Rock, Paper, Shotgun

Last month, veteran game developer Brenda Romero called out Tomorrow, And Tomorrow, And Tomorrow - a bestselling novel about three aspiring game devs - for leaving her out of the acknowledgements page. Romero’s acclaimed board game Train inspired the in-book video game Solution, by the author Gabrielle Zevin's own admission, which resulted in Romero speaking out. The book’s publisher Knobf Doubleday have now issued a statement refusing to credit Romero since “the only games listed in the author’s acknowledgements are video games.”

Read more

Since some people apparently can’t go a few months without some sort of mega money-off event, here’s a guide to all the best Amazon Spring Sale deals on PC gaming hardware. This doesn’t look to be as much of a wide-ranging sale as Prime Day or Amazon’s Black Friday dealings, but there are still some decent savings to be had on plenty of RPS-approved gear, from gaming mice and keyboards to SSDs and gaming monitors.

Read more

Earlier today we looked at a great price on a Microsoft Xbox Wireless Controller in blue using a 20% off Ebay code, and now it's time to check out another deal using the very same discount method. This time it's a massive 18TB HDD from Seagate, an Exos enterprise-grade drive, which is available for £245 when you use the CATCH20 code at CCL's Ebay shop front.

Read more

I like to think I have rhythm, in the same way that a wobbly air dancer lunging about sporadically has rhythm. That is to say I have none at all, and that any time spent dancing turns me into an uncontrollable set of limbs flailing in the wrong directions. Think Octodad in a night club and you’d be on the right track (although the disastrous limb flailing is enough to keep me out of the clubs).

That lack of rhythm isn’t just native to the dance floor of an awkward family party, though. Even nuzzled into my chair with a controller in hand, I simply can’t stick to the beat. My eyes glued to notes floating across the screen, trying to hit them at just the right time, you’d probably see Time hiding in a corner to my left, giggling at my repeated failure. A barrage of borked bleeps and bungled notes tend to leave me with spirits sunk.

In Hi-Fi Rush, though, I always leave with my head held high.

Read more

A long time ago (in 2013, in fact) in a student-y house far away (assuming that you don't live too near to Nottingham), I started playing the BioShock series. I'd flirted with the idea for years, but it was the release of BioShock Infinite that finally convinced me to take the plunge. And I can't exactly complain: the series' Rapture arc — made up of the first and second games, plus the prequel novel by none other than John "The Crow" Shirley — now makes up maybe 10% of my personality, having given me two of my favourite video games, my favourite video game tie-in book, and a front-running contender for my favourite video game locale all at once.

I just wish that, after all that prep I did for it, I'd actually liked BioShock Infinite a bit more.

Read more

Want an Xbox controller? This official controller in Shock Blue is available for £35 brand new at CCL's Ebay store when you use the code CATCH20. That's a handy £5 cheaper than any equivalent controller on Amazon, and the best deal we've seen for these gamepads since Black Friday last year.

Read more

It has been said (by me) that a lot of games journalists are generalists in terms of what we play, especially if we're talking about people who are staffers at an outlet, or have ever worked in guides. Though we all have stuff we prefer, or series that we serve as the go-to expert on for in-house needs (I think vid bud Liam might actually walk around wearing an ASK ME ABOUT RESIDENT EVIL badge in his day-to-day life), we - unlike the blue-haired neo-Gods of streaming - often can't focus on one game all of the time. You have to know enough about enough to be able to write about enough.

There are, however, a bunch of big important games that I haven't played. Sometimes it's because a bunch of other people have, so that gap in the site's knowledge is already plugged (and I do always make sure to be aware of their impact and basic facts). Other times, they might be games that I'm not really interested in playing, either because they're not my genre or they seem too overwrought. Or, in some cases, it's because everyone says they're really good and I have to try them, though I've been burned before on this method (you people said the same about Ready Player One). But you know what would make me take in info about these games, even if it's just by osmosis? If they all got PowerWash Sim DLCs.

Read more

We’ve known about Shadows Of Doubt for a few years now, mainly peeking at it through Screenshot Saturday posts, which makes sense considering the game’s beautiful, neon-soaked voxel art. Happily, the open world detective sim is now sneaking into an early access release next month, on April 24th.

Read more

Terra Nil is a puzzle-citybuilder about reclaiming the environment. You replace pollution with lush life across a series of four randomly generated dioramas (plus four slightly more complicated challenge levels), covering the landscape in fynbos and forests, lichen and lagoons. When it all comes together and you can look over the fruits of your labour, birds chirping and piano melodically playing in the background, it’s beautiful. Getting to that point, though, is an often repetitive experience marred with frustration.

Read more

Slay The Spire has remained an incredibly popular deckbuilding roguelike, so it naturally invited a healthy modding community that added fun stuff to the game - goofy googley eyes included. One of Slay The Spire’s most popular mods was called Downfall, a huge fan-made expansion that added tons of playable characters, a new mode, and more. Those developers - Table 9 Studio - are now back with their own not-modded game: an auto-battling, fantasy Chess roguelike called Tales & Tactics.

Read more

I keep alternating between wanting to play more and feeling weary at the prospect. While that might sound bad, it arguably means that it's balanced an appealing strategic challenge with the grinding theme of trench warfare.

The Great War Colon Western Front is about taking the Triple Alliance or Entente through the hell years of 1914-18, or beyond. It's a purely military game about overcoming massed defences through attrition, both in localised real-time battles, and a turn-based strategic map. It's perhaps unfair to criticise it for repetition and some intermittent sense of futility, since a First World War game without them would defeat the point. But I still feel a little mixed.

Read more

If you're a fan of The Sims 4 and your ears pricked up during this month's reveal of Paradox Interactive's upcoming life sim Life By You, you might want to check your PC's specifications before it enters early access later this year. During a chat with Paradox Tectonic's general manager Rod Humble at this year's GDC, I spoke to him about whether there was any plan to accommodate lower-end PC specifications when Life By You enters early access this September, and he answered by urging players to take its minimum PC specifications "seriously".

Read more

Rod Humble has his son to thank for his upcoming life sim Life By You. After finishing up work on two successful mobile games around four years ago, Humble was itching for something new. But he wasn't quite sure what. "I was in the kitchen talking to my son about, 'Oh, what should I do? I don't know what opportunities there are,' and he was like, 'Why don't you just pick the company you want to work at and ask them?'" And as a life-long Crusader Kings player, the answer was clear. "Okay!?" Humble says incredulously. "I can do that, I guess. So I did. I wrote to [PR manager] Troy [Goodfellow], and he knew Fred [Wester, CEO], and that was it. It was two weeks later and I met him in San Francisco and said, hey, I'd like to start a studio, and here's the way I'd like to run it. And he was like, sure, let's go for it."

So began Humble's journey to creating Life By You, his upcoming life simulator that's set to give his former pet project, The Sims, a run for its money. With The Sims 5, or Project Rene as it's currently known, still some way off, Life By You seems poised to finally give life sim fans the game they've always wanted. "I wanted to make an open world life simulator where the core tenant was freedom," says Humble. "Where players could freely play and tell their stories with minimal friction." And what was standing in the way of that freedom? Loading screens, says Humble.

Read more

You might have heard of Dark And Darker, a dungeon-crawling take on Escape From Tarkov’s PvPvE that’s been gaining popularity over the last few months. Alice0 enjoyed its alpha playtest last December, and it ended up becoming one of the most popular games of February's Steam Next Fest. It wasn't due to launch in full until sometime this winter, but that window's now up in the air after Dark And Darker was removed from Steam over the weekend, following a messy legal dispute between Nexon and developers Ironmace, who have been accused of “using trade secrets and copyrighted information,” allegedly stolen from Nexon.

Read more

Jokes about Valve’s inability to count to three practically write themselves, but in fairness, the publisher have reportedly reached the mythical number in Counter-Strike 2’s files. The mention of “Left4Dead3” was recently spotted in CS2’s files (thanks, Reddit) which sparked online speculation for a third game in the series. The files state that the “severity” is “high”, the “version” is “2”, but what about the “priority?” Bad news for fans of the run-and-gunning zombie shooter: according to the files, the priority is “none.”

Read more

Imagine for a moment, if you will, that Persona 5 let you suplex your opponents. Even better, imagine if those moves were pulled off through timing based minigames that resembled the battles found in Nintendo's excellent (and underrated) Mario & Luigi RPG series. Sounds good, right? Well guess what, that game exists! It's called Wrestle Story and it's definitely a project to keep an eye on.

After spending twenty glorious minutes with its colourful demo at PAX East, I was keen to chat to creative director Steve Jimenez about the team's inspirations, the challenges of translating wrestling into a turn-based RPG and the exciting locations that players will attempt to liberate from a group of devious heels.

Read more

Earlier in the week, Liam and I had the opportunity to chat with Animal Well's solo developer and publisher Bigmode about creating their eerie subterranean world. We then had a chance to go hands on with the PAX East demo, and wow, we were both incredibly impressed. Watch the video below for our enthusiastic impressions:

If we could give an RPS 'Bestest Best in show' award to a game, is would be Animal Well. Liam and I loved the game's dense atmosphere, spider-web of interconnected caverns, and creepy creatures that lurk in the dark. We also loves the effects the game has, which reminded Liam of Octopath Traveler's visual flairs. If I had to compare it to one game, it would be Hollow Knight, which is very exciting.

We have plenty more PAX East indies for you to check out so make sure you have a peruse through our RPS@PAX tag. A couple of our favourites have been chaotic rouguelite Pizza Possum, Resident Evil-like Alone In The Dark, and island exploration game Mythwrecked.

Read more

Show me a game about a feral, furry creature with a never ending hunger for junk food and I'm immediately interested. I played Pizza Possum on the first day of PAX and knew it would make a great indie highlight for our time here at PAX East. Liam and I have now both played the demo and you can listen to our impressions in the video below:

What really appealed to us about Pizza Possum is how chaotic it is. It's like Untitled Goose Game but at double the speed. Playing the eponymous possum, you need you scamper around a sunny Mediterranean town scoffing as much food as you can get your grubby mitts on.

There's an element of hide-and-seek too, as there are patrol dogs who will try and stop your food eating rampage, but you can quickly jump into a berry bush to thorw them off your scent. It's goofy fun, and we're completeley smitten with it.

Read more

Sundays are for doing your best Ed Thorn impression, because he’s holidaying in Japan right now and you said you’d cover the Sunday Papers for him. Okay, here we go: "Hi I’m Ed and here is this week’s best writing about games (and game related things)." Nailed it.

Read more

Liam and I had a fun time chatting with the folks over at Mega Cat Studios about their upcoming wrestling RPG WrestleQuest last year at PAX West, and this time at PAX East we finally cornered them in the ring for a proper interview.

Watch below to learn about how the developers created their zero to hero story, how they're addressing myths and persaonl issues in the world of pro wresting, as well as sharing a story about how one of the team got their nose broken in a wrestling accident during development.

My main take away from the interview is how much of the RPG incorporates all aspects of Wrestling, not just the ring fights we see on TV. Another interesting thing is that Mega Cat reached out to a handful of real-life wrestlers to ask their permission to use their likeness in the game - not an easy feat to secure, I'm sure.

Read more

I've played a bunch of indie game demos at PAX East, but none left my head reeling as much as 43 Studios' fiendishly frantic action platfotmer Hell Of An Office. It's a super fast parkour adventure in the vein of Neon White, and after ten minutes with the demo my heart race was through the roof. If I owned a fitbit it would have been screaming at me to have a nice sit down with a cuppa. Check out my full impressions in the video below:

Hell Of An Office puts your platforming reflexes to the test as you're tasked with sprinting ad jumping your way straight outta hell. With only a stapler as your means of survival, you need to navigate through each level before it slowly sinks into the burning lava. React quickly, or fall victim to Hell's scorching pools.

If you love the blood-pumping, sweaty palm inducing action-platforming of Neon White, make sure to keep an eye on Hell Of An Office as it makes it's way through Early Access.

Read more

Have A Nice Death's dark art and quick-slashing combat bring Hollow Knight to mind, but it has more in common with Hades and Dead Cells. One of the things it has in common with those games is that it was released in early access. After a little more than a year, version 1.0 arrived this week, bringing a final area, a new boss, and the end of its storyline.

Read more

Go-Go Town! has more than a little Animal Crossing about it, as players become mayor of a cutesy fixer-upper town and start doing oddjobs to attract new visitors and inhabitants. It differs in several key ways too, thankfully, from its more urban setting, its tactile power tools, and the ability to automate a lot of the gathering and crafting by putting residents to work for you. Watch the reveal trailer below.

Read more

Honkai: Star Rail has been hinting at an April 26th release date for months, but now it's official. The free-to-play, turn-based Genshin Impact spin-off will be available for pre-download from April 23rd and will be available via its official site and the Epic Games Store come the 26th. A presentation streamed yesterday also revealed its first two banners.

Read more

I somehow missed the news two weeks ago that Wargroove 2 was on the way. The actual successor to a spiritual successor to Advance Wars, Wargroove 2 is another 2D turn-based strategy game, but with new factions, a new roguelike mode, and a new co-developer.

There's also a demo available to play right now, although only until the end of the weekend.

Read more

I really enjoyed dark fantasy adventure Roki when it first released back in 2020, and keen to see what developers Polygon Treehouse have gotten up to since, I jumped at the opportunity to play the PAX East demo for Mythwrecked: Ambrosia Island. You can watch my impressions of the demo in the video below:

In Mythwrecked you play as Alex, a backpacker who has washed up on the sun-drenched shores of Ambrosia Island. As she begins exploring, she soon realises that this island seems to be a hot spot for the gods from ancient Greek myths. Your task is to befriend each god, help them restore their memories, and find a way back to civilisation.

From playing the demo, you can see much of what made Roki fun reflected in Mythwrecked. The environments are interesting to poke around in, puzzles are breezy brain ticklers, and it has Polygon Treehouse's sense of humour. Each Greek god has a humerous twist on their lore, and during the demo I had a fun time chatting with Hermes, who is dressed in nothing more than a pair of skimpy white speedos and a matching white sweat band - a bold choice of attire.

Read more

Out of all the game demos Liam and I have played at PAX East, we both agree that Animal Well is something special. It's a 2D metriodvania where you play as a little blob trying to navigate a subtterranean labyrinth filled with creatures - some cute, some not so cute.

To find out more about this strange puzzle platformer's beginnings and development, we spoke to solo develeoper Billy Basso and Bigmode's Leah Gastrow which you can view in the two videos below.

You can watch me interview Billy here:

Read more

A combination of work trips to America and regular time offs means that there are actually only four of us here to fill in the WAP on the what we're playing this week. Given that it would make for a very short article for you, the reader, I have decided to fill in for the various absent members of the treehouse myself, in character, italicised for clarity. Anyone actually here and writing for themself is in regular text.

Read more

Join us for another PAX East game highlight straight from the show floor, and this time we decided to revisit a cult horror classic: Alone In The Dark. This psychological horror is being developed by Pieces Interactive with publishing backing from THQ Nordic and is a love letter to the original game released back in the 90s.

As someone who had played the original, and RPS' Resident Evil uber fan, Liam decided to check out the demo and you can hear his impressions in the video below:

According to the devs at the THQ booth, this demo is a stand-alone prequel story that will not be in the final game, but shares the same eerie atmosphere and action that'll be in the main game. This reimagining is set in the Gothic American south and in the main game you'll be playing as Edward Carnby or Emily Hartwood as they navigate the monster infested Derceto Manor, the same mansion featured in the demo.

Read more

We've had our eyes on Goodbye Volcano High since it appeared in Sony's State Of Play back in February and the demo at PAX East is one of the first times that the devs have placed a game preview in the hands of eager players. I had the chance to sit down with the demo and play KO_OP's teen dino adventure first hand. Check out the video below if you're interested to know what I thought:

Goodbye Volcano High follows a group of teen dinos as they begin their senior year of highschool. It's part coming-of-age visual novel part rhythm game as the group try to grapple with school while also trying to make it big as up-and-coming musicians.

I had a great time with the demo, and it looks like we won't have to wait long for the full release at Goodbye Volcano High is launching on Steam and PlayStation on June 15th.

Read more

It's almost become an RPS tradition to search the show floor at PAX events and find the coolest stuff and highlight it in a video, so that's exactly what we've done at PAX East. There's a lot of cool booths, fun props, and generally weird stuff to see, so we've chosen our absolute favourites and have listed them in video form for your viewing pleasure.

Everything at PAX East is situated in one massive hall (instead of PAX West's multiple floors, rooms, and buildings) so it's nice and easy to see everything in one or two loops. It doesn't feel cramped at all, even with Friday's busy crowds, and the booths are as spectacular as ever.

Some of our favourites included Devolver Digital's movie theatre-inspired booth, which has the new addition of a candle-lit shrine for Cult Of The Lamb's upcoming free expansion Relics Of The Old Faith. We also loved Ysbryd Games' Demonschool booth which had a school desk layout and cool retro TV. Another favourite was the animated robot dinosaur (complete with rideable saddle) that we found at the Roots Of Pacha demo builds.

Read more

“Imagine someone saying ‘We need you to make a trailer for our movie, but we've only got half of the sets and props ready…” says Tim Bevan de Lange, Creative Director at Realtime Nordic, a studio that makes, specifically, video game trailers. “...and we haven’t actually shot anything, so you’ll need to do that yourself. Some of the actors won't come out of their trailers. One of them will but if you shoot him from the front you realise he's got no eyes, but don't show the audience that. It's not intentional, he's getting them fixed. Also can you film it twice, for different streaming platforms? Make a really good version for Netflix and a slightly worse looking one for Quibi.”

Every so often a game trailer comes along that makes me think, hang on, that was bloody brilliant! I bet some people made that! Most recently it was Creative Assembly’s Immortal Empires trailer. Well, I’ve been digging around and I’m happy to report that yes, although I’m the first one to just see a trailer as an algorithm trying to snatch my coin purse away like a manure-encrusted Victorian ne’er-do-well, game trailers are made by humans. They're often humans who do it as as specific job, either in-house at a developer or as an outside agency like Realtime Nordic. Enlightened and enthralled, I asked some of them about what went into the strange space that is making the trailers for your favourite games.

Read more

The Mercenaries DLC mode will be added to the Resident Evil 4 remake, for free, on April 7th. The full game launched today, so by the time you’re done gorging on the remake’s fancy additions, the new mode should be ready. Hopefully, you’re still in the mood to roundhouse kick waves of infected in two weeks' time.

Read more

I can't remember if I've already banged on about what a terrible, unhelpful term "metroidvania" is, so let's skip past to say that Angel's Gear reminds me of the one Castlevania game I've ever played.

It's partly the tone: a compelling blend of gothic and biomechanical horror, with a 90s game boy goriness that's cartoony enough to feel colourful rather than repulsive. "Camp" isn't the right word, but a hint of melodrama gives the story severity without self-seriousness. I mean, within the first minute of the game, your soldier goes from a terrified Normandy-style amphibious assault on a fortified metal church to seeing their war made irrelevant when the moon explodes. The whole thing is kind of metal, to be honest.

Read more

Everywhere (not to be confused with Everything) was a big fat question mark at last year’s Gamescom Opening Night Live. It comes from Build A Rocket Boy, the studio founded by ex-GTA boss Leslie Benzies, and despite its cryptic reveal trailer, AliceB theorised it was some kind of Robloxlike. Turns out her hunch was correct - Everywhere is a platform that allows players to create their own custom content. To show off what the tools can do, Benzies and the team unveiled MindsEye, an episodic “blockbuster” adventure available inside Everywhere. A game set inside a game, if you will.

Read more

How are you surviving in Sons Of The Forest? Perhaps you’ve become a self-sufficient blueberry empire, surviving off handfuls of fruit while cannibals knock at your door. Or maybe you’ve gone full Charlie Kelly, consuming tins of cat food found around the island. If so, it’s time for a diet cleanse. Sons Of The Forest’s newest patch adds a demon boss, a new cave system, and tons of other improvements. It’s also nerfing cat food, since it was overpowered and, well, are there actually any cats in the game?

Read more

Sludge Life is skidding back into our grimy little lives with a sequel, Sludge Life 2. Just like the first, Sludge Life 2 is a sticky graffiti vandalism sim set inside a funky lo-fi open world. You’ll be running about, snapping pics of chain-smoking crabs, tagging graffiti spots around the city, and just generally having a super chill time, yo. Developer Terri Vellman and music producer Doseone are back behind the scenes, and if you want a taste of the slime (ew), Sludge Life 1 is free to keep until March 31st. On Steam, that is.

Read more

To celebrate Deep Rock Galactic’s fifth anniversary, developer Ghost Ship took us back in time to the mystical land of 2018 and let us play Deep Rock Galactic Legacy, a version of the co-op shooter as it was back in 2018, before all of the updates. It was a fun, nostalgic way to let fans reminisce on the game’s infantile days. Ghost Ship had planned to remove Legacy today - March 23rd - but after fan feedback, they’ve decided to keep Legacy edition around indefinitely.

Read more

The Resident Evil 4 remake is a mostly cool runner on desktops, and good news if you’re recently picked up a certain handheld PC in the sales: its Steam Deck performance is alright too. Maybe not to the battery-sipping, framerate-abundant extent of the very best Steam Deck games, but with the right settings, nu-Resi 4 can keep its burlap sacked head well above 30fps even in its most visually demanding scenes.

Read more

Unlike Liam, I started on the Resident Evil 4 remake without the roundhousing know-how of someone that repeatedly beat the 2005 original. Still, twelve maulings, three beheadings, and one chainsaw disembowelment later, I’ve got enough of a handle on Leon S. Kennedy’s disappointing Spanish holiday to help you get the most out of the new model’s PC performance. Including a guide to its best settings, which can especially help on lower-end rigs.

Read more