Rock, Paper, Shotgun

Last year's arcade brawler Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles: Shredder's Revenge will receive DLC titled Dimension Shellshock later this year which includes a new playable character and game mode. Regular ally of the Turtles Usagi Yojimbo will join the roster, allowing players to dish out damage as the rabbit samurai. Developers Tribute Games have shared a trailer for Dimension Shellshock, which you can take a look at below.

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As well as it runs on your average desktop PC, it wasn’t until I began playing Diablo IV on the Steam Deck that its demon-thwacking really clicked for me. Largely because this was my first experience of it with gamepad controls, and using thumbsticks and face buttons to move and toss out spells just feels more... I don't know, direct? Like I’m actually controlling my Necromancer and her boney bodyguards, not just clicking a unit and watching their animations.

It helps that Diablo IV’s Steam Deck performance is surprisingly spry, with fast 45-60fps framerates within reach even when leaving the majority of graphics settings on Ultra quality. Unlike all of the other best Steam Deck games, there’s no native support for its Battle.net launcher, but with some resourcefulness, that needs only be a temporary barrier.

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Some games adapt to VR more naturally than others. Games that take place primarily in a cockpit, like Elite Dangerous or Euro Truck Simulator 2, need relatively little adjustment to make them enjoyable in VR. They don't require the player to move around much, and their whole shtick about providing an authentic, immersive experience.

Games that require a lot of fast movement, or require the player to keep track of a lot of different objects, are generally harder to make work through VR Goggles. Hence why Amid Evil VR caught my attention. Shooters are common VR fodder, but they're typically built as VR experiences from the ground up. Amid Evil, on the other hand, is a flatscreen retro shooter designed to be reactive, surreal, and above all, fast. It's a game where you zip around arcane dimensions like a magic missile, splattering weird little armoured guys with enchanted swords and a staff that fires planets. It's a brilliant game, one of the best old-skool shooters to emerge from the genre's revival. But on paper, it's about as VR friendly as Morpheus.

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Tetris is grand, but it could do with more chainsaws. Thus (presumably) went the thought process of the developers behind Dr. Fetus' Mean Meat Machine, a Super Meat Boy spinoff about lining up colourful meaty blobs while dodging buzzsaws and other grizzly hazards. Think Tetris meets match 4 meets Meat Boy slapstick.

A demo came out in April, but publishers Thunderful Games have just announced you'll get to play the full thing on June 22nd.

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Everyone's favourite hunny-yellow bear will mutate into a fleshy horror bristling with extra arms and eyeballs and glands in Winnie's Hole, the next roguelikelike dungeon crawler from Ring Of Pain developers Twice Different. The earliest Winnie-the-Pooh stories are no longer under copyright in the US, see, meaning people can do whatever they want. Including this. Inevitably including this. Come see the horrible Pooh and his hole in the announcement trailer below.

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Out of all the roguelike deckbuilders that have followed in Slay The Spire's footsteps, Wildfrost is my second favourite. The cardplay never quite reaches the dizzy heights of Spire or Monster Train, but it's far cuter than either of them and still absolutely splendid. Now's a great time to pick it up, too, because its first big update is primarily aimed at clarifying rules to help new players avoid all the painful deaths I suffered through.

Developers Deadpan Games have released a roadmap, too, revealing a rough plan for what they're working on next.

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UPDATE: Diablo 4's first level 100 Hardcore character is no more, after a dropped connection to the game's servers killed Carn's Barbarian. The moment it happened was captured on stream, and you can watch it for yourself in this clip on Carn's Twitch channel, aptly titled "rip?".

Former Starcraft and Dota pro "cArn" has won the race to hit level 100 on a Diablo 4 Hardcore character, thus earning him a letter from the king and a nap. This is Diablo's permadeath mode, where one death is enough to wipe your progress. He dinged his final ding on his Barbarian in the early hours of June 5th, just five days after the game's early access launch, and he's now been officially confirmed as the first Hardcore centurion. It's a feat that sounds as impressive as it does exhausting.

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20 Minutes Till Dawn, one of only a handful of worthy Vampire Survivors-likes, will leave early access on June 8th. Its final update is currently available as a beta and adds weapon evolutions and new weapons, among other things.

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EA are in conversations to move ongoing development of BioWare MMO, Star Wars: The Old Republic, to a third-party developer, Broadsword Online Games. IGN reported the news earlier today, after which EA confirmed that conversations were taking place.

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Diablo 4 is Blizzard's "fast-selling game of all time", according to Blizzard themselves. They're not sharing how many copies it has sold exactly, but the figures are based on all platforms as of June 5th, the day before the action-RPG's full launch. Blizzard also say that the clickfest has been played for 93 million hours during its early access period.

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Adam (RPS in peace) once described Lisa: The Painful as "Earthbound by way of thecatamites", but that was back in 2014 and there's a decent chance those references mean little to you. That might be part of the reason why Lisa has remained a cult classic, even if it has overwhelmingly positive reviews from those who persevered with the punishing, deranged, tragicomic RPG Maker game.

Now it's 2023 and Lisa: The Painful is getting a Definitive Edition re-release, and I'm lucky that I can draw on better known references. It's like Undertale by way of... Uh, thecatamites?

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The RX 6650 XT has emerged as one of the best value graphics cards for 1080p gaming, and today you can pick one up for a new low price. Newegg has discounted the AsRock Challenger D model to just $229.99 when you use the code VGAEXCAA735 at the checkout, knocking $20 off the usual price.

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The Crucial P3 Plus is an SSD that we recommend as one of the best for gaming, and today it's even cheaper than usual - with a price drop on Amazon UK bringing it to £43.79, nearly 60% off RRP and a solid £17 reduction from its price back in April. This makes it an incredible time to upgrade your system with super-fast PCIe 4.0 storage.

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Following on from the lovely space highjinks of Citizen Sleeper, Katharine has unwisely allowed me to take the wheel on this month's RPS Game Club, and thus I am steering this baby right into fiendish puzzle town. Next stop: The Tartarus Key!

It's only recently come out, so we're fresh to death this time - literally, because in it you're trapped in a mansion full of SAW-esque murder-puzzles. I really enjoyed this game, with its low-poly PS1 style, and its vibe of being an early 00s thriller that would probably star e.g. Morgan Freeman hunting down a twisted serial killer played by e.g. Hugh Jackman. But in this metaphor, I am the twisted monster, and I have trapped both you and my colleagues and am forcing you all to play this game I like.

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Itching to click on skeletons but not sure about Diablo 4? Have a gander at Halls Of Torment, a game I'll broadly describe as 'Vampire Survivors meets Diablo'. It lets you click on: so many skeletons. Halls Of Torment launched into early access last month and I've had a few hours of fun for a couple quid. The Diablo vibes are strong, it has some neat ideas for the genre, and it has a demo you can try for free. I only wish it drew a little more inspiration from Diablo and a little less from Survivors 'em up conventions.

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More fool me for thinking the Amnesia story (a now-complex horror sci-fi epic about Cenobite-esque weirdos who gain immortality by drinking pain-milk extracted from people via torture at the hands of specially engineered torture-monsters) was done with Amnesia: Rebirth. Although, I suppose it actually is, because Rebirth is set in 1937, and Amnesia: The Bunker is effectively a bottle episode taking place during the First World War. And what a bottle episode! You'll spend 4-6 hours being chased around the tunnels of a maze-like bunker, winding up a dim, rubbish torch and reading increasingly unhinged diary notes from the French soldiers who've all been eaten, and boy will you have a great time.

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This year's prettiest RSI machine Diablo 4 arrives on PC in full today, having spent the few couple of days in early access. But even though it's barely out the gates of Hell, Blizzard are already thinking about the future of their mega RPG, confirming not one, but two expansions are already in the works.

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Our sister site Eurogamer is celebrating 15 years of EGX (aka: the Eurogamer Expo) this month, and they're holding a charity pub quiz in its honour down in London this Thursday, June 8th. Yes, yes, we know that's the same day as Geoff's Annual Trainer Showcase (aka: Summer Game Fest), but hey, at least it's for a good cause, with all proceeds going to the lovely folks at GamesAid. Tickets are on sale now, and RPS supporters can also get a special code to nab themselves a free drink. Details below.

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With the arrival of Nvidia RTX 40-series graphics cards in gaming laptops, models with previous-gen RTX 30-series cards are becoming super-affordable. Now you can get even high-models for less than £1000, including this HP Omen machine which includes a 16.1-inch 1440p 165Hz display, RTX 3070 Ti graphics card and Ryzen 7 6800H CPU for £972 on Amazon.

The same machine retailed for £1629 in March this year, so this is a huge bargain - especially given that this is still hugely a powerful machine for 1440p gaming. The spec even includes a 1TB NVMe SSD and 16GB of DDR5 RAM, so it's a convincing machine from top to bottom.

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I've spoken on many occasions about my love for Cooler Master's NR200 small form factor PC case, and today it's gone on sale in the US for the first time in a while - so I thought I'd let you know!

Right now you can pick up the NR200 in white for $70, down from $115. To get this price, you'll need to use code CMJUND2 at the cart and then use a rebate form for an additional $25 back. That's a bit of a faff for sure, but in exchange you do get one of the best and most popular SFF PC cases on the market.

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People might have been sleeping on Swordship, which is as unfortunate as it sounds. It’s a dodge ‘em up about luring enemies into attacking each other while swooshing down waterways. Clean, is the word that comes to mind: a purity of purpose. Everything looks and sounds exactly like it should, while making little metal chumps shoot other little metal chumps is a fundamental joy.

It launched last December, but developers Digital Kingdom just shipped a 1.1 update that adds a new mode, overhauls unlock progression and tweaks loads more. There’s a free demo, if you don’t want to take the full plunge.

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If there’s a single upside to the collapsing standards of technical competence among big-budget PC games, it’s that when something like Diablo 4 comes along and simply performs well, there’s an almost pleasant relief to it. Like your bus arriving on time, a minute after watching the previous, late-arriving one flip onto its roof attempting a handbrake turn.

It’s not perfect, but Diablo IV does run smoothly for the most part (also sorry Google, but I'm going back to Roman numberals), and its system requirements on PC are as likely to involve museum pieces as they are the latest and priciest graphics cards. I’ve put some hours into the early access build and have come up with a best settings guide, but in truth, this will likely just optimise your framerates – Diablo IV’s higher quality settings rarely trouble it, especially at 1080p.

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Tch, who opened the door to Necrom? Now we’ll be up to our eyeballs in tentacles and ichor - or at least, we will be if you buy The Elder Scrolls Online’s new expansion. Necrom: Shadows Over Morrowind sends you off to biff a threat that could unravel all reality, packing traditional expansion fare like new zones and new companions, as well as the game’s first new class since 2019.

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Dig deep, for both mental fortitude and coin, because yet another videogame is getting the cardboard treatment. Paper Fort Games are transmuting beloved mine and craft ‘em up Terraria into a 4 player co-op board game, albeit one that's on the distant horizon. A crowdfunder is coming and the devs “don’t expect” the game will ship this year, but a lucky few did get to try an early alpha prototype at the UK board games expo last weekend. Somewhat surprisingly, they seemed to like it.

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For those in the UK, the latest “here’s what you could have won” bit of helpful EU regulation just dropped. Valve are now required to show Steam users in EU countries a game’s lowest price over the past 30 days, which means sellers can’t display deceptively high discounts by bumping the base price before a sale. Valve made the change in order to comply with the ominously named “Omnibus Directive”, which applies to all online stores.

Steam already enforces limits on manipulating prices around sales, but it’s nice that some people get to have a little extra peace of mind.

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And just like that, Summer Games Done Quick 2023 is over. The summer segment of the speedrunning celebration wrapped up last weekend, having this year taken place slightly before summer for some reason. The event raised over $2 million for Doctors Without Borders, while also spawning an excellent Ratatouille speedrun/audition for award-winning chef drama The Bear.

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Every weekend, indie devs show off current work on Twitter's #screenshotsaturday tag. And every Monday, I bring you a selection of these snaps and clips. This week, we're even heavier on vibes and moods than usual, and with only one retro-styled FPS for once! The vibes are plentiful and they are powerful and I hope you enjoy this latest selection of interesting and attractive indie games.

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Sundays are for recovering from yet another wedding. Before you consume some electrolytes, let's read this week's best writing about games (and game related things).

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Diablo 4 has had a smooth launch so far during its early access period. Still, Blizzard's latest skeleton-clicker isn't perfect yet, and two new hotfixes were released yesterday in order to tweak the Sorcerer, the Rogue, and the strength of monsters later in the game.

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Skateboarding games are great, but their insistence that I flip a kick, pop an ollie or grind my trucks inevitably tires me out. Driftwood looks more my pace. You play a sloth with a longboard and must drift, at high speeds, down beautiful hills. It's out in early access now.

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Blaseball, the supernatural baseball browser-based betting league that became a brief social phenomena in 2020, is closing down. Its developers The Game Band announced the news yesterday, writing that the cost of running the game, "literally and metaphorically, is too high." An undisclosed number of staff are also being laid off.

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Midnight Ghost Hunt pits ghost against hunters in multiplayer scraps in which the ghosts are able to possess inanimate objects and both groups can unlock abilities with which to catch out their opponents. It's still in early access, but it's also free to keep from the Epic Games Store right now.

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Diablo 4 launches on Tuesday and who knows how many people will soon part company with the sun? Our Diablo 4 review called it "a beautiful, frictionless grey toybox that puts nothing in the way of you playing it for hours and wondering what you've done with your life." And just when the weather got nice. But quite a few of us have been playing advance copies, and I hope they've remembering to chug vitamin D pills like so many healing potions. Anyway! What are you playing this weekend? Here's what we're clicking on!

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Earlier this month, we asked you to vote for your favourite space games of all time, and man alive did you lot come out swinging for this. Hundreds and hundreds of votes have been beamed in over the last few weeks, resulting in an overwhelming favourite that was (no word of a lie) several thousand points ahead of its nearest rival. Not hundreds. Thousands. When you see it, you'll probably go, 'Of course, of course that's number one!' but let's not get ahead of ourselves. Come and find out what other games made the cut as we count down your 25 favourite space games of all time.

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You know who you shouldn't trust? Hotel cleaners. Not in real life, I should add - where they are hardworking and one time one helped me catch and kill cockroach even though we didn't speak the same language - but in the game This Bed We Made, a third person mystery set in a slightly grimy 1950s hotel. The reason why you shouldn't trust this particular cleaner because it is, in fact, you, in the kitten heels of Sophie here, as you rifle through their belongings and ogle at their undies. There's a demo of one such room on Steam now, and it plops you right in medias of some juicy res.

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Just yesterday, June 1st, early access for Diablo IV officially began for owners of the Ultimate and Digital Deluxe editions. But the biggest news for PC players is how surprisingly stable the launch has been. So far. Fingers crossed for the full launch on June 6th. There have been some annoying licensing errors affecting console friends (and a few PC players too), but with the disastrous launch of Diablo III in mind, early access hack n’ slashers can let out a sigh of relief that lightning hasn’t struck twice.

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I'm unsure whether to call Raid On Taihoku a "historical game", since it's an adventure game with enough daftness to feel a bit unlike what that phrase brings to mind. But it's set very thoroughly in Taiwan towards the end of World War II, and though the focus is a young girl's relationship with her family and friends, that context is critical to why I've enjoyed it so much.

Taxonomy aside, then, the important thing is that it's enjoyable. It hasn't hit the emotional highs of the kind of interactive fiction I favour, but for a story with such heavy themes, it provides a relaxing drip feed of mystery reveals and plot thickenings in between low-pressure minigames. It's a good time, without undermining its obvious respect for the people who had to live through this.

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Take one good look at the upcoming Catch & Cook: Fishing Adventure and you might just mistake it for 2023’s other third-person cartoony fishing sim: Dredge. The big-toothed mutants and otherworldly horrors in Dredge can get quite overwhelming though, especially when they start to chomp at your ship beneath the surface. After playing Catch & Cook’s recently released demo, I’m happy to report that it’s the ideal fishing sim for people who find Dredge’s spooky undercurrents, erm, too spooky. Just a very chill, very good time.

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It's time for the next gathering of the RPS Game Club! From 4pm BST today, June 2nd, we'll be chatting about all things Citizen Sleeper - your favourite moments, your most heart-breaking questlines, and lots more. We've been having a swell time revisiting one of our favourite games from last year for this month's Game Club, and we hope you've had fun playing it as well. So why not come and join in the discussion? See you at 4pm sharp!

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Continuing their annual tradition, developer Don’t Nod have announced that all three episodes of Tell Me Why will be free to keep for the rest of June. Rather than spending money on the game, the team asks that you might consider donating that money to “trans creators, trans-inclusive charities local to you, and trans people in need,” in honour of Pride Month. Regardless, the supernatural mystery is one of the best recent adventure games and is well worth the time.

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