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EGX 2023 is upon us, and you may recall that RPS is sponsoring the Rezzed Zone this year. That means we’ll be tucking into the 50+ indie games that will be there over the coming days, and we can now confirm the full and final line-up of what’s going to be on the showfloor. Most of these are only playable at the show, but you may still find some of them have demos available on Steam thanks to this week’s Steam Next Fest. In any case, read on below to come and see what’s coming up.
Whereas most games begin by getting you into the action as quickly as possible, Saltsea Chronicles opens with a quick note about its save system. It’s a small, but important detail in this story-driven adventure game, as throughout its nine-to-ten-hour run time, you’ll be faced with various decisions about where your crew of post-apocalyptic drifters will explore next, as they set sail in search of their missing captain Maja. By choosing one island at the end of every chapter, you’ll naturally miss out on visiting another – and with 14 locales to explore in total in the Saltsea archipelago (and only 12 chapters to do it in), each playthrough has the potential to end up being quite different from the last.
But up front it tells you “There are no wrong choices, only your choices” in Saltsea Chronicles, and that ultimately this is a tale about “tracing different pathways” using its clever branching save system. While you can, of course, play it through from start to finish in a single swoop, you also have the option to purloin its additional save slots to take those roads less travelled (presented here as delightful, wiggling seaweed tendrils), and all without overwriting your existing adventure. Immediately, that sense of FOMO is dispelled, and instead of worrying about ‘seeing everything’ or making sure you get a ‘good’ playthrough, you can simply enjoy its enthralling tale of high seas soap opera, curious exploration, and the knotty drama that comes with trying to forge connections in an increasingly fragmented world. It’s a journey well worth taking, even if what lies at the end of it didn’t quite come together in the way I’d hoped.
Fishing sim-cross-deep sea exploration game-cross-restaurant management gem Dave the Diver has reeled in a fairly expansive update, with new content updates, performance improvements and various bug fixes.
Overwatch 2 is getting new skins that clothe Moria and Pharah in the outfits of Diablo 4’s Lilith and Inarius. Those skins are part of a new wave of cosmetics incoming for the game’s Season 7: Rise of Darkness, but they’re not part of the standard premium battle pass. Instead, they’ll cost you another $40 – as much as the whole of Overwatch 1 did when it was first released. As you can imagine, people aren’t too chuffed.
XCOM-y pulp strategy adventure The Lamplighters League has been written off as a ‘disappointing’ flop costing publishers Paradox almost $23 million, a mere week after the game’s launch.
Whenever a friend asks for help in speccing out their upcoming PC build, I almost inevitably go to check if the Cooler Master Hyper 212 Evo V2 is in stock. Because, for lower-end and mid-range builds especially, do you truly need any other CPU cooler? The Hyper 212 Evo V2 near-perfectly balances simplicity, effectiveness, and affordability; it’s like the PC component equivalent of Charles Eames’ museum-beloved leg splint, only less stackable. More to the point, it’s down to £33 in the Amazon Prime Big Deal Days sale, equalling its lowest price of 2023 thus far.
Ara: History Untold‘s headline gimmick is actually a couple of centuries old. In this deceptively Civilization-esque 4X strategy game, all player turns unfold simultaneously, once you’ve decided what to build or research, where to move your units, and so on. As Oxide Games design director Michelle Menard tells me over Zoom, this approach takes inspiration from an ancient military simulator, Kriegsspiel, which was devised by the Prussian army officer George Leopold von Reisswitz, aka the “father of wargaming”, in the mid-1800s.
“It was to train their generals, it was a legit apparatus of war, it was not for funsies,” says Menard. “And they basically created this massive table that had a modular terrain system. At first they used sand, but that was kind of messy, [and so] they developed a system where they had interchangeable tiles, like hills and valleys and plateaus.
“They would build out this table, literally drop a sheet down the middle, and it’d be like, OK, you guys on each side, you can’t see what the other person’s doing. There was an actual game master, who was the referee who you would report your moves to. He would then re-set up the board and basically call people back into the room and be like, tada! It’s the next turn – let’s see what people did. Was it what you expected?”
In terms of usefulness to the average PC owner, sales events like Amazon Prime Big Deal Days aren’t just for knocking hundreds off big-ticket hardware. They can also make already-affordable kit even more of a bargain, as is the case with the Logitech G413 SE mechanical keyboard: a snip at £60.
This has been on our best gaming keyboards list for a while now, specifically for delivering all the satisfying finger-feel (and durability) of a true mechanical board with a pricing that puts it closer to high-end membrane and hybrid switch models. The G413 SE employs the bumpy ‘tactile’ style of mech switches, so it’s good for accurate typing, and it’s easily fast and agile enough for gaming duty as well. I actually ended up using this as my main keyboard for a while, despite having more expensive linear-switch boards piled up in a nearby cupboard, and I’d extra-extra-recommend it at this price.
The consolidation of the games industry threatens to continue apace, as rumours surface that senior Disney staff are urging CEO Bob Iger to acquire a major game company, such as Deluxe Paint and Shaq Fu publisher Electronic Arts (who also publish Battlefield and Apex Legends, if I remember correctly). Apparently, the aforesaid senior executives think Disney are losing out for merely licensing Disney properties to developers, but Iger is said to be “noncommittal”.
Hundreds of thousands of Minecraft players are downing pickaxes and revolting against what they feel to be Microsoft and Mojang’s stingy approach to updating the decade-old sandbox building sim. The trigger is this year’s Minecraft Mob Vote, a community ballot to decide which of three creatures will be added to the game. Many Minecrafters feel the Mob Vote (which has extended to potential new Minecraft biomes in the past) is needlessly parsimonious, and cynically divisive: given Mojang’s current headcount and Microsoft’s resources, why not add all three mobs to the game, rather than asking players to do battle over scraps? And now, those players are trying to shut the whole thing down.
