Category: Rock, Paper, Shotgun

I like a good puzzle game, but to be honest I don’t play them all that often. Not because I’m bad at them, thanks for assuming I’m a numpty, it’s more just that I prefer games with a really good hook to them – think Portal as the prime example of such a game. Clean, knows exactly what it is, and uses its concept in increasingly interesting ways without overstaying its welcome. I have no idea if Chromatic Conundrum will manage that or not, but I’ve never seen a game use light as part of its puzzles in quite the same way before.

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There are two shooters that I imagine will never die, because they just seem to hang on despite being incredibly old and plenty of other games coming out in the mean-time: Team Fortress 2, and Counter-Strike (both Valve games, funnily enough – they’ve clearly got the Source (sorry)). Counter-Strike 2, which came out back in 2023, is the most played shooter of all time on Steam in fact, but even now the original game is still pretty popular. There’s literally more than 16,000 people playing it right now. And though it might not be official, a group of modders have come together to remake the 1.6 version of the game.

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I don’t usually get this excited about a CPU, but the AMD Ryzen 7 9800X3D is something special. It has been impossible to find for weeks, and now it’s back for $479 at Amazon (and at Amazon UK). That’s the official launch price, which is great because I refuse to pay a penny over it.

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Rise of the Ronin is just not having a very good time on PC. The game only launched on Steam just last week, where it was quickly discovered that, oh dear, there are a lot of issues. Just a quick look at the game’s reviews will let you in on its myriad of problems, but one of the biggest ones that’s cropped up is an issue where save files are being completely wiped, obviously quite an annoying bug especially if you’ve put a lot of time into the game.

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Even though the Assassin’s Creed series has become something of a hooded, shifty-eyed poster child for AAA bloat and excess, its more recent editions have understood the need to keep the hardware side accessible, never over-gorging on fancy effects to the detriment of performance. That Assassin’s Creed Shadows adds mandatory ray tracing to its already hyper-detailed rendition of feudal Japan might, therefore, make it look like it’s going rogue.

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I’m still learning how to say “ginger” in Ginger, which was recommended to us by Maw feeder Fachewachewa. It’s listed in the game’s dictionary, and I have worked out how to say “er” – A + space + down arrow – and “g” – shift + S + space + up arrow. But I’m struggling to string together these consonants and vowels into words. It turns out computer keyboards are not an intuitive way of operating the human voicebox. This, of course, is what makes Ginger fascinating.

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Half Life 2 RTX, the Nvidia-backed graphical overhaul mod for Valve’s seminal FPS, has a Steam demo out today. It covers both the Ravenholm and Nova Prospekt chapters, for an extended look at how much ray-slash-path tracing, RTX Remix asset remastering, and DLSS 4 Multi Frame Generation is being packed into the decades-old shooter.

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Two years since the first gaming-focused PCIe 5.0 SSDs showed up, there are some encouraging signs that these drives might eventually develop something approaching a point. Consider the Crucial T700, one of the first 5.0 SSDs to escape the data centre and make a break for our PCs: more expensive than the best PCIe 4.0 models, and slower than them at loading games. Useless. Now, though, we have drives like the PNY CS2150 bringing down the entry fee, as well as the new Samsung 9100 Pro to finally – finally – deliver a performance improvement.

Still, there’s a way to go before PCIe 5.0 storage becomes the new standard, and honestly, that could take another two years or more. For all the CS2150’s cost-cutting and the all the 9100 Pro’s speed, neither make for compelling all-rounders like their 4.0 cousins do.

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It was around the time the sigil-ridden corpse hooked up to a breathing tube pooped out a slithering, smiling garden gnome, and shortly after I had to sacrifice my arms, legs, colours and voice to a bunch of hideous trees that I realised that, hang on, this isn’t my current lunchtime favourite Bracket City. This is the demo for Moroi, a top-down “dark fairytale” from Violet Saint and publishers Good Shepherd, in which you are a horrible little man in a world of talking meat grinders, plughole maggots, and clamp-faced crawling things.

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Metro 2033 turned fifteen this month, prompting a blog from 4A Games celebrating the FPS horror series’ past while looking forward to the next entry. The unnamed Metro 4 surfaced again last January as part of a reveal for VR title Metro Awakening, following a 2023 blog detailing the studio’s experience under the Russian invasion.

“We do want to reassure you that work is continuing on both of our projects despite missile strikes, air-raid sirens, and terror still raining down on Ukraine,” reads the new blog. “These circumstances are incredibly challenging, the situation remains dangerous and not within our control, but we are currently as safe as possible, and we want to manage your expectations around the reveal of the next Metro title, it will be ready when it is ready, and we can’t wait for you to see it”.

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