Category: Rock, Paper, Shotgun

I’ve only dipped my distal index fingerbone in The Necromancer’s Tale, a just-released historical fantasy tactics RPG from Psychic Software, but I can at least report back that the character creator is a gentle joy, to the point that I was disappointed to reach the end of it. True to the promise/threat of “400,000 words of hand-written narrative and lore”, it’s a hearty choose-your-own-adventure prologue that follows the protagonist’s infancy and early adulthood. Each choice you make skews the stats on the left. Might sound unremarkable of concept. Here’s why it’s stuck with me.

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If you’re sick of being tag-teamed by Gaping Jaw & Darkdrift Knight, then I bring good news. Elden Ring Nightreign‘s next wave of enhanced bosses have now successfully RSVPed to the big darkness party. They’ll be arriving when the next cycle begins on July 31st.

Sure, that was the most logical point for a fresh rotation, given it’s when the established lot of Everdark Nightlord duos were set to disappear. Though, for whatever reason, FromSoft haven’t fully committed to a date until now. One can only assume the Equilibrious Beast was busy polishing its horns.

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“I’m not a perfectionist,” says the guy who makes niche puzzle games that turn me into a gibbering wreck obsessed with efficiency. And I feel a wave of comical fury. If like me you’ve been whirring and clicking your way through very good engineering puzzle game Kaizen: A Factory Story, you’re probably a fan of previous work from the same developers. The creators of Opus Magnum and Infinifactory may have dissolved their old studio Zachtronics and chemically regenerated as Coincidence Games, but there are still large traces of a Zach present. I caught up with designer Zach Barth to ask about perfectionism, the Factorio-like automation game he gave up on out of boredom, and how the team managed to make a story about factories in 1980s Japan feel human.

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BoJack Horseman was a show about Horsin’ Around.

There was a good thing that had once been and a horse man who was now years removed from it, but still clung on to the idea that the magic was still there. I’ll not stray into spoiler territory, but that clinging generally didn’t go too well for old BoJack. He was a bitter, selfish, washed-up star who so often looked back, rather than looking forwards. It was to his detriment.

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Helldivers 2 developers Arrowhead have made clear that they’re still very much all-in on the game right now, with adding more stuff to the good shootery thing they’ve got going being the main focus. That said, the studio’s bigwigs have provided a couple of hints at what the future might hold for them, with the latest being that Helldivers 3 is “hopefully many years away”.

Also, they aren’t fans of players voting to rename a city on Super Earth ‘Gun’, which is a thing that’s been going on in Helldiverland lately.

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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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