Rock, Paper, Shotgun

Having recently complained about managing traffic in building games, it is only natural and right that I now praise one that is entirely about managing traffic.

I've had an eye on All Quiet Roads for months, but between Tile Cities and Blink Planets it seemed a bit much to throw this recommendation at you as well. But a game exclusively about the thing I hate most holding my interest this well has to be respected. All Quiet Roads also balances relaxing, freeform play with stressful, occasionally overwhelming challenges, giving it a tonal variety that I wasn't really expecting from such a simple concept.

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My strongest memory from my 100-hour-long first playthrough of Horizon Zero Dawn was the first time I took on a Thunderjaw. A colossal T-Rex-esque machine with powerful legs, twisted metal horns, and artillery cannons strapped to its back, it loomed larger than any other enemy I'd seen so far in the game. My first thought as I crouched behind a nearby rock and surveyed its chromium splendour was: "I am definitely not yet ready to fight this thing."

My second thought came quickly after the first, when my cover was blown by a nearby Watcher that immediately reared back and emitted a shrill noise that alerted the Thunderjaw to my presence. "Oh shite. Here we go."

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Stress Level Zero's Boneworks was Half-life: Alyx before Half-Life: Alyx released. Released in December 2019, its combination of deeply tactile interactions with a campaign heavily inspired by Half-Life 2 represented a major step forward for VR experiences at the time. It had a fair few rough edges, and you needed a cast-iron stomach to play it, but for about four months it was the ambitious, all-encompassing VR experience that the medium had hitherto lacked.

Then Half-Life: Alyx came around, raising the (crow)bar so high that you'd need to be Mr Fantastic or some sort of bird with hands to reach it. Which is partly why Bonelab, the newly released sequel to Boneworks, hasn't quite gelled with me in the way its older sibling did. Technologically, its still very impressive, and noodling around with its massive interactive potential remains undeniably fun. But it often feels like a lot of good ideas with too little connective tissue between them. It's also even less compromising on your physiology than Boneworks was, seemingly determined to make existing in VR as uncomfortable as possible.

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Raw Fury have announced they’re publishing the narrative-horror game, My Work Is Not Yet Done from indie developer Sutemi Production. In their announcement tweet, Raw Fury describe the game as “nothing you’ve ever experienced before,” which in my books is more than enough invitation to plug its announcement trailer straight into my eyeballs:

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Supernatural doesn't have to mean scary, so this Halloween weekend you might enjoy some unearthly laughs with The Darkside Detective: A Fumble In The Dark. Yesterday, the delightful point 'n' click adventure game launched the final free bonus chapter of its spoOoky anthology, with three new mini-cases in one. Darkside Detective games are great madcap adventures with buckets of fun, so more is certainly welcome—and at a great price!

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It really is that time again: the time of peering through price histories, of comparing the latency figures of two seemingly identical RAM kits, of falling to one’s knees and screaming at the sun when Amazon adds £5 to an SSD for no reason. That’s right, Black Friday 2022 is almost here, which means so are the early Black Friday deals on PC hardware!

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I'm not a very big enjoyer of horror games. On the very rare occasion that I do boot up a horror game, a chemical change seems to occur in my body. The part of my brain responsible for going "holy mother of hell get me away from this scary thing" is dampened. I expect to be scared, and therefore I'm more resilient to said scariness. I might just not be very good at getting into the horror games mindset. My brain is too busy battening down all the hatches and readying the engines of war against the oncoming spookies and ghosties.

The times I've been most scared playing a game are when I don't expect to be scared. And what better way to lull myself into a false sense of security this Halloween than to play an otherwise not-so-scary game, with just one particularly horror-esque moment?

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Square Enix have given us another look at Forspoken, the open world action RPG slated for release on January 24th 2023. The latest deep dive trailer details the game’s magical parkour abilities that you’ll be using to get across the fantasy realm of Athia. Forspoken’s flashy, stamina-based movement is by far the most distinctive thing about it in my eyes, so let's take a look at Frey's parkour abilities below.

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Early last week, I had the opportunity to get hands-on with the demo for The Devil In Me, the upcoming fourth entry and season one finale of The Dark Pictures Anthology. I'm a big Dark Pictures fan, but had some reservations about this latest outing due to its subject matter, which this time around draws more inspiration from real-life serial killers than supernatural legends. Still, by the end of my 90 minutes or so with the game, my feelings had evolved considerably, and I'm happy to say I'm now way more excited for it than I was. In fact, I think this could easily end up as the best Dark Pictures game yet.

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Overwatch 2’s arctic scientist Mei has had a notable bug in her toolkit since launch, but the problem is becoming more persistent for some players. All of Mei’s abilities revolve around ice, whether slowing down enemies with a snowy spray or incubating in a cocoon of ice. However, a compilation on Reddit showcases various problems with her Ice Wall ability, which seems to be in need of some serious TLC.

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CEO of Microsoft Gaming Phil Spencer spoke about the possibility of price increases for consoles, games and Game Pass at the Wall Street Journal's annual Tech Live conference (thanks to The Verge for transcribing.) "We've held price on our console, we've held price on games and our subscription. I don't think we'll be able to do that forever," Spencer admits. "I do think at some point we'll have to raise some prices on certain things." He was quick to point out, though, that these changes wouldn't come into effect this holiday season, as Microsoft wants to "maintain the prices that we have."

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Bad news for RTX 4090 owners this morning. Reports are coming in that the 16-pin power adapter for Nvidia's flagship RTX 40 series GPU is getting so hot it's actually melting the hardware, which is... err... not something you want happening inside your PC case.

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Sonic Frontiers will release on PC in November, but it's not the last you'll see of the blue hedgehog in 2022. Netflix have announced that Sonic Prime, their new animated series, will release on December 15th.

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Rain World's wholesome, physicsy slugcat GIFs were breadcrumbs which eventually led to one of this century's most brutal games. Now it's getting DLC. Rain World: Downpour is arriving in January 2023 and will add five new slugcats, hundreds of new rooms to survive, official mod support, and co-op. Check the announcement trailer below.

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You can now test a new version of Steam's Big Picture mode which applies the interface Valve designed for Steam Deck. It includes several of the handy features of the Deck's UI, including a new home screen, universal search, and more. Find more details and how to opt-in to the beta below.

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Around 24 hours ago, Gotham Knights on Steam received its first patch. Among fixes for was various bugs, the game was also updated to remove Denuvo's anti-tamper DRM from the game. Sometimes games remove their DRM after the launch window, but not normally just five days after release, making its removal from Gotham Knights a surprise.

Well, now Denuvo has been re-added.

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The Intel Arc A750 is a surprisingly strong graphics card for 1080p and 1440p gaming, and after an initial period of unavailability it is now back on sale at Newegg in the US.

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The AMD Ryzen 5 5600 is a surprisingly capable processor, with the single-core grunt of the rest of the Zen 3 family and only slightly lower clock speeds than the top-end six-core processor, the Ryzen 5600X. The Ryzen 5600X costs the best part of £200, but the vanilla 5600 is down to £145 at Ebuyer - a great value in my book.

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I pity anyone who has to review, or god help them, write a guide for Terra Invicta, because doing it even semi-comprehensively would take longer than I expect to live.

This is a hugely ambitious game, covering something I've never seen before, with a scope that makes Europa Universalis seem limited. It is a complicated, huge, and ponderous alien invasion simulator that constantly threatens to drop the other boot on you the entire time. Anything you do could be the butterfly whose little wingflaps eventually result in the obliteration of the planet. It is not a game to be powered through, but to be played and contemplated exclusively for a solid month.

That is its central weakness. But I think it had to be this way. Its commitment to an idea is demanding, but if you can tolerate some issues with clarity and presentation, the payoff for meeting it is utterly unique.

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Today has brought the launch of Signalis, a new retro-styled survival horror about an android trapped in a spooky place in deep space. It looks neat! I've heard it's good! I can neither confirm nor deny that because I can't get past the main menu. The background is a big blinking eye, see, and it follows my mouse cursor, so I cannot resist making the eye look around and go silly. I don't know how the devs expected players to beat this near-impossible first task of leaving the eye alone long enough to click the "Begin" button.

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Wanna get into the Halloween spirit but are a bit of a wimp (100% guilty), or just struggle with horror games in general (1000% guilty)? No worries; I got you. Here's a list of the best spooky games for non-horror fans.

Don’t get me wrong, I love Halloween, I just don’t want to have the bejesus scared outta me, you know? I like games that give me a lil bit of spooky-ookiness, but not like bone-chilling, stomach-churning, nightmare inducing, wont-sleep-for-a-week horror games. Absolutely not. You won’t find any Resident Evil or Silent Hill recommendations here! Feel safe knowing that the spooky-not-scary games you'll find below will get you thoroughly into the Halloween mood, just without all the over-the-top violence and buckets of gore. Enjoy!

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I’ve mentioned before that I’m into survival games with a goal past staying alive, because if surviving is the only goal, what’s the point in living at all (he says, with a firm glare at the Tory party)? Grounded has its main quest and Minecraft has the Ender Dragon, for example, which gives you something to work towards past simply keeping your heart beating. 7 Days to Die is the biggest counterpoint to that, with its routine weekly horde attacks delivering moreish gameplay that keeps me playing way past my bedtime.

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Developer Jumpship have announced that their dystopian adventure game, Somerville, is coming to PC, Xbox consoles, and Game Pass on November 15th 2022. The news was revealed on Jumpship’s Twitter account with a cryptic logo, and Somerville's mysterious vibe is no accident as it comes from Playdead's former co-founder Dino Patti, who left the studio after shipping creepy side-on platformers Limbo and Inside.

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Apex Legends: Eclipse, the 15th season of Respawn's peerless battle royale, is nearly upon us. We've already seen quite a bit about Broken Moon, the brand new map being added with Season 15 - but now Respawn has finally released more details about the new Legend, Catalyst, and the Ferrofluid-powered abilities she brings to the Apex Games.

It turns out that part of Catalyst's diverse skillset is an Ultimate ability that may at last provide some serious counterplay to the ever-present scan meta dominated by recon Legends such as Bloodhound and Seer. Take a look at Catalyst's abilities in the new Season 15 vignette trailer below.

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Happy skeleton war month, ya filty animals! This week on the Electronic Wireless Show we talk about dread, as in, the thing Matthew feels when confronted with glistening food, or when he knows he has to record a podcast with us. We talk about some cracking scary games, going a bit down the beaten track and away from our normal path of least resistance (talking about Red Dead Redemption 2 and BioWare games). We also have some spooky recommendations for you to spice up your Halloween! Plus, it's Nate turn to produce a Cavern Of Lies. More like Cavern Of Jump Scares! And we coin a couple of new euphemisms you're sure to work into your every day language.

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Saturnalia isn't a terribly long game, but it has spent much longer occupying my thoughts. Any time in the past couple of weeks that my friends and colleagues thought they were talking to me, they were in fact talking to an exquisite Italian neon-folk horror game wearing my skin and looking out of the eye-holes in my skull. On at least one occasion I lay in bed at 3am, sweaty and frozen in half-asleep fear, because I thought I'd heard a strange rattling noise...

In fact it was not stillness, but the panic-sprint into darkness that became my main and oft-unsuccessful tactic whenever I heard the creature of Gravoi. Gravoi itself is a small but inconveniently maze-like fictional Sardinian town, host to a yearly folk festival that, every so often, involves the unwary being carried off and killed by a... something. Unfortunately, four very unwary outsiders - rendered outsiders for a variety of reasons, whether they're locals or not - find themselves having to survive the night of this festival, armed with things like matches, firecrackers and a polaroid camera.

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A little while back, I went to Cornwall with some friends in the hopes we'd detox on lovely beaches and coastal walks. Somehow, we managed a mental cleanse between horrendous downpours that knocked us sideways and made our socks all soggy. And while we cocooned ourselves in metal and waited for these bouts of terrible weather to subside, we played disgusting amounts of Assassin's Creed: Valhalla.

Over the course of a couple of weeks, we racked up a solid 60+ hours of game time. I'd wake up and see my friend clearing map markers. I'd pop out for a quick run (yes, I ran on my holiday like a chump) and return to see both of my friends clearing map markers. Did we enjoy it? Sometimes! But then, why couldn't we stop playing? The Ubisoft Effect, I reckon.

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For the past week, Marvel anti-hero Deadpool has been taking over the social media accounts for Firaxis' upcoming turn-based tactics game Marvel’s Midnight Suns’, leading many to believe he was going to be a playable character when it launches on December 2nd. Now, Firaxis have confirmed that, yep, Deadpool will be coming to Marvel's Midnight Suns, but only as part of its newly unveiled season pass.

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What's better than a little city full of mysteries to solve? A mysterious little city trapped in a time loop, where you slowly learn all the secrets but no one remembers what you did last time around. That's The Forgotten City, and if you're on Game Pass, I do recommend having a go before it leaves Microsoft's service next week. It's a great puzzle box running to clockwork, like if Outer Wilds had you meddle with people's lives rather than machinery.

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Game Of Thrones author George R. R. Martin has admitted he hasn’t played Elden Ring, despite creating the history and lore for FromSoftware’s RPG. He does have a fairly good reason for it, though. On The Late Show with Stephen Colbert Martin said, “I have not played it because people seem to want this Winds Of Winter book,” the (very) long-awaited sixth chapter in the Game Of Thrones series.

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Unknown Worlds Entertainment have announced big changes are coming to their tabletop battling game Moonbreaker. In a blog post, the developers announced they're removing all monetisation from the game, including its in-game currencies and in-game store, in order to "better reflect our early access goals". The changes will come into effect today, alongside the Moonbreaker's first content update, Zax’s Story.

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BioWare have announced, via a blog post by general manager Gary McKay, that Dragon Age: Dreadwolf, the fourth game in their fantasy RPG series, has completed its Alpha milestone. If that means nothing to you, BioWare describe it as the moment “a game all comes together… we can experience the entire game, from the opening scenes of the first mission to the very end.” The Dragon Age sequel was officially announced in 2018, but it was initially conceived as a game about wizard heists before restarting development. So, Dreadwolf's progress should be encouraging to fans of the series.

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The last Frog Detective game is here, marking the end of an era for everyone's favourite amphibian-based mystery game series. Our froggy pal has saved a haunted island from the clutches of ghosts, thwarted wizardous party-poopers in Warlock Woods, and now their investigatory prowess has taken him to the wild west. Frog Detective 3: Corruption At Cowboy County may be the last in Worm Club's trio of Frog Detective games, but it's also a certified banger, successfully joining the first and second games in putting a stupid smile on my face for the entire time I played.

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38-inch gaming ultrawides are few and far between, and it's particularly rare to find good deals on them - so that's why I was excited to see this Dell Alienware AW3821DW on sale with a code from HUKD. When you use code HUKDAW3821DW, this monitor drops from £1299 to £899, an incredible value for a monitor of this spec.

Let's quickly run through those specs. This 38-in monitor has a resolution of 3840x1600, essentially a shorter version of 4K, with a 144Hz refresh rate. The monitor is Nvidia G-Sync Ultimate certified, meaning it has a physical G-Sync module to prevent judder and tearing, and it also gets bright enough to earn the lofty DisplayHDR 600 rating. All in all, it's a ton of monitor for a fairly reasonable price.

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The Ryzen 7 5800X3D is one of AMD's fastest gaming CPUs - and the only one of the top contenders that runs on cheap and widely available AM4 motherboards with DDR4 RAM. Earlier this week we covered a deal for the 5800X3D in the US, and now we're back to finish the job with a deal for the UK market.

Right now Ebuyer are taking orders for the 5800X3D at £349, a solid £110 discount from its UK RRP. A lot of folks have already jumped on this deal, using up Ebuyer's existing stock, but you can order now for delivery on October 31st - and get a spooky Halloween upgrade for your PC.

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Welcome to Part Two of The RPS 100, our annual countdown of our favourite PC games from across the ages. Earlier in the week, we ranked our favourite games from 100-51, which you can find over in Part One of this year's list. But now we're here for the main event, counting down our top 50 games all the way to number one. Come and join us for the final stretch.

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Hello again. Now that Call of Duty: Modern Warfare 2 (the second one) is out in full, not just its campaign, I’ve revisited my best settings guide to see whether it can provide a preset-beating balance of looks and performance in the multiplayer component as well. And it does! If anything the various online modes tend to run more smoothly and consistently than the singleplayer story, but whichever you prefer playing, you can make just a few key changes to visibly improve your frames per second. And a COD with more frames just feels better.

Despite this universal truth, MW2 can be a toughie on older PC hardware: even graphics cards listed among the recommended system requestions need quality cuts to get a stable 60fps at 1080p. In this guide I’ll be showing you how various GPUs perform and where, precisely, the make those cuts if needed.

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I didn't have the greatest understanding of how one is meant to play a real-time strategy game as a child. It wasn't a neck-and-neck, ebb-and-flow struggle between two equal powers. Instead I played RTS games as though they were city-builders, with the added bonus of absolutely steamrolling through the AI when I'd had enough fun.

This was true of basically every RTS I played back then. In Starcraft I'd amass an army of Protoss Carriers and launch them across the map. In Supreme Commander, I'd tech all the way up to the Experimental Weapons, and then send the colossal CZAR Mothership to Independence-Day the entire enemy base. But my favourite variation of this was in Impossible Creatures: a wonderful early noughties strategy game where you create your own units by stitching together parts from different animals.

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I’m fairly sure that zombies are the perfect video game enemies. They’re relentless, for one thing, happily chomping their way through anyone who gets in their path. The undead are faceless as well, so you don’t feel too bad about escorting them back to their graves. Yet they can be poignant, dramatic reminders of friends and family that meant a lot to characters too, depending on who the shambling corpse used to be. If I was going to hire any enemy for a game, I’d hire a zombie. Then they’d eat my brain. That’s why I hired them! So to celebrate our very iconic, vitality-challenged friends, I've put together a list of my favourite zombie games.

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Developer Strange Scaffold surprise launched El Paso, Nightmare today as part of Steam Scream Fest. The team describe Nightmare as a “mind-shattering extradimensional take on the classic CoD zombies formula” with some emotional baggage on the side. Essentially, it’s a horror FPS that has you up against vampires, werewolves, and angels (the bad kind) across six biomes. This bite-sized FPS acts as a companion piece to next year’s El Paso, Elsewhere, the previously announced third-person shooter

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