Category: Rock, Paper, Shotgun

This week we finally got our raging bear gauntlets on Elden Ring Shadow Of The Erdtree, an even dingier and danker edition of 2022’s best and dankest open worlder, but perhaps you’d rather play a Soulslike with a Florentine flounce and the warmth of a Mediterranean sunset on its brow. A brighter, stagier variety of action-role-playing, which deepens the connection between Italian folklore and Soulsliking established by last year’s Lies Of P. Well then: cast aside those ursine mitts, slip on a pair of immaculate white theatre gloves and get your thumbs into Enotria: The Last Song, which has a demo on Steam.

Read more

In Sorry We’re Closed, an axe-murdering entrepreneur called Jenny is described in newspaper clippings as both a serial embezzler and as the city’s “wealthiest bachelorette”. Aside from being a dry reflection of tabloid reporting on women who commit crimes (bad woman! sexy, bad woman!) this is also the kind of incidental character-building you can expect in this perky, retro-styled survival horror. It plays like Silent Hill charged with the hot pink body horror of Porpentine interactive fiction. And judging by my hour of unsettled strolling through the decrepit tube station of the game’s demo, it’s a powerful combo.

Read more

Silkbulb Test is a game in which, going by its demo, you are strapped to a chair and made to answer questions projected onto a screen. You answer the questions by looking ponderously down and pressing the big red and yellow buttons on the desk in front of you. The questions begin with relatively innocuous, CAPTCHA-style inquiries, such as “is this a door?” accompanied by a picture of a face. A few minutes later, there’s stuff like “Are you alone?” and “Is it safe to be alone?” and “You are alone” and yep, time to smash Pause or better, throw the Steam Deck behind the sofa and go stare out the window for a while.

Read more

Witchy roguelike Hades 2 got a fresh update yesterday that sees a bunch of weapons getting stompier, thumpier, and, yes, whompier. It’s like the hammer of Hephaestus himself was put to work on the entire armory. The Moonstone Axe’s heavier attacks now channel faster, for one thing, which could make the most sluggish of the weapons a little more viable. I haven’t had a go at the re-jigged bashing yet myself but I trust from these patch notes it will be subtly noticeable.

Read more

I’ve set aside some time this evening for Destiny 2‘s latest expansion The Final Shape, which launched last night. My pal Liam suggested we play this evening because Bungie’s servers would inevitably go up in flames the moment it launched. And what do you know? The right decision was made. Are we smug about it? Yes. Anyway, the good news is that Bungie have put out a few of those fires, though there are still a few bugs to fix.

Read more

Just Cause creators, Mad Max developers and Rage 2 co-developers Avalanche Studios have announced that they will lay off 50 developers – nine per cent of their global workforce – and close their New York, USA and Montreal, Canada studios in order to “ensure a stable and sustainable future for the company”.

The announcement post doesn’t go into much detail about either the reasons for the layoffs or how exactly Avalanche will be supporting the departing staff, adding only that “our focus is now on supporting all Avalanchers through this challenging time” and that “we’re grateful for the invaluable contributions of those leaving and remain committed to creating incredible gaming experiences for our players.”

Avalanche’s Montreal studio had been open for all of eight months. The studio was founded in October 2023 after Avalanche acquired and integrated Monster Closet, who were themselves founded in 2021 by former developers of such headliners as Halo, Prince of Persia and Assassin’s Creed. Avalanche’s New York studio, meanwhile, dates back to 2011.

Read more

I was a diehard WipeOut player as a kid. Seriously, me and the boys used to roam the streets of Bradford looking for F-Zero players to bully, at least till the RollCagers rocked up and stole our lunch money. Mind you, I think I was probably less interested in WipeoUt’s racing than its trackside landscapes, which remain exquisite decades on – all those sweeping album-cover facades with their animate fixtures that thickened and solidified into full-blown peripheral cities as the series progressed.

I am similarly hooked by the worlds of Ghosts Ehf’s Phantom Spark, which are a million lightyears from WiPeout in terms of their influences and atmosphere, much as the underlying hover-jockeying is a million lightyears away from WipeouT in terms of its gentleness and lack of combative elements. But these spaces are just as mesmerising to fly through and think about when not focussed on finding the perfect line through the next corner, or avoiding a patch of grass. Small wonder, given that the game’s art director is Joost Eggermont, whose streaking astral contraptions and “small interactive moments” I’ve long admired, but never managed to write about until now.

Read more

From the moment I understood the weakness of my flesh, I thought: no bother, like. Everyone has different skills. Then, I realised that some other people might be less enlightened than me about the whole ‘having limits’ things, and that there was a lot of money to be made hawking implants. Enter space strategy story-spewer Stellaris, specifically, it’s spost specent spee-LC The Machine Age. It adds many options for your space civs, most of which I’m too rusty with the ever-yawpening sandbox’s myriad nuances to appreciate. But what’s this? A new origin that lets you play as techno-religious corpo-cult obsessed with transcending the limits of their meat prisons through cybernetic augmentations? I recognise that from toys! Let’s do some clicking.

Read more

Yes, I’ve played a portion of Elden Ring’s expansion Shadow Of The Erdtree and I think it’s brilliant. But there’s one thing I didn’t flesh out in the preview and that’s the DLC’s standalone levelling system, brought to our attention a month or so ago. Well, here I am to flesh it out! Be warned, though, the role of the system is a jarring thing to condense into words.

Read more

If you heard loud swearing last night in the Watford area it may have been one of two things: 1) me cussing out my (borrowed) Steam Deck while stealthily accessing the wifi from outside a closed public library, as I don’t currently have broadband at home, or 2) me subsequently trying to make head or tail of Mech Engineer, in which you take charge of a mobile undersea metropolis and send squads of painstakingly assembled robosoldiers to semi-auto-battle squidgy alien fauna.

Engineering a mech is a Herculean labour whose completion eludes today’s puny scientists, and Mech Engineer doesn’t aim to make life easier, whatever its putative status as a “means of fun”. Mech Engineer is a game with an attitude problem, frankly. I realised this on in-game day two, when the interface coughed up a bunch of damage reports presented as pieces of paper, which I then had to crumple up and toss away individually.

Read more