Rock, Paper, Shotgun

After teasing a 3D sequel when Prison Architect received its final update last May, developers Double Eleven and publishers Paradox Interactive have announced that, yep, Prison Architect 2 is indeed a thing that is happening - and in 3D, no less. Prisons will now have multiple floors to police, as well as a whole new inmate behaviour system to navigate along the way that will feed into gang warfare, escapes and other budding management problems. It's coming out surprisingly soon, too, with its reveal trailer dating it for March 26th.

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Stalker 2: Heart Of Chornobyl's release date is September 5th 2024, GSC Game World have announced, as the developers make some final adjustments to a post-apocalyptic FPS that was revealed way back in 2010 and has been racked by more than its fair share of setbacks and changes of circumstances. They've published a new trailer to mark the occasion, in which a group of the game's quarantine zone mercenaries squat around a campfire, supping mugs of what probably isn't cocoa, and listening to guitar music. It strikes a fitting note of world-weariness.

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Alright, alright, they're in a disupte over the letter R as used for a logo for a video game company. As spotted by Respawn First, Remedy (they of the Alan Wake) revealed their new logo last year, a big letter R, and Take-Two (they of the owning Rockstar Games) contest it. Rockstar's logo is also a big letter R, although I think they're pretty different Rs.

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We've all got 'em, right? The games we play to make ourselves feel better, to self soothe, the game we play over the Christmas break. My most recent one has been PowerWash Simulator, because it has clear goals in an organised list, it goes ding, it has a nice white noise... But imagine my shock when I re-installed Immortals Fenyx Rising for the somethingth time, and realised that it has been a comfort game for me all along.

This might make me a massive hypocrite. It's a big Ubisoft RPG filled stuff I complain about modern games having, notably a big map of empty space filled with busywork quests and collectibles. But I don't know what to tell you! It requires concentration but not too much, the set dressing all looks great, and it's doing all that AAA stuff with a wink and a smile, so it's sort of fine. It has fourth wall-breaking meta narration! How can I not like it!

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The denizens of Frostpunk are, understandably, quite grumpy so-and-sos a lot of the time, but through their cries of "More heat!" and "Please can we not with the human waste hothouse jobs!", I reckon even they'd be quite pleased to hear that Frostpunk 2 will be heading to PC Game Pass on its day of release (with Xbox Game Pass following when it arrives on consoles). Alas, we still don't know exactly when it's coming out yet, but in the mean time, why not gather round the burning barrel of 11 Bit's very first gameplay trailer for it while we wait?

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Having spent what feels like an entire lifetime in JRPG Persona 5 Royal, going back to the original Persona 3 is pretty jarring. It's unsurprising given it came out 18 years ago, but exploration is more akin to a slideshow and dungeon-running to a well-rehearsed routine.

But with an hour of Persona 3 Reload under my belt, P3's remake felt immediately familiar. It's absolutely built for a seamless transition for P5-likers and takes away some of P5 Royal's learnings, too. Unless something disastrous happens when Reload fully releases, I can't ever see myself returning to the original.

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Here's a pitch for you: a spec ops shooter, except it's haunted. Well, that's exactly what early access co-op FPS Contain is going for, where four of you gear up in tactical clobber and clear corners of military chumps and anomalous… rumps? It's a mixture of Rainbow Six, a bit of Stalker, and maybe a touch of Control, with gameplay showing real promise. It's also got me thinking about unexpectedly scary moments in shooters, too.

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Ubisoft's director of subscriptions Philippe Tremblay has said that for all the growth of videogame subscription services in the past few years, players are still accustomed to "having and owning their games". Accordingly, he feels his task is to help you grow "comfortable" with the idea that the game you're playing might be taken offline as part of the release schedule, with Tremblay pointing out that you can still resume your save file when the game is next available.

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Rebel Wolves, the studio founded by a few of the CD Projekt folk behind The Witcher 3 and Cyberpunk 2077, have officially titled their forthcoming dark fantasy RPG. That title is… Dawnwalker. They’ve also shared a new teaser image, which I think could depict one of two things: a) a vampiric or otherwise supernaturally-inclined hero flying through the air care of a Dishonored-style Blink teleport, sword raised and clawed fingers stretched towards an unseen foe against a blood-red backdrop. Or b) a man with his trousers aflame swinging through the window of a second floor spa while attempting to use his umbrella as a parachute, having received only half a pedicure before the building caught fire.

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I worked on the phones when I was in pension admin, years ago, and I fielded some weird ones, but nothing quite as weird as the calls in Home Safety Hotline. It's, technically, I suppose, a horror game about manning a call line through a 90s CRT-screen PC, where people will be like "my kitchen is full of droppings that look like coffee grounds, what do?". You look through your list of potential household hazards and select the right one, so your caller gets sent the info on dealing with cockroaches. Except as your week at HSH goes on, your calls start to be less roaches, more "my house smells like death and my dog is acting strangely" or "I can see someone looking through my window at night and hear them breathing heavily."

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Charity speedrunning extravaganza Games Done Quick has kicked off its first week-long event for 2024. Among the highlights are speedy plays of 2023 highlights including Starfield, Baldur’s Gate 3 and Lies of P, along with a marathon from the world’s first canine speedrunner.

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Tekken 8’s first DLC character will be a familiar face: Eddy Gordo, the capoeira pro who has previously appeared in the mainline roster of the fighting game series since 1997’s Tekken 3.

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We’ve had barely an official word on Elden Ring DLC Shadow of the Erdtree since it was announced about a year ago, itself a year after the release of From Software’s superb open-world soulslike. That hasn’t stopped a steady drip of decidedly unofficial rumours and signs about the Elden Ring expansion could arrive, though - and the latest indication is that Shadow of the Erdtree’s release date might be soon. Very soon, in fact.

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The developers of renovation sim House Flipper 2 have outlined their own ongoing renovation plans for the chill clean-and-decorate game, including notable bug fixes and incoming features missing from its predecessor.

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Hello folks. It's probably officially too far into January to get away with saying Happy New Year now, but stuff it, I'll wish you a good one anyway, as well as a warm welcome back to Letter From The Editor. This month's letter can be considered very much a part two to the one I wrote in November, in which we had a sneaky peek at the behind the scenes process of putting together our annual RPS Advent Calendar (or in regular video game website speak, our big games of the year feature).

We always have a big old voting barney around November time to decide which games do or don't make the cut in our Advent Calendar (that is: we all submit top ten lists and we count up the votes afterwards), and every year lots of you try and guess which ones will make it over on the RPS Discord. Inevitably, there are only so many slots for what is always a heck of a lot of games put forward, but the key question has always been thus: who voted for what? WELL. For the first time ever, come and find out below as we reveal all.

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War Hospital, out now on Steam, is about subsisting on the periphery of a war and keeping it firmly off-screen by means of adept time management. Set in 1918, it puts you in charge of a field hospital in northern France, a few minutes drive from the frontline. Here’s how all that works: casualties arrive from the trenches by ambulance or stretcher, and are carried by your medics to a clearing station, where nurses look after them before they’re seen by a doctor. Patients may be lightly or severely injured, but they will all eventually die if they’re left unattended.

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First reported by MP1st, Raven Software lead designer Michael Gummelt mentioned a couple of cancelled projects on his Linkedin page. One was a live service version of Call Of Duty's zombies mode, and the other, a revival of a classic Raven IP. I'm not sad about one and I'm mildly sad over the other, with the mystery not being too hard to solve.

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I mentioned this in a What Are We Playing? and the podcast last week, but I've been playing a point and click puzzle game called Twilight Oracle, which is out at the end of the month. It's cool! It reminds me a lot of Legends Of Kyrandia, in that it doesn't need to explain why stuff in the world is like it is, it just is. Big talking fish? Sure. Skull floating in space? You betcha.

Twilight Oracle isn't immune to the kind of counter-intuitive puzzle solves that are sort of inherent to the genre (use pineapple on wallet, etc.), but there's a demo to see for yourself, and I thought it'd be just as well to make more of you aware of it before it comes out on the 30th of January. Also because I wanted to point out that one of the reasons I have been enjoying Twilight Oracle is the colour.

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Combine the turn-based mech battles of Into The Breach with the rule-changing puzzling of Baba Is You and you have Mobile Suit Baba, whose launch I entirely missed right before Christmas. Pick a squad of mechs to field in different scenarios where you must push, pull, and slam your way to victory. All of which will be so much easier if you rewrite the rules by shunting around syntax blocks. And yes, Baba is piloting a giant Baba-shaped mech.

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Lost Boys Interactive have reportedly been hit by "sizable" layoffs, as overall owner Embracer Group continue the "restructuring" program that claimed over 900 jobs at various studios last year.

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Given the sheer quantity of games releasing on Steam these days, having a neat little elevator pitch for your game can be vital in helping it stand out. For example, if I get an email saying a game is like "Obra Dinn meets such and such" or "Into The Breach but a deckbuilder", that's like personal catnip to me, and can be a handy indicator of whether I should investigate further - maybe watch a gameplay trailer for it, say, or see if it's got a demo. Case in point: this is exactly how I stumbled upon the upcoming Donkey Kong Country-esque platformer Windswept last week, although instead of an email, I saw it on the growing "Your game is too much like..." thread over on Xwitter - which is definitely worth a browse if you have very niche interests in need of a good scratch.

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Do you like trapping innocent, extinct animals in diabolical, broken worlds of your own devising, miring them in a purgatory of genre comparisions from which they may never escape? Because Ark: Survival Ascended developers Studio Wildcard and Grove Street Games are promising/threatening to "put the power of unbridled game creation directly in your hands" with the game's next major dev kit update, which will release by the end of January.

This will greatly expand the game's moddability, though concrete details are thin on the ground. It'll ship with a "Mario-inspired" platformer to show you how. There's also a dev kit update planned next week for multiplayer spin-off Ark: The Survival Of The Fittest. This will allow you to "sculpt the ultimate battlegrounds where your fellow ARK survivors will fight to see who will be the ultimate survivor".

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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 variety of cool and fun movement methods, from skimming your broomstick over the sea to committing violence while surfing atop an enemy's body. Check out all these attractive and interesting indie games!

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Time for another week desperately shovelling quotes, release dates and trailers into the Maw, our weekly news liveblog and also, an abyssal abomination poised to guzzle the waking world and all forms of existence, unless we can satisfy its hunger for headlines. The year is starting to pick up, with a few intriguing titles slated to drop this week in addition to the widely acclaimed Prince of Persia: The Lost Crown, out 18th Jan, which Katharine has called "a deep and challenging Metroid-like with some of the best platforming this side of Moon's Ori games".

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Sundays are for searching for book recommendations. Let's browse as we also peruse the week's best writing about games and game-related things.

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Bethesda has already laid out their update schedule for Starfield in 2024, which includes updates every six weeks beginning in February. There's an update coming before that, however, and arriving on the Steam beta branch next week. It won't add major new features but includes "over 100 fixes and improvements".

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Dominions 6 was announced last year, with promise that the latest iteration of the complex 4X god-battler would be thick with UI and quality-of-life improvements. I dared to dream of a game that was more accessible than Dominions 4, the last in the series I played.

Well, it now has a release date of next Wednesday, January 17th, and there are videos that show it in action.

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Overwatch 2 is going to receive some changes designed to make teamwork easier, and to make bad teamwork less frustrating. The latter is more interesting, because one of Blizzard's proposed solution is giving Tank and Damage heroes "a modified, tuned-down version of the Support self-healing passive", which would make them less reliant on Support players to heal everyone.

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I am eagerly watching the weather forecast in hope of good snow. I've got hills bookmarked from Tweedbank to Aviemore and by god, if snow falls near a train line and some trees, I'll be right out there. And possibly stuck out there when the trains are cancelled. This winter has so far been miserable rather than cruel, and I crave the cruelty. Cleansing cruelty. Next week, I think next week will bring cruelty. Until then, what are you playing this weekend? Here's what we're clicking on!

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11-year-old game Resident Evil Revelations recently released an update that apparently introduced DRM, only to swiftly roll back the patch after complaints from players that it reportedly caused performance issues. Capcom aren’t giving up that easily on their vow to crack down on mods, though.

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It’s been almost seven years since Danganronpa V3 brought a close to the trilogy of gloriously twisted murder-mystery visual novels. With several of the series’ biggest names going on to release their next game as an exclusive for the Nintendo Switch, there’s room for a properly good successor on PC. Or why not successors? Last year’s exceptional Paranormasight is definitely in the running, and 2024 is already looking promising thanks to the reveal of Kumitantei: Old-School Slaughter.

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A fan-made remake of Team Fortress 2 in the Source 2 engine has been cancelled after the ambitious project, three years in the making, ran into a double-whammy of recent development issues and a legal takedown from Valve.

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The two best parts of a Choose Your Own Adventure book are when you initially feel out the shape and paths at the start, and then when you grow tired of dead-ends and faff and just start cheating. The same seems true for Reigns: Three Kingdoms, the latest in the decision-making story series, which arrived on PC (and Switch) yesterday after a year exclusive to Netflix's inexplicable library of mobile games. Once again, you will decide the fate of a kingdom (this time, China) by swiping left or right on binary decisions. Unfortunately, you cannot cheatily flick through to interesting parts nor use your finger as a bookmark. Not even if you jam it into a USB port. I did try.

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God-battling free-to-play MOBA Smite is getting a full sequel, with an alpha test due to kick off this spring. The revamped rebuild will overhaul the decade-old game with fresh visuals and gameplay changes, but developers Titan Forge promise it won’t replace the original game.

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Crystal Story: Dawn of Dusk is a combination of words that screams "predatory mobile fantasy RPG" but that's very much not my takeaway from the game's demo. Out tomorrow on Steam for £10.23, $11.99 or €11.83 including the 20% launch discount, this first instalment in the Crystal Story series blends the cuddly feel of a 16-bit Zelda with the dream logic of a Yume Nikki. There's a splash of Undertale's crackpot experimentalism to the writing and certain battles, as well.

Those are big comparisons to invoke, and I don't expect Crystal Story to measure up to them. But it's a lot better than I was expecting from a game whose title had me picturing microtransaction-sodden levelling systems and a pouty elf in a bikini.

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Readers, I have good news and bad news. Good news. My mum got me an incredible hot chocolate maker for Christmas this year, as well as a jumbo-sized box of grated chocolate sachets to use with it. It is, quite honestly, one of the best presents she's ever given me, and it now means I can have perfect hot chocolate, practically on tap, in as little as three minutes. Hotel Chocolat's Velvetiser, you're an absolute beauty. Honestly, it is so much better than anything I could make, or have made, myself. It's fast, easy, wonderfully smooth and properly delicious hot chocolate. Crucially, the machine itself is also dead simple to clean. Gone are the days I have to worry about washing up a pan of semi-encrusted milk afterwards, or faffing about with how many teaspoons of hot chocolate powder to plonk in because I accidentally coughed and sent half of it flying all over the counter.

Bad news. This recent revelation of such effortless, technological ease has instantly kneecapped any excitement or desire I might have had for Kitfox Games' new tea brewing sim they announced at the tail end of last year, or indeed any other kind of drink-based simulation game (of which there seem to be an increasing number of these days). Whereas before I might have revelled in the step-by-step process of making a perfect hot drink, I have now been fully converted to the ways of instant button pressing and time-saving efficiency. After all, why dwell on the manual minutiae when machinery is king?

Kainga Colon Seeds of Civilization is one of many, many games that I didn't get on with for some reason or other in early access, and has subsequently sat in my pile long past a 1.0 release, neglected and generating a vague guilt. It's come some way since, but its edges are still a little rough, with (usually) minor bugs and limited feedback wrapped up in a design that's influenced, of course, by that vague shimmering ghost of Rogue (and thus is innately bad and you're all just wrong). So yeah, it kinda has problems.

But I like it. Weird, huh?

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The latest IAS Game Maker's Notebook Podcast (embedded in the full article below) is a chat between Sony's head of independent development Shuhei Yoshida and Square Enix producer, designer and director Naoki Yoshida, one of the big fish behind Final Fantasy 14 and Final Fantasy 16. In a lengthy discussion of the latter game, the two Yoshidas chew over the familiar topic of where Final Fantasy should go next. According to Naoki Yoshida, it might be time for an injection of new blood.

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CES 2024 is drawing to a close, and honestly, I’m not especially sad to see it go. While the Las Vegas tech megashow is probably the closest thing PC gaming hardware has to an E3 (and in some ways surpasses it, given CES still exists), this year’s event has been characterised by an all-too-credulous obsession with AI nonsense. Not the fun/useful DLSS kind that makes your games run faster – more the kind that replaces actual creative work with dubiously-sourced robot media. Icky stuff, even by Vegas standards.

Mercifully, not everyone was there to flog Stable Diffusion boxes and imaginary ChatGPT friends, so there is actually some interesting new kit to look forward to in 2024. I’ve rounded up the highlights here, along with some of the more questionable AI-based showings – because they may well merit discussion, even if that discussion amounts to "Is this a good idea?" followed by "No."

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In addition to resolutions, new years are always good times to start thinking about the futureeeee, with or without a wibbly oooOOOoooOoooOh intonation. Predictions about what's going to happen over the next 12 months abound, some of which are more spurious (and light-hearted) than others. But such near-sightedness is not what we're concerning ourselves with today in this latest edition of Ask RPS. We're looking much further ahead, thanks to this excellent question from MiniMatt.

They ask: "Dearest RPS, This being your 150th year in PC gaming [Ed: this question was submitted in 2023], please tell us what the next 150 years hold? Will VR become universal? Will the desktop PC box survive or will we all move over to laptops & steam decks? Will industry continue to consolidate or fragment? Get yer nostradamus on and tell us Peter Molyneux's future.

Indeed, a lot has changed in the world of PC gaming since our esteemed founding in 1873, so come and find out our best guesses for what the future holds below.

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