Category: Rock, Paper, Shotgun

‘If you want to torture somebody, first show them your tools’ is one of the better horror game design lessons taught by Amnesia: The Dark Descent. I thought of Amnesia’s cistern chapter while playing through a later area in Lunar Software’s excellent first-person spookathon Routine, announced 13 long years ago, though only in active development for around five. The area centres on a curious underground tree, with water dripping from a hydroponic ceiling and sealed doors on all sides. You can imagine Amnesia’s Shadow manifesting here, clogging the roots with acid rot as it homes in on your comically loud footfalls.

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In case you missed it, Hitman‘s latest celebrity elusive target mission is all about Eminem. The rapper has Agent 47 take down his blonde alter-ego Slim Shady, it’s all very meta and a tad less appealing to me than the cameos previously made by the likes of Bruce Lee and Mads Mikkelsen as Bond villain Le Chiffre.

That said, a new interview some IO Interactive folks have given to Variety, in which boss Hakan Abrak makes clear there will be a new Hitman coming once the studio have gotten some stuff off their plate, has caught my attention by contrasting Mr Nem with murderbald handler Diana.

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Hey, Helldivers 2‘s just gotten a patch with some noteworthy balancing tweaks and fixes ahead of its latest warbond – Python Commandos – dropping. In short, a fair few guns now do more damage, some enemies have been made a tad less potent, and the drawback which usually comes with attachinga magnifying scope to your favourite bug blaster has been scaled back.

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Ubisoft’s Splinter Cell remake has a new director who’s served as its director before. David Grivel has returned to Ubisoft and take up the role he left when he departed the company in 2022, not long after being tapped as the remake’s original director following its late 2021 announcement.

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It is an incredibly difficult thing to sell someone on a game in just one sentence. What are you meant to focus on, genre, specific mechanics, an interesting element of the story? There’s not a right answer! I’m not going to figure out a recipe for success right here and now, but what I can do is at least show you a single sentence that sold me on a game called Burden Street Station quite quickly: “A surreal, narrative adventure game where you shapeshift during conversations to uncover how God went missing.”

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Around May last year, the one and only Ron Gilbert of Monkey Island fame announced an RPG that was meant to be some kind of mix between classic Zelda, and Diablo, and Thimbleweed Park, that last one being another of the game designer’s notable works. It never got a full reveal, or even a name, and unfortunately it seems it never will, as it’s essentially been canned.

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I can only assume that Halloween’s proximity to Christmas is the reason as to why there is so much winter holiday horror media. Perhaps it’s even just as simple as the fact that people like it when Christmas is a little bit messed up! Either way, I do actually enjoy some Chrimbo horror, so I’m pleased to see the return of Haunted PS1’s Madvent Calendar this year, which just so happens to have launched today.

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“Where the hell did that goblin go?” asks a mean knight of some sort whose English accent is of questionable authenticity at the beginning of the latest trailer for Styx: Blades of Greed. This is a reasonable question! When the goblin stealth game was revealed earlier this year, it was slated for a 2025 release, except the rest of the year is in very short supply. So, this trailer acts as a double way: a confirmation of a delay, and the announcement of a proper release date.

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If a CEO says their company is going to do that something sounds ridiculously unrealistic, or borderline unachievable if you actually take a second to think about it, you can probably assume that this is for the ears of shareholders. With that said, CD Projekt Red recently held a financial call (thanks, IGN), where co-CEO Michał Nowakowski made some comments about The Witcher 4… and The Witcher 5 and 6, all of which are apparently planned to be released within a six-year period. Right!

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Since 1873, the team at Rock Paper Shotgun have gathered once a year to select what they believe to be the best PC games of all time. Admittedly, they only started writing the list down in 2021, but try not to hold their spotty recordkeeping against them.

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