Category: Rock, Paper, Shotgun

I’m relatively new to the Mount and Blade series and its medieval warlord roleplaying in a siege-heavy sandbox. That said, it’s not taken me long to find its rhythm. The world is a constantly bubbling cauldron of small skirmishes and big battles. The nations that dot the continent of Calradia throw untold numbers of bodies at their neighbours with the goal of expanding their land. It’s an orgy of violence that’s often charming in the ways it can be slightly wooden or how you can feel the combat simulation creak under the weight of swordsmen you’re trying to sic on a settlement or castle wall.

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This week’s most popular game is not a robovoiced extraction shooter or a buggy martial arts RPG, but Guess The Steam Machine Price: a well-meaning (if largely speculative) timepasser wherein whoever most accurately converts Valve’s teasing into a final street price for the resurrected SteamOS mini-PC wins. In 2026, when it launches.

I feel left out, so will have a go myself below, though there’s quite a serious kink in mine or indeed anyone’s plan to ticket the Steam Machine by speccing an equivalent DIY PC. Alas, RAM prices have gone stratospheric, in a manner not seen among computing components since the Great Graphics Card Dumpster Fire of 2020.

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Saturnalia and Wheels of Aurelia developers Santa Ragione have announced that they will “wind down operations and face a high risk of closing the studio”, following Valve’s refusal to allow their upcoming horror game Horses on Steam, PC gaming’s largest digital storefront by some distance. They say they have the funds to support and update Horses after launch for around six months, but claim they “will not be able to start new projects unless Horses somehow recoups its development costs without access to more than 75% of the PC gaming market”.

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One of 2025’s unlikeliest game announcements was Spellcasters Chronicles, a 3v3 MOBA in development at erstwhile singleplayer specialists Quantic Dream. It’s a three-lane magic-slinger starring a selection of flying mages, with an emphasis on summoning creatures to do your structure demolition work for you, and I’ve now played a couple of games ahead of its closed beta on December 4th-8th.

I wasn’t overly enthusiastic about Spellcasters based on the original reveal. And after two games of mostly bodyguarding other, bigger, cooler magical beings, I’m still not convinced. That said, it wasn’t as bad as I’d feared: it makes bold, maybe even brave departures from wizard fight genre conventions, some of which pay off rather nicely.

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I get no joy from skills and gear in games that tweak back of house stats. An upgrade that adds 0.5% to explosion radii. A helmet that multiplies your base ‘luck’ total. A god’s blessing that increases your character’s attack rate by 4%. On paper these boosts change a game, but I often find them unsatisfyingly intangible in practice. I am but a simple editor of words and, as such, numbers confuse me. If I had wanted to be up to my chin in numbers, I would have followed my uncle into the abacus-making business. (For one thing, I’m glad my house isn’t filled with loose beads waiting to be painfully trod on while barefoot.)

Which is why I’m surprised by how much I’m enjoying Monsters Are Coming, a game that if you lifted up and shook would rattle with invisible numbers like a rainstick.

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The original 256GB LCD version of Valve’s Steam Deck is 20% off till 1st December, knocking it down to around $319.20 or £279.20 in the UK. It’s all part of this year’s Blackening of Friday, whereby whimpering price tags are shoved partway into sausage machines for the benefit of the first Xmas shoppers.

“That’s a chunk of cheddar,” whistled our new editorial director Julian, a choice of words I choose to take literally, mostly because he’s just ruined my sausage machine analogy. According to the UK’s Office of National Statistics, cheddar was 873p a kilogram as of January 2025, the last recorded figure. Assuming that average holds true, the Steam Deck is currently worth 32 kilograms of classic farmhouse cheese. That is a chunk of cheddar. Good work, Julian! This is why they handed you the big boss trousers.

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Saudi Arabia’s conquest of the games industry continues apace, but whoops, the country’s Public Investment Fund appear to be running out of money. In the sense of being reportedly down to a mere pocketful of billions, anyway.

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Far Cry is set to be turned into a live-action TV series on FX, something Ubisoft reportedly let slip back in August, but has now been formally announced by the publisher in a post that’s yet to be randomly zapped into the ether.

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Remember Tower of Fantasy? It was one of those Genshin Impact-ish gacha games, with its particular twist, so to speak, being that it’s sort of an MMO. I say sort of, because it’s described as a shared open world, meaning you can see other players, and there are some MMO elements, but its monetisations are much more gacha like. Or, well, they are until tomorrow, November 25th, as in quite a big move developer Hotta Studio is stripping Tower of Fantasy of all of its gacha elements.

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Look, I have my fair share of problems with Palworld, but to give credit where credit is due, after announcing their foray into publishing earlier this year, they’ve lined up a suite of games. Dead Take, a psychological horror complete with Baldur’s Gate 3‘s Neil Newbon and Final Fantasy 16’s Ben Starr, launched earlier this year, Truckful just looks like a delight, and now there’s Vision Quench, a game for freaks like me who like it when fantasy gets a bit techy.

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