Category: Rock, Paper, Shotgun

Where were you on October 11th last year? If you were Edwin, Brendy, or myself – which, statistically, you are not – you were writing news articles about one of three aspirant spiritual successors to detective RPG Disco Elysium. It was an “I’m Spartacus”-ass day of press releases, culminating in the announcement of a project from former ZA/UM writers Argo Tuulik and Olga Moskvina.

Before that came sci-fi RPG XXX Nightshift, and before that was an unnamed “psychogeographic RPG” from newly formed Longdue. We now know that it’s called Hopetown, and Longdue are set to launch a crowdfunding campaign which you can “pre-register” for here, should you wish. Here’s the sell:

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Dwarf Fortress‘s Adventure mode – a procedurally generated campaign that lets you approach the famously dense colony sim like a more traditional roguelite – is now out as a free update on Steam. The game represents perhaps the most cavernous, yawping blind spot in my entire pile of shame. I do own it, but I’m yet to play. I’ve already read a great deal of extended wordery on its merits – please, sell it to me in the comments in seven words or less. Here’s a trailer:

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Readers, I have spent two full days in the benchmark pits to tell you what you’ve already guessed: the GeForce RTX 5090 is very fast, too expensive, and laden with more AI tech than Philip K. Dick’s cheese dreams. At least two of those points will, I’m sure, send the average graphics card shopper running, especially at a time when even game developers are growing suspicious of generative AI and its many-thumbed, robot-voiced nostrums.

Yet while there’s not much to be done about the RTX 5090 costing at minimum £1939 / $1999, hundreds more than the infamously spenny RTX 4090, its suite of more purely performance-focused artificial intelligence tools is – dare I say it – quite neat. These range from Multi Frame Generation (MFG), which is basically DLSS 3 frame gen but up to twice as fast, to DLSS 4’s general upscaling enhancements and even the ability to apply newer DLSS versions to older games. All this will come to the rest of the RTX 50 series as well, with some trickling down to the enter RTX range, so maybe the RTX 5090 is best understood not as a practical GPU purchase in itself but as a Picadilly Square-filling advert for its more affordable siblings can do.

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Some eager beavers who bought the GeForce RTX 4090 at launch were, quite infamously, rewarded for their investment with a defective power adapter, one that that could melt the plastic in their £1679 graphics card like it was Ronald Lacey’s face. Nvidia reckon that won’t be an issue with for the imminent RTX 5090 and RTX 5080, though, even with the former’s drastically increased 575W power limit.

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You’d think Talha and Jack Co would have earned themselves a nice custard cream and a sit down after having just released Judero last September, but they’re back already with a crowdfunder for Mashina – a robo-stuffed adventure where you’ll “Dig, build, discover and mend in a chill, stop-motion world.” Now I think about, you could probably eat quite a lot of custard creams in five months, although less so if you were using your hands to build model robots. Have a trailer. It’s got robots in it.

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Back in December, a bunch of cool games had the extreme impoliteness to sneak onto digital shelves while we were losing our hair, souls and marbles covering various gaming award shows. One of those games was Escape From Castle Matsumoto – which can be excused, admittedly, because it’s a game about ninjas, and we expect ninjas to be sneaky.

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The creators of All Will Fall are pariahs, as far as I’m concerned. You should warn you children to avoid them. If you encounter them in the street, you should jerk away with a muttered oath, making a sign to avert evil spirits – for these are the scumbags who’ve decided to develop a city-building game in which all the buildings and building materials are subject to realworld physics. A city-building game that takes place on small, post-apocalyptic islands, where the only way to expand is upward.

“Playing Jenga with human lives” is how they summarise it, the wastrels. Here’s a trailer.

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Celeste and Towerfall creators Extremely OK Games have announced the cancellation of their pixelart exploration platformer Earthblade, in what studio director Maddy Thorson calls a “huge, heartbreaking, and yet relieving failure”. The decision to call it quits follows a bust-up within the development team, though this isn’t, apparently, why they pulled the plug. Thorson and programmer Noel Berry have found making something “bigger and better” than Celeste exhausting, and have decided to work on smaller projects in future.

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I can’t get out. I’m trapped in a tractor full of beer and spare tires. I haven’t taken a shower in days and a fly has gotten into the cab, buzzing around my ears, anticipating the feast that will come from my sweaty summer death. I just spent nearly an hour driving this tractor to the shop, buying car parts, and rumbling back in the dark. I took my eyes off the road for two seconds to turn on the headlights. It was a mistake. The road curved sharply and I went off a steep bank, tipping my tractor on its side. The door is stuck, the tractor’s wheels spin helplessly. There is no recovering from this. I restart the game for the third or fourth time, not knowing whether to laugh or sob.

My Summer Car is as hardcore as they come. It does not simply throw you in at the deep end. It ties you up in a cloth sack with 50 kg of lug nuts and dumps you in the Baltic sea. “Sink or swim!” yells this game at you, but in Finnish, so even that you cannot understand. To a certain kind of person, this is an act of love.

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The high-end prebuilt PC market is a battleground for premium prices, but catching a solid deal can save you a significant chunk of change. Case in point: Dell is offering the Alienware Aurora R16 GeForce RTX 4090 gaming PC for $2,899.99, a full $1,000 off the usual price. It’s a rare sight to see an RTX 4090 gaming rig dip below the $3,000 mark, especially given the recent uptick in standalone GPU prices.

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