Category: Rock, Paper, Shotgun

It’s easy to feel pride when you’re flying through space at 1000 metres per second. “Look at my spaceship go,” you say to yourself, “look how fast it crashes into that other, smaller ship.” Building your own galactic snowpiercer from scratch in Space Engineers 2 will bring a smile to anyone who once revelled in clicking together Lego podracers and bashing them into one another on the living room carpet with a violence eight-year-olds should not yet have mental access to. That said, this is the precise extent of the things you can do in the game so far. Build ‘n’ crash. Every feature fits in this opening paragraph. There’s good reason to trust the developers’ ability to deliver the rest of this crafting and survival game. But right now, it’s all core, no loop.

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You’ll have to bear with me for this one, because the press release we received for Demeo X Dungeons & Dragons: Battlemarked contains about an 86/14 split between scrambled hypeguff and actual tangible information. In brief, it’s a VR collaboration between D&D traffickers Wizards Of The Coast and Demeo studio Resolution Games that aims to simulate a tactical co-op tabletop experience without any of the boring bits, like seeing your mates’ genuine reactions to things or having your frigid digitised soul warmed at the hearth of human kinship. Here is – in a sense of the word so loose I fear imminent smiting by a bellicose scribe god for typing it – a trailer:

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Has any genus of graphics card been as dramatically storied as the GeForce XX80s? The RTX 3080 was a thing of beauty, only to be tarnished by the worst wheeler-dealing spree (and crypto mining misappropriation) in PC component history. Then the RTX 4080 rocked up with its laughable £1269 / $1199 price tag, a miscalculation so severe that the RTX 4080 Super looked good – despite hardly being any faster – simply for not repeating it. For the new RTX 5080’s sake, you almost want it to be boring.

It isn’t. But then, neither is it a blood-boiler like the RTX 4080, nor a largely aspirational show-off piece like the RTX 5090. By maintaining the 4080 Super’s course correction on price while tooling up on compelling DLSS 4 improvements, the RTX 5080 is an agreeable GPU from the off. Particularly, if you’ve got the 4K monitor to take full advantage of it.

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Friend, I regret to inform you that ant nests are computers now. Which is to say, somebody’s finally made a video game version of Hex, the sentient glass hive from Terry Pratchett’s Unseen University. In spooky automation-driven strategy sim Microtopia, you manage a swarm of what could either be ants who’ve been to the ripperdoc, or PC components who’ve grown legs and antennae. Your goal is to expand an insect colony that is also a motherboard, where glittering pheromone trails double as silicon circuits.

The developers Cordyceps Collective have just announced a release date – February 18th – and what’s this, there’s a demo as well? Catch the trailer below.

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Sniper At Work is the work of Cherrypick Games, hitherto known for “soothing merge-2 experiences” featuring puppy-eyed princes. The only “twos” you shall be “merging” in Sniper At Work are bullets and faces. The only “cherries” you shall be “picking” are hoodlums in sore need of a skullful of lead. The only princes you shall acknowledge are their royal highnesses Distance, Wind, and Timing.

You may or may not find all that “soothing” – I won’t judge. I will only repeat Nic’s observation from the Maw that Sniper At Work look “a bit like Commandos, a bit like Hitman”, which I would translate to “my comrade in PC gaming, if historic audience trends are any indication you shall do well here”. Right, that’s enough quotation marks for one article. There won’t be any left for the next interview feature at this rate. Here’s the trailer.

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Peripeteia feels like what I’d get if I asked a wasp to describe Deus Ex to me. It has sharp, insectoid qualities. Unwelcoming but oddly comfortable in its rusty soviet Ozymandism. The first sign of sentient life this immersive sim offers me is the greeting of a gasmasked freakdroid as I leave a warehouse. Tinny propaganda songs play from TVs too big to comfortably fit in anyone’s car. The warehouse is so huge I thought it was outside until I looked up and there was writing on the sky and I realised it was a roof. I’m still messed up about it, honestly.

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Today is release day for The Game Kitchen’s The Stone Of Madness, an isometric tactical stealth game set in an 18th century monastery – “isometric tactical stealth game” being a pretty clinical way to describe the plight of sundry lost souls exploring a maze of hellish Catholic art populated by guards and ghouls.

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Did you have a tamagotchi as a kid? I did, and yes, I too let it die. I am thankful that the handheld LCD graphics of the era did not allow me to witness my companion blob’s amiable decline into shit-caked starvation. I am also thankful that my tamagotchi did not itself have a tamagotchi, because the only life principle I ever taught my tamagotchi was neglect. This is also the reason I may never play the reportedly pretty decent virtual pet game Yoke Heroes: A Long Tamago, whose developers 14 Hours Productions are defying God and Man by developing another virtual pet sim inside it.

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The Sims and The Sims 2 are getting digital PC versions with all their original expansion packs included, and should be released by the end of the week, say Kotaku. The report follows teases made by the official Sims account on X as part of a 25th anniversary celebrations roadmap, as well as a few other scattered hints in various bits of promo as collated by Redditor skyline7284. “According to a source familiar with the plans, both games will be released digitally on PC later this week,” write Kotaku.

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Outside The Blocks is a diorama building game so beautiful I was initially distrustful of it, as if it was some sort of dazzling carnivorous plant trying to lure me in to munch on my hands. I’ve had a play of the Steam demo now, and am happy to report that it’s still very beautiful, and also that I still have hands: an incredible victory on all counts.

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