Rock, Paper, Shotgun

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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Honkai: Star Rail, the intergalactic interrailing RPG from the makers of Genshin Impact, is gearing up for its final closed beta. It'll leave the station on February 10th and you can sign up to take part now. Or you can just watch a new trailer below.

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It's rare to see a £400 discount on an RTX 3070 Ti gaming laptop, but that's the situation today as the MSI Katana GF66 is reduced on Amazon UK by 25%. This model is well-equipped too, with a 12th-gen Core i7 12650H processor, 16GB of DDR5 RAM, a 1TB NVMe SSD and a 15-in 144Hz display.

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If the Independent Games Festival awards are the Oscars of video gaming, then that surely makes Rock Paper Shotgun's yearly Advent Calendar the BAFTAs. I'm justifying this spurious comparison because the games we picked as our favourites of 2022 have proven a strong indicator of what you'll find on this year's list of IGF finalists. Among the selectees are Tunic, Betrayal At Club Low, Norco, Neon White and The Case Of The Golden Idol.

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While we spend a lot of our time over here in the deals corner of RPS covering high-speed NVMe SSDs, I also try to keep an eye out for good deals on classic 2.5-inch SATA SSDs as well. These drives are physically larger, slower and not much better value than NVMe M.2 alternatives, but occasionally prices become so low that you have to take notice.

Today's example is this 480GB Kingston A400 SSD, which has been reduced to under £25 versus an original RRP of £63. That's an astonishing amount of space for the money, and well worth picking up if you have an old machine still running on a HDD.

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It seemed a shame, given Forspoken's somewhat unusual system requirements, that its demo remained unavailable on PC. Well, that's no longer the case. As of today, you can now give Square Enix's Cuff-ing season action-adventure a whiz before you decide whether you want to pay £65/$70 for it.

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Fun story: I didn’t know what Qbasic Gorillas was called for over 20 years.

As a kid, we would refer to it simply as “The Banana Game”. I had to rely on my Dad to play it, as only he was able to access an unfathomable portal called “DOS”, summoning it out of the inky void using long strings of seemingly random letters; an incantation that gave it a sort of mystical allure.

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A fix is on the way for the security vulnerabilities discovered earlier this week in Grand Theft Auto Online, Rockstar have said today. Players began efforts to alert Rockstar to the issues en masse over the weekend, after some nefarious types took advantage of the issues to disrupt the game for other people. Rockstar Support have tweeted that a security-related update is coming, but didn't give a specific timeframe for it yet.

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Back in the days of 1987, fantasy point-and-click adventure Shadowgate was notoriously deadly. The type of thing that fell very much into the 'touch anything and you're dead' bracket of early adventure games. Getting eaten by sharks, burned to death by a dragon, and the awkward fate of being dragged into space through a shattered mirror were just some of the ways you could cop it on the black and white Apple Macintosh original. Heck, if you lost your torch while exploring, you'd also fall and break your neck within minutes. Happy days! No doubt, then, that you'll be pleased to hear that the original creators are now making a Shadowgate sequel for PC, more than 35 years after its initial release. Beyond Shadowgate is launching a Kickstarter campaign on February 18th, and promises lots more ridiculous ways to pop your clogs.

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Over the past couple of days, Book Twitter (and actually regular Twitter, because it's such a catastrophically mockable opinion to have in public) have been making much fun of this dude, who essentially pitched that AI could disrupt books. Another guy enthusiastically replied that you could add Metaverse features so you could "live the book". Don't bother adding to the pile on, because there are no more jokes to make. They have been deluged by people pointing out that TV, films and video games all aready exist.

This made me think about, firstly, that we'd be much better off as a society if techbro web3 enthusiasts were all siloed into one giant Truman Show-esque hamster ball where they can all scurry about together thinking they're achieving things. But secondly, that some people really put a lot of store on interactivity. Including me! Graham was the one who sent me those tweets, and he said he wouldn't want to live in any of the books he's been reading, because everyone in them is sad or angry for the whole book, until almost the end. I said I wouldn't want to be in them because you'd only end up being a side character, and that's boring.

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343 Industries "will continue to develop Halo now and in the future," says studio head Pierre Hintze. The statement was released in response to rumours that 343 would instead take a backseat on future Halo games by serving to manage external studios, rather than developing the games themselves as they had on Halo Infinite.

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The original Granblue Fantasy was a JRPG mobile game only released in Japan, but that didn't stop enterprising westerners going to the effort to play it. That's mainly because it counted Final Fantasy composer Nobuo Uematsu and art director Hideo Minaba among its developers.

Granblue Fantasy: Relink is set in the same universe and has the same Final Fantasy vets involved, but it's a big, splashly 1-4 player action RPG blockbuster, with combat reminiscent of some Platinum Games. You'll find the latest trailer below.

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Steam's next genre-specific event kicks off on Monday, January 23rd, and this time it's entirely focused on base building and citybuilding games. For a week, there will be discounts on games like Dyson Sphere Program, Frostpunk and Planet Zoo, and hopefully some demos for unreleased games, too.

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Crystal Dynamics are ending support for Marvel's Avengers, their live service superhero game. That means it won't receive any further new content, its final balance patch will be released on March 31st, and all other support and the sale of the game will cease on September 30th. Players who already own the game at that point will be able to continue playing in single- and multiplayer, for at least a while.

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Happy weekend, you silly little sausages. I know squirrels gathering autumn hazelnuts is a seasonally incorrect header image, but I like it. The boiler is gone in my house, so I'm wearing one of those giant hoodie things that comes down to my knees, and scuttle about the place secreting foodstuffs in the pouch. Wait, that's more like a kangaroo, isn't it. Curses! Regardless, I will only be able to warm my hands this weekend by cupping them over the light of my PC screen. What will I, and others, be playing on them this weekend?

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Samsung's Odyssey G4 gaming monitor is a great option for competitive gaming, with an IPS panel, 240Hz refresh rate and comfortable 25-inch screen size. The monitor normally costs around £243, but today it's down to £199 at Amazon UK.

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Dell's brand new 34-in gaming QD-OLED monitor is reduced at Dell USA, with a $100 discount reducing the monitor to triple figures - $999, to be exact. This is still a ton of money to spend on a monitor, of any description, but this is genuinely the best monitor I've ever used.

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Are there any sweeter words than "A Short Hike-like"? Both because the sweet, mountain adventure is one of my favourite games, and because "Hike-like" is a fun rhyme. Well, anyway, Haven Park is like A Short Hike crossed with Animal Crossing, and it's currently free to keep from GOG.

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New games have become more expensive in recent years, but older games have continued to remain the same price or to get cheaper. Excellent factory construction sim Factorio is bucking that trend. On January 26th it's going to raise its price from $30 to $35, says its developer.

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The Callisto Protocol had a rocky launch, with plentiful bugs, performance issues and a paucity of graphics options on PC. Some of those issues have been resolved in post-release updates, and yesterday another new patch arrived with more fixes and a New Game+ mode.

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Warzone 2's second season will drop on February 15th, and bring it with it new content and several changes to Call Of Duty's battle royale mode. One of those changes is being celebrated by the community: the return of the first game's 1v1 Gulag fights.

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With all the Sad Dad™ games that have cropped up in recent years, many have rightfully been asking: "Where are all the video game mums at?". Well, what if I told you that Swedish indie studio Might and Delight have been putting mums at the centre of their games since 2013? Yup, elephant mums in Shelter 3, Lynx mums in Shelter 2, and the OG badass badger mum in Shelter 1. Sure it’s kinda terrible that the only major rep mums are getting in video games is in the form of Might and Delight’s animal tales, but I’ll honestly take any story about motherhood I can get my paws on.

As much as I love Shelter 2 (less so Shelter 3, unfortunately), Shelter 1 holds a special place in my heart, mostly because no other animal-focused survival game has come even remotely close to claiming the coveted title of "most brutal animal sim that made me ugly cry."

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Devs Massive Monster have revealed that sweetly macabre roguelite management sim Cult Of The Lamb is getting its Relics Of The Old Faith update soon, followed by a second big update towards the middle of the year. Both are free, although there’s not a suitably intimidating cult-related name for the latter yet. Relics Of The Old Faith was shown off a bit at the end of 2022, but this is the first we’re hearing of another arriving later in this sparkly new year.

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Despite the name, Sailing Era isn't one of the sailing sims that have popped up recently. It's a little hard to describe, but let's see how we get on.

You steer your wee boat around a grounded anime age-of-sail Earth, looking for shipwrecks and treasures, fighting pirates (and possibly being one, although fairly peripherally),exploring, trading, and doing the usual Elite-style open world thing. I'll be honest: I don't exactly love this one, and it's spread a little thin. But I've played it for hours longer than I expected and enjoyed it more as it went on. It's doing a lot, in its own slightly roundabout way.

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Now that the Rockstar-embarrassing, staccato-titled Grand Theft Auto: The Trilogy – Definitive Edition is out on Steam, this terrible trio of remasters has bailed out of Rockstar Store exclusivity and rolled into the speeding bumper of easy Steam Deck compatibility. I’ve spent this afternoon ambling around the redone GTA III, GTA: Vice City and GTA: San Andreas, in handheld form, to confirm what you probably already know: they’re all still a bit crap.

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I’m a big fan of frogs in games. If I see a cute little green lad in a game, then I’m absolutely going to play it. This is how I started playing the free prologue demo for Die In The Dungeon, a turn-based roguelike where you place dice on a grid to slice and , er, dice your foes. It’s smart, concise, and I can’t stop playing.

Playing as your little green knight, you are given five dice each round to place on a game board. Each one represents a certain action, the basic ones being attacking and defending, but ramping up to mass healing and boosting the stats of other dice. Energy points dictate how many dice you can place on the board, with each one costing the number on its face. Placement is key, as different combinations can lead to better outcomes like, for example, how you can place an attack die in a space affected by a booster die to up its damage.

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Grand Theft Auto Online’s been around for the best part of a decade, but you can now become a taxi driver at long last. You’ll probably need to do some light robbery to afford to buy a taxi from Warstock Cache & Carry for the most authentic cab driver experience. Still, it’s relatively straightforward to start your latest, and uncharacteristically honest, money making venture. If you don’t have a taxi then you can still start taxi work jobs, and completing 10 in a row unlocks the cheaper trade price to nab a legit taxi. You can even call a cab from your iFruit phone to fast travel, if you don’t fancy driving your own.

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This past weekend, I ended an 18-month-long love affair. I managed to drag the experience out for all it was worth, but in the end, there was nothing to do but let go, and complete the fifth and final game in the Ace Attorney Turnabout Collection. And, oh, my heart, the post-game blues are real!

I was extremely late to the party when it comes to Capcom's long-running series of legal dramedy visual novels, which debuted all the way back in 2001. But I found my way here in the end, largely thanks to the aforementioned collection, which packages prettied-up versions of the original Phoenix Wright: Ace Attorney Trilogy and its prequel duology The Great Ace Attorney Chronicles onto modern systems.

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