Category: Rock, Paper, Shotgun

It begins as every Japan-set dating sim worth its salt does — with a transfer student.

It’s Aya’s first day at the ominously-named ‘Love-Love All-Girls High School’, and they’re (understandably) a little nervous. Shy and socially anxious, they hope they’ll manage to make a friend or two. Turns out their classmates are eager – perhaps a little too eager – to get acquainted. Aya is set upon by a stampede of besotted young women, but Aya doesn’t have romance on the brain themselves. “I Just Want To Be Single!” they yell. Cue chirpy acapella theme music.

I Just Want To Be Single!!: Season One, recently released on Steam in Early Access, is a game you’d be forgiven for overlooking on a Steam Store that today is packed with visual novels from Western indie devs. A handful carry a reverence and understanding of the medium (the excellent VA-11 HALL-A, for example), but many take a mocking, ironic approach, or exist primarily to titillate, such that fans have grown wary. Tsundere Studio’s debut, I Just Want To Be Single!! stands out from this crowd.

Billed as ‘aromantic, asexual, and nonbinary’, I Just Want To Be Single!!’s player protagonist, Aya, is a reflection of its mononymous lead developer ‘m.’. “I’m still figuring things out about myself and this game is an extension of that,” m. tells me over Discord. “The story in this game is largely about finding yourself and who you want to become.”

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You know how it is: you rush to the bus stop because you think you’re going to miss it, then it arrives 12 years late. Typical. The makers of Euro Truck Simulator 2 have shown off a short trailer with a big shiny European coach in it. It confirms that the sim will add driveable buses in some form soon, fulfilling a long-forgotten tease that was first made by the developers back in the cloudy days of 2013.

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We might rightly judge Batman Arkham-style combat by how cool the counters make you feel, what with the core of it melting into second-nature rhythmic meditation that renders you basically unkillable after a few minutes of practice. You will win the fight. This is guaranteed. The combat is designed to make you win. Usually the second tutorial prompt is “here’s the button that makes you win. Don’t worry if you don’t know when to press it. We’ll tell you”.

Likewise, you will win the fights in Dead As Disco‘s Steam demo. Maybe the action after the demo gets harder. I dare not predict the future. But this is not the important part. The important part is that you will feel very cool as you easily win. You can hold down a button to beat your enemies with a glowstick that hits about three times to every beat in the music. It feels like doing violence with a turbo maraca made of steel and also filled with steel balls. You can also import your own music, so maybe this doesn’t exactly line up with, say, Meshuggah’s Bleed. But it certainly lines up with Michael Sembello’s She’s A Maniac. Here’s a trailer.

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This week is the week of Summer Game Fest and its entourage of accompanying showcases. As such, the feeling right now is of preparing for an avalanche. Join me as I play out the next few days in my head.

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Hello reader who is also a reader, and welcome back to Booked For The Week – our regular Sunday chat with a selection of cool industry folks about books! Did you know that adopting language altered the position of the human larynx, making us more susceptible to choking on food? I learned this because I’ve finished Blood Meridian, and was reading McCarthy’s musings on the evolution of language as a chaser. Proof, then, that the only truly fitting way to leave this world is to die choking on a book. Perhaps this week’s guest can recommend a good one?

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The next Phasmophobia update, Chronicle, is due out next month with a newly revealed June 24th release date, and developer Kinetic Games have offered up some details on what it calls one of the game’s “biggest updates” so far. So, let’s have a look at what that entails! The key addition with this update is the arrival of sound evidence, which as you can probably guess is a new haunting paranormal proof type that you’ll acquire by using the newly added sound recorder.

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Developer Rebellion Developments revealed a first look at Atomfall’s first DLC expansion yesterday. Titled Wicked Isle, it unsurprisingly brings you to an island called Midsummer Island that is, in fact, a bit wicked, but like, in the bad way, not in the something a teen in the 2000s would say about something they like kind of way. Specifically it’ll have a bit more of a folk horror vibe to it, which I’m certainly into conceptually. Lots of great folklore in the UK, as long as it’s not stepping over frequently trodden upon territory.

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Yesterday, ZeniMax Workers United-CWA, the union made up of more than 300 quality assurance workers at Microsoft via its subsidiary ZeniMax Media, reached a tentative contract agreement with Microsoft. The union was formed back in 2022, and has been bargaining with Microsoft in the intervening years since. Last month, the union was preparing to potentially strike against Microsoft, but now it seems like this may be avoided.

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Earlier this week, EA did the thing they oh so frequently loves to do, which is making a bad decision. This time, it was cancelling Marvel’s Black Panther, alongside shutting down the two year old studio that was making it, Cliffhanger Games. As every single announcement like this over the past few years has been, it was an incredibly frustrating one that can’t be justified. Now, a new report from Bloomberg has shed a bit of light on why it was cancelled, as well as what the game might have been like.

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Elden Ring Nightreign is, to the surprise of no one, off to a bit of a flying start (even if not everyone is completely in love with it just yet). I have no intention of diving into it just yet, in part because the solo experience doesn’t interest me all that much, and I don’t really want to be matched up with two other randos that would surely abandon me the moment I forget what my character can do. There isn’t a duos option either, the thing I’m actually after, something that was a bit forgotten about during development, but might be coming further down the line. The power of modding always comes through however, as despite only launching yesterday, there’s already a seamless co-op mod that allows for duos.

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