Category: Rock, Paper, Shotgun

I’m playing Rusty’s Retirement as I type this article. This cute farming sim runs at the bottom of your screen as you go about your working day. You can plant crops, hire watering robots, harvest blueberry bushes, raise pigs, all while validating the spreadsheets from Paula in accounts. Paula! Where are the running totals!? I can’t find the running t- oh, they’re under the turnips. Sorry, Paula. My bad.

But can you actually play “idle games” like this while getting your work day done? Aren’t they distracting and obstructive? These are important questions. I plan to find the answers by playing Rusty’s Retirement while simultaneously – and dutifully – completing days of work. Let’s go!

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Among Us, the super popular game where you control a little bean guy to bamboozle your pals, is getting a bunch of new things this year. Developers Innersloth unveiled the game’s 2024 roadmap, which promised new roles, lobby tweaks and better “Bean Fashion” among a few other bits and pieces.

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A recent update for procgen whodunnit sim Shadows of Doubt added “Sharpshooter Assassins” with high-powered rifles to the game’s glowering alternate-1980s cities, with players having to work out the killer’s vantage point by deducing a bullet’s trajectory, before proceeding to a secondary crime scene to search for a murder weapon and witnesses. The prospect of snipers certainly adds menace to the game’s forensic sandboxing. The trouble is, the shooters aren’t always as sharp as they could be.

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Ready for a sentence that could only apply to the everything-but-the-kitchen-sink pop-culture smorgasbord of modern-day Fortnite? Here we go! A rucksack containing Star Wars’ Yoda has been temporarily banned from the battle royale game, after crashing games when players wearing the green Jedi master on their back do the Zoidberg Scuttle emote from Futurama.

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Despite being hugely allergic to horses – my eyes once swelled up so severely at a local fair my wife had to guide me home – I continue to be absolutely spellbound by the animals. I’ve been rewatching The Lord of the Rings this week and I’ve been genuinely gripped by watching professionally trained horses galloping across the vistas of New Zealand, rearing up against tennis balls representing CGI orcs and charging down the incredibly steep slope next to Helm’s Deep. Not to mention my love of just riding endlessly in a direction on horseback in Red Dead Redemption 2 and Assassin’s Creed Odyssey (helped by Kassandra’s wonderful command of “Phobos!” to summon her mount).

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Confident design is one thing, but there is confidence, and then there’s the almost reckless certainty in both your game’s sturdiness and the player’s curiosity required to trust a feckless, glitch-hungry game-poker with Prey (2017)’s GLOO Cannon. A recklessness in designing a sprawling, multi-tiered, metroidvania-esque space station – one boasting multiple-bathroom verisimilitude – like Talos I, and then immediately giving the player a gun that lets them make their own ladders up keycard locked grav-elevators.

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As I write this, Gray Zone Warfare is sat at fourth place in Steam’s top sellers list. I’ve seen loads of vids from big FPS YouTubers pivoting to it as the next big thing, especially for the Escape From Tarkov-likers. So I gave it a whirl, both as someone who wanted to see what these more hardcore extraction shooters were like and to play a video game that worked. Unfortunately for me, the game barely functions on my rig to the point where it hurts my poor eyes.

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Tangle Tower was a weird and cute point and click murder mystery set in a big weird tower full of colourful characters, so what better way for the devs to fill time before the sequel comes out than by making a creepy retro survival horror set in a regional theme park? Crow Country is like if Resident Evil was made out of Duplo: more chunky, less threatening, and easier than playing with a fully motorised K’Nex ferris wheel, but darn it, it’s still a good time.

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Even as Nic spent this morning writing lovingly about frogs, I was watching trailers of frogs disintegrating beneath an unstoppable ant tsunami. The game in question is Empires Of The Undergrowth, an RTS from developers Slug Disco and Manor Lords publisher Hooded Horse. The 1.0 version launches on June 7th, after almost eight years in early access during which Empires Of The Undergrowth has accumulated positive user reviews with truly antlike meticulousness. Here’s the release date trailer, which you should not watch if you dislike seeing various larger insects and small animals getting eaten alive by ants.

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Fans of Helldivers 2 have started a petition asking developers Arrowhead to reinstate a fired employee in charge of community management. The employee, “Spitz”, was let go following the fiasco in which Sony told PC players they would need to link their Steam and PlayStation Network accounts to continue playing the shooter. Sony and Arrowhead changed their mind about that after player backlash in the form of 100,000+ negative reviews on Steam. The kicker? Community manager “Spitz” was low-key encouraging players to continue the review bombing. This doesn’t seem to have gone down well internally.

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