Category: Rock, Paper, Shotgun

Some would say the best way to wind down after a rough day down the Content Reactors isn’t to play a grotty occult horror game, but I caught a trailer for Tenebris Somnia earlier, and couldn’t help myself. In this foetid offering from Argentinian devs Andrés Borghi and Tobías Rusjan of Saibot Studios, you play a young woman, Julia, who is visiting her film-maker ex-boyfriend to drop off their old apartment key. Julia’s having a hard time getting over the break-up, but she’s clearly doing better than her ex: his apartment is full of broken glass, anomalous red gloop and creepy occult books.

The game’s twist is that it’s two visual styles thrust into the same frame. On the one hand, you’ll explore an 8-bit world of unpleasantly bright colours, finding and combining objects adventure-game style (I say adventure-game-style, because this is a bit more energetic than most adventure games – you can equip and swing a wrench, and there’s a run button). On the other hand, well. Click the headline to find out, if you dare. Yes, this is me trying to do a jumpscare. Brace yourself!

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Early access action RPG Last Epoch has just received update 0.9.2, which adds a new class of mage called the Runemaster. The Runemaster has five new spells they can use to tear through the game’s monsters, and each spell can be customised via its own skill tree.

The update, called “Runes Of Power”, also adds eight new languages, and a new type of event called Rune Prisons. Developers Eleventh Hour also announced that Last Epoch’s 1.0 release would happen in December this year.

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Kung-fu brawler Sifu‘s final update is out now. It mostly adds new content for previously added modes, including 75 Challenges, six Arenas, two Outfits and 27 cheats and modifiers. There is also a new Custom Mode, however, which lets you “play and replay the Arena Challenges with your own twist.”

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Maybe it was replaying Aperture Desk Job for the RPS Game Club, or maybe it was the sheer scale of Baldur’s Gate 3 activating the ol’ fight-or-flight. Either way, I’ve recently developed an intense appreciation for teeny, tiny microgames, to the point where I’ve essentially been begging in the RPS Slack channel for recommendations. Just one more Steam link and I’ll be fine, promise.

And I don’t mean short games in the seven- or eight-hour sense. Not even film-length games like Portal or Jazzpunk. No, I seek to gorge on the slightest sub-hour canapés, games in which you can see and do everything in one or hour or less. “Irresponsibly large”? Another time, Mister Starfield, I crave something irrevocably small.

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Space will neither save nor free us. Like Starfield, it will not be glamorous or exciting. As billionaire jebends plot to establish their own corporate fiefdoms amongst the stars, our descendents’ potential spacelives are looking as miserable as collecting 5 spacewolf livers. But I find some hope in spaceship salvage sim Hardspace: Shipbreaker, both in the overt plot about unionisation and in the small satisfaction of doing a job well. Head down, shut up, and focus on dismantling this spaceship carefully and efficiently. It’s an attitude that won’t save the world but can get you through one more day, and sometimes that’s enough.

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Hello folks. How was Baldur’s Gate 3 August for you? Ready for Starfield September? I hope you are, because lemme tell you, it’s coming all right. In truth, I was surprised (and somewhat saddened) by some of the comments we received around our Baldur’s Gate 3 coverage. If you missed them, they were mostly in the vein of saying our increased volume of BG3-related posts felt like “spam”, harking back to when we (and the internet at large) all went similarly bananas over Elden Ring last year. I know it can sometimes seem like writing about these games – particularly on RPS – feels like we’re somehow neglecting everything else going on in PC gaming. But the truth is a little more complicated than that, so I wanted to take some time to talk a bit about this in this month’s Letter From The Editor, because there are a number of reasons why this happens – and will probably continue to happen more generally as websites fight for survival.

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Sometimes, a game sits at such a cross section of my interests that it almost feels made specifically for me. In the case of Affogato, it’s three of my favourite types of games mashed together: it’s Coffee Talk by way of Persona by way of any card-based tower defence game – only here it’s sort of “reverse tower defence”, as the game’s Steam page is keen to point out. It’s your own card units that are the ones moving along pre-defined tracks wreaking havoc on stationary enemies, not the other way around. Maybe tower assault would be a better term, but that’s by the by. Served with a dollop of anime froth on the top, Affogato should be my exact cuppa joe. But despite its intriguing ingredients, I wouldn’t say it’s been wholly successful in slooshing them all together.

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Oft’ am I struck by the fact that video game homes belonging to characters in the depths of despair are nicer that all of the homes I’ve lived in myself. Granted, I’m a thirty-something in a country with a years-long housing crisis, so even the Baker House in Resident Evil 7 is of “I think I could just about afford that one day” status. But it comes to something when a 70s depresso-capsule at the bottom of the sea has more square footage and storage space than I do.

Under The Waves (which got patched today, and not before time because I’ve had one fatal error crash per play session since it came out last week so far) is about a deep sea diver called Stan, who is living and working at the bottom of a big wet metaphor for grief. You will know this because a) its Steam page says this up front, and b) it’s not super subtle (this game is published by Quantic Dream). But, as newsman Edwin pointed out to me today, when was the last time the sea wasn’t a metaphor for grief? It’s never a metaphor for enjoying a nice raspberry ripple ice cream. And despite Stan making reference to “what [he’s] been through” half an hour in, I think it does a great job with its chthonic sadness. You float about in your tiny little sub in a great misty darkness, listen to the extremely melancholy music, and you start thinking about sad stuff in your own life. But you get into Stan’s capsule living area and you think “this guy has a carpet and a book nook, what the hell?”

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I like to think that I’m above the lure of Cool Violent Thing in Videogame these days, but when I see a lanky robot parry a nuclear shockwave with a katana as though swatting a wasp, I find myself Enthused.

The videogame in question is Pyrolith’s V.A. Proxy, which I’ve had my eye on for a while, on account of it being inspired by Nier: Automata and Devil May Cry, with a landscape of megastructures and bruised and rusty art direction that faintly call to mind The Signal from Tölva. In this moody open world action game, you play one of three robots who awaken to find their memories gone, and promptly set out in search of their creator. It’d be an eye-catcher even without the atomic parry, which you can witness for yourself in the embedded clip below.

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Are Starfield‘s planets continuous spaces? Are they just collections of sealed-off maps that fake the presence of landmarks such as named cities beyond their invisible boundaries? I just don’t even know any more, but Starfield mod creators are looking into it. One intrepid soul, Draspian, has tinkered with the code to disable said invisible boundaries, and in the process, revealed that planetary maps do, in fact, join together, though as you might be expecting, Starfield doesn’t take kindly to being treated this way.

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