February 2023

Dead Space’s Isaac Clarke is clearly a man of many talents. He’s a systems engineer by trade, so he knows his way around the dense innards of space vessels. He’s also handy around a toolbox and is more than familiar with high-risk equipment like the Plasma Cutter. Oh, and he’s remarkably good at slicing and dicing necromorphs into juicy squelchy lumps. What a resume!

But did you know that our favourite space engineer also has lots of secret talents too? When Dead Space originally came out in the back end of 2008, his corporate overseers at EA sent Mr. Clarke to do all sorts of odd jobs before he popped off on the believeable, but bleak USG Ishimiura. Golf caddy, professional skateboarder, even a part-time dragon slayer. Heck, he's recently been back on the second gig train with his stint in Fortnite just earlier this week. The poor dude is in desperate need of a vacation. Until then, though, come and marvel at Isaac's many talents and see what a hard worker he is.

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Co-founders of the studio developing Steam wishlist hit The Day Before have rejected claims the game is a scam. The post-apocalyptic survival MMO was delayed from March to November this week as it turned out the devs hadn't actually got the game trademarked, prompting accusations from within the game’s Discord and Reddit communities that it might not exist at all. Talking to IGN, Eduard and Aisen Gotovtsev insisted that the delay was necessary and had been planned before the game’s Steam store page was removed.

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The AMD Ryzen 7 5800X has dropped again on Amazon UK, this time to £200 when you buy stock from Amazon EU. That's £20 below the next-best price and a fair deal for a strong eight-core 16-thread CPU for gaming and content creation.

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Amazon US is running a Lightning Deal today that's worth knowing about: just $180 for a 27-in 1440p 144Hz gaming monitor from Innocn. This brand is one I've covered before - my colleague John Linneman was impressed with both a portable OLED and a 40-inch ultrawide from the Chinese company - so it's definitely worth trying in my view.

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I am fond of Cook, Serve, Delicious!, a trilogy of cooking games which became increasingly ambitious until the third was about operating a food truck on a post-apocalyptic road trip.

Cook Serve Forever looks more ambitious again. It's a new game from the same developers with similar combo-tapping food prep at its core, but set in a new solarpunk city. As of today, there's a demo you can play and an early access release date set for April.

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Hitman 3's long-awaited Freelancer mode is finally out, letting you play missions from across the trilogy with randomised objectives and other roguelike elements. Hitman 3 is also now called Hitman: World Of Assassination and its multitude of editions, bundles and DLCs have been combined and simplified. As a result, every Hitman 3 owner now has access to all the levels from Hitman 1 and 2, if they didn't already.

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Road 96 was a road trip where your journey was assembled from parts and each attempt to reach the border of a fictional USA-alike played out differently. Now it's getting a prequel. Road 96: Mile 0 stars Zoe, one of the hitchhikers who could join you in the original, and her best friend Kaito, and features "psychadelic musical rides."

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Dishonored: Death Of The Outsider, Arkane's wonderful standalone expansion following on from Dishonored 2, will be free to keep from the Epic Games Store next week. It could be your chance to complete the series, given that the giveaway follows on from Dishonored 1 and its expansions being given away via Epic at the start of the year, and Dishonored 2 being given free to Amazon Prime subscribers at the same time.

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After twelve cheap 'n' cheerful hidden object games about finding bees in pretty pictures, the developer behind the I Commissioned Some Bees series has moved onto concealing a new animal: rabbits. Today they launched I Commissioned Some Bunnies, where once again they have commissioned artists to draw pictures with hidden animals to find. Still a big fan of that casual descriptive naming scheme. And yup, the pictures are nice, and the rabbits are hidden, and I'm happy to have spent £3 on it.

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Shoulders Of Giants is out today on the Epic Games Store. When we first saw the trailer for Shoulders Of Giants, a few people on team responded with murmurings of "What the hell is this?", which increased in frequency and volume as more bizarre things appeared on screen. I sort of did what the Goonies do when they first find the map to One Eyed Willie's treasure, or what anyone in Pulp Fiction does when they open the briefcase: "Wooooaaaah."

Consider the progress of information. It's a sci-fi roguelike best played, I think, in 4-player online co-op. You play a sword-wielding combat mech. You also control a small frog standing on the mech. You drop onto proc-gen planets overrun by a kind of magical accelerated entropy, that turns everything black and pink and grey. By destroying totemic altars orbited by floating eyeball robots, you start to re-energise the planet, so areas have grass and butterflies. Eventually you will destroy enough totems to get to a planetary boss fight, which might be against, for example, a giant ghost samurai or a floating purple hand with an eyeball in it. It's mad, but I sure do wish more games were like this.

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Snow leopards are my absolute favourite animals in the world. I would die happy if I ever got the chance to see one in real life (from a great distance of course, lest it de-grundle me). Alas, the closest that most of us will get in our lives is to play Planet Zoo - easily the best zoo simulator out there right now.

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One dev who worked on The Witcher 3: Wild Hunt had a good think about their most useless piece of video game knowledge in response to a Twitter stumper, but still came up with something interesting anyway. Patrick Mills was a quest designer on The Witcher 3 and senior quest designer on Cyberpunk 2077 for CD Projekt RED, and shared a neat bit of trivia about The Witcher 3’s wandering merchants on his own account this week. Mills revealed that the script for these lads would dish out fixes whatever stage you were at in the game.

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Well. They certainly remade Dead Space. With some small but welcome exceptions, Dead Space is a one-to-one remake of the 2008 original.

Your opinion on whether that is a good thing or not will depend on how you feel about the endeavour of remaking games from fifteen years ago in the first place. As far as I’m concerned, this remake allowed me to replay one of my all-time favourite games in a lavish new form, and in that sense, Dead Space is extraordinary.

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February might be the shortest month, but this year it’s jam-packed with free games for anyone with an Amazon Prime membership. There’s nine games up for keepsies over the course of the month, with The Elder Scrolls III: Morrowind GOTY Edition standing out at the front of the pack from February 2nd. Members will also get to claim the bathhouse management game Onsen Master, futuristic 3D runner Aerial_Knight's Never Yield, and chibi god-brawler Divine Knockout in the first half of the month.

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After a mysterious delay from December, arcade racing game Hot Wheels Unleashed will finally arrive on PC Game Pass in early February. I hear it's pretty good! It's one of the small handful of games Microsoft have confirmed as coming to PC Game Pass in the next fortnight, which also include the JoJo's Bizarre Adventure fighting game and a return to the subscription service for Darkest Dungeon. Alas, games coming mean games going. Do check out Donut County before it's swallowed by the abyss.

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Season: A Letter To The Future begins with a goodbye. You wander around your home for the last time, choosing five objects which inspire deep memories that spur each of the five senses. You then place them into a cauldron one by one, your mother keeping a watchful eye. The ritual comes to an end and the result is a small glowing pendant that will protect you from the dangers of the outside world. “You must promise me never to take the pendant off,” your mother says. The Goodbye ritual is finished, and you leave, knowing you’ll never see your mother or your hometown ever again, all as the prophecy foretold.

It’s a fantastic - if sad - start to Season, and gets straight to the heart of the adventure ahead of you. This is a world where prayers, rituals, and prophecies hold great weight, and where you'll be exploring the fragility and fickleness of memory. Underpinning everything is a deeply profound sense of melancholy - and here I was expecting some relaxing two-wheeling through lovely-looking landscapes. Well, turns out Season is a lot more than a pretty travelogue.

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Hello folks. You may have noticed that you've started getting email notifications when somoene likes or replies to a comment you've made on an RPS article. Here's a bit about why we've started doing that, and how you can set your notification preferences if they get too annoying.

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Sony-owned developer Naughty Dog’s brand of story-packed action is relatively new to the world of PC gaming, but it sounds like we could miss out on more of their Uncharted and The Last Of Us games in the future. Naughty Dog’s co-president Neil Druckmann commented in a Buzzfeed interview that the company is “moving on” from the Uncharted series, and that they’re not feeling pressured into making The Last Of Us Part III.

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EA Motive’s Dead Space remake stalks onto PC tomorrow, nearly a decade and a half after the original made us collectively need to buy new pants. Earlier this week, I reported on the possibility of this new take on Dead Space getting an alternate ending. The Reunion ending was leaked by an achievements list for the remake, but now the Dead Space Twitter account has confirmed that the game does indeed feature a secret ending. That’s not all, either.

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Call Of Duty: Warzone 2 and Modern Warfare 2 multiplayer both begin Season 02 on February 15th, and the battle royale will see the return of the first Warzone’s 1v1 Gulag. Raven Software and Infinity Ward have shared details about how that’s going to work in a new blog post, along with some info about more changes to battle royale, DMZ, and Modern Warfare 2 multiplayer. The post doesn’t go over incoming maps, modes, and features that players can expect to see in Season 02, but the devs say they’ll be sharing more on those nearer to the new season’s kick-off time.

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A roadmap for what’s coming to Animal Crossing-alike Disney Dreamlight Valley has revealed the life sim will be going multiplayer this year. Along with the option to drag your mates into bothering popular Disney characters and creating a magical kingdom of your very own, Dreamlight Valley’s roadmap shows that Encanto’s Mirabel, Frozen’s Olaf, and Simba from animated classic The Lion King will be coming to the game in free updates over the next few months. The roadmap also promised more new characters, realms, and gubbins such as clothing and furniture to stuff your house full of.

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I'm a sucker for mechanical keyboards, but I don't discriminate against high-end membrane or scissor switch boards either. One of the best non-mechs I've tried over the last few years has been the Logitech MX Keys, which is available in a compact MX Keys Mini model or as the full-size MX Keys. Today, the full-size UK model is discounted on Amazon UK, where it's down from £120 to £80 - a nice 33% or 40 quid off.

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Minecraft Legends is an action strategy game, which means you view the world from above and command armies of mobs. But there's still plenty that's familiar from traditional Minecraft, if tonight's presentation during the Xbox developer showcase is any indication.

They also announced a release date: April 18th.

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Beijing-based outfit Edifier have been making some of the best value computer speakers for a while now; in fact my roundup over at Digital Foundry dedicates two of the seven slots to their designs. One that doesn't feature on that list but has attracted strong reviews elsewhere is the Edifier R1280T, a 2.0 studio speaker set that delivers excellent sound for the money. These speakers are normally normally around £100, but today on Overclockers you can grab a pair for £84 - lower than they've ever been before.

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While Tango Gameworks' Hi-Fi Rush was the big surprise of tonight's Xbox developer showcase, there was other news, too. For example: Redfall, the open world co-op vampire shooter from Arkane, now has a release date. You'll be able to find out exactly how much like Far Cry it is on May 2nd.

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So those Tango Gameworks leaks turned out to be true. After repeatedly stating that this evening's Xbox Developer Direct would feature just four games, it turned out to contain four. Hi-Fi Rush is a new third-person rhythm action brawler from the makers of Evil Within and Ghostwhire: Tokyo. It's a substantial departure from their previous games in terms of style - although there's an even bigger surprse.

The bigger surprise is it's out now, so you can play it via Game Pass right away.

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The original Pharaoh, released in 1999, was a lot of people's first citybuilder. In part because it was exactly the kind of game that could be found in the software section of your local supermarket, and in part because it appealed to dads, who would buy it and then their bored kids would play it in lieu of any other options.

Well, I'm the dad now, and the "full remake" Pharaoh: A New Era has a release date of February 15th.

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A fast-paced game that's all about reflecting bullets back with a katana sounds great to me, a known fan of parrying projectiles. I bought new indie game Agent In Depth within 20 seconds of seeing it. Then I played it. Oh no. I feel old. Am I too old? What I can tell you is, if you like fast-paced action platformers with bullets to parry, instadeath to punish you, and no checkpoints to support you, you might enjoy this. It's only £2 to find out.

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Justin Roiland, the co-founder of High On Life developer Squanch Games, has resigned from his role as CEO of the company. Squanch Games announced Roiland's departure today, nearly two weeks after it was reported that Roiland is awaiting trial on domestic violence charges.

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Last time, you decided overwhelmingly (94%!) that knocking folks over edges is better than big engines rising from the bonnet. Honestly, I cannot disagree. I adore that giant supercharged engine. I will always pick the cars with that giant supercharged engine. But imagine if someone were standing atop that giant supercharged engine's towering intake, and I kicked them off it. Glorious! This week, I must apologise, but circumstances have led us to a choice between two wholly dissimilar things. What's better: a pre-boss battle supply cache, or resources too good to use?

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Thanks to the joys of late code delivery, a few of us are just now getting to grips with talkative Squeenix ARPG Forspoken. While Alice Bee hammers her review together, I’ve been on my usual hardware bullshit, mainly investigating the peculiar system requirements that were released last week.

These aren’t just an odd collection of specs because of the sheer weight and breadth of their demands; they also overtly target resolutions and framerates that hardly anyone is going to be engaging with. Who on desktop plays at 1280x720? Fewer than 0.3% of Steam users, apparently. And personally, if I’ve spent the cash on a 1440p gaming monitor, I probably wouldn’t be satisfied to watch it display my games at just 30fps. I’ve therefore been finding out what PC hardware Forspoken actually needs to run both smoothly and at more realistic resolutions. Maybe then we can update those system requirements to create some very-much-unofficial, but hopefully more useful, spec guidelines.

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I'm a fan of a rhythm game. Something where you can get into a flow state, you know? They can be perfect when you've had a long day and don't want to engage brain. The thing is, I don't think Thumper is one of those games. Thumper is some kind of sci-fi nightmare in space, and it moves so fast that you can't relax for a second.

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Sneaky new photos taken of the set of Amazon’s Fallout TV adaptation have been shared on Twitter that show one of the retro-futuristic series’ Red Rocket gas stations being built. While the chain’s distinctive rocket doesn’t feature in any of the snaps, all taken by J. Carson in New York state, you can clearly make out the Red Rocket branding on its sign and bright red atomic fuel pumps. The whole look is very post-apocalyptic, dilapidated with beaten up 1950s-style American cars parked around the forecourt.

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We’re still a month and a bit away from The Last Of Us Part 1 arriving on PC, but it sounds as though the TV adaptation is doing well enough to land itself a second season. Actor Bella Ramsey, who plays Ellie in HBO’s The Last Of Us show alongside Pedro Pascal as Joel, told the BBC that she reckons Season 2 is “pretty likely”. Quickly covering herself – and preventing an online outbreak reminiscent of a scene from the show and/or game – Ramsey stressed that the show being renewed was still a decision for the suits at HBO. “There's nothing confirmed yet so we'll have to wait and see,” she said.

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Source code for fantasy MOBA League Of Legends and its autobattler spin-off Teamfight Tactics has been stolen and ransomed, Riot Games have confirmed. In a series of tweets, the developer revealed that the code was taken in an attack on their systems last week. Demands have been made by the hackers, which Riot say they won’t stump up for. The hack is being investigated both by Riot and law enforcement agencies, but Riot insist that League Of Legends players’ personal data and information weren’t compromised by the hackers.

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I was absolutely elated when Square Enix announced a new Final Fantasy Theatrhythm game during the Tokyo Game Show last year, as there's been a Final Fantasy music game shaped hole in my life for the best part of a decade. I played the pair of Theatrhythm 3DS games to absolute death back in the day, and was hoping that Squeenix's newfound PC love-in would mean I'd be able to write about it non-stop when Theatrhythm Final Bar Line comes out on February 16th. Alas, that joy was immediately curtailed when I saw FBL wasn't, in fact, coming to PC at all, and would remain a Switch and PS4-only game for the foreseeable future. But that's okay, because YouTuber Gloomhonk has created the perfect antidote to my Theatrhythm woes in the form of their brilliant Trombone Champ rendition of FF VII's Those Who Fight Further. Come and have a listen.

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Enigmatic survival MMO The Day Before was set for release on March 1st, but devs Fntastic have announced that it’s slipping to November 10th due to trademark concerns. In the latest unusual twist in The Day Before's development, Fntastic shared a statement explaining the delay that credits it to a US trademark filing that the company overlooked. Oddly, The Day Before’s store page also seems to have disappeared from Steam within the past day.

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Proving that our ability to organise recording a podcast episode wasn't some sort of one-off fluke, the Indiescovery crew are back again! Going forward, this is going to be a fortnightly podcast, but we just couldn't wait to share our thoughts on this year's best upcoming indie games, so we decided to release Episode 2 a week early, as a treat (the treat is for us, really, but we hope you enjoy it too!).

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Microsoft have reported worldwide technical issues with multiple Microsoft services this morning, including Minecraft, Xbox Live, Teams, Outlook and other 365 products. In a Twitter thread from Microsoft's 365 Status account, they said the problems have been caused by “networking configuration issues”, and that a recent network change had been rolled back. It's hoped this will solve the access problems people have faced trying to use these services this morning, but lingering issues may still be kicking about.

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Warhammer 40,000: Darktide developers Fatshark have announced that they're delaying the co-op horde shooter's seasonal content in order to focus solely on addressing "the feedback that many of you have." That feedback is best witnessed via the recent Darktide Steam reviews, which sit at "Mostly Negative" after 8471 submissions. Specifically, Fatshark say they're going to improve crafting, stability and performance.

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