Open your mouth, Hades 2. Ah, it’s as I suspected, you’ve eaten the original Hades! Don’t worry, I don’t blame you. You were only hungry, and the modders controlling your great maw were keen to see how Melinoë would cope with taking on the roguelike run through the underworld which Zagreus blazes through in the first game.
Hello reader who is also a reader! Today marks the sad and glorious return of Booked for the Week, our reliably irregular Sunday column in which games people talk about books. It’s sad because the original creator of this column, arch word baron Nic Reuben, is no longer full time at RPS. It’s glorious because this is one of the best columns I’ve ever read, and I’m delighted Nic has given permission to keep it rolling. He’s now got a Patreon, by the way.
Today’s advent calendar hails, in both setting and make, from the RPS homeland of the United Kingdom. Which means, like most of RPS, it’ll probably spend Christmas predominantly unconscious, driven into a coma by a combination of tiredness, pigs in blankets overreach, and acute exposure to King Charles. Best play it before then, eh.
The eternal problem with online shooters of any flavour that has some variation on a levelling system, is that eventually you run out of room, and can’t progress any more. That’s why so many of them essentially allow you to reset your levels, or to prestige as it’s often colloquially known. Arc Raiders is one such game that will feature such a system, and in a new blog post, developer Embark have outlined what you get when you prestige.
Video games have a tendency to be very impatient in a way that I think often makes for a worse experience. Constant rewards of many flavours push us to chase after the next challenge, there’s not nearly enough games that ask us to slow down. That’s why I love a fishing minigame. It is a test of patience that you cannot win by brute forcing anything, the fish must come to you, and you must wait for the right time. About Fishing, the next release from Arctic Eggs developer The Water Museum, does ask for your patience… as well as for your willingness to embark into strange, murky waters.
A new trailer for the next Path of Exile 2 update, The Last of the Druids, was shared earlier this week, showing off all the cool things you can do in it! Which are mostly relegated to turning into animals, but in my eyes that is eternally a cool thing to be able to do, in a game or not. And with that trailer also came a release date for the update.
I can see it now… in the near future, the review embargo for Suda51’s next game Romeo is a Dead Man, and as far as the eye can see the digital realm is scorched with 7/10s. Its maximalist shenanigans, techno-blasting soundtrack, and ridiculous premise puts it in a position where it couldn’t possibly be for everyone, even if such a score is actually ideal for such a game, but when has that ever been the case for a Suda51 game? However, as I said, this vision I have is in the near future, because the hyper-violent action game now has a release date.
Part turn-based RPG, part-survival horror, with a sprinkling of metroidvania goodness, Look Outside was always going to be my jam. But where it sank its grotty little hooks into me was how gleefully punishing it was. My first playthrough quickly became a cacophony of mistakes, but each one moulded my adventure in ways I never expected.
It’s after 5pm on a Friday, but no force on this Earth can stop me hurrying back to my desk to report on a large financial transaction. Also, we should have written this up earlier, but we were busy deciding which are the objectively correct 100 best PC games.
I’m not… sure we put any Warner Bros games in that list. I’ve just done a CTRL-F for “Batman” and got zero results. I know, WTF – Arkham Asylum is amazing. Mark needs to stop driving things and think about capes for a change. I’m sure Warner Bros aren’t too bothered about this gross oversight right now, though. Netflix have just revealed plans to buy their entertainment business for $82.7 billion in stock and cash.