Category: Rock, Paper, Shotgun

I have never enjoyed those grid-based dungeon-crawling games. I dislike the very notion of dungeon-crawling in general, frankly, but the awkward juddery squareskipping rat-toucher games have always left me absolutely cold.

You will be shocked and aroused to learn that I preface with all this just so I can make an exception of Islands Of The Caliph. Does this mean she’s becoming more open minded, or just that she’s found a way to gripe and complain even within a recommendation? Who can say, readers.

What I can say is that I don’t merely hate it less than its genremates. I think it’s a bloody great little RPG, full of charm and detail that never drags it down.

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If you told me at the start of the year that Palworld would break Steam records, I would’ve done a hearty “no no” chuckle. But here we are, with the survival game exceeding 19 million players and Pocketpair probably wondering how they managed such a feat. With its success has come the inevitable slew of impatient people saying the game’s dead because it’s not received updates fast enough, or folks saying it’s lost a hefty percentage of its player base, and others saying its viewership numbers over on streaming services have plummeted. Palworld’s community manager Bucky has gently reminded folks that not only is this discourse “lazy”, but to play other games instead.

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Embracer have released their interim financial results for Q3, October-December 2023, in which they share details of the conglomerate’s on-going efforts to “restructure” and reduce their massive debts, to the tune of hundreds of layoffs over the past year.

Amid the talk of revenues, profits and losses, we learn that Embracer have laid off 8% of their global workforce since announcing their restructuring program in June 2023. According to the report, Embracer’s total headcount has fallen from 16,243 in the period October-December 2022 to 15,218 in the period October-December 2023. The number of Embracer studio game projects in development, meanwhile, has fallen from 224 to 179.

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Readers, consider this is a public service announcement for (deep breath) Tomb Raider I-III Remastered Trilogy Starring Lara Croft. Do not, for the love of all that’s ancient and holy, play this game with its newly-added modern control scheme. The original tank controls are by far and away the best (and only real) option for going back and experiencing Lara’s OG adventures from the late 90s, and I’m not just saying that out of nostalgia. The modern controls are bad, plain and simple, and are as much an enemy to Tomb Raider’s incredibly precise mode of 3D platforming as the tigers and wolves that stalk its trap-filled catacombs. They are utterly maddening, and the antithesis of everything Tomb Raider stands for. I implore you, do not go anywhere near them, for your own sake as well as Lara’s.

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The AMD Ryzen 7 7800X3D is my current go-to high-end gaming CPU recommendation, on account of its brilliant top-tier performance at a mid-tier price. The CPU normally costs around £375, but today it’s down to £350 at Amazon UK. This isn’t the cheapest we’ve ever seen this model, but it’s the best price recorded in 2024 so far and a solid £25 below the going rate.

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Last time, we conducted citizen science with a rare suggestion from a reader, and you decided that being able to reroll your build is better than instant-death bottomless pits. May you live a long and happy live refining by degrees, rather than slamming into hard lessons. This week, in celebration of Valentine’s Day, we turn to matters of the heart, of loves and organs. What’s better: health pick-ups looking like hearts or Doomguy’s pet rabbit, Daisy?

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A new update for The Sims 4 has added options to give characters vitiligo, the autoimmune disorder which causes patches of skin to lose pigmentation. Rather than a handful of preset full-body patterns, The Sims 4’s vitiligo impressively comes as loads of patterns for separate bodyparts, so you can create a wide range of effects. And no, you don’t need to buy an expansion for it.

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We’ve eschewed any Valentine’s theming this year, but Edwin put this in our news queue last night as a sort of dare for our evening shift, and let the record show I am less of a coward than Graham Smith. The Cosmic Wheel Sisterhood, a visual novel Tarot-themed card game from perennial (perhaps perineal, in this case) favourites Deconstructeam, was praised by Edwin in his review, and I was going to use the same strapline for this news post had he not got there first. Because now, in time for the season of romance, they’ve teamed up with sex toy purveyors Uberrime to create a frankly prohibitively massive dildo as an official tie-in for the game, which can be won in a free competition by three lucky people living in either the UK, EU, US or Canada (as in, they each win their own dildo; they don’t have to time share).

I mean I say “prohibitively”, but I don’t know your life.

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Granblue Fantasy: Relink is a JRPG that is ticking off many of the action RPG tropes. It would be in danger of becoming workmanlike, such are the number of things you can tick off on your fingers like a plumber ordering parts: boss fights against improbably huge glowing monsters, an evil god, catboys, numbers popping off enemies, women who appreciate the combat applications of a thigh-high split skirt, anachronistic sunglasses, horned giants carrying halberds of the same approximate size as a caravan.

In practise, though, you sort of can’t be mad at Granblue Fantasy: Relink. It’s built around a layered combat system that seems impenetrable if you don’t take some time to understand it. But really Granblue Fantasy: Relink is just a game so committed to the rule of cool that the entire setting is physically impossible, and every battle is a disorientating Panic! At The Firework Factory that flirts with being a photosensitivity nightmare. I’m not selling it as such, but it’s actually charming.

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The Silent Hill 2 remake’s State of Play combat trailer doesn’t give a full and proper representation of the game, Bloober Team’s president Piotr Babieno has observed in an apparent swipe at publisher Konami, who Babieno portrays as responsible for the upcoming horror game’s marketing. If you missed it, the trailer in question focuses on the “modernised” combat. It shows alleged “everyman” protagonist James Sunderland getting all Gears of Warry with some maggoty marionettes and rancid demon nurses.

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