Category: Rock, Paper, Shotgun

Imagine Tetris but played in a bottomless ocean shaft, with linked tetronimoes serving to continue your journey down that shaft, providing you keep earning enough points to play them. This is Podvodsk, a free game jam experiment from Loop Hero developers Four Quarters.

Not played Tetris? 1) you bloody liar, and 2) let me frame this differently, then. The idea here is that you’re trying to construct a tapering underwater city out of random clumps of building blocks, dangled from the bottom of a miraculously unsinkable surface platform. Each building both costs points and also, earns points based on different scoring criteria, and every time you play a piece, the screen scrolls irreversibly downward.

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A group of QA workers at Call Of Duty studio Raven Software have officially signed off on their first union contract with parent company Microsoft and COD publisher Activision-Blizzard, in the run-up to the launch of Call Of Duty: Black Ops 7. The contract is the result of years of negotiations, and offers some protection against the treatment of QA workers as disposable staff – hired to quash bugs shortly before release and laid off soon afterwards, with minimal odds of personal development or progression to other roles.

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It’d be fair to say 8BitDo knows a fair bit about peripherals, but this one still caught us by surprise. The 8BitDo Retro 87 Xbox Edition is a mechanical gaming keyboard inspired by Microsoft’s original, monolithic black box.

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I’ve been liking, even occasionally loving ghostly bicycle racer Wheel World, for several reasons. One, it’s relaxing enough for post-work decompression; two, it’s just competitive enough that I can enjoy winning without necessarily undermining point one; and three, it’s far enough outside my usual interests that the culture and lexicon it celebrates feel fresh and interesting to learn. Those of cycling, to be clear. I obviously know loads about ghosts.

Nonetheless, I’ve struggled to engage with its parts system, which isn’t ideal given it both determines the performance of your haunted bike and, outside of the story, acts as Wheel World’s primary measure of progression. I agree with Brendy (who doesn’t?) that once you earn enough metal bits to replace the rusting starter parts, there’s very little to be gained from fine-tuning towards a particular spec – an all-rounder bike can win anything. And, given the game’s gentle difficulty, probably will.

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The new Bioshock game in development at Cloud Chamber Games is in difficulties, according to sources of the multiple and anonymous persuasion. Announced in 2019, the game has reportedly failed a recent internal progress review, with its narrative found to be in particular need of revamping.

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Techno-loving hollowtooth Blade has joined the playable cast of Marvel Rivals, but he’s not what I find most interesting about the free-to-play shooter’s latest update. Developers NetEase Games have introduced a new system of penalties for ragequitters, keyboard-away-frommers, and other craven scumbags who abandon a competitive mode match early on because the dishwasher’s overflowing, or similar.

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I was munching crisps while watching a showcase of upcoming games from THQ Nordic last week, letting the likes of a new Spongebob Squarepants game and the Gothic Remake wash over me like barely flavoured fizzy water, when Fatekeeper showed up. I straightened up, just a little. It is a fancy looking first-person RPG made with all the hyper detail and vivid lighting you might expect of a game developed in Unreal Engine 5. It is also conjuring a game worth conjuring: the heavy hitting fantasy brawlabout Dark Messiah Of Might And Magic. As I watched the below trailer, I became more and more cautiously hopeful. Looks slick, but where’s the kick?

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August 2025 now has as many Skyblivion developer diaries as there are modern The Elder Scrolls IV: Oblivion reimaginings: two, which in both cases remains a weirdly high number. But while last week’s Finishing Skyblivion focused on one volunteer’s attempts at getting the ambitious Cyrodiil-in-Skyrim mod over the line, this other vid makes a very specific pitch to those whose interest may have been diverted by Bethesda’s official Oblivion Remastered, showcasing how Skyblivion looks to more aggressively expand and rework the original RPG.

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We enter week one of RPS Post-Graham. The office Slack echoes like the Great Hall of Durin after a Balrog teaparty. Horace coils about the foot of the Treehouse like a sullen Viking serpent. The Maw seems peevish and incontinent, spurning any news we offer it. The wifi network keeps changing its name to “Execute Order 66”.

It is time to smash the emergency glass and bust out a few favourites from my personal collection of morale-boosting videogame intros. Here’s Red Alert, to put some spring in your step; Okami to let the light in; Colony Wars for the WRAAAOW noise at the end. And here are this week’s most interesting new PC games.

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Financial service giants Mastercard have denied accusations that they sought to influence the recent removal of adult/NSFW games from Steam and Itch.io, claiming that they have “not evaluated any game or required restrictions of any activity on game creator sites and platforms,” and that they allow all lawful transactions. It’s a brief and unequivocal statement, but Valve themselves have since suggested it might not be entirely accurate, telling PC Gamer that Steam’s payment processors objected to the availability of law-abiding adult games by citing one of Mastercard’s specific rules.

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