Category: Rock, Paper, Shotgun

Soon after it launched in 2019, Taiwanese horror game Devotion was pulled from sale following some controversy regarding Chinese president Xi Jinping and Winnie The Pooh (long story). It was made available for purchase again a couple of years later, though it should have been a touch earlier than that as it was promised to be released on GOG late 2020. However, on the same day it was announced to be returning, GOG put out a statement saying they wouldn’t be releasing it after all. Now, half a decade on from that, managing director Maciej Gołębiewski reflects on the decision to not put it up for sale, after it stood by selling the also controversial Horses.

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Roguelike deckbuilders! They’re everywhere! It’s a bit of an epidemic, honestly, sorting the wheat from chaff is a tough job. Of course, once in a while a genuinely novel take on the genre rolls around, and PinKeep has done just that, a pinball game where you change the playfield as you progress through runs. And it’s from the devs behind the Far series and Herdling!

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Highguard was never a game that was going to win me over, as I generally only like single-player shooters if any, but it isn’t helped by the fact that since its announcement there hasn’t been a lick of actual marketing to help it prove itself. This, of course, has been the subject of much discourse, to which I will contribute slightly in the coming paragraphs, but the main point of all this is to say that actually, against all odds, Highguard is in fact sticking to its January 26th launch date, and will even show off some gameplay… on its release day.

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When I gave extraction shooter Arc Raiders a glowing review in November, I wasn’t certain it would keep me hooked.

Two months later and I’m 250 hours deep. Despite clear flaws – and developer Embark Studio’s insistence on retaining AI-generated voice lines – I feel its pull every day, and not for the reasons I would’ve thought.

I used to think what was special about Arc Raiders was that every round was different, that anything could and would happen when you met another player mid-round. What’s kept me coming back, however, is not the ways it’s surprising but the ways it’s predictable – the ways I can master its systems to squeeze more fun out of it, more high-tier loot, and more of its special, absurd moments.

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Har(c)ken to me, defenders of Speranza! Embark have just announced their plans for ARC Raiders updates over the first four months of 2026. The extraction shooter’s next season is called Escalation, and its offerings range from new maps and enemies to new Raider decks, changes to existing maps, and more Expeditions. The headline attraction is surely the “new large Arc” coming in April. I wonder how big Arcs can get. Perhaps an Arc the size of a map, like Cronos in God Of War 3? But, you know, metal?

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The Saudi-led acquisition of Electronic Arts is meeting with more friction in the US House of Congress. 46 lawmakers have signed a letter calling on the Federal Trade Commission to investigate the debt-financed $55 billion deal for signs that it could be damaging for workers and anti-competitive to the point of breaking US anti-trust law.

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Sine Fine is a “hard sci-fi” space exploration game from the avid stargazers at Vindemiatrix Collective, a developer based across western Europe. It is certainly hard to get your head around, but also, very promising. The premise is that you’re a lonely, functionally immortal AI, seeking a new home for some meagre frozen embryos in the wake of humanity’s extinction. Labouring across eons, you’ll send out probes to nearby systems and build outposts and communication networks.

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Playground Games offered the first in-depth look at Forza Horizon 6 during last night’s Xbox Developer Direct, in addition to confirming its leaked release date of May 19th. As you’d expect, there were lots of cars sliding and speeding through a variety of Japanese biomes in a manner I can’t wait to experience for myself, but one new feature introduced left me wondering whether it’s something I’ll actually take time out of my driving around for.

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The surprise game reveal at last night’s Xbox Developer Direct was Kiln, a pottery-based multiplayer party brawler in the works at Double Fine. Combatants take the form of pots, vases, dishes, and urns, custom-sculpted and fired by players themselves, and will usually end up smashed into shards of tragic ceramic in the following online slapfights. Or maybe not, as there’s apparently nothing stopping you from simply playing Kiln as a nonviolent pottery sim by sticking to its clay-shaping component alone.

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Microsoft are telling the world that the sooner we all switch to using generative AI tools in our day-to-day lives, the sooner we will 10x ourselves. Yet the corporation are still only finding haphazard pick up by videogame developers, including some of their own studios.

As executive producer Susan Kath tells me, the Elder Scrolls Online team haven’t yet found a part of development where they can use it. “Right now, we generally use it for things like this,” Kath says, indicating our call. “A lot of us get a lot of use out of Copilot, for meetings, for summaries, inbox organisations, stuff like that.”

But, in the case of art, coding, or writing, generative AI is not something the team are using in Elder Scrolls Online’s development, and its adoption is still an open discussion within the studio. “I don’t know what our decision is going to be, because we’re still having conversations about where we go with that,” Kath says. “Obviously we all have strong opinions within the studio. Obviously Microsoft has invested heavily in this. That would be a thing that I would imagine we would talk about in the future.”

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