Category: Rock, Paper, Shotgun

Paranormasight: The Seven Mysteries Of Honjo isn’t your average visual novel. There are some buck wild concepts in Square Enix’s game, including fourth wall breaks to manipulate characters’ actions and literally muting someone by turning voices off in the options menu, to name just two of the wackier features (and a big plot twist is discussed in this article, so beware if you’re planning on playing Paranormasight soon).

At the outset, though, Paranormasight loks like it is your average visual novel, with the player working away to prevent curses from claiming the lives of Tokyo citizens. Writer and director Takaya Ishiyama explains this was actually the starting point for Paranormasight’s inception. “I first decided what the final goal of the game would be, and from there I began to plot out the broad elements I needed to include, such as the Seven Mysteries,” he explains.

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Star Wars Jedi: Survivor developers Respawn Entertainment have been busy on patch duty, pumping out a series of updates aimed at addressing the torrid state of its PC performance at launch. The newest, last week’s Patch 4, sounded particularly enthusiastic about tackling Jedi: Survivor’s technical troubles, so now would be a fine time to check in on the progress of this fixing-upping campaign.

A few droid decapitatin’ benchmark runs later, I can say that Patch 4 (and its predecessors) have made meaningful improvements to ray tracing performance, and that there’s a lot less stuttering than there was at launch – even if this hasn’t been smoothed out entirely. General performance, however, remains deeply underwhelming, with powerful GPUs still unable to achieve a bulletproof 60fps even at 1080p.

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The Green New Deal Simulator begins with a talking owl. This owl can’t sleep at night, mainly because it’s nocturnal, but also because the planet’s impending environmental doom has affected their shoddy sleep schedule. That’s where the Green New Deal Simulator comes in, a micro deck-builder about transitioning the USA into a post-carbon economy, all while keeping employment rates stable. The results are simultaneously funny, educational, intense, and they help that damn owl get a good night’s rest.

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Early access strategy RPG Songs Of Conquest has added its newest necromantic campaign today, letting us raise an army of undead and knock a few bones about. The Barony Of Loth campaign features four singleplayer missions, and similar to the previous campaigns – Arleon and Rana – we’ll be focused on one main faction: the necromancer.

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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, my eye has been caught by retro-inspired stylings everywhere from JRPGs to platformers, and a demonstration slicing a cat Revengeance-style (do not worry, the cat is fine, it’s not a real cat, it isn’t even meant to be a fake cat, it really is fine). Come admire these interesting and attractive indies!

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The up-and-coming farmlife indie Roots Of Pacha has been pulled from Steam, following a dispute “over the rights” of the game between developer Soda Den and publisher Crytivo. The game is a prehistoric take on Stardew Valley’s crop-growing, dungeon-exploring, people-romancing formula. Its PAX East demo caught our eye earlier this year, and the full release late last month charmed many fans on Steam for the short time it was available.

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Samsung’s 870 Qvo SSD is one of the best options for high-capacity solid state storage, with a simple 2.5-inch form factor that doesn’t take up a valuable M.2 or PCIe slot and a fast-enough SATA connection. While performance is good, at up to 550MB/s for reads and a little less for writes, the real benefit here is having up to 8TB of silent, reliable and low latency storage.

You can currently pick up this RPS-recommended gaming SSD in its ultimate 8TB form for less than £415 from two places in the UK: Tech Next Day, where you can use code TND-10 to get it for £414, and Amazon, where you can get the drive for £412. I’ve included both options in case you have a preference, and in the event the drive goes out of stock at this reduced price by the time you come to click the links below!

• Tech Next Day – Get the Samsung 870 Qvo 8TB for £414 w/ code TND-10 (RRP £452)

• Amazon – Get the Samsung 870 Qvo 8TB for £412 (RRP £452)

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AMD’s RX 6950 XT has been enjoying a surprising revival as of late, as precipitous price drops have positioned it as a cheaper competitor to Nvidia’s new RTX 4070 GPU that offers better performance in rasterised titles – by a significant ~20% margin, too.

Today, the RX 6950 XT has dropped below the £600 mark for the first time we’re aware of, with a chunky triple-fan ASRock model costing just £598 at Overclockers in the UK. That’s significantly cheaper than the £999 that these cards originally debuted at, bringing it into contention with newer-gen cards.

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Summery explore ‘em up Despelote first caught our attention at the Day Of The Devs many years ago, thanks to its gorgeous art style and special premise. Developers Julián Cordero and Sebastián Valbuena chart a semi-autobiographical experience of their childhood in 2001’s Ecuador, right before their football team qualified for its first-ever World Cup. After disappearing for a while the devs have now announced a partnership with indie publisher Panic to help release Despelote next year. Watch its re-reveal trailer below, please, it’s beautiful.

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Here I am, once again, The Gears Of War-liker. I’m back, specifically because vidbud Liam and I played some Gears Of War 5 co-op campaign the other night, a rare occasion where we hadn’t played a game for work but for just like… fun? Anyway, through all the roadie-running and chainsaw-gun-toting, I kept thinking, “I haven’t played a video game that feels so much like a video game in ages, I miss it”.

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