Category: Rock, Paper, Shotgun

One of my favourite pieces of internet television last year was Scott Pilgrim Takes Off, a Netflix anime series that pretends to be just another adaption of Bryan Lee O’Malley’s graphic novels before, rather brilliantly, pirouetting into a warm and sincere (but not overly self-flagellating) study of the original story’s tropeyness. One of the beneficiaries is Pilgrim himself, who’s forced to confront his own immaturity and entitlement: a reckoning that, one suspects, mirrors that of O’Malley himself, not to mention lapsed fans (hello) whose ability to parse these faults needed time to develop.

It’s a growing-up that continues in Scott Pilgrim EX, the 2026-bound sidescrolling action brawler from Tribute Games (a studio packed with devs who worked on Ubisoft’s Scott Pilgrim Vs. the World: The Game). While not a direct continuation of Takes Off, it’s apparently set not that long afterwards, and sees the new, more likable Scott teaming up with friends and foes to biff around demons and fitness bros on the streets of Toronto. I played about thirty minutes at Gamescom, and compared to Ubi’s 2010 beat ‘em up, EX appears to have done some maturing of its own.

Read more

Tis the season for publishers apologising for screwing up their DLC rollouts, apparently. Even as Paradox Interactive appear crown in hand before Crusader Kings 3 players to say sorry for the buggy Coronations DLC, Funcom are weathering a backlash of their own over communication problems with Dune: Awakening’s new paid Lost Harvest expansion.

Read more

Hollow Knight: Silksong contains what could be a cheeky reference to this year’s prior headline success story from a smaller developer, Sandfall Interactive’s Clair Obscur: Expedition 33. Are you playing Team Cherry’s new metroidvania? Here’s how to find that Easter egg. Beware mild area and equipment spoilers from this point on.

Read more

You want an Assassin’s Creed Shadows update? You’ve got an Assassin’s Creed Shadows update! Well, you will tomorrow, September 11th anyway, but Ubisoft did release the patch notes for the action game in any case. Here’s what you can expect for the Assassin’s Creed Shadows 1.1.1 title update! First up is the fact that the game will be ready for its first expansion, Claws of Awaji, which is due out next week, September 16th. The level cap is also being raised to 100 to account for the expansion!

Read more

Cooking is a thing I think about almost on a daily basis, not because of the usual pesky reason that is my mortal coil demanding sustenance, but because I love to do it! Having a family background in hospitality will do that to you. Of course, doing this whole writing about games thingy is a bit of a different beast, but cooking does still often crop up in games. My only problem is I often wish it was a central aspect of a game, rather than a singular, miniscule feature. Lucky for me, a new restaurant management RPG called The Hearth and Harbour from the team behind The Pale Beyond has just been announced!

Read more

It is always an exciting time when Red Candle Games are up to something. The sheer variety they’ve put on display with Detention, Devotion, and most recently Nine Sols is nothing to sniff at. Now, it appears they’re gearing up for the next project in an appropriately mysterious way. Earlier today, the official Red Candle Games YouTube channel shared a video titled “The Dark Legacy of the Sun Tribe,” and it certainly is… something.

Read more

The bar for getting me to write up a new roguelike has never been higher. I don’t care how many twists you throw into the formula, developers. I don’t care how imaginatively you have reinvented the wheel of permadeath and unlocks. I am tired of this genre/wantonly adhesive cultural phenomenon. I wish for it to die in shame and ignominy.

You’ve made a roguelike in which attacks are performed by assembling a manga page, you say? Well… go on then. Here’s a trailer for The Fable: Manga Build Roguelike.

Read more

Look, we all know The Sims is a weird little series. You can torture your Sims, meet fairies and werewolves and vampires, have half alien babies. So I feel like I shouldn’t be all that surprised by The Sims 4’s next expansion pack, Adventure Awaits, seeing the return of imaginary friends. And yet here I am, taken aback and slightly horrified by the game’s interpretation of imaginary friends in its first gameplay trailer.

Read more

Hola, big Steam update alert, featuring some stuff you might already have tried in beta and a crap tonne of other stuff you might not have. Either way, it’s all in the hands of the masses now, so worth being aware of. Yes, “removed a setting from music settings that wasn’t hooked up to anything” is a change you need to know about, don’t question me!

You can find the full notes for this latest Steam update here, and I advise you whip out your best Sunday Papers pipe and slippers when you do, because there are bullet points for days. In the meantime here’s a quick rundown that you can safely consume without old man tobacco and weird indoor shoes.

Read more

I regularly go against my best consumer instincts and check out the yearly iterations of sports games. It’s not something I’d likely be doing without some Steam press account magic letting me dodge the yearly cash sacrifice for a game that usually shares a huge chunk of DNA with its direct predecessor; a sense of deja vu is inevitable, unless you’ve been sensible enough to either let a few years pass or wait until you’ve spotted a new feature that piques your interest.

With NBA 2K26, there was one such addition in my mind. As someone who’s been keen to see 2K’s ball-to-basket series get rid of the invisible wall it’d put up between its simulations of men’s and women’s basketball for a good few years, the first-time addition of WNBA players to one of the marquee male-dominted modes caught my attention. Granted, it was MyTeam, the depressing pit in which you fork over either real money or fake money – acquired across hours of grinding – to buy trading cards that may or may not be dished out via something resembling a slot machine.

Read more