Category: Rock, Paper, Shotgun

We were late to the party with the last big horse game, Umamusume: Pretty Derby (I confess, I avoided it because I’m not that keen on gacha, though I am not above watching Gold Ship/Michael Jackson crossover memes on the toilet), so I’m getting in on the ground floor with Sha Beast Dressage.

It’s sure to be the next global hit. Who doesn’t want to parade around on a horse that looks like it’s made of ancient Egyptian embalming tools? Who doesn’t want to be trapped in “a perpetual cycle of non-consensual reincarnation” by a god of torture, forced to train up hellbeasts for exhibition to earn your freedom? Who doesn’t want to make the Nuckelavee do a croupade?

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November is here. The sunny uplands are far behind us. The great gilded procession of Videogaming trundles and cavorts through the deep forest. The bells of the indie jesters are muffled by fog, and the CEOs peer anxiously from their carriages of scarlet and bronze, instructing their guardsmen to beware the union organisers concealed in the undergrowth. Keep watching the trees. Everytime you glance away, they look a little more like placards. Do you see the moths, idly winking on boughs? They are the Maw’s eyes. Those distant, whistling spirals of pine, somehow immobile behind the foreground trunks, in defiance of the rules of perspective? They are the Maw’s lungs. Those squirrels having shouting matches with magpies? Erm. The Maw’s thrombocytes, maybe.

Listen! The crunch of twigs and leaves under hobnailed boots. Approaching torches. It is a refugee party of freshly released PC games. Let us pick the heartiest or strangest from their ranks to bolster our forces, before the shadows close in for good.

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I’m having a hard time wrapping my head around Arknights: Enfield. It is One Of Those Games, to which there are two versions of. Arknights: Enfield is One Of Those Games, as in an anime gacha game filled with anthro-adjacent women for you to roll for and fight with in flashy, lackluster-in-feeling combat. Arknights: Enfield is also One Of Those Games, a factory sim where you build complex systems to produce, uh, something. This is a combination I cannot fathom, but registration for its next beta test is open, so perhaps I can figure it out.

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I know that with winter on the way, you might be wanting to play some summery games to remind you of what life was like before Jack Frost started nipping at your chestnuts. Put that to the side, perhaps, just for a while, as developer 11 bit studios have revealed the release date for Frostpunk 2’s first bit of DLC, Fractured Utopias.

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How do you follow on from making a game that essentially popularised a whole new genre? I can only imagine that question is one Brendan Greene, aka Player Unknown, i.e. the creator of PUBG, has asked himself a few times. The answer to that question is Prologue: Go Wayback, a game that has been in the works for a little while now, and at long last has an early access release date.

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Things aren’t sounding so hot over at Grand Theft Auto 6 developer Rockstar right now. Yesterday, a report came out from Bloomberg (paywalled) that a number of employees have been allegedly fired, with the UK’s IWGB Game Workers Union claiming it was an act of union busting. Two-Two, Rockstar’s parent company, have denied this allegation.

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Sure looks like Arc Raiders is off to an alright start, ‘ey? Success doesn’t mean there’s any rest for the wicked, i.e. a live service game, however. Just yesterday, only a day after launching, developer Embark Studios revealed their Arc Raiders roadmap for the rest of 2025. It’s light on details, but does offer a good outline for what you can expect at the very least.

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It’s often pointless to wish a game series would come back once it’s been thrown on the great pile of dormant names. I try, and regularly fail, to stop myself yearning too forlornly for a new Midnight Club, a new Motorstorm, or a new Burnout.

Mostly because it means that when a game like Wreckreation comes along, there’s a temptation to go into it with lofty expectations inflated by a rose-tinted longing for something the game more than likely isn’t. Despite drawing plenty of elements from the anarchic arcade racer and the Criterion credentials of devs Three Fields Entertainment, Wreckreation isn’t Burnout, coming home after all these years getting takedowns in the wilderness.

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Europa Universalis 5 is a forever game. Insofar as you might be able to play this grand historical strategy forever, but also because – my god – it takes forever to play. After a mere 45 hours of conniving, trading, battling, and scratching my head at menus, I have just about scraped my way through 150 years of Neapolitan history. I have yet to come across a single pizza with buffalo mozzarella on it, but there are approximately 250 years left to find one. This is the blessing and curse of a typically dense playthrough of Europa Universalis. Paradox’s trademark blend of intricate geopolitical clockwork, hands-tied confusion, and “one more year” compulsion is all here. You just need to set aside a few centuries to enjoy it.

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Brethren! Cease your prattling and pick up your GameCube controllers. It is time to start playing Eternal Darkness: Sanity’s Requiem at an unhealthy velocity, while funding lawyers to uphold the legal rights of LGBTQ+ people in the USA.

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