February 2023

If you were a fan of last year’s TactiCon, the digital festival highlighting all sorts of strategy games, you might be pleased to learn it's coming back. Organised by Old World publisher Hooded Horse, along with Firesquid, the publisher behind Great Houses Of Calderia, the Steam event will showcase games in every tactical subgenre, and will run between May 11th-15th later this year.

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It’s the dead of night. I’m in my little tugboat out on open waters. I can barely see three feet in front of my nose because of the thick blanket of fog, but I'm trying my hand at night fishing, hoping to hook something really good. I find a squid spot and start to fish, reeling in one or two fine-looking catches. The third one, however, is monstrous, a mess of jagged teeth and sickly pale flesh. Yes, this should make for a fine amount of cash. The more morbid it is, the more money I get. Suddenly there’s a deep rumbling in the ocean and panic starts to creep in. I chuck my prize into my cargo and speed back to town, the phrase ‘fuck round, find out’ circling my brain.

I’ve not been playing Dredge long, but I’m calling it one of my favourite games of the year, right now, in February. Black Salt Games' sinister fishing RPG is gripping and enchanting in a way I didn’t anticipate. I’ve spent hours exploring its murky waters and my constant shock at what unsettling creatures my hook brings in is seemingly never-ending. Its eldritch world keeps pulling me back with its mystery and malevolent horror, and its sense of atmosphere and tension is incredible. Basically, I'm completely enraptured, hook, line, sinker. Dredge already feels like one of this year’s greatest indie horrors and all this, from a fishing game of all things.

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Last week Valve announced a “full-on update-sized update” would be coming to Team Fortress 2 this summer, getting us all excited at the thought of new content after years in maintenance mode. Valve have now quietly edited their original announcement blog post, walking back the hype while emphasising the community-developed aspects of the update.

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Kaiju-quashing RPG Wild Hearts is out today and, eesh, the PC version is quite the technical mess. I’ve put together this settings guide – based on the game’s early trial build – for those who want to join the hunt pronto, but above all else my advice is to wait until developers Omega Force get the promised performance improvements up and running. From what I’ve played, Wild Hearts’s bad shape is doing an otherwise enjoyable Monster Hunter-like a huge disservice.

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It's rare to see a double discount deal on Amazon, but today that's exactly what's happened with this promotion on the Irongear Single Monitor Arm. It normally retails for $75.99, but you can tick a 50% off coupon on the product page and use code 2YXE4T73 to knock the price down to just $22.79 - an incredibly low asking price for a solid budget option that can handle even ultrawide monitors up to 26.4lbs/12kg.

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SanDisk's Ultra line of Micro SD memory cards has long been one of the most popular memory card options for Switch and Steam Deck, and now you can pick one up for just £40 at MyMemory - compared to £52 for the same model at Amazon UK. This makes it an awesome time to upgrade your gaming handheld, or your smartphone, or whatever cool gadget you have with Micro SD or full-size SD slots.

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It's no secret that there a ton of low-cost, high-speed drives out there in the world. We like to call them SSDs, and nowadays you can pick them up for extremely tiny prices. For example, this 240GB SSD from Netac is down to just £14, making it an essential upgrade for any old laptops or desktops sitting around still using mechanical hard drives.

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It’s probably not a huge surprise to say that Pentiment, Obsidian Entertainment’s visually intriguing mystery set in 16th century Bavaria, required a lot of historical research during development. What may surprise you, however, is how deep these historical details run throughout Pentinment’s DNA, right down the game’s text fonts. Obsidian design director Josh Sawyer told me all about how the team revived long-dead historical fonts, to give them a new life in a modern format.

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Last time, you decided that throwing knives are better than active reload. I enjoyed the spirited discussion over which throwing knives are good and which are bad. I can't help but feel active reload didn't get a fair shake because so few games do it outside Gears Of War, but the results are science and we must continue. This week, I suppose our choices are both about architecture, but in very different ways. What's better: funicular fights or elaborate corridor architecture?

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I've never had much of a desire for "I'm attending school" sims, because I hated attending school and not having to do it is one of the prime benefits of growing out of your teens. Running a school though? That's a challenge I don't mind taking on. Twopoint Campus does a great plate-spinning take on a school admin sim, but if you want something with cards, a dark lord, and the option for organic school meals, then... well, then you're making a very specific request. But it's one I can fulfil with Spellcaster University. And it's bloody difficult.

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Returnal is here on PC and lo and behold, it’s not as scary as it looked. In a hardware demanding, recommended spec kind of way, at least – those lanky alien tree-man enemies are greying what little hair I have left.

Like previous Playstation port Marvel’s Spider-Man Remastered, it’s not the most easygoing game either, but I’ve cycled through my share of deaths and rebirths and can report that Returnal will make do with older graphics cards and middling RAM counts. It’s a mostly well-considered porting job too, with optional ray tracing, various upscaling tools, ultrawide support for 21:9 and 32:9 monitors, and pages upon pages of customisable display and control settings.

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Developer Pixel Hunt's track record of delivering intriguing visual novels began with the optimistic, heartrending refugee story of Bury Me, My Love. They’re now returning with the similarly unique The Wreck, a memory-hopping, 3D visual novel unpacking themes of trauma, recovery, and motherhood, and it’s releasing on March 14th for PC.

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The last thing you need when you’ve just crash-landed on an unknown planet teeming with predatory wildlife is to discover you’re also stuck in a time loop. But that’s the fate of deep-space astronaut Selene in Returnal, when she ditches her single-seater vessel on a remote rock called Atropos. Each time she falls foul of the local fauna, she pops back into existence right next to her broken ship, with no obvious means of escape. Forget Aliens vs Predator, this is Aliens vs Groundhog Day.

But what a day it is, as Returnal combines a best-in-class third-person shooter with a deep dive into the psychology of its protagonist. Selene’s journey into Atropos, through a thick jungle, a burning vermilion desert and beyond, sends her circling through a smorgasbord of emotions – from confusion to hope, despair to determination. And so often, her mood dovetails with your own highs and lows of elation and frustration, until every part of Returnal encases you in its loop.

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Magic Week could use a dash more dark magic, I reckon. Through The Nightmares may not be about spellcasting and amateur alchemy, but it still draws upon the arcane and otherworldly, setting its deviously difficult action-platforming inside the sleepscapes of frightened children.

You are the Sandman, and you are neither sprinkling happy dust on Danish eyelids nor delivering Liberace-haired boyfriends to vocal quartets. Instead, you’re an active fighter of nightmares, diving into the brains of restless kids to explore their most traumatic memories and, ultimately, defeat the monstrous embodiments of their fears.

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March is fast approaching, which means we’ll need to say goodbye to another batch of Game Pass games very soon. This month’s list of leavers includes a few heavy hitters, like the horrifying Alien Isolation, and a duo of big JRPGs that are likely impossible to binge in just two weeks.

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Wild Hearts developers Omega Force are looking to lower the blades of disgruntled PC players, penning a Steam news update that acknowledges performance issues with the early trial of their Monster Hunter-y RPG.

"Omega Force are working continuously to improve performance and optimise the game for a wide variety of hardware specs across future updates", the note reads. It also confirms that support for both DLSS and FSR upscalers is on the way, and asks those who’ve found their hunts scuppered by dodgy performance to report their issues to EA’s support team.

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Loathe as I am to become one of those "want to feel old?" types of posters, this review requires me to point out that the original Pharaoh came out in 1999, almost 25 years ago. It was one of that era's City Building series that included Zeus and all of the Caesars, a run of games so good that they earned the capital letters. Pharaoh also happens to be one of my foundational video games, and I played it when I was knee-high to my big brother's desk, at a time when family homes had one (1) yellow-grey computer with a CRT screen. And now it's back, baby.

Pharaoh: A New Era means I can play that game of my childhood on my shiny black RGB-lit bastard. Honestly though, the "A New Era" part is a bit much. Sure, the updated graphics are fabulous and the quality of life changes mean it plays like smooth peanut butter to the 90s' extra crunchy. It's a good remake of a solid game, but the mummy in the casket is fundamentally the same.

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Riot have announced a brand new (previously leaked) League Of Legends spin-off coming this year. The Mageseeker: A League Of Legends Story is a 2D action RPG from Digital Sun, the dev team behind Moonlighter, which was a delightful fusion of roguelike action and shopkeeping. The Mageseeker is launching this spring, while the other LoL spin-offs have also received release windows for 2023.

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Spells & Secrets is an eye-catching, dungeon-crawling, magic-slinging action-rougelite with a lot of potential — and it's set in an academy for wizards, so basically catnip to me as a fan of a good high school story. I first became aware of this upcoming game while covering last summer's Future Of Play Direct, and I've been itching to write something about it ever since. Happily, as part of RPS Magic Week, I've had the opportunity to speak with Florian Mann, CEO and co-founder of Spells & Secrets development team Alchemist Interactive.

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2021’s Before We Leave was a chill, planet-hopping city builder with the occasional space whale who might hoover up your world’s hexagonal tiles. Now developer Balancing Monkey is back for another go at spacefaring management, but this time your city is built on top of a space whale, rather than being terrorised by one. Their follow-up, Beyond These Stars, will be hitting early access on PC later this year.

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I kind of hate mechanical hard drives these days. Yes, they're cheap per gigabyte, yes they're fairly reliable, yes they're absolutely the way to go if you need to store a lot of data and don't care how long it takes to access it. But. But. These drives are hard to go back to after you're used to SSDs, with their near-instant access times, completely silent operation, resistance to shocks, drops and magnets and of course their overall SPEED.

So when I had the chance, I bought the biggest SSD I could afford, a 4TB model at the time, and copied literally every bit of data from the four or five 1TB or smaller hard drives that I'd bought over the years and stuck into my increasingly full PC tower. It was expensive, and it took ages to copy everything across, but as soon as I turned my computer on for the first time and I didn't have to listen to the clicks and whirs of a mechanical drive, I was completely convinced I'd made the right call to ditch spinning rust.

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Guild Wars 2 is over ten years old now, and last year it brought its long-running storyline to a close with its third expansion. Now its developers say they want to release smaller and cheaper expansions more regularly, with quarterly updates filling the gaps in between.

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Terra Nil is terraforming sim, in which you land on a barren wasteland, construct machines for restoring it to a lush, green wilderness, and then pack up your toys and leave. It's one of the games I'm most looking forward to in 2023, and its latest trailer just cements that. It's three-minutes-long, has no music, and simply lets you revel in the "satisfaction in reclamation".

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Far Cry 6 sounded like more of the same when it released in 2021, and for the first time that's not what I wanted. Maybe this weekend is when I once again pick up my bow and arrow, however, as Ubisoft are running a free weekend.

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Mojang have spent the week revealing new details of Minecraft's 1.20 update, including two of the things pictured above: the new Sniffer mob, which won a public vote to be included in the game; and the less expected new cherry blossom biome. Both seem adorable.

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I’ve said it before and I’ll say it again: if there’s a cute animal game that looks like it’s going to make me cry, then sign me up, I’m ready to go. In fairness, though, co-op adventure Blanc looks like it's going to be a lot lighter than games like Endling: Extinction is Forever and the notoriously upsetting Shelter series at first glance, but I’ve learned to never let my guard down around these kinds of games. Those cute art styles are almost always a front for a brutal sneak attack on your emotions.

Blanc is very much aiming for your heartstrings with its adorable animal duo and picturesque snowy landscapes. The first half teases massive potential for a cutesy story with fun puzzle antics, but the game is majorly let down by a repetitive and often frustrating second half and lacklustre ending. After the promise of a warm, cosy adventure, I watched the end credits roll and couldn't help feeling like I'd been left out in the cold.

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I am loving all the magical witchy games we’ve been covering for RPS Magic Week, but I wanna learn how to actually be a witch, you know? I wanna learn the witchy ways, and not just from some not-so-well informed TikToks.

Thankfully, So May It Be has been my gateway to Witchcraft 101. It’s a sapphic dating sim about a bunch of witches just hanging out doing witchy things. You're part of a small coven with your three friends, and you all meet online every night to chat about school, shitty part-time jobs, and of course, witchcraft. At the end of each evening, you can privately ask one of your friends to hang out the next day 1 on 1, getting to know them better and just doing cool witch shit.

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The upcoming theme park management sim Park Beyond gave us a lovely Valentine’s Day-themed trailer, except, wait a second, this isn’t lovely at all, Oh God. I’m sure Park Beyond will be a wholesome bit of fun - creating outlandish rollercoasters and managing the nuts & bolts of a made-up business is always a good time. But, good grief, there’s something seriously disturbing about its latest trailer.

Lay your eyes on it here, if you dare:

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It’s been five whole years since the Firewatch devs announced their tomb-raiding adventure, In The Valley Of Gods, and in that time the idea of the game itself has fossilised. The first-person archaeology game was put on hold in 2019 after Valve acquired Campo Santo and had them support other Valve projects like Half-Life: Alyx. Now Campo's in-limbo game has a December 2029 listing on Steam, which almost certainly means nothing, but it’s fun to dust off some memories.

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Overwatch 2’s third season is well underway, adding more of the usual maps, modes, and cosmetics. The big surprise this season is the Valentine’s themed Loverwatch, a non-canon text adventure that allows you to court either Mercy or Genji. Naturally, I chose to date Genji (described as Overwatch’s “bad boy”), and the results were surprising. It’s cringe-y and occasionally grating, but it’s also surprisingly charming and stuffed with referential humour that OW fans will surely love.

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Most great platforming games dabble with gravity at some point. It's one of those classic, age-old moments where you're suddenly walking on the ceilings and jumping over gaps upside down to further test your skill and overall dexterity. Gravity Castle, on the other hand, has seemingly made it its entire premise, making for a brilliant Next Fest demo that's still available to download on Steam right now. It also looks absolutely gorgeous, channelling Ico and the rest of Fumito Ueda's oeuvre in all the right ways.

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I've never met a deck I didn't want to build, but I don't think I've met deck-building in a shoot 'em up before. That's the offer of Dire Decks, a cute little arcade shmup which you can play for free right now in your browser on Itch.io. As you face down endless enemies, you draw and play cards representing individual attacks and power-ups, drafting new and more powerful cards as you level up. I dig it! In another time, this might have been a wee hit Flash game on Newgrounds.

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