Category: Rock, Paper, Shotgun

Our Black Myth: Wukong review hails the game as “a generous Soulsy adventure hybrid that works within its limitations and delivers a beautiful challenge to be unpicked with a magical toolbox”. Reviewer Edders went so far as to find the world more engaging than that of Elden Ring – proper defying-the-gods level rhetoric. Players seem to agree – the game launched last night, and has already accrued a concurrent player peak of 1.44 million – Steam’s fourth highest ever, exceeded only by Counter-Strike, Palworld and PUBG. By that metric, it’s the platform’s most popular strictly single player game of all the time.

All that goodwill has been spoiled, however, by a Steam code handout message to streamers and other “content creators” before launch which includes some reactionary, non-binding requests – no mention of “trigger words” like “Covid-19”, no talk of “politics” or “feminist propaganda”, and no mention of “China’s game industry policies, opinions, news, etc”.

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Tactical Breach Wizards is a tactics game for people that don’t like tactics games. Magically, it’s also a tactics game for people who love them like nothing else. It’s permissive and demanding; playful and tense. Its globe-spanning plot covers conspiracies, PMCs, and brutal theocratic dictatorships. It also features a traffic-summoning warlock named Steve wearing a hi-vis robe. It’s finding that one absolutely, perfectly ridiculous XCOM turn, every turn…and at the same time knowing it’s absolutely, perfectly fine if you don’t. In short: it’s one of the most enjoyable tactics games I’ve ever played, and the only tactics game with a pyromancer so rubbish he relies on making his enemies pass out from heatstroke.

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Silent Hill has a messy, up-is-down relationship with time and history, so let’s go about this hands-on with the Silent Hill 2 Remake in a messy, up-is-down way. Developed well over two decades ago, the original Silent Hill 2 is the magnum opus of Polish horror stalwarts Bloober Team. Running on then-innovative “Unreal Engine 5” technology created by Jazz Jackrabbit publishers Epic MegaGames, it’s a wonderful abyss of a game that remains perfectly playable today, given a certain amount of tolerance for the quirks of the era.

It begins with your character, James Sunderland, descending from the road towards the eponymous Midwestern nowhere-town. Like many games of the period, Silent Hill 2 uses a third-person, over-the-shoulder manual camera, which allows you to glance fearfully up at the monstrous pine trees that fringe the path – each rising from a bulging tide of fog that menaces with the suggestion of approaching figures. There is moisture everywhere, gushing from drain pipes and dribbling down concrete barriers. As you amble into the murk, deathly chords and groaning, unmechanical motifs reverberate from somewhere deep underground.

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I’ve likely mentioned hitting Lovecraft fatigue so often that it’s now evolved into a second phase of Lovecraft-fatigue fatigue. This is not the same as Lovecraft refreshment, no matter how much I might want to return to the days before old one plushies and Cthulhu children’s books terrorised the internet en masse. There’s not quite enough information about “story generator” sim Marry a Deep One: Innsmouth Simulator for me to confidently say it’ll cut through my exhaustion with all things tentacular and horrifically be-gilled. But it is beguiling, isn’t it? There’s all sorts of little widgets and details shown off that remind me of everything from Sid Meier’s Pirates to classic adventure games, and maybe even a little Rimworld? It’s a heady soup, although one I’d recommend against quaffing, given where the water comes from.

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Last week, the Xitter account for H2M – a mod aiming to recreate the heyday of classic Modern Warfare 2 multiplayer inside Call of Duty: Modern Warfare Remastered – announced that they had received a cease and desist from Activision Blizzard, and would shut down the project. The 2022 version of Modern Warfare 2 lacked the original’s multiplayer, and H2M was so highly-anticipated that Steam sales of the 2016 FPS balooned in the lead-up to the mod’s planned release date. It didn’t hurt that Activision had it on sale, of course, but the timing lined up so well that some fans speculated the discount was a deliberate bait-and-switch on the publisher’s part to profit from excitement over a mod they were already planning to shut down.

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When Bloober and Konami announced that they were remaking Silent Hill 2 as part of a comprehensive series reboot, it made immediate if slightly deflating sense to me. Silent Hill 2 is the more feted of the Hills – if I were a calculating franchise custodian tasked with ‘bringing back’ one of the acclaimed original trilogy, that’s probably the instalment I and my spreadsheets would fix upon. I mean, it’s the game with Pyramid Head in it – the nearest thing Silent Hill has to a mascot, and it’s not like there’s an issue of cutting out plot material: each game in the Silent Hill series is, on some level, a distinct story with a distinct protagonist.

Still, the decision to ‘skip’ the first game in the series, whose world, narrative themes, music and art direction set the parameters for all the rest, made my brain itch a bit, and when I ran into Bloober’s creative director Mateusz Lenart and lead producer Maciej Głomb at a Konami event, I had to ask about it.

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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! You know books, right? They’re like RPS articles, but slightly better for piling under a flock mat to make little hills for your plastic spacemen. Fitting, then, that this week it’s plastic spaceman enthusiast, writer on Absolver, Nightingale, Gladius, and Total War: Warhammer 3, and Ten Things Video Games Can Teach Us author, Dan Griliopoulos! Cheers Dan! Mind if we have a nose at your bookshelf?

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JDM: Rise Of The Scorpion is a free prologue for JDM: Japanese Drift Master, a racing game about – who could guess – drift racing in Japan. It’s got an open world set in rural towns to burn rubber around as well as several story missions to play. You can download it from Steam now.

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I’ve got a real soft spot for Trombone Champ, a rhythm game about tooting along to music that works perfectly with the mouse. I’m also a huge fan of Beat Saber, a rhythm game in which you slice at blocks that whizz towards you in VR.

You can see where this is going. Trombone Champ: Unflattened transports that 2022 tooting into 2024 virtual reality.

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Minecraft‘s Realms servers have been down for most of the past four days. Mojang’s official account for reporting service status updates noted that “intermittent failures or slowdowns” began on August 13th, and despite similarly intermittent reports of uptime in the days since, the servers remain inaccessible to most players today.

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