Category: Rock, Paper, Shotgun

One of my favourite satires is the Screwtape Letters, an epistolary novel by Narnia scribe C.S. Lewis. It consists of messages from an oily elder demon to his nephew about how to correctly groom the soul of an unsuspecting human being. It’s a claustrophobic send-up of managerial politics and nepotism, with World War 1 unfolding in the background. A real pick-me-up. Sintopia is the Two Point incarnation of that premise – in other words, brighter and breezier and definitely more slapstick than Christian. It puts you in charge of a world divided between Earth and hell, and challenges you to ensure a steady movement of optimally sinful souls between one and the other. Say your prayers and watch the trailer.

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I never completed the original Red Dead Redemption, but not for the usual reasons of being terrible at the game, or thinking that open worlds are too big and boring these days and I just want to lie down forever and watch anime. I never finished it because my Xbox 360 version was not, in practice, an open world game, but a lonely farm at the bottom of a vortex of butchered spacetime. In the prologue, reformed outlaw John Marston confronts an old bandit acquaintance and gets himself roundly shot to bits. He’s rescued by local rancher Bonnie MacFarlane, who nurses him back to health and gives him a few odd jobs to warm him up for the next plot point.

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Classic god sims like Populous and Black & White teach that deities love to reach their horrible holy hands into our world and mess with us directly. They teach us to see 1-1 divine intervention in every random house fire and every lightning bolt that miraculously strikes our enemies. By contrast, the forthcoming Zero Orders Tactics teaches that god prefers to operate via covert means, because after all, personally lobbing some electricity at somebody would be inelegant. It’s far more graceful to trap them behind a mountain, instead.

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Hark! Comments have been temporarily turned off on Rock Paper Shotgun. We and all of our sibling websites are moving to a new commenting platform and the existing comments need to be ported across. This process will take some time – days, perhaps – and we’ll update this post once it’s complete and commenting functionality has been restored.

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“Worthless,’ they’d declared. Most NFTs were ‘worthless.’ The greatest artistic movement since The Big BSoD, the greatest proof of the power of the blockchain, the very future of the whole funging Infobahn, and the hedgie soybean-counters say it’s all ‘worthless’,” once wrote the greatest living prophet of our era.

Now, in an entirely predictable case of “I am once again asking our tech overlords to watch the whole movie”, those plucky chancers at Ubisoft have lifted AliceO’s ideas wholesale, ignored her timely and cogent commentary, and released a roiling puke reservoir of NFT upchuck masquerading as a game. Thank you Ian Games for the spot. You are the Neal Stephenson to AliceO’s William Gibson, but for worthless crap. (The IGN piece has some very good context and is worth reading).

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The line between escapist entertainment and Problematic fantasy can be thin, but I think Indiana Jones’s dislike for the German National Socialist Party of the 1930s and 1940s is fairly clearcut. “Nazis – I hate these guys!” he says in Raiders Of The Lost Ark. Let’s play Devil’s Advocate and try to Lionel Hutz that quote: “Nazis? I hate these guys!” [pointing at some Communists]. Yeah, I’m not really feeling it.

I guess Indiana did sleep with a Nazi once, but only by accident, and yes he did once cosplay as an SS officer and get Hitler’s autograph, but again, only by accident. I think his political stance is abundantly obvious in Indiana Jones And The Great Circle – the new Wolfenslike from MachineGames, in which you will blast and bludgeon literally hundreds of Shitlerites in unambiguously one-sided first-person view. So it’s amusing, if not wholly unexpected, that MachineGames and Bethesda have slapped the game with an explicit disclaimer stating that the game’s depictions of Nazis are not, in fact, Nazi propaganda.

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If I am ever murdered, please do not ask Max Caulfield to investigate. I’ve already written our review for Life Is Strange: Double Exposure, in which I celebrated the touching moments of Max’s return to the series, and lamented the clunky plot that she finds herself in. In this adventure game, you’re looking into the killing of a close friend, shot by an unknown assailant. You hop between two dimensions to solve the case – one world in which your pal still lives and the other in which she’s dead. Unfortunately for the murder victim, you play a bona fide hot mess who could not perform a cross examination if she were standing in front of a crucifix with a magnifying glass.

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When they’re not doing environmental art for projects like Wasteland 3, The Brotherhood have a history making enticingly odd games. Sin very nearly liked Stasis: Bone Totem, landing positive despite giving up after several hours. That’s also my experience with Beautiful Desolation – an isometric RPG I got a real kick out of the art for before also stopping one day and just accidentally never playing it again. This might be a coincidence, but whatever else can be said about these projects, one thing is for certain: when compared to upcoming horror FPS Animal Use Protocol, they both featured considerably less monke.

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Going by three hours with a preview build last month, the Indiana Jones of Indiana Jones And The Great Circle has the hungriest hands this side of Thief 2014. They’re always surging into view, reaching restlessly toward objects as you explore, for there is ever so much to touch: photos and letters; pipes, frying pans, and other blunt implements; relics that translate into “Adventure Points”, used to “unlock” books of skills; camouflaged levers and other chunks of fusty comicbook exotica that harbour clockwork secrets. Sometimes, Indy’s magic fingers help you glean an object you need from the game’s religiously-sourced piles of Lucasfilm memorabilia. Sometimes, they exhaust you: please, Dr Jones, for the love of George. Stop trying to pick things up. Let me look at “ancient history” for a while.

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Bungie have been fairly quiet about Marathon, the upcoming extraction shooter they announced in 2023. Yesterday they released a devlog in which game director Joe Ziegler seemed to want to reassure fans of the studio that the game was still in development. He talked around a lot of the game features, without actually saying much about it. As yet, there’s still no footage of the game in action, making its previous release window of 2025 appear even more tenuous.

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