Category: Rock, Paper, Shotgun

If you don’t have anything else on this morning, perhaps you’d like to fill the life of a small clay golem up with purpose. I cannot be certain, but at present I believe that the easiest way to do this is with the demo for Tall Trails. It reminds me of playing old N64 3D platformers round my mate Liam’s house between watching VHS recordings of Keenan and Kel, which is a nice place to be. It’s also got Breath Of The Wild’s stamina wheel and freeform clamouring, although you don’t need to worry about that too much because you can stuff chilli peppers into your boot and use it like a jetpack.

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FromSoftware’s RPGs have done much to explore the cycle of death and resurrection that games have historically taken for granted, but ask comparatively few questions on how the bosses feel about all this. What of the growing psychological weariness that comes from having to swat the same quixotic gnat over and over? What of the despair that grows from realising that, in the eternal battle between godly power and free resurrections 4 life, resurrections will always win out on a long enough timeline. Broken meta. Plz fix. My crumbling empire and poetically exposed eterna-hubris cannot take any more.

What I’m saying is, when people talk about Dark Souls being about “overcoming adversity”, they are lying to themselves. Dark Souls is about being a tiny little cheater running face first into a wall until your head is so used to the shape of the bricks that they simply have no effect on your fat, dumb skull. Dark Souls is about using an unfair advantage to torture gods who are much better than you at everything.

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Mixtape isn’t entirely the retro 90s nostalgia piece you might be expecting from trailers – it’s also a playable job application. Protagonist Stacy Rockford is enjoying one last night in their east US hometown with childhood friends Slater and Cassandra, before Rockford sets off to chase a music supervisor gig in New York City. Mixtape is both a going-away celebration and, on some level, Rockford’s portfolio project, edited together from teenage flashbacks and waiting to be thrust into the hands of a distant producer.

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Fantastical football sim Rematch has, we’re told, a passing problem. Specifically, no-one is doing it. While I suspect this dearth of teamplay is exaggerated in the darkness of upset Steam forum posts, I definitely remember a lot of ballhogging going on in the third person booter’s open beta.

It sounds to me, then, that Rematch is suffering from the same issue you get in low-ranked Dota 2 lobbies: everyone wants to be the superstar, the one who ends the match with the biggest numbers next to their name, oblivious to how few instances of the letter ‘I’ occur in the word ‘Team’. It’s very few, people. Clearly, what’s needed is someone willing to do the dirty work as a passing-focused support character, and today, that would be me. I’d score no goals and seek no glory, only defending, distracting, and most importantly, promoting the redistribution of stitched leather orbs.

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The Drifter is sometimes quite silly in ways I don’t think are intentional, and it managed to yank me right out of the experience more than once. You obviously have to be in a thing to get yanked out of it though, which is my way of saying that The Drifter is good, although I will be taking the piss out of it later. It’s stylish, moody, and pulls off the point n’ click adventure game two-for-one: characters worth caring about, and also characters worth irritating by fiddling with their stuff.

Mostly though, it’s just got a great eye for an arresting scene or setpiece. Some of my favourite parts did end up being its more complex multi-scene puzzles, but mainly because these are used sparingly in a story with bloody-minded dedication to anxious forward momentum.

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The dramatic dismissal of three senior developers at Subnautica 2 studio Unknown Worlds gets messier by the day. In a publicly filed lawsuit, the three fired heads of the studio have accused publishers Krafton of all sorts of dirty tactics, ploys, and shenanigans to purposefully delay the game until 2026, all in an intentional effort to avoid paying a maximum $250 million earnout bonus to the studio.

In one bizarre episode alleged in the lawsuit, Unknown Worlds co-founder Charlie Cleveland went to lunch with Krafton CEO, Kim Chang-han, who told him via translator that having to pay such an earnout would be “disastrous financially and hugely embarrassing” for the publisher.

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Alienware is running Black Friday in July, dropping a bunch of desktops and laptops down to some of the lowest prices I’ve seen all summer. Doesn’t matter if you’re after a decked-out Area‑51 tower with an RTX 5090 or just looking for a leaner Aurora machine for everyday gaming, there’s something on offer. And it’s not just desktops either. A handful of 16 and 18-inch gaming laptops are trimmed down by hundreds, which is rare for models packing things like 5070 Ti or 5080 graphics

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Ex-Elder Scrolls developer Julian LeFay has stepped away from his role as technical producer on The Wayward Realms due to an ongoing battle with cancer taking a turn for the worse. OnceLost Games, the studio LeFay’s been working with for the past few years, say they’ve been informed by his doctors that “his time with us is limited”.

The developer’s best known for his work on the first two Elder Scrolls games, Arena and Daggerfall, alongside The Wayward Realms creative director Ted Peterson. The pair gave a talk together at 2024’s GDC delving into those early days at Bethesda, and the RPG they’ve been working on at OnceLost since 2019 is very much aiming to recapture Daggerfall’s vibes.

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Virtuos, the company best known for working with other studios to deliver the likes of Dark Souls Remastered, Oblivion Remastered and the upcoming Metal Gear Solid Delta: Snake Eater, are reportedly preparing to lay off staff. 300 people are cited as being at risk.

That’s according to reporting posted to Bluesky by Gauthier Andres of French outlet Origami. Andres’ post dropped same day Virtuos lead game designer Adrien Jouannet appeared on a Cyberpunk 2077 livestream to talk about the studio’s work with CD Projekt on the futuristic RPG’s latest update.

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“When our fathers stood against the Persians,” spake Greek statesman and general Pericles, “they had no such resources as we have now”. Time, of course, muddies the clear waters of specifics, but I’m basically sure he was talking about the ability for each of his men to keep a thirty foot ladder snuggled safely away in their rectal passage just in case they encountered any massive walls.

Which is probably where Total War got the idea from. Since launch, The Total War: Warhammer series has given each troop, from the lowliest Chaos Chosen to the bravest and most beautiful ratman, the ability to magic a ladder from nowhere during sieges. There’s a mod for Total War: Warhammer 3 that removes them, but now the end of arse ladders is getting official support, including tweaks to hopefully teach the AI how to behave without them.

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