Warhorse have revealed Kingdom Come: Deliverance 2, sequel to the 2018 open world action-RPG which you will likely remember for a couple of reasons: 1) its ostensibly faithful but inevitably skewed representations of race, gender and class in medieval Bohemia, which were amplified by its creative director Daniel Vávra's qualified endorsement of Gamergate, and 2) being a moderately entertaining, buggy and mucky chivalric fable in which you have to worry about keeping your sword sharp and eating food before it rots. Going by the announcement video, the new game is the same game but with more cash to burn. It's the work of 250 people, with Jan Valta returning as composer. According to Vávra, "what we are making now is what it was supposed to be in the beginning, but we were not able to do it because we didn't have enough resources and experience." Read more

If you somehow haven’t fallen down the Balatro hole just yet, that slope is about to get a whole lot slippier. The mesmerising roguelike spin on poker is easy enough to lose an entire afternoon to by itself, but now it’s been combined with the granddaddy of all computer-related procrastination: classic Windows Solitaire. Read more

Former PS4 hit Ghost of Tsushima is the next big PlayStation exclusive to make the leap to PC, and it’s bringing some extra PS-shaped features with it. The game’s Director’s Cut - representing the fact this re-release will include its Iki Island expansion and co-op mode - will be the first game that lets you earn PlayStation trophies from your PC, if you so wish. Read more

Despite military sim series Arma and its zombie survival spin-off DayZ having their de facto home on PC, developers Bohemia Interactive opted to snub us keyboard-and-mousers for their post-DayZ game Vigor. The free-to-play survival shooter hit early access on Xbox way back in June 2018 - almost six years ago - and subsequently made its way to PlayStation and Nintendo Switch. And yet, for more than half a decade, no whisper of a PC release was heard - until now, that is. Read more

The Anniversary Edition of Braid was originally announced almost four years ago, and originally meant to be out sometime in 2021. As such, the latest delay to Jonathan Blow’s time-rewinding puzzle-platformer - which sees its date pushed back two weeks into the middle of next month - feels like a relative drop in the hourglass. Read more

Larian aren’t just not making Baldur’s Gate 4 – they’re treating Baldur’s Gate 3’s success as an opportunity to develop their own intellectual properties, with two new games in the works. These games will build on the “sensibilities” of Baldur’s Gate 3 in being “immersive experiences shaped by your choices”, but by the sounds of things, they won’t be adaptations of anybody else's narrative or setting. Divinity: Original Sin 3? It’s the obvious call, but come now, free your mind. How about a kart racing game, Larian, or a banging old school mascot platformer? When are you going to make a platform game, Larian? Read more

As you may know, the network this site belongs to is for sale.To help us with our impending separation from the ReedPop business we are detaching some systems and services from the ReedPop brand.One of those systems is our reader accounts system which powers profiles, comments, subscriptions, and newsletters on this very website. Read more

Here at the Electronic Wireless Show podcast we're nothing if not ready to jump on a bandwagon, and the hottest wagon in town right now is the Fallout TV show. We've watched varying amounts of Amazon's new adaptation of Bethesda's favourite post-apocalyptic RPG baby, so there are some mild (but not total) spoilers within, as we talk about the show, the show biffing the leaving-the-vault-moment, the best things about the games, the Righteous Gemstones, and how good Walton Goggins is just, like, in general. Read more

If the purpose of a tech demo is to induce a flash of thinking "Hey that’s neat," then I’d be lying if I said Nvidia’s Covert Protocol – a playable showcase for their AI NPC tool, Avatar Cloud Engine (ACE) – hadn’t worked on me. If, on the other hand, it’s to develop that thought into "Hey, I want this in games right now," it’s going to take more than a slightly stilted natter with an aspiring bartender. Read more

The problem with deciding to play every single Nancy Drew mystery puzzle game for a column is that, because they have been coming out since the 90s, Her Interactive have built up enough steam that I may never catch up to the front of the plucky citizen detective train. They have today announced a release date of May 7th for Nancy Drew: Mystery Of The Seven Keys, along with the official trailer. This time Our Nance is heading to Prague, for a sort of old-world-meets-new story about hacking, medieval myths, and a stolen necklace. Nancy is hired to find said heirloom, and interview a bunch of suspects, one of whom is creepy puppet guy up there (there are no screens of Nancy because she never actually steps out from behind the camera in these games; she may as well be a cryptid). I realise this may not be of interest to regular readers of this site, but while I may not have seven keys, I do have one to the back end of this website, so nobody can stop me. Read more

Friends, I have officially discovered another game I can play with my life partner, who regards most games with enormous suspicion and fatigue. That game is Morels: The Hunt 2, released this week, and as you might guess, it is about finding and identifying various species of mushroom in lush, photorealistic wilderness locations. There are also unicorns, crystal skulls and robot parts. Slightly confused by the unicorns, crystal skulls and robot parts, if I'm honest. It feels a bit like developers Abrams Studios are unconvinced as to the popular appeal of mushroom hunting, and have garlanded the concept with random mythology so as to widen the Venn diagram overlap between "fungi fans" and "people who want to live in cyberpunk Narnia". Read more

If you'll be hiding from the sweltering sun in July (I say, daring the fates to try to spite me by delivering a cracking summer), good news: you won't be the only shadow-dweller. The fascinating Schim finally has a release date, July 18th. It stars a little shadowy soul trying to reconnect with its human by hopping from shadow to shadow through city streets, farms, factories, and parks bustling with life and moving parts. See how it works in the new trailer below! Read more

1000xResist, from Vancouver-based sunset visitor 斜陽過客, is one of those high-concept sci-fi yarns that easily unravels into a million, bewildering threads of ambition and inspiration. Let me try to pack the premise, at least, into a clean paragraph: you are the Watcher, a clone of the immortal ALLMOTHER, who herself is the sole survivor of a disease spread by the arrival of enormous aliens, the Occupants. The ALLMOTHER's many clones reside in an underground bunker, the Orchard, while their deified parent fights the Occupants elsewhere. Your job within the Orchard’s theocratic hierarchy is to relive and interpret the ALLMOTHER's memories of life before the fall, a thousand years ago. Read more

Blackbird Interactive, the team behind upcoming strategy game Homeworld 3, have released details on both the planned roadmap and the game’s chunky-looking collector’s edition, ahead of the game’s release next month, 13th May. The roadmap details three pieces of paid DLC for the year ahead, plus an additional planned paid piece in 2025. This is alongside several free content updates. Together, they’re all targeted at fleshing out the game’s ‘War Games’ three player co-op mode. Specifically, the roadmap details new playable factions, starting fleets, challenges, emblems, and maps. Read more

Nowadays, I'm more than happy to sacrifice high frames and a big screen for the comforts of the Steam Deck. I like lounging on the couch, the light forearm workout, and heating my room in only a few minutes. So it's good news that Moon Studios' upcoming ARPG No Rest For The Wicked will be playable on launch for Deck, the ROG Ally and other handhelds. Minimum PC specs also don't look too taxing, but those after the shiniest-looking game on recommended hardware may be in for a shock. Read more

Slavic Magic, the sole creator behind anticipated (sub genres forthcoming) strategy game Manor Lords, has written a transparent and refreshingly to-the-point blog post on Steam addressing both expectations and future updates. Specifically, Slavic Magic aka Greg Manor Lords has taken time to outline exactly what his game - currently the most wishlisted on Steam, ahead of Hades 2 - isn’t. Read more

Bethesda's very own Mr Handy (director and executive producer) Todd Howard has addressed the controversy surrounding the Fallout TV show's treatment of Fallout backstory, reaffirming the canonicity of Obsidian's Fallout: New Vegas and promising that Bethesda and Amazon are being "careful" to maintain consistency between the games and the TV series. Are you new to this latest lore scandal? Watch out for Fallout Season 1 spoilers ahead, then. Read more

“It’s time to venture outside your fortress!” reads Kitfox’s invitation to play the beta for Adventure Mode in Dwarf Fortress on Steam. Sounds like a trap to me. Sounds like the kind of thing a werebadger would say, to lure you out of hiding. Are there werebadgers in Dwarf Fortress? If there aren’t, I have to ask what developers Bay 12 have been doing all these years. Doubtless, the hills and valleys of the hitherto base-construction-only Steam edition are teeming with were-creatures of every flavour. Werefinches! Wereotters! Werebudgerigars! Werepoets! Read more

Last time, you decided that gliding powers are better than Dragon's Dogma 2's Unmaking Arrow. Honestly I'm surprised it was that close (66% vs 33%—don't sweat the rounding), and I'm proud of your ability to weigh a whole concept against a single-game implementation. We are so good at this. Onwards! This week, I ask you to choose between placing things in two very different ways. What's better: a 'put back' action, or standing atop another player's head in an FPS? Read more

The surreal pop synth of Sayonara Wild Hearts may have been the game that put Swedish developer Simogo on the map for PC players, but for me their earlier iOS puzzler Device 6 stands in my memory as being one of the most distinctive video games I've played. An interactive mystery novel at its heart, Device 6 took full advantage of its mobile-based hardware, asking players to turn and rotate their device to read certain lines of text, and scroll through its chapters searching for audio visual clues to solve its puzzles. I've often lamented that it never made its way to other platforms, even though part of its magic is inherently tied to physicality of its tactile origins. Happily, after playing a few hours of Simogo's latest game, Lorelei And The Laser Eyes it's clear this equally classy detective story shares much of the same DNA as Device 6. It has the same love of riddles and mysterious, cryptic puzzles, only now they're writ large in a fully explorable 3D setting - a monochrome and maze-like hotel belonging to a reclusive artist. But Simogo's love of text hasn't been diminished in the process. Early on you find an instruction manual for Lorelei And The Laser Eyes within the game itself, which straight away tells you to have a pen and paper nearby to help solve its numerous conundrums. Heck, publishers Annapurna Interactive even sent me a full-blown notebook in the post just to hammer it home. They're not kidding, either. Even the opening section of the game had me scribbling down names, sums and symbols, much like Tunic, Return Of The Obra Dinn and Outer Wilds did before it. Which is just as well, really, as I'll definitely be needing some reminders when I come to play the full version on May 16th. Read more

I briefly posted about this in The Maw, but was unsure at that point if SteamWorld Heist 2 was coming to PC day and date with the launch on Switch. That date is August 8th, by the way, and the answer is: yes it is! Though it was revealed at Nintendo's Indie World Showcase earlier this afternoon, strategy action-adventure-with-robots sequel SteamWorld Heist 2 isn't a timed platform exclusive, so that's fun! SteamWorld Heist 2 is, if you hadn't guessed, a sequel to SteamWorld Heist, which came to PC in 2016. The first was a side-on tactics game where you, leading a team of robots, shot teams of other (bad) robots in turn-based skill-heavy tactical battles. While that all took place in space, the sequel has achieved splashdown, and you'll be chuntering about the seas with a new lead character (Captain Leeway) and a new bunch of crewmates. It's a robot pirate game, in other words. Read more

If you can't wait to start rummaging in The Witcher 3: Wild Hunt's guts with its powerful new modding tools, you can now shoot for early access by signing up for a playtest on Steam. The new REDkit suite is based on the actual tools that CD Projekt RED themselves sued to create one of the best RPGs, and will let folks make a much wider range of mods. We'll be able to make new quests, new characters, even whole new worlds. Read more

FACEMINER is a clicker/puzzle game where you work from your CRT monitor to analyse packets of facial surveillance data for a mysterious company. It describes itself as a ‘hardcore thriller clicker set in 1999’. As a connoisseur of unusual word combinations - as well as a believer in the satirical power of clicker games since playing Universal Paperclips - I immediately set about downloading the free Steam demo. Read more

GTA 6 publishers Take-Two Interactive have announced that they're "rationalizing" their "pipeline" and positioning/restructuring/streamlining for growth by, you guessed it, laying off a load of people and cancelling a bunch of games. As detailed in a US Securities and Exchange Commission filing, Take-Two are doing away with five per cent of the approximately 11,000 people who work for them, and have cancelled several in-development projects worth tens of millions of dollars. Read more

Elden Ring: Shadow Of The Erdtree will release in June 2024, but even if you buy it day one, you might not be able to access the Elden Ring DLC expansion’s new overworld areas and dungeons right away. This is an add-on aimed squarely at those in the later stages of the game, as FromSoftware’s own Elden Lord Hidetaka Miyazaki has revealed in a new Famitsu interview – to gain access, you must first defeat two of the main game’s nastier bosses. Yes, I know that all Elden Ring bosses are nasty, but these two are among the worst, in my experience. Read more

Is waiting for Hades 2 to release starting to feel like a sisyphean endeavor? If so, push that boulder no longer. Supergiant announced yesterday that fans of the action roguelite can sign up now to be considered for an upcoming technical test, via Hades 2’s Steam page. Read more

With the arrival of Amazon’s Fallout TV series last week came the dropping of another bombshell: the possible truth behind a mystery that’s gone unanswered in the video games for over 25 years. Before you read on, please bear in mind that spoilers for the Fallout TV show’s season one finale follow! Read more

With Larian having now officially handed the reins of the Baldur’s Gate series back to Dungeons & Dragons owners Wizards of the Coast (and their Monopoly-making parents at Hasbro) - with the developers saying they have no plans to make any DLC or a sequel - the ball for a Baldur’s Gate 4 now sits in Wizards’ court. The good news is that, yes, they also want to make a follow-up to one of the most acclaimed and successful video games of the last few years. Just don’t expect that to necessarily be anytime soon. Read more

World of Warcraft is setting a whole new story arc in motion with its next expansion, The War Within. If you can’t quite wait until this summer to see what the first chapter of the new Worldsoul Saga trilogy has to offer, you might not have to wait so long. Blizzard are running a beta for War Within that will give testers the chance to delve into the subterranean addition early - and sign-ups are now open. Read more

Palworld, the viral survival game that stirred up controversy (and found plenty of success) on the back of being a Pokémon-a-like - with added guns and factory labour, mind - is now due to become the inspiration for its own generation of clones, according to the head of its developers. Read more

The Crucial T500 is one of the best-performing PCIe 4.0 SSDs on the market right now, going toe-to-toe with both the WD Black SN850X and the Samsung 990 Pro SSDs when hardware ed James tested it last year.You have to spend a bit to get the top performance, especially now with memory manufacturers slowing production and SSD makers offering fewer discounts as a result. Fortunately, the 2TB T500 does have a decent discount going at the moment, worth $51:The T500 takes the title of best high-end PCIe 4.0 NVMe SSD for gaming in the RPS best SSDs for gaming guide, and boasts ridiculous sequential speeds of up to 7400MB/s and 7000MB/s for read and writes respectively. It's worth reading through the list to see how it compares to other, but here's a quote from James that explains how the T500 has edged above the competition: Read more

Six months is a long time. In that half-year you could fully grow a patch of delicious strawberries, plant the seeds, then grow another. Or you could squirm through three and a half successive Liz Truss premierships. Or, as Cities: Skylines 2 developers Colossal Order have done, you could take the technical mess of your long-awaited citybuilding game and reconstruct it into something that performs... okay, not well, but better. Read more

Years before she worked on top-drawer point-and-clickers Return To Monkey Island and Thimbleweed Park, Australian game developer Jenn Sandercock was a junior designer on Team Bondi's historical open world game L.A. Noire. Eventually published by Grand Theft Auto developers Rockstar in 2011, L.A. Noire took seven years to make and is an especially notorious example of crunch culture and mismanagement. Sandercock joined in the middle of one such crunch period, and wanted to make life a little easier for her exhausted colleagues. "Everyone looked so miserable after literally years of hard work & crunch," she wrote on Twitter in 2018. "So late one night after work I baked 2 cakes for the office. I sent out a mass email & we all took 30 minutes to eat cake and talk." Sandercock began hosting weekly "Cake Days", baking a fresh batch in her own time to share around the office. Rockstar were unimpressed, however. They thought Cake Day was evidence of poor productivity and, according to Sandercock, badgered Team Bondi leadership into forcing her to only share cake during official lunch hours. "Apparently the higher ups thought our entire office slacked off ALL the time because we had cake once a week," Sandercock wrote. She herself was told "that I was jeopardising my career". Sandercock hasn't let the demise of Cake Day cramp her creative interest in food, however. In fact, she's found a way to combine baking with game design. Sandercock is now the author of Edible Games, a book of recipes and instructions for concocting games out of food, and food out of games. Read more

If you've been narked about favourite bits of Fallout not yet appearing in Amazon Prime's unexpectedly good live-action show, hold your horses. In an interview, the showrunners have talked about holding back certain "iconic elements" to do them in a hypothetical second season right rather than cram in all the greatest hits—and also so the show didn't "seem like it was written by people who just like spent 10 seconds reading the Wikipedia page for Fallout and didn't bother to like bring in some deeper cuts." Read more

Following a mild-to-moderate outcry, Ubisoft have clarified that queasy worm gangster Jabba The Hutt isn't, in fact, a Star Wars Outlaws special edition or season pass exclusive. The apparently much-beloved star slug will appear in every edition of the game, but if you scrape together the credits for the Gold or Ultimate Editions, you'll get access to a Jabba's Gambit mission as part of the game's season pass. It's a timely clarification, because I've just checked on Xitter and yes, #Jabbagate has been trending... in reference to unflattering photos of Donald Trump in 2016. And also, Steven Gerrard in 2020. And... Wrestlemania in 2017? Jabba is quite the meme these days, it seems. Read more

Set in 1975 on an oil rig in the Scottish North Sea, horror game Still Wakes The Deep is less about supernatural events, and more about the people who experience them. Here, that’s Scottish electrician Caz McLeary and the crew of the Beira D rig. In bringing the rig to life, The Chinese Room turned to archival footage, oil and gas legislation, blueprints, and photographs. For lead designer Rob McLachlan, though, it was conversations with former platform workers that painted the clearest picture of what life on the rigs was really like. Read more

As a big fan of Ori And The Blind Forest, I am very excited for Moon Studios' new venture No Rest For The Wicked, an online ARPG which swaps the cutesyness of Ori and that ickle wickle forest for top-down fights against abominations slathered in muck and entrails. A new early access release trailer highlights said fights, alongside the devs saying that there's going to be no microtransactions, no always-online requirement, and no anti-cheat software bundled in. I don't want to speak too soon, but so far, it looks like we're onto something pretty darn good here. Read more

I've been watching this year's ostensible "major" news developments - the launch of a Fallout TV show, the impending release of Elden Ring: Shadow Of The Erdtree, to pick a couple - with a sense of zealous disapproval and weary resignation as to the hubris of human beings. Do these brazen publishers and developers not know that this, the year 2024, is the Year of Shadow the Hedgehog? Sega said as much only a few days ago. They've announced a series of fan celebrations for Sonic Adventure 2's Ultimate Lifeform, beginning in the traditional style with a Shadow-themed MotoGP bike and an associated LEGO tie-in. And now, the earth quakes underfoot as we learn via The Hollywood Reporter that Keanu Reeves, forgotten star of 90s romantic drama A Walk in the Clouds and also those recent John Wick films, will play Shadow in the forthcoming movie adaptation Sonic 3. Read more

I remain the least qualified person alive to appraise Manor Lords an actual strategy game – my village stewardship is proving inept, even by medieval posho standards – but I have delayed economic and social ruin long enough to know it runs well on the Steam Deck. Just as it’s smooth low-end performer on desktops, Manor Lords can easily keep its head above 30fps in handheld mode, and that’s usually more like 40-45fps with the right visual settings. Still, there’s scope for it to become a much more Deck-friendly game, if not by its April 26th release date then hopefully at least during its early access phase. Faster performance would be nice, sure, but what this citybuilder-meets-RTS-battler really needs for optimal portability is a more refined set of controls. Read more

I sort of reject that the Fallout TV show has Easter eggs hidden in it because it, as a whole, is the equivalent of one of those fancy Hotel Chocolat ostrich-sized patisserie collection bastards that cost 40 quid. However. Eagle-eyed viewers of the Fallout show noted that episode 6 gives you a number for Valt-Tec that you can actually get in touch with - 213-25-VAULT (or, 213-258-2858). Charges apply, as well as international codes if you're outside the US, which makes it 001-213-258-2858. If you text the number you get a reply from Vault-Tec saying "The next available appointment is 33 weeks from now, please stand by!" (handily captured by X user FanaticalGuy cos my response hasn't come through yet). And then the significantly less immersive "Reply Y to get recurring marketing and other texts from FallOut", which is quite funny. There is speculation that this is just a reference to Vault 33, the vault where main character Lucy was born and raised. On the other hand, 33 weeks from now is November, the month when both Fallout 4 and Fallout 76 came out. Read more

Just Cause developers Avalanche have become home to the latest union in the games industry, with over 500 staff at the Swedish studio set to be covered by a new agreement formed with local labour unions. Read more

The former president of Blizzard has suggested that players should have the option to tip developers after finishing a game. That’s on top of paying $70 for the game in the first place, mind. Read more

Co-op smash-hit Lethal Company has received its first update in a couple of months, and it’s a biggie! Version 50 brings a new map and some new creatures to contend with, alongside some changes that make being a shovel-wielding monster-slayer or speedrunning the game a bit less easy. Read more

Fallout: London, the Fallout 4 mod set in a post-apocalyptic English capital that’s large enough to effectively be its own game, has been hit by an indefinite delay just two weeks from its planned release date. The reason? Fallout 4’s long-in-the-works next-gen update is now due to drop just two days after London’s planned launch date, which its fan devs say will “simply break” the ambitious project. Read more

My city has become far too egalitarian for the Icebloods. Marxist policy choices mean the faction are now protesting in my coal mines, shutting down a vital heat pipeline and fomenting further dissent among the now freezing broader populace. It is, regrettably, time to talk. They want me to pass the Apex Workers decree, a darwinian shift towards culling the weak while enhancing the strong. That’ll mean a tasty increase to production efficiency, so I’m not complaining - but the Technocrats will, so the vote won’t pass unless I can persuade the Machinists, their less extreme cousins, to support the bill. Not to worry: I promise the Machinists they can choose the next law we vote on, and watch a chunk of undecided voters shift towards implied eugenics. The Frostpunk 2 beta has rammed home how different my role is to Frostpunk 1’s dictator. I’m more of a smooth talkin’, palm-greasin’ mayor tasked with keeping a dozen ideologically-opposed plates spinning above a city that could be one harsh blizzard from disaster. I like it, even though at times this jaunt to the a-popsicle-ypse can feel less like solving a crunchy puzzle and more like wading through politics soup. Read more

Five years after LawBreakers shut down, we're getting to play the gravity-defying multiplayer FPS again thanks to fans. LawBreakers was the first game from Boss Key Productions, a studio co-founded by Gears Of Wars lead designer Cliff Bleszinski, and it had delightful ultraviolence beneath its uninspiring genric look. Alas, it did not sell well. Boss Key closed less than a year after launch, and the game soon followed. But after years of work, a group of fans this weekend successfully ran the first public test for a workaround to play the game again. While there's no clear launch plan yet, more playtesting will follow. Read more

As MMORPG Final Fantasy 14's upcoming Dawntrail expansion gets ever closer, Squeenix have released a benchmarking tool that lets you see how your rig might handle its graphical update. Not only that, but it also lets you sample the new female Hrothgar playable race. So far, folks seem to be happy with the tool and the catmoms. Read more

Crawl out through the fallout, baby! I've watched two episodes of Amazon's recently released Fallout TV show, a series for and about Walton Goggins' rizz (a thing the kids say). I've been on the Goggins hype train for over a decade at this point, and it's great that - oh sorry, I'm being told that the Fallout TV show is in fact about Bethesda's post-nukepocalypse RPG series of video games, and as such has given a massive player bump to said video games on Steam. Posted on Xitter by SteamDB yesterday (HT to our pals at Eurogamer), it appears Fallout has more than doubled its concurrent players on Steam since the show dumped all its episodes last week. Read more

It's not every day you get to use both the 'sports' and 'horror' tags for the same game. Pool of Madness, an upcoming eldritch pool game where your surroundings get more bizarre and maddening the longer you play, is the latest game to crowbar Lovecraft into a place where no Lovecraft existed previously. It’s also the latest game to make me, someone who’s ostensibly had enough Lovecraft for one lifetime think: actually, yes, go on then. Read more

I sometimes struggle with what to write about for supporter posts (a contender this week was "why does Fallout the TV show insist Walton Goggins' character is from California when he talks like Foghorn Leghorn?"). And then we got an email about a game called Ants Took My Eyeball and I was like "Man, games need good names more often." I played the Steam demo for Ants Took My Eyeball (which is a 2D action roguelite where you go into an anthill to fight ants, who took your eyeball) and I very much liked the design, weapons and idea, but not the controls so much. Not my cup of tea, but have a go of the demo. But you know what got me to play an action platformer roguelite when those games aren't really my cup of tea? That godamn name is what! Read more

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, my eye has been caught by the slow (yet speedy!) reload of a flintlock, feathered dinosaurs, parrying bullets, snowboard stunting, an underslung chainsaw, and heaps more. Check out these attractive and interesting indie games! Read more

In the world of strategy and management game Goblin Stone, the goblins are nearly extinct. Getting murdered in large numbers by adventurers hungry for a quick experience point and a slack handful of coin will do that. I cannot tell you that you will want to bestow protection and prosperity on these gribbly green niblets. They exhibit a tweeness that you’ll either find charming or despicably manipulative, even when they’re showering in the blood of their enemies. Should you want to, though, Goblin Stone offers you the chance to rescue these maligned misfits from the brink of extinction, rebuilding their kingdom and leading them on outings to take the fight to all those heroes that have spotlight-hogged the left side of your screens for far too long. Read more

We hired Katharine back in 2017 as our first full-time hardware writer, having been impressed by her rare talent for writing about tech in an approachable way. It quickly became obvious that Katharine's skills stretched beyond just hardware and in 2021 she became editor-in-chief, responsible for running the entire site. Now, sadly, she is departing RPS for a new adventure. Come say thank you and farewell. Read more

Another week, another Monday waking up to find Edwin has trapped himself between the Maw’s cyclopean molars on what was supposed to be a routine scrubbing expedition. We usually get him out just fine, but today he’s become entranced by the chomper’s blighted runoff, and is busy stuffing plaque samples in his trousers to bring back and study. So, you get me instead. In other, non-affront to-science news, Warhorse are announcing a new game this week, Thursday 18th, rumoured to be medieval rpg sequel Kingdom Come Deliverance 2. Elsewhere, the Steam FPS fest kicks off later. Read more

Among the onslaught of game trailers at the terribly named Triple-I Initiative was a release date for Gestalt: Steam & Cinder. It's a 2D platformer with a heavy dose of combat and a big upgrade tree, and there's a demo available now. Read more

The Crew, Ubisoft's 2014 racing game, closed its doors on March 31st. After that date, launching the game took you to a splash screen and then presented an error message when trying to advance, because the servers are no longer offline. Ubisoft have now taken the extra step of revoking The Crew licenses from purchasers and removing it from their library. Read more

Sundays are for making a heroic dent in the bottle of Japanese whiskey I bought to celebrate the RPS job. Before I make the highballs I’ve been craving since playing LAD: Infinite Wealth, prior to answering the door in a snakeskin jacket and shouting KIRYU-CHAAAAAN! at the Greggs driver, prior to wondering if maybe I’m a little too impressionable, let’s read this weeks best writing about games (and game related things!) Read more

Possibility Space has become the second studio owned by Prytania Media to close in recent weeks following Crop Circle Games' closure in March. Both studios were founded by Jeff Strain, the co-founder of Guild Wars creators ArenaNet and the founder of State Of Decay developers Undead Labs. In a message to staff about the studio's immediate closure, Strain implies the outcome was prompted by employees who leaked information about the company to a journalist. Read more

Please excuse my lack of pleasant chitchat today; my kitten has decided I no longer get to sleep. This week she's woken me up by sprinting down the full length of my body, licking my armpits, dropping toys on my face, and generally shouting. Baby, I love you, but night is when I do my sleeping. You wouldn't be happy if I came and licked your armpits at noon when you're snoozing in your hanging radiator bed, little cat. But go on, do tell, what are you playing this weekend? Here's what we're clicking on! Read more

Remember when Pac-Man got its own battle royale game where 64 Pac-People competed to eat each other and be the ‘Chomp Champ’? Me neither! But Pac-Man Mega Tunnel Battle apparently came out on Google Stadia - ah, that’d be why - back in 2020, and served up a massively (or at least medium-ly) multiplayer spin on the arcade classic. With Stadia dead and buried, Mega Tunnel Battle is chewing its way out of the streaming console’s grave with a new subtitle and a fresh Steam release next month. Read more

It continues to be a difficult time at Ascendant Studios, the developers behind last year’s magical shooter flop Immortals of Aveum, as it’s claimed that the studio have now furloughed most of their staff - only a matter of months after almost half of their employees were laid off. Read more

As if you needed more proof that Baldur's Gate 3 is, in fact, a pretty damn fine video game, Larian’s D&D RPG swept through the video game BAFTA awards yesterday, picking up five of the British entertainment org’s top trophies. Even more impressively - after all, Baldur’s Gate 3 winning a shedload of awards is old hat by now - its latest Best Game triumph means that the sprawling RPG-slash-fanfic machine is now the first video game to win all five of the industry’s major Game of the Year awards. Read more

Steam’s next week-long celebration will pay tribute to that most treasured of genres, the first-person shooter. The PC marketplace’s FPS Fest kicks off next Monday, letting loose a hail of discounts and playable demos for shooters that prefer things from the first-person perspective. Read more

I have a rule: no more than one post about a horror game per day. The mind can only withstand so much, after all. But POOLS isn't really a horror game. It's just a walking simulator in which you explore a bunch of underground swimming pools. True, their size and layout defy explanation - what is this, a swimming pool for Slender Men? - but look, there are cute covered slides you can ride down in first-person. You know, like the ones you used to enjoy as a kid. Always that element of anxiety though about getting stuck halfway down, am I right? Read more

"Very little Bela Lugosi" is not a criticism I ever expected to level at a game. It's not entirely unexpected considering he's dead, but I'm still grumbling at you, Carpathian Night Starring Bela Lugosi. It is, as it appears, an unabashed homage to Castlevania, but with none of the -vania, making it much more like the original (or the game boy ones, and possibly a few others in the series I don't know about): a straightforward, linear platform game about whipping monsters and not stepping on spikes. Ten a penny, right? But CNSBL captures it so well that it had me looking up old game boy tunes it vaguely reminded me of. Read more

Avast, me hearty bowls of soup! Welcome back to Plundertales, a chronicling of my journey to best strategy game Total War: Warhammer 3 as vampire pirate Count Noctilus without ever touching grass. When we last saw Noctilus, he’d just received a challenge from his ancient rival Gentlemen Jenkins, crudely scrawled on the rear of a carrier pigeon (I had to google ‘do birds have buttocks?’ to write that.) I say ancient rival, it’s been about 15 turns, but Horace said the column needed more drama and that Noctilus’ ongoing battle with the weevils to reclaim his biscuit tin ‘wasn’t testing well’ with the Treehouse’ preview audience. Avast, Jenkins! (I really should find out what avast actually means.) Read more

Friends, there is trouble a-brewing down the radioactive watering hole. While Amazon's Fallout TV adaptation has launched to pretty positive verdicts, a contingent of Fallout players are up in arms over its portrayal of the Fallout timeline. In particular, it's being claimed that the show has written the events of Obsidian's Fallout: New Vegas out of the canon, despite reassurances from Bethesda Game Studios design director Emil Pagliarulo. Dare you read on? Let me just load up my Junk Jet with piping, hot Fallout Season 1 spoilers... Read more

Need anything from the shop? Mushroom milk? Fresh tarts? Mystical bejewelled skull? I'm just popping out to Dépanneur Nocturne, a lovely little game which came out in 2020 and I kept forgetting to post about. It's a small first-person explore-o-chatter set within a corner shop in a magical, mystical Montreal, full of things to admire, find, poke at, and chat about with the owner. And it'll only cost you about as much as a pint of semi-skimmed and loaf of Kingsmill from your own local shop. Read more

My most recent experiences with performance-testing strategy games have been defined by miserable sluggishness and dental drama, so it’s been a relief to find that citybuilding/RTS hybrid Manor Lords is set to launch in a relatively fine state. As an early access game, no less. Having dug into the latest build’s GPU performance and graphics settings, I have found a few loose strands of technical flax that Manor Lords could do with snipping away. Yet it’s generally in good shape, both for early access and a solo developer project, successfully balancing strong visuals with relatively light hardware demands that should help it run on older PCs (or handhelds like the Steam Deck). Several hours in, the ugliest things I’ve seen are my road layouts. Read more

Nationalism is obviously weepingly dull, even when it’s not being genuinely harmful, but the UK does have a few special things you can’t get anywhere else. Nik Naks, for example - the only crisp without at least one inferior flavor in the multipack. If I’m even vaguely patriotic about anything, though, it’s the sort of colloquial variety for such a comparatively tiny landmass that means you can drive an hour in any direction and get in a guaranteed fistfight with a stranger over what one of these is called*: Read more

I tried to look up the plot of Bore Blasters, because my focus when playing the game is entirely on exploding dirt, but it turns out the Steam store page doesn't bother to explain any kind of plot either. Thus, the purity of Bore Blasters. Some facts can be divined from the earth, though: you play a dwarf, piloting a small ship akin to Robotnik's flying hedghog killer, and are dropped off on a small, discrete, gem-bearing chunk of dirt. This you pulverise, in a downward direction, with the aim of finding a huge chest of gems at the bottom somewhere. Your drill is the machine gun on your ship, your efforts governed by about two minutes worth of depleting fuel and a hull that can take three hits total. It's cyberpunk by Gimli. Read more

With the Fallout live-action show now out and honestly far better than I was expecting, are Bethesda also brewing an adaptation of their other big RPG series, The Elder Scrolls? Not at present, according to Bethesda executive producer Todd Howard, and he says he'd "probably say no" if approached. Mind you, that was the stance he had until Fallout finally fell into place. Read more

Some new videogame releases pounce on us like excitable Golden Retrievers, while others become apparent to us more insidiously, like undead Golden Retrievers creeping back from the grave to do their master's bidding unto eternity. Withering Rooms is one of the latter: released out of early access last week, and noticed by me just yesterday, it's a haunted mansion metroidvania in which you are a small girl in a nightie who must use meat cleavers, pentagrams and spells of self-enlargement or possession or incineration to overcome various monsters of the Silently Hilly and/or Residentially Evil persuasion. No, none of the monsters are Golden Retrievers. Read more

When I was a wee lad, my grandfather, an avid gardener, walked with me down to the end of his immaculately tended botanical kingdom, and bid I look upon his favourite flowers, bright blooms of Geraniums. He was a humble man, but even he could not disguise his pride at how wonderfully full and rich their colours and forms had come in this year. “Does the fragile beauty of these blooms not fill you with tender hope for the future?” he asked. “No, Grandad,” I replied, “these flowers are mid.” Read more

I like co-op shooter Remnant 2, because it doesn't pretend to be much more than what it is: a dodgerollathon where, in between dodge rolls, you fill demons with bullets. I've been meaning to go back to it, so it's convenient that there's more DLC arriving soon. Dubbed The Forgotten Kingdom, it adds a new Invoker archetype, fleshes out an existing jungle biome, and introduces more gear, more monsters, and the like. Yes, count me in. Read more

Wanted: Dead is a terrible game that I sort of adore. Created by some of the people behind the Ninja Gaiden series, it's the kind of rough diamond or perhaps, chunk of lacerating windscreen glass you find at the bottom of a mouldy box at a service station car boot sale along a particularly depressed stretch of the UK's M1. Read more

Likely to capitalise on the hype generated by BezosTech’s (by many accounts, pretty entertaining) Fallout TV show, Bethesda are spiffing up Fallout 4 with a new update, including widescreen and ultra-widescreen support, fixes to Creation Kit, and a “variety of quest updates.” The update is slated for this month, April 25th. A new quest, “Echoes of the Past,” sees you going up against the Enclave. Alongside this are new workshop items including previously released Creation Club content, such as Enclave uniforms, weapons and armor skins, new power armour, a Tesla Cannon, and a Heavy incinerator. Here are a few more additions, via the update: Read more

For someone so skeptical of taxonomy, I sure love a good subgenre dive. That's partly because it's so easy to find a healthy one now, and there's a joy in shearing down multiple times and still finding material. You can start from "strategy games are in a good state" and go all the way down to "Turn-based strategy wargames that balance detailed simulation with accessibility and are set in World War 2" and still find several strong entries from the last few years. But it's The Troop that grabbed me most. It's a little surprising, given its modest look, and the stiff competition. I think what clinched it is that The Troop has revealed to me something that I already sort of knew, but hadn't quite caught hold of: that a tank warfare game is all about the pause. Read more

This week League Of Legends teased a PvE Vampire Survivors-like mode, and recently World Of Warcraft revealed a limited time PvEvP battle royale with pirates. What's going on? Is chasing trends a bit of a risky click? Should Age Of Empires II get a battle royale mode? All these questions and no more, just these ones, are discussed in this week's episode of the Electronic Wireless Show podcast. Plus: I am cursed by scaffolding again, and we recommend some lovely things that aren't video games, as is our way. Read more

It's been lovely to see Thatgamecompany bring the likes of Journey and Flower to PC, following their debuts on other platforms long before, and oh look here comes their latest too. Sky: Children Of The Light is now available free-to-play in early access on Steam, inviting everyone to explore a pretty world full of pretty sights and sounds in this "peaceful" MMO. Having installed it and started playing it myself, the important part is: yes, you can slide down hills in this one too. Read more

Amazon and Bethesda's Fallout TV show is now available to stream over Amazon's Prime subscription service. Picture it: the post-apocalyptic America of Fallout, radroaches and stimpacks and all, except that this being a TV adaptation, the first hour doesn't consist entirely of trying to persuade Bethesda's face editor not to make your character look like their soul has been sucked out. Instead, you can kick back with a can of Nuka Cola and watch flesh-and-blood stars Ella Purnell, Walton Goggins and Aaron Moten rove the wasteland. I caught the first couple of episodes last week, and while I find the show's aesthetics off-putting - it's kind of a Fallout themepark, rather than a convincing world - I do think there's the makings of a fun tale here. Read more

The $70 release day price for standard AAA titles is both unsustainable and on the way out, claims Saber Interactive CEO Matthew Karch, via an interview with IGN reporter Rebekah Valentine. Speaking to Valentine, Karch reckoned in public that the $70 game is “going to go the way of the dodo" because it isn't "sustainable". Here's the full chunk: Read more

In the mind of Jordan Mechner, the sands of time flow both ways. It happens even when he doesn’t mean it to. When making the Myst-like adventure game The Last Express, he set his story on a train crossing Europe in 1914 - the same year Mechner’s own grandfather became a teenage refugee, his life in a Jewish enclave on the Austro-Hungarian border shattered. “He was drafted as a soldier,” Mechner says. “So I’m sure that in the back of my mind, in creating The Last Express, I was thinking of the terrible impact that war had on Europe and my grandfather’s experience as well. What’s interesting to me is that a lot of these echoes are unconscious.” Read more

Revealed during yesterday's Triple-i Initiative, procedurally generated detective sim Shadows Of Doubt largest update yet is playable right now. Dubbed "The Sharpshooter Assassin", the the patch introduces two new killer variants, both snipers who'll blast lead from vantage points around the city. And the city's expanding too, with new uber-rich gated communities as well as a contrasting shanty town. Not to mention a new auto-travel feature that lets you wander about these spots and attend to some casework without pausing the game. Read more

The legally distinct Cheerios in Tiny Tires, the upcoming miniature racing game that looks to be a loving homage to Micro Machines, have their own physics. This delights me. So does the milk, actually, leaving trails on the checked linoleum tablecloth as the infinitely minute driver tries to compensate for its skidding effect on those titular Tiny Tires. There’s pool balls, too! And floppy disk ramps! Floppy disks were probably still useful the last time anyone thought about Micro Machines, but now I’m reminded of it, I’m suddenly very excited again! Read more

Developers at Dead Space remake creators EA Motive were pushing to make a "new entry" in the sci-fi horror series before EA shelved it last year, according to the latest in a recent outbreak of Dead Spacey rumours and revelations that have spread through the bulkheads of the internet, coating everybody's devices with necrotic slime. Read more

Never Alone, a quiet, snowy adventure set in the Alaskan arctic wilderness, won a Bafta in 2014, and at the Triple-I Initiative stream last night we got a glimpse of the upcoming sequel, Never Alone 2. It's still the tale of Nuna and Fox journeying through aforementioned cold tundra, and like the first game is inspired by Indigenous Iñupiaq storytelling traditions, but this time the story unfolds in co-op. No release date, but we have a teaser trailer for your viewing pleasure. Read more

Last time, you decided that shopkeepers annoyed when you don't buy anything is better than security cameras following your every move. So rather than an implied surveillance which doesn't actually have consequences, you wish to be actively scolded for things you've not done. Alright reader dear, I'm noting that in your psychological profile. Onwards! This week I ask you to choose between soaring through the sky or making something else soar. What's better: gliding powers or Dragon's Dogma 2's Unmaking Arrow? Read more

Update: EA have now denied Grubb's claims that the Dead Space 2 remake was in development before being effectively cancelled, telling IGN: "We don't normally comment on rumors but there is no validity to this story." That report adds that the sequel wasn't considered for development to begin with, despite the first remake having performed well in EA's eyes, according to a source. Original story continues below A remake of Dead Space 2 - following last year’s return of the original sci-fi survival-horror game - was reportedly in the works at EA, but has since been halted after the first game suffered underwhelming sales. Read more

We first learned of Spiritfarer studio Thunder Lotus' latest endeavour 33 Immortals at last year's Summer Geoff Fest. They showed off some brief snippets of its 33-player cooperative roguelike-ing, where you'd beat up hellish monsters in a miniature take on MMO raids. If you were intrigued by it back then, I have good news. The Triple-i Initiative gave us more of a glimpse at how the game would look in the hands, with precious UI markers and the promise we'll uncover new "Torture Chambers". Lovely. No seriously, it does look quite lovely, if a touch predictable. Read more

In news that will come as a complete shock to all of you, Ubisoft is partnering with Evil Empire to bring the world a new Prince Of Persia roguelite - though according to Matthew Houghton, Evil Empire's marketing manager, this has been in the works since a post-conference meeting conversation in 2021. Called The Rogue Prince Of Persia, a name choice that makes it sound a bit like an illegal knockoff being sold out of the back of Evil Empire's Peugeot, I got to have a go of about 45 minutes of it last week. It's 2D, side on platforming, and super colourful. Think Dead Cells skinned as a kids cartoon with a branded cereal tie-in, extremely cool music, and an emphasis on wall running. It's mobile even by the standards of a platformer, in fact, and is entering Steam early access on May the 14th. Read more

If you needed one more Pokémon comparison for Pokémon-with-guns survival game Palworld, you’re in luck! The viral monster-battling and -labouring game has teased a multiplayer arena mode arriving later this year, with more than a hint of Pokémon Stadium to it. Read more

Among your obvious blockbuster video games ripe for similarly blockbuster film and TV adaptations like Fallout, Borderlands and The Last of Us, it seems there’s room for some of the smaller gems to be fished out and brought to the big screen, too. Read more

Laysara: Summit Kingdom, a breathtakingly gorgeous city builder set in a fantasy world inspired by the Himalayan region, is out now in Steam early access. The meditative mountain environments are the sort of tranquil backdrop I’d happily stare out for hours, possibly with a Bonobo album and some incense, which is helpful, because the actual game is aiming to be quite a challenge. According to its Steam page, the game “tasks you with creating a new home for your people forced out of the lowlands.” There are both campaign and sandbox modes, where you’ll establish multiple towns on multiple mountains, each with its own traits. “All your towns co-exist in symbiosis,” it continues, “creating a trading network, which you can then adjust to your needs by revisiting already developed settlements.” Here are some more deets, via Steam. Read more

There have been a lot of remakes that take provocative creative liberties with the original game of late. I've always felt like last year's Darkest Dungeon 2 was secretly one of them. Rather than simply building on the previous game's premise of a Hamlet's worth of upgradeable, derangeable heroes venturing into tabletop RPG-style labyrinths, it stripped away Darkest Dungeon's skin and moved its bones and organs around to create a gruelling roguelike. Well, developers Red Hook appear to have done it again with Darkest Dungeon 2's free Kingdoms mode, out later this year, which slices open Darkest Dungeon 2's hide and recomposes it into a turn-based strategy boardgame, where you defend a world map against encroaching eldritch creatures. Read more

Today is Tuesday, statistically the day of the week least rife with wacky hijinks, whimsical calamity, or even, dare I say, madcap antics. However, if you want to buck tradition, you could do worse than playing What the Car?, the upcoming absurdist physics game from What the Golf? and What the Bat? devs Triband. You can do it right now, actually. It’s just gotten a free demo on Steam, alongside a proper release date of September 5th 2024. Don’t do it if you’re actually driving, though. That’d be lunacy. We only promote the fun kind of lunacy here, like the type shown off in What the Car?’s trailer at the Triple-i initiative. Read more

Revealed at the Triple-I Initiative just now, Vampire Survivors is getting another cool DLC, this one a crossover with classic Konami run 'n' gun Contra. It's called Operation Guns. Get on board. Trailed with, as is now traditional, a cool animated trailer that suggests the game is a Saturday morning cartoon and not a top down pixelated nightmare that will flush out any latent photosensitivity lurking in your skull (complimentary), Operation Guns is arriving on May 9th, so about a month away. Read more

No one can see the future, but I've a fairly good sense of where at least 300 hours of my life will go next year. Slay The Spire II was announced during today's Triple-i Initiative stream, returning to the towering fantasy city where Steam says I've spent more than 300 hours building decks and battling monsters. While the announcement doesn't reveal much about the sequel, Slay The Spire is still my favourite roguelikelike deck-builder, so that's just grand. Read more

Action roguelike UnderMine is getting a numbered sequel. That number is two. The follow-up to 2020’s action roguelike is UnderMine 2. It was announced today as part of the Triple-i Initiative, which is a silly name that I’m writing with the correct stylisation out of respect to UnderMine 2’s slimes. Read more

World of Warcraft Classic is steadily embarking on its time-travelling trip through WoW of old. The next stop is apocalyptic 2010 expansion Cataclysm, which we now know is due to, uh, re-shatter Azeroth at the end of next month. Read more