Rock, Paper, Shotgun

Sundays are for looking at a week of half-term ahead of you and wondering what you’re going to do with yourself. Interact with the child? Mm. Let’s think about it while reading some of the week’s best writing about videogames.

Brendan Caldwell, RPS in peace, wrote about his experiences being dog piled by Final Fantasy fans. That was for an article he wrote while here, by the way. I still think it’s a great article, and the new piece is a snapshot, for those interested, of what it can be like to write about videogames.

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Don’tcha know it’s illegal for spaceships to have consciousness ’round here? Set to take off sometime next year, A Long Journey To An Uncertain End is the galaxy-hopping debut from Crispy Creative, a narrative management space opera that seems to imagine a version of Cowboy Bebop where the eponymous starship had the final say in all the semi-legal shenanigans. And also one where Ein’s a hologram, I guess.

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Last weekend, Among Us was experiencing the highest of highs, with hundreds of thousands of eyes watching US congresswoman Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez face off against both streamers and a fellow politician in the spacey stab ’em up. Unfortunately for developers Innersloth, however, it didn’t take long for that high to come crashing down. This week saw a seemingly massive spam attack strike Among Us’ servers, locking up matches with threatening messages in what appears to be a far unfriendlier form of political activism.

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Even up on our high, turbo-cooled horses, we PC folks are not so above the petty factionalism of console rivalry. With Call Of Duty: Black Ops Cold War just around the corner, Activision this week revealed that they’re once again locking a bonus Call Of Duty mode behind PlayStation 4 and 5 copies of the game for a year. This time, it’s Zombies Onslaught, a co-op horde mode that we’ll not be touching until November 1st at the earliest.

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Okay, so there may be one or two. But they’re not the focal point of the piece, which is more than could be said for Jacob Janerka’s previous attempt to snag wishlists for The Dungeon Experience. After failing to draw eyes on the game by way of viral embarrassment, the Aussie dev is trying a more traditional approach with a proper reveal trailer. Sometimes you’ve just gotta stick with what works, y’know?

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People in the UK: remember that the clocks go back this weekend. People in America: don’t mind that, your clocks go back next weekend. Thus we enter the confusing week where I look at announcements in my inbox and times on my calendar and try real hard not to blow it. Then as soon as I get my head around it, American clocks change too. Anyway!

What are you playing this weekend? Here’s what we’re clicking on!

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Ah yes, one of the many valid spinoff arcs for animated stories: the one where the gang goes to camp. Monster Prom 2: Monster Camp is the new sequel to teenage monster dating sim Mosnter Prom. This time the gaggle of monster teens is headed on a camping trip to the woods where—wait no I don’t think anybody dies. Not anyone that isn’t already undead, anyhow. The multiplayer dating sim is out now with double the demons to date.

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What’s a holiday if it doesn’t come with a sale on games loosely related to its theme? A terrible trick, which is part of what makes Halloween a real treat—discounts on horror games galore. The Humble Bundle are joining in on spooky sales with their own Halloween offers. Some are, appropriately, horror games. Some others are just vaguely grim, I guess. But hey, they’re all on sale. (more…)

After that big Wastelanders update that added human NPCs and a legit storyline to Fallout 76 earlier this year, the story quests are rolling right along with the upcoming Steel Dawn update. Militant tech fanatics Brotherhood Of Steel are entering Appalachia while apparently doing what they do best: stomping around in power armor and scowling. A new teaser trailer lets on just a little bit about what the new story will add to online Fallout.

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If you’re a fan of the old Pokémon Snap games, you might have some interest in Penko Park, which came out today. You’re given a simple task: wander around a mysterious abandoned wildlife park and take photos of the weird and wonderful creatures that reside there. It sounds pretty tame, but I think Penko Park has massive Bugsnax vibes and I’m somewhat suspicious it might be a bit spooky. Get a load of the trailer yourself, surely I can’t be the only one who thinks that.

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As announced earlier this year, battle royale ’em up Apex Legends is going to be available on Steam. Electronic Arts have now put a date on those plans for you eager Apelegs-ers ready to make the move. You’ll be able to download it from Steam starting on November 4th when Season 7 begins.

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The Long Dark

has been plenty scary for years, in my opinion, but this year Hinterland Studio are upping the horror vibes for spooky season. Escape The Darkwalker is a new in-game event that will force you to stay on the run ahead of an invisible, evil entity. Because being stalked by wolves and weather sure wasn’t enough. Escape The Darkwalker will run from October 29th to November 12th.

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After a year of Epixclusivity [correction: oh god, and the Microsoft Store, I forgot], The Outer Worlds today launches on Steam and GOG. Obsidian Entertainment’s sci-fi FPS-RPG feels a whole lot like a return to their days of Fallout: New Vegas, but in space. If you’ve been waiting for it to land on a store you like more, here you go. Or if you’ve been waiting for it to be cheaper, hey, it’s half-price right now too.

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This week, I had my first Apex Legends boxing match. If you’re a fan of the battle royale, you may have seen clips of this phenomenon on social media. It’s when squads of total strangers manage to make peace, drop all their guns and armour, and settle their final standoff by throwing hands (and occasionally feet). This will never happen to me, I thought, I’m far too distrustful of enemy players just to drop all my loot. That was, until the other night, where I had my favourite match of Apex I’ve ever played.

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The original Little Nightmares is one of my favourite horror games ever. I admire a horror game that doesn’t rely on the first-person perspective. Little Nightmares is scary in the same way it was scary to hide in your parents’ wardrobe because you were planning to jump out at them, but then you sort of fell over your dad’s shoes and you weren’t sure what it was you were sitting on and oh dear.

I was therefore thrilled when Bamco announced a sequel to this most stylish of puzzle-platformers, due out early next year. And, having played half an hour of Little Nightmares 2, may I just say: nope. Hard nope. Stop that this instant. This is too scary.

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It’s no secret that big publishers spend small fortunes on marketing, but it’s rare that we get to put actual numbers to it. Here’s one: Ubisoft are paying approximately 11 million Swedish krona (around £940k/$1.23m) for one trailer. That’s according to the company who this week announced they’ve signed an agreement with Ubisoft to create a trailer. You probably don’t know their name but you might know some of their work, like the Cyberpunk 2077 trailer from E3 2019 which revealed virtual Keanu Reeves.

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D’you like dogs? I like dogs. How about five dogs? Hot diggidy daffodil, now we’re talking. In The Red Lantern you’re a musher who has decided to adopt a bunch of sled dogs and take ’em over the Alaskan wilderness to a distant cabin that you’re pretty sure definitely 100% exists. This is, of course, how idiots die. Solo sled across Alaska, they said! It’s easy, they said!

But even though I knew this was a roguelite survival adventure going in, I wasn’t expecting there to be quite so much adventuring to it and so little chill sledding with my dogs.

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My biggest ludological disappointment of 2019? Close Combat: The Bloody First, without question. Slitherine’s 3D take on Atomic’s gripping top-down wargame series should have been irresistible, but a host of bugs and questionable design decisions left many of the pages in its copybook looking like Rorschach tests. Curious to see what difference a year of fairly regular patches has made, I reinstalled last Friday. (more…)

The honeycomb below is a fancy form of wordsearch in which every cell is used, and words can curl and zigzag but never overlap. Each hive foxer has a theme (some previous ones: sheep, mazes, earthquakes, and The 39 Steps). Identifying the theme is a vital part of the defoxing process. Today’s puzzle is made up of 18 answers, two of which are abbreviations. (more…)

A little while back I restarted Baldur’s Gate III to play through as the most interesting person I could make in the current character creator. Owing to several comments misunderstanding a cheap joke I made in an image caption, this character is now known as Wonderwall, although technically the game thinks their name is Tav.

Despite my misgivings about the chaotic and impractical nature of their build, ol’ DoubleDoubleyou and crew are actually going okay, mainly because all of the NPCs are competent at their roles, and Wonderwall is a decent archer so they can stand at the back and not get in anyone’s way. But as well as going okay, their adventure is also going very slowly, and I am finding this an ideal turn of events.

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There’s nothing like a spot of cheery post-apocalyptic city building to keep you going in this fine year we call 2020. After a year of Epic exclusivity, Surviving The Aftermath has arrived in early access on Steam. It’s one of those strategy and management games where you can build a colony for some apocalypse survivors to hang out in, with the ultimate goal of restoring some civilisation to the doomed world. So, you know, good practice for the years to come.

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Deck-building roguelikelike Monster Train last night officially launched its mod support, after a short beta, opening it up to all sorts of player-made newness. Possibilities include new cards, new monsters, new looks, and so on, and I see some folks have already made a whole new playable faction. After seeing how much Slay The Spire mods shook up that other card-slinging dungeon-crawl, I’m dead keen to see what happens here. I’m already digging that fan-made faction, the floor-shifting Arcadians.

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Old Gods Rising

came out relatively recently, but I’m asking if you have played it because I think more people should.

It’s a first person exploration game with a few puzzles, where you play as a disgraced TV historian (as in, historian who had a TV show not a historian specialising in TV) who has been called to serve as the expert on a film set. The filming is taking place at a small and obscure UK university. Except when you turn up, the place is deserted. The director calls you on a long range walkie talkie and directs you around to look at a few locations, while claiming to be stuck at a farm location nearby. And needles to say, some strange things are afoot.

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Is there anything scarier than buying products at below the recommended retail price? Almost certainly, which is why I’d hesitate to call the Epic Games Store Halloween Sale particularly spooky. It is, however, taking a massive knife to game prices across the platform, with some pretty hefty discounts of up to 80% going on a number of range of fantastic games until the sale wraps on November 3rd.

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Alright, listen. The 2018 Mortal Engines adaptation might’ve been largely forgettable, but it did a damn fine job of bringing the book series’ ridiculous towns-turned-monster-trucks to life. Now, one Planet Coaster architect has crafted their own version of London-Upon-Wheels, wrapping their fantasy amusement park around a multi-tiered truck of a city. It’s just a shame there’s no way it’ll ever move. Unfortunately, Planet Coaster just wasn’t built for that.

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Have I mentioned I used to work with sled dogs? While it’s only the most interesting thing I’ve done in the last ten years, I reckon I’ve bored the ears off everyone I know gabbing about it ever since. The Red Lantern, then, is a game for the part of me that’s desperate to pack on fifteen layers and get back into the snow with a band of huskies, riding off into the Alaskan sunset of an Epic Games Store release today.

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Like most jolfing pitches, playing a round of What The Golf? on PC has, until now, the domain of those snooty folks up at the Epic Games Store country club. But no more! The king’s game has been democratised, and you can now thwack in a few holes with Triband’s wonderful ball-smacker over on Steam, arriving with the tools to hand-craft your own golfing nightmares.

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The Old Gods bloody love the circus, apparently. For the final Hearthstone expansion of 2020, Blizzard are taking us way back to 2016, the last Worst Year Ever (in real life), when C’Thun, Yogg-Saron, and the eldritch squad first came to Hearthstone. Today they announced Madness At The Darkmoon Faire, arriving in November. Thankfully, Hearthstone was one of those constants I always went back to in 2016, with the tentacle-infested expansion playing a big part of my first year at uni when I should’ve been revising for exams.

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As I have now stepped through the dread portal to my 30s, I have noticed with horror that I sometimes start sentences with, “When I was young”, which is basically the same as, “In my day”. Might as well fall into my own grave now. But I do think – no, honestly, listen – that children’s entertainment isn’t as fun and grim as it used to be. Every parent I know complains mightily about a small pig at the moment, but if you go back in time then you have to pass through the terrifying talking phone on Wizadora and the unrelenting misery of The Animals Of Farthing Wood before you even get to old women being eaten by wolves.

Point is, I am firmly of the opinion that kiddies are made of sterner stuff than we often give them credit for – and if we’re going to teach them that monsters are real we should then take the next logical step of teaching them that you can kick seven shades out of the monsters, cut them open and get your granny back. All of which is to say that I have played the first four or so hours of Immortals Fenyx Rising, and I think Ubi’s Ancient Greek-themed action adventure (no not that one) might have managed the titanic feat of being something that children and adults can genuinely both enjoy.

Spook-o-ween is almost upon us, dear readers. And while there’s not a single fun-sized Snickers in sight, trotting up to old Mr Epic Games Store’s front door this week has treated to two new freebies – Double Fine’s charming Costume Quest 2 and the decisively less whimsical Layers Of Fear 2. Same as before, they’re yours to keep until this time next week, when they’ll be replaced by two new frightful freebies.

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I have watched the trailer for Tenderfoot Tactics three times now. It looks: weird. It’s a turned-based tactics RPG with lots of roaming in a minimalistic yet super pretty open world. You play as a goblin escaping some spooky fog that has doomed your homeland, and along your adventure you collect other goblins to help you figure out what it’s all about. Have a gander at the launch trailer for yourself below.

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Call of Duty: Warzone

just received a brand new shotgun, with Infinity Ward patching it in with little fanfare to speak of. That doesn’t mean you should ignore the JAK however, as it’s a real beast when set up correctly. There are a few different builds to run with, given that slugs, frags and dragon breath are all an option here. In this in-depth best JAK-12 Warzone guide I’ve highlighted the best all-round option for running the JAK-12 when playing Warzone. You’ll find info on what attachments to use and why, as well as some stats for the new shotgun.

• Best JAK-12 loadout in Warzone
• Warzone JAK-12 stats
• Best Perks for JAK-12 loadout in Warzone

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I won’t lie to you listener, the ratio of games to not-games chat on this week’s episode of the Electronic Wireless Show is pretty… it’s pretty low. This may be the least amount of games chat we’ve ever done. Nevertheless: here is a podcast. This time it is about autumnal games – not games about the season, but games that are cosy, that are good to play when the evenings are drawing in and wish you had a log fire to sit in front of.

Although perhaps not, because on one of many tangents Nate describes how one time a pigeon wrapped in a binbag fell down the chimney in his childhood home. So. Other topics not related to games include hyperforeignism, and what member of a family is, psychologically and emotionally speaking, representative of the concept of autumn. There is also a very tense Cavern Of Lies, where Matthew does impressions of Baldur’s Gate characters (only slightly undercutting the tension). Reminder: Matthew is, incredibly, not a professional voice actor.

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Frankly, it’s about time someone took the expansionist nations of Sid Meier’s Civilization VI down a peg. This month’s free update for the hegaxonal society generator adds the Pirates multiplayer scenario, daring you to wear in those sea legs by becoming the most feared fleet commander on the high seas. Plunder trade routes, inspire fear, flee the forces of burgeoning imperial powers… hang on, Sid, haven’t we been here before?

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The [cms-block] continues to be sold out almost everywhere, but when it does finally come back in stock, is it worth spending that little bit extra on one of the more expensive versions of Nvidia’s new flagship GPU? I’ve been testing the enormous MSI GeForce RTX 3080 Gaming X Trio to find out.

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Mojang have decided that as of next year all of their games will require a Microsoft account to play, including Minecraft Java Edition. Don’t panic just yet, because while this does mean that you’ll need to log in with Microsoft to play the Java edition, it’s not being merged with the Windows 10 (or Bedrock) version of Minecraft. You’ll still be able to mod your game and use Java servers. Mojang simply say that one of the big reasons for the move is increasing account security.

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A new 14-minute gameplay video gives a close look at the oozing sphincters and glistening meaty protrusions of first-person shoot-o-adventure-horror Scorn. It’s still Gigered to the gills, as expected, but I will say even I was surprised to see door control systems activated by frigging an orifice with a gristlegun.

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In Genshin Impact, each element has varying effects. Pyro, Cryo, Hydro, Electro, Geo, Dendro, and Anemo will all have different properties which interact with each other in unique ways. Here’s all the elemental reactions in Genshin Impact, and all their effects.

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Is the tense tactical zombo shooter GTFO too easy for you? Well, that shouldn’t be a problem much longer, because today’s update adds levels with multiple routes that can make it even harder. It’s part of the new Rundown, Contact. Just like previous Rundowns, this is a big update that wipes away the old levels making way for some brand new ones – this time with a new enemy, as well as new weapons and new tools to help fight it.

Oh, and if you’re bored of looking on LFG sites for pals to play with, GTFO finally has a matchmaking system, too.

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