Category: Rock, Paper, Shotgun

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.

Read more

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.

Read more

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.

Read more

Spider dislikers, your concerns have been noted. At least by Capcom, anyway. The developers of Monster Hunter Wilds are including an option in the upcoming beast-skinning action RPG that will turn all arachnid style monsters into something much less creepy and/or crawly.

Read more

Path Of Exile 2‘s early access release has been shoved back three weeks from 15th November to 6th December 2024, game director Jonathan Rogers has announced in a brief Youtube video. The action-RPG itself will seemingly be ready in time for the original launch date, but there’s a load of “server-side infrastructure work” that needs doing.

Read more

What Remains Of Edith Finch is a very upsetting collection of interactive short stories, all devoted to the tragically short lives of a cursed family who live in a monstrous treehouse. It’s also a wonderful show of experimentation, switching genres from story to story – one minute you’re a playable bestiary on shuffle, the next you’re beheading fish in a cannery as the worktable disappears beneath your scrolling daydreams. The developer’s next project seems to be pursuing a similar balance of whimsy and darkness. It’s another anthology experience, which casts you as a field biologist studying “the strangeness of organic life”. Also, chicken-legged houses.

Read more

It’s always nice to say that a big, look-how-much-we-spent-on-pore-rendering AAA game actually runs quite well on PC, as Call of Duty: Black Ops 6 does. Unfortunately for Bl6ps, and for us, that technical success is balanced on the knife tip of some seriously overwrought infrastructure. Mainly in the form the UX nightmare that is the Call of Duty HQ launcher, as well as a meddlesome always-online requirement, itself serving a feature that doesn’t even work that well.

Read more

You can feel two ways about something at the same time. The feuding academics of Life Is Strange: Double Exposure might call this “emotional superposition”. But the word “ambivalent” already exists. So let’s say I’m ambivalent about this new adventure featuring Max Caulfield, the returning hero of Life Is Strange, and time-travelling photographer whose powers have resurfaced after years of off-screen atrophy. I’ve been deeply moved by individual scenes in this sequel. By the end I was sorry to leave its characters behind. At the same time (please now imagine my face is splitting into a second, colour-washed expression with wobbly VFX) I am relieved it’s over, so I don’t have to deal with the inconsistent behaviour of those characters, the flimsy plot, and a convoluted approach to murder mystery.

Read more

If there’s one thing I’d like to get across about my time with Dragon Age: The Veilguard – perhaps a surprise given Bioware’s recent history, Anthem, and some of the early marketing for this game – it’s that in my 50 hour return to Thedas, I very rarely felt I was playing something cynical.

Read more

In case you don’t know the headline reference, Orpheus was a mythical Greek musician who famously descended to the underworld to rescue his snake-bitten lover, Eurydice. The underworld’s rulers, Hades and Persephone, were massively bummed out by Orpheus’s emo lyre-playing, and swiftly agreed to let him lead Eurydice’s soul upward to the waking world, with the extremely simple proviso that he not look back at her till they’re both on the surface.

Being a love-drunk spannerhead, however, Orpheus couldn’t resist a quick peek at Eurydice after crossing the threshold – and the result is a timeless moral about human frailty and the specific truism that you should absolutely never date musicians, which Australian developers Oppolyon Studios have totally ignored in their otherwise-redolent game about kicking your brother’s soul out of hell.

Read more