Category: Rock, Paper, Shotgun

When Clickolding – a vaguely Inscryption-y sub-hour dread droplet – opens, you’re sitting on a bed across from a man wearing a mask that looks like someone gave up halfway through carving an Easter Island statue of Joe Camel, stuck a pair of googly eyes on it, then went to cry in the corner at what they’d created.

In your hand is a clicker counter. Moose-face stares. What do those eyes convey? Patience? Intent? Longing? If nothing else, they betray a deep certainty that whatever else happens, you’re going to click. If you stop clicking for a moment, a prompt appears in the corner telling you the controls. At least, I think it’s a prompt, because it might actually be a threat.

Left click to click. He’d like you to click 1000 times, please.

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The word “kiss” occurs 10 times in the latest blog post for the seventh major Baldur’s Gate 3 patch, while the word “bug” occurs 14 times. I think this ratio captures how BG3 updates at large walk the line between dealing with stuff like progression blockers, and sating the inexhaustible horniness of the fanbase. There’s more to patch 7 than glitch-hunting and snogs, however. Due in September, it introduces dynamic splitscreen functionality, expansions for Honour mode, modding tools, new endings for evil playthroughs, and a brace of tweaks for Origin characters.

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Recent SSD prices have made for miserable reading and even worse shopping, with the costs of last year’s manufacturing woes passed onto innocent punters. At least Prime Day 2024 is, if only temporarily, righting those wrongs – such as with the massive 2TB WD Blue SN580 going for a mere £96. Two whole terabytes of quality NVMe for less than a hundred quid? Nature is healing.

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Apologies for the two handheld-minded deals posts in a row, readers, but I’ve just noticed that the Prime Day 2024 has made the Lenovo Legion Go – a bulky but commendably unique handheld Windows PC – cheaper than it’s ever been in the UK. Provided you’ve got an Amazon Prime account, or at least the free Prime trial, the 512GB model can be yours for £569, a saving of £131. Not bad, for a device with a higher-rez display and more graphical horsepower than the Steam Deck or Steam Deck OLED.

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My favourite ever mode of travel in games is flying, so I was already poised (in mid-air) to really enjoy swooping around the world of Flock. It’s a gentle exploration game from the people who brought you Wimot’s Warehouse and I Am Dead (including Pip Warr, RPS in peace) where you never touch the ground, instead gliding around the strange forests and rippling meadows atop a giant bird with a beautiful trailing tail. Big Journey vibes, but more whimsical and colourful.

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My love of the chilly, lightless heavens is equalled only by my love of free things, and right now, Star Citizen ticks both boxes. Cloud Imperium are offering free access to the long-in-the-making space game until July 19th, as part of the latest Foundation Festival. During that fleeting window of opportunity, you can try out 10 ships and enjoy such astral pastimes as stripping wrecks, busting asteroids, or getting blown up by other pilots. If you’re an existing citizen of the stars, there are also festival-themed discounts of various kinds.

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The ouroboros is a snake eating its own tail: an infinite thing, a never ending cycle. While I do think this is a rather metal logo, there’s an argument to be made that it’s not current or trendy enough. With this in mind, I think the words “Call Of Duty” should represent the endless, unstoppable nature of existence. And with Call Of Duty: Black Ops 6 revealing its multiplayer open beta and early access dates, we must further consume and be consumed by the circular march of COD. Let’s dolphin dive in, shall we.

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I know as much about programming video game monsters as I do the exact flavour and consistency of the sands on Mars, but I’ve always thought the chief advantage of the Slime monster archetype is its economy. A slime, in most games, is a squashy smiley face. Why, I could grow myself one of those right this very instant, by doodling a circle in MS Paint and squinting very hard. Slimes do take more complex forms – chrome slimes, fire slimes, slimes with angry eyebrows, etc – but come now, it’s not on the same level as rebooting Lara Croft’s hair to billow in the blowback from grenades.

The simplicity of slime creation may soon become a distant memory, however, for Epic Games tech artist and current Duck Shake Games Asher Zhu is hell-bent on reinventing the homely Dragon Quest sludgeball as a technical tour de force on par with his previous contributions to Unreal Engine showcase Matrix Awakens. That’s the impression I garner from the below video of Zhu’s latest project, anyway, whose description also tantalises with talk of “Splatoon mechanics in dungeons”.

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We do love a good diegetic interface here at the treehouse, whether that’s the analogue radar twisties of HighFleet, or the myriad hefty flickables of PVKK (Planetenverteidigungskanonenkommandant. Duh.) The fifth mech jam is currently happening over at Itch.io, and the clear standout for me thus far is Armored Shell Nightjar. It’s a first person pilot-em-up that puts you in the cockpit of a grasshoppery rust-bucket carrying out a critical mission on an industrial desert planet. The more the intro text stresses the importance of this mission, the more guiltily useless I feel, because I cannot get this beautifully run-down mech to do anything of note, unless you count violently hopping into walls to be notable.

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So I’ve just hopped on my motorbike, enjoying one of several pleasingly incongruent classical musical tracks that plays from the radio, on my way to tick tasks off a list in the top right corner of my screen by scavenging an abandoned hospital. It’s a great hospital, by the way. Spotlight-headed phantasma shamble about corridors reminiscent of The Division 2 or The Last Of Us’s naturalia.

Striking, but also within easy reach of comparisons. And if Once Human was purely the collection of x from ys it very much appears to be, I’m not sure I’d have much positive to say about it. On the surface, what you’re getting here is a 6/10 third-person shooter from ten years ago that gleefully spills thumbtacks along any simple paths to progress with live service obfuscation, propped up by a detached crafting and building economy that has you popping mined rocks and chopped wood in the oven then taking out freshly baked shotguns a few minutes later. Its systems run the gamut from numbly enjoyable to being a source of major psychic damage, and even the simple act of replacing your initial tier I rustic baseball cap means navigating several menus, currencies, and resources.

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