Rock, Paper, Shotgun

Take the Countdown numbers round, replace the number cards with cute woodland creatures and the mathematical operations with spells, and consider the target number a boss you must defeat, and you've basically got Super Algebrawl. This tactical mathematical RPG is the latest from Punkcake Délicieux, the small team behind the roguelikelike 'chess with a gun' Shotgun King. Super Algebrawl started life as a experiment by one of the devs to help teach his daughter maths, though frankly I think it'll teach her maths is cruel. This game and I have very different relationships with numbers.

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Who'd have thought toilet plungers would make for such good jumping assistants when it comes to propelling yourself over big, thorny brambles and angry animals? Well, clearly the trio of developers at Phoenix Blasters did, as their upcoming platformer Telmari puts them front and centre as its main form of traversal. Your titular tiny heroine can't jump very far on her own, you see, so to save her beloved sunflowers from the spiky thorns of an ominous-looking tree, she'll need to fire them around the environment to help hoist her over obstacles to get to the, err, root of the problem. I've been playing its Steam demo this morning, and while it's a little rough around the edges, there's definitely something here for those trained in the Super Meat Boy school of pixel perfect platforming.

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Friends, it is finally time for me to discourse unto you about my great love of balls. The roots of my enthusiasm go back to pinball machines - both the fancier, arcade variety that transmogrify into e.g. screaming robot skulls when you achieve a high-enough multiplier, and the crappy, play-at-home variety that are basically a canted wooden sheet with some numbers drawn on it. But it wasn't till I embraced the holy medium of videogames that I realised the full potential of balldom.

Initiated, of course, by Sonic the Hedgehog, I descended into a frothing ballpit of ball variations, encompassing everything from the squashy rolling UFOs of Exo One through Katamari Damacy to the overcrowded chutes of Marble World and the spectacle of Overwatch's Hammond clearing out a capture point by means of sheer, delicious torque. I am always up for a game in which you either control or become a ball, and Go Mecha Ball looks like one of the better ones.

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The august representatives of the Pokémon Company have descended from their hilltop PokéMansion, approached the hushed masses of PokéFans with their flaming Torchics and shocked Pichaku placards, and asked everybody to please, please, please, please, please stop yelling at them about Palworld potentially breaching Pokémon's copyright. Or at least, that's what it sounds like they're saying between the lines of a statement published a few hours ago, in which the Pokémon Company acknowledges messages sent by the concerned PokéFaithful about "another company's game released in January 2024".

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Graham remarked the other day about how strange it can be to see which indie megahits spawn waves of homages and which ones don't, noting that Lucas Pope's Papers, Please has surprisingly few immitators. His post reminded me of Pope's other hit, Return Of The Obra Dinn. The closest we've come to a "Dinn-like" is probably 2022's outstanding The Case Of The Golden Idol, though as I said in my review, its fill-in-the-blanks murder tableaus felt just about distinct enough to be their own separate thing.

Happily, the "Golden Idol-like" appears to be having a bit of a moment of its own right now, as Playstack, the publishers of Golden Idol, have just announced the delightful-looking Little Problems, a detective game that turns its word-shuffling problem-solving to the altogether more relatable conundrums of everyday life. And I couldn't be more here for it.

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Frontier Developments, the British developer-publishers behind Elite Dangerous, Planet Zoo and Warhammer games including Warhammer 40,000 XCOM-a-like Chaos Gate: Daemonhunters and last year’s Age of Sigmar RTS Realms of Ruin, will host a new monthly developer showcase starting next week.

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For those of us who don’t have a garden to grow plants in, an allotment is one way to get your green-fingered fix of tending to nature in return for its peaceful healing properties. When an allotment is a bit too cold, or muddy, or expensive, or outside, upcoming gardening sim Peaceful Oasis looks to be a fine digital alternative.

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Veteran pen-and-paper RPG Dungeons & Dragons is getting its first official virtual reality game. Before you get all excited about being able to let Astarion bite your neck in first-person or shack up with a bear-shaped druid using hand tracking, know that it’s more likely to be a virtual reality experience emulating the original experience of rolling dice on a tabletop. Still, that’s what imaginations are for, right?

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Want to build a high-end gaming PC in the US? We've got you covered - or rather, Newegg has. They're bundling an AMD Ryzen 7 7800X3D processor, one of the fastest gaming CPUs of all time, with an Asus ROG Strix B650-A Gaming WiFi motherboard and G.Skill Flare X5 32GB DDR5-6000 RAM for just $595, saving $132 over buying separately.

In fact, if you buy the same parts on Amazon, you'd still pay $119 more, making this a genuinely good deal.

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Supermassive Games’ breakout horror game Until Dawn is apparently headed to PC, becoming the next previously PlayStation 4-exclusive title to make the leap as an enhanced re-release after the likes of Horizon Zero Dawn, God of War and The Last of Us.

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Last time, you decided that asymmetrical outfits are better than playing on an old patch. As a seasoned Destiny fashionista, I can respect this decision. However, as a fan of mods, I should point out that in many games, being forced onto a new patch might break compatability with a mod which added hundreds of pieces of stunning asymmetrical couture, and the developer hasn't updated in years, and might never again. We continue. This week, I ask you to choose between two ways to picking your own level of challenge. What's better: different puzzles on different difficulty levels, or bullet grazing?

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AMD's entry-level Ryzen 7000 processor, the Ryzen 5 7600X, is down to $199. That's $100 below the original launch price of the chip and the exact same price as the slightly slower but otherwise identical Ryzen 5 7600. (It's even cheaper than Intel's $204 Core i5 13400F, a chip that the 7600X beats convincingly in most games.)

In the UK, it's the 7600 that's the better deal, at £189 versus the 7600X at £209, but both are fine value options too.

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Roots Of Yggdrasil - an inkwashed, roguelikey, card-playing, turn-based citybuilder, inspired by Norse myth - shot to the top of my wishlist after I read Katharine's preview last week. And look, here it is in Early Access. Roots isn't one of your traditional, SimCity-derived town sims in which you steadily colonise a single map (at least, until you lose patience with your glittering urban creation and press the Godzilla or Hurricane button). As per the roguelike element, it's a game about being on the run.

In Roots, you take charge of a band of warriors fleeing an expanding purple smog, the Ginnungagap, in a flying longship. To escape its coils, you must land on floating islands, play cards to raise settlements, and harvest energy for your vessel from the titular roots of the World Tree. Succumb to the advancing mists, and you'll time-rewind back to your Holt to unlock new mechanics and upgrades. There are also various big-league mythological celebrities to meet and recruit, and a variety of randomised encounters and events to shake up each run. Here's the launch trailer.

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Rival survival sims Palworld and the just-launched Enshrouded are now openly battling for hearts and minds on Steam, and here comes genre supremo Valheim out of the blind corner like, errrr, one of the celebrity WWE wrestlers who hasn't turned out to be Problematic - I don't know, maybe Zack Sabre Jr? Educate me, wrestling fans.

Valheim isn't waving a folding chair or a small flight of stairs, mind you. It's holding a development diary for the forthcoming Ashlands update, due sometime in the first half of 2024. The update introduces the titular Ashlands biome, a blend of graveyard and volcano level notable for the presence of burning skellingtons, some of whom emerge from glowering stone totems.

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Before Doom became the lean, mean murdermachine we know and love, Id Software had far bigger plans for their seminal satanic FPS. Ideas dropped during development include a big focus on story, four playable characters, elemental shields, demonic weapons, and more. The mod Doom Delta brings to life many such ideas from sources including an old design document and leaked alpha builds, which I think makes it fanfic? A new version of Doom Delta launched last week, offering a curious vision of the many Dooms Id didn't make.

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As Palworld continues to set mad records on Steam, the players themselves (all 7m of them, man alive) also seem to be in a race to see just how fast they can break it. Case in point: over the weekend, it was discovered that humans, in addition to Pals, could also be stuffed into balls and set to work in your base camp, but now they've only gone and started capturing the in-game bosses, too, thanks to a surprisingly easy-to-achieve exploit involving my bestest of friends, the island police force.

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Fntastic, the folks behind the debilitating 'open world zombie MMO' The Day Before, have released a statement to combat "misinformation" about its development and catastrophic release. They claim certain "bloggers" made huge money by creating "false content" about the game, and that its closure is thanks largely to a hate campaign that inflicted "significant damage". Bizarrely, they also believe they "implemented everything shown in the trailers". Riiight.

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I realised several hours into my Enshrouded playthrough that I have an unspoken internal checklist for what makes a great open-world survival crafting game. Great building, a sense of scale, a beautiful atmosphere, and the ability to die in extremely stupid ways. In Minecraft, it's digging straight down into lava. In Valheim, it's getting crushed by the very tree you'd just chopped down. And after dying for the third time by trying to climb a slightly-too-steep hill, slipping down and building enough momentum to send me careening off the cliff to my death, I realised that Enshrouded, too, ticks all the boxes for maybe one day being listed among the titans of the genre.

One paragraph in, and I've already compared Enshrouded to Valheim. You'll see that quite a bit throughout this review, and for good reason. Enshrouded has come the closest for me to recapturing that feeling of when the world collectively discovered Valheim for the first time. But that's both an accolade and a reservation. Because it's not quite there... yet.

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I realised several hours into my Enshrouded playthrough that I have an unspoken internal checklist for what makes a great open-world survival crafting game. Great building, a sense of scale, a beautiful atmosphere, and the ability to die in extremely stupid ways. In Minecraft, it's digging straight down into lava. In Valheim, it's getting crushed by the very tree you'd just chopped down. And after dying for the third time by trying to climb a slightly-too-steep hill, slipping down and building enough momentum to send me careening off the cliff to my death, I realised that Enshrouded, too, ticks all the boxes for maybe one day being listed among the titans of the genre.

One paragraph in, and I've already compared Enshrouded to Valheim. You'll see that quite a bit throughout this review, and for good reason. Enshrouded has come the closest for me to recapturing that feeling of when the world collectively discovered Valheim for the first time. But that's both an accolade and a reservation. Because it's not quite there... yet.

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As much as I love looking at and admiring sandbox citybuilders like Townscaper, I am terrible at actually playing them. I get the same kind of blank canvas choice paralysis I do in games like Minecraft, or anything where there's no real clear objective for what I'm meant to be building. I sit there with a big toybox of lovely things to stick together, but always end up deflated and disappointed with my own lack of imagination. But Summerhouse, the sandbox citybuilder (or townbuilder, more like) from solo developer Friedemann is just teeny-tiny enough to give me a sense of creative satisfaction. I've been playing its gorgeous little demo this week in between Palworld sessions, and yes, more of this please, this is utterly delightful. Happily, we don't have to wait too long for the final game now either, as it's coming to Steam on March 8th.

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I wasn't as sold on Half Mermaid's Immortality as the internet at large, but I'll give Sam Barlow as much rope for his FMV games as anyone else. He recently Xeeted about the studio's upcoming projects C and D, described as "next level FMV, hold onto your seats", and "reinventing 3rd person horror again", respectively. The games now have heavily redacted Steam pages, and Barlow revealed a few more details on Kinda Funny Games (helpfully transcribed a bit by VGC if you can't be arsed watching).

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Forthcoming Palworld updates will add PvP multiplayer arenas, raid bosses, Xbox feature improvements, Steam-Xbox crossplay, extra islands, server transfers, new Pals and new technologies, according to an early access roadmap just released by developers Pocketpair. The monster-catching survival sim continues to set concurrent play records on Steam, and Pocketpair are presently focussed on fixing bugs. Beyond that, though, the sky appears to be the limit, as you might expect of a game that shifted a million copies in eight hours. In particular, Pocketpair seem markedly more confident about the odds of adding PvP to the game, having downplayed the idea in interviews before release.

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Helldivers 2 will crashdown on our planet's surface on February 8th, 2024, and turns the topdown co-op alien shooter into a flashier, fancier third-person version of the same. A new trailer release today details how its 'Galactic War' systems work - that is, the macro-scale conflict within which your missions and bug hunts take place.

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Some indie hits create a legion of copycats, but others, not so much. I don't think there are too many Papers, Pleaselikes, for example - perhaps for obvious reasons given that game's grim subject matter.

Lil' Guardsman is a Papers, Pleaselike though - and a seemingly delightful one. You play as 12-year-old Lil, who is a substitute guard at the castle gate for a fantasy kigndom, and you must decide who to admit and who to deny entry. It's out now.

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Palworld, that survival game mashup, continues to grow in popularity. In the past 24 hours, its peak concurrent player count reached 1,864,421, the second highest of any game on Steam, ever. It took that spot from Counter-Strike 2 and the only game to reach higher is now PlayerUnknown's Battlegrounds, aka Plunkbat, aka PUBG.

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420mm AiOs are quite rare - not many cases come with space for three 140mm fans in a row - but they're the biggest size of consumer radiators currently available and offer unmatched cooling potential. Therefore, it may be of interest to you to learn that the Arctic Liquid Freezer II 420 is down to just £79 at Amazon UK, a crazy-low price for a cooler of this size and prowess.

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Dear reader, are you - like everyone else I know - keen to build a small form factor PC? If so, you'll probably want a Mini ITX AM5 motherboard, and this one from Asus is one of the very best available: the Asus ROG Strix B650E-I Gaming WiFi. It cost £329.99 last year, but now it's on sale from Amazon UK for just £239.99 - a £90 savings and still £30 cheaper than Asus' official web store.

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Riot Games have announced that they will shortly lay off "about 530" people, or 11 per cent of their global workforce, so as to "create focus and move us towards a more sustainable future", in the words of CEO Dylan Jadeja. The "biggest impact" will be felt outside of core development, though the reductions will affect at least one major internal team - the developers of Legends Of Runeterra. Riot are also binning off the Riot Forge publishing label, under which third-party developers create smaller-scale games based on Riot's own intellectual properties.

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Readers with keen memories may remember that I recently self-described as being in my scented candle girlie era. I'm currently burning one called Starry Night, which is a nice fresh scent but it's nowhere near as strong as I would like. I can never find fresh scents that are as long-lingering as the fruity or woody ones. Anyway, I have been discussing my new interest (and interrupting work meetings with pretend candle unboxing videos where I tell them to like and subscribe and check out my collab with WickManiac) with the rest of the Treehouse, which prompted us to talk about the idea of gamer candles. They exist! They're just candles of lies.

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A new update for the PC Game Pass and Xbox versions of Palworld has fixed some of its many, many known issues today, but those hoping for some fixes to its online multiplayer options will sadly have to wait a little longer. Currently, those playing on Game Pass still don't have the ability to join or create dedicated servers for up to 32-player multiplayer like their mates on Steam can. Instead, they remain limited to just 2-4-player co-op via the use of friend codes, meaning that Game Pass players aren't having quite the same experience as their Steam counterparts.

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If you're in need of some quiet time - and I certainly am, because the people upstairs are having their kitchen refitted, and the resulting powerdrill noise is literally shaking things off my desk - I recommend a stroll across the plains of Planetside 2. This might seem odd advice, given that PlanetSide 2 is a shooter in which hundreds or even thousands of players fight each other simultaneously, but the thing about planet-sized wars is that they require plenty of legroom, and the thing about crowds is that you can lose yourself within them.

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Basically the only sort of strategy games I like are city builders, so I was interested in the playtest for El Dorado: The Golden City Builder, which casts you as the leader of an ancient Mayan-ish city. The playtest is only the prologue, but the eventual goal is to take over the Yucatán peninsula, and if nothing else it's refreshing to see a city-builder that doesn't feel overwhelmingly European. It also has a complicated system of religion. Whereas in a similarly polytheistic game like Zeus, the gods would turn up to stomp on buildings and/or bless them, at fairly large intervals, in El Dorado I was getting a home immolated every few days. Building shrines that have an area of effect, and that require resources to run and protect your town, is its own supply chain in El Dorado. This is a very interesting idea that I liked.

But. The aforementioned deities are figures from Maya mythology, and the Yucatán peninsula is the bit where the Mayans lived, so I just find it a bit sus the word "Mayan" does not appear anywhere on the Steam page or in the press release materials. Sometimes said materials say "the Yucatán peninsula", and sometimes "the mystical land of Jukatan", which could well be an innocent translation mistake, but doesn't make me less sus. I've hedged my bets by saying "Mayan-ish" - just as an uncharitable person could say the devs are doing...

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Today I'm just tickled pink seeing an excellent Deus Ex cosplayer fully step into the role of JC Denton, funny walk and weird talk and all. Seeing as you voted the seminal immersive sim your seventh-favourite RPG of all time, I thought you might like to see it too. It's very good.

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I try to be open minded, you know. What usually happens is I give an adventure game a chance though they're all terrible (all of them), and I try. I really do. I made it several hours into Stasis Colon Bone Totem before getting frustra-bored and giving up. That may sound damning, but it's actually very good indeed, because usually that happens within about ten minutes. I can't say it defied my hatred of the genre as much as a The Last Express or The Cat Lady, but it had a good enough run to deserve talking about. Not least as I'm still curious about its setting.

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Ahhh, fast travel: the opinion generator. Speaking to IGN, Dragon's Dogma 2 director Hideaki Itsuno threw his own hat into the ring, saying that he's keen to avoid fast travel in DD2 and would prefer that "players travel normally and experience the world around them". If you're someone who argues all games should let you teleport to the objective, then Itsuno thinks you're wrong. Hey, he doesn't mess about, and I don't disagree with him, as long as the game isn't actually wasting my time.

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Yakuza: Like A Dragon was a brilliant foray into turn-based chaos, but some of its RPG elements didn't quite lead anywhere. Well, in swaggers the frankly ginormous Like A Dragon: Infinite Wealth to tie off the loose ends and give us a follow-up that links all the best bits of Yakuza into a far more satisfying reward loop. Some of the refinements make for superb silliness, while others are a bit eh - not everything is perfect. But spending time with Ichiban and his pals in the sun-soaked Hawaii and beyond is the real treat. It's a wonderful, happy JRPG and it will never fail to brighten my day. Thank goodness for Yakuza.

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When I am faced with Death, and that grim skeletal mouth asks me to choose the game we play to decide my fate, I have long believed I will pick Tekken. I'm not confident I will best the reaper in Iron Fist combat. But I cannot pass up the adrenally depraved possibility of successfully performing a ten-button airborne combo on mortality made manifest. It would be rad. It would be absurd and beautiful and I know, for a fact, that Death will play as Panda.

But will we play Tekken 8? Or roll back to Tekken 7? Hmmm. Let's find out.

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For such a ma-bloody-hoosive RPG, it turns out Like a Dragon: Infinite Wealth can fit rather snugly in the diminutive Steam Deck. Developers RGG Studio revealed, a full two weeks before launch, that Valve had awarded it coveted Verified status – a mark of honour for games that run, control, and generally operate well on the handheld.

What that golden sticker doesn’t explain is that to keep above a suitable 30fps, Infinite Wealth does demand that you swing the stolen bicycle of quality reductions directly into the soft skull of its graphical settings. It’s perfectly doable, mind, so if LADding around Hawaii sounds like as much fun to you as Ed’s review makes it seem, read on to find out how Infinite Wealth gets on with the Steam Deck and Steam Deck OLED.

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Obsidian's Avowed is a game for the more indecisive or changeable RPG player, with no "enforced" classes and an emphasis on easily respeccing and experimenting with different combinations of weapons and abilities. Or at least, that's my overall takeaway from a new Xbox podcast interview featuring game director Carrie Patel and gameplay director Gabe Paramo. In the video, the pair delve a little deeper into last week's Xbox Developer Direct showcase and how the game compares to their previous Pillars of Eternity games, which are set in the same world.

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I didn't think it was possible for Palworld's animal sweatshop-style base building to get even more bleak and depressing than it already was, but it turns out I was wrong. Last night, I reached a part of the game's Technology tree that sent an actual shiver down my spine, it was that awful and morbid. No, it wasn't the option to arm my leaf monkey with an assault rifle, or my green squirrels with machine guns - though they were on the same tech branch. Nope, this one was even more sinister, and I absolutely refuse to unlock it.

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