The Long Dark already offered an expansive survival game, including an open survival mode and many hours of a story campaign. Still, it's getting bigger if you want it to with Tales From The Far Territory, a paid expansion pass that will deliver a year of updates beginning on December 5th. A new trailer shows a little of the new region below.
Botany Manor has an art style that reminds me of The Witness, but instead of filling its bucolic setting with line-drawing puzzles, it's about growing plants. This sounds vastly preferable to me. Check out the gorgeous trailer below.
Overwatch 2's next hero is Ramattra, an Omnic shape-shifting tank. We got to see that shape-shifting in action for the first time in a new hero trailer released earlier tonight. If you want a glimpse of his powers in action ahead of his release as part of Overwatch 2's season two on December 6th, check below.
The Crucial X6 is a USB solid state drive that I keep recommending, as it offers dependable SATA SSD speeds in a convenient yet rugged form factor. It comes in sizes from 500GB to 4TB, and now that massive biggest size is discounted: just £225, down from a UK RRP of £475 for a cool £250 discount.
Mainstream 2TB SSDs just barely breached the £100 barrier for Black Friday this year, and now the Integral V Series has firmly pushed beyond it. You can now pick up this 2TB SATA SSD for just £93, making the drive just 4.7p per gigabyte - a very reasonable asking price for a drive that's significantly faster than an old HDD you may still have in your desktop or laptop...
Reader dear, it's almost here, the most wonderful time of the year, the day we've all been waiting for: Cyber Monday. I am planning to once again celebrate cyberpunk, hackers, internauts, and all things cyber by mulling Jolt Cola and singing Front Line Assembly carols around a burning barrel of AOL free trial CDs. Plus I'll have some special Cyber Monday posts for y'all to read with your nearest and dearest. But first, what are you playing this weekend? Here's what we're clicking on!
Here's an exciting 'AI can do that now' moment: Meta's latest AI, Cicero, can beat human players at classic negotiation and betrayal game Diplomacy. While playing online at webDiplomacy.net, it's achieved "more than double the average score of human players", ranking "in the top 10 percent of participants who played more than one game". It can figure out who needs persuading to do what, then engage with those players using impressive and effective natural language.
I won't do a 'taking over the world' joke. I won't.
What if spiders had lightsabers is an impeccable premise for a game, and Spiderheck delivers on that premise with aplomb. It's an arena fighting game geared towards couch co-op and couch competition, but there's online play and single-player modes too. Yesterday's "THE TRIALS OF JAZEPS" update added new difficulty levels to wave survival, as well as custom trials you can send to your friends.
It also chucks in some new maps with portals, because the only thing better than a lightsaber-wielding spider is a lightsaber wielding spider suddenly emerging from a portal.
With the possible exception of Gwent, mini-games inside open world RPGs tend to suck. They're often poor imitations of much deeper and exciting board and card games you can play in the real world, offered as an unwanted break from the monsters I've come to stick a sword through. Will Genshin Impact's upcoming Genius Invokation TCG buck that trend?
Probably not, no, but we'll know for sure when the Version 3.3 update lands on December 7th. There's also a new quest that takes place after the game's main storyline, a couple new playable characters, and a Breakout mini-game. Ah. I do actually quite like Breakout.
It’s getting to the time in winter when we reflect on the year, and pick our Bestest Best games that we’ve played over the past twelve months (okay eleven months, but December is always kinda quiet). We recently had this chat in the RPS hive-mind, and going through each month and making note of my favourite releases completely shocked me with how many fantastic mystery games have come out this year. It’s honestly awesome.
I’m a huge fan of mysteries in games, with some of my all-time favouites being Kentucky Route Zero, The Return Of The Obra Dinn, and Disco Elysium. I just like getting wrapped up in a good story that will kick my brain into gear. Strange murders, devious disappearances, and just general strange happenings - I love all of it.
Half-Life Alyx: Levitation is the most compelling reason to dust off my VR goggles I've seen since Half-Life: Alyx. Out today after two years of development, the ambitious mod promises 3-4 hours of barrel-chucking, window-breaking, train-dodging, combine-blasting fun.
Perhaps the full package will pale in comparison to Valve's polish, but the bit in this trailer where the player scurries down a train while contorting around manhacks looks oh-so appetisingly transportative. I think it's time I dug out my lighthouses.
Back when our guide to the best Black Friday gaming mouse deals was but a wee list of early offers, I’d check every few days whether the Logitech G Pro Wireless had a compelling sale going for it. Every time, nada, at least in the UK. Only now, during Black Friday proper, has its price dropped – and damned far too, with Amazon chopping £70 off the RRP to bring our top wireless gaming mouse pick down to just £50.
Playing Nidhogg is like playing a dozen frantic games of rock-paper-scissors back to back. Like all the best couch co-op games, it's very easy to get to grips with the controls: you have a sword, and you can raise it or lower it across three different heights to try and get around your opponent's guard. There are other things you can do, like ducking, and jumping, and throwing your sword. But so many fights come down to a tense little close-range shuffle where each player stands just out of range of the other's blade, moving their sword higher and lower in a seconds-long game of chicken.
Oh look, now I'm holding rock! Can you switch to paper fast enough? Nope, now I'm holding scissors! Oh, and now it's paper! Now rock again! Now paper! What will you do?... Oh. You can just jump over me and keep running. Fair enough, I suppose.
A few weeks ago, I got the chance to visit Supermassive HQ for a hands-on with The Devil In Me, the fourth game in — and season one finale of — The Dark Pictures Anthology. While I was there, I also had the chance to interview three of the series leads: Tom Heaton, creative director on both The Devil In Me and Man Of Medan; Will Doyle, creative director across the whole Dark Pictures Anthology and director of last year's entry House Of Ashes; and Dan McDonald, the studio director for the anthology.
Survival games! Oh, the many disparaging remarks I could make if only I had time in between punching rocks and eating an entire deer. It's not often that I recommend one here, and jokes aside, it'd be unfair and untrue to say it's because there aren't enough good ones. It's more that I don't have much room for new ones.
Lilith Odyssey is, if we must, a survival game and a roguelike (oh, the many dispara-[yeah alright, alright. Jesus. - ed.]), but that is reductive. This is a strange and somewhat contradictory game I feel uneasy comparing directly to anything, except possibly the wonderful Taxinaut (which is now on Steam, incidentally). Lilith Odyssey is very much what I'd call a vibes-based game.
Black Friday generally doesn’t involve as many CPU deals as it does, say, SSD deals or gaming keyboard deals – probably because there just aren’t that many CPUs. Nevertheless, a few choice discounts have emerged for an unlikely group of chips: Intel’s 13th Gen Raptor Lake processors. These only released late in October, so it’s a welcome surprise to them on the Black Friday chopping block so soon.
During my journey into the depths of TikTok's dabloon craze, I’ve joined a cult who worship the high priestess Dabloonis, have sailed across the high seas on a pirate ship called The Dabloonian, and accidentally taken part in a dabloon heist that's now made me a wanted fugitive by the dabloon police. It's been a strange couple of hours.
Dabloontok is TikTok’s newest trend, and is probably best described as a chaotic player-generated RPG where users collect an imaginary currency called "dabloons" cashed out by awkwardly photoshopped black cats (usually) in fantasy settings. These cats will either gift you dabloons, steal your dabloons, or tell you what you can do with your dabloons. It's as simple as that, and so far there more than 520 million views on the dabloons hashtag. It’s kinda wild.
A tiny bridge makes so much sense as a late-game Vampire Survivors challenge stage. The game's arguably at its most captivating when the hordes start clogging up your death machinery, squeezing you into tighter and tighter corridors as you pray for a power-up or multi-item chest. It's pleasantly squirmy, but will the bridge added in yesterday's appropriately titled "The Tiny One" update be too squirmy?
The update also added a couple new achievements, and an item that lets you banish a weapon or power-up of your choosing across all of your runs. Come see.
Sometimes, my friends, the Internet pulls something out of the ether that truly stumps even the most knowledgeable and informed among us. Case in point: today’s rumblings that Grasshopper Manufacture, the devs behind the No More Heroes series, are working on a AAA game in the Aliens universe. This caught Grasshopper Manufacture's founder and CEO Goichi Suda, aka Suda51, so much by surprise that he wordlessly tweeted his utter bemusement at the rumour. I’m taking that as a no for the Alien game, then.
I’ve been recommending the WD Blue SN570 to anyone who’ll listen for over a year, and now it’s not just one of the best gaming SSDs you can buy, but the star of several of the best Black Friday SSD deals. Multiple capacities of this cheap but deceptively speedy solid state drive are on sale today, with savings of up to 44%.
Black Friday: The Actual Day Itself has begun, which means this is perhaps your best chance of picking up the SSD, keyboard, GPU, or monitor you've wanted on the cheap.
While we're gathering up Black Friday's best PC gaming deals, discounts and price changes can come and go quickly. For that reason, we're also running this liveblog. We'll post the best discounts we spot throughout the day - and you should feel free to post your own discount discoveries in the comments.
Fantasy strategy game Total War: Warhammer 3 has got its final patch of 2022, update 2.3.0, which brings the single-player customisable endgame scenarios to its multiplayer mode. This change allows whoever is setting up one of the game’s Immortal Empires campaigns in multiplayer to fiddle with the endgame how they please. Devs Creative Assembly have even gone and done one of those video thingies for the update, which you can watch below.
Another Black Friday means another opportunity for the Logitech G502 Hero - RPS readers' most favouritest gaming mouse - to get nice and cheap. This button-rich desk rodent is a particularly common sight during big PC hardware sales like Black Friday, but it's hard to tire of seeing when it's one of the best gaming mice ever made, and I actually prefer it to the recent G502 X refresh - especially when it's 56% off. That's precisely 56% off in both the UK and US, too.
Alright, technically it's the Logitech G502 Hero SE (Special Edition) that has the best available price in the UK; the standard model is £5 more for some reason. But the only difference between this and the all-black G502 Hero is the addition of some white highlights, so otherwise they share the same comfortable shape, highly customisable 11-button layout, and sharp 25,600dpi sensor.
The magic of Yakuza games (now known as Like A Dragon, technically but hey) lies in the dramatic ascents up the Millenium Tower to prevent surprisingly muscular 60-year-old men from detonating Kamurocho. The rain falls. The lads rip their suits off. Then they settle things with their fists, because to do anything otherwise would be silly.
But the real magic of Yakuza lies in its minigames, one of the best being karaoke. And thanks to Game Informer's interview with Ryu Ga Gotoku Studio, we now know why their games are obsessed with the beloved singsong.
Imagine not being fazed that a powerful demon cursed you, while maintaining your style and composure to investigate how to free yourself before your time’s up. I’m not sure I could manage not to totally lose it under those circumstances, but survival horror Sorry We’re Closed from devs à la mode and publishers Akupara Games plonks you into the vaguely 32-bit shoes of cool cucumber Michelle to do exactly that. The game takes the familiar fixed camera angles from classics such as Resident Evil, Silent Hill, and Alone In The Dark, but combat’s being handled in first-person. Have a look for yourself below, and watch out for your third eye.
.jpg/BROK/resize/1920x1920%3E/format/jpg/quality/80/MSI-Katana-GF66-key-art-(2).jpg)
It’s still the frigid morning of Black Friday 2022, but there might already be a superlative gaming laptop deal up for grabs. Here in the UK, Ebuyer has an RTX 3070-equipped version of the MSI Katana GF66 laptop down to just £950 – a saving of £449.
Not only is that a big, meaty chunk of cash to carve off, it’s also an outstandingly low price for a gaming laptop with the RTX 3070 specifically. I’ve seen this high-end GPU in a few other laptops that are up for Black Friday sales, but they’re tending more towards the £1100 mark. In terms of getting the most graphical power for the least money, then, the Katana GF66 is unlikely be beaten today. Even by the RTX 3080 laptop for £1200 deal that's still going.
Activision Blizzard executive vice-president for corporate affairs Lulu Cheng Meservey has tweeted that the company “won't hesitate to fight to defend” Microsoft’s $68.7 billion (£57 billion) buyout of the publisher. The comment came after reports began circulating that the US Federal Trade Commission could bring a lawsuit against Microsoft over the deal. Anonymous sources claiming to be close to the matter also suggested that a lawsuit from the FTC might begin as early as December.
AMD's Ryzen 9 7900X is an awesome gaming processor that also kicks a lot of butt in content creation tasks, but a high asking price means that it's out of reach of many. However, that is slowly changing, with Black Friday Eve bringing a new low price on the high-end CPU: £475, down from a launch RRP of £600. That's a tidy £125 discount and a great price for one of the fastest consumer CPUs money can buy.
The best budget gaming monitor just got cheaper. Dell have knocked the price of their G2722HS 27-in 1080p 165Hz gaming monitor down to £129, but when you use the code BFUKG2722HS it gets even cheaper: just £116.10. That's a tiny fraction of the original £239 price point, and one heck of a Black Friday discount on one of the best value gaming monitors of recent memory.
Gene Shift Auto began life as a Geneshift, a topdown, Grand Theft Auto-inspired multiplayer game which dropped into Steam Early Access in 2017. It added a battle royale mode the year after, when we were all drunk on Plunkbat. Now it's changed name and it's going free-to-play on November 28th.
Warhammer 40,000: Darktide isn't out until November 30th - unless you pre-ordered it, in which case it's playable in beta right now. This also means that it's already being regularly patched and expanded with new features. Today's update, version 1.0.8, introduced "the first element of the crafting system" as well as new cosmetics.
Dwarf Fortress is coming to Steam on December 6th, which on its own is fantastic news. Even better news: it will have Steam Workshop support from day one.
It's been a long while since there was a new Splinter Cell game, but you'll soon be able to listen to Splinter Cell on the radio. BBC Radio 4 are producing an eight-part drama series called Tom Clancy's Splinter Cell: Firewall which will broadcast this December.
It’s that time of the week again, when the Epic Games Store reveal what new games they’ll be giving away for free next Thursday. If you haven’t jumped on it straight away, then you can nab EA Motive’s decent sci-fi dogfighting sim Star Wars: Squadrons for precisely nowt until December 1st. Starting from December 1st, you’ll have the opportunity to claim game creation tool RPG In A Box and fantasy turn-based strategy Fort Triumph.
This year’s Black Friday season is awash with early deals on gaming monitors, and there’s one I want to highlight before it sells out – which might be imminently, if its stock tracker is accurate. It’s the NZXT Canvas 27Q, which I recently called the best 1440p gaming monitor you can buy. And that was before it felt the force of a 30% Black Friday saving, with £116 sliced off the RRP.
Back in the day, I could get lost in The Elder Scrolls III: Morrowind for days, when I could get it to stop crashing anyway. There’s loads more Morrowind in 2022 than I could’ve imagined as a teenager though, as the Tamriel Rebuilt mod project has been working for decades to add other areas of the Elder Scrolls’ provincial mainland into the game. Their latest release, 22.11, landed this week, adding a huge one-two punch of expansions. You can see some of one of those, Dominions Of Dust, in the trailer below.
Today is a sad occasion on The Electronic Wireless Show, as Matthew is leaving the podcast, and we take the opportunity to go on a short hiatus while we search for a replacement by making staffers perform tricks for our amusement, reality competition style. But though it be sad, it is an occasion nonetheless, which means Matthew is going out in style as we build the ideal video game character dinner party. Spoilers: there is a giant ant and a boat full of cocaine.
As it's his last day, Matthew also does a fiendishly difficult Cavern Of Lies themed around secret endings. Which of us will end up dead and loaded onto the cocaine boat while the others beat a retreat?
Upgrading to an AMD Ryzen 5 7600X or Ryzen 7 7700X could prove trickier than with an Intel equivalent, as while the latest Core CPUs give you a choice of using DDR4 or DDR5 memory, the Ryzen 7000 family is only compatible with the newer and more expensive DDR5. There’s no re-using old DDR4 sticks with AMD’s latest and greatest, then, but with this week’s Black Friday deals you could get a brand new DDR5 kit for less.
You'll have heard by now that Pentiment is bloody good. It's a medieval murder mystery with monks and manuscripts and other m things - including the protagonist, who is an artist called Andreas Maler. It's inspired by The Name Of The Rose, a murder mystery similarly focused on a medieval scriptorium in a monastary (and notable for being adapted into a film where Sean Connery is a detective monk aided by a tiny baby Christian Slater).
In the ol' days books, were copied by monks onto parchment made of animal skin. Most people weren't educated enough to read, in case poor people got radical ideas like maybe they should get some rights, and controlling the flow and spread of information was one of the things that made the church as powerful as it was. Pentiment takes place just as printing presses are becoming popular, which makes access to knowledge more readily available. Part of how the game conveys this is through the dialogue - not the stuff people are saying, although that helps, but what their speech bubbles looks like when they talk. You've probably already heard this, but I want to show you in a bit more detail.
