Category: Rock, Paper, Shotgun

Borderlands 4 is out now. Our Borderlands 4 review is not, because we have only just been sent a review code. I fear I was unduly forgiving of Team Cherry last week for not supplying Silksong code before release – they’re a cute, tiny indie, after all, albeit a cute, tiny indie with the power to break Steam – so let’s take a firmer stance this time: bad! Wrong! Don’t you know you’re suffocating games journalism, Gearbox and 2K Games, you swaggering chancers? Whither accountability and transparency in a time of choosy PR departments?

I should teach you all a lesson by diverting your brand power and googlejuice towards some other game instead. I think I will, actually. What else is on sale today. Ah yes, Try To Drive.

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CD Projekt have rolled out a fresh Cyberpunk 2077 patch with fixes and tweaks for some of update 2.3’s additions. The most noteworthy is what sounds like a pretty hefty revamp of how the autodrive function goes about conveying your ride from A to B.

If you missed it arriving back in July, update 2.3 was the final set of new stuff CD Projekt plan to add to the first Cyberpunk, a game they’ve been physically unable to stop themselves from delving back into over the past couple of years, despite Cyberpunk 2 having been in the works for a little while now. To be fair, most of its contents were vehicle and photo mode-related, with the autodrive function and similar Delamain taxi system heaflining alongside some new rides.

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One of my favourite pieces of internet television last year was Scott Pilgrim Takes Off, a Netflix anime series that pretends to be just another adaption of Bryan Lee O’Malley’s graphic novels before, rather brilliantly, pirouetting into a warm and sincere (but not overly self-flagellating) study of the original story’s tropeyness. One of the beneficiaries is Pilgrim himself, who’s forced to confront his own immaturity and entitlement: a reckoning that, one suspects, mirrors that of O’Malley himself, not to mention lapsed fans (hello) whose ability to parse these faults needed time to develop.

It’s a growing-up that continues in Scott Pilgrim EX, the 2026-bound sidescrolling action brawler from Tribute Games (a studio packed with devs who worked on Ubisoft’s Scott Pilgrim Vs. the World: The Game). While not a direct continuation of Takes Off, it’s apparently set not that long afterwards, and sees the new, more likable Scott teaming up with friends and foes to biff around demons and fitness bros on the streets of Toronto. I played about thirty minutes at Gamescom, and compared to Ubi’s 2010 beat ‘em up, EX appears to have done some maturing of its own.

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Tis the season for publishers apologising for screwing up their DLC rollouts, apparently. Even as Paradox Interactive appear crown in hand before Crusader Kings 3 players to say sorry for the buggy Coronations DLC, Funcom are weathering a backlash of their own over communication problems with Dune: Awakening’s new paid Lost Harvest expansion.

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Hollow Knight: Silksong contains what could be a cheeky reference to this year’s prior headline success story from a smaller developer, Sandfall Interactive’s Clair Obscur: Expedition 33. Are you playing Team Cherry’s new metroidvania? Here’s how to find that Easter egg. Beware mild area and equipment spoilers from this point on.

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You want an Assassin’s Creed Shadows update? You’ve got an Assassin’s Creed Shadows update! Well, you will tomorrow, September 11th anyway, but Ubisoft did release the patch notes for the action game in any case. Here’s what you can expect for the Assassin’s Creed Shadows 1.1.1 title update! First up is the fact that the game will be ready for its first expansion, Claws of Awaji, which is due out next week, September 16th. The level cap is also being raised to 100 to account for the expansion!

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Cooking is a thing I think about almost on a daily basis, not because of the usual pesky reason that is my mortal coil demanding sustenance, but because I love to do it! Having a family background in hospitality will do that to you. Of course, doing this whole writing about games thingy is a bit of a different beast, but cooking does still often crop up in games. My only problem is I often wish it was a central aspect of a game, rather than a singular, miniscule feature. Lucky for me, a new restaurant management RPG called The Hearth and Harbour from the team behind The Pale Beyond has just been announced!

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It is always an exciting time when Red Candle Games are up to something. The sheer variety they’ve put on display with Detention, Devotion, and most recently Nine Sols is nothing to sniff at. Now, it appears they’re gearing up for the next project in an appropriately mysterious way. Earlier today, the official Red Candle Games YouTube channel shared a video titled “The Dark Legacy of the Sun Tribe,” and it certainly is… something.

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The bar for getting me to write up a new roguelike has never been higher. I don’t care how many twists you throw into the formula, developers. I don’t care how imaginatively you have reinvented the wheel of permadeath and unlocks. I am tired of this genre/wantonly adhesive cultural phenomenon. I wish for it to die in shame and ignominy.

You’ve made a roguelike in which attacks are performed by assembling a manga page, you say? Well… go on then. Here’s a trailer for The Fable: Manga Build Roguelike.

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Look, we all know The Sims is a weird little series. You can torture your Sims, meet fairies and werewolves and vampires, have half alien babies. So I feel like I shouldn’t be all that surprised by The Sims 4’s next expansion pack, Adventure Awaits, seeing the return of imaginary friends. And yet here I am, taken aback and slightly horrified by the game’s interpretation of imaginary friends in its first gameplay trailer.

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