Category: Rock, Paper, Shotgun

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Avowed’s rickety combat feels like the undoing of its lush fungal world

I have significant reservations about Avowed, Obsidian’s first-person Pillars Of Eternity spin-off RPG, but those reservations are significantly offset by the fact that I can be an undersea mushroom woman called Mystic Meg. In Avowed, you are the god-touched envoy of a distant emperor, sent to an island realm known as the Living Lands to investigate a mysterious blight. “God-touched”, in this case, means “fungal and a bit mermaidy”. It means that you can make rainbow toadstools sprout from your eyesocket in the character creator. It means that you can accessorise your cheekbones with what look like bracket polypores, or deck your ears with staghorn coral.

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Steam tighten up rules for games with season pass DLC: “you have to commit to completing that content on time”

Valve have unveiled a new policy about season passes on Steam, which aims to ensure that developers release all the individual DLC involved on time and share adequate details about each DLC pack in advance. It specifies that developers can delay release of a season pass DLC just once, and by no longer than three months. In the event that a developer postpones DLC release by longer than three months, Valve may take such corrective actions as removing the season pass from sale or refunding players.

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Microsoft Flight Simulator 2024’s launch has been marred by long load times, server issues and now it has overwhelmingly negative reviews

I’ve been looking forward to Microsoft Flight Simulator 2024 since it was announced, but I might wait a while longer before trying to play it. It launched yesterday and currently sits at “overwhelmingly negative” Steam reviews due to long loading times caused by server issues.

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Masterfully silly brawler Gang Beasts gets surprise update with driveable cranes and Hitchcockian bird attacks

Gang Beasts is one of the games I think of when I recall the golden days of video game expos, before Covid rolled up and nuked the business model. It casts you as one of several jellybaby pugilists, fighting for dominance over such locations as Ferris wheels and the tops of speeding vans. All of the characters are 1) seemingly drunk, and 2) subject to real-time physics. Your abilities consist of 1) punching, headbutting or kicking people, perhaps knocking them out for a few seconds, and 2) grabbing people and things and either hoisting them skyward like a wrestler, or hoisting yourself skyward like a toddler climbing onto Mummy’s head. The only way of defeating people is to hurl them off-map.

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This sidescroller combines cat photography with the joy (misery) of social media clout-farming

One of my proudest pictures of a 2018 trip to Croatia wasn’t of me and my pal. No, it wasn’t of the beautiful scenery or the glistening sea either. It was of many cats lying in the sun together outside a little church. I hadn’t seen that volume of cats in my life, nor that volume together in one spot, all hanging out. Now, you too can live this magic: there’s a demo of this upcoming sidescroller called Neko Odyssey on Steam, and it consists of you taking photos of cats for internet clout. It’s nice!

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S.T.A.L.K.E.R. 2 is out now and buggy as hell but the developers are already planning fixes

S.T.A.L.K.E.R. 2: Shadow Of Chornobyl is out today. As you may have read, it’s on the buggy side. Buggier than a bucketful of locusts. Buggier than Kafka’s Metamorphosis. In our S.T.A.L.K.E.R. 2: Shadow Of Chornobyl review, wasteland wanderer James called it “easily the most borked FPS I’ve played in years”, detailing such issues as HUD elements disappearing, stuttery performance, flashing textures and character mouths not working properly.

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Come steal the bodies of your robot foes in RAM: Random Access Mayhem, out now in early access

Did last week’s paranormal body-swapper Slitterhead leave you cold? Do you consider its brain-jacking of rando cityfolk for monster-hunting purposes a sad waste of potential? Perhaps you’ll prefer RAM: Random Access Mayhem, in which you’re a fugitive AI hopping between warlike robot bodies in top-down view.

Yes, the subtitle involves both a colon and a dad joke, but the demo is entertaining – Nuclear Dawn meets Ctrl Alt Ego, in short. The one major criticism I have after 20 minutes or so is that the flat pixelart perspective makes walls and walkable surfaces look interchangeable, and this feels more like a question of acclimatisation than a real complaint.

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There’s a playable Disco Elysium 2 prototype in the wilds, according to a report on clashes between the “spiritual successors”

On 11th October 2024, three video game studios announced themselves near-simultaneously as the creators of “spiritual successors” to ZA/UM’s mournful Marxist RPG Disco Elysium. First came Longdue, a conspicuously corporate operator who are making an untitled “psychogeographic RPG”. Dark Math Games followed around lunchtime – they’re making a sexy Antarctic ski resort mystery called XXX Nightshift. Finally, there was Summer Eternal, the mouthiest and Marxiest of the lot, who have set themselves up as a workers co-operative and have yet to announce a specific project.

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