Rock, Paper, Shotgun

I've played Shiny Shoe's upcoming roguelike Inkbound once before, and not only is it markedly different to their previous game Monster Train, but it also featured the snappiest turn-based combat I'd seen. With that in mind, I dove into the game's recent technical test with fellow RPS Treehouse-dwellers Ollie and James to sample the game at a more leisurely pace, and to draw upon their greater strategic expertise. Did the combat hold up? Were they pleased to be dragged into a co-op session with me? Yes... and no. We had fun, but it didn't come quite as naturally without the guiding hand of the developers showing us the ropes.

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Last time, you decided that a pre-boss battle supply cache is better than resources too good to use. Honestly, I'm proud of you. Look at you, freely using all the full range of tools at your disposal, not living in fear of the future, living a life glorious and full of fireworks than stocking up to do it all over again. I can't be you, but I'm happy for you. This week, you must chose between vivacious violence and virtual reality. What's better: mixed dual-wielding, or VR support?

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Call Of Duty: Warzone 2 and Modern Warfare 2 drop into their second season on February 15th, and we now have our first look at Warzone 2’s newest map and modes. In a series of Twitter posts, Activision announced a new, free-to-play “small map” called Ashika Island. Warzone’s new map will feature a brand new mode DMZ, alongside the returning mode Resurgence - a slimmer BR that cuts the lobby size down from 150 to 50 players, and enables respawns. Ashika Island and the new modes will launch alongside Season 02 on February 15th.

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The Sims 4 didn't have toddlers until they were added in 2017, and sims' early years will continue to telescope when March comes around. That's when infants will finally be added to the game, turning babies into full sims.

The latest update also offered news on Project Rene, the eventual successor to The Sims 4. The key takeaways: it's not an MMO but it will have multiplayer as well as singleplayer, and it's years away from release.

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Star Wars Jedi: Survivor has been delayed by six weeks. In a statement released on Twitter, developers Respawn Entertainment said that the action-adventure sequel would no longer meet its March 17th release date and will instead draw laser swords on April 28th.

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Test Drive Unlimited was set on a Hawaiian island modelled after O'ahu and the Forza Horizon games each focus on a festival of racing events. If those two games were to come together in a high speed collision, the mangled wreckage might look like The Crew Motorfest, Ubisoft's newly announced game about a racing festival on the island of O'ahu. The reveal trailer is below.

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Marvel Snap is several rare things at once: a licensed superhero game that's fun; a card game that's graspable and allows for casual play; and a free-to-play game that doesn't feel warped by microtransations.

As of today, it now has a PvP battle mode to enable friends to pit their decks against one another. It's either making a good thing better, or it's the beginning of the end of all the things I mentioned above.

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Portable SSDs are jolly useful for quickly transferring large files, like Steam game file backups or 4K videos, from device to device. I've said before in similar blogs that I use one to ferry videos from my computer downstairs to my TV, but I also rely on one to quickly set up a PC for performance testing and copy game files to my Steam Deck.

In any case, you'd normally expect to pay anywhere from £70 to £100 for a 1TB drive of a decent spec, but today you can pick up Integral's 1TB USB-C Portable SSD for £59.99 at MyMemory. To get this price, you'll need to use code HMMJSU at the checkout.

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Sony's WH-1000XM line of noise-cancelling headphones is brilliant - I've used a pair of XM4s while working for years - and they're actually pretty decent for PC gaming too, especially if you're in a louder environment. That's why I thought I should tell you that these WH-1000XM5s are discounted to £249 on Sony's UK site when you use code UPGRADE50 to knock £50 off the price. This is the first time they've dropped to this level, and for a go-anywhere set of headphones they might just be worth a look.

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Dead Space’s remake treatment has produced a piece of gory greatness, some Steam Deck wobbles notwithstanding. Vid bud Liam touched on the visual upgrades in his review, but since it’s been shaking my bones even harder than the original did, I wanted to dive even deeper into the mottled flesh of the modernised Dead Space to examine how all those new polygons and effects aren’t just there to please nerds. They do, in fact, make the remake scarier.

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I've come to regard the four main games in the Life Is Strange franchise as kind of like the siblings in a big family. There's the eldest, who will always be heaped with praise because no matter what the others achieve, she did it all first. Her twin is always keen to remind you that even though she's the younger and perhaps not quite as accomplished half of the duo, she's more charismatic and less coy about who she is and what she wants. Then there's the youngest, who's extremely likeable, in large part because she's learned what behaviours to avoid just by watching the others make mistakes; even if she's modelled herself on the eldest a bit too closely in her quest for approval, and so hasn't really forged her own identity.

Then there's Life Is Strange 2: the awkward middle child. Still very recognisably a member of the family, but the one that stands out in all the photos because he's just a bit gawky. He's experimented a lot with his storytelling and plotline in an attempt to make himself stand out, and it's only sort-of worked. His romantic subplots are underdeveloped, his villains are one-dimensional, and his attempt at tackling a Very Serious Issue has grown in all crooked.

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Last Friday afternoon, 40 developers from Ubisoft Paris gathered to strike in the first labour stoppage of Ubisoft’s history. It's the capper on what has been a turbulent month for the company. Three weeks ago Ubisoft announced they were cancelling three unannounced games amid “worsening macroeconomic conditions.” In a letter to employees, CEO Yves Guillemot said that “the ball is in your court” in regard to hitting deadlines and overturning Ubisoft’s sticky financial situation. French union Solidaires Informatique said that Guillemot’s "words mean something: overtime, managerial pressure, burnout, etc," and called on Ubisoft Paris employees to strike for better pay and working hours. It seems some devs heard the call.

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The road to launch has been a uniquely turbulent one for The Settlers: New Allies. After an eight-year absence, the next entry in Ubisoft’s beloved city-building series was finally revealed in 2018, only to be delayed indefinitely two years later. The game then reemerged in a fresh new form in 2022, but a less than favourable reception from long-term fans to its closed beta saw the game delayed indefinitely once again.

12 months later, The Settlers: New Allies is all the better for it. An extended delay is never an easy decision to make, yet the team at Ubisoft Düsseldorf (formerly Blue Byte) has seen this additional development time as an opportunity to reach out to those most familiar with the series. “We learned [more] than just what was needed for the game,” creative director Christian Hagerdorn tells me during a recent preview event. “One of our biggest focuses was to be absolutely transparent with the players. Not just on where we were standing, but where we were going. We've been collecting the feedback as we were developing”.

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Whomst among us hasn't dreamt of somehow being transported to a magical world, where there are talking unicorns, and you can throw lightning and control plants because you are this universe's very special hero? Such is the fate of Frey, who falls through a portal into Athia and finds that world in mortal peril. Although if I were here I'd be a bit disappointed. It's all very well being able to zoom around doing magic parkour everywhere, but there isn't much to do or many places to go. Not a single talking unicorn to be seen.

Forspoken is somehow both full and devoid of content. There is a huge open world, but it is mostly empty. There is an epic story of magic, other universes, and saving the world, but it only takes up a couple of days. I actually enjoyed a lot of Forspoken, but it gets more fun the more you play, and then it's over; I didn't pre-order this game for sixty odd quid, and if I had I'd be disappointed. Even the much-Tweeted about annoying dialogue doesn't happen much, and isn't contextually annoying. Forspoken is annoying, though, just not in the ways you might expect if all you've seen is people discussing out-of-context clips from cutscenes.

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A series of senior job listings have revealed some details about The Molasses Flood’s upcoming Witcher game, codenamed Project Sirius. The studio behind Flame In The Flood were acquired by CD Projekt Red back in 2021, and CDPR first mentioned Sirius in an investor call last October. The project was initially described as "an innovative take on The Witcher universe telling an unforgettable story.” We now know that this “unforgettable story” could potentially be told inside of a multiplayer game, or at least a game with multiplayer and social elements.

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Dream life sim PowerWash Simulator is heading on another unexpected mission, this time to Final Fantasy 7’s industrial city of Midgar. You’ll need to wait a little longer to help Cloud and friends clean up the city, as we don’t have a release date for the free Midgar Special Request DLC yet. The crossover pack’s announcement (via the Square Enix Extreme Edges Twitter account) did tease a few of the things we can expect to clean up, including the Seventh Heaven bar, and FF7’s first boss the Guard Scorpion. The teaser image also shows off the motorcycles from FF7’s mini-game, so I’ll be expecting to hose that down in time for a quick escape.

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As part of their 30th Anniversary celebrations, NIS America announced that Disgaea 7: Vows Of The Virtueless, the next instalment in the long-running JRPG series, is coming to PC this year. Disgaea 7 was actually released in Japan just a few days ago, but it’ll see an overseas release on Steam this autumn. NIS also announced rereleases for Rhapsody 2: Ballad Of The Little Princess and Rhapsody 3: Memories Of Marl Kingdom coming this summer.

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Hello folks. I think there's probably some sort of law against wishing people a Happy New Year when you're saying it on the final day of January, but stuff it, I'm doing it anyway. Happy New Year everyone. Let's talk about all the cool stuff coming up on RPS in 2023.

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It's not often that you see an OLED TV for less than $800, and it's even less common to see an OLED gaming monitor for that kind of a price - especially when it's Gigabyte's well-respected FO48U, a 48-in model that supports 4K 120Hz over HDMI 2.1 or DisplayPort. It's got USB-C charging, KVM functionality, FreeSync/G-Sync... and it cost $1499 when it launched two years ago.

Now, you can pick it up for $729 at Newegg when you use code JAN2548, an outstanding deal for a monitor of this size and quality.

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The Corsair MP600 Pro is a great high-end PCIe 4.0 SSD, so to get the 1TB model for $155 at Newegg, a reasonable $45 off, is a deal worth writing about. As you'd hope from a drive of this calibre, this uses more expensive TLC NAND flash and has a DRAM cache, providing noticeably better sustained performance than QLC drives without a DRAM cache.

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Some developers spend their careers inching towards their dream job, leapfrogging between roles in a grand strategy game of their own making. Others, like Randy Smith, simply show up on their first day and find they’re exactly where they’re meant to be.

“The approach that Looking Glass had to creating games was pretty unique,” he says now. “Even to this day, there are few studios who have that same ideology and mindfulness in how videogames are made.”

Thief: The Dark Project had a great director, in the form of Greg LoPiccolo, who later became a pioneer in the world of music games with Guitar Hero and Rock Band. And before him, Ken Levine had laid down the cobbles of Thief’s setting, defining its noir-ish tone before heading off to work on System Shock 2. Yet Looking Glass games weren’t driven by a singular 90s auteur. In fact, the very absence of ego in the studio’s culture meant its many “bright stars” were happy to adhere to a shared vision.

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Microsoft and Sony have been in a months-long back-and-forth over Microsoft’s proposed Activision Blizzard acquisition and the issue of Call Of Duty exclusivity, and they’re not done yet. In a series of tweets published last Friday, Microsoft’s chief communications officer Frank X. Shaw said Sony were “briefing people in Brussels claiming Microsoft is unwilling to offer them parity for Call of Duty if we acquire Activision," but added that “Nothing could be further from the truth.” I would have thought that a legal venue would be a more appropriate place to air these grievances, but I suppose this gets the job done quicker. Either way, it’s a toffee popcorn-worthy accusation in the ongoing drama.

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Let's not muck about here. Homeworld is essentially just Battlestar Galactica, if it were a real-time strategy game that jumped through a hyperspace gate exclusively onto PC. There's still much more to Relic Entertainment's sci-fi take on the plot of exiles returning home, though. When Homeworld's Kushan civilisation set out on their journey to the lost planet of Hiigara in the space-year of 1999, the game was doing something very unique compared with most other RTS games on the market.

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It's been a hot minute since the papercraft Diablo-like Book Of Demons last stomped through these monster-infested halls, but developer Thing Trunk are back today with news of the next chapter in their dungeon-crawling fantasy series. Hellcard will continue the story of Book Of Demons when it launches into Steam early access on February 16th, but instead of slicing up devil flesh in traditional hack and slash fashion, this time you'll be building decks of cards to tackle each dungeon layer as a roguelike.

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I love secret languages in games. I’m too slow to decipher any of them myself, but I enjoy seeing a game’s community pick apart foreign symbols to uncover a game’s deep mysteries (Tunic’s musical language was especially fun.) Fortunately for me, players have already deciphered the ‘Indecipherable’ text log in the new Dead Space remake, revealing a poem that potentially hints toward the series’ future. Naturally, spoilers within.

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Footage purporting to be from Horizon Forbidden West's multiplayer alpha has appeared online. The leak surfaced on Reddit over the weekend, claiming to be from a "very old alpha" build from summer 2020. It's an interesting watch, as while the world and robo dinos look like classic Horizon, the characters jumping around fighting them look a lot more stylised than their hyper-detailed mainline counterparts.

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I spent the past weekend flicking between the Dead Space remake on my PC, and the Dead Space remake on my Steam Deck. It’s a belter of a refurb, and for me personally, has been like getting dessert after being forced to finish my Forspoken vegetables. Still, some lingering performance woes on the Deck mean I’m probably going to continue Isaac Clarke’s first and worst job on desktop alone.

To be fair, the remake is playable on Valve’s handheld. It’s not outright broken, despite having been so on launch day, with problems ranging from drastic FPS dips to outright hard crashes. Following some impressively fast work from Valve themselves, focusing on hotfixes for SteamOS’ Proton compatibility software, Dead Space’s Deck performance has become more or less manageable. But worthy of the best Steam Deck games? Nope, nein and non.

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Keyboards are eternally horizontal, and moving or rotating them outside of their designated comfort zone feels like an affront to all that is good and right with the world. But that's precisely what makes Ludipe’s alt-ctrl game Tie Simulator 2020 so wonderfully weird. As many RPS Treehouse members found out at EGX 2022, it's a game that sees you holding your keyboard vertically, and pressing buttons to (sort of) tie your tie onscreen. Now, Ludipe's back with a new co-op sequel called Back Scratching Simulator 2023 where you're once again doing terrible, but brilliant things with a vertical keyboard.

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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 so very much! Come check out immersive sim piano-playing, hand-drawn and stop-motion art, alien horror and pandemic horror, dogfighting planes, and loads more!

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Lara Croft has seen her fair share of live-action adaptations, but this time she’s raiding the small screen with a Tomb Raider TV series and a film in development at Amazon. THR reported that the Emmy-winning Fleabag writer Pheobe Waller-Bridge is set to pen (and executive produce) the upcoming show, though there's no word on who's attached with the film. THR states that Amazon is looking to "build out a connected world of Tomb Raider, with the video game, TV series and film." This sounds a little ambitious, considering that Crytal Dynamics' game is already in production, so we'll have to wait and see how the adaptations interact with the games.

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I went to Berlin not long ago to sample the emotional highs and lows of Like A Dragon: Ishin, a remake of a spin-off that was previously only released in Japan back in 2014. Aside from almost crying and racing chickens, I had the chance to interview Ryu Ga Gotoku Studios' chief producer Hiroyuki Sakamoto, who revealed his favourite thing about the game: Goro Majima's undeniable sex appeal.

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Sundays are for curling a mic away from your mouth, so your friends don't hear you crunching down on some Pringles. Before you bend, let's read this week's best writing about games (and game related things).

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American Truck Simulator hasn't yet received its already-announced Oklahoma DLC, but work is underway on the state that will follow it: Kansas. You'll find a reveal trailer filled with grassy fields and grain silos below.

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Battlefield 2042's update 3.2 will arrive next week, which is notable because it will revive Battlefield's traditional class system. If you were one of the many players to be frustrated by 2042's Specialists, then 3.2 is your chance to once again don the roles of Assault, Engineer, Recon and Support.

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Barotrauma is a co-op scifi submarine sim, which is a great thing to be. It's been navigating the murky depths of early access for the past three years but is now prepping for a 1.0 this spring. Prepareations in this case mean "pre-patch" with "final fixes and changes" the development team wanted to make before the big release day comes, and a price increase in two weeks time.

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Overwatch 2 players haven't been happy with the way its ranked matches have worked since launch. Blizzard agree, it seems, although they're not going to be reverting back to how things were in Overwatch 1. Instead they'll be implementing changes in season 3 and season 4 "aimed at creating more clarity in the system."

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Please do say goodbye to news reporter CJ as he descends the ladder from the RPS treehouse one final time, if you haven't already. Then return to tell us all what you're playing this weekend. Here's what we're clicking on!

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Steam's various discovery hubs are normally designed to steer you towards new games you might like to buy. The latest experiment from Steam Labs, however, is a DLC Discovery Hub. It offers up a tailored list of additional content you might be interested in for games you already own, and prioritises those you've played recently or played most.

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HBO's adaptation of The Last Of Us has been renewed for a second season, after just a handful of episodes have aired. If you haven't seen any of it so far, you can also now watch the entire first episode for free via YouTube.

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Risk Of Rain Returns is a remaster of the 2013, side-scrolling roguelike, but it's adding plenty that's new. The latest 'dev thoughts' video from developers Hopoo Games demonstrates some of the new alternate attack abilities available for every character, from sniper shots to turning your enemies into food.

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