Category: Rock, Paper, Shotgun

These apparitions and portents, Crystal Dynamics – what game are you playing now? It turns out the game they are playing is: a remaster of amazeballs vampire odyssey Legacy Of Kain: Soul Reaver, together with its less amazing but sturdy sequel. Said remaster project was rumoured earlier this year, when Sarafan scouts caught sight of a telltale plaque at San Diego Comic-Con. Consider that rumour strongly trending towards the status of a Real Thing, because Sony are in the habit of publishing Real Things, and they’ve just (accidentally, I guess) popped a bunch of screens and a trailer with a release date – 10th December 2024 – on the PlayStation website.

Read more

Look out, it’s Spiders. It’s fun to write about Spiders, because you get to frighten people for a moment, before they realise you’re talking about the game development studio, Spiders. They have just released GreedFall 2: The Dying Land into early access. For those who don’t remember the first GreedFall, it was a colonial-styled RPG about landing on the magical shores of another continent and getting into scrapes with monsters and frontiersfolk. This time the story is furthering the fantasy Columbian exchange by putting you in the role of a native who’s been uprooted against their will and taken to the “old world”. The game’s release comes against a backdrop of dissatisfaction in the studio. But workers have gained some concessions in talks.

Read more

For years, a dangerous and charismatic game has evaded the grasp of many designers. Some say it doesn’t exist, that no publisher would ever back it. I’m talking about the one city block RPG that Warren Spector has often mentioned. Sure, we’ve seen a few usual suspects already – Deus Ex Mankind Divided, Disco Elysium, even Else: Heart.Break – they all grimace in the line-up but nothing ever sticks. Now, out of the gloom of indie development, comes another perp ready to have his mugshot taken. Shadows Of Doubt is an open world detective sim that comes perilously close to being our guy. Its clothes, stature, gait, and fingerprints match the description of what Spector often describes. And yet, if you tilt your head, something is just a little off. The game isn’t confined to one block. It’s not an RPG precisely. And its simulation has plenty of bugs, jank, and unintentional comedy. But after all this time, in the absence of a smoking gun, shouldn’t we just put this guy in the slammer and call the case closed? I say yes, let’s. Officers! Arrest this game, it’s brilliant.

Read more

We liked Jusant, Don’t Nod’s clamber-upper masterpiece, and we also liked Banishers, their colonial ghost-busting action-adventure, but it seems that not enough people did. The company have posted a profit warning, reflecting an 11% decline in operating revenue for the first half of 2024. They’ve also “paused” two unannounced games in development, and altered other unannounced games to be more appealing to a “wider audience”. Beyond that, they’re considering “all possible options regarding our roadmap”, which sounds just a touch ominous.

Read more

This one’s a very simple build at the moment, but neat enough that I wanted to shout it out. Near Mint is a roguelike deckbuilder where you advance through a tower fighting slightly stronger iterations of the exact same skeleton. Ok, nothing too captivating so far. The twist comes from the cards: someone’s left them in their Oodie pouch, spilt BBQ sauce down it, then stuck it in the wash before taking the deck out. Now, all the cards have split apart into three pieces. It’s name-your-own-price on Itch here, and it’ll only take you a couple minutes to get acquainted, but I’ll explain the gist below. Gist is a good word. Satisfying to say. Gist.

Read more

Ever since Crimson Desert dropped that audacious trailer at Gamescom 2023, I’ve yearned to soak in its medieval Just Cause 2 vibes. It’s hard not to be moved by the exaggerated kineticism of it all – the magic-enhanced swordfights, the jumping off cliffs and turning into a flying shadow monster, the ability to drift horses. Yes. Yes!

I’m therefore somewhat unnerved to report that my enthusiasm has been tempered significantly by actually playing it. I’ve since used all the straws I’ve clutched at to spell out “It’s just a demo” on my floor, but the fear remains that Crimson Desert’s fantastical open-world exploration is going to be interrupted by regular bouts of twangy, unwieldy, unsatisfying combat.

Read more

Disney Epic Mickey: Rebrushed is a remaster of Disney Epic Mickey, a cult classic 3D platformer first released a decade ago on the Wii. In the original you controlled the titular Mickey Mouse who, armed with a magical paintbrush (wieldable by waving the Wiimote about), could paint or rub out surfaces to solve puzzles. It was the work of Junction Studios led by Warren Spector, best known for being The Deus Ex Guy. No, sadly Mickey could not nano-augment his brush for better target acquisition, nor project laser-guided anti-tank rockets from his podgy white mitts.

And no, Rebrushed doesn’t let him do anything of these either. Clearly a missed opportunity. But is it better nonetheless? With an updated look, some added secrets, more moves for Mickey, and controller/M&K support, I’d say longtime Mickey heads will adore this nostalgia trip. For total newcomers like me, I’d say it’s a platformer that’s certainly charming and clever and wonderfully experimental, but a bit flat in places too.

Read more

Valve are likely up to something hardware-related again, report NotebookCheck. Their next chunk of plastic and wires – following the Valve Index, Steam Deck and Steam Deck OLED – could swap PC gaming’s favoured x86 architecture for ARM, the type of processor favoured by the Nintendo Switch, Macs, and mobile phones.

Read more

Shirley Curry, aka the “Skyrim Grandma”, is no longer posting gaming videos, she’s told her viewers. An upcoming eye surgery is going to leave her recovering for some weeks and (more importantly to her) she is simply tired of playing games for an audience.

“It isn’t fun anymore,” she says in a video. “I’m tired of it. I’m bored with it, bored to death with it. So I am making the decision now – totally, finally – I am not going to be making any more gaming videos and uploading them.”

Read more

Spoilers throughout. TLDR: fun, generous, beautiful animation and cinematography. Worked mostly fine on my PC. I would not have given it the best narrative award if it were up against Gran Turismo 7.

Writing of the frigid framing of Clockwork Orange’s atrocities, the film critic Pauline Kael asked: “is there anything sadder – and ultimately more repellent – than a clean-minded pornographer?” The lavishly directed and animated universe of God Of War Ragnarok is far from repellent, but it also feels spiritually squeegeed; a world of pulpy violence so chirpy and chaste as to strain belief that the scars that haunt its reformed anti-hero could have ever been inflicted there.

Read more