Rock, Paper, Shotgun

Darkest Dungeon 2 has launched in early access, inviting us all on a delightfully stressful wagon ride. The sequel to Red Hook Studios' dark roguelike moves away from expeditions in the gloomy Hamlet, and instead sends you on a journey through horrific lands to stop an apocalypse. The devs recently told me about why they're taking their gothic tale on the road, and it has something to do with wanting to emulate a rather uncomfortable road trip.

Read more

Windows 11 may not be an essential upgrade yet, but its Auto HDR feature is mightily impressive: in games that don’t support HDR (high dynamic range) natively, it can apply similar brightness-boosting, colour-emboldening effects. There’s no performance loss, so if you’ve going to upgrade to Windows 11 on your gaming rig, it’s worth giving Auto HDR a try – and this guide will show you how to enable it.

Read more

Swords are cool and all but the medieval fight I find a delight is a tavern brawl, so I'm chuffed to heck to see Chivalry 2 focus on them in a new mode. 'Brawl' mode has players rumble through feasts and halls, fighting with found weapons including chairs, steins, and giant fish. Oh yes, thank you. Also in the field of delightful foolishness is a new headbutt move for armless players to launch one desperate last attack.

Read more

Brinkmanship doesn't get explored all that much in games. Precipice is almost certainly derived from Balance of Power, a political strategy simulation from 1985 about the Cold War powers and their winner-armageddons-all staring contest. It was impressively original, complex, and completely unplayable. Happily, Precipice has kept most of what made that game interesting to begin with, and dumped the baggage.

Read more

I've heard a lot about sci-fantasy roguelike Caves Of Qud, split between "This game is amazing" and "This game sounds amazing but what am I doing and why do I keep dying?" Good news for both types: the latest early access update has added new areas, factions, and items for experienced players to enjoy, while also adding two new friendlier modes. Character creation is overhauled too, complete with some helpful presets.

Read more

A glitched out corner, textures too-smooth in some places and too-rough in others. Play some distorted audio, and add some film grain. That’s lo-fi horror, baby, and the lo-fi games that fit this brief can prey on the valley between the uncanny and the unknown. It’s no secret that the unknown is the scariest part of any horror media. Well, aside from that clown with extremely sharp and pointy teeth - but that’s a kind of unknown. Like... Who’s their dentist? Where’d they get that axe? You know what... I take it back. I don’t want to know that one. Let’s get back to those lo-fi videogames.

Read more

If Halloween is best spent doing scary things with pals, Phasmophobia is one of the best games to play this Halloween. The cooperative game sends us to investigate haunted places, trying to capture evidence of ghosts without getting murdered by them. And now it's even more Halloween-y (well, technically Friday The 13th-y) thanks to a big new early access update, which has added a new map set in a haunted campground, new types of ghost, and new spooky weather. Great, just what I wanted in a game I'm already too scared to play.

Read more

Valve can't keep sales secret. Every year, the big dates leak well in advance, whether whispered by devs or blasted by PayPal newsletters. This year, Valve are apparently content to say them in public where anyone might here. Hey, it's just a sale, why the secrecy? So yup, we now definitely know dates for the Steam Halloween Sale, the Steam Autumn Sale, and the Steam Winter Sale.

Read more

Looking for the best LAPA loadout in Warzone Season 6? Treyarch and Raven Software are sending Cold War out with a bang, adding a series of unusual, interesting weapons in the final seasons. The LAPA SMG is the latest, and one of the most intriguing yet. Several of its barrel attachments alter the LAPA’s damage and fire rate. That variety makes the LAPA a very fun gun to customize and play around with. Of course, there is always a best configuration. Once you’ve had your fun and are ready to sweat, we’re here to help.

The LAPA’s range isn’t great, but up close it has monstrous potential. Its high neck and head multipliers make for a skill-dependant weapon, but in the right hands, with the right build, the LAPA fries. Here’s our build of choice:

As usual, we’re starting off with an Agency Suppressor. Added range and bullet velocity on a suppressor remain nigh-impossible to pass up. As long as you’re using a Cold War weapon, you’ll want this attachment. Things get interesting with the barrel. We’ve gone with the Rifled Barrel, which provides the most consistent damage profile. The LAPA very much relies on chest, neck, and headshots, but the Rifled Barrel helps even out the damage to the stomach and limbs. All of the barrels are frankly pretty close in power though, so try a few and see what feels right.

Read more

Everything in the seaside town of Moonglow Bay has seen better days. That includes you, a middle-aged accountant who’s moved out of the big city for a fresh start. But things never go quite to plan, do they? The moment-to-moment of Moonglow Bay is a chilled-out experience of getting out onto the waves, exploring various biomes, catching fish, and cooking them up to sell or gift to the townspeople. But within that is an exploration of things going awry, and letting go of old dreams in order to build new ones.

Read more

It started a few months ago: we got an email about shoes designed using 'blockchain technology', and had a good laugh about it as a concept. But in retrospect, this email was merely the ripple on a glass of water that go ahead of a T-Rex's mighty tread. Except in this analogy the T-Rex is one of 10,001 unique dinosaurs programatically generated from different traits. And it's wearing wacky sunglasses and smoking a pipe.

Read more

Chinese publishers NetEase have bought Grasshopper Manufacture, the Japanese studio behind stylish, swaggering games including No More Heroes, The Silver Case, and Killer7. While NetEase have roots in mobile games, they have been investing in fancier things. Grasshopper say that with NetEase's cash, they plan to release "three even higher-quality 'Grasshopper Manufacture Games'" over the next decade.

Read more

After focusing a lot of attention on Halo Infinite's multiplayer, Microsoft have turned back to showing off the story campaign. Today's new campaign trailer, sadly, did not give us another hot WWE promo from a space-ape but it did kinda have Far Cry-ish vibes. Watch on for Master Chef zooming around big levels in vehicles, causing big explosions, upgrading his abilities, and bantering with his new Tamagotchi girlfriend.

Read more

In a video game landscape that's pocked with millions of map markers and vast open worlds, Marvel's Guardians Of The Galaxy is a linear action adventure game with a clear beginning, middle and an end. It's an approach that feels refreshingly old-school, in the way it guides you smoothly from one story bit to another. But this doesn't mean it's one big flatline without any peaks, troughs, or surprises.

If anything, the game as a whole is a wonderful surprise. Planet-hopping as Star Lord is great fun, made even better by his colourful compatriots and the genuinely funny craic they share. Marvel fan or clueless layman? Doesn't matter, you're in for a good time no matter where you sit on the MCU scale.

Read more

Halloween comes but once per year, and it's nearly over already! But here on RPS we celebrated the reason for the season (i.e. horror things; scary stuff; being scared, you know) in style. We had a whole host of spooky themed articles this year, and what a troupe of little devils they are to behold!

Whether you're staying in for a quiet one, pelting fun-size chocolate bars from your upstairs window at the neighbour children with vicious force, or you're having a heavy weekend and will need to recover come Sunday morning, have a look at the Halloween 2021 for some dark delights. Or read on in this article!

Read more

Blizzard have announced that Overwatch's McCree will be known as Cole Cassidy going forward. They're renaming the cowboy to distance him from his real-life namesake, former Blizzard employee Jesse McCree. He left the developer due to unknown reasons in August, but his departure came after the State of California filed a lawsuit against Activision Blizzard, alleging the company fostered a "frat boy" culture of sexual harassment and discrimination. The name change will take effect in-game tomorrow.

Read more

"I have a phobia of animal suits, and I have done my entire life," says surreal artist and Spiral Circus' co-founder Tom Mead. I'm listening to him talk about the making of his latest game, Silt, at EGX 2021. First announced at the PC Gaming Show earlier in the year, Silt is a surreal 2D puzzle game in which you play a mysterious diver who can project their soul through the window of their diving helmet to possess nearby fish. Piranhas can chomp through chains and ropes, for example, while hammerhead sharks can help bash crumbling walls to create new pathways. Hand drawn by Mead using a simplified version of his signature cross hatching and fineliner penmanship, Silt instantly calls to mind the likes of Limbo and Inside. And yet the origins of this strange, watery tale stem from a far more innocuous source of inspiration.

"The main influence to any of my work is good old Beatrix Potter, believe it or not," Mead continues. "I blame my mum entirely because she made me and my sister watch this horrible ballet when I was a kid, and I still haven't watched it since then. Over the years, though, I realised that this was one of my main things that fuelled my characters, and the fox man character, I started drawing him and he became my main character for years."

Read more

It's tempting to bang on about the history of Age Of Empires, but let's be real here, you already know it well enough. Even if you haven't played them, the Age Of Empires games were a pillar of RTS design, and probably the most popular candidate for a comeback since publishers largely abandoned the genre in the 2000s.

Let's not argue about which of its elements is the defining one. They're base building, four-resource-gathering contests between factions based on historical world powers, and progress throughout a match happens in explicitly tiered eras that loosely represent historical ages. Age Of Empires 4 has all of that, across four 9-mission single player campaigns, 17 skirmish maps (which can be slightly modified with seed numbers, and we're told more map options are coming), and 8 playable, well-differentiated and slightly unequal civilisations. And I kinda like it.

Read more

Sundays are for nearly having a heart attack when the toaster pops. Before you jolt awake, let's read this week's best writing about games.

Read more

I ate my first mince pie this week, which feels like a betrayal of my belief that Christmastime should not start before Halloween is over. That said, it wasn't a mince puff, so does it really count? Please, tell me about your festive eating. And may as well mention what you're playing this weekend.

Read more

Cyberpunk and Witcher crew CD Projekt have acquired The Molasses Flood, the American studio behind post-apocalyptic raft ride The Flame In The Flood and base-building game Drake Hollow. Huh! The studio will be making a game set in one of CD Projekt's worlds, which warrants a second: huh! It's all secret for now.

Read more

When I think back to the games of my childhood, nothing puts a warm, fuzzy smile on my face like Warcraft 2. As one of the few PC games I had growing up, I ended up playing the campaign over and over again - or at least starting it over and over again - for what felt like actual years. I loved building up my fort and endlessly poking the peasants and peons until they shouted back at me in annoyance, and man alive, there is nothing sweeter than ordering a tooled-up army across the map and absolutely wrecking the enemy in one fell swoop of doom and destruction.

Change isn’t for everyone: just ask the 5% of Steam Hardware Survey respondents still using Windows 7. Sadly, even the most eager of early adopters might be looking to find out how to uninstall Windows 11, the very latest of Microsoft’s operating systems. It could be the newly centralised Start menu; it could be the lack of DirectStorage support among games making the best SSDs perform below their full capability; it could just be a single unsquished bug, which remains a risk with the infant OS. Fortunately, if you decide to want to switch back to Windows 10 within 10 days of installing its successor, it’s possible to roll back in just a few, mildly regretful clicks.

Read more

Alright, fine, here’s how to upgrade to Windows 11 from Windows 10. The current stance of this hardware ed is that Windows 11 has some cool features but is yet to fulfil its potential, largely owing to the missing DirectStorage capability – which, to be fair, could be a very big deal when games start supporting it. For now, then, it’s a free but absolutely not an essential upgrade, and you can think of this post as the RPS equivalent of that video where Valve tore down a Steam Deck: we’re not saying you should do this, just that you can do this.

Read more

After adding official multiplayer modes to American Truck Simulator and Euro Truck Simulator 2, developers SCS Software have now made both support mods in multiplayer too. They're games many truckers mod with the trucks and decor of their dreams, so it'll be nice to show everyone your true truck self. I'd call this your drivatar but Forza has already claimed that.

Read more

After a stretch of teasing and leaking, Rockstar today revealed how they've renovated the GTA 3 trilogy for the upcoming horribly named collection, Grand Theft Auto: The Trilogy - The Definitive Edition. A new trailer and screenshots reveal that GTA 3, Vice City, and San Andreas still have distinctly cartoon vibes, now paired with fancy reflections and effects. Rockstar also announced a release date of November 11th and a price of... £55? Gosh. See the new look for yourself in the trailer below.

Read more

On Tuesday the 26th of October, Doom Eternal players will be able to rip and tear through the hellish shooter's new horde mode. If you're not quite satisfied with murdering demons in a linear fashion, you'll be able to jump into a match to fight off waves of the beasties instead. It's arriving in the game's 6.66 update, along with two new master levels and Battlemode 2.0.

Read more

After decades of Halo being primarily an Xbox series [settle down, disgruntled elderly Mac fanatics -ed.], Halo Infinite will buck that with a simultaneous launch on PC too. With that December launch drawing near, a new trailer focuses on the PC edition, detailing various graphics settings and multiplayer options and noting the interesting detail that you'll be able to use a PC to host a dedicated server for a cross-platform LAN party. Watch on for lots of shots of scrolling through options menus.

Read more

New World's long-awaited character transfers have been taken away almost as soon as they arrived, because they've caused a glitch that allows players to duplicate gold. The bug came about after the MMORPG's 1.0.3 update this week. It makes it so characters don't save properly after transferring, letting them trade gold and items to others while magically keeping it in their own pockets. Amazon have paused server transfers for the time being to work on a fix, and have warned players that those caught exploiting the glitch will be banned.

Read more

“It’s all in your head.” It’s a response that encapsulates all the condescension and ignorance surrounding mental health issues. And yet, in a way, it’s true. Subjective experience is an objective reality – that just so happens to be located and locked away in your head.

These individual realities can only be conveyed through language and other subjective means of communication, and more and more games are grasping this fact, turning inward to explore and map the inland empires of the mind. They have all the tools of the medium at their disposal to turn the invisible workings of the mind into landscapes of audio-visual and mechanical metaphors that can be explored and interacted with. At their best, they convey the dynamic and complex mechanisms of the psyche in a way that only this medium can.

Read more

Football Manager 2022 pre-launch beta is live now. If you buy the kicking sim on Steam or Epic, you can immediately start playing a nearly-finished version of the game. If you're really committed you can probably be sacked at least once before the sun comes up.

Read more

At this point, it has become a cliché to say that space sim No Man's Sky has come a long way since its initial release. And yet, is there any better example of its long development journey than the sandworms? Initially shown in pre-release trailers only to be cut from the release version, they were finally added in some recent updates. Now the most recent update and seasonal event adds new sandworm varieties, including rideable sandworms. The worm has indeed turned.

Read more

Corsair's Virtuoso RGB Wireless XT is just as fancy as its long-ass name implies, and today it's £65 off as part of Corsair's autumn sale. That drops the price from £250 to £185, considerably less than even the going price on Amazon of £230. I think this is a great deal if you've got a hefty budget for an all-in-one wireless headset, so let me share a little on why I'm so convinced!

Read more

The developer of Stardew Valley has revealed their next game: Haunted Chocolatier. It's again a game about moving to a new town to "try your hand at a new way of living", but instead of a farm, you're opening a chocolate shop staffed by ghosts. There's an adorable trailer below.

Read more

The XPG S70 Blade is one of the few 'second-gen' PCIe 4.0 SSDs on the market, offering incredible speeds on PC and even full compatibility with PS5. Today the 1TB model is heavily discounted at Amazon UK, with the NVMe drive dropping from £176 all the way to £139. To get the reduced price, tick the box where it says 'Apply 21% voucher'; the reduced price will be visible at the checkout.

Read more

Battlefield 2042 has been and gone, and now its developers have written about what they learned based on player feedback. There are some straight fixes, some explanations, and lot more in a post on the Battlefield blog.

Also: a look at the five previously unrevealed specialists you'll be able to play as when the game launches.

Read more

The Uncharted series will arrive on PC early next year with Uncharted 4: A Thief's End. That game features a retired Nathan Drake being coaxed into another adventure, but you therefore might want to experience some of the Indylike's earlier treasure hunts first. There is literally only one way I can think of to do that: watching the Uncharted movie, which is also due to release in cinemas early next year.

The first trailer just released, starring Tom Holland and Mark Wahlberg.

Read more

Razer, purveyors of green and black gaming peripherals, have announced they’re having a proper go at PC components as well. The Razer Hanbo AIO liquid CPU cooler series, Razer Katana PSUs, Razer Kunai case fans and Razer Pulse Width Modulator (PWM) Fan Controller all debuted during this year's RazerCon showcase.

Read more

"You will not believe what the hell just happened in Dwarf Fortress!" my pal will tell me, proceeding to share a screenshot which, to me, is indistinguishable from e.g.:

"That's wild!" I will reply, not wanting to hurt their feelings. But how delightful, then, to watch the latest video from the upcoming premium edition, where co-creator Zach Adams demonstrates defending against a goblin attack and you can actually see it's a goblin attack.

Read more

Amanita Design are known for their cheery and charming adventure games, wonders like Samorost, Machinarium, Botanicula, and Chuchel. Their next game sounds like it should be their cheeriest yet, given that it's named Happy Game. Reader dear, this is a trick. Happy Game is blood and death and horror. You will see this soon, as Amanita today announced plans to release Happy Game on the 28th of October. Or you can try a demo now!

Read more