Category: Rock, Paper, Shotgun

Helix: Descent N Ascent sounds like it should be a mascot platformer starring a jaunty DNA molecule with floating Rayman hands, whose special power is making stuff go up and down. Up and down the evolutionary ladder, even! A platform game in which you can evolve and devolve your character at will, to solve different puzzles? Good lord, we’ll make one million dollars out of this! Somebody get me the CEO of Midway.

Alas for my career prospects, Midway is no more. And Helix is not a mascot platformer, probably to its benefit. As revealed by the new Steam demo, it’s a slow and atmospheric puzzler in which you investigate a fallen civilisation, while chasing your doppelganger. You being a lanky Area-51-looking lad, who acquires paranormal powers and must weave them into solutions for terrain puzzles of the Pressure Plate N Lever variety.

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Earlier this month, Epic Games Store shyly announced that their free game giveaways are having “a measurable halo effect across the broader PC ecosystem”, increasing the sales of those games on Steam during the offer period. New Blood Interactive’s Dave Oshry has made the same argument a bit less sympathetically: boosting the profile of games already on Steam is the only reason to release anything on the Epic Games Store, even given Epic’s more generous developer revenue share, because EGS sucks.

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Sometimes you get a note through the door, nestled among the bills and flyers for local takeaways. Oi, it says, some priest’s been murdered, and we need you to track down the folks on a list of Nazis he smuggled out of Germany after the war. Ok, you reply, it’s the 1970s and I’ve got nothing better to do.

That’s the setup for Owlskip Games’ The Ratline, the Steam Next Fest demo of which has just put my beleaguered Monday brain to the test.

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Happy this week all! It’s time for another Steam Next Fest. A time to stock up on unfinished business. A time to litter your desktop with dead-ends. A time to install 30 game demos and play exactly three of them – unless you are RPS supporter Mr_B, who I think accounts for the majority of Valve’s downloads traffic these days.

We’re not doing the whole Wishlisted thing this year due to a chronic shortage of wishfulness brought on by our collective advancing age, but we’ll be writing up the hottest demos as they arrive, in a dramatic departure from our regular news coverage of… writing up the hottest demos as they arrive. It’s not all demos, mind: a few developers have scandalous plans to unleash complete games into the storm of prototypes and playtests. Here are the ones we’re thinking about feeding to the Maw.

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Make sure the dildos are flying at half mast. Saints Row 1 design director Chris Stockman has said he believes the series is “dead”, following conversations with Embracer Group about his pitch for a prequel. According to the developer, who currently heads VR studio Bit Planet Games, that chatter about a potential Saints Rowssurection post Embracer’s closing of Volition has ended in the publishers ghosting Stockman.

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Ubisoft’s CEO Yves Guillemot has confirmed that they are making a bunch of new Assassin’s Creed and Far Cry games, together with some unannounced original projects, in a wide-ranging albeit very rehearsed-sounding chinwag with Variety.

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Hello reader who is also a reader! It’s time for another instalment of our winningly impromptu article series in which game developers discuss and marvel over books. Let us make the customary ritual sacrifice to Saint Nic Reuben, baron of words and founder of this column. Excelsior! And now, I turn the lecturn over to Mariia Grygorovych, executive producer at GSC Game World, developers of S.T.A.L.K.E.R.: Shadow of Chornobyl and S.T.A.L.K.E.R. 2: Heart of Chornobyl. Cheers, Mariia! Mind if we have a nose at your bookshelf?

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Ah, it’s a Friday night, time to rela-

Wait a minute, long-time Microsoft gaming CEO Phil Spencer’s retiring, his assumed replacement and Xbox president Sarah Bond has resigned, and the suit now being tapped to take over Spenny’s gig currently has the following job title: president of Microsoft’s CoreAI product. Right, guess I’m writing a news.

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So much of what the SteelSeries Arctis Nova 7X Wireless Gen 2 does, it does right. Its build quality is outstanding, having a thickness and solidity that most wireless headsets lack. Its stretchy headband, as on pretty much all SteelSeries headsets, successfully tricked my entire skull into thinking it was lighter than it is. It’s flexible, working over Bluetooth or a 2.4GHz dongle, the latter’s USB-C connection also making it a plusher Steam Deck alternative to the Arctis GameBuds. And it sounds, both in games and music, fabulous: audio is powerful but detailed, like you could peel apart the stacked-up layers of a song mix or shooter soundscape into its individual tracks.

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For once, I bring what should hopefully be good news for folks looking to buy or upgrade their PC hardware without having to factor in a bunch of inconveniences they can do nothing about. The RAM crisis is still in full swing, but the US Supreme Court have struck down the majority of President Trump’s tariffs on imports. These tariffs have been another of the key annoyances complicating the state of play when it comes to hardware companies being able to sell you the bits you need at prices which haven’t been driven far above where they should typically be.

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