Lies Of P’s upcoming easy difficulty modes have wonderfully unhelpful names

Which sounds like the more intense experience to you, dear reader – “Butterfly’s Guidance” or “Awakened Puppet”? No, this isn’t me workshopping titles for my latest range of exotic fragrances. I’m referring to the new easier difficulty modes Neowiz will add to Pinnochio-powered soulslike Lies Of P alongside the game’s Overture DLC this summer.

The difficulty modes will arrive in a free Lies Of P update. The standard difficulty will be “Legendary Stalker”, which honestly I think is a bit of a letdown, after “Butterfly’s Guidance” and “Awakened Puppet”. It barely sounds like an exotic fragrance at all. Possibly you could peddle it as some kind of feline musk.

Read more

Randy Pitchford shows he’s capable of not being an idiot about Borderlands 4 prices, raising questions about previous insistence on being an idiot

Borderlands boss Randy Pitchford submitted an-all timer entry into the pantheon of neoliberal thirst tweets earlier this week, telling a player concerned about a potential $80 asking price for Borderlands 4 that “if you’re a real fan, you’ll find a way to make it happen”, before telling an anecdote about how, when he were a lad, he used to lick the fleas from unwashed goats for quarters to play Bubble Bobble, or something.

This went down about as well as you’d expect, prompting Pitchford to yesterday follow-up with a clip of him on a panel talking about a potential price increase in, wait for it, much more sober and considered terms. So, in the interest of not only reporting on Pitchford when he says something incredibly stupid (although, lets be real, only because it’s related, I’m still muckraking here) here’s the clip.

Read more

Dreamspring is an open world RPG inspired by Morrowind and King’s Field

The Steam trailer for open world RPG Dreamspring contains: shooting spiders with a revolver. Hanging out near a green ocean. Fighting green skeletons. Most curiously, it features an armoured knight convulsing on a bed as if being shocked, from the inside, by some sort of magical electricity disease. Did this knight eat an entire pack of bad batteries? Do batteries even exist in this world, described as “a realm in ruins…beneath a twilight sky”. It’s a damn hell ass bum mystery, and mystery is exactly what I want from a game that lists both Morrowind and King’s Field as influences.

Read more

Nvidia GeForce RTX 5060 review: passable GPU, shame about the drivers

I’d so desperately like to do a graphics card review without the fug of a wider controversy (or cacked-up market conditions), but the RTX 50 series hasn’t been particularly cooperative in that regard, so why should the RTX 5060 be any different? This time, the sadness cloud comes wafting from Nvidia themselves, amid accusations of engineering dodgy RTX 5060 previews and attempting to trade access for greater coverage of its Multi Frame Generation (MFG) capability.

Read more

Monster Train 2 review

The roguelike deckbuilder is a remorseless evil that strives to colonise every dream ever dreamt by the human brain. It is a sparkling, shuffling plague, germinated by Slay The Spire, that threatens to absorb every other mortal pastime, from space travel through poker to carpentry. We must find a way to neutralise the entity before it assimilates us all. But in the words of the oldest proverb: just one more go. Just one more go, before I dissipate raging into that goodnight. Just one more run, before I play all those shortform avant garde releases in my Itch.io wallet.

If Monster Train 2 were the last roguelike deckbuilder I ever played, I would consider myself fairly pleased, and also very relieved. While not a huge departure from the game that plunged Matt Cox (RPS in peace) into unholy raptures, it’s a great pick if you’re fond of numbers going up and realising it’s 1.30am and that you are now too addled by card synergies to sleep. You do not have to like or understand trains, but it’s a plus.

Read more

A studio gutted by Embracer have come back to life and are working on a new RPG

One of the many game studios smashed to pieces by Embracer Group has come back to life. Campfire Cabal, which was seemingly shut down in 2023 as part of their parent corporation’s scorched earth “restructuring” policy, have crawled out of the grave to announce they’re still around and, in fact, “never stopped working”. They’ve been making a new game in the Expeditions series of historical RPGs, and have been given “the green light to scale back up and transition into full production.”

Read more

Military Incremental Complex is freeware classic Dope Wars for arms dealing

Oh, Dope Wars ’98, let me count the ways you moulded me into the man I am today, buying extra large trench coats in which to store my 100 units of acid. Military Incremental Complex riffs off that game’s unmistakably ’98 interface, but instead of playing a cool and aspirational heroin entrepreneur, you play a dastardly bullet merchant. Begin crafting artisan handmade farm-fresh shotgun shells, work your way up to nukes. Typical woke renewable energy propaganda. Can’t even sell massive bundles of dynamite with ‘TNT’ written on them anymore in case it offends the coyotes.

You’ll “produce multiple different weapons, research upgrades, manipulate the stock market, and lobby the government for favours”. It’s from Space Kraken, makers of Squeebing Up The Tower Of Friendship, a game I have not played but enjoy saying the name of aloud. Squeebing. Squeeeebing. “6 hours in the demo and another hour in the released game, I still have no idea what squeebing is,” reads one review. UrbanDictionary defines ‘squeebing’ as … actually, I’m not repeating what UrbanDictionary defines squeebing as. Here’s a trailer with wholesome god-fearing guns in it instead.

Read more

Avowed director Carrie Patel has left Obsidian, and joined Oxenfree dev Night School as a game director

Whether or not we’ll be getting any more Avowed somewhere along the line is still very much up in the air. But if we do, it seems it won’t be under the leadership of Carrie Patel. In a quick post Patel shared on LinkedIn, the game developer shared that she’s “starting a new position as game director” at the team behind Oxenfree, Night School Studio. Patel mentioned literally zero details outside of what her new role is, so it’s not even clear why she left Obsidian.

Read more

Cyberpunk 2077’s sequel will see you return to Night City, and head to a new city described as “Chicago gone wrong”

CD Projekt Red’s sequel to Cyberpunk 2077 is mostly a bit of a mystery, and it likely will be for a while yet given that they’re currently full steam ahead on The Witcher 4. We know Anna Megill, who worked on Control and the upcoming Fable game, is attached as lead writer, and that the team wants to deal with some big topics, but there’s been nothing like plot details shared so far. At the very least, Cyberpunk creator Mike Pondsmith shared some tidbits about it at Digital Dragons, namely to do with the game’s map.

Read more

Shift Up essentially confirm Stellar Blade 2 is in the works, haven’t revealed how revealing it will be

Alright, so, I know those of us on PC haven’t even had the chance to play the first one yet, but it seems like Shift Up have essentially confirmed that Stellar Blade 2 is in the works. As spotted by Insider Gaming, Shift Up recently shared its investor relations presentation for May of this year, most of it being businessy nonsense neither you or I could give two tosses about. The key thing is a slide in its strategy section, showing a very basic plan for its games Nikke and Stellar Blade.

Read more