Rock, Paper, Shotgun

To coincide with the game’s 15th anniversary today, CD Projekt Red have announced that The Witcher Remake is currently in the early stages of development. The “full-fledged” remake of 2007’s RPG is being developed from the ground up in Unreal Engine 5 and will use the same toolsets that CDPR is creating for their upcoming Witcher trilogy. The studio call the project a “modern reimagining” and say they’re “updating the game for the next generation of gamers to experience it.”

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I've done a lot of talking about The Callisto Protocol this year, starting with the game's gore system and spiky walls at Summer Geoff Fest, before finding out its Die Hard and Shaun Of The Dead inspirations at Gamescom. In-between all the talking? Lots of slides and presentations and absolutely no hands anywhere near controllers. But finally, finally, I've played a 90-minute PS5 demo of The Callisto Protocol and can confirm that it felt like a last-gen game in a good way: all photorealistic sweat and blood scrawled on walls, coupled with 360-era exploration and fighting. Refreshingly familiar, I'd say.

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Team Ninja have announced that their fantasy action title, Wo Long: Fallen Dynasty, is slated for release on March 3rd, 2023 on consoles, PC and Game Pass. Wo Long is a Chinese-martial arts game set during the Han dynasty - this time with deadly demons for you to battle. The game was previously revealed at this year’s Xbox & Bethesda Showcase, where it made an impressive debut.

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Creative Assembly have responded to allegations of abuse within the company regarding a former employee and have vowed to investigate. The Total War developer say they’re working with an "external party" on the investigation and have asked former employees to share their experiences if they “feel able to do so.”

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To celebrate Fallout's 25th anniversary this week, Amazon Prime Video have released the first official glimpse of their upcoming Fallout TV show. Amazon posted a screengrab from the show on Twitter last night, depicting three Vault 33 dwellers staring at a silhouette coming in or out of the Vault - and what appears to be a body lying on the ground beside them. This is the first and only proper look we've had at the adaptation since August’s leaked set images mysteriously disappeared from the internet, but that hasn’t stopped fans from wildly theorising about what's going on.

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Last time, you decided that relocatable buildings are better than slide kicks. I often side with functionality over flash but honestly, this is gutting. Still, this is science, and I respect the process. Next up, I am asking you to choose between two things which, if we're honest with ourselves, are both really about trying to be cool. What's better: parrying projectiles or customisable horn honks?

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After the past three years, I’d have happily never heard the word "plague" again, let alone in the context of one of my favourite co-op games. Yet after an early play around with Deep Rock Galactic Season 3, I’m already sold that this update – which centers around a corrupting, planet-wide infection – could be its best one yet.

After repelling a robot-spamming rival corp across Seasons 1 and 2, your reward in Season 3 – which launches on November 3rd – is to find your mining operating pelted by a meteorite storm. And they’re carrying a nasty payload: Rockpox, a contagion that quickly infects both the caves of Hoxxes IV and the many, many giant bugs living within them. These sickly Glyphids and contaminated caverns will present you and your fellow space dwarves with some new perils, but also new opportunities to turn a management-pleasing profit. And isn’t providing value to shareholders why we’re all here to begin with?

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Nothing frightens me more than not being in control. The fear of an outside force pushing me into the corners of my mind and redecorating however they wish. It’s what should be scary about zombies when they’re not just mindless headshot fodder. This is also the main fear behind Endoparasitic, a top-down horror game released earlier this week. A research facility suffers a parasitic outbreak, leaving you with one arm, surrounded by mutated monsters. Oh, and you’re also infected by one of those deadly parasites I just mentioned. Jolly!

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Call Of Duty: Modern Warfare 2's campaign may be the best it's been for a long while. There's great variety in the game's first-person shooty bang with plenty of interesting ideas to break the illusion of it being an on-the-rails ride. Where it excels is in its action movie sequences, but it also takes itself too seriously at times and struggles to balance the sensitivities of conflict within its choppy story.

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165Hz gaming monitors are getting so cheap these days, that it doesn't make much sense to pick up anything less for gaming if you're buying new. Case in point is this MSI Artymis MAG242C gaming monitor, which offers a 24-in span, 1080p resolution and curved VA panel for £120 after a £30 discount at Currys.

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AMD's Ryzen 7000 processors are brilliant, often beating Intel 12th-gen offerings and drawing close with 13th-gen, while offering support for PCIe 5.0 SSDs, DDR5 RAM and a brand new AM5 socket. For content creation, they're by far the best CPUs AMD has ever produced - but for gaming, there is another option: the Ryzen 7 5800X3D. This CPU remains stunningly fast in some games that can take advantage of its uniquely huge L3 cache, and best of all works with a wide range of inexpensive AM4 motherboards with cheap DDR4 RAM.

Pound for pound, it's by far the best AMD CPU for gaming on the market - and now it's been reduced to just $329 at Antonline via Ebay. That's a healthy $120 reduction from its US MSRP of $449, and a great price overall given the level of gaming performance it provides.

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Today marks the 25th anniversary of strategy classic Age Of Empires, and to celebrate Xbox Game Studios have announced a ream of updates coming to Age Of Empires II: Definitive Edition next year. Technically, the main bit of news from tonight's anniversary stream is that both Age Of Empires II: DE and Age Of Empires IV will be arriving on Xbox consoles in 2023 (that, and Age Of Mythology is coming back), but the upshot of all that is that the PC versions will be getting the very same benefits, including controller support, crossplay with consoles and cloud gaming support.

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Horror games are usually a bit too scary for me to play alone. I actually barely manage to play them at all, though not for lack of trying. Whenever I load them up, I just can’t help but pause every five seconds for a breather. Multiplayer games are far more manageable, though, and often also turn stifled screams into contagious laughter as your friends terrorise each other.

If you’re a scaredy cat like me and would rather scream at the horrors of your unhinged mates than at unpredictable AIs and scripted jump scares, then you’re in the right spot. Here are five games in which your mates can play as the monster. Some are creepy, some are cute, and none of them will force you to run around alone. If you're looking to get monstrous yourself this Halloween, Liam's done a list all about games that make you the monster. No overlap, promise.

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Shareware platformers defined my PC gaming as a kid. Yeah, a cheeky blast on Wolfenstein 3D was okay, but Commander Keen and Duke Nukem were an amazing discovery for a small person who’d been introduced to games through the NES. One of my all-time favourites is Apogee’s Crystal Caves, a gem of a platformer about an interstellar miner who goes space spelunking in search of alien crystals.

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It’s been two years since developer Origame Digital released the beloved photography game Umurangi Generation and since then, the team have been relatively quiet. That all changed over the weekend when Umurangi’s composer, ThorHighHeels, posted a YouTube video showcasing three obscure horror games. A short teaser for Origame’s FiveSeven was mysteriously tucked in the middle of it.

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Last week I reviewed New Tales From The Borderlands and I really didn't like it. This was upsetting to me; this may come as a surprise, but I try to avoid playing and reviewing games I think I won't like. I don't want to go out of my way to be mean, and I also don't want to spend hours not enjoying myself. I go into almost every game I play actively wanting to enjoy it (the exception being things like Succubus, which I can only assume are trying an avant garde technique to plumb new, unexplored depths of badness on purpose).

As it turned out, a lot of other reviewers did like it. I'm not going to object to that, because it takes all sorts to make a world, and so on. Rather, it made me wonder if I'd sort of hallucinated how much I liked the first Tales From The Borderlands. How fantastic it was, managing to be both the best Telltale game and the best Borderlands game in one, was a big part of why I was so excited for New Tales. It came out a long time ago, and I hadn't played it for a while. Maybe it wasn't how I remembered. Maybe I'd changed, you know?

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When Adam Isgreen, creative director at World’s Edge, first played the Age Of Empires series, he was still working at Westwood Studios on Command & Conquer. “The first thing I was impressed about more than anything with this series was just like, wow! History! That's really smart," he tells me. "Like, there's no need to explain anything to people. You don't have to be like, oh, there's a laser gun or this is a magic missile. It's like, it's a wheelbarrow. I know what that does!”

To Isgreen, it’s this level of accessibility that’s carried Age Of Empires all the way to today’s 25th anniversary. The instantly legible historical warfare - “pikemen, ranged units and cavalry” - paired with randomised maps that promised, effectively, an infinite amount of replayability; “It just had a lot of features that I think players really loved and kind of defined itself along those features in a way that, yeah, it's just outlasted everything else.”

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Praise the sun! Dark Souls II's online features for the Scholar Of The First Sin edition are back up and working after months of being down. Back in January, FromSoftware deactivated online features for the Dark Souls trilogy on PC due to the prominence of hackers and security concerns. Recently, Dark Souls III servers were reactivated (before being deactivated and reactivated again) and now it's Dark Souls II’s turn. The base version of Dark Souls II will have these features “made available at a later date," but for now, Scholar Of The First Sin players can continue to invade the fallen kingdom of Drangleic and scribble down messages for others.

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The Activision Blizzard King Workers Alliance have teamed up with the Communications Workers of America (CWA) union to file another charge of unfair labour practices against Activision Blizzard. The filing is in response to a message described as anti-union that was sent by Activision Blizzard’s communications executive, Lulu Meservey, to 18,000 employees last week. The CWA had previously filed a charge of unfair labour practices in September 2021, accusing the company of violating US labour laws and stopping employees from discussing working conditions. Last year’s complaint was closed just a month later.

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What are you doing for the next ten minutes? Nothing much? Alright, here's what you're doing: playing Greaser, a wee free visual novel about riding a Cronenbergian biomechanical motorbike along an endless unreal desert highway. It's playable in your browser so kick-start on over to Itch.io right now. I don't know what else you're doing this morning that'll get your engine running more than adventure, self-discovery, and erotic motorbike maintenance.

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EA held their first Behind The Sims Summit last week, revealing plenty of Sims updates, including a very early look at the next game in the series, Project Rene. Despite this big news, discussion around the event has focused on EA’s lack of community representation, as they only included one “black simmer” onscreen during a stream full of other content creators. Black content creators have been a significant part of The Sims' online presence for years, creating custom content, mods and more.

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Welcome to the 2022 edition of The RPS 100, our annual countdown of our favourite PC games of all time. This is the second time the RPS Treehouse has gathered together to hash out our collective Bestest Bests from across the ages, and lemme tell you, this year's list has seen tons of movement compared to last year's ranking. Not only are there buckets of new entries, but there's been plenty of upward and downward shuffling of old favourites, too. So come on in and find out what's made the cut.

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The Radeon RX 6950 XT is the fastest AMD graphics card in the world, and will remain so until at least November when AMD is expected to announce a new range of next-gen GPUs. It originally debuted at $1000, undercutting the RTX 3090 Ti at $1500, but third-party models could cost much more - such as this $1200 PowerColor Red Devil. Today though, with that whole 'impending release of better graphics cards' thing, the 6950 XT is down to $800 at Amazon, which is an awesome deal for the level of graphics performance on offer.

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Folks, I’ve got some bad news. Victoria 3 is not a game where you play the clone of the clone of Posh Spice. I was all geared up for some science fiction-tinged Spice Girls shenanigans, but I was left bitterly disappointed. However, I’d already installed it, so I decided to check it out and see what kind of game it actually is. Turns out that Victoria 3 is a grand strategy game, just like its Paradox stablemates Crusader Kings and Hearts of Iron.

Trying to classify Victoria 3 is pretty damn important. Unlike, say, the Total War series, Paradox’s grand strategy titles are differentiated by a lot more than their time periods. Hearts of Iron its WW2 military ticker on its sleeve, while Crusader Kings (my personal fave) is secretly an RPG, just one that happens to cast you as the ruler of a country, rather than a random wandering murderer. Figure that out and you grasped the appeal of the game, especially for people who may lack interest in - or be downright put off by - the historical era it covers.

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The Corsair 5000D is a rather good PC case, but as it's fairly new it's normally quite expensive - like $165 on Amazon expensive. So it brings me good cheer to announce that Woot are doing the case in white or black for just $99.99, the lowest price we've ever recorded for this model.

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The Angel of Darkness gets blamed for a lot of the Tomb Raider franchise's failures in the early-to-mid 2000s — whether it's the downfall of Core Design, the box office flop of the second Angelina Jolie movie, or the continuity reboot the series needed before anyone would agree to publish another one of its games. While I have to admit there's some pretty damning circumstantial evidence there and that not every accusation is exactly unfounded, the game's memetic unpopularity even among people who never played it still feels harsher than is warranted.

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Horror games are great and all that, but what about games that make you the monster? Yeah. Chew on that for a second.

I'm not just talking about games that belong to the horror genre, either. In fact, spare those asymmetrical multiplayer games that are all the rage with their worryingly young audiences, there are few actual horror games that let you assume the role of the villain. But that doesn't mean there isn't a deluge of titles where you play as a creature so vile, so menacing, that the residents of their worlds undoubtly view the player as evil incarnate. Far from it. The games on this list may not all be spooky in tone, but your character is still the stuff of actual nightmares.

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Alright folks, bear with me, because it doesn't look like this one is going to get less messy. As reported by Tech News Space, it appears that Robert Kurvitz, the lead developer and writer on Disco Elysium, is suing Studio ZA/UM, the development studio of Disco Elysium, via his own company Telomer. Kotaku AU seem to have corroborated this, finding a record on the Estonian Ministry of Justice's website showing Telomer has filed an application against ZA/UM Studio to "obtain information and review documents", which you can see for yourself here.

This comes after Martin Luiga announced (in a frankly kinda weird post) the dissolution of The ZA/UM Cultural Association, and that Kurvitz, writer Helen Hindpere, and art director Aleksander Rostov were no longer working at Studio ZA/UM.

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House Castle has been on a bit of a horror binge this month, what with it being Spooky Season and all. Not because we're die-hard horror buffs - if anything, we're both lifelong wimps when it comes to this stuff. But buoyed by a growing resolve to tackle our collective cowardice head on, October has seen us watch, play and read several of the big horror classics we've been too chicken to attempt in the past. Over the course of it all, though, there's been a gnawing, slightly dreadful realisation slowly bubbling away beneath the surface. Far from being scared by these horrible things, I've often come away feeling no emotions whatsoever. I have remained unmoved, neither frightened, unnerved, or creeped out. Just plain, simple indifference. The Japanese Ring? Nothing. I Saw The Devil? Nah, mate. Lake Mungo? More like Lake Yawngo.

I was beginning to think I'd lost the capacity to feel anything at all. Heck, the real horror show this month has been the collapse of the entire UK nation state, and yet I still cannot bring myself to muster anything beyond a tired sigh. Then I got to the second act of Resident Evil Village's Shadows Of Rose DLC and, oh yes, hello fear. It's been a while, hasn't it?

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Season 15 of Apex Legends is ziprailing its way towards us at a frightening speed. When it lands at the end of the month, it'll bring with it a new Legend, just like every new Season - but even more significantly, Apex Legends: Eclipse will introduce the fifth Apex map, a big and beautiful multi-biome arena called Broken Moon.

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During a 30-minute livestream this weekend, Genshin Impact detailed its upcoming 3.2 update titled ‘Akasha Pulses, the Kalpa Flame Rises,’ set to launch on November 2nd. The 3.2 update will add tons of new stuff to the game, including two playable characters, a conclusion to the Sumeru Archon quest, and much more.

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Silent Hill: Townfall’s announcement was decidedly cryptic, but fans have since found various secrets hiding in the trailer. Announced during Konami’s Silent Hill Transmission broadcast last week, Silent Hill: Townfall is being developed by No Code, the studio behind the spooky Observation. The trailer was light on details, with a speech about crime and judgement playing over footage from a Pocket Television, but some eagle-eyed - or perhaps eared - fans have uncovered messages hidden in the audio that might give us a hint of what Townfall is all about.

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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 extremely athletic handwashing, handpainted art, a cute witch, and more. Come see!

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After this week in UK politics I, as the kids possibly said seven(?) years ago, can't even. Just. Yep. What a time. A good weekend to get lost in video games and attempt not to encounter any of the chaos which will need to be taken seriously soon but right now brings only despair in its ever-shifting uncertainty. So what are you playing this weekend? Here's what we're clicking on!

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This week, the Uncharted: Legacy Of Thieves Collection came to PC, marking the first time Nathan Drake's Tombraider-but-a-bro adventures have arrived on our fair platform. It is also, err, a collection of the last games in the series. The bundle comprises Uncharted 4: A Thief's End and The Lost Legacy, a standalone Uncharted adventure featuring ladythieves Chloe Frazer and Nadine Ross (they are thieves who are ladies, they don't steal women). Uncharteds 1-3, on the other hand, are nowhere to be seen. In fact, the only way to play them on PC right this second is to buy an expensive PlayStation Plus Premium subscription and stream them via the cloud as part of the Nathan Drake Collection - a far from ideal solution.

This puts us PC lot in a bit of a pickle. Naturally, if you haven't played any of these PlayStation exclusives until now, you're missing three entire games worth of story context. So, is it worth starting with Uncharted 4? The short answer is, "Yes". The long answer is, "Yeeeeeeeeeees - probably".

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Although I try to recommend things that you can't simply try for yourself, I'm making an exception here because the spirit of this column is to report back on good things, and free or not, Blackhaven is a very good thing.

It's about starting a job in a museum and archive based around a former tobacco plantation, and run by the extremely wealthy descendants of its owners. It's not about what great people they were. It didn't feel like trauma porn, but obviously I can only speak as a ludicrously white person from another country.

What it is definitely good at it is representing real historical research, and who gets to write the history that suits them.

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Anyone who’s played the charming Tunic knows that it’s a little cryptic. There’s an immediately nonsensical language to try and decipher, for one thing. Then you’ve got an in-game manual that’s been pulled apart, with pages strewn around the world to find before you can figure out how to do everything your little fox is capable of. Well, now audio designer Kevin Regamey has explained a whole other secret side to Tunic, and it turns out the game’s soundtrack hides a whole other language.

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As Ed detailed in his review earlier this week, Gotham Knights is a bit of a disappointing dud. I've also been picking my way through Gotham City as various members of the bat family, weightlessly punching dudes in alleys before crafting new sticks that hit 2% harder than the one I was using before. Despite a relatively good looking rendition of the iconic gothic metropolis and a pretty engaging story, Gotham Knights ultimately failed to capture my imagination.

It didn't help that throughout my time with Gotham Knights, I was thinking about the Arkham series. Rocksteady's trio of Batman-em-ups are essential superhero games, titles that redefined the genre and provided a template that still feels contemporary to this day. Aslyum, City and Knight fully immerse you in the Batman fantasy, successfully crafting a depiction of the caped crusader that was deadly, capable and - perhaps best of all - human.

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Buried beneath an Everest sized pile of TikTok dance emotes, Marvel skins and lavish live concerts for Ariana Grande lies the actual reason Fortnite has kept me playing for the best part of half a decade: Fortnite is one of the finest multiplayer shooters on PC, and no, I’m not joking. It rules.

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Space flight simulation sequel Kerbal Space Program 2 will finally get to take off in early access on PC on February 24th, 2023, devs Intercept Games have announced. The early access version of the game will allow you to fully travel around the Kerbolar system - can’t quite believe I typed that - which has been given a major overhaul since the first game. There’ll also be more than 350 new parts to build your spacecraft with. You can watch a lengthy chat with the Kerbal team about their early access mission below.

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