Category: Rock, Paper, Shotgun

I’m not all that big on ranking games, truth be told – why would I want to catalogue a piece of art that way? But seeing as you have me at gunpoint (just pretend for me), I’ll admit I’d probably put Celeste in my top five. The platforming is tighter than any Mario entry, the art and soundtrack are stellar, and the story really hits home for me too.

You can imagine how excited I was when Earthblade, the follow-up from developer Extremely OK Games, was announced, and how upset I was when it was cancelled a couple months back. Still, we’ve been treated to a small taste of what the game might have been like in the form of a mini-album with a select set of tracks from composer Lena Raine.

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Grand yet furtive robot action-adventure Steel Seed will launch on April 10th, developers Storm in a Teacup and publishers ESDigital Games have announced. Not heard of Steel Seed before? You would’ve if I’d ever written up that demo build I played at last year’s Game Developer Conference. I don’t know why it’s taken me this long to mention the game, given that it contains one of my favourite things in fiction: a machine the size of a world.

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With several Disco Elysium spiritual successors in the works from former staff, controversy regarding the exits of key team members behind the beloved RPG, and an in-development expansion cancelled, you might have been wondering what Studio ZA/UM will do next. Well, that answer is here. In a recent presentation held for the press, ZA/UM revealed a first look at their next game. It’s called C4 and it’s about espionage.

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The first enemy I encounter in the Steam demo for Songs Of Rats is a giant golem, encased in fridge-thick armour with fists the size of fridges and a thousand-fridge stare. If RPGs are good at anything, it’s making numbers scary. To wit: The battle golem has 40 health, and I have a nerf crossbow with pretensions that does one entire damage. I manage to do two entire damage, and he downs me in two hits.

This may well be what it feels like for a real life rat to fight a real life fridge, and in that, Songs Of Rats earns its name. The intro is all 80s cheese meets a desperate melancholy bolstered by bleak and bitty retro-futurist visuals. It’s also very pen n’ paper, down to losing health if you don’t have enough food and the limited action points you have to spend each day on exploration.

A trailer for you. It took some digging, I tell you. A certain other song about rats has monopoly on the search term.

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We all know what’s coming up in The Last of Us season 2, right? I mean, everyone knows what happens quite early on in the game, because it was a pretty controversial narrative choice so everyone and their mum has spoiled it. I haven’t played it myself and I know what happens, but it seems like streaming service Max is happy to pretend that everything is peaches and cream (more or less) in their adaptation.

A new trailer for The Last of Us season 2 dropped over the weekend that is full of drama and light on spoilers, which is why I’m staying quiet too, but it has been funny watching all of these trailers knowing that they’re lying just a little bit.

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A bunch of playtester footage for the next, modern-day-set Battlefield game has slipped past EA’s non-disclosure agreements and erupted all over social media. The footage stems from the company’s Battlefield Labs community testing program, and consists of multiple consecutive minutes of burly shootyfolks running down alleyways through showers of grit, firing very briefly at enemy troopers, and getting themselves bullet-bonked back to the lobby screen.

EA had been taking the videos down, but have seemingly now decided to let them roll. It’s the kind of tactical withdrawal in the face of overwhelming numbers that seldom occurs to me when I play Battlefield, because I always play Battlefield in the character of a movie extra. I am here to cultivate the ambience for other players by prancing around yodelling “INCOMING”, not contribute to our victory.

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Alta used to be a champion fighter. Now, she can’t even lift her sword. After she collapses in the forest, a kindly teashop owner called Boro invites her to join him. Maybe a spell of cozy gardening, cleaning, and making tea for customers will help her feel better? But it’s only an offer. You can go back into the forest at any time.

Obviously, I tried to leave. Firstly because I know how to accurately roleplay a stressed, overly devoted burnout who puts all their value in their vocation. And secondly because, come on. This game was written by Davey Wreden, the creator of The Stanley Parable. There’s got to be some kind of secret to ignoring the clear invitation of the game, right?

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Monster Hunter Wilds has a new update that makes copious little and large changes to the popular animal-hitting sim. As often with PC game patch notes, the changelog is a balance of mealy fare such as fixes for broken weapons, and moments of absurdity, such as addressing a problem whereby you’d hack the tail off an Ajarakan only for it to transform into another monster’s appendage. Also, you’ll no longer be able to cheese the Gore Magala by somehow dropping a dozen boulders on it simultaneously.

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One of my Foundational Video Games is Mazeworld, an elder Apple Macintosh first-personifier in which you explore a Carollian landscape of blue-walled darkness and rainbow-shelled snails. I was a young slip of a boy when Mazeworld released, and prone to daymares about crocodiles floating through the ceiling at night. Imagine my reaction to a game in which you are immediately confronted by a slathering, bodiless Cheshire Cat, its face a grinning smear that is only visible when it’s charging right at you.

I’m always looking for games that similarly hide themselves, throwing you into a chasm of occult potentiality from which anything might emerge, given the appropriate rites. Games like Nix Umbra, Death Of A Wish and now Nothing Beyond This Point, a topdown metroidvania in which you are a flaming cube surrounded by floating rods, dropped into a pixelart-scuffed void. RPS reader Mr_B recommended it in our last weekend plays thread, and I couldn’t resist trying the demo.

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A new trailer for Death Stranding 2: On the Beach has dropped. It puts a ten-minute dent into the upcoming open world game‘s enigma, but the most tantalising question still remains: is Kojima using that subtitle to deliberately remind everybody of the original’s most infamous scene? Bold choice if so, although not the only one. Here’s the trailer, complete with familiar mechs and very familiar bandanas. See Konami, this is what happens when you pop out for five minutes to re-release Suikoden.

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