Rock, Paper, Shotgun

Between tax returns, terrible weather, and rank Tory corruption, 2023's opening act has put me in a right foul mood. So foul, in fact, that I could quite happily kill something (in a game). I want to hack something to death, with sharp implements in some sort of virtual environment. Oh, what's this hiding down the back of the sofa? Why, it's Blade And Sorcery, a VR game about hacking people to death in a virtual environment. How fortunate!

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Space management sim The Last Starship has moved early access plans forward from a hazy Spring release to next week on February 15th. Coming from Prison Architect’s devs, Last Starship has you build and customise your own fleet of spacecraft before taking them on various missions. If you want to try this spaceship builder now, there’s a free demo available on Steam as part of Steam’s Next Fest.

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You know, I always figured I’d be great at making potions. As a kid, I was obsessed with pulling things out of cupboards and combining them into a bowl. Shampoo, bubble bath and toothpaste. Salad cream, yeast and lemonade. These concoctions were the result of pure genius, a brilliant mind capable of harmonising with ingredients on a sub-atomic level to create combinations that were beyond the capabilities of any known god. My Mam was only shouting at me because she didn’t understand. These were my elixirs! Sup from this bowl and taste the future of human evolution! Yes, I know this is the same bowl we’re also sick into when we’re not feeling well, but you also bake in it so let’s not start being picky.

As I got older, It became apparent my future was not in alchemy. Someone who puts baby corn into a bolognese clearly doesn't posses the skill to create balanced mixtures. And yet, Potionomics has wrenched the rotting corpse of that childhood fantasy right out of its grave. Finally, here is a suitable outlet for my feats of fantastical alchemy.

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Crucial's 3200MT/s CL22 laptop RAM is a great upgrade for gaming laptops with slower DDR4 memory, and now you can pick up a 2x8GB kit for £33 with the use of a 10% code at Crucial's UK site. To get this price, use code 10CRUCIAL at the checkout.

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Celeste was a delight to play when it launched in 2018 - a pixel-perfect platformer, filled with catchy earworms, and emotional revelations. After completing Celeste all I really wanted was, well, more Celeste. It seems I wasn’t alone, as over 350 fans have collaborated on Celeste Strawberry Jam, the “largest collaborative project in Celeste history.” The mega-mod is adding 111 stages, five difficulty modes, and over 8 hours of original music on February 17th.

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PCIe 4.0 SSDs are a great option for cutting down game load times, especially in this exciting time of actual DirectStorage 1.1 games being around, and today there's a good deal on the Netac NV7000, a high-end 'second-gen' PCIe 4.0 SSD that can hit read speeds up to 7000MB/s and write speeds of 6700MB/s - impressive stuff.

It's down from £196 to £157, thanks to a 20% off voucher you tick on the product page at Amazon UK, and well worth picking up for that price - especially as the drive comes with a heatsink attached.

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Last week, I finished the free Tomb Raider DLC for PowerWash Simulator, in which you pressure-blast scum off Lara Croft's ancestral home. It's a great DLC, not just because it has loads of nods to the older Tomb Raider games, but also because if you're just in it for the powerwashing, you've got some lovely levels to clean, with nooks and crannies and satisfying walls to scour. My favourite thing about it, however, is that it kind of canonically confirms Lara is an ass.

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Hello folks! As you may have spotted last week, this year we're going to be compiling a new series of game genre lists, as voted for by you, the RPS readership. They're essentially going to be your versions of our own Bestest Best lists, and to kick things off (and to celebrate the upcoming launch of Company Of Heroes 3 later this month), we're asking you to vote for your favourite strategy games of all time. Want to get involved? Here's how.

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We’ve seen Austin Powers take a stab at running the Normandy, but the 60s spy is probably too old school to be fighting Reapers in the year 2183. The head of the Normandy requires a modern managerial style, someone with the diplomatic skills necessary to bring the galaxy together. So, obviously, the natural choice to replace Commander Shepard is… Michael Scott? Someone made a video editing The Office’s nutty boss into scenes from the Mass Effect trilogy, and the results are hilarious.

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Relax, friend. That momentary disappointment you feel at the prospect of no new Legend being added with Season 16 of Apex Legends? Allow me to assuage it with exciting news about what the devs have been working on instead. Namely - a complete rework of the Legend classes and perks system; a new top-tier burst Assault Rifle; a rotating playlist of limited time modes, including the new Team Deathmatch mode; improved onboarding for new players; and much more.

Read more about all the major changes coming with Apex Legends Revelry on Tuesday 14th February below, and join me as I aggressively chew the walls in anticipation of the five new character classes that are about to shake up the Legend meta.

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Although my favourite type of witch is a spooky old crone, who cackles at the top of her lungs and lives in a swamp crunching rat bones and squeezing crow blood into her cauldron, the laid-back cottagecore witch is a close second. What's not to love? Living in a cute little thatched roof house, tending to your garden, baking bread, sipping magical teas, reading old tomes on the front porch - absolute bliss.

Witchy Life Story is all about this lifestyle. It’s a fluffy, cosy visual novel where you play as a mischievous witch who is sent to live in a new town called Flora to prove themselves after royally flubbing their training. The town is preparing for a festival and, as the newly appointed town witch, you need to pull your weight by brewing potions, giving tarot readings, and even leading a guided meditation session or two.

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Overwatch 2’s third season is beginning later today and it looks to be the most substantial season yet. Blizzard have released a brand new trailer alongside a Season 3 roadmap, detailing everything we can expect for the next few months including a One Punch Man crossover, a long overdue dating sim, and a Battle Pass themed around Asian mythology.

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Darkest Dungeon 2 has been in early access since 2021, and it’s finally taking the roadtrip to a full 1.0 PC release on May 8th. We originally thought the nail-biting roguelike would see a 1.0 release this month, but developer Red Hook haven't left us empty-handed. Darkest Dungeon 2 currently has a demo available on Steam and the Epic Games Store until the end of Steam Next Fest on February 13th. Red Hook say the demo will feature the four starting heroes as you take them around one full region and explore either the Sprawl (city) or the Foeter (farms.)

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Some of my favourite games involve visiting a fantastical town, befriending the residents, discovering their stories, and trading with them. Too often those same games also have too-difficult turn-based murderfests in-between, though. Here comes Townseek to fix that. It's an adorable and "relaxing" exploration-trading game in which you pilot an airship, customise your balloon, and visit eg. some sort of bee kingdom, as per the screenshot above.

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Steam Next Fest is back with a veritable truck ton of fresh game demos to sample, and we've been plunging our eager little mitts into the latest batch of indie delights to unearth some handy recommendations for you to hit first. Running from now until February 13th, there are always oodles of demos to try in a Next Fest, so sometimes it's nice to have a helping hand in working out what's worth sinking your time into. Below, we've rounded up 16 of our favourites so far, and we'll be writing about plenty more demos we've yet to try over the coming week.

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It takes a particular type of farming game to really hook me in these days, but Lightyear Frontier's crop-planting mechs might just be the thing I've been looking for. Everything I've seen of Frame Break's futuristic life sim looks delightful so far, and in a recent ID@Xbox showcase, the developers told us a bit more about how it's going to operate, and whether those Stardew Valley comparisons are on the money.

When asked whether players would be able to befriend NPCs like other Stardew-likes, Frame Break's CEO Joakim Hedström told us: "In short, yes. We don't have a full town like Stardew, but the characters that are there, you'll be able to get to know better and learn their stories."

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It was only last month that we last covered Solidigm - better known as SK Hynix - and their P41 Plus 2TB PCIe 4.0 SSD, which dropped to $122 at Newegg in the US. Today, there's another one-day sale on the drive, this time at $104.99 - an incredible value for an SSD of this spec.

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One of Intel's best budget gaming CPUs, the Core i5 13400F, is down to £189 at Tech Next Day in the UK - compared to £238 for the cheapest 12400/12400F model on Amazon UK. This is a great price for this level of performance, with a 10-core and 16-thread design, max turbo frequency of 4.6GHz and of course the same socket 1700 compatibility as other 12th and 13th-gen Intel CPUs.

Note that to get this price, you'll need to use code TND-10 at the checkout - a long-running code that seems to apply to other products as well, FYI.

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During the weekend’s Taipei Game Show, Team Ninja announced that Wo Long: Fallen Dynasty would receive one final demo on PC and consoles. The action-RPG’s demo will be available starting from February 24th at 8AM GMT/ 9AM CET/ 3AM ET until March 27th. The full game is slated to launch on March 3rd for PC, consoles, and Game Pass, so you can try out the game’s Chinese-martial arts combat before and after release.

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Original story: A new week means one thing: another update on Microsoft’s $69 billion acquisition of Activision Blizzard. According to a report from The New York Times, Microsoft is expecting the UK’s Competition and Markets Authority (CMA) to oppose the deal, after EU regulators issued their own antitrust warnings last week. Microsoft reportedly believes it can convince EU and UK regulators to accept their concessions and eventually approve the acquisition.

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Early footage and screenshots from Dragon Age: Dreadwolf, BioWare's fourth entry in its fantasy RPG series, have been leaked online. Although links to the video and screengrabs have since been removed from Reddit, the original post remains live and describes the contents of the leak in detail.

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Vampire Survivor-likes are a thing now, all trying to emulate the success of Poncle's indie hit that became our best game of 2022. As I've said before, a lot of them can't quite match the OG for all manner of reasons, but Spellbook Demonslayers is different. Despite only being in early access, it's already got a solid foundation to work from. No, there isn't an Old Testament that whirls around your person like a holy sawblade, but there is a revolving shield with a pistol glued onto it. Yeah, I thought that would convince you.

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Wishfully's upcoming cinematic platformer Planet Of Lana turned eyes and heads when it was first announced at E3 2021, and the comparison we instantly settled upon was "like Ori meets Inside". At a recent ID@Xbox showcase we attended last week, creative director and Wishfully co-founder Adam Stjärnljus acknowledged that Playdead connection, saying that both Limbo and Inside "had a huge impact on me". But he also said Studio Ghibli's animated film Spirited Away was another key influence, which, yep, that definitely tracks.

"I was very inspired by Studio Ghibli films, and especially the film Spirited Away," Stjärnljus told us. "That's been kind of like a guiding star from the beginning in terms of tonality with this serious, emotional story, but [also] still, like, a fun quirkiness to it, and really this sense of exploring another world, which we really want."

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After two years of early access, the spacefaring looter shooter Everspace 2 is ready to fly into full release for PC on April 6th. Last November, the open-world sequel received its last major update before release, adding in a rift-opening endgame. The game already has grappling hooks - which automatically makes every shooter better - so, now we’re just waiting for a few extra bits before it’s ready for takeoff.

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The RPS Time Capsule returns for its first outing of 2023, and this time we're casting our minds back to the hallowed year of 2006. Little did we know it at the time, but this is the year we start to see the birth of certain game series that are still alive and kicking today (just about), as well as the nascent beginnings of now beloved studios honing their craft on some of their very first titles. But which of those games have earned themselves a spot in the eternal RPS Time Capsule? Come and find out which ones have stood the test of time, and which, after reading this article, have been consigned to the smog-filled trashfire of future Earth.

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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 walking witch hut, using a shotgun to rocket-jump, some Dark Messiah-style kicking baddies into spikes, and unusual animal encounters. Come see!

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I hesitate to call Potion Tales a shop sim or retail management game, because the economics of running a figuratively and literally underground magic potion shop seems a secondary concern next to making the potions and deciding whether you want to screw people over or not. If the answer to that last part is yes, you need to move on to the question of how.

In practice, Potion Tales is a 3D puzzle game. People come to you - I use the term people broadly because the tutorial level involves helping a fire spirit and soon after you're approached by what appears to be an aggressive daisy who is the local gravekeeper - and present you with a problem. They ask for a potion to solve the problem. That's all the steer you get. It takes some getting used to, but the Steam demo shows an impressively flexible game with a good sense of humour.

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Cower, brief mortals! Wait, that's a halloween thing, isn't it. Welcome to the magic circle, pals! Not the actual one, just, like, thematically speaking. Starting today until next Friday, February 17th, it's Magic Week here at RPS, where we aim to highlight all manner of fabulous games about magic, witches, wizards, general sorcery and other spell-adjacent tomfoolery. We're also putting special emphasis on magic games made by trans developers, too. Join us for a glimpse of what's coming up.

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Sundays are for folding away your clothes horse carefully, so it doesn't snap shut on your fingers. Before you struggle, let's read this week's best writing about games (and game related things).

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Steam offered discounts on builders last month, and is is due to offer cheap mysteries from February 20th-27th. They've already announced the next genre-specific sale, though: Steam Puzzle Fest is coming in the last week of April.

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Tactical mech shooter Phantom Brigade has been held by the twin prisons of early access and the Epic Games Store for a couple of years now, but it'll soon be set free. Developers Brace Yourself say it'll hit 1.0 and arrive on Steam on the same date: February 28th.

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Cannibal and arboreal survival 'em up Sons Of The Forest was due to to launch later this month, and it has not been delayed. It's developers have announced that they've decided to release into Steam Early Access, however, after initially intending to head straight to 1.0.

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HBO's The Last Of Us television series has reportedly increased the player count for The Last Of Us on console, years after its original release. It stands to reason that there might be increased interest in the looming PC release, too, but you'll have to wait a few extra weeks. Naughty Dog announced yesterday that their shroomy shooter has been delayed.

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The snowdrops are out! This is still a sign of winter, but it's a sign of winter progressing, and the progress of winter inevitably leads towards spring. Then we'll have the crocus, and iris, and bluebell, and oh spring! I'm overwhelmingly excited by the realisation that come Thursday, sunset in Edinburgh will no longer fall during working hours. Ah, light! Life! But until then, what are you playing this weekend? Here's what we're clicking on!

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When Duke Nukem 3D burst onto the FPS scene in the Nineties, young CJ was a bit confused. This Duke wasn't the purple-shirted acrobat I'd known from Apogee Software's pair of platformers earlier that decade. He was brash, crude, and and didn't side-scroll anymore. It wasn't for me, so I moved on to other games. I still occasionally loaded up those earlier platformers though, wistfully remembering a time when Duke presumably used actual toilets when he needed to answer a call of nature.

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Gather round, children, and I’ll tell you of something magical: the NZXT Source 340 compact mid-tower PC case with side window, product code CA-S340W-B1. Good gravy, did I love that case. Tightly proportioned without being too cramped for a full-size graphics card, maturely designed without looking dull, and hewn from some of most gorgeously textured matte steel I’ve seen on a piece of computing hardware. Don’t even get me started on the upgraded Source 340 Elite. It’s been years since these cases disappeared from sale and ascended to Component Heaven, and although it’s taken a few tries, there’s finally a new chassis that’s worthy of the legacy: the NZXT H5 Flow.

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Hello folks. Earlier this week, we unveiled some of the cool things coming up for RPS this year - many of which revolve around you, our lovely readers and supporters. If you haven't had a chance to check that post out yet, I'd love to hear what you think of it. And yes, fixing our comments nesting is still very much on the agenda as well. Our tech team have a lot of websites to take care of these days, and they're working as fast as they can to sort things out. As soon as I have an update I can share, I'll let you know.

But enough about techy bits. I wanted to use this Letter From The Editor to talk about some of the more supporter-oriented things mentioned in that 'What's coming up' post. Specifically, I want to kick off the inaugural Ask RPS - your chance to ask us, the editorial team, questions about games, the site, the way we do things, and other things we like.

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You might recognise developer Octavi Navorro’s pixel art in Thimbleweed Park, 2017’s detective point-and-clicker. But since then, Navorro has been releasing surreal 2D horror games on an almost annual basis. Navarro’s series Midnight Scenes has been the highlight, having disturbing premises and Twilight Zone creepiness. The newest episode, Midnight Scenes: From The Woods is due on February 9th and it looks as chilling as ever.

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I really do not play enough visual novels these days. Raptor Boyfriend has been sat on my hard drive for at least a year, and it won't be the last. Historically, I have fallen hard for two kinds of VN: emotionally probing character dramas like Eliza and Watch Me Jump, or gentle and slightly silly comedies like Laura Silver and Camp W. The jokey dating-sim-but-everyone's-a-talking-table type vein never quite grabbed me. Unless Monster Prom counts? Hmm.

Raptor Boyfriend is more the lighthearted comedy kind, but with through lines on social anxiety and navigating confusing coming-of-age relationships. It is also not actually about having a raptor boyfriend.

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This year, I decided to make a New Year’s Resolution for the first time in my life. I’m 21 and my knees click, which means I must be turning into stone faster than someone having a staring contest with Medusa. So, I vowed to exercise a few times a week. Then, during my first week back at work, vid bud Liam told me to try Age Of Empires II. Never before has a New Year’s Resolution been abandoned so fast. I really wanted to stick with it. Promise.

But! After my first match, the following 30 hours vanished quicker than the Galaxy Caramels in a box of Celebrations. I became obsessed. I mastered AOE II's low AI difficulties and quickly used the Advanced Techniques tutorial to learn build orders. Before I knew it, I had a Google Doc filled with step-by-step plans for various playstyles, the perfect strategies for any scenario. But that Google Doc ended up ruining everything for me. If that recent Xbox release with the good gamepad controls has you tempted to revisit Age Of Empires II on PC, do not make a Google Doc. You’ve been warned.

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