Rock, Paper, Shotgun

Thatgamecompany, the widely admired studio behind Flower and Journey, are bringing their peaceful MMO Sky: Children Of The Light to PC. The game’s all about flying through endless fluffy clouds, exploring ancient ruins, and befriending wordless strangers throughout the chill open world. There’s no release window yet, but check out its gorgeous new trailer below.

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Telltale are ready to release their first new game since their sort-of revival, in collaboration with fellow adventure game experts Deck Nine. Episodic adventure The Expanse: A Telltale Series will debut on July 27th with its first episode, with four more episodes dropping every two weeks - hopefully keeping those water cooler conversations alive. The full game should be available to binge starting from September 21st, 2023.

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Star Wars Jedi: Survivor was released on a rocky road last month, bogged down by some troublesome technical problems. After a series of patches, our James took a second look at the sequel, where he said, “neither of these really make Jedi: Survivor's PC performance good, merely less bad.” Now, developer Respawn continues its mission to lessen the badness with a fifth patch aimed at performance and stability.

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Last time, you decided that petting the dog is better than entering cyberspace. I'm not angry, I'm just disappointed. And you probably don't even notice me sulking here in cyberspace because you're so busy tickling some lousy stinkbag with the mind of a toddler. Fine, fine, whatever. This week, it's all about self-imposed challenges. What's better: fighting your double, or optional challenges giving rewards upfront?

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Universal Pictures have dropped the first teaser for their Five Nights At Freddy’s film adaptation, based on the hit horror series. Ten years ago, I’d hear schoolmates chatting about the games’ ghosts, purple people, and dismembered heads stuck in animatronics. Now, we’re old enough to buy R-rated cinema tickets, and Hollywood’s ready to capitalise on some teen nostalgia - essentially the film industry’s version of min-maxing. Check out the first teaser here:

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My ever-growing backlog of farmlife sims gives me a judgemental side-eye every week, as I crawl back to my scarily silent husband in Stardew Valley. That list of Stardew-likes is becoming harder and harder to ignore, though. I’m very much looking forward to Grave Seasons (aka Stardew meets murder mysteries). I was looking forward to Roots Of Pacha (aka Stardew meets the Stone Age) before its publisher woes. And now, I’m incredibly excited about Mirthwood (aka Stardew meets Fable). Check out its announcement trailer below:

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A most peculiar quandary has befallen Atomic Heart players on the Steam Deck, though mayhaps not to the extent that it’s worth writing like a knockoff Sherlock Holmes for any more of this article. Basically, the display and graphics settings have gone missing, leaving the Sovietpunk FPS without any means of resolution or visual quality adjustments.

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Strategy sequel Jagged Alliance 3 is coming out on July 14th, publisher THQ Nordic have announced. The last numbered entry in the series was released almost 25 years ago, and Jagged Alliance 3 continues the tradition of eccentric mercenaries who politely wait for their turn before shooting people. Take a look at the latest trailer below to see what the game is and is not, plus some pumped-up voicework ripped straight from an early 2000s MTV reality show:

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Whoooo we’re officially in the double-digits gang! We’ve somehow managed to make it to episode 10 of Indiescovery without going completely feral and wrecking the joint. I say that, but this week’s episode is a little, shall we say, unhinged? Rebecca, Liam, and Rachel hadn’t really had a proper chat all week so there’s a lot of Friday energy and catching up, and the energy levels only increase when we start to talk about our main topic of this episode: Eurovision! And indie games, of course.

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When Overwatch 2 was first announced at Blizzcon 2019, Blizzard promised an ambitious "highly replayable" PvE component that somewhat justified the '2' at the end of the title. Last night, the Overwatch 2 development team announced that they've scrapped most of their ideas including the Hero Missions mode which had skill trees, levelling up, and other light RPG elements shown off in the trailer below. Instead, they'll be gradually releasing co-op story missions and integrating them into their ongoing seasons, similar to how PvE operated in the first Overwatch.

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Steam's latest genre-specific sale is entirely about sports games. From yesterday - this post was postponed due to frozen pitch, sorry - until May 22nd, you can find discounts on everything from skateboarding to golf, wrestling to fishing, and of course lots of fitba.

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It's long been possible to download demos of some games on Steam, particularly during periodic Steam Next Fests. It's also technically possible to buy a game, play it for under two hours, then refund it if it's not for you.

As of yesterday, you can experience a marriage of both these ideas on Steam via a time-limited 90 minute trial for EA's Dead Space remake.

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Humanity has been released. Not from our inevitable march towards eternal slumber, but the puzzle game wahey. It's being published by Tetsuya Mizuguchi's Enhance and it seems shot through with the same mixture of the silly and the sublime as that designer's Rez and Tetris Effect, as you play a Shiba Inu who commands crowds of humans around large abstract architecture.

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EVGA's Kingpin motherboards are some of the most bonkers out there, proper slabs that are designed for extreme overclocking with hugely impressive power delivery, multiple BIOSes and some unique features. They're also hugely expensive, normally costing close to $1000, but a deep discount on their Z690 model over at Newegg brings it to $400. That's still pricey, but a reasonable pickup given the feature list for anyone designing a top-end gaming rig around Intel's 12th-gen or 13th-gen Core processors.

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It's been a little while since we covered a prebuilt gaming PC here at RPS, but there's a good deal today on a RTX 4070 system over at CCL.

Update (18/5): CCL has upgraded the motherboard from an Asus A320 to a newer MSI A520 model. Original article continues:

A configuration that includes a Ryzen 5 5700G, 16GB of DDR4 and 500GB NVMe SSD is available for £960 when you use code GAMER20 - and you even get a free copy of Diablo 4, which debuts on 6/6 and looks quite promising!

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A new series of challenge mod packs aim to raise awareness for Long Covid and chronic fatigue symptoms using three perennial favourites: Elden Ring, Minecraft, and The Witcher 3. The initiative is called Long Covid Mode and all three mods make sweeping adjustments to the games, turning “real-world symptoms into in-game effects.” Take a look at some of the examples below:

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I've been meaning to write about Veiled Experts for over a month now, since playing it religiously during the Final Beta Test. I've been putting it off mostly because I've been busy, but also because I'm trying to find a way of saying "actually it's really good" without people laughing and throwing garbage at me. It's very hard to describe Veiled Experts to someone in a way that doesn't prompt an instant dismissal. That was my reaction too. I saw it on Twitch, my mind said "third person Counter-Strike", and sent an automatic signal down to my lips to proclaim the words: "sounds awful".

Thank goodness for boredom. Later that day I was at a loose end and saw that Veiled Experts was free, so I downloaded it and tried it out. And here we are, a month and a bit later. The game is about to release into Early Access, and I'm desperately trying to get everyone I know to play it with me, because it's bloody phenomenal.

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May marks the beginning of summer, the end of spring, and National Paper Airplane Day. Oh, and another fresh batch of Game Pass comings and goings. The rest of this month welcomes a few gems (Chicory: A Colorful Tale and FIFA), and bids farewell to others (Europa Universalis and FIFA).

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After playing a bunch of the demos at LudoNarraCon earlier this month, the best one I played, with zero hesitation, was Cryptmaster. Its smart text-based puzzle design fused with stylish dungeon crawling had me completely spellbound, to the point where it's now become one of my most anticipated indie games for 2024. It’s honestly unlike anything I’ve played.

Developed by Paul Hart and Lee Williams, Cryptmaster is a dark fantasy dungeon crawler where you need to type (or speak) commands to help get your undead amnesiac party members out of a strange underground kingdom. Your band of forgetful adventurers aren't completely at the mercy of the dungeon, as a devilish-looking necromancer is there to give a helping hand. An ominous figure who acts as both guide and a quest giver, the horned necromancer helps you navigate the strange rules of this underground world where words and letters are a resource for survival.

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After giving us a release window for horror collection Layers Of Fear, developers Bloober Team have now set a concrete date: June 15th, 2023. The game previously changed its name earlier in the year, dropping the pluralisation of Layers Of Fears. Presumably, it'll still explore more than one fear, though. You can see for yourself as the game released a new demo today, available on Steam until May 22nd.

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What can I say? I love games that have a bit of a sing-song. I've enjoyed the pop platforming of Sayonara Wild Hearts, the DIY DJ-ing in Fuser, the grungy game-meets-album Teenage Blob, and the recently released fist-pumping robot-thrashing Hi-Fi Rush just to name some from the top of my noggin'.

Music is a definitely big part of these games, but Stray Gods: A Roleplaying Musical has set itself on a different kind of musical path, in that it’s actually a musical. I'm talking like a full-on ballad-belter, curtain-caller, exit-stage-left-er musical. And get this: it’s also a modern retelling of the mythos behind the Greek Gods. It feels like my inner theatre kid has chugged ten Red Bulls and is waiting for her cue to burst out.

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Free-to-play battle royale Vampire: The Masquerade - Bloodhunt is ending development a year after launch, the team at Sharkmob have announced. That means the game won’t receive frequent updates in the future. Sharkmob points to their limited player base, which made sustainable development difficult for the battle royale, although servers will remain online indefinitely, as long as there’s an “active player base and community.”

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Five years after competitive multiplayer mech shooter Hawken shut down, a new game will invite us back to stomp around in its scrappy mechs. Announced last night by developers and publishers 505 Games, the free-to-play Hawken Reborn will launch into early access tomorrow. This time, it's a PvE game, with story missions plus open patrol zones to explore and complete jobs. I was enamoured with the jetdashing scrappy mechs and greeble-covered apartment blocks of the first game but always wished it had a singleplayer or co-op campaign, so I'm certainly curious about this.

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Amazon Games are taking another stab at creating an MMO based on The Lord Of The Rings world, this time partnering with the Embracer Group who recently bought the entirety of Middle-Earth - the IP, not the realms, though I wouldn't put it past them. The untitled project is currently in early development for both PC and consoles with Orange County - the folks behind MMO New World - leading the charge.

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Paranormasight: The Seven Mysteries Of Honjo isn’t your average visual novel. There are some buck wild concepts in Square Enix’s game, including fourth wall breaks to manipulate characters' actions and literally muting someone by turning voices off in the options menu, to name just two of the wackier features (and a big plot twist is discussed in this article, so beware if you're planning on playing Paranormasight soon).

At the outset, though, Paranormasight loks like it is your average visual novel, with the player working away to prevent curses from claiming the lives of Tokyo citizens. Writer and director Takaya Ishiyama explains this was actually the starting point for Paranormasight’s inception. “I first decided what the final goal of the game would be, and from there I began to plot out the broad elements I needed to include, such as the Seven Mysteries,” he explains.

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Star Wars Jedi: Survivor developers Respawn Entertainment have been busy on patch duty, pumping out a series of updates aimed at addressing the torrid state of its PC performance at launch. The newest, last week’s Patch 4, sounded particularly enthusiastic about tackling Jedi: Survivor’s technical troubles, so now would be a fine time to check in on the progress of this fixing-upping campaign.

A few droid decapitatin’ benchmark runs later, I can say that Patch 4 (and its predecessors) have made meaningful improvements to ray tracing performance, and that there's a lot less stuttering than there was at launch - even if this hasn’t been smoothed out entirely. General performance, however, remains deeply underwhelming, with powerful GPUs still unable to achieve a bulletproof 60fps even at 1080p.

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Microsoft’s proposed buyout of Activision Blizzard just received some good news. The European Commission have today approved the $70 billion acquisition, saying that Microsoft’s commitments “represent a significant improvement for cloud gaming.” That’s a markedly different tone to the UK’s conclusion last month, as the British regulator blocked the acquisition over concerns about the cloud market’s future.

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The Green New Deal Simulator begins with a talking owl. This owl can’t sleep at night, mainly because it’s nocturnal, but also because the planet’s impending environmental doom has affected their shoddy sleep schedule. That’s where the Green New Deal Simulator comes in, a micro deck-builder about transitioning the USA into a post-carbon economy, all while keeping employment rates stable. The results are simultaneously funny, educational, intense, and they help that damn owl get a good night's rest.

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Early access strategy RPG Songs Of Conquest has added its newest necromantic campaign today, letting us raise an army of undead and knock a few bones about. The Barony Of Loth campaign features four singleplayer missions, and similar to the previous campaigns - Arleon and Rana - we’ll be focused on one main faction: the necromancer.

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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, my eye has been caught by retro-inspired stylings everywhere from JRPGs to platformers, and a demonstration slicing a cat Revengeance-style (do not worry, the cat is fine, it's not a real cat, it isn't even meant to be a fake cat, it really is fine). Come admire these interesting and attractive indies!

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The best open world games can mean a lot of things, but here we're going with the strongest selection of games set in a sandbox, where the onus is less on survival and more on exploration or questing. You know, the sort of games where you're let loose on some open turf, perhaps with an objective, perhaps not, but always with an eye to see what's over yonder. There are some exceptions to the rule, but we reckon they're justified because some worlds are too special to discount. So, join us as we've put together our list of the 10 best open world games to play in 2023.

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The up-and-coming farmlife indie Roots Of Pacha has been pulled from Steam, following a dispute “over the rights” of the game between developer Soda Den and publisher Crytivo. The game is a prehistoric take on Stardew Valley’s crop-growing, dungeon-exploring, people-romancing formula. Its PAX East demo caught our eye earlier this year, and the full release late last month charmed many fans on Steam for the short time it was available.

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Sundays are for marvelling at the sun sticking around for longer each day. Before you enjoy the extra light, let's read this week's best writing about games (and game related things).

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Samsung's 870 Qvo SSD is one of the best options for high-capacity solid state storage, with a simple 2.5-inch form factor that doesn't take up a valuable M.2 or PCIe slot and a fast-enough SATA connection. While performance is good, at up to 550MB/s for reads and a little less for writes, the real benefit here is having up to 8TB of silent, reliable and low latency storage.

You can currently pick up this RPS-recommended gaming SSD in its ultimate 8TB form for less than £415 from two places in the UK: Tech Next Day, where you can use code TND-10 to get it for £414, and Amazon, where you can get the drive for £412. I've included both options in case you have a preference, and in the event the drive goes out of stock at this reduced price by the time you come to click the links below!

• Tech Next Day - Get the Samsung 870 Qvo 8TB for £414 w/ code TND-10 (RRP £452)

• Amazon - Get the Samsung 870 Qvo 8TB for £412 (RRP £452)

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After back-to-back three-day weekends, I feel a little cheated by this two-day weekend. Is this allowed? It's certainly not right. Can't believe we have to wait a whole fortnight for another three-day weekend. Still, while we're here, we may as well play some video games. What are you playing this weekend? Here's what we're clicking on!

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AMD's RX 6950 XT has been enjoying a surprising revival as of late, as precipitous price drops have positioned it as a cheaper competitor to Nvidia's new RTX 4070 GPU that offers better performance in rasterised titles - by a significant ~20% margin, too.

Today, the RX 6950 XT has dropped below the £600 mark for the first time we're aware of, with a chunky triple-fan ASRock model costing just £598 at Overclockers in the UK. That's significantly cheaper than the £999 that these cards originally debuted at, bringing it into contention with newer-gen cards.

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Summery explore ‘em up Despelote first caught our attention at the Day Of The Devs many years ago, thanks to its gorgeous art style and special premise. Developers Julián Cordero and Sebastián Valbuena chart a semi-autobiographical experience of their childhood in 2001's Ecuador, right before their football team qualified for its first-ever World Cup. After disappearing for a while the devs have now announced a partnership with indie publisher Panic to help release Despelote next year. Watch its re-reveal trailer below, please, it's beautiful.

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Coming-of-age visual novel Goodbye Volcano High has been delayed to August 29th, developers KO_OP have announced. The upcoming dino drama is being pushed back to deliver the “best version” of the game, avoid crunch, and move out of a busy launch period, the developers say.

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Here I am, once again, The Gears Of War-liker. I'm back, specifically because vidbud Liam and I played some Gears Of War 5 co-op campaign the other night, a rare occasion where we hadn't played a game for work but for just like… fun? Anyway, through all the roadie-running and chainsaw-gun-toting, I kept thinking, "I haven't played a video game that feels so much like a video game in ages, I miss it".

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Yesterday’s price and release date announcement for the Asus ROG Ally puts it in even closer competition with the Steam Deck: far from being a flashy, luxury alternative, the ROG Ally comes surprisingly close to the matching the Steam Deck on affordability. It could even outdo Valve’s portable PC on value, considering how the two devices’ specs compare.

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