Category: Rock, Paper, Shotgun

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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TimeSplitters is one of those weird series that I look back on quite fondly despite never having owned a single one of the games as a wistful youth. I think I’ve got one kicking around somewhere these days, but back then the only way I would play it was at a friend’s house, us messing about, not doing a very good job at co-op in the main story, me failing to beat my friend in multiplayer because I was crap at shooting games. And now, here we are, with a fanmade rework that’s been 13 years in the making finally released, offering unto me a chance to relish in some nostalgia, but New.

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I’ll be honest with you folks, as aware as I have been about The Blood of Dawnwalker, i.e. Not The Witcher 3 from some of the folks who helped make The Witcher 3, I have felt very disinterested in it. Sure, that recent look at gameplay certainly paints a polished at minimum picture, but at a cursory glance I have to admit I did just kind of write it off as vampire Witcher. Except I’ve now been quite quickly pulled in thanks to an important element of the game shared by its director in a new interview: there’s no main quest.

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Right, has everyone got Hollow Knight: Silksong out of their system? I’m sure there’s plenty of you that have scoured enough of its map to feel satisfied and ready for another hand-drawn metroidvania. Enter Constance! A game that fits that bill precisely, albeit with its own, quite literally painterly flair, one which is out today.

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