graspable. It's the kind of citybuilder where, if you place a building in the wrong place, it simply lets you pick it up and move it at no cost.

As of its latest update, there's now a new customisable game mode that lets you make your expeditions even more relaxed - or much harder.

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Google and Nvidia have both provided the US Federal Trade Commission with objections to Microsoft's attempted acquisition of Activision Blizzard, Bloomberg report. The FTC opted last month to sue Microsoft to block the acquisition, arguing that the deal would suppress competition.

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Google Stadia will close its doors on January 18th. As a parting gift, Google have released the game they built to test the streaming service before the streaming service launched. "Worm Game" is a version of Snake with plenty of levels and modes to try and, of course, it's playable within your browser.

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The weekend is here. Let's give it a cheer! In the thread of WAWAPTWs we're ready to start chatting with you. So what are you playing this weekend? Here's what we're clicking on!

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AMD's cheapest eight-core Ryzen 5000 processor has hit a new price low at Amazon UK, making it a great time to grab the Ryzen 7 5700X to upgrade your machine from an older Ryzen model - or build a shiny new one. The CPU is now £185, a 44% drop from its £329 RRP and even cheaper than it was yesterday.

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Logitech's G435 Lightspeed headset is down to $30 on Amazon, which is an awesome deal for a model that I've tested and recommended at its original price of $80 (over at RPS sister site Eurogamer). To recap, this headset launched in late 2021, comes with 2.4GHz "Lightspeed" wireless and Bluetooth, with a lightweight design and in a range of colours - so $30 is an incredible price.

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It's been 14 years since RPS started writing about Beyond Good & Evil 2, Ubisoft's open world follow up to the cult classic I'm too young to have played. We haven't seen hide nor genetically modified pig tail of it since 2018, but rest assured, it lives.

That's despite the most recent swing of Ubisoft's game-cancelling scythe, which was brought down on three unannounced games last week due to the company's underperforming sales.

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Desktop Dungeons is a morish puzzle game from 2010 that channels conventional dungeoning into fiendish headscratching. Every enemy sits still, waiting for you to come and whack it. Whack willy-nilly, though, and they'll kill you in no time - so you have to tactically explore parts of each level to heal, while targeting foes in an order that lets you survive long enough to level up and take on the big bads.

Desktop Dungeons: Rewind is an upcoming "modern remastering" of the original, with 3D graphics and the ability to rewind time rather than start each level from the very beginning. It's got a demo you can play right now, and it's adding free daily challenges with a sharable leaderboard later this month. I am hyped.

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Make no bones about it: Ubisoft's perennially delayed Skull & Bones is still coming. A new developer video proves that, offering a fresh look at some sumptuous seas during a hunt for an Ungwanan renegade. The most interesting part of Skull & Bones is still its tortured history, with a recent sixth delay pushing it even further back from the original 2018 release date - but oh, maybe I do want to be a boat after all. At least for a bit.

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When The Anacrusis launched into early access in January 2022, its retrofuturist take on the co-op FPS instantly delivered on funky sci-fi fun. Yet it was also tempered fun: a brutal AI Director could easily tip manageable chaos into a fatiguing onslaught of fishy alien minibosses, and I still remember my will to persevere being sapped by connectivity issues and a general lack of weight to the otherwise enticing pew-pew gunplay.

Happily, following a year of tweaks and additions, The Anacrusis is in a much better place. Even if that place is still turtleneck-deep in extraterrestrial viscera. Ahead of the game’s first anniversary, I poked developers Stray Bombay for a chat on how their early access approach is working out, the impact of long-awaited mod tools, and what’s next for this most stylish of space shooters.

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I'm playing Assassin's Creed Valhalla right now, and it's too bloody big. This is my second stint, jumping back in after playing for 14 hours when it came out in 2020 then abandoning it - and I'm beginning to remember why. It's a pretty but largely empty-feeling time, with woefully repetitive mission design and characters I only have a passive interest in. It's good, therefore, to see Assassin's Creed Mirage creative director Stéphane Boudon make more noises about how the next Creed game will be smaller and "more intimate".

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When you think of object-gathering game Katamari Damacy the first things that spring to mind are usually balls, and the rolling thereof. Computer scientist and custom controller kitbashing experimenter Dr Tom Tilley had the same thought and, erm, rolled with it. In a case of life imitating art, Tilley repurposed a trackball he’d made from roll-on deodorant and a soccer ball to play the game with (thanks, Time Extension). You can watch Tilley mucking about with the trackball to control an emulated version of the PS2-era Katamari Damacy in the video below.

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What makes a good platformer? Christ, I don't know. Why would you open an article with that. Calling Kandria a platformer feels a little reductive, so there's a need to clarify why it works. You play as an android revived several decades after an apocalypse, by a tiny camp of survivors who inevitably need your help. A lot of this help involves, well, platforming. To the point of having nonsensical areas of pure platforming in between you and a destination or secret area. You'll climb, jump, do the little dash thing that recharges when you touch the ground or pick up a hovering lamp thingy. You'll land on a lot of thorny instakill spikes.

So yeh, lots of the old platforming, but it feels more like an exploration and scavenging game, with a side order of light-light-heavy-dodge combat too. And a plot with varied dialogue options and mysteries about the world and its history. It's immediately and consistently fun, but I'm not sure exactly how to recommend it. Hmm.

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I've learned to love Apex Legends, having bounced off it hard multiple times. The pace is high, the movement tricky, the guns have like, 18 bullets in a clip and it's really easy to buzz them all into thin-air. But once a few friends held my hand and taught me to be patient and position myself properly, rather than charge into battle at any given opportunity, the game began to click. And what a battle royale it is.

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Horror movie maestro John Carpenter has ‘fessed up that he’s not directing a movie version of Dead Space, but suggests there’s another director attached to a possible big-screen adaptation. Talking to Variety about his career ahead of his 75th birthday, Carpenter was asked about rumours he could be helming a non-interactive take on Dead Space. Considering Carpenter hasn’t made a film in 13 years it does seem a bit of a wild idea, but then the director is both a horror auteur and video game fan.

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A huge Valve leak from last week already gave us a peek at the Counter-Strike Source map that lead to Left 4 Dead, but there are plenty more old-school Valve assets where those came from. Fans are currently sorting through 60 gbs of unused Team Fortress 2 assets, including 20 maps, 40 man vs machine maps, and assorted intriguing models. I do kind of wish we'd got to play the version of TF2 with mechs that resemble three-footed Star Wars Walkers.

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Writing up our big guide on all the upcoming PC games of 2023, I was introduced to a number of smaller games in development I hadn't heard about before. One of them was Broken Roads, an isometric RPG set in a post-apocalypse Australia. The gorgeous artwork was enough for me to click on the Steam page and read more, and while scrolling through the screenshots something strange caught my eye.

It was a screenshot of a fairly traditional RPG dialogue scene, with a panel at the bottom displaying all the possible dialogue options for the player. But what caught my eye was an unusual radial graphic on the right-hand side of the options. Reading on, I discovered that Broken Roads uses a rather unique Moral Compass, one which plots your overall moral stance towards the world and its people with a golden arc. Different decisions may rotate the arc, expand it, contract it, lengthen it, or shorten it. And in so doing, you'll unlock various traits dotted about the Compass, which only remain in effect for as long as that golden arc covers those traits within the wheel.

I can see a dozen different ways in which this Moral Compass may end up being a bad idea in practice. But I don't care. I adore it. And I'm going to play Broken Roads solely so I can see the consequences of my actions in satisfying radial form.

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As I scale the sides of apartment blocks with climbing axes and pole-vault through windows, I often feel like I'm breaking Babbdi. I feel I've done something particularly clever or busted outside the boundaries of its little brutalist city. I haven't, but I'm delighted to explore with this feeling. Oh sure, my objective in this splendid free indie game is to find a way out of the terrible city, but I'll enjoy my final hour here. You might too.

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A mod for the original Final Fantasy 7 that adds full voice acting to the game is set to release today after seven years of work. Tsunamods’ Echo-S 7 mod has actors from around the world voicing every character in Final Fantasy 7, including the battle barks. You can see a trailer of the mod in action below, but if you’re watching in the office on your lunch break then be aware that there’s a fair few cuss words in it.

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GOG has decided to scrap their GOG Connect service, which allowed users to claim a limited selection of games they already owned on Steam for free. The service was quietly killed off at the beginning of this year and removed from GOG’s site, which didn’t go unnoticed by frequenters of the GOG subreddit. GOG confirmed the closure of Connect to RPS fan site PC Gamer, saying “for a long time nothing really happened there, so we've decided to shut it down”. Fair enough.

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You know that bit in The Matrix where Neo says he needs lots of guns, and racks of them pop out of nowhere? Well, Grand Theft Auto Online’s latest addition is the Gun Van, and it’s going for a similar vibe. You can flag down the entrepreneurial van driver to buy pieces from a weekly rotating selection of what Rockstar calls “top-of-the-line weapons, ammunition, and armor”. It’s pretty much just the GTA equivalent of an ice cream truck, but for guns. Witness a short snippet of the Gun Van in action below.

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Justin Roiland, the co-creator of Rick and Morty and the founder of High On Life developers Squanch Games, has been charged with domestic violence. The charges relate to a 2020 incident, according to a criminal complaint filed in May 2020 and obtained by NBC News. Roiland pled not guilty to the charges in October 2020.

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A new single player MechWarrior game is in development at Piranha Games, the developers of MechWarrior 5 and MechWarrior Online. The news was shared by Piranha CEO Russ Bullock in an interview with the podcast No Guts No Galaxy, as reported by VGC.

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Several games have attempted to successfully marry first-person shooting with real-time strateging, and to my mind none have quite succeeded. Outpost: Infinity Siege, at the very least, understands why the ambition its worthwhile. First revealed during last year's E3, its newest trailer shows more massive scale combat - as well as confirming its name and a release window.

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Ubisoft CEO Yves Guillemot once said that Tom Clancy's The Division 2 being absent from Steam was "a long-term positive". Perhaps he meant that only in the sense that, long-term, the game would come to Steam anyway. That's what has happened now. As announced late last year, the open world cover shooter is now available on Steam after a period of Epic and Ubisoft store exclusivity.

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Back in my day, we had to pay hundreds of dollars for a high-end gaming display - but nowadays, you youngsters get them for almost nothing! Look at this $280 Acer Nitro gaming monitor on Newegg. It came out at $600 - and not even that long ago! And now it's $320 off, for a 27-in 1440p 240Hz monitor. It's got a cool curved screen, a VA panel for great contrast, absolutely incredible. When I were a lad, we'd have killed for a display with more than sixteen colours!

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The official Valve Steam Deck Docking Station looks great, with DisplayPort and HDMI, ethernet, three USB ports and a design that perfectly fits the Steam Deck for £79. However, delivery times are 1-2 weeks, and you can now get a functionally identical alternative for half the price.

It's the iVoler Steam Deck Dock, which normally costs £49.99/$55.99 but is now down to £37.59 in the UK or $44.99 in the US. I've been testing this model for the past few days; here's why I rate it.

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