Category: Rock, Paper, Shotgun

Were we to pluck up a passing stoat, or wandering pigeon, and inspect their entrails for omens as regards the quality of mythical roguelike Hades 2, we would find ourselves covered in blood and perhaps a little wiser. But I have been given strict editorial directions not to kill any more small creatures for gambling purposes. So let us instead use the semi-public “technical test” as a portentous looking glass from which to discern whether this hell-hopping sequel seems promising. Fine by me, the approach is no less stabby.

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No Rest for the Wicked launched into early access as a bit of a fixer-upper, even by the standards of its ‘buy now, play finished game later’ model. The good news is that the grim action-RPG’s wonky performance is already being straightened out, with two of its three hotfixes thus far delivering a noticeable improvements, even on older graphics cards.

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Speaking to RPS regular Jeremy Peel in a new feature about RPG design, Amazon’s Fallout TV show and his time working on Pentiment and Pillars of Eternity, Obsidian’s Josh Sawyer has reflected a bit on what Fallout: New Vegas owes to Black Isle and Interplay’s very first Fallout from 1997. “A lot of the philosophy that I approached New Vegas with was the philosophy of Fallout 1, or how I interpreted it,” Sawyer observed. “Fallout 1 was foundational for me in understanding how role-playing games should be made.”

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As one of the Treehouse’s resident Atlus sickos, I was incredibly happy to wake up to 25-minutes of Metaphor: ReFantazio‘s director Katsura Hashino talking us through some new footage. We get a look at a new rural town and the activities you can get up to, like bounty hunting. Travel on your magic mech is compared to “camping”, which I wasn’t expecting. And there’s lots of combat on show, with transitions from real-time to turn-based battles outlined in a bit more detail. Oh and it’s coming out in October, which gives me plenty of time to clear my JRPG backlog before this inevitably takes over my entire existence for the foreseeable.

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What’s it like to watch a smash hit TV show set in the backyard of a game you’ve made? It’s a question which Fallout: New Vegas project director Josh Sawyer is uniquely qualified to answer.

“The show really does capture the aesthetic of Fallout 4 and 76, while also feeling like it is set on the West Coast,” he says. “If you’re a fan, then you can see where the plot elements have been pulled from in previous entries. And if you’re new to it, thankfully, those plot elements are fairly straightforward. So I think it’s a good show for fans and a good show if you’re new to it, even though there’s a lot of stuff going on. I’m certainly interested to see where they’re going in the second season.”

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I often regret that I didn’t get into football as a kid (note for people across the pond: football is what we call soccer in these here accursed, eternally post-imperial isles). The trouble was, all my friends liked football and I have an abiding hatred of popular things, a hatred that has obviously served me well during my later career as an online news journalist. I played hockey instead, which is the superior sport in that you get a big nasty stick, but also relatively niche because you need more equipment.

Still, I’ve enjoyed rediscovering football in videogames, and especially videogames that don’t treat football with much respect. You may have played or at least heard of Behold The Kickmen – now, here’s free downloadable Itch.io offering Cereballers to stick the boot in.

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The former multiplayer lead for RTS giant StarCraft 2 is working on a new real-time strategy game that he promises will mark a “paradigm shift” for the storied PC genre.

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The Fallout TV show effect continues. This time, it’s popular mod site Nexus Mods on the receiving end of the double-edged Shishkebab, as its servers struggle under the weight of people rushing to play through the series again – and mod its latter entries into games worth playing, presumably.

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Perhaps you are fatigued by orcs and swords. Maybe you yearn for a simple life of bucolic betterment to recover from your addiction to spicy wedding bands but still fear to stray too far from your beloved fantasy franchise. Oh look, it’s Tales of the Shire, a game set in Middle-earth which features not a single ounce of stabbing nor – as far as I can tell – any gigantic spiders at all. It’s a life sim about building a home in Hobbiton and keeping up with the Proudfeet. Maybe you will also get to lie around getting totally blazed on halfling reefer. Although I did not spot that in this hearthful new trailer.

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Until I played Tales Of Kenzera: Zau I figured people had run out of ways to make original platformers, but an Afrofuturist story-in-a-story framing for a mythological platformer about healthy ways to deal with grief sure did teach me to not underestimate human creativity. I really liked a lot about Tales Of Kenzera, and got annoyed by a bunch of stuff too – and the division seems to be that a lot of the former falls on the story and design side, and the latter on the mechanical side, which I guess isn’t ideal for a platformer. But still, I think it’s worth persevering.

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