Category: Rock, Paper, Shotgun

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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The dramatic dismissal of three senior developers at Subnautica 2 studio Unknown Worlds gets messier by the day. In a publicly filed lawsuit, the three fired heads of the studio have accused publishers Krafton of all sorts of dirty tactics, ploys, and shenanigans to purposefully delay the game until 2026, all in an intentional effort to avoid paying a maximum $250 million earnout bonus to the studio.

In one bizarre episode alleged in the lawsuit, Unknown Worlds co-founder Charlie Cleveland went to lunch with Krafton CEO, Kim Chang-han, who told him via translator that having to pay such an earnout would be “disastrous financially and hugely embarrassing” for the publisher.

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Alienware is running Black Friday in July, dropping a bunch of desktops and laptops down to some of the lowest prices I’ve seen all summer. Doesn’t matter if you’re after a decked-out Area‑51 tower with an RTX 5090 or just looking for a leaner Aurora machine for everyday gaming, there’s something on offer. And it’s not just desktops either. A handful of 16 and 18-inch gaming laptops are trimmed down by hundreds, which is rare for models packing things like 5070 Ti or 5080 graphics

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Ex-Elder Scrolls developer Julian LeFay has stepped away from his role as technical producer on The Wayward Realms due to an ongoing battle with cancer taking a turn for the worse. OnceLost Games, the studio LeFay’s been working with for the past few years, say they’ve been informed by his doctors that “his time with us is limited”.

The developer’s best known for his work on the first two Elder Scrolls games, Arena and Daggerfall, alongside The Wayward Realms creative director Ted Peterson. The pair gave a talk together at 2024’s GDC delving into those early days at Bethesda, and the RPG they’ve been working on at OnceLost since 2019 is very much aiming to recapture Daggerfall’s vibes.

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Virtuos, the company best known for working with other studios to deliver the likes of Dark Souls Remastered, Oblivion Remastered and the upcoming Metal Gear Solid Delta: Snake Eater, are reportedly preparing to lay off staff. 300 people are cited as being at risk.

That’s according to reporting posted to Bluesky by Gauthier Andres of French outlet Origami. Andres’ post dropped same day Virtuos lead game designer Adrien Jouannet appeared on a Cyberpunk 2077 livestream to talk about the studio’s work with CD Projekt on the futuristic RPG’s latest update.

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“When our fathers stood against the Persians,” spake Greek statesman and general Pericles, “they had no such resources as we have now”. Time, of course, muddies the clear waters of specifics, but I’m basically sure he was talking about the ability for each of his men to keep a thirty foot ladder snuggled safely away in their rectal passage just in case they encountered any massive walls.

Which is probably where Total War got the idea from. Since launch, The Total War: Warhammer series has given each troop, from the lowliest Chaos Chosen to the bravest and most beautiful ratman, the ability to magic a ladder from nowhere during sieges. There’s a mod for Total War: Warhammer 3 that removes them, but now the end of arse ladders is getting official support, including tweaks to hopefully teach the AI how to behave without them.

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Counter-Strike surfing is a modded game mode for Valve’s bomb defusal FPS in which players skate through obstacle courses by means of a Source engine physics glitch. It has a proud history dating back to 2004, when modder Charles “Mariowned” Joyce discovered that it was far more enjoyable to slide off roofs than shoot people in his custom map Killbox. So he made a new map dedicated to sliding, The Gap. Thus the greasy chute that led to Alice0 (RPS in peace) hailing CS surfing as “the esport we deserve” in 2020.

People have crafted their own versions of the mode in games like Roblox, and Proper Game Developers such as Blizzard have seemingly taken inspiration – Overwatch‘s Lucio is surely a love letter to the mode. Now here comes SurfsUp, a free-to-play surfing game in the Godot Engine. Released this month, it’s been favourably compared to surf maps in Valve’s Counter-Strike 2, and is worth a pop even if you have no prior experience of counters or striking. Also, to clarify, it has nothing to do with that licensed penguin game for Xbox 360. Stand down, Cody Maverick groupies.

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Cyberpunk 2077‘s previously delayed update 2.3 drops tomorrow, July 17th, CD Projekt have revealed in their latest livestream. It’s mostly about giving you more options in terms of traversing the world, because adding in a whole metro system post-launch didn’t do enough in that regard.

The studio will not stop, even though they’re now making Cyberpunk 2. They’ve worked with fellow developers Virtuos to add-in some new cars, a taxi system, self-driving cars, and other stuff not related to getting from A to B.

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You already knew hectic 1v1 bullet sprayer Straftat was going to add 2v2 matches and a four-player free-for-all mode. You knew because I told you months ago. Don’t pretend you forgot. Please, it’s insulting. Anyway, the update that adds these modes arrived yesterday and it also adds – surprise! – a ton of new maps. Which brings the game’s total number of killing arenas to over 300. Straft THAT, other shooters.

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I hesitate to call Space Warlord Organ Trading Simulator “the best organ trading sim of 2021”, because Cruelty Squad also came out in 2021 and I worry about starting a localised flame war. But it means Strange Scaffold’s sci-fi stockbroker sim was, at the very least, 2021’s second best organ trading sim. Nice to see it’s getting a sequel then, called… oh no. Space Warlord Baby Trading Simulator.

“We aren’t monsters. You aren’t going to be trading babies,” says head of studio, Xalavier Nelson Jr. “You’re going to be trading stocks based on babies, which means you can short a baby.”

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