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There comes a time in every cat owner’s life where they must ask themselves: how large would this creature need to be before it attempted to bat me around like a catnip mouse? I suspect the answer is “only as large as it needed to be”, so it’s fortunate that Monster Hunter Wilds‘ Palicoes are apparently bred for helpfulness. Is installing a mod to the action game that makes them tall as humans a form of gene splicing? Don’t worry, hunter. Gene splicing is how nature heals itself.
Another Steam Next Fest is drawing to a close, having had to compete with Monster Hunter Wilds for PC-beholding eyeballs – yet losing none of its knack for highlighting interesting and offbeat games set for future release. A quick dangle of our indie demo astrolabe indicates we’re a few months off the next Next Fest, though at the time of posting, there are still a couple of precious hours to download and try out the best samplers that this wintery showcase has to offer. Here are our favourites from the past week, and if you’ve played something you think deserves some more attention, why not share it in the comments?
Monster Hunter Wilds has been racking up the skulls, attracting well over a million simultaneous Steam players this weekend despite a mixed player reaction, with particular scorn reserved for its technical performance.
Now begins the process of patching the behemoth to address some player-reported problems with certain quests. Patching is sort of like slaughtering a Monster in reverse: sewing on horns and tails rather than chopping them off, re-embowelling the shackled form of the creature so that it can gallop across the plains, monstrous and free.
Warhammer 40,000: Space Marine 2 developers Saber Interactive are pushing back on player calls to add an even-harder difficulty mode, following the introduction of an Absolute difficulty setting this spring via game update.
Apparently, some of you muscleheads have been finding Absolute “a bit easy”, or at least, not enough of a shake-up from the preceding Lethal difficulty. Saber are open to suggestions, here, but game director Dmitriy Grigorenko also reckons that “we are almost at our limit in terms of how we can make the game harder without making it unfair and not fun”.
Lubricate your brain with some pure Omega-3 oils, a new puzzle game from the makers of Opus Magnum and Eliza has been announced. Kaizen: A Factory Story will be an “open-ended puzzle automation game from the original Zachtronics team, set in 1980s Japan” in which you’ll build toy robots, computers, TVs, and… katsu curry? Well, why not. Although the studio behind this engineer ’em up is technically new, the main designers – Zach Barth and Matthew Seiji Burns – are the same folks who brought you Exapunks, TIS-100, and Shenzhen I/O. This, my friends, is very good news.
Hello reader who is also a reader, and welcome back to Booked For The Week – our regular Sunday chat with a selection of cool industry folks about books! “Nic, you selfless paragon. You champion of the people. You prince among men. I can’t believe you put your favourite column on pause for several weeks to let me finish my book!”. Please. I’m sure you would have done the same, were you also a dashing genius with a moustache powerful enough to crack the pyramids.
To ring in the resurrection with style, it’s The Norwood Suite, Betrayal At Club Low, and Moves Of The Diamond Hand‘s Cosmo D! Cheers Cosmo! Mind if we have a nose at your bookshelf?
RPS’s corporate daddy has announced that IGN Live is returning this June. The in-person event aims to fill the void left by E3, with playable demos in LA and livestreams of game reveals and panels for those who can’t attend.
Coatsink have announced a sequel to Islanders, their pastelcore seaside town-arranger, which was the last game Alec Meer ever reviewed for RPS. Until he reviewed Kentucky Route Zero: Act V, a year or so later. If I didn’t know better, I’d say Alec had planned that deliberately to screw me up. But I’ll forgive him because the KRZ review is very good and thoughtful, and also because the first trailer for Islanders: New Shores is extremely calming. Here you go.
How long do you tend to spend creating a character in a video game? The correct answer is three hours. Four hours if it’s a Bethesda game, because creating a character in a Bethesda game is like rewinding the Raiders Of The Lost Ark face-melting scene while shooting at your TV with Homer Simpson’s Make-Up Gun. It takes patience to extract beauty or even just plain inoffensiveness from the Creation Engine’s sticky coils.
Hang on, why am I being mean to Bethesda? I should be directing my snide remarks at Capcom. It turns out the scalliwags want you to pay a small fee to edit your Monster Hunter Wilds character’s voice, face and body structure more than once – so if you’re buying today, you might want to spend a few more hours perfecting that Hunter physique at start-up.
AMD have finally confirmed pricing, dating, and specs-ing for their first RDNA 4 graphics cards. The Radeon RX 9070 and RX 9070 XT will be out on March 6th, and start from $549 and $599 respectively. While these are still relatively fat stacks o’ cash, AMD say they’ll compete with Nvidia’s RTX 5070 and RTX 5070 Ti – and considering the latter is supposed to start at $749, with most models currently going for above $800, that could make for a tasty undercutting.
