Category: Rock, Paper, Shotgun

When cute crafting RPG Bandle Tale: A League Of Legends Story was first announced at the end of last year, I don’t think I really appreciated the fact it was going to be the next game from the devs behind mortuary farming-me-do Graveyard Keeper. I keep turning this fact over in my head as I watch Lazy Bear Games’ associate producer Vlada Redko play a portion of Bandle Tale over Discord for me, with creative director Nikita Kulaga and Riot Forge’s creative director Rowan Parker telling me about what’s happening onscreen in front of me. As Redko explores the whimsical, knitting-themed city of Bandle as one of League Of Legends’ tiny fluffy Yordle creatures, it is, to put it lightly, quite the tonal shift from their previous work. But don’t let its cute looks fool you.

This is a crafting RPG with a ferociously long set of skill trees to master, with 40-60 hours’ worth of new abilities to learn, objects to construct, errands to run, friends to enlist and – crucially – parties to throw. For in the Bandle woods of Runeterra, life’s problems are solved by having a good old fashioned boogie, including the rather urgent issue of fixing the world’s portal network, which has collapsed in a mysterious accident. It may have a softer, fluffier-looking surface than Graveyard Keeper, but underneath it looks as though there’s just as much to dig into here, so here’s what I’ve learned so far ahead of its release on February 21st.

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I enjoy Games Done Quick, an organisation that raises money for charity (this year is the Prevent Cancer Foundation) by playing games at peak efficiency. If you’ve never watched it before, I recommend loading up the Twitch stream at about 1am and sort of gently dissociating while someone plays an 80s NES game you’ve never heard of. Speaking of, one of the headline acts for this year’s stream – which is running through to this Sunday 21st – was Peanut Butter, a shiba inu trained to press buttons on command, “playing” a NES game that came out in 1985. Although Peanut Butter obeyed his training, some technical issues colluded to snatch a world best time from him – but he raised many thousands of dollars, so good for him.

Peanut Butter is the latest high tide line in the efforts to put more weird and difficult hurdles between you and the controls of games when speedrunning or streaming them. And I must ask: where next? A cat? A snapping turtle biting pressure sensors? A Grey parrot to play a game without any input from you at all? Where will this madness end!?

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Hey! How would you like to contribute to the downfall of society? I do so by regularly tuning into Love Island and/or Married At First Sight. For those of you who’d like to do your part in videogame form, dev_hell looks to be the answer. It’s a first-person deckbuilding roguelike where you play as a software developer employed by a shady corporation to “reshape the future”, and it’s giving off strong whiffs of Inscryption. As much as I know dev_hell will be incredibly unsettling… I’m in.

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A round of videogame company layoffs following a period of “unsustainable” spending? It must be a Wednesday. Swedish conglomerate Thunderful Group AB – whose corporate possessions include Somerville developer Jumpship and several teams working on the SteamWorld games – have announced that they will lay off around 20 percent of their staff as part of a restructuring program that “stems primarily from over-investments made in the last few years”.

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What the hell is going on in Diablo 4 these days? “Devilish machinations”, would you believe. Blizzard have formally unveiled the brooding action-RPG‘s Season 3, aka Season of the Construct, which launches at 6pm GMT and 10am PST on January 23rd, and features a new quest line in which you investigate an ancient technology, the Loom, created by the mage Zoltun Kulle, which has now been purloined by the demon Malphas.

Along the way, you’ll both fight deadly arcane constructs or fantasy robots, and enlist one called Ayuzhan as your Seneschal Companion. These machinations aren’t just devilish, in other words. They are literal machinations, with all manner of automated foe awaiting beneath the deserts of Kehjistan.

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Dave The Diver was one of last year’s surprise hits, but though some called it an indie game, it was actually the work of Mintrocket, a subsidiary of Korean publisher Nexon. Now Mintrocket have announced their next game and it seems less likely to cause such confusion. It’s called Wakerunners, and it’s a team-based “battle action game” about heroes smashing at each other.

It’ll have a demo in Steam Next Fest next month and there’s a teaser trailer below.

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Prison Architect 2 was announced earlier this evening and will switch the carceral management sim to 3D when it releases on March 26th.

It’ll also have robust mod support, with “a mod editor built-in for PC players”, according to game director Gaz Wright.

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Top Spin is returning. The 2K Sports tennis series last received an entry back in 2011, which didn’t come to PC, but while there’s no confirmed platforms for Top Spin 2K25, I choose to live in hope. You’ll find a teaser trailer below.

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Against The Storm left early access late last year, but has just now received its first major post-release patch. Update 1.1 “isn’t as spectacular” as its developers had first hoped, but it does buff the roguelite citybuilder with som new art, UI improvements and quality-of-life tweaks, as well as new orders to make early stage settlement building “a little more interesting.”

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AMD’s flagship RDNA 2 graphics card, the RX 6900 XT, continues to drop in price over in the US. Right now you can pick this once-fastest-ever Radeon GPU for just $500 when you buy an open box model from Newegg. That’s outstanding, given that this card cost twice as much when it debuted in 2020.

This is the fancy AsRock Phantom Gaming D model too, which brings a snazzy design and a faster 2340MHz boost clock (versus 2250MHz on the vanilla spec).

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