Rock, Paper, Shotgun

Normally, when a big game releases, I’ll test how it runs on PC, knock together a best settings guide, respond in the negative to an email that asks if it will run on a GTX 680, and we all move on with our lives. Not so with The Last of Us Part 1, which as you’ve probably seen, has launched in a technical state that’s bleaker than Joel’s face. The first few patches and hotfixes (more are planned) have made it somewhat less terrible on powerful desktops, but I’m sad to report that playing The Last of Us Part 1 on the Steam Deck is not currently worth your time.

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At last year's PAX East, we spent a lot of our time poking around the PAX Rising Showcase booth, which is a collection of indie games curated by PAX itself. Not only did we find a bunch of cool games to play, but we were also able to chat to the games' creators, as all Rising finalists are invited to attend in person to show their work to the public.

This year, though, Rachel and I decided to go one step further. We interviewed the teams behind four of the eleven 2023 finalists, asking the developers behind Go-Go Town!, Paper Trail, Slay the Princess and Xenotilt: Hostile Pinball Action about their experience of bringing their games to PAX, what they learned along the way, and what it’s like to spend four days standing on your feet talking to thousands of attendees (spoilers: it’s really bloody tiring).

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We learned what was leaving Game Pass only yesterday as we bid farewell to Life Is Strange: True Colors, Moonglow Bay, and The Long Dark. But it seems the subscription gods (and whoever runs that division) saw our frowns, as Microsoft have now announced the next few games hitting the service this fortnight.

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Yesterday, the US Department Of Justice filed a civil suit against Activision Blizzard, accusing the publisher’s Competitive Balance Tax of capping esports players’ wages and penalising Overwatch and Call Of Duty league teams if they exceeded the salary cap.

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Everspace 2 is an arcade space shooter with an action-RPG style loot system and a distinctly early 2000s vibe, set entirely within a false memory of a Saturday morning cartoon that never existed, and featuring some obscenely shiny spaceships.

I don’t claim to understand whether this has something to do with “ray-tracing” or some manner of “screen space occlusion” or what have you – Digital Foundry, I am available for work – all I know is that there’s an option to crank up the gloss until you’re pretty much zooming around the galaxy in a big angry disco ball.

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2018 April 1st, the music producer Nosiestorm dropped the single Crab Rave, which became a meme sensation. Since the music video was made with the Unreal Engine 4, it's no surprise that the Nosiestorm ventured into game development, and threw the rave cabe into a shooting game. After three long years of development, Crab Champions was finally launched - on April 1st this year.

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Asus have confirmed that the ROG Ally, a Steam Deck-esque handheld PC announced on April Fool’s Day, is in fact a real device that’s in production right now. There’s no price or release date info as of yet, but it sounds like it will be more of a premium alternative, aiming to beat the Deck on specs like APU power and display performance.

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Support mains, relax. Overwatch 2's next playable character is a support hero called Lifeweaver and he’ll be joining the roster alongside Season 4, expected to begin on April 11th. Blizzard had previously said they were committed to bolstering Overwatch 2's support lineup since it’s currently the game’s most taxing and least rewarding role to play. It seems they’re making good on that promise, though, as Lifeweaver’s reported abilities have the potential to sway matches.

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Legendary Entertainment have secured the live-action film and TV licence to Street Fighter, according to a report from Deadline. The production company is currently developing a film, but Capcom are holding their baby tight and will be co-producing any future projects.

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EA’s monster-hunting Wild Hearts is getting its first new Kemono species later this week as part of a post-launch update. April 6th will bring new creatures to hunt, new abilities to hunt with, and more ways to enhance your equipment - presumably to get better at hunting.

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There's a kind of game that we all have a fondness for. It transcends genre, even if it doesn't particularly push the boat out. It's not the first game that comes to mind as a favourite or recommendation, but it's a plain good time. Raidborn is one of those.

It doesn't try to take over your life, or be the Everything Game that invariably becomes the Nothing Game. It's just a neat little thing to have some harmless fun with. Sometimes that's what you want.

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Storybook strategy sim Six Ages: Ride Like The Wind was a spiritual successor to 1999’s cult classic King Of Dragon Pass, created by some of that game's former developers. Six Ages is now receiving its own proper successor later this summer, developer A Sharp and publisher Kitfox have announced. Just like its predecessor, Six Ages 2: Lights Going Out is a blend of tribal management and choose your own adventure drills, all wrapped up in some gorgeous fantasy illustrations.

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Liam and I played a lot of games at PAX East, like a lot. Most of them we managed to make videos for, but there were many more that we just didn't have the time to cover, and that were also very good! So here's a quick list of five more games I wanted to spotlight in written form while Liam's busy in the editing mines working on all the community videos we filmed (the first of which is out right now, chronicling the PAX Facebook group that takes a community photo every single year). It's very wholesome. We've got more community videos coming out this week, plus an article listing our absolute favourite games we played throughout the entire event, so keep your eyes peeled for those, too. For now, though, let's dive into some more indie highlights.

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Solitaire has been a constant fixture for professional procrastinators since time immemorial. Many households, including mine, used the casual card game to kill time - dragging cards, dropping them, and planning sets ahead of time, all in an effort to catch the final fireworks. I was never much good at Solitaire, but as an adult I do understand Word Solitaire, a remixed version of the classic from indie dev Petri Purho.

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There's a lot to be said for being consistent these days. After playing four hours of Star Wars Jedi: Survivor last week, I can tell you it is exactly what you probably already thought it would be: a competent, big-budget action-adventure sequel, well made by talented people, that isn't breaking the mould but expands upon the first game in the areas you liked best. If, like myself, you enjoyed Jedi: Fallen Order, this will probably be a solid follow-up for you. But if you were less well disposed towards that first game, you'd probably want to swap "consistent" for the word "predictable".

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Graham (RPS in peace) text me yesterday and, with little warning, launched into what were clearly pre-prepared paragraphs of complaints about games he'd tried playing in his free time at the weekend and not enjoyed. I shall draw a veil of discretion over the names of the actual games, but his chief complaint was that none of them had, actually, very robust design or tutorialising fit for purpose (i.e. teaching you how to play the game), especially for people who aren't able to give games their singular attention for hours at at time. I agree with him, although his attention is divided by, e.g., having a child in need of stimulation, and mine is divided by, e.g., being a child in need of stimulation.

It's probably turning my brain into cottage cheese, but I often do things at the same time as playing a game, like listening to music or a podcast. I understand that podcast games are sort of a genre now, but I've started doing it with regular games. Is this a me problem? Sure. Does it mean I want games to bring back that thing where NPC quest givers will just explain the quest again to you if you ask? 100% also yes.

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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 have immersive sims spraying perfume and hurling fluorscent tube bulbs, motorbike murders, and several journeys with animal friends. Plus, I've been away a few weeks for various reasons, so this Monday I have a little catch-up on some bits and pieces I made notes of last month. Look!

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April is the time for foolish jokes, seasonal showers, and World Rat Day. But another month also means another batch of Game Pass leavers. This time we wave goodbye to summertime fishing escapades and cold treks through frozen wildlands - truly mirroring April’s zig-zagging weather.

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Developer Landfall - the studio behind wobbly strategy game Totally Accurate Battle Simulator - have released its next game, although game (singular) might be inaccurate. Landfall Archives is a digital museum of sorts, compiling 23 playable prototypes and demos from unreleased projects that never crossed the finish line. It’s out now, and best of all, it’s free.

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Sundays are for lying face-down on the sofa with a soothing 10-hour rainscape YouTube video playing in the background trying to recover from a packed games event in Boston. Hello! I am the second imposter covering for our dear Ed, who is currently away on holiday in Japan (and I’m definitely not jealous at all). Let’s get into some good words, shall we?

Wired’s Megan Farokhmanesh interviewed Richard Hofmeier, the developer of Cart Life - a sobering game about three street vendors trying to make ends meet. Hofmeier tells the story of his decision to remove the game from Steam ten years ago and his reasons for bringing it back.

His time away from game spaces made him appreciate the spectrum of expertise his colleagues had in things he’d never done. It was humbling. “So many people have talent and passion that gets entirely overlooked,” he says. He loved working in games, but back when he released Cart Life he feared a career in the field could get too insular. “The most interesting art, to me, comes from outsiders,” he says. “I was a little bit scared of becoming an insider myself.”

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The Last Starship, the new game from the developers of Prison Architect, is currently in the earliest stages of early access. Its latest update is named "Alpha 2" to help make that clear. Released this past week, it expands the industrial and manufacturing aspects of the spacefleet simulator.

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The end of support for Marvel's Avengers was announced in January, but wrapping up a live service game and doing it right is a gradual process. Yesterday saw the release of patch 2.8, its last content update, which made "nearly all" cosmetics free, converted in-game currency into resources, and handed out rewards as a thank you to players.

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ARK 2 has been delayed until the end of 2024. The dinosaur survival sequel currently best known for having Vin Diesel in it, for some reason, was originally aiming for a 2023 release, but developers Studio Wildcard say they need more time.

To compensate, they're going to instead release Ark: Survival Ascended in August, a remaster of the original Ark: Survival Evolved that moves it over to Unreal Engine 5. That's the good news. The bad news is you can only buy it in a $50 bundle with the sequel (which won't be finished for at least a year), and that the original Survival Evolved servers will be switched off when Ascended launches.

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Sonic The Hedgehog has been murdered - and not by negative reviews, for a change. Instead it's the precipitating event at the beginning of The Murder Of Sonic The Hedgehog, a short, free visual novel released by Sega for April Fool's Day.

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Pretty weird. I woke up this morning, and everyone was gone. The office (by which I mean our Slack channel) was cold and empty, and a shining beacon of light rose from my monitor screen and proclaimed that I was now an honourary Alice. And as such, the heavy responsibility of compiling everyone's weekend gaming plans fell to me. To entertain myself (and force those who left me in charge to think twice), I'll be writing a series of unhinged 90s-style "where are they now?" epilogues in italics for each person who neglected to send me words of their own.

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The first chapter of Videoverse took me right back to the early 00s last night. I can still remember sitting at the family PC in our living room, begging my parents for more internet time because I wanted chat to my friend on MSN Messenger. We had to buy hours of internet in those days, and between my young teenage self and my three brothers, we absolutely devoured those meagre weekly limits, always pleading for more, more, more as we became absolutely captivated by this new world of the online.

Luckily, Emmett doesn't have to contend with such antiquated restraints in Videoverse, as his portal to the internet is built right into his enormous Nintendo DS-like home console, the Kinmoku Shark. As well as using it to play games reminiscent of old 16-bit classics, there's also a Nintendo Miiverse-esque social network on the Shark that Emmett uses to chat to his friends, post fan art of his favourite game, Feudal Fantasy, and feel part of something bigger. What hasn't changed since those early internet days, however (or indeed, the internet today) are the types of people he interacts with - there are trolls, of course, but there are also plenty of nice people here to support him, and the emergence of seemingly new user (and budding fan artist) Vivi quickly becomes the main subject of Videoverse's current free demo that's available as part of Steam's Storyteller Festival.

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After a slight delay, The Last Of Us Part I’s PC port released earlier this week and was subsequently torn apart by fans online. The kind-of-remake is still sitting at a mostly negative rating on Steam thanks to reports of frequent crashes and a generally wonky porting job, but some technical problems are getting fixed in a recent patch.

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With the solemnity of Samwise Gamgee informing Mr Frodo that one more step will take him the furthest he's ever been from home, I recently realised that it'll soon be the longest we've gone without a new Life Is Strange game since the franchise debuted in 2015. I looked into it and sure enough, the current record-holder is the gap between the season one finale of Life Is Strange and the first episode of its prequel Before The Storm: 1 year, 10 months, and 12 days. That means that come mid-August of this year — specifically, the 14th, which marks the 683rd day since True Colors' Wavelengths DLC released — LIS fans will be leaving the Shire whether we like it or not.

I suspect that Life Is Strange: Steph's Story — the first prose novel tie-in to the franchise, released on March 21st — was commissioned with fans like me in mind. Fans who work out useless trivia like the above because they need something to occupy them when there's no new game on the horizon and they've played all the existing ones to death. Fans who know every character's canonical middle name and birthday. Fans who complain that it feels like they never have time to read any more, but nevertheless finished the novel and wrote a silly supporter post about it within ten days of publication. Of course I really liked Life Is Strange: Steph's Story. But will you, as a person whose relationship with this franchise is statistically guaranteed to be more normal than mine?

As is fast becoming a thing on RPS this week, Alice Bee and James are both away this week, so I'm filling in writing this post and doing my best Alice impression in the process. In this week's episode, The Electronic Wireless Show podcast talks all things mods - specifically, the ones that got real big and broke out from their respective source games. It's a chat that's been prompted by the developers behind Slay The Spire mod Downfall announcing their own brand-new game, Tales & Tactics.

There's also a lot of undead fish chat, and Alice's plans for entertaining herself on an upcoming long-haul flight. And in James' hardware corner, the gang chat about Nvidia's comments on AI and crypto, as well as Ubisoft's AI writing software tool thinger.

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Vampire Survivor’s first DLC gave fans exactly what they wanted: more Vampire Survivors. The bullet-hell auto-shooter’s next DLC is aiming to do the same in just two weeks as the Tides Of The Foscari expansion launches on April 13th, developer Poncle have announced.

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Roadwarden was one of many fantastic mystery games from last year, and fans of the text-based RPG can now look forward to solving more secrets from the world with Windy Meadow - A Roadwarden Tale, coming to PC later this year.

Windy Meadow is set in the same fantasy world as Roadwarden and similarly presents a slice-of-life story that can branch out depending on your choices. This time, though, you’ll be following three protagonists in their interweaving day-to-day lives.

Windy Meadow’s press release teases the stories of Vena, Fabel, and Iudicia: “Will talented huntress Vena depart the harmonious but harmless village and leave her family behind in pursuit of riches with a merchant guild? Can Fabel finally embrace his talents, ditching the figurative shackles of his difficult past as he chases his dream of becoming a famous bard? And will outsider and herbalist Iudicia take hold of her love life, choosing not to marry a man she doesn’t really love at the risk of leading a lonely future?”

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Hot (weeks) off the back of Sons Of The Forest and the Resident Evil 4 remake coming out, we're celebrating your bestest best, most favourite survival games this month. Your votes have been counted and tallied, and your accompanying words of praise and affection matched accordingly. But which game has survived to make it to the top of the pile? Come and find out as we count down your 25 favourite survival games of all time.

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PAX East is a great place to play the latest games, sure, but as anyone who's attended the event will tell you the games are just a small part of a wider medley of things to see and do. Last year we highlighted the show's thriving pin collecting scene, for instance, interviewing a bunch of Pinny Arcade enthusiasts about the hobby and discovering that physical badges are just a minor part of the appeal.

Encouraged by the lovely warm feeling making that video left in my belly, we set out to shine a light on other lesser-known parts of PAX East during our time at this year's show. This led us to discover the PAX East Facebook group, a community of over 8,000 members brought together through their shared love of video games, pop culture and PAX itself. The page is dominated by a striking banner image, a photograph that shows a large group of people crowded around the PAX logo that's a permanent fixture in the main hall of the Boston convention centre.

Rachel and I found this photograph fascinating. Who were these people? Do they take this picture every single year? How did something like this start, and who was responsible for organising it in the first place?

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There’ll be all kinds of horrors present in Fallen London’s spin-off, Mask Of The Rose: green-tentacled creatures, underground Londoners, and most frighteningly, love. Sometimes two or more of these horrors intersect, and by that I mean you can romance that tentacled man in this gothic, alternative-history dating sim. Spooky suitors will need to wait a while more, though, as Mask Of The Rose has been delayed to June 8th - previously slated for April.

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The BAFTA Games Awards were held last night - an annual show where a jury of developers throw weighty man-head statues at the crowd, celebrating the best games of any given year. The 2023 BAFTAs celebrated the best of 2022 with a mixed bag of games, awarding big blockbusters alongside popular indies, but the jury agrees with RPS on one front: Vampire Survivors is the best game of 2022. Good BAFTAs.

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E3 2023 has been cancelled. The Entertainment Software Association announced the news to its members earlier today and confirmed it publicly shortly thereafter. The ESA's email said that the event "simply did not garner the sustained interest necessary to execute it in a way that would showcase the size, strength, and impact of our industry."

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Foxhole finished its early access journey last year as an expansive massively multiplayer World War 2 shooter that looks and functions like an RTS in which every soldier is an individual player. Now developers Siege Camp (formerly Clapfoot) have announced Anvil Empires, which seems similar in every way except its now thousands-strong armies are forging arrows and sieging castles in medieval warfare.

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Each month, subscribers to Amazon's Prime service get a new batch of games to keep. April's collection includes a bumper crop of fifteen games, released in waves every Thursday, including Terraformers, Metal Slug 4, and BJ Blazkowicz sad eyes in Wolfenstein: The New Order.

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Not many video game series reach the 40-year mark, but that's the anniversary Nobunaga's Ambition celebrates this year. The historical grand strategy series is celebrating with the announcement of a new western release, Nobunaga's Ambition: Awakening, which will launch this July. You'll find the first trailer below.

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Indie studio Majorariatto have released small, experimental games every March since 2017 - barring the cursed year of 2020 - and now they’re back with another thought-provoking adventure called Pineapple On Pizza, this time asking the profound question: can video games convey such a complex flavour? It’s out now, it’s free, and it’s only about ten minutes long.

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