Publisher Nexon have filed a lawsuit against Ironmace Games, the developers behind the multiplayer looter Dark And Darker, accusing the studio and two individual developers of copyright infringement. The two Korean companies recently went public with their dispute, but now their beef has extended to the US legal system where Nexon is demanding a trial by jury.
Sundays are for spending your first weekend back in the UK in a while, and feeling a bit disoriented. Before you settle back in, let's read this week's best writing about games (and game related things).
Shardpunk: Verminfall smooshes together a bunch of different ideas you'll have seen before. It's got turn-based tactical combat against rats with magic rifles in a steampunk world already in ruins. It's got the need to keep on moving, lest an approaching rat horde overwhelm you. It's got bunkers in which your party rests, de-stresses, and tools up before moving on.
Kind of a Fallouty, XCOMy, FTLy, Vermintidey mix, then - which together seems very cool. It's out now, and there's a demo.
Occasionally I wonder if the market for wholesome town builders has reached saturation, but then a trailer pops up for another one and I'm never less than intrigued. The latest is Fabledom, which promises the pastoral fields and castle wall construction I adore, then adds a twist by being set within a fairytale kingdom. It's in early access now.
Mordhau is about alternately bashing at other players with swords, axes and polearms, and teaming up with other players for playful buffoonery with lutes, emotes, and spontaneous roleplay. It was one of our favourite games of 2019 and it's currently free to keep from the Epic Games Store.
Part of the fun of Vampire Survirors lies in discovering new weapons and items, and knowing that there are still surprises to uncover as you construct your monster murder machine. That thrill fades as complete more runs and reach the game's edges, but its DLCs are so far doing a good job of creating new, uncharted territory. The latest, Tides Of The Foscari, is out now.
If you're starting playing Ghostwire: Tokyo after it came to Game Pass this week, I have a hot tip for you: prioritise upgrading movement abilities. The freedom to glide from rooftop to rooftop over haunted Tokyo will bring you so much more joy than any incremental damage upgrade. That's the most important thing I have to say, that it makes for good virtuatourism.
Oh, and I suppose a free content arrived this week too, adding new side-missions, handy new combat abilities, and a new "rogue-lite" mode. The update, uh, apparently also added Denuvo, over a year after the game launched? Cool, cool.
This week, for the first time in a long time, I stayed up way past my bedtime playing a video game. I had left weird abiogenesis idle clicker The Barnacle Goose Experiment running in the background for a few days, dithering a bit any time I stumbled back across the browser tab, until one day it hit me. I don't remember what it was, but one discovery was so strange and exciting that I then sat there for four hours, thinking "I'll go to bed when this result comes in", and then. Woof. I am now far too old to stay up past my bedtime playing video games, and am still tired. Anyway! What are you playing this weekend? Here's what we're clicking on!
I'd planned on starting with a line about how Loretta is an exception to how psychological horror games are about trudging around an abandoned mental hospital with the worst torch in the world until the girl from Ringu menaces you. It was already interesting and good enough pretty much right away to earn a recommendation, but after one of what will definitely be several playthroughs, leaving my praise that faint would do it a terrible injustice.
Loretta is goddamn excellent by any standard. Where other games use the mentally unwell narrator to explain everything away with "turns out you're secretly crazy", it's instead just one layer of a complex horror mystery with splashes of drama and noir, whose surprises I'm straining not to spoil.
I'm always up for trying new and odd foods. I mean, I barbecued some womb in a restaurant in Japan recently, and I can confirm that it was like calamari but tougher, and, largely, a lot worse. So, that's why the idea of Pringles releasing a limited-edition Minecraft Suspicious Stew flavour intrigues me! I would like to give it a go and see if it's actually quite nice or makes me barf.
Japan's brutal working culture isn't exactly a secret. You've probably heard the horror stories, or at least, got the general gist that success in Japanese business often equates to time. You don't necessarily need to be doing work, you just need to be present as the clock hands shift. A hard worker is reduced to a statue that only springs to life again when their boss gets up to leave.
Mr. Saitou is a short pixel art RPG that offers a hilarious commentary on the absurdities of working culture in Japan, with occasional flashes of seriousness. Completable in one sitting, it's a game I'd recommend to anyone.
I spent my morning trying and failing to rise from the depths of a vast Brutalist tower in Beton Brutal, a new first-person platformer. It's a challenging climb yet a curiously chill vibe, perhaps because any time I fall all the way down, I'm delighted to be back surrounded by overgrown plants and sculptures rising from a pond. The developer says Beton Brutal "tries to replicate and build upon the parkour mechanics seen in Minecraft," and I think I have a lot to learn. I didn't even know Minecraft had parkour.
Update: this post originally said Gloomrot is coming "next week" because I don't know what month it is.
Frakenstein is often cited as the first science fiction thing, and now it can add to its honours because it's the inspiration for the first major update to V Rising. The info on Secrets Of Gloomrot doesn't actually use the F word anywhere, but it's a new biome "twisted by the tortured ambitions of a scientific genius and his legions of followers", so I feel pretty confident in the citation. This new free addition to the early access vampiric survival game - which won a few hearts here at RPS - is arriving on May 17th. That's in a month, that is, and boy, it's a biggun alright.
If you recognise the name PlayWay it is because PlayWay publishes most of the [Noun] Simulator games, often but not always involving being a mechanic of some kind. Today, though, I'm excited to tell you that with their next game, developed by PlayWay subsidiary Games Incubator, they're branching out into the long-neglected magical horsegirl genre with My Horse: Bonded Spirits.
The Logitech G305 Lightspeed, a top-tier wireless gaming mouse that normally retails for £60, has dropped to £30 at Amazon UK this morning. Here's why we rate it.
In short, the G305 offers a lightweight design, fast and reliable Lightspeed wireless, 300 hours of battery life and a comfortable shape, making it ideal for a wide range of use case for competitive gaming on a desktop PC to a light, comfy mouse for working on a laptop in a cafe.
As you may have noticed, the RTX 4070 was released earlier this week - indeed, the official RPS 4070 review went live yesterday. It's a good graphics card, fundamentally speaking, but like many recent releases it's a bit more pricey than it should be at $599 / £589.
Thankfully though, in the US you can actually pick up AMD's more powerful last-gen flagship card, the RX 6950 XT, for just $10 more thanks to a deal at Newegg.
Surveying the sprawling piglin outpost before me, a plan forms. With a flourish of button presses from my controller, I spawn a sizeable army of zombies. They'll zomble their way up the main path, and with their high health pools they'll cut into the vast piglin forces and buy me time. With another flourish a contingent of friendly creepers scuttles along behind me. I lead them on a flanking attack around the outpost, targeting their spawners while the main piglin army is occupied with my frontal assault. A masterpiece of tactical engineering!
Or it would have been, if my minions weren't so bloody stupid. Half my zombies fell off the staircase they were climbing due to their terrible pathfinding, and burned up in the lava moat below. Meanwhile, I sent my creepers off to explode against the first spawner I found. Only one of them got there; the others relentlessly humped a wall they could easily have climbed, until Piglins surrounded and slaughtered them. I returned to my starting point with what remained of my army, a fair bit poorer in resources, and a great deal poorer in patience.
Welcome to Minecraft Legends, a strange mixture of real-time strategy and open-world adventure which frustrates and impresses in equal measure. There's half a great game lurking here, but it's marred by inadequacies that have nibbled away at me like piglins at my walls. This game could have been so much more.
Today saw the release of the Chaos Dwarfs DLC for Total War: Warhammer 3, which is pretty cool if what you like is beards and spending money. If you only like beards, today also saw the release of the free update 3.0.0, Mirror Of Madness, which includes two new game modes, a new legendary hero, and more.
Back in February, Rocksteady released several trailers of Suicide Squad: Kill The Justice League that confirmed that it was a looter-shooter with a battle pass and an always online internet connection. The response was poor and anonymous sources cited in a report in March that the game was to be delayed.
It's now official. Suicide Squad will now release on February 2nd, 2024 rather than in spring 2023.
The Steam Deck is powered by SteamOS, a custom Linux-based operating system developed specifically for running Steam and its games. It's possible to install Windows on your Steam Deck if you wish, but the drivers are rudimentary and there are a bunch of obstacles when it comes to controlling Windows via Steam Deck's controls or its touchscreen.
A leaked project from an internal Microsoft hackathon shows that staff at the operating system developer have noticed these issues - although it sounds like a version of Windows optimised for gaming handhelds is a long way off.
A handful of Bandai Namco Europe games are headed to the GeForce Now cloud streaming service this week: Get Even, 11-11 Memories Retold, and Little Nightmares and its sequel. They're four of the seven games joining the service, and the full list also includes the multiplayer medieval melee, Mordhau.
4K monitors are brilliant for watching movies, playing pretty games and getting work done, and you might be surprised how affordable 4K monitors are these days. Case in point are these two big reductions on 27-inch and 28-inch 4K monitors on Amazon, available from Dell for $249.99 or Innocn for $199.99.
After two hours of XDefiant, I came away with a rather different thought in my mind than I expected. More than anything, I was impressed at just how good we have it in the multiplayer FPS genre at the moment. Apex Legends, Warzone 2, Overwatch 2, Valorant, Rainbow Six Siege. That's some unbelievably tough competition. XDefiant has to either give players something completely different, or absolutely nail the basics. It's opted for the second path, and having played several matches against a medley of press people and content creators, I'm not convinced Ubisoft's new arena shooter is up to the challenge.
The weirdest, wonderfullest ultralight gaming mouse, Cooler Master's MM720, is down to $16.99 at Amazon compared to a launch price of $52.99. This is an awesome pickup at almost any price, but at $17 you need to consider this - even if you've never tried an ultralight mouse before - or if you've already got a full collection.
When Immortals Of Aveum was first revealed in December last year, there wasn't a lot to know. After a hands-off preview last week, I can tell you it's a singleplayer first-person shooter but with magic, which would sound a lot like Forspoken if I described it without context, and it actually looks pretty cool. Mainly, though, I can tell you that I'm never going to forget whose idea this game was.
I entered a sterile biodome with nothing but myself present and nothing to do but cry, spit, and piss. This is what science looks like. From these scant three verbs, you can create a whole world in The Barnacle Goose Experiment, combining substances to spontaneously generate whole other forms of matter, life, landscapes, and oddities. Made by Everest Pipkin, it's part idle game, part clicker, and wholly fascinating. Best of all, you can play for free in your browser.
Dragon Age writer David Gaider’s new adventure game Stray Gods: The Roleplaying Musical will now hit the stage on August 3rd. It was formerly known as Chorus - and presumably changed its name to avoid sharing an RPS tag with Chorvs - but after reaching its crowdfunding goals and finding a publisher, Stray Gods is ready for the limelight.
After debuting at £320, the Core i5 13600K has remained resolutely at that price thanks to limited supply and high demand. Now, the 13600K has seen its first major discount, dipping to around the £300 mark at Amazon UK. Meanwhile, the same CPU without integrated graphics, the 13600KF, is down to £281.
These are solid deals for a great-performing 14-core, 20-thread CPUs that excel in gaming and content creation - especially given that you can pick up a motherboard that allows you to carry over the DDR4 memory in your existing build to keep costs down.
Last week it was revealed that after literal years of pushing, American McGee is officially not getting a third Alice game. We at the Electronic Wireless Show podcast take a look at the history of Alice: Asylum, the game that would never be, as well as the game design bible that was, it seems, the last great hope for the project. We also give American McGee friend of the show status, as consolation.
Many moon rotations ago, Crusader Kings 2’s sprawling grand strategy received A Game Of Thrones facelift thanks to a fan-made mod, replacing the political tensions of mediaeval Europe with the political tensions of Westeros. The AGOT mod was both huge and hugely popular, and now the team are back with a similar mod for Crusader Kings 3. It’ll be released in open beta tomorrow, April 14th.
One of my favourite Steam Deck accessories is £10 off today, bringing it to an all-time low price and more than justifying the article you're reading right now. The item in question is Jsaux's excellent now-£30 Docking Station, which holds your Steam Deck at a comfy angle while charging it and providing a ton of extra ports.
As I was pleased to let you know earlier this week, the next free game for RPS premium supporters is roguelite citybuilder Against The Storm. This is your reminder that you can log on to claim your copy today, April 13th, from 4pm BST/8am PT. That should be around the same time as Against The Storm gets is new free update, Sentinels Of The Forest, which adds Foxes as a playable species, along with new buildings, abilities, and porridge - the most sensible of all the breakfast foods
We don't have infinite codes, so this key drop, kindly provided by publishers Hooded Horse, is on a first come, first served basis until we run out.
At PAX West in Seattle last year, I had the pleasure of interviewing the voice cast of Team Fortress 2. I chatted to John Patrick Lowrie (The Sniper), Gary Schwartz (The Heavy, The Demoman), Robin Atkin Downes (The Medic) and Ellen McLain (The Administrator) about the game's fifteen year long legacy, the process of finding their character's voices as well as their favourite quotes. It was a riot of an interview and, to be honest, a bit of a career highlight. It also did really well on TikTok, which I have mixed feelings about.
Fifteen minutes after the gang left the grimy conference room in which the interview took place (I had immediately crawled onto the floor in an attempt to ease the anxiety from having conducted said interview), I got a Twitter notification. Robin had posted a video. Following our chat, the group had attempted to order a sandwich from a cafe in-character, leaving the staff completely bemused as a result. Understandably the video did numbers, and over the last six months, the gang have been releasing new episodes in what is now known as "The Sandvich Saga" on a regular basis.
Movie tie-ins are back, and smaller than ever! After the free Pac-Man-style adaptations of Banshees Of Inisherin and Cocaine Bear, we now have a game for Renfield, the “Nic Cage is Dracula'' horror-comedy. It’s been appropriately turned into a Vampire Survivors-like bullet heaven shooter called Renfield: Bring Your Own Blood, and it’s in early access right now.
It’s taken a few GPUs, but Nvidia’s RTX 40 series is finally veering away from ludicrous luxuries and heading back in the right direction: that of graphics cards you can, and maybe even should buy, even if you’re not the heir to an Emirati property conglomerate. The GeForce RTX 4070 launches with a heavier price tag than the RTX 3070, and doesn’t make the shin-splintering performance leap forward that its predecessor did, but between its high speeds, low power usage, and DLSS 3 advantage, it’s a potent upgrade regardless.
Fans of Amplitude Studio’s ever-evolving ENDLESS series might be sad to hear that Endless Dungeon has been delayed by five months, pushing its May release date back to October 19th. The extra time will be spent “to better incorporate community feedback,” by improving the balancing, meta-progression, and onboarding, and giving the roguelike a few more layers of polish.
Summer Games Done Quick is coming back for its annual speedrunning charity event. Like previous years, SGDQ will be raising money for Doctors Without Borders, an NGO that provides medical care to those affected by disease, disasters, and conflicts. An Elden Ring double bill closed last year’s event - which managed to raise more than $3 million for charity - and FromSoftware’s juggernaut is once again featured at 2023’s SGDQ.
Last time, you decided that bioluminescence is better than dark darkness. You want not just light but eerie, near-magical light, and I can understand that. We're doing science here, we can't go groping about in the dark. This week, I ask you to choose between a reward for caution and a dare to be reckless. What's better: unit veterancy, or rerolling dice?
Cococucumber - the folks behind the beautifully odd Echo Generation - are ready to release their next voxel adventure, the fairytale slasher Ravenlok coming to PC, Game Pass, and Xbox consoles on May 4th. It’s clearly riffing on Alice’s Adventures In Wonderland as our protagonist, the titular Ravenlok, moves to a new inherited house, gets sucked through a magical mirror and steps into a trippy, mushroom-filled land. From there, she needs to fight this realm's off-brand Queen Of Hearts and save the remaining, slightly weird, storybook denizens.
Star Wars Celebration was held last weekend and the much-anticipated sequel Star Wars Jedi: Survivor is speeding toward us on April 28th. All of this nostalgia and excitement means there’s still fun to be had in a galaxy far far away, and luckily, there’s a 14-game Star Wars bundle on Fanatical to celebrate. It's currently enjoying a deep 80% discount for a limited time.