Rock, Paper, Shotgun

Western Digital, the PC storage giants behind some of the best gaming SSDs, have released an update on a data breach that occurred in late March. Uplifting news, it is not: the "network security incident" was a large-scale case of digital thievery, with the culprits stealing a database containing the names, billing and shipping addresses, email addresses, and telephone numbers of customers to WD's online store.

The plundered database also included encrypted and salted passwords and partial credit card numbers, according to the statement. Western Digital are contacting affected users directly, and have temporarily shut down their store.

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Every PC* needs fans, so why not pick up some of the best value options for a historic low price? Arctic's P14 140mm fans are great performers as both radiator and case fans, although they're intended primarily for the former. They've attracted strong user and critical reviews since debuting a few years back, as they offer a good balance of airflow, pressure, noise and price, and now you can pick up a five-pack for just £22 - a solid £5 off their normal cost, and the cheapest they've been since 2020.

*OK, there are some passively cooled PCs, but most of us have at least one case or radiator fan contributing to our airflow needs!

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We've covered the EVGA Z20 mechanical keyboard a couple of times here on the RPS Deals beat, thanks to its quality design, full-size layout and extremely low asking price, and now we have an alternative deal for those that prefer the lighter feel and softer sound of membrane keyboards.

The EVGA Z12 is the firm's rubber dome offering, and it's down to £20 at Amazon UK, a heavy reduction from its £60 RRP and a few quid less than it's been over the past few months.

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It’s funny how some aspects of game design are so ubiquitous that we stop questioning them, or even noticing them. After decades spent playing video games, I know that if I look behind the waterfall, there’s likely to be some sort of shiny goodie to collect. If I head left rather than right at the start of a level, I’m bound to find a juicy secret. There are conventions. Traditions. I can’t remember a time when games didn’t have giant lifts - and yet, I’m not entirely sure why they’re there. I’m not talking about the regular kind of lifts that you pile into, usually at the end of a level, to transition from one part of the game to another; those ones have historically been used to hide lengthy loading times, like the interminably long lifts of Mass Effect.

What I mean is the lifts that are essentially tennis-court-sized moving platforms, usually with little more than a flimsy guard rail around the edge to stop elevator enjoyers from plunging down the shaft. Even more specifically, I’m talking about the diagonally moving elevators that trundle slowly into the depths, often to some nefarious laboratory. There’s a good example in the Resident Evil 2 remake, where you fight the final boss on an inclined elevator as it slowly, ever so slowly, descends towards the train that will grant your escape. So where did these giant elevators come from? And why do developers keep putting them in their games? I set out to answer both questions, and went somewhere unexpected.

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Last month Rachel made us aware of a life sim called Grave Seasons, a kind of mash up of perennial favourite Stardew Valley and, er, the half-season serial killer arc of a police procedural TV show. Naturally this turned my head, like Tarantino walking past a ladies shoe store, and I emailed the developers Perfect Garbage to find out a bit more. They describe the game as "fun, campy and spooky" and hint at yet more secrets to be revealed. Appropriate for a game where, every time you start a new run, one of the townsfolk starts killing everyone else.

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Sundays are for being unreasonably excited by the prospect of a Gousto box. Before you unpack, let's read this week's best writing about games (and game related things).

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RPS will mostly be slumbering this Monday, May 8th, as the UK has a national holiday for some reason or other. That means I won't be around to tell you about a stagecoach's journey across a decaying land. I'm referring, of course, to Darkest Dungeon 2 hitting 1.0 and arriving on Steam for the first time.

I'm telling you now, instead. Helpfully there's already a launch trailer and Red Hook have shared some details of their post-release plans.

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The Case Of The Golden Idol was one of our favourite games of last year. It's a detective game in which you solve a dozen murders, each presented as a freeze frame at the moment of death.

It now has an expansion. The Spider Of Lanka offers three more murders to solve and acts as a prequel to the main game.

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Magic: The Gathering Arena was released in 2019 as a (better) digital adaptation of the decades-old physical trading card game. Our review deemed it a success for its ability to make untapping and cycling graspable for newcomers and for its adoption of HearthStone-style attack animations.

Previously it's only been available as a download from its own website, but now Wizards say it'll come to Steam on May 23rd.

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Mimimi Games, the developers of upcoming supernatural pirate stealth-strategy Shadow Gambit: The Cursed Crew, have warned that they're being "targeted by a phishing campaign." Apparently some nefarious party is sending out emails with a link to a website that looks nearly identical to the official Shadow Gambit site with the promise of beta access. Mimimi say that the email is not from them and that there is no beta.

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Here in the UK, we're having another long weekend for no particular reason. Government thought we might enjoy a day in the sun, you know? An opportunity to go marvel at some lambs, catch up on the housework, read a book, lounge on a beach, have some pals over for a barbecue, just a free day to do nothing in particular for no reason. We'll return in full force on Tuesday. Until then, what are you playing this weekend? Here's what we're clicking on!

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Welcome back to another RPS Time Capsule. I will age a thousand years by writing this next sentence, but today we're casting our minds back to twenty years ago, excavating our personal favourite games from the actually quite good year of 2003. Yep, instant wrinkles like I've just been caught in a Death Stranding rain shower. I better finish this introduction quickly before I disintegrate to a pile of dust - much like all the other games from this year that didn't make it into this year's Time Capsule. Come and find out which ones we've decided to save below.

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Over the last week and a bit, we've been steadily releasing a bunch of stories from our big, hour-long chat with XCOM and Marvel's Midnight Suns director Jake Solomon that took place at this year's GDC. It was a wide-ranging interview, looking at what Solomon plans to do next now that he's left Firaxis, and how he feels about his 20+ year career there. You can read the condensed version of that interview here, but as a treat for RPS supporters, I thought you might like to read our chat in full. There's still a lot I couldn't quite squeeze into separate news stories here, and I think (and hope) you'll find it interesting to read as a whole. So here it is. All 8760-odd words of it. Enjoy.

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Aeons ago, I wrote about the Leftfield collection that was supposed to happen at Rezzed 2020. Ploughing through several emotions without comment, in amongst the games that we never got to see as a result of Things Happening was an earlier version of Lunark, a clearly Flashback-influenced action puzzle platformer.

I've kind of worried about it ever since, so I was glad to see it released recently, and gladder still that it's a lot of fun.

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Fortniters everywhere, rejoice! Playing Fortnite can now put you on the road to the Olympics, so teachers can no longer scold kids for sneaking in a game during class - that’s how you win gold medals now, goddammit. The Olympics have today announced that the money-printing battle royale has joined the line-up for the Olympic Esport Series 2023, taking place in Singapore next month.

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Arcadey ice hockey action slams into roguelikelike runs with Tape To Tape, out now in early access. Imagine 'NHL 94 meets Hades' and you have a vague sense. Across a run, you travel a strange land playing hockey matches and earning upgrades to boost your team with better stats and whole new abilities. It's an interesting idea and quite a silly game, with a daft tone and some cheery ultraviolence.

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Developers Torpor Games have been teasing something mysterious over the last few months and they’ve finally shed light on their future plans. The acclaimed political RPG Suzerain is getting even deeper thanks to an upcoming paid expansion called Kingdom Of Rizia and a free 2.0 update called Amendment, the developers announced during this week's LudoNarraCon digital fest.

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After being invaded by Thargoids at the end of last year, Elite Dangerous is now letting its players fight back in its next update. Update 15 introduces a new tool to help players finally get inside the mysterious Thargoid Maelstrom clouds that have been cropping up across the galaxy ever since the invasion began last November. However, there are also new enemy classes and Thargoid vessels to encounter, and one in particular - the Hunter-class Glaive - looks very nasty indeed.

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Earlier this week I announced that RPS Yearly Premium Supporters can claim a game key for the Park Beyond closed beta, running until Friday May 19th. This is your reminder that you can claim them today, from 3pm BST/7am PT - that's in less than an hour's time!

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Beleaguered vampire huntin' FPS Redfall has at least one seal of approval, even if our reviewer Ed was left cold. Shortly before release, Valve bestowed it with Verified status for the Steam Deck, a coveted green tick that represents more or less complete compatibility and suitability for the portable PC.

I wouldn’t normally curl an eyebrow at this sort of thing – having more great Steam Deck games is good for PC gaming – but given how all-over-the-shop Redfall’s performance is on desktop PCs, could it really settle in on the less powerful Deck? A few ambulatory vamp slaying jaunts later, I can conclude that it... maaaaaybe can. Sort of.

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Developers Don’t Nod are carrying over their signature melodramatic decisions and super-powered characters with their next game: Harmony: The Fall Of Reverie. The studio behind Life Is Strange and Tell Me Why announced their visual novel earlier this year, but we now have a solid June 8th release date. A playable demo is also available as part of the LudoNarraCon festival on Steam.

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Redfall, an open world FPS by the folks over at Arkane, plays like a game that was pulled in so many directions over its development that it exploded into various bits, which were then patchworked together into a live service game that already feels like it's been abandoned. Flashes of Arkane's brilliance make an appearance, but they are a rare find amidst a bland, incoherent world that clearly points to deeper issues in a game that's been drained of its magic.

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The neon-soaked labyrinthine world of Saturnalia is coming to Steam later this year with a bunch of new features, developers Santa Ragione have announced. Saturnalia is an Italian folk horror that was released last year as an Epic Games Store exclusive, and it charmed many white knuckle horror fans. That includes the RPS Hivemind as Saturnalia was one our favourite games of last year.

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The Crucial X8 is one of our favourite portable SSDs, having in its corner a tough and compact design, impressive speeds and very reasonable pricing. That last point is especially true today, as the 1TB model of this external SSD has dropped to £61 - nearly half of its original £116 UK RRP.

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Samsung's 980 Pro SSD remains one of the fastest PCIe 4.0 options on the market in terms of both raw numbers and real-world gaming performance, so it's worth knowing that the capacious 2TB size is now available for £122 at TechNextDay when you use code TND-10, knocking £10 off its price to come well under the next-nearest retailer.

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Last year's Saints Row received a rough reception, leading developers Volition to become part of Gearbox and to pledge that they were "supporting Saints Row for the long-term."

That pledge bears fruit on May 9th with the release of the Sunshine Springs update, which includes a new district, a combat overhaul, and many quality-of-life improvements.

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F1 2021 had a story mode calling 'Braking Point', but it was absent from the racing simulation's 2022 iteration. It returns in F1 2023, which will launch this June. There's a reveal trailer below which features its protagonists, including newcomer Callie Mayer.

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Redfall currently has 'Mostly Negative' reviews on Steam, reflecting a co-op shooter that feels sparse, unsatisfying and buggy to players. Our Ed is no fan either. In an interview with Kinda Funny earlier today, Xbox head Phil Spencer talked at length about Redfall's issues.

"I'm upset with myself," said Spencer, while defending the decision not to delay the game.

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Take one look at Luna Abyss and you'll probably go, 'Wait a minute, this looks like first-person Returnal!' And having played the first mission of the game at GDC, I can confirm that yes, this is very much in the vein of first-person Returnal. It's a fast-paced, bullet hell shooter set on a strange alien moon where everything's out to get you, but the shift in perspective makes everything in its titular abyss feel closer and more intimate, calling to mind the frantic, confined gun fights of Doom and Quake more than Housemarque's seminal roguelike - games that creative director Benni Hill tells me were formative experiences for him growing up.

There's also a greater emphasis on story-telling in Luna Abyss, with Hill also citing Nier: Automata and Bioshock as other key influences. It's a compelling mix, based on the first chunk I played, and arguably one of my surprise GDC favourite demos alongside The Thaumaturge and The Lamplighters League. Indeed, Hill tells me they started working on Luna Abyss a year before Returnal was even announced, and when they first saw it during Sony's PlayStation 5 reveal stream in the summer of 2020, he and his team did a collective double-take.

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Perennial favourite The Sims 4 is about to get some much-needed competition in the life sim arena. Not only have we got upcoming games Life By You and Paralives offering more customisation options, more features, and more polish than The Sims, but now there's Tiny Life as well, a new entrant that asks the question: what if The Sims was simply smaller? Tiny Life has just released into early access, and it’s aiming to scratch that Sim-itch in a leaner, pixelated package.

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For the past while, I've been playing a closed beta build of Park Beyond, and let me tell you, I am very bad at it. I can just about (by the skin of my teeth) make a profitable park, but my god, that park will have the worst layout you've ever seen in your cursed, vomiting in the bins at a Disneyland life. But look, if the park works, it works, right? The shareholders can't complain!

Thing is, much like with the internet or your mum's relationship with the binman, theme park simulators can really change while you're not paying attention. While part of Park Beyond's selling point is making literally impossible rides via the aptly-named method of Impossification (an upgrade to rides you buy by spending units of amazement gleaned from your slack-jawed guests, in order to strap a canon to a rollercoaster), I really was not prepared for how simulation-y the simulation bits are.

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Frictional Games are releasing the next entry in their hit horror series later this month - May 23rd - with Amnesia: The Bunker, taking their signature stalks through the dark into a World War One setting. That date’s creeping up very soon, and we now have our first extended look at gameplay down below.

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You’ve probably head by now that Redfall is a few virgins short of a vampy picnic, mainly by un-virtue of its undercooked co-operative cryptid blasting. But there are plenty of PC performance problems to contend with as well, despite it getting a helping hand from DLSS and FSR 2.1.

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On account of not loads happening in the last week apart from the Actiblizz acquisition news, which I do not want to talk about under any circumstances, the Electronic Wireless Show podcast talks this week about DLC, because a couple of good games got some DLCs - good, but different games getting different kinds of DLC expansions. Thus we discuss DLCs in general and what the difference is between a live service game and a game that is supported with DLC for years. As usual, we all talk about what we've been playing - what's up with Redfall, y'all? - and have some recommendations. The mini-game this week is to imagine feeding beans to Quentin Tarantino.

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Digital festival LudoNarraCon is back for its fifth year, showcasing games that are all about story-telling and narrative. It kicks off today, May 4th, at 10am PT/6pm BST and runs until next Monday, May 8th. The event is being hosted on Steam where you can sample 36 demos, enjoy discounts on over 140 games, and watch 15 panels through a livestream. Highlights this year include three ‘fireside chats’ with Ron Gilbert of Monkey Island fame, the designer of the OPUS series Scott Chen, and Life Is Strange: True Color’s staff writer Felice Tzehuei, who’s sitting down to chat with our lovely reviews editor Rachel.

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Hello folks. I meant to kick off this list last month, but I accidentally put it in the wrong airlock in the RPS Treehouse and poof. Off it went. (I also ran out of time to put our voting form together - apologies!). But as we all continue zhoooming our lightsabers around in Star Wars Jedi: Survivor or jumping aboard the stellar space train in Honkai: Star Rail, it still feels like an appropriate time to ask you this all-important question: what are your favourite space games of all time?

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When Nintendo first released their level-building game Super Mario Maker, many fans hoped for a similar set of tools based on The Legend Of Zelda series. The Big N haven’t gotten around to it yet, but indie developers Rokaplay and Firechick have beaten them to the punch with Super Dungeon Maker, which just released out of early access. It’s what the name implies: a game where you can build your own classic Zelda-like dungeons, share them online, and then play through other people’s whacky creations.

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"What will ye do, when steel hearts break, and courage does abscond?" reads the penultimate line of The Pale Beyond’s poetic prologue. Actually, it’s less of a poem and more a call to action: how on earth will you keep a ragtag bunch of sailors alive in the harshest conditions on the planet? If you hadn’t already twigged, The Pale Beyond is a narrative survival sim that puts you in the frostbitten boots of First Mate aboard The Temperance - a coal guzzling steam ship that set out on a polar expedition in search of its sister, The Viscount, which went missing five years prior. As Captain Hunt’s second-in-command, you’ll take daily requests from the crew, manage the food rations, and settle petty squabbles on the poop deck.

Beginning life as a way for co-founders Michael Bell and Thomas Hislop to create World of Warcraft mods, Bellular Studios grew alongside its gaming and Warcraft YouTube channels into a fully-fledged development team based out of their hometown of Belfast, Northern Ireland. The Pale Beyond is their debut game that fittingly draws on Ireland’s rich maritime history, although, as Hislop tells me, this wasn’t always the plan. "We initially didn’t set out to do so, but it quickly emerged as a core influence that we kept finding ourselves drawn back to," he says. "The further we delved into the golden age of exploration, and its very local routes, the more it resonated with us personally."

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The Pokéverse continues to spread onto the PC route this summer with an updated digital version of the trading card game. The free-to-play Pokémon TCG Live is set to leave open beta and launch fully on June 8th at 10am PT/6pm BST, The Pokémon Company have announced. TCG Live will be replacing the older version of the creature-card-collectathon Pokémon TCG Online, which was first released back in 2011.

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As you might expect from a roster of 12 Marvel superheroes (or 17, if you count the four extra DLC supes and its original, player-designed protagonist The Hunter), the lycra-clad buds of Marvel's Midnight Suns all look and feel substantially different from one another when it comes to combat. When Firaxis were designing the moveset for each hero, creative director Jake Solomon says he and fellow lead game designer Joe Weinhoffer would take turns being "point designers" for certain characters. "Joe was point designer on one hero, I was point designer on another hero," Solomon says, highlighting Magic and Iron Man as two of his own favourite heroes that he designed.

Both are what I'd call quite technical heroes, with Magic relying on careful battlefield placement to boot enemies into nifty magical portals, while Iron Man's most powerful abilities often only come from discarding other cards. But when I ask Solomon at GDC if he thinks he has a particular design 'style' that unites his crop of Marvel heroes, he says he loves being "bombastic".

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