Rock, Paper, Shotgun

Happy new year all. What's the weather like where you are? We've got Amber and Yellow warnings in London - I do not understand what these terms mean, but I'm going to add a Sapphire warning for escalating Maw activity. The creature was pretty lively over the Xmas weekend, but Graham managed to soothe it with posts about gaming-related new year resolutions and, of all things, the Spike Video Game Awards. We can expect the Maw's petulance to mount during January, a lean month for announcements and revelations, but there are a few tasty morsels in the offing - a new Prince of Persia and Tekken 8, for instance. Fingers crossed we can build up some kind of momentum.

Some new game releases we are pointing our telescopes at this week: Skeleton Rebellion (4th Jan), a scrappy offbeat RPG with claymation elements in which you are a skeleton trying to overthrow some mages, and The Night Is Grey (5th Jan), a point-and-click adventure about a beardy bloke and a little girl stuck in the woods with some weirdo wolves. If you like, you can also play a free drinking game I've just invented in which you do a shot for every time I accidentally write 2023 instead of 2024.

Happy new year all. What's the weather like where you are? We've got Amber and Yellow warnings in London - I do not understand what these terms mean, but I'm going to add a Sapphire warning for escalating Maw activity. The creature was pretty lively over the Xmas weekend, but Graham managed to soothe it with posts about gaming-related new year resolutions and, of all things, the Spike Video Game Awards. We can expect the Maw's petulance to mount during January, a lean month for announcements and revelations, but there are a few tasty morsels in the offing - a new Prince of Persia and Tekken 8, for instance. Fingers crossed we can build up some kind of momentum.

Some new game releases we are pointing our telescopes at this week: Skeleton Rebellion (4th Jan), a scrappy offbeat RPG with claymation elements in which you are a skeleton trying to overthrow some mages, and The Night Is Grey (5th Jan), a point-and-click adventure about a beardy bloke and a little girl stuck in the woods with some weirdo wolves. If you like, you can also play a free drinking game I've just invented in which you do a shot for every time I accidentally write 2023 instead of 2024.

Fallout: London has been in the works for five years now, culminating in a seriously impressive mod for Fallout 4 that’s essentially a brand new game set in a radiated England rather than North America. After missing its planned release window in 2023, it now has a full release date - and it’s only a few months away.

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Fallout: London has been in the works for five years now, culminating in a seriously impressive mod for Fallout 4 that’s essentially a brand new game set in a radiated England rather than North America. After missing its planned release window in 2023, it now has a full release date - and it’s only a few months away.

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The director of Tekken 8 has responded after a video of the upcoming fighting game’s colourblind mode was reported to have caused migraines and vertigo among players, with accessibility experts expressing their worries that the filter could cause even more serious side effects among those with epilepsy and other photosensitive conditions.

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The director of Tekken 8 has responded after a video of the upcoming fighting game’s colourblind mode was reported to have caused migraines and vertigo among players, with accessibility experts expressing their worries that the filter could cause even more serious side effects among those with epilepsy and other photosensitive conditions.

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While the weather outside is still a bit chilly and everyone’s bank accounts are recovering from the holidays, visiting an escape room with friends might not be at the top of your to-do list. Fortunately, you can currently get some of the same puzzly satisfaction for free - and without having to go outside - by nabbing Escape Academy over on the Epic Games Store for the next 24 hours.

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While the weather outside is still a bit chilly and everyone’s bank accounts are recovering from the holidays, visiting an escape room with friends might not be at the top of your to-do list. Fortunately, you can currently get some of the same puzzly satisfaction for free - and without having to go outside - by nabbing Escape Academy over on the Epic Games Store for the next 24 hours.

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Happy Wintermas, dear reader. And happy new year, I guess. Are you enjoying yours? I'm writing this in the distant past of mid-December, a period of total spiritual desolation. If all has gone to plan, I am currently waving a goblet over my head like some kind of hipster barbarian, and trying to finish all the dodgy vegan Xmas food I've cooked which the rest of my family won’t eat, the savages.

I have now read our so-called RPS 2023 Advent Calendar and found it to be woefully deficient in flirty rebels, lunar deities and stage coaches packed with damned adventurers. Never fear, however, because by happy coincidence I have also now written an end-of-year/start-of-year round-up article about these very things.

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Happy Wintermas, dear reader. And happy new year, I guess. Are you enjoying yours? I'm writing this in the distant past of mid-December, a period of total spiritual desolation. If all has gone to plan, I am currently waving a goblet over my head like some kind of hipster barbarian, and trying to finish all the dodgy vegan Xmas food I've cooked which the rest of my family won’t eat, the savages.

I have now read our so-called RPS 2023 Advent Calendar and found it to be woefully deficient in flirty rebels, lunar deities and stage coaches packed with damned adventurers. Never fear, however, because by happy coincidence I have also now written an end-of-year/start-of-year round-up article about these very things.

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Promise you won't tell the other children, but the RPS staff are actually complex magical spells cast by the Sugar Plum Fairy, as part of an age old pact with the ents of the forest where the RPS treehouse was built hundreds of years ago. Each year the Sugar Plum Fairy has to collect more wishes to power the spells every year (you can help to make the spells more powerful by joining the RPS supporter program). While she's out wish-hunting, here are some Christmas Crackers to distract you.

Time to enjoy your lovely joke!

Q: What’s a fisherman’s favourite carol?

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Promise you won't tell the other children, but the RPS staff are actually complex magical spells cast by the Sugar Plum Fairy, as part of an age old pact with the ents of the forest where the RPS treehouse was built hundreds of years ago. Each year the Sugar Plum Fairy has to collect more wishes to power the spells every year (you can help to make the spells more powerful by joining the RPS supporter program). While she's out wish-hunting, here are some Christmas Crackers to distract you.

Time to enjoy your lovely joke!

Q: What’s a fisherman’s favourite carol?

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Want a 32-inch gaming monitor for around $150? If you sign up for LG's US store newsletter and get a 10% off code, you can get the LG 32GN600, a VA-panel monitor with excellent contrast, a 2560x1440 resolution and 165Hz refresh rate with FreeSync and G-Sync support, for just $152 rather than its already-discounted $169. That's a phenomenal deal and the best we've ever seen for a monitor of this size.

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With refreshed SUPER cards expected in the month ahead, mid-range RTX 40-series graphics cards are seeing heavy discounts at many retailers. One deal that caught our eye this morning is this deal on a Gigabyte RTX 4070 Windforce 3X OC model, which is down to £530.58 when bought from Amazon US via Amazon UK.

The deal price, which includes shipping and import duty, is significantly cheaper than UK-based options from major GPU makers which are in the £560 to £600 range. However, there are cheaper UK options if you're happy with a smaller, non-overclocked Palit card. Palit is more of a budget brand, but is built around the same Nvidia GPU and therefore offers the same performance.

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Everyone's saying 2023 has been a stonking year for video games. To be honest dear reader, I don't think it's been my year. That might be because I've not had a huge amount of time to play loads outside of review duties and general life things, but there's only been, like, less than a handful of games that have truly commanded my attention.

One of said games comes backflipping in right at the tailend of this year: Astral Ascent. It's a 2D roguelike in the vein of Dead Cells, where you battle through stages, power-up, try and get as far as you can, inevitably die, reinvest your winnings, power-up permanently, then go again. It saddens me that I've not seen much excitement for the game elsewhere, so here I am with a little pudding for you. A little treat. Here comes the plane, nyaaaooownnn.

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Greetings all! Hope you're enjoying a Christmas with an appropriate degree of merriment. Me, I'm not. I'm angry. I'm fuming. Why? Because the RPS 2023 Advent Calendar is wrong. It's wrong, I tell you!

If all were just and right in the world, then it wouldn't have left out the following list of excellent games that came out this year! Plus a couple others that came out of early access in 2023 but which I sadly don't have time to write about in full. Trust me, The Last Spell and Against The Storm are both phenomenal games as well.

Anyway: in this handsomely decorated selection box, you'll find four of my honourable mentions for games I've enjoyed playing the most this year. If you have a hole in your Steam library, maybe these will help fill it over the Christmas break!

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Promise you won't tell the other children, but the RPS staff are actually complex magical spells cast by the Sugar Plum Fairy, as part of an age old pact with the ents of the forest where the RPS treehouse was built hundreds of years ago. Each year the Sugar Plum Fairy has to collect more wishes to power the spells every year (you can help to make the spells more powerful by joining the RPS supporter program). While she's out wish-hunting, here are some Christmas Crackers to distract you.

Time to enjoy your lovely joke!

Q: What did Thor say when he saw his brother hogging the mince pies?

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Escape From Tarkov's major new 0.14.0.0 update is live now. It brings with it all of the many features announced last month, including a new map, Ground Zero, designed specifically for newcomers, as well as a vaulting system, new armor and hitbox modelling, and much more.

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American Truck Simulator is heading to Missouri for its next expansion. It'll be the first appearance of the Mississippi river in the beloved simulation game.

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I’m going to level with you, readers. Probably something like 70% of my 2023 games time was spent on precisely two co-op shooters, neither of which I’ve written about much, nor were new enough to be eligible for the most recent Advent Calendar. I apparently have a type. I’m sorry.

Still, while the man’s rules prevent me from recommending Deep Rock Galactic or Darktide, I do have a few picks that fell short of full Advent Calendar glory. And they’re all... colourful, quite short indie platformers? Hmm, maybe I have two types.

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Saints Row's 2022 reboot is currently free to keep from the Epic Games Store. It's bittersweet considering its developer, Volition, was closed down in August, but it's also an opportunity to experience the last game the 30-year-old studio got to make.

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Welcome to my first selection box for Rock Paper Shotgun, where I get to pick my favourite games of 2023 that didn't make it into our Advent Calendar draw. In anticipation of your judgment incoming, I'd like to preface this list by saying I didn't play nearly as many games as I should have this year (something echoed by other RPS staffers). My pile of shame is ever-growing, but here are a few games I did play and actually liked.

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Promise you won't tell the other children, but the RPS staff are actually complex magical spells cast by the Sugar Plum Fairy, as part of an age old pact with the ents of the forest where the RPS treehouse was built hundreds of years ago. Each year the Sugar Plum Fairy has to collect more wishes to power the spells every year (you can help to make the spells more powerful by joining the RPS supporter program). While she's out wish-hunting, here are some Christmas Crackers to distract you.

Time to enjoy your lovely joke!

Q: Where does Basim get his car fixed?

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And thus, we arrive at the end of another year. A year filled with some very excellent games, and some very not excellent games. And through it all, the RPS guides team has been quietly toiling away, appeasing The Beast That Is Google with medium-rare slabs of SEO meat, and providing the answers to oft-asked gaming questions.

It's important to me to have a moment in the year where we can step into the light for a little bit and celebrate everything the guides team has accomplished this year. Usually we stay well out of the spotlight, because people only like seeing guides if they're actively searching for it. But today, we're staging a coup. We're taking centre stage, and threatening the lighting technician with all manner of disagreeable bodily experiences unless they keep the spotlight fixed firmly on us for the duration of this post.

2023 has been an amazing standout year for guides. Let's take a look at the games that have defined the year for us, and celebrate some of the fantastic work our team has published.

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I've mentioned elsewhere that I played a lot of huge games this year, both literally referring to their size, and metaphorically referring to their brand name awareness (I had great intentions of doing a long-running Starfield diary, where I visited every planet I could until I got demoralised by the project, but unfortunately that turned out to be the length of one entry). I didn't play quite as many small, odd things as I would have liked in 2023. I am very pleased with the shape of our Advent Calendar this year, though, especially the mid-table, which has some good weirdo entries and some surprises there.

So I thought I'd struggle to come up with three reminders for you for the Selection Box. And yet I didn't! They're also very on brand. Words and murder you say? Maybe in 2024 I should make a resolution to switch things up a bit. Gotta keep you guessing, dear readers...

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Promise you won't tell the other children, but the RPS staff are actually complex magical spells cast by the Sugar Plum Fairy, as part of an age old pact with the ents of the forest where the RPS treehouse was built hundreds of years ago. Each year the Sugar Plum Fairy has to collect more wishes to power the spells every year (you can help to make the spells more powerful by joining the RPS supporter program). While she's out wish-hunting, here are some Christmas Crackers to distract you.

Time to enjoy your lovely joke!

Q: What do you hang above the fireplace in a cyberpunk space station controlled by a malevolent AI?

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Valve have put together their "Best Of 2023" lists on Steam. This is different from the Steam Awards, voting for which is ongoing, and instead is built from Steam data like revenue, peak concurrent players, and so on. It's interesting every year as older games or indie obscurities do better than you expect.

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I keep an eye out for games I can use to introduce my young son to new genres. Cat Quest fit the bill last year. It's a straightforward action RPG with cute, clean art about a cat slicing up a world of hedgehogs, foxes and, of course, dogs.

It's currently free to keep from the Epic Games Store.

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This year's Game Awards ceremony garnered a lot of justified criticism for the way it rushed winning developers off stage in favour of adverts, rambling conversations with Hideo Kojima, and celebrity cameos from the likes of Timothée Chalamet.

Obsidian's Josh Sawyer was right when he called it an "embarrassing indictment of a segment of the industry desperate for validation via star power". Yet I still can't help but also see the Game Awards as something else: a sign of progress. That's because I remember the Spike Video Game Awards from 2007, which remains the nadir of both the games industry specifically and popular culture in general.

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Cor, there's been a lot of games this year, haven't there? While I've only slapped one Bestest Best badge down in 2023 (woe is me), our lovely freelancers, current RPSers, and former RPSers have done a whole lot more badge-slapping. A grand total of 26 Bestest Bests have graced our monitors this year, which makes it three more than last year's Bestest Best round-up. And I'd say it's a nice mixture of big budget open worlders, puzzle gems, and indie delights that make up our roster for 2023, too.

So yeah, I'd encourage you to have a flick through the list below and see if there's anything you can add to the wishlist. Even as the person with "Reviews" in their job title, I can confirm I literally have loads of these Bestest Bests in my backlog. I will endeavour to play a handful over this Christmas break on my Steam Deck, maybe combining the experience with a nibble on a mince pie. Anyway, enjoy! And Merry Reviewsmas!

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I didn't have much time to play new games this year, honestly. Prior to joining the RPS Treehouse in late October, I spent much of the year organising a massive international move with my family from the US to the UK, which meant that many of 2023's fresh releases - aside from the few that I've highlighted in this year's advent calendar - remained in the unplayed depths of my Steam list. Now that it's December and life has settled somewhat, I had to wrack my brain to come up with three entries for this Selection Box. After much deliberation, I realised that there were a few indie gems that I managed to crack open amidst all the chaos of arranging 60+ boxes for shipment across the Atlantic.

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Promise you won't tell the other children, but the RPS staff are actually complex magical spells cast by the Sugar Plum Fairy, as part of an age old pact with the ents of the forest where the RPS treehouse was built hundreds of years ago. Each year the Sugar Plum Fairy has to collect more wishes to power the spells every year (you can help to make the spells more powerful by joining the RPS supporter program). While she's out wish-hunting, here are some Christmas Crackers to distract you.

Time to enjoy your lovely joke!

Q: What d'you call it when you need the loo, but incorrectly assume you can hold it?

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Slay The Spire mod Downfall suffered a "security breach" on Christmas day which allowed hackers to distribute malware through Steam, the developers of the mod say. The malware attempts to steal users' passwords from their internet browser, as well as passwords for messaging services Telegram and Discord.

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These are salad days for fans of novelty golf, from What The Golf? to Desert Golfing to Turbo Golf Racing. Released in 2022, Cursed To Golf set itself apart from the mini genre by being a golflike roguelike - and it's currently free to keep from the Epic Games Store.

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We're now firmly in the liminal space between Christmas and New Year. Sick of your family, sick of leftovers, wondering if the day after Boxing Day is still excuse enough to eat two dozen After Eights for dinner, your mind might start to slip towards the future. 2024! What all could you achieve with a whole twelve months stretched out before you?

You could finally learn piano, you could re-commit yourself to bouldering, you could finally scratch out that novel. Or maybe you could just play a lot of video games. That's no less noble a pursuit. So what is your video game resolution for 2024?

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It has once again fallen to me to pick out my favourite features, this time from 2023. This is a terrible task, because there are always a lot I like. I've tried to cut it down a bit from last year, for both our sakes, dear reader, and decided that previews don't count (because as a format previews do a lot of the work for you, to be honest). Even reducing my task this way made it tough to whittle things down, and I'm sure I've missed some excellent articles and writers - and that I will be corrected in the comments!

Still, read on for a place to start if you want to look back at the year that was on RPS. We've got interviews, community nonsense, and even more interviews for you to enjoy here. I think in 2024 I'm going to advocate for more horseposting.

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This year, I've mostly played smaller games, mostly from small or solo developers. Playing a giant timesink game all day hasn't appealed as I've sought to spend more time in forests and up hills and down rivers, and Destiny 2 burned me out so hard on live service games that I still can't face those. But a year of little games has been great fun, short bursts of play and ideas explored concisely, so here are some of my other favourites.

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Promise you won't tell the other children, but the RPS staff are actually complex magical spells cast by the Sugar Plum Fairy, as part of an age old pact with the ents of the forest where the RPS treehouse was built hundreds of years ago. Each year the Sugar Plum Fairy has to collect more wishes to power the spells every year (you can help to make the spells more powerful by joining the RPS supporter program). While she's out wish-hunting, here are some Christmas Crackers to distract you.

Time to enjoy your lovely joke!

Q: What did loveable Geordie Dec say to his double act partner after a tough climb?

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In the market for a high refresh rate gaming monitor for FPS? Right now you can pick up the Asus ROG Strix XG27AQMR for $499 on Amazon US, a great price for a 1440p 300Hz (!) esports-grade gaming monitor that delivers a silky-smooth experience. The current price is a $100 discount on its normal going rate and quite competitive for a montor with these specs.

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While other god games might have been recently consigned to the scrapheap, the cute, toy-like WorldBox continues to improve. The early access god sim is going to start simulating family trees in its next update.

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