Category: Rock, Paper, Shotgun

Countless are the pretenders to Dungeon Keeper‘s skull-buttressed throne, but I sense a certain fearful promise in The Deadly Path, a building management and roguelike strategy game from Owlskip Enterprises. The setup here is that you’re stuck in a tabletop underworld with a bunch of elder gods, or Dread Deities. As Custodian of this dusty funereal expanse, you must place structures on tiles around your throne room, striving to fulfil the desires of whichever Dread Deity is in play, while fending off pernicious attackers from the realm of light. Here’s a trailer.

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If you gotta go fast, you probably don’t want to be a stubby-legged spearman who climbs every ladder like a geriatric walrus. Yet that’s the challenge taken up yesterday by speedrunners at Awesome Games Done Quick. The UFO 50 speedrun includes an impressive dart through the retro collection’s most bewildering game, the ancient and mysterious Barbuta, in which your character is a frustratingly slow hero with a fearfully short attack range. They managed to complete it in less than five minutes. Not only does the run (and its helpful commentary) serve as a short and sweet explanation of why Barbuta is so glitchily fascinating, it also left plenty of time to marathon another three games from the collection.

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I don’t want to talk to a game. I assume I’m not alone in this, because the tech’s been around for donkey’s and barely anyone tries to use it. Mass Effect 3 tried voice commands. Socom U.S Navy Seals shipped with a headset. “Dunno if I wanna be shouting out tacticool commands in my living room,” wrote a Redditor on the subject four years ago, speaking to my very soul in the process. “Gimme the clunky buttons instead”.

Thankfully, you can also use your keyboard to interrogate suspects in murder mystery Dead Meat. It’s a moody, slightly goofy noir puzzler that lets you ask anything you want. Whether this means you’ll always get a worthwhile response, I’m not sure. “Want to discuss their alibi? Probe them on the meaning of life? Confess your love? Or just troll them mercilessly? Your words hold power, and anything goes,” reads the Steam page. Here’s a trailer.

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It’s not being spelt out overtly, but there is a whiff of Intel’s new Battlemage GPUs being pitched as what the Alchemist generation should have been. Those eventually grew into their PCIe shoes, but only after months of dial-shifting driver updates – whereas the flagship B580 promises Nvidia-besting games performance from the off. Even at such a stage in the current graphics generation (the GeForce RTX 5090 and RTX 5080 could be revealed literally tonight, at CES 2025), there is something enticing about that proposition.

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The last time I wrote about Sonic fangame, I innocently and absent-mindedly described it as “SNES-style”. This led to a social media dog-pile of an intensity typically reserved for major international banks accidentally tweeting rule34, a howl of derision that washed over me again and again while I rolled around on the floor beneath my desk, caterwauling at Graham to please please delete the whole internet, I want to start all over again.

Let’s see if we fare better this time round: Sonic Galactic is an absurdly accomplished Sonic fangame from Starteam that, broadly, imagines how the Mega Drive and Genesis platformers might have looked and felt had they been made for the Sega Saturn. There’s a new demo, if you fancy trying it for yourself. Please find it here on Itch.io. Perhaps if I’d put the download link higher up the page in the other article, people would have got distracted and refrained from dunking on me so awfully.

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An upcoming life sim which claims to be a competitor to Grand Theft Auto VI is continuing to amass followers and wishlists on Steam, despite the game being unmasked as a vehicle for a dodgy cryptocurrency. Paradise is marketed as a third-person game set in a sunny modern city, where you can speak to any NPC via microphone on the street and get stilted responses powered by artificial intelligence. You will supposedly drive sports cars, shoot guns at people, and accrue in-game cash. But its more outlandish claims attracted immediate scrutiny from video creators who found countless inconsistencies in the marketing material. The game has since been removed from the Epic Games Store, presumably for breaking many of the store’s rules. But it’s still on Steam, and somehow clambering steadily up the wishlist ladder in defiance of its many red flags.

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Original Fallout designer Tim Cain, also known for co-directing The Outer Worlds at Obsidian, has published a video responding to a player’s question about why violence is the “default” path in so many big budget RPGs. That’s specifically RPGs with “AAA” budgets, whatever AAA means these days. Cain is, of course, well aware that there are many RPGs from smaller teams that “evolve past the paradigm of violence being the default way in which the player interacts with the world”, and that there are plenty of puzzle games, adventure games and the like in which there is no violence at all.

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The baggiest thing about PS1-harkening soulslike Tyrant’s Realm is the ratty pair of prisoner pants you start out with. Everything else is pleasingly austere. It is, like Dark Souls, a game about equipment and stamina management, but it finds most success as a soulslike in the sensation that you are alone somewhere bad, not able to do very much except hit horrible things in the space between them trying to hit you. It also offers notable moments of lonely, loud footsteps rebounding off cold stone tiles in the seconds after felling some giant man-bastard – one of the subgenre’s greatest un-joys.

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Last June, Valve’s trading card game Artifact Classic peaked at 78 players. November was a little rosier for the abandoned multiplayer game, with a monthly peak of 1,028. Then, on New Year’s Day, that number jumped to 11,900 players on Steam – its second highest concurrent besides launch. Soon after, they vanished. Who were these mysterious shufflers, flocking to the deserted, echoing halls of Valve’s disastrous flop like your mate who uses the word ‘liminal’ too much to a dead shopping center? Forbes, who first reported on the phenomena, don’t know. No one knows. Somebody might actually know but writing ‘no one knows’ makes it more dramatic. Let’s dig in.

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Hello reader who is also a reader, and welcome back to Booked For The Week – our regular Sunday chat with a selection of cool industry folks about books! The longest novel ever written is generally agreed to be Proust’s Remembrance of Things Past – a coward’s pick, since it’s actually 13 different volumes. Don’t let Proust’s despicable lies sully the joy of literature for you, though. He did have a good quality moustache – a far more important literary trait than actually doing any writing, imo.

This week, it’s ITU Copenhagen Games Professor and Broken Rules co-founder, Martin Pichlmair! Cheers Martin! Mind if we have a nose at your bookshelf?

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