Rock, Paper, Shotgun

If tappy trickling whispery noises tickle your neck in a pleasant way, keep your ears peeled for ASMR Food Experience. Announced today by PlayWay, the upcoming video game will attempt to use restaurant and cooking noises to provoke that 'autonomous sensory meridian response' which has become a YouTube phenomenom. To some, it's a delightful tingle on the neck. To others, it's nothing, just weird noises. To me, it feels like spiders crawling beneath my skin and I hate it. Watch the trailer to find out which camp you're in!

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Fantasy RPG sequel Pathfinder: Wrath Of The Righteous is going roguelike for its third paid DLC, the piratical The Treasure Of The Midnight Isles, setting sail on August 11th. Devs Owlcat Games are also launching an Enhanced Edition of the game as a free update for PC, coinciding with its arrival on console on September 29th. Board the creepy, boney vessel and set sail for some loot in the trailer below.

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Fresh off the back of last weekend’s final network stress test, 40-person brawler battle royale Rumbleverse has revealed it will finally be going live on August 11th. Devs Iron Galaxy say that season one will begin a week later on August 18th. Put up your dukes and get ready to go toe-to-toe when you watch the trailer below.

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Capcom’s survival horror granddaddy of a series Resident Evil is hitting the small screen today, with the arrival of Netflix’s live-action TV adaptation. It’s not spoiling anything to say that Albert Wesker is back, but this time he’s bringing his family along for those bioweapon hijinks he’s known for. It wouldn’t be Resi without some zombie dogs jumping through windows either, as you’ll see in the trailer below.

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The upcoming new mystery from FMV maestro Sam Barlow, Immortality, has seen its release date pushed back to August 30th. The game was previously scheduled to launch on July 26th. While you’re waiting for that extra month to pass you can always refresh your memory by watching the trailer below.

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On this day, in the year of our Horace 2007, Rock Paper Shotgun was born. Yes, previous birthday posts will tell you the site's official birthday is August 20th - the day RPS was fully unveiled to the world - but those same posts will also tell you the four RPS founders were mucking about with the site in secret for well over a month before that. It's also the date that's been etched into our Wikipedia page, which we all know is the true source of all knowledge. So here I am, demanding showers of cake and confetti, because I'm now the one to blame for all this. Happy Birthday to us.

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While the Tour De France is currently zooming about the Alps, the next stage of my own cycling journey through video games leads somewhere far flatter—and weirder. Bird Snapper is a nice little free game that's just you, an endless grey desert, a bicycle, a howling night, and innumerable antennae and electricity pylons. A walking simulator on two wheels, with a bell.

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Valve are staging their first Steam VR Fest starting on July 18th. Gabe and friends don’t seem to have made much song and dance about the event yet, with details emerging today via the company’s Steamworks site. The festival promises discounts, demos and details of upcoming releases from the giddy world of virtual reality.

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In keeping with the theme of highlighting Prime Day 2022 deals on hardware I’ve used personally, here are two discounted HyperX headsets that are no strangers to the ol’ chrome dome. First we have the all-round superb HyperX Cloud II, a snip at £50 / $58, while the much newer HyperX Cloud Alpha Wireless is down from £189 to £119 in the UK.

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The better part of a decade ago, I got really into Gwent. Like, ‘stay up till 3 a.m. scouring The Witcher 3’s vast lands for new cards’ into Gwent. With Gwent: Rogue Mage, I can feel that drive slowly creeping in again.

The latest spin-off from The Witcher trilogy (and technically the spin-off of the standalone Gwent spin-off), Gwent: Rogue Mage puts you in charge of two mages, Alzur and Lyliana, attempting to create the very first Witcher hundreds of years before Geralt’s adventures. They do this by apparently journeying over a board of randomised roguelike encounters, stopping at each one for either a Gwent battle or an event, before facing off against a final boss to bag a mutagen needed for their radical experiments.

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Army Of Darkness, perhaps the best movie in Sam Raimi's horror series, has hopped through time to arrive in Evil Dead: The Game with an update today. It brings a new map, two suitably medieval and marvellously chunky weapons, and some premium outfits. Hail to the King by watching the trailer below.

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Having graduated from Escape Academy, I'm left with a notepad of strange scrawls scattered over two pages. A block of crosses, squares, and circles like a snippet of an old GTA cheats page. Wonky boxes filled with letters, like a shed that's just about held itself together after a storm. The rest? 1) WRO; 2) NYYVR; and other babblings of a newborn trying to make sense of the world. They might seem unhinged – they are, a bit – but they're signs of an experience that was really quite fun, and incredibly, made me feel quite clever.

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If the Roccat Vulcan 120 is a bit too wide and/or cabled for your gaming keyboard tastes, Prime Day 2022 has a pretty compelling alternative in the Logitech G915 Lightspeed Wireless TKL. This is the more compact, tenkeyless version of the G915 that lives in our best gaming keyboard rankings, and those with Prime accounts can lop huge chunks off its retail price.

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Last time, you decided that explosive barrels are better than hints. I suppose you don't need hints to know what a red barrel does. While we still have so many more things to assess, let's next revisit somewhat familiar ground. You previously decided romance is better than de_dust2 and now I want to escalate both things. What's better: sex cutscenes or bullet time?

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Chicken-loving battle royale PUBG: Battlegrounds is adding its ninth map today, the near-future and ecologically compromised Deston. There’s plenty of fancy features in the new map such as ascenders to zip you up the side of its skyscrapers, and areas that only drones can get to. Sit back on your favourite airboat and glimpse the only slightly terrifying fate that awaits us all in the trailer below.

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Today is the second and final day of Prime Day 2022, which means sadly – assuming we’re setting an extremely low bar for things to consider sad – a lot of the best deals have been and gone. Nonetheless, there are still a fair few offers still running on the WD Blue SN570, a seasoned member of the best SSDs club owing to its high PCIe 3.0 speeds and relatively affordable pricing.

It’s even more affordable now, of course, especially if you’ve got an Amazon Prime account and are in the UK. The 1TB and 2TB models – both capacious enough to act as your PC’s sole storage drive – have Prime-exclusive savings on Amazon UK, with the 1TB SN570 a few quid cheaper than it was during last year’s Black Friday sales.

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Square Enix’s upcoming fantasy strategy-RPG The DioField Chronicle is launching September 22nd, and a demo is coming August 10th – just not to PC. The demo will be on PlayStation, Xbox and Nintendo Switch, leaving us out in the cold. While you weep into your lukewarm beverage, you might as well watch the new trailer below.

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I would like to talk a little bit about my experience with The Invisible Guardian. Not the 2017 Spanish thriller movie, but the prodigiously popular Chinese visual novel that quickly became the highest-selling title on Steam in 2019. Why haven’t you heard of it? Because the game is strictly region locked. This is unfortunate, because The Invisible Guardian rules.

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Online fantasy action-RPG Genshin Impact is taking to the seas with a time-limited area to explore and a new detective character in its 2.8 update, out today. Called Summer Fantasia, the update lets players sail around an oceanic place called the Golden Apple Archipelago, which is only sticking around until update 2.9 arrives. Dive into the trailer below to see all the new stuff in action.

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Amazon Prime Day 2022 is entering its final hours, so last chance to take advantage of the best Prime Day PC gaming deals. While some good discounts vanished overnight (Prime Day is in fact two days, July 12th and 13th), the majority will keep running until the clock strikes midnight. To save you the bother of sifting through a mighty mountain of bargain bin junk, I've been collecting agreeable Amazon deals on actually good PC hardware right here.

Unlike the kinds of offers you’d find during, say, Black Friday, all the best Prime Day offers are only available to Amazon Prime subscribers. If you don't have a membership, you could always sign up for Prime's 30-day free trial - more on that in our guide to everything you need to know about Prime Day, which you can also find further down. Here's some tips on how to find the best Prime Day deals for yourself, too.

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Relic Entertainment has announced that Company Of Heroes 3 will parachuting onto Steam on November 17th. They also unveiled new details about its second North African campaign this evening, which will offer a more traditional, narrative-led single-player experience compared to its more open-ended Italian campaigh, which was revealed last year. We had hoped to bring you more hands on details of this new campaign this evening, but in classic RTS fashion, things didn't quite go according to plan. Sorry about that folks. Here are the headlines instead.

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Aside from our eternal love and gratitude, lovely folks who choose to support RPS at the premium tier get extra perks - and one of those is getting regular access to free game keys. Today I'm excited to tell you that we have two more games stepping up to the code plate, and you can choose one of them to take home for free later this week: The Longing or Ghost On The Shore, both beautiful and contemplative games.

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What's with all the cute frog-centered indie games right now? A Frog’s Tale, Schim, Frog Detective, Paradise Marsh, Olliefrog Toad Skater, Teacup, Frogsong - it feels like we're in the middle of an (incredibly adorable) frog uprising. Not that I'm complaining, I'm more than happy that our amphibian friends are getting the love they deserve and one such game is Time On Frog Island, a cosy adventure where you play as a gruff sea captain who has been shipwrecked on an island that is chock-a-block with, you guessed it, frogs.

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Prime Day 2022 comes just as the global graphics card market slowly emerges from a devastating crypto-coma. That means some prices are back to normal, some aren’t, and the entire concept of a deal becomes kind of nebulous and squishy. And yet, there will undoubtedly be people out there desperate for a new graphics card – any new graphics card – so let’s take a look at what’s out there.

The bad news is that the vast majority of Prime Day GPU “deals” still reach above the respective card’s original retail price. The good news is that I’ve found a small handful of offers that are, if nothing else, good value by the incredibly whacked-out standards of the past two years. First up, there are a couple of Nvidia GeForce RTX 30 series cards worth considering in the UK, including an MSI-made RTX 3070 (that Ebuyer have price matched). Sticking with RTX cards, which can run both DLSS and DLAA, GameStop have a reasonable RTX 3060 deal for US buyers.

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Gruesome side-scrolling Metroidvania Blasphemous is a pixel art game where a burly man in a very pointy hat smacks the daylights out of unholy monstrosities, from Spanish devs The Game Kitchen. Now they’re back – the devs, not the monstrosities – with something a bit more than a game. It’s a VR platform for co-op board games called All On Board!, and its Kickstarter launches today. Have a 2D-looksie in the trailer below, but maybe mute it or you’ll have the song stuck in your head all day.

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If there’s a US-only Prime Day 2022 deal I wouldn’t mind seeing over here, it’s the Roccat Vulcan 120 for $88. That’s nearly a full 50% off the $160 RRP (I believe you aluminium mispronouncers call it “MSRP”), for a full-size mechanical keyboard that’s sat atop our best gaming keyboard rankings for ages.

What’s more, you don’t even have to limit yourself to Amazon – Best Buy are currently matching that price in their own sale.

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Between it being Prime Day 2022, and Valve drastically speeding up the rate at rate at which they're shipping Steam Decks, now seems like an opportune time to check on whether you can save some cash on the best microSD cards for the handheld PC. Also because Liam just got his Deck and asked me about them this morning. So if you find these deals posts annoying, s’his fault.

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Developers of The Quarry and The Dark Pictures Anthology series Supermassive Games have been fully acquired by Danish film production company Nordisk Film. UK studio Supermassive announced the buy-out today on Twitter, but did not share how much the acquisition will cost.

The Copenhagen-based Nordisk is the world’s oldest continuously active movie production company, founded in 1906. Their Nordisk Games division has minority and majority stakes in six other development studios.

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I’ve been using the Razer Basilisk V3 as my everyday gaming mouse for months, and now that Prime Day 2022 has launched, I have more reason than ever to talk it up. Amazon’s two-day “sod it, money off everything” event has brought the Basilisk V3 down to £35 in the UK, a price that appears to be an all-time low here in Blighty.

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If the word "simulator" in PowerWash Simulator puts you off, please don't let it. Where other simulators double down on the minutiae surrounding the thing you're meant to be doing, that they put you off the thing you're meant to be doing, PowerWash Sim understands that you just want to rid surfaces of grime in the most satisfying way possible. You do not need to prize open your powerwasher with a tri-wing screwdriver or manage your finances via a convoluted banking app or determine whether a kitchen sink delivers enough pressure. Instead, you wash things with power: you power wash. You wash, powerfully.

After a year in early access, the game's launching in full with a variety of modes and I cannot stress enough how stress-less the experience is. This is a first-person soother you'll either think is an absolute bore or the best kind of meditative chore.

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Hearing that Age Of Empires 4 is getting a second season of support is a bit like finding out an old friend from school who struggled for a while is finally doing well for themselves. Good on you, decent-ish sequel to several real-time strategy classics, for adding more multiplayer features, campaign unlocks and quality of life improvements. Check out what’s coming in season two of AOE4 in the trailer below.

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Amazon Prime Day 2022 is characteristically awash with sales on PC gaming hardware. But what if you don’t have the Amazon Prime subscription required to partake of them – or if you just don’t like Amazon? Cheap new peripherals/monitors/SSDs/other gubbins can still be yours, as plenty of other retailers are running sales this week to give Prime Day some healthy competition. In some cases they’ll even have the same kit as Amazon but at a matching or even better prices. Thus, this list, which gathers together all of the best anti-Prime Day deals I’ve found.

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Monorail! Humanity’s greatest form of transport after dirigibles and the tuktuk. Space survival sandbox Astroneer has been good enough to plonk in the ability to construct our own railways among the stars in its new free rails update. It looks like a pretty chill addition to an already chilled take on the survival genre, if I’m using my chills correctly. Raise your visor and have a watch for yourself below.

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It is now Amazon Prime Day 2022, Amazon’s misnomerly two-day long bargain hunt. I’m assuming you’re not reading this for the discounts on grip tape and toothbrushes, so here are all the best Prime Day deals on PC hardware across Amazons UK and US.

Unlike the kinds of Amazon deals you’d find during, say, Black Friday, Prime Day offers are only available to Amazon Prime subscribers. They’re going quickly, too, lasting from July 12th to the end of July 13th at the very latest. Still, there are inarguably some good prices here, on a lot of quality PC hardware; the deals you’ll find below are my picks of the thousands available. You can also read up on everything you need to know about Prime Day, as well as how to find the best Prime Day deals for yourself.

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I had expected to dislike Riders Republic because Ubisoft's marketing made the open-world xtreme sports game look like it was about gnarly middle-aged dudes with sikk lingo and twatty hats. And it is, and they are awful. But behind the rude 'tude and Fortnite-grade fashion, Riders Republic makes riding a virtual bike feel like riding a real one in a way few video games manage. Switch to the first-person camera, turn off the music and HUD, and just cycle through American national parks with your bike humming beneath you. Bliss.

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I have long been on the "eh, seems okay" side of the fence regarding Valve's newest lil child. To me, the Steam Deck did not do anything not already covered by the four different video game boxes I already own. The largest advantage afforded by the Steam Deck, the ability to play cool games on a handheld device, was surely the domain of the Nintendo Switch - a console that I personally use about once a year. Usually the process is that I go "Oh yeah!", pick up the Switch, and contemplate buying Breath Of The Wild before I see that it has not depreciated in value whatsoever since it came out five years ago. Then I turn off the Switch.

Last week, though, I picked up the Switch, saw that Tangle Tower was on sale, and played it through in one go. "This is great!", I thought, marvelling at how I could play a game while sitting on the sofa, but leaving the TV free for my partner to watch whatever stupid TV show he wanted. I went to look for other cool indie games that might be on sale on the Switch, and that's when I discovered that the Switch eshop is hot garbage unless you know specifically what you're looking for. So now I want a Switch.

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After over a decade of game development, Last Call BBS is the curtain call for prolific indie studio Zachtronics. Released only a month after the studio casually announced it would be disbanding, Last Call BBS will be the last game the studio releases. It's a bittersweet feeling for fans, but this final game is not just a goodbye, it's a retrospective dive into the studio’s ten-year-plus run making games. It also acts as a reminder of how flipping good Zachtronics is at making puzzle games, even if they do melt my brain into a puddle.

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The revamped co-op mod for Bethesda's classic fantasy RPG The Elder Scrolls V: Skyrim only launched on Friday, but it’s already been downloaded more than 59,000 times. The past three days have been very kind to Skyrim Together Reborn, which has been put together by mostly student modders in their spare time. They’ve even made a video guide on how to install, create a server and start playing with your Dragonborn mates, which you can watch below.

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In a bizarre turn of events, development studio Kojima Productions has threatened to sue people making suggestions online that their founder Hideo Kojima was involved in the assassination of former Japanese prime minister Shinzo Abe. Abe was shot dead on Friday. Online commenters making some very bad-taste jokes about the identity of the shooter led to a Greek media outlet and French politician misidentifying him as Kojima.

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Historical spin-off port Assassin’s Creed Liberation HD could well end up totally unplayable for people who own it. At the start of July, the publisher shared 15 getting-on-a-bit games they intended to shut down online services for, including access to bought DLC. Now, Assassin’s Creed Liberation HD, Space Junkies and Silent Hunter 5 have already been delisted from Steam at Ubisoft’s request, and won't be accessible from September 1st.

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