When Alice wrote about Star Wars Jedi: Survivor earlier this week, she explored an "almost prohibitively large map." It turns out those embiggened maps have a knock-on effect: Survivor will require 155GB of hard drive space.
Seagate's Iron Wolf and Iron Wolf Pro drives are brilliant choices for NAS (networked attached storage) and regular PC use, and now an 8TB model is available for just £159 on Amazon UK. That's down from an RRP of £225, and the best price we've ever seen on this model.
Look, I’m not saying Far Cry 3 is responsible for *gestures vaguely towards modern AAA games* but it’s definitely a prime suspect. If I was trying to connect a piece of red string from the middle of my evidence board (which would probably be a picture of the map screen from Assassin’s Creed Valhalla), I’m not sure I’d push a pin directly into Jason Brody’s face, but I’d definitely circle it in black Sharpie a few times. Basically, in the eleven years since its release, I’ve grown a bit suspicious of Far Cry 3’s lasting legacy.
And yet, in those halcyon days of 2012, we named it our game of the year. Although it’d be easy to simply say that decision was made a bit before my time here, I should probably admit that when reviewing the game for the blog I used to run when I was at university, I awarded it an equally prestigious (stop laughing at the back) 10/10. That almost seems ludicrous, doesn’t it? Far Cry 3? Game of the year? Surely not.
After spending a few hours revisiting the sunny shores of Rook Island, I was shocked to discover a game that feels surprisingly pure. Mechanically, I hasten to add. The actual act of playing Far Cry 3 in 2023 is still good fun, it’s the bits around it that are a bit ropey.
The Radeon RX 6600 is a strong option for 1080p gaming, and you can now pick one up for just £212 at Ebuyer's store on Ebay, nearly £90 cheaper than it debuted in 2021. To knock 10% off the listed price, use code APRIL10 at the checkout.
Falling-block puzzle games get a gory makeover in Dr. Fetus' Mean Meat Machine, a spin-off from Super Meat Boy. Rather than dodging buzzsaws and baddies while platforming, here you'll be doing that while dropping coloured blobs into grids to match chains of colours and make 'em vanish. You can see that for yourself, as Mean Meat Machine now has a free demo offering a taste ahead of the game's launch later this year.
A new deal, another pair of deals on NVMe SSD drives. This time, it's the Solidigm P41 Plus which is the subject of our deals post, with a 1TB model available for £48 and a 2TB model available for £90 - some incredible prices for PCIe 4.0 SSDs capable of up to 4125MB/s reads. To get this price on these drives from Ebuyer, just use the code APRIL10 at the checkout at Ebay.
Calling all failed artists! Passpartout 2: The Lost Artist is out on Steam. I am still the frustrated artist struggling to survive that I was in the first Passpartout. This time, though, I’ve lost more than just my shabby shack. There are no bills to pay; instead, I’ve invested all my money into art supplies and rented a studio in the town of Phénix. Finally, I can become an art master, having my naive artwork displayed just alongside Van Gogh's.
Forget rumours of a portable Xboy. Halo: The Master Chief Collection’s newest update has enabled matchmade multiplayer, and together with the custom game browser for the Steam Deck, you can now play some of the wackiest maps in any FPS from the comfort of your bed - or anywhere in the galaxy really. MCC’s multiplayer was previously disabled on Steam Deck since the mode required Easy Anti-Cheat, which has now been turned on.
A week late but never a dollar short, The Electronic Wireless Show podcast talking about the past present and... well mostly just the present, to be honest, of The Last Of Us Part 1. It's had, and continues to have, a few problems with its PC launch last week, so we discuss that, we talk about the TV show, and we talk about some of the impact the game has had in general. Nate tells us all about Ceramus the Brick Knight, James polls us on Steam Deck alternatives coming out of the woodwork, and there are a lot of cowboy metaphors. Plus: what we've been playing this week, and our recommendations! It's a rootin', tootin' good time alright! Apolgies in advance for the recording going on the wonk right at the end, though.
Players likely recognise Celeste as the pixel-perfect platformer from 2018, but it began its life as Celeste Classic, a free game written for the PICO-8. Celeste Classic presented a condensed climb up the titular mountain, letting you dash across platforms, hang onto walls, and collect strawberries - in miniature form. As a fun homage, you can find the PICO-8 version inside Celeste proper. And now, as an even funner homage, you can play it on the Playdate. A loveable game on a loveable handheld.
There's a moment in BioShock Infinite's opening act that's always stuck with me. As you emerge onto the floating city of Columbia, the game takes you on a guided tour of the sights and sounds of this airbone civilization. As you saunter through the streets, you learn about its citizens and its creator, just sort of taking it all in. The sun is shining. You're surrounded by smiles. Before you know it, an airship rises above the clouds and perches next to a hugging couple, gently swaying in the summer breeze. Aboard the ship is a barbershop quartet, cheerfully harmonising the iconic Beach Boys tune God Only Knows. It's a memorable scene, and has become an integral part of the game's lasting iconography.
But for Tyler, Nick, Derek and Greg, this section was more than just a fun tease for the secret behind Columbia's unusual success. Self-confessed music school kids, the quartet inspired them to create their own musical group styled after Infinite's singing hairdressers. In 2023, BioShop Infinite celebrated their ninth year at PAX East, where they performed a wonderful collection of harmonised tunes to an absolutely packed community room - and we were there to film it.
The Source VR Mod Team have been faithfully modding the Half-Life games into virtual reality - an excellent way to relive Valve's classic shooters. The team modded Half-Life 2 last year and followed it up with a mod for Half-Life 2: Episode One a couple of weeks ago. They’re now back with Half-Life 2: VR Mod - Episode Two, coming to Steam later today.
It's weird that Road 96 has gotten a prequel, because it only came out about six months ag- what's that? A year and a half? Good lord. Still, it seems a slightly odd move, because Road 96 - a first person hitchhiking choose 'em up about the collective action of wayward teens bringing down a totalitarian government - doesn't really need a prequel. On top of that, Road 96: Mile 0 is a sequel to developer DigixArt's first game Lost In Harmony, a musical runner about skateboarder Kaito whose fiend Aya is dying of a terminal illness.
In Mile 0, Kaito and his family have moved to a small gated town called White Sands, in the 90s USA-adjacent dictatorship Petria, and made best friends with Zoe, who 96ers will remember as a recurring NPC from that game. Zoe is the daughter of an important minister and lives in the nice part of town; Kaito's parents are workers who are forced to live on the wrong side of the tracks. Through a combination of Road 96-style character-driven vignettes and Lost In Harmony-style rhythm action tracks, the two come to the conclusion they must leave White Sands. If you played Road 96 you kind of already know how Mile 0 has to end.
Ask RPS returns today with a question that takes us right back to the beginning of how we all got here. Not in the scientific, evolutionary sense of all of human history, I should add, but rather how we, the RPS Treehouse, ended up writing about video games for a living.
The question comes courtesy of Bloodyhell, who asked: When did you know that you not only wanted to play games, but to write about what you played? And, does writing about games ever dampen your enthusiasm when you are dealing with deadlines and putting words on a page?
A sneaky double-part question, there, but both good questions nonetheless. So come and find out our collective origin stories, and whether any of us have cried tears of pain and regret over the years after turning our favourite hobby into an actual job.
There's always been something quite comforting about loading into a brand new Minecraft world. Dropping into that first forest, punching that first tree... It's a promise of all the myriad adventures to come. And despite some fundamental changes in genre and perspective, it's something that the team behind the upcoming Minecraft Legends has tried hard to preserve.
I recently was treated to the most in-depth look so far at Minecraft Legends, in an hour-long livestream which gave us all some much needed answers on what manner of beast Legends actually is. It's a curious blend of action adventure and RTS, one that shares Minecraft's focus on exploration, but guides the player down a stricter, simpler path of summoning friendly mobs and constructing defences to repel a Piglin invasion. This will likely be a solid introduction to the RTS genre for a lot of players, but I came away unsure about whether the game will have enough depth to keep its prospective playerbase's attention.
Last night ID@Xbox held their latest showcase to spotlight all sorts of indies. One of the highlights was the cute deduction game Lil’ Guardsman, a riff on Papers, Please where you work on a guard post, choosing to accept or refuse entry for fantasy folk wanting to get into the city. Or you can just jail them. It looks like lighthearted fun, and it’ll be hitting PC and consoles later this year.
Jack Joyce has run out of time, or steam, both work! Remedy’s time-bending Quantum Break - part superpowered shooter, part live-action TV show - has been delisted on Steam and The Microsoft Store. The game’s Steam page is still up, but it’s no longer available for purchase on PC or Xbox consoles. Publisher Microsoft had already confirmed the game would be “temporarily” removed from Game Pass (for console, it was never on the PC version) due to licensing issues, although there was no word on a removal from storefronts.
The world of hack-and-slashing Hammerwatch returns this summer with a sequel, developers Crackshell have announced. Just like the first game released ten years ago, Hammerwatch 2 is a top-down fantasy ARPG where you’ll be building your own hero, choosing between a series of classes, and battling hordes either alone or in a co-op group of four.
One of my all-time favourite gaming laptops is £300 off at Ebuyer UK today. The Lenovo Legion 5 Pro offers sterling performance in a slim, stylish chassis, and now you can pick up a model with an 11th-gen Core i7 processor, 16GB of RAM, 512GB NVMe SSD and RTX 3060 graphics card for £899.98.
The Corsair MP600 Pro LPX is a great SSD that we've recommended before, on the back of its excellent performance - and often, great value too. Today it's cheaper than usual, with the 2TB drive dipping to £154.99 on Amazon UK - that's £45 below the £200 price point we wrote a deals post to commemorate back in January!
We've covered surprisingly cheap NVMe SSDs on this deals patch before, but today we've hit a new high - or new low, depending on how you look at it. Right now you can pick up an Integral 2TB SSD for just £94.99, down from a regular price of £124, and best of all it's a fast PCIe 4.0 SSD capable of 4850MB/s reads and 4400MB/s writes. Nice!
Last time, you decided that time loops are better than resuming interrupted reloads. We thankfully won't need to re-run that result, but we cannot fully leave the past behind us. One eagle-eyed reader observed that time loops and staged reloads "aren't really comparable", and I cannot overstate my embarrassment at having made such an obvious mistake. My deepest apologies to everyone who has trusted me to conduct this research with great rigour. I must do better. So reader dearest, I now ask you to pick between two things we can all agree are two of a kind. What's better: dark darkness, or bioluminescence?
Nvidia have previewed the upcoming Overdrive Mode for Cyberpunk 2077, showcasing how it replaces the game’s already extensive ray tracing effects with full path tracing. Why Nvidia and not the developers, CD Projekt Red? Well, that might have something to do with Overdrive Mode being such a graphics card shatterer that it will supposedly take a GeForce RTX 40 series GPU – with DLSS 3 in effect – to run.
I really like retro first-person shooters. Show me a game with a gun in it that looks like it could feasibly run on Windows 95, and all of the neurons in my brain will start to fizzle and spark. I just think they're neat, and their recent resurgance has been extremely nice for me, specifically.
Unsuprisingly, then, I've been very excited to get my hands on Warhammer 40,000: Boltgun, a retro FPS by Auroch Digital set within the grim-dark universe of Warhammer 40k. A retro shooter where you play as a Space Marine is so obvious a pairing it's a wonder the concept has never been tackled before, to the point where the game's own marketing materials sort of pretend that it already was back in the 90s but everyone just forgot about it.
Spooky fishing game Dredge is overflowing with underwater eldritch horrors, ghoulish critters, and mutant fishies - like, the Blinky-the-fish kind. Based on that description, you’d expect some three-headed sea beast, incomprehensibly twisted and glowing with an otherworldly light, to be the game’s most supreme being. Nope. That title goes to the dog you rescue in one of the game's side missions, the developers have revealed.
You may remember Defender’s Quest: Valley Of The Forgotten as the beloved early-2010s game that swapped the towers in tower-defence, with humans that you could level up and customise. Essentially an RPG/tower-defence hybrid. You might also remember that a sequel was announced before it somewhat fell off the map - you probably don’t remember since it happened a decade ago, to be fair. Regardless, Defender’s Quest 2: Mists Of Ruin is now ready to re-emerge into the public’s consciousness with a 2023 PC release.
Developer Level Up Labs and publisher Armor Games have released a new trailer to mark the re-announcement:
An important Star Wars question is: what colour lightsaber would you have? The lightsaber is the mood ring of elegant weapons for a more civilised age. Jason de Heras, design director on Star Wars Jedi: Survivor, agrees with me on the purple blade (a colour introduced to the canon specifically because Samuel L. Jackson wanted it for his character in the prequels). "I was like, 'we gotta have a pink lightsaber blade'," says production director Kasumi Shishido. "So whenever I play I always stick with my pink saber."
Shishido tells me the dev team focused on improving on Jedi: Fallen Order for this sequel, and one of the bigger areas where they did that was customisation. "We knew we wanted to put more resources and effort into it," she says. "There's a lot more that you can do with Cal, with BD... and just within Cal, it's not just outfits you can customise, so I'm just really excited to see what players are going to do with it."
A new month means it's time for the RPS Game Club to pick its next game, and I thought, you know what, let's do Betrayal At Club Low, the surreal nightclub RPG from Cosmo D Studios. Not only did we give it a Bestest Best when it came out in September last year, but just last month it was freshly annointed as the IGF Grand Prize winner, making it an excellent time to revisit this latest slice of Off-Peak City madness.
Monster Energy strikes again, coming back to claw at games with the word “Monster” in the title. The drinks company and its legal department have now targeted the indie devs behind Dark Deception: Monsters & Mortals, a multiplayer game where you control either the titular humans or horrors through a maze.
It's episode seven of Indiescovery and this week, wow, the gang is tired. With a busy four days in Boston for PAX East, mine and Liam's brains were basically mush last week, so Rebecca - an absolute angel - graciously said she could host a special PAX East episode where she chats with Liam and me about the indies we saw on the show floor and try desperately to string together a coherent sentence. She also made bulletpoints of our entire chat so writing up the shownotes would be easier; we do not deserve her.
Saying that, our exhaustion doesn't stop us from kicking up a riot over the BAFTA Game Awards at the start of the episode. We then delve into our PAX East indie round up and, as always, we end with our current hyperfixations.
You can listen and subscribe via your podcast provider of choice! Find us on RSS feed, Spotify, Apple Podcasts, Google Podcasts, Pocket Casts, Amazon Music, TuneIn, Deezer, and now YouTube.
Total War: Warhammer 3’s next expansion Forge Of The Chaos Dwarfs is still coming on April 13th, but now it’s being accompanied by some free DLC too. Developers Creative Assembly have detailed the Mirror Of Madness update - previously teased a couple months ago - in a blog post, and it’ll contain two new game modes for all players.
A Little to the Left is dropping its second free Special Event, running from April 7th to April 10th (that's this weekend coming!). This Easter-themed Something Eggstra event will introduce four new egg-themed messes for players to unscramble. Not sticky egg messes in real life, but cute egg puzzles in a warm, charming video game. Something Eggstra follows on from December's Christmas freebies.
A belated apology to anyone who was assaulted by a sudden burst of upbeat bagpipes in the GDC press room the other week. I was having an early sneak peak at Inkle's new game A Highland Song in an appointment booth with paper-thin walls and no ceiling. The speakers on my Steam Deck demo unit were really going "full pipe" that day, so I'd like to say a big awkward sorry to any of my neighbours in there who were trying to conduct actual serious business interviews.
But also: A Highland Song is 100% a game that deserves to have its music cranked up to full, whether it's returning Heaven's Vault composer Laurence Chapman's soaring orchestral score, or Scottish bands Talisk and Fourth Moon's aforementioned folk music. The clue's in the name, after all, and after a spirited 30 minutes with it, I'm certain this will have Inkle fans singing from the hilltops.
The Last of Us Part 1 developers Naughty Dog have released the latest hotfix for its beleaguered Murder Dad adventure, although it doesn’t include the anticipated fix for a widespread camera jitter issue that’s been popping up for mouse users. According to an official tweet thread, that’s been pushed back to a later patch, leaving this update – v1.0.1.7 – to squash some other UI and UX problems.
Crusader Kings 3's next expansion has been announced. Tours & Tournaments will introduce new events to the medieval grand strategy game including jousting events, grand weddings and the ability to send you ruler on a tour of their domain. All offer an opportunity to impress your subjects and rivals - or, I'd guess, to fall off your horse and die.
Meet Your Maker is out. The first-person shooter from the developers of Dead By Daylight is set in a post-apocalypse in which players alternately construct death mazes to protect their precious resources, and infiltrate the death mazes of others.
Devolver Digital have acquired Doinksoft, the developers of kitty mech platformer Gato Roboto and the upcoming Gunbrella. All of the indie team's games had thus far been published by Devolver, including a physical-only Switch game, Demon Throttle, and the Devolver Bootleg compilation.
A new mod for Elden Ring adds one of the most important things a game can have: a really hefty kick to boot people onto their bums and over edges. This has come with an update to First Person Souls, an impressive mod which gives FromSoftware's game a good first-person camera view. And thanks to the mod's recent update, you can now punt ragdolling baddies across The Lands Between, following in the bootprints of games like Deathloop and Dark Messiah Of Might & Magic.
Originally released in 2010, Desktop Dungeons is a top-down puzzler about whacking beasties in the correct order, exploring the map to heal, and retreating to enjoy your hard-earned taxidermy skills. Desktop Dungeons: Rewind is a recently announced remaster of the tile-based roguelike - freshly coated with 3D graphics and a rewind feature - and it’s now fully launching on April 18th.
When Marek Markuszewski had finished working on The Witcher 3's Blood And Wine expansion, he wanted to go back to basics and make something by himself, Starward Industries' chief marketing officer Maciej Dobrowolski tells me at GDC. Something that would capture the same kind of cultural Polish heritage as The Witcher - originally adapted from Andrzej Sapkowski's six-strong series of novels - but that would take him on a new, more introspective kind of development journey. It took a while to find, but after a fateful encounter with an investor who'd just sailed across the Atlantic with only a copy of Polish sci-fi writer Stanislaw Lem's The Invincible for company, the signs were too good to ignore, Dobrowolski says. And after spending the best part of a year convincing Stanislaw Lem's son (and current rights holder) of the same thing, Markuszewski finally had his something - and a new partner to help him realise it.
"People tell us, 'Don't fuck it up, this guy's important,'" Dobrowolski continues, and no wonder. During the course of our conversation, Lem is described as both a "national treasure" and "mandatory reading in high school" for Polish students, and his hallowed cultural status is something the team's "had to deal with" in bringing the book to life. Despite all this, though, Dobrowolski insists this "isn't a one-to-one adaptation" of Lem's interstellar rescue story gone wrong, and that fans of the book will still find some surprises on the surface of Regis III as they explore its strange canyons, caves and crash sites.