Category: Rock, Paper, Shotgun

I can’t get out. I’m trapped in a tractor full of beer and spare tires. I haven’t taken a shower in days and a fly has gotten into the cab, buzzing around my ears, anticipating the feast that will come from my sweaty summer death. I just spent nearly an hour driving this tractor to the shop, buying car parts, and rumbling back in the dark. I took my eyes off the road for two seconds to turn on the headlights. It was a mistake. The road curved sharply and I went off a steep bank, tipping my tractor on its side. The door is stuck, the tractor’s wheels spin helplessly. There is no recovering from this. I restart the game for the third or fourth time, not knowing whether to laugh or sob.

My Summer Car is as hardcore as they come. It does not simply throw you in at the deep end. It ties you up in a cloth sack with 50 kg of lug nuts and dumps you in the Baltic sea. “Sink or swim!” yells this game at you, but in Finnish, so even that you cannot understand. To a certain kind of person, this is an act of love.

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The high-end prebuilt PC market is a battleground for premium prices, but catching a solid deal can save you a significant chunk of change. Case in point: Dell is offering the Alienware Aurora R16 GeForce RTX 4090 gaming PC for $2,899.99, a full $1,000 off the usual price. It’s a rare sight to see an RTX 4090 gaming rig dip below the $3,000 mark, especially given the recent uptick in standalone GPU prices.

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I argued with myself for several weeks in university about whether to go to a seminar discussing T.S. Eliot’s The Love Song Of J. Alfred Prufrock. The poem meant enough to me that I didn’t want to dissect it with a class. I wanted to keep for myself. I went in the end, and though I hesitated, I talked because I had things to say. It didn’t kill the poem for me, but it does have a slightly awkward gait now, having never quite recovered from the incisions.

I now have to etherise Final Fantasy 7 Rebirth. Cait Sith is splayed upon a table. It’s all scalpels, forceps, and oversized novelty dice. It’s a strange way to treat art you love. The feeling I remember most from Rebirth on release is how grateful I felt to be alive to play it. Acute, active awareness of my own mortality with thoughts like “it would be properly shit if I died right now because I’d really like to see how this pans out”. A personal ‘never kill yourself‘ moment months before the meme gave voice, as the best often do, to an obscure and precious feeling.

An RPG where your character sometimes knocks on doors before opening them? What a time to be alive.

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In the UK, May has hitherto been a month of innocent delight and sacred observance, with no less than two bank holidays. On May Day – a festival of ancient origins that shares a date with International Workers’ Day – the youths of the village garb themselves in daisies, erect huge candy-striped maypoles, and dance around them in an effort to get all entangled and possibly end up kissing. NO MORE. For May is now the month of DOOM. It marks the coming of a new Dark Age.

Which is to say, it’s when we’ll get to play id Software’s cacodemon-booping FPS Doom: The Dark Ages, going by a leaked release date ahead of tomorrow’s Xbox Developer Direct.

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“Your grace, the act of assigning blame is often as satisfying as resolving the issue itself,” opens brilliant little browser strategy Vox Regis by Sheepolution. From your tower, you gaze down at four factions, each with their own members and complaints. If any one faction gets too large, they’ll rebel against you. Luckily, you’re very good at speeches, which you can use to blame all the realm’s ills on other people. “It was the lion faction! They raised taxes!” you shout and point with one hand, holding a big bag emblazoned “taxes I done stole from the people” with the other. It worked! Now, the members from the other factions that are personally annoyed about taxes will come cull the lion faction down to a more manageable size. Bloody love a bit of politics, me!

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Many moons ago in the Before Times, a mysterious cataclysm scattered a number of seasoned BioWare developers across the face of heaven. The developers fell upon the mortal planes like comets. Where each landed, a game development studio took root. Inflexion Games. Summerfall Studios. Humanoid Origin. Worlds Untold. Archetype Entertainment.

Summerfall appears to be prospering, but many of the studios founded by former BioWare devs have fallen on hard times. In particular, Humanoid Origin and Worlds Untold have respectively closed and “paused operations” without releasing a single game. I’m raising a tentatively congratulatory glass, then, to Yellow Brick Games, a studio founded by former Dragon Age director Mike Laidlaw. The company’s debut game Eternal Strands will release on 28th January, and there’s now a PC demo.

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Or months ago, maybe. I don’t know and I have no time to check, because I’m playing the Steam demo for The King Is Watching. I wrote about it last year, but that was an older demo build. Things were different then, but the core of this minimalist city builder strategy remains: you’ll need to actively train your kingly eyes on your feckless underlings if you want them to do any work. Don’t watch the wheat fields, no food. Don’t watch the barracks, no knights. You’ll need those knights to defend from attacks too. Do you see how it all connects?! Do you?! Please, do your research. Here’s a trailer to help:

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The relaxing fish catchin’ and scratchcard gamblin’ of Webfishing proved itself deeply attractive to anyone looking for an easygoing escape. So it makes sense at least one other developer is looking to apply the same lo-fi principles to their own “hangout game”. The simply titled Sledding Game looks like a chill afternoon of standing around on mountains with your mates and going for a big slide downhill every now and again. It’s still early in development, as you can tell from the trailer below. But you’ll be able to embody penguins, frogs, and polar bears as they drink hot cocoa in log cabins and ragdoll into one another willy-nilly. Other cute animals are to be confirmed, but I am putting my money on an dopey-faced ermine.

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Steam are throwing a Real-Time Strategy Fest this week, encompassing discounts and demos, and people who like clicking on Orc-emitting huts are eating well. Of the new strategy game demos I’ve spotted so far, the one that interests me most is Calyx, in which you are at war with a mass of alien vegetation, which expands toward your base in a blossoming, suffocating avalanche of green moss and purple tendril. It seems a bit raw at the level of controls and performance, but the concept is very promising: basically, imagine if Creeper World 4 were a bit more like Ground Control. Here’s a trailer.

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Capcom have declared that they hope to bring down the recommended PC specs for open world dinosaur-tipping simulator Monster Hunter Wilds, just a month before release day on 28th February, and a few weeks ahead of the final open beta. Much like an exhausted hunter applying a carving knife to the flanks of a steaming heap of Rathalos, they shall trim and whittle their prize to its essential organs – hmm, actually we never see the concluding butchery in Monster Hunter games, now that I think of it. You just waft your knife around dramatically while the slaughtered quarry peacefully disappears and chunks of dino component materialise in your inventory.

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