Polygon.com (10), Rock Paper Shotgun Latest Articles Feed (100)
Magic: The Gathering’s crossovers aren’t always created equally. For every Warhammer 40K Commander deck, there’s a set that doesn’t quite hit the same heights (we’re looking at you, Spidey), but the Avatar: The Last Airbender set was actually pretty great. One of the big draws for fans of the show will undoubtedly have been the card art, though, and while Play Boosters can net you a handy collection to, you know, play with, Collector Boosters are where you’ll find the set’s biggest earners and flashiest designs.
When you’re playing video games against a professional athlete, you could be forgiven for hoping their rigorous training and competition schedule might prevent them from getting really, really good at games. Sadly, this isn’t the case for Taylor Fritz, the tennis star who destroyed me in Mario Tennis Fever.
The "Contradiction" quest in Crimson Desert assumes you were paying attention to what the culprits said and reading between the lines. Even if you didn't ignore their dialogue, though, making those inferences isn't exactly easy, since it relies on guesswork and wordplay in some cases.
Resident Evil and The Evil Within creator Shinji Mikami's new studio, Unbound Inc., has joined Shift Up, the developer behind Stellar Blade and Goddess of Victory: Nikke. The two companies announced their partnership on Wednesday in a video that offers strong hints about Mikami's next game.
The writing was on the wall when the official Cyberpunk trading card game raised more than $8 million on Kickstarter in just 24 hours after a March 17 launch. On March 31, Cyberpunk TCG officially became the most-funded game in the history of Kickstarter. As of this writing, the campaign has raised $15.4 million with 16 days left to go, already a solid margin above the previous record-holder: Brandon Sanderson's Cosmere RPG raised just over $15 million in August 2024.
“There’s a special place in hell for women who don’t help other women.” That’s a quote from former Secretary of State Madeline Albright, famously cited by Taylor Swift by way of Katie Couric (and/or Starbucks cups where it appeared). But Swift’s use of it — in response to some light awards-show joking from Tina Fey and Amy Poehler — is the one that echoes throughout the extremely millennial-coded new horror-comedy Forbidden Fruits. Swift only comes up directly once during the film, when Cherry (Victoria Pedretti), one of three fruit-named women in a witchy workplace clique, notes that she has a Scottish fold cat, just like the pop singer. But in a movie that’s largely about younger millennials’ precarious position in the world, Swift’s cultural cachet as the preeminent member of that generation extends far beyond her influence on Cherry’s pet.
In Crimson Desert, the Fallen Kingdom armor is the perfect set if you want a fierce look combined with good lightning resistance. It features vibrant red and green tones along with an imposing helm. While in the early stages of the game, this is a great armor to chase since all of its parts are located within Hernand. You just need to know where to look.
Nintendo's efforts to patent the idea of summoning a videogame character and letting it fight another character have suffered a significant reversal in the USA, even as the Mario makers continue a copyright infringement lawsuit against Palworld developers Pocketpair in Japan. The United States Patent and Trademark Office has now revoked the character-summoning patent in question, though their decision is "non-final". Nintendo have two months to respond and argue their case.
You might think there aren't that many upcoming games in April, and you'd be wrong. It's true this month is missing big spotlight-stealing hits like Resident Evil Requiem or Pokémon Pokopia, but there's a trove of indie games flying under the radar that we're keeping an eye on in between things like Pragmata and Outbound. God games, convenience store sims, more Moomin, builders, and mouse shooters — it's a strong month for variety, and value, as nearly all of these games cost a fraction of what you'd pay for a new AAA game.
It's been almost a year since KPop Demon Hunters first hit our screens, building a fervent fandom with its slick, stylish animation and songs that quickly rocketed to the top of the Billboard Hot 100. One of our personal favorites is "Free," featuring Rumi (Ejae) and Jinu (Andrew Choi) belting out a heartfelt ballad about their desire to run from the expectations placed on them. It was the only duet the two shared, until now.
April Fools' Day is here, meaning you can trust even less of what you read on the internet today. Plenty of corporations are getting in on the fun, including game developers and publishers. Some are obvious parodies, while others are ideas we wouldn't mind becoming a reallity, like how the Palworld dating sim started as a joke and now will be an actual game.
Stormgate is set to go offline-only at the end of April, with developers Frost Giant Studios having announced that the server provider for the strategy game's multiplayer modes have decided they no longer want to be a server provider for online games. That's a byproduct of said provider, Hathora, having been taken over by an AI company who plan on using their latest purchase "to work on compute orchestration for AI inference at scale".
Heroes of Might and Magic: Olden Era will release in PC early access on April 30th, Hooded Horse and Ubisoft have announced. The new strategy RPG from developers Unfrozen is the first freshly baked HOMM game in over a decade, and will launch with a mixture of familiar and new modes, spanning singleplayer and multiplayer.
If you're new to the series – there is the faint but horrifying possibility that you were not yet born, when the last one came out - it's a turn-based, empire-building affair, where you alternate between tending to your towns and sending heroes, fantasy beasties and armies on quests.
Resident Evil director, Devil May Cry producer and former Tango Gameworks boss Shinji Mikami is now making games for Shift Up, developers of Stellar Blade. You know, the one with the shiny bums and quite good hack-and-slash mechanics. The one that has a DLC version of 2B off've Nier Automata (pictured). Shift Up have acquired Mikami's new company Unbound, which he founded in 2022 after leaving Tango.
I'll be honest right off the bat. As a single player Elder Scroller, the Elder Scrolls Online's never managed to hook me for more than a few hours. I've given it a couple of goes, usually during periods when it's gone free to play, but have always bounced off its vast MMOiness. Might the slew of fresh additions coming across the next couple of years be able to change that and finally convince me to spend significant time with ESO in the same way I have Fallout 76 in the past few years? The answer could be yes, if the naval combat and underwater exploration Zenimax have just revealed are as fun as they sound on paper.
Ho, wasteland packmules and sticky-fingered ornithologists! Embark have released a sizeable Arc Raiders update. Titled Flashpoint, it introduces a new shotgun, SMG and deployable together with a Close Scrutiny map condition, a fresh breed of Arc enemy, some cosmetic bundles, and a feeding boost for Scrappy the loot chicken, which will cause him to dig up a wider variety of more valuable items. As warned, they've also permitted all those awful Shredder things from Stella Montis to infest the other maps.
Well, that's certainly a bold strategy. Mark Gerhard, CEO of MindsEye developers Build a Rocket Boy, has said that the studio are indeed planning to add a new mission to the game which will "share some of the evidence of the sabotage". That'd be the sabotage from a malevolent third party which the exec's been alleging MindsEye faced around launch for a while now, with Gerhard also claiming that an investigation into it is currently in the hands of "authorities" in the UK and US.
There is always a risk with a live service game, or any game with only competitive elements, that it enters the Cool For Some Zone. This is a space that exists within a given game and also around it, a place where you can pull off Sick Tricks as a result of movement tech not purposefully included in the game, but born as an incidental result of mashing buttons in just the right way. And until today, Marathon found itself in said zone, but Bungie have made the call to patch out the offending issue.
As pretty (and ugly) as the Resident Evil games have become over the years, there is a quality to the original PS1 entries that lingers on in the hearts of many. That'll likely be partially down to the permanently raised heart rates of kids playing them too young everywhere. But I think the thing that endures in the ever popular PS1 aesthetic in the indie horror scene is that nasty griminess that just feels so at home. And Vultures - Scavengers of Death, a turn-based, extractiony take on Resident Evil, looks like it'll stay true to that vibe.
Well, the time has finally come. After releasing almost a decade ago, The Long Dark finally wraps things up today with today's release of Wintermute's fifth and final episode, The Light at the End of All Things. It's been a long time coming (the free episode update was originally slated for the end of 2025), but it marks the end of a tough, cold journey. Sorry, what's that? It's "not the end, but also an end"? Oh, my mistake!
There is no such thing as a free lunch. Or, so the saying goes, but I'm pretty sure the ham sandwich I had at my friend's house when I was seven didn't cost me a penny. Still, in Crown of Greed, a fantasy real-time strategy game inspired by the likes of Majesty, the old adage certainly holds true. And with its release today, it can even be put into the test!
Traditionally, the words 'ergonomic' and 'gaming mouse' haven't really gone together, although Keychron sought to bring them together with its M5 mouse. It's a vertical mouse that brings your hand into a more natural position, while retaining the beefy internals to make this a suitable mouse for gaming workloads. Currently, it's down to just $60 from Amazon USA on the final day of the Spring Sale, marking out a new low price, which is always nice.
If you're looking to fit in a break from social media discourse in the near future, it's looking like May is going to be a good time for it. That's because ZA/UM's followup to Disco Elysium, Zero Parades: For Dead Spies, is launching around then. And what better a game to post about than one which has a studio embroiled in a whole heap of mess.
A major French consumers group is taking Ubisoft to court over the publisher's ending of online support for The Crew in March 2024, rendering the notionally singleplayer-friendly open world racer unplayable. They're acting with the backing of the Stop Killing Games movement, who want publishers at large to stop yanking servers and taking games offline.
If you've ever longed for your Steam library to be a bunch of shelves littered with physical games you can touch, sniff, and agonise about having to shift if you move house, let me introduce you to Boxroom. It takes all of the games you've either bought for pennies in a sale and never got around to playing or paid through the nose for on release and have put 1000 hours into out of sheer sunk-cost fallacy. It sticks their front covers onto boxes you can use to fill a cosy customisable computer room.
There is a tiny wild sun trapped inside my crystal tower. I hear its garbled voice and catch the yellow of its fire through the blinding white blocks of the summit. The tower itself is so bright on the outside you can barely identify objects placed on it, but I have smashed the crust and dug a network of passages, and it’s shadier within. A realm of shining fog, slick as tooth enamel, with fissured, fugitive reflections that call to mind the beautiful quartz spacecraft in Noctis.
The relative gloom inside the tower implies that the structure’s external radiance is also a reflection. It appears to be caught in the glare of some celestial body, but if such a body exists, it emits radiation invisible to the naked eye, discernable only from its impact on other bodies. The skies of Lucid Blocks are dark and cloudy even by day, inasmuch as ‘day’ means anything in the game. There is one major astral feature, a hazy torus that neither rises nor sets, luminous enough to orient by when exploring the game's procedurally generated landscapes, but not enough to actually light your steps after dark. The only real sun here is the one below. The one I crafted. It slurs and shouts, nosing the walls of its prison.
Letters have been sent by the US Federal Trade Commission to the CEOs of Visa, Mastercard, PayPal, and Stripe, reminding them that there could be hell to pay if they deny customers access to their services because of said customers' political or religious views. Potential discrimination against those with Trumpy views are the body's main concern, but their push could also impact the buying of NSFW games.
A capacious and speedy power bank is a tech essential in my book for keeping all your stuff charged, be it a phone, headphones or a handheld games console such as a Steam Deck. This Anker Zolo option provides up to 30W of power for speedy charging, and has a hefty 20,000mAh capacity in a compact size. At the moment, this power bank is at the lower part of its price cycle on Amazon judging by price tracking graphs, working out to £25 on Amazon UK and $34 on Amazon USA. The latter deal is part of the final day of the US Amazon Spring Sale, too. That's an excellent price on such a powerful unit, giving you a compact and powerful option that's a surefire hit for when you're taking on your travels.
With the first few months of its latest target release year drawing to a close, the modders behind Skyblivion are looking to make some "final" and "vital" veteran additions to their team in order to get the ambitious remake of Oblivion in Skyrim's engine over the line. This comes after a delay late last year, which saw Skyblivion's arrival pushed to 2026, following some accusations from a former dev that it was being rushed out of the door.
Amazon's Spring Sale rumbles on, and in its final days in the 'States, it's knocked a staggering 37% off one of the beefier processors in AMD's current lineup - the 12 core/24 thread Ryzen 9 9900X. At $315 from Amazon USA, it's dropped to a new low price from the big online retailer down from a previous price of $370 or thereabouts, although Amazon is stating a bigger 37% discount on its $499 list price.
I know exactly who Kliff, the protagonist of Crimson Desert, is. During my romp through the vast expanse of Pywel, he was a distant tower enthusiast with a side interest in lonely locomotives. Aside from those things, he's rather bland. Though, the actor who played him has now outlined that throughout the game's regularly shifting development - which included a name change for its main character - he pushed Pearl Abyss to make the character more than just a stoic line-grumbler.
An ancient, work-in-progress version of Rockstar's Grand Theft Auto IV has reportedly been discovered on an Xbox 360 development kit at a car boot sale, somewhere up Edinburgh way. Dating back to November 2007, about six months before the open world game's launch, it's said to contain a cut model for a Liberty City river ferry that once featured in a trailer.
While we only have the buyer's word that the development hardware - "a phat white Xbox 360 XDK with a Rockstar North label on it" - is legit, former Rockstar technical director Obbe Vermeij has, at least, verified that GTA 4 was once supposed to have a ferry, though he doesn't have much to share about the presence of materials for what appears to be a canned GTA 4 zombie minigame. Cor!
The Logitech G515 Lightspeed TKL first launched back in mid-2024 as a more affordable alternative to the Swiss brand's all-conquering G915 TKL. It retained enough of the fundamentals - solid chassis, snappy low-profile switches, reliable wireless connectivity and so on - to make it feel like a strong value proposition at the time, although with current sales, has been made an even better one. I'm currently seeing it for its best prices in a while on both sides of the Atlantic - that's £95 on Amazon UK and $70 on the Amazon USA - the latter is part of the final couple of days of the Amazon Spring Sale.
When James and I published our impressions of anime racer Screamer the other week, I mentioned I was keen to give its online races a go once it’d pulled out of the garage. Would the sights and sounds of sliding around its twisty tracks and slamming into real people make for as much fun as I’d had racing the computer in its story mode?
Much of the time, using social media is like fondling a wasp's nest, but sometimes, sometimes, social media is Nice. For example, Firaxis narrative director Cat Manning recently started a Bluesky thread "of small practical pieces of advice developers just starting out or unfamiliar with a genre might not know". The replies and quote-posts include thoughts from people with credits on fairly big games.
Inevitably, they run the gamut of approachability. At one end of the spectrum, you have Apex Legends engineer Jay Stevens jauntily observing that "a navmesh is a very handy thing to have, even in a multiplayer game without NPCs", which I maybe half-understand, and sounds like it could be the opening to a Broadway song of some kind. More digestibly, you have former Marvel's Avengers and current Legacy of Orsinium developer Keano Raubun commenting that the "biggest bang for buck in (open world RPG) game writing will always be NPCs having funny ambient conversations amongst themselves".
Hello, new week of PC games! Hey, I thought you'd be taller. Ah, I see what's happened: the Maw has eaten Friday again, and swallowed next Monday for good measure. As ever, the normies are calling this a "bank holiday weekend". There are various festivities planned - apparently, some bunny has been running around laying chocolate eggs.
Epic Games' mass layoffs led a programmer with terminal brain cancer to lose his life insurance, leaving him and his family struggling to find new coverage. Following news of the situation breaking, Epic CEO Tim Sweeney has said the company have reached out to the programmer - Mike Prinke - and that they "will solve the insurance".
Some people like to ease into the week, as though dipping toes into a frigid northern sea, and some people Monday Hard by wrapping their arms around an iceberg. Are you the latter kind of bather? Try this on for size, then: Riftborne is a real-time sci-fi grand strategy game that's controlled using an old-fashioned, "terminal-style" interface.
Seize your silly computer mouse and feed it unto the dog. Where you're going, there shall be no drag-selects, cursor animations, right-click menus, and all the rest of that piddly frippery you are accustomed to in these modern SO-CALLED "best strategy games", with their cosseting, 32+ colour visuals that even your dog might be able to understand, assuming you didn't just kill your dog by feeding her a piece of plastic.
Pearl Abyss' bashing of their massive open-world into a more palatable shape continues, with Crimson Desert's latest patch packing a bunch more tweaks to controls and adding some new animals to ride around on. It also looks to have begun swapping out those AI paintings the studio previously claimed were accidentally left in it on release, though the patch's wording around this change is fairly vague.
Sundays are for deciding to re-watch The Sopranos. Specifically that episode in which Tony gets a bad tummy and then talks to a fish. You wonder what you might fever dream of, if you too were to go and eat at an Indian restaurant, then have enough room for a snack at Artie Bucco's fine Italian eatery? Would you too dream of surreal wandering down a boardwalk? Would you instead dream something different? Would you dream of a platypus sitting in a high-rise apartment, looking up from the newspaper as he reminds a house guest not to trip over a potted cactus when they exit his bathroom?
Would that be the-Oh. Oh no. It's happening again. The person who's emerged from the bathroom, tripping over the plant on the way, is bald and reeks of alternative comedy. Ready the words and prepare to fire.
Video games, or more so the people who play them, I suppose, have this annoying thing where they assign a genre name as an insult. I don't want to reignite the discourse around JRPG as a term, but it certainly was used in quite a derisive and othering manner in its earlier years. The term walking sim was used more as a point of ironic degradation, even though it was perfectly apt in many ways. Then there's Eurojank, a sort of real but not technically real genre that describes ambitious but imperfect games made by European developers. And Andrii Verpakhovskyi, designer on the original Stalker games, doesn't think such jank should be geologically categorised.
The mystery of what you should price your game is one that I am sure will continue to remain mostly unsolved. There's just no right answer, and to make matters worse, there's currencies other than your own to consider. On Steam there have been plenty of occasions where regional pricing differences haven't gone down well, primarily due to games costing too much based on local wages. However, a new Steam update should now make it easier for devs to set better regional prices.
It sounds like Kingdom Come: Deliverance 2 developer Warhorse Studios' future projects won't be translated entirely by human hands. Earlier today, a Reddit post was shared to the game's subreddit from Max Hejtmánek, a Czech to English translator and editor on the developer's most recent game, where he claimed that yesterday, March 27th, he was laid off "in favour of using AI for all translations going forward."
The problem with playtesting is that it is impossible to predict every last thing any given person may do once a game is out in the wild. It's an imperfect science where you do the best you can in the moment. I imagine a live service game like Arc Raiders to be extra difficult, given how many playstyles need to be accounted for. And based on a recent interview, it sounds like some of the team at Embark took an approach that involved a randomiser determining their own playstyle from day to day to make sure they weren't just playing one way.
It's been a little over a year since the release of Wanderstop, the debut game of Ivy Road, itself a studio made up of Stanley Parable, Gone Home, and Minecraft talent. Since then, the developer has been trying to find funding for its next game, Engine Angel, but in January announced that this had been unsuccessful, with layoffs taking place as a result. Now, the studio has announced that it is, unfortunately, shutting down.
There is a significant danger that this article will have aged terribly. You see, I asked everyone what they were playing this weekend on Thursday, rather than the usual post-lunch scramble on a Friday. You see, I took Friday off to travel to Wales to spend a long weekend with my family. Who knows what happened between my polling of the team on Thursday and Friday? Perhaps Valve surprise released Half-Life 3 and everyone is playing that instead. Maybe they all went off videogames in the interim.
I can only hope they thought to go into the CMS and update the article accordingly. Otherwise, I'll look like a right plonker.
One of the biggest upgrades you can make to a PC setup in my eyes is to switch to an OLED monitor for a much sharper viewing experience. A lot of it is down to the deeper blacks, stronger contrast and excellent colours you can get from modern panels. It is more of a premium upgrade if you've got the cash and the PC needed to drive a high-res and high refresh rate screen, but definitely worth it as someone who made the switch to a 32-inch 4K 240Hz option just like this Samsung Odyssey OLED G8. This screen is down to $849 from Amazon USA in the Spring Sale, marking out a hefty $450 discount on its previous high price - it has been closer to $900 and this exact price in more recent weeks, though.
Free-to-play tactical shooter PUBG: Blindspot is being shut down by developers Arc Team and publishers Krafton a whole couple of months into its early access career. Launched on February 5th, it will cease service on March 30th.
The Logitech G703 Lightspeed isn't one of the mice I can personally attest to using, but it's got the makings of a solid choice from the spec sheet - a reliable 25,600 DPI Hero senor I've used in some of the brand's other mice and a reliable Lightspeed wireless connection, plus a more ergonomic, contoured shape, and up to 35 hours of battery life.
Currently, this rodent is on the receiving end of a hefty discount in the 'States for Amazon's Spring Sale which makes it $60 from Amazon USA - that's its best price of 2026, and a solid price for such a potent rodent. It's £53 from Amazon UK, for reference, although that's a much more minor discount against its price in previous weeks.
Crusader Kings 3's latest "Realm Maintenance" update, all about improving and adding to the base game's established systems, is out now in beta form. It includes a big ledger full of spreadsheets you can use to keep track of the world, a rework of accolades, and makes the lives of older rulers even more miserable.
Slay the Spire 2 developers Mega Crit have rolled back aspects of last week's big STS2 balancing update, which nerfed a number of cards according to the broad objective of making infinites – that is, cunning combos that let you prolong your turn forever - harder to accomplish.
The patch in question isn't even formally part of the roguelite deckbuilder yet – you have to opt into the Steam beta branch to test it out. But it has sparked a ruckus nonetheless among the Spire Slayers, some of whom attempted to review bomb the game despite Mega Crit's protestations that Slay the Spire 2 is still in early access development.
Though there are things to love in Crimson Desert if you're open to hobbies like tower ogling or ghost train riding, the mammoth action adventure blob's story is arguably its biggest weakness. Well, aside from those AI paintings which were left in it on release. Developers Pearl Abyss, currently in the midst of trying to patch up a lot of the other holes players and critics have pointed out, have now made clear they're aware that their tale of people witrh grey manes fighting evil bears isn't the best.
In ZIPIT's splendid story-driven photography sim The Wide Open Sky is Running out of Catfish, you are a young witch living on the back of a huge, aerial catfish – a benevolent flying island of trees, fountains and windchimes that puts me in mind of The Legend of Zelda: Wind Waker.
The catfish is sad that the skies are so empty nowadays, so you must use a magic flute - see, we're definitely in Zelda's orbit - to transform into a similarly gravity-agnostic eel, which eats clouds and poops them out as various creatures. Snapping photos of those creatures grants you seashells, which turn into more clouds when thrown into the fountain.
Teyon and Nacon have revealed Hunter: The Reckoning – Deathwish, a new "semi open world" first-person single-player RPG set in the World of Darkness table-top universe. Where stablemate series Vampire: The Masquerade is about a secret society of bloodsuckers, Hunter is about the humans who stalk and kill those bloodsuckers together with werewolves, ghouls and, well, anything remotely monstrous or supernatural.
Snap. Up until now, that's been the sort of sound you only hear in Resident Evil Requiem when a spooky monster may or may not be sneaking up on you. Thanks to a new patch from Capcom, though, it could now also signify that you've just taken a cute photo of the spooky monster about to ruin Grace or Leon's day.
The JSAUX ModCase is our second favourite Steam Deck case, serving as a more affordable alternative to the Dbrand Project Killswitch. It's an affordable means of protecting your handheld PC while also having the modularity of more expensive cases. The deal we've spotted is on the base option, which is coming in at $25 from Amazon US in the current Spring Sale. You can push to other options with more accessories, although those aren't discounted to the same extent at the moment.
As hinted at by previous peeks at it, which were set in 1915 and 1943, Like A Dragon devs RGG Studio are jumping around in time with their upcoming historical brawler Stranger than Heaven. They've confirmed via a fresh trailer that it's set in five different decades and, arguably more surprisingly, five different Japanese cities.
Alien Deathstorm is the new sci-fi FPS from Rebellion, developers of skull-popping shooter series Sniper Elite and the recent, Very English survival game Atomfall. What is Alien Deathstorm about? Why, it's a slice-of-life story about a neurodivergent person growing up in the big city HOHO OF COURSE NOT, it's a game about aliens in which there is a storm that will make you dead, set in another collapsing extra-terrestrial colony full of dependably phat, lived-in 1980s technology. Here's the announcement trailer.
I've already spoken once today about my intrigue around permanency today, so why not keep that train running. Star Wars Zero Company, a strategy game with XCOM in its veins and execution, is continuing on its spiritual predecessors lineage by having the most controversial of all video deaths as a main feature: permadeath.
The appearance of AI in art is nothing new, hell, Mr. Movies himself Steven Spielberg literally made A.I. Artificial Intelligence near the start of the millenia. But that was the Cool AI, where robots could be people, too, if we let them. Now what we have is the Donkey Bollocks AI that produces garbage facsimiles of things we know and actually like. But that doesn't mean it's not worth considering AI, and I really need you to bear with me here, within our art, as that's exactly what the team behind Pragmata did (without touching the stuff).
It would be a reasonable assumption to make that there are only so many variations on football games you can make. Ultimately, no matter how many bells, whistles, or rocket powered cars you throw at it, it always comes down to getting a ball in a net and shouting SCOOOOOORE. Except in the case of Nutmeg!, a "nostalgic deckbuilding football manager" which looks like it features more faxing than any sort of kicking, but I mean that in an endearing way, promise.
I quite like a bit of permanency in games. Well, like might be too positive, I'm more intrigued by it and the friction it provides. It's interesting that if you're silly enough to kill an NPC in Dark Souls, for example, that's it, no take backsies. So despite honestly not caring all that much for zombie games, I'm still a bit interested in Dying Light: The Beast and its new Restored Land update which introduces a mode where if you kill a zombie once, it truly is gone for good.
We've all been there. You and two other morally dubious alien treasure hunters have an expedition go wrong, and find yourselves having to tactically blast through some baddies in order to secure some relics in timely fashion. Well, at least that's situation the three protagonists of Vaunted, a newly announced tactical RPG, find themselves in.
STALKER 2: Heart of Chornobyl is getting its first proper expansion this year, titled Cost of Hope, and it looks stuffed to its icky mutant gills with classic STALKER series beats that the base game – while a powerfully engrossing survival FPS – missed out on. The Chornobyl Nuclear Power Plant returns as an explorable, doubtless horrible addition to the game’s open world, and the story concerns the conflict between the rival Freedom and Duty factions that’s been simmering since the original STALKER.
A new Life is Strange game doesn't always feel particularly odd given its sort of steady turn into a franchise. The last one was only in 2024 with Life Is Strange: Double Exposure, bringing back the original game's Max Caulfield. This wasn't necessarily a welcome return for all, and ended up being somewhat of a mixed bag. And now we come to now with a potentially odd entry, Life is Strange: Reunion, which is out today. As the subtitle suggests, and where the oddness comes in, Reunion reunites Max with the surprising return of Chloe Price. Big spoilers ahead for Double Exposure, by the way!
I dunno if you heard earlier this month, but PlayStation are reportedly breaking up with us PC folks, at least when it comes to the PS5's biggest singleplayer hitters. Asked where Returnal devs Housemarque's new game Saros - due out next month - fits into that, its director has opted to remain tight-lipped.
Having re-launched Splitgate 2 as Spligate: Arena Reloaded late last year, 1047 Games have now kicked off early work on a new shooter. Details are scarce aside from the fact you'll be able to move around in it and that 1047 CEO Ian Proulx reckons it should appeal to fans of Titanfall and Call of Duty Blops 3. Oh, and that you can sign-up for to playtest it now.
I have two dreams as mayor of an island town in Nova Roma, the new early access city-building game from Lion Shield and Hooded Horse. One is to erect a fantastic water network for my people - a sturdy yet poetic lattice of aqueducts, following their deft gradations down from the mountain rivers to cisterns gracefully spaced amid the insulae, forums, circuses and temples. In my reborn Rome, no populous bathhouse, tinkling fountain, or humble latrine shall ever run dry. With my other hand, I shall raise mighty dams, diverting the rivers away from my walls to avoid flooding in times of heavy rainfall, while exposing velvety expanses of buildable, tillable soil.
My citizens will learn to treat water frivolously, swilling and pissing it away in their decadence, much as they did in the Rome of old. The fools! For when my empire of hydration is complete, I will ascend the slopes and whimsically commission one final dam. Trusting in my stewardship – for what reason have I given them to disobey? - the citizens shall toil day and night to finish the structure. Then, when the last stone is laid and the sluices slam shut, they shall gaze in horror as a tidal wave engulfs their fair metropolis and sweeps all their precious bloody bathhouses away.
AMD's Ryzen 9000 series of gaming CPUs might not have provided the hefty uplift in performance that we expected, after the revolution that the AM5 socket chips first brought, but they've nonetheless proven to be more efficient and slightly quicker options than the Ryzen 7000 chips they replaced. Slap bang in the middle of this range of options is the Ryzen 7 9700X, an eight-core and 16-thread processor that can be had for decent money. It's currently $265 from Amazon US in the Spring Sale, working out to a genuine reduction on a decent option for most folks that makes for a much more compelling option if you want to change over to AM5 from an older system, or want to upgrade your existing rig to the latest generation.
Up until Bethesda's announcement that it'll be getting some robot army DLC next month and the yassification of its faces by Nvidia's DLSS 5 tech, I'd not thought about seeing how Starfield's modding scene is getting on for a little while. That's now changed, because they've finally gotten seamless custom animations working.
Perhaps sensing competition in the field of Japan-flavoured arcade racing games, Forza Horizon 6 devs Playground Games have revealed the open-world vroomer’s system requirements. Agreeably, they’re a sensible balance of attainable low-end fare – at 1080p, a GTX 1650 and 16GB of RAM are apparently all that’s needed for 60fps – and the kind of hulking graphics bricks that you’d expect for 4K ray tracing. Only the most baby-oiled of hypercars for the RX 9070 XT owners, you understand, though support for lil’ handhelds like the Steam Deck is confirmed as well.
Players and developers should boycott Nvidia's AI-stuffed DLSS 5 tech, with hopes that it'll force the compny to "think about going back to giving us what we want". That's the appeal being made by Dave Oshry, CEO of indie studio New Blood Interactive, who's been asked for his take on the neural rendering gubbins Nvidia exec Jensen Huang's recently been adopting a multitude of tones as he's tried to convince critis that they've just got it all wrong.
I am shocked to discover that this is the first time we've written about Amberspire, the new sci-fi city builder from Nic Tringali, developer of starfaring monastic strategy game The Banished Vault. Shocked, I tell you!
It's set on a gas giant moon, looks a bit like isometric Sable, features dice with arcane symbols, and challenges you to "cohabit" with an ecology of ooze, silica and rust, rather than turning everything into a mall. It's the kind of speculative fiction racket an eco-vibing hipster like myself goes crackers over, and here I am announcing Amberspire to you with the release barely a month away on 6th May. I can only hang my head in shame, and offer you this trailer.
House House were kind enough to keep a video of my hands-on session with Big Walk, filmed by one of the participating PRs. Generally, a full video of a preview event including player audio is a lifesaver for a journalist, struggling to keep notes while pushing buttons. But in this case, I don't want to watch the Big Walk video, because then I would hear what the other players were saying when I wasn't there.
You see, I fell down a cliff midway through Big Walk, and spent the night floundering about in the ocean. Eventually, a developer armed with a big, ball-shaped lamp tracked me down and ushered me back up, hoisting me onto his shoulders so that I could leap to a rock. Nights in Big Walk last moments. I was gone for the length of a luxurious toilet break. But still, those were moments in which the others were gathered, waiting for me. Perhaps they were making fun of me. I don't want to know.
Phwoar, look at that striking steeple on the horizon, I thought after arriving in Crimson Desert’s first town.
I was playing a man I was fairly sure I couldn’t give a toss about, embroiled in a conflict I also couldn’t give a toss about, but that tower. Man, it took my breath away. Who could dwell within it? Who first built it? Can I climb it? Where did they get all of that stone? These questions buzzed around my belfry-addled brain. ‘Hey, stay on track,’ argued another bit of my grey matter, ‘you’ve got a train to find’. ‘Train can wait,’ I replied, ‘must take in the visual majesty of this faraway tower and maybe visit it to see if there’s anything interesting to do there’.
One of my most useful tech purchases in recent times hasn't been anythng big or flashy, but a humble Ugreen SSD enclosure. It essentially takes any spare M.2 drive you might have laying around and turns it into a fast external SSD, with minimul fuss and for a lot less cash than just buying a whole new portable drive. I've done this with a 2TB Crucial P310 I had left over, and it's worked a treat for the last year. At Amazon, it's down to £16 in the UK and $16 in the USA. The latter is for Amazon's Spring Sale in the States, while the one in the UK is more of a cyclical discount, judging by the price history.
High-resolution monitors have become a lot cheaper over recent years, in contrast to a most internal component types, which are currently in a race to see who can plunge us into financial destitution the fastest. It wasn’t that long ago that the 4K, 160Hz, 27in panel of the Asus ROG Strix XG27UCG would put it out of reach for anyone who didn’t have access to a sovereign wealth fund, yet here it is, discounted to just £319 / $299. That’s only about half what it would cost to buy a new graphics card capable of actually running 4K games.
I’ve been through much with my Razer Wolverine V3 Pro. Malenia, Blade of Miquella. Groal the Great. The bit in Dispatch where you have to choose a favourite doughnut and "Chocolate" isn’t an option. Then there’s the psychic shock of having a game controller than costs more than, say, 40 quid to begin with – it’s not something that immediately feels right.
The Wolverine V3 Pro itself, however, feels very right indeed. It's a solid and endlessly comfortable wireless pad, whose buttons are enriched with the pleasant mechanical clickiness of a high-end mouse. Cost-wise, it’s also a lot less now than when I got mine: Amazon US has it at 35% off during their Spring sale, while in the UK, Scan has it down from £190 to £130. Still premium, but worth it, in my eyes. And hands.
It takes a lot to get me interested in anything tower-defensive these days, and I'm getting pretty grouchy about paper-based aesthetics, too, but "minimalist strategy game" Painted Kingdoms combines these trends to promising effect. It takes place in a living book, where each chapter is illustrated according to a different cultural heritage, extending from Europe to China.
As a roving general-hero, your job is to build a settlement by filling in the blank pages with your magic brush, giving rise to both fortifications and lovely wild spaces. Then, you must fight off waves of badniks who threaten to set the paper alight, reducing your pop-up terrain to ash.
Slay the Spire 2's multiplayer component is a lovely, sociable game of tactical chemistry and unity in the face of hideous door-based lifeforms, but inevitably, the modders are trying to ruin the bonhomie by adding PvP.
The new Steam Machine remains an almost tragically distant prospect, despite Valve’s attempts at reassurance. But y’ know what the next best thing is? Not caring about hardware release dates, obviously. The second next best thing is to equip a Steam Deck with Ugreen’s handy 9-in-1 docking station, which is down from $60 to $40 in the Amazon US Spring Sale – and isn’t all that expensive in the UK either.
Following Epic Games' mass layoffs, a Fortnite producer has said that the devs left behind "cannot even fully understand" the sort of impact the job cuts will have on the game during this year and into the future.
The Asus ROG Strix Scope II 96 Wireless has been a long-time favourite mechanical keyboard of mine. That's because of its highly functional, near-full-size layout, its smooth, lubricated switches, and just the sense that the entire package feels thoughtful and well-put-together. I tried looking for a deal for in in the UK, sadly to no avail, though our US pals will be happy to learn it's currently $130 from Amazon US in their Spring Sale (that, for some strange reason, is happening over a week after the UK one ended).
Like many people at companies preoccupied with discovering the next "goose that lays the golden egg", Half-Life 2 and Portal writer Erik Wolpaw has been "poking around" with generative AI. He and a small team at Valve have been testing out different applications, in what Wolpaw assures us isn't a "concerted" effort at implementing the soul-regurgitating, workforce-abrading gadgetry in any particular new game.
Wolpaw's current feeling is that generative AI isn't very good at anything "creative", like cracking jokes. But he does think Large Language Models could make for entertaining NPC voice reactions in games such as Grand Theft Auto and, indeed, Wolpaw's own Left 4 Dead, because AI is marvellous at being a fawning little gopher. It is fantastic at "going along with whatever insane thing you say and kind of adjusting to the flow of that".
Around the turn of the new year, Fallout: London developers Team FOLON teased plans to drop the second of the brilliantly British Fallout 4 mod's second DLC in early 2026, assuming no hiccups got in the way of those plans. Sadly, it seems that's exactly what's happened, necessitating the "skeletal crew" still working on the mod to push Last Orders beyond a projected April release window.
I've heard Cornwall is quite lovely this time of year. Still cool enough for a fresh pastie, warm enough to have fish and chips by the beach. Shame about all the mutant fish people that are hungry for death! Ah, no, sorry, I think I've gotten myself too enveloped within BRINE, a fast and heavy footed boomer shooter where you play as an angry fisherman who must defend the strange country from "crustacean cultists and piscine horrors."
Let's travel back in time, roughly to the late 2000s and early 2010s. It was a time where indie games were becoming more of a defined Separate Thing from blockbuster games. It certainly wasn't the birth of indie games, but with the release of certain notable games like Fez, it did mark a change in who got to make money from them at the very least. But to me personally, there is no more quintessential indie game from that era than Superbrothers: Sword & Sorcery EP, which against my wishes has turned 15 today.
It sounds like Sony are continuing to do what they presumably coldly view as cost cutting. According to Jason Schreier, often known for his insider information, and a leak shared in a ResetEra thread, Dark Outlaw Games, a studio set up by former Call of Duty lead Jason Blundell, is being shut down. It's unclear how many people this includes at this time.
Fancy forming your own opinion of Peter Molyneux's supposed final ever game, Masters of Albion? Outside of just commenting on a trailer that plays all the hits, that is? Well, you can, maybe, if you're lucky enough, as Mr. Molyneux himself has put out a call for you to sign up to beta test the game ahead of its release next month.
Sintopia, the very Bullfroggy strategy management game from developers Piraknights and publishers Team 17, will release on April 16th. I compared this one to The Screwtape Letters back at announcement, but the more obvious, gamer-brain pitch is that it's Black & White sitting on top of Dungeon Keeper. That is, a god sim parked on top of a management game, albeit with a greater emphasis on automation than you might recall from Bullfrog's heyday.
In Sintopia, you are the middle manager of Hell. Above you, there is a bucolic, self-sufficient realm of weirdly plant-based humans, all going about their lives farming, building and searching for treasure. And sinning. The Humus (Humusians? Humusings?) do love to sin. Which is where you come in. When the Humus die, they are swept away to the underworld by a toothy hellbus, and must be purged of moral stains before they can be safely granted a new body.
The year is 2026, and a new-but-not-really EverQuest is on the way. Announced today, EverQuest Legends is the same MMO some of you have been playing for coming up to 30 years, just without all the years of expansions. And the graphics look as they did upon launch. And there's a few modern upgrades. Don't ask me what the word same means.
Epic Games have announced that they're laying off over 1000 staff today, March 24th. In the wake of that news, the publishers have announced that three Fortnite modes are being permanently sunsetted. Meanwhile, one of the studios Epic own - Horizon Chase developers Aquiris - have announced plans to pull downloads for the first two games in their arcade racing series offline later this year.
The UK games industry is "seeing a decline of unprecedented scale and speed" according to the latest research done by video games industry trade association TIGA. According to TIGA's report, 1,537 development jobs were lost overall in the sector during the year-long period leading up to September 2025, marking the first downturn on that front in 14 years. Meanwhile, studio numbers have fallen and startup companies are struggling.
Epic Games, the creator of Fortnite and the Unreal Engine, have announced plans to lay off more than 1000 staff. In a company-wide letter, CEO Tim Sweeney blamed both "industry-wide challenges" and "challenges unique to Epic", including a downturn in Fortnite's popularity.
In addition to the layoffs, the company have made more than $500m in cuts by reducing contracting, marketing, and closing open roles. Sweenet says this puts the company "in a more stable place."
Sweeney, a strong advocate of AI, says the layoffs "aren't related to AI".
Roguelite clone-stabber (and upsettingly effective paranoia generator) It Has My Face is skulking out of early access this month, a Steam news update confirming its 1.0 release for April 3rd 2026. Hooray, and also, arrrrrrgh. I’ve been following IHMF since its impressive first demo under the name DoubleWe, and its short, highly-strung bursts of deduction and one-hit-kill violence are as cleverly staged as they are stressful.
Having reached the point of making their case to the European parliament, the Stop Killing Games's organisers are having to think about keeping their campaign going in the long-term. For example, they're setting up set up NGOs to advocate on the issue of server shutdowns rendering online-only games impossible to play.
Ironically, though, one of the factors the group see as helping ensure their efforts don't end up fading into background noise is the depressing regularity with which games like Highguard are dying in a fashion that's difficult to ignore.
If you read our verdict over the weekend, you’ll know that Mark and I found the anime-flavoured Screamer reboot to be a delightfully exaggerated bit of slidey arcade racing – albeit one that, in the story-based Tournament mode, sometimes becomes randomly, viciously hard for no readily apparent reason.
Judging by Screamer’s first update, which launched yesterday alongside game access for Digital Deluxe pre-orderers, those difficult spikes were an oopsie on the part of developers Milestone. Rather than send themselves on a Driving Awareness Course, though, they’ve "tweaked AI behaviors in various events to bring them closer to the intended difficulty," while announcing a future balance pass for the game’s difficulty settings. That’s good news for controller-chuckers and desk-smashers, though obviously as someone who progressed through Screamer before this update, I claim entitlement to the same Smug Bellend rights as those Elden Ring players who beat Pre-Patch Radahn.
Nvidia CEO Jensen Huang has decided to try something a bit different in his latest defense of the company's recently revealed DLSS 5 neural rendering tech. No longer does he throw cold coffee in the faces of critics and bellow 'you're dead wrong, and you better give me something on this guy or you're toast'. Instead, he sits on the desk like a teacher playing it casual - saying that he understands where critics are coming from, but still insisting that the tech's benign.
Sordid, flesh-eating medieval tactics RPG Wartales is getting a new Fires in the Capital DLC expansion in April. It adds a wartorn metropolis to the game - Isandrin, crown jewel of Edoran and home of the Legion. As such, it's a departure from the mucky outland gigwork you may be accustomed to, offering what Shiro game director Quentin Lapeyre calls "a dense, reactive capital, where the Chaos system ensures that every decision can impact the entire city".
As the boss murderer of a troupe of thugs, you are under no obligation to save Isandrin from escalating factional tensions. You can work to restore order, or you can hasten the proud burg's demise, with dastardly methods ranging from the shanking of bandits to outbreaks of public singing. How horrible!
That sound you can hear in the distance is someone mumbling in-teh-grih-teh, because a key bit of RuneScape's in-teh-grih-teh-focused 2026 additions has gone live today, March 23rd. It's part one of the Havenhythe expansion, which Jagex are touting as the MMORPG's largest area embiggening yet.
Get in the videogame, loser, it's time to break into an "impossible palace", stab insect gardeners with your saber, and rescue your mother from some bastard prince. Out today, Journey Of The Garden Rose is the latest "old school 3D action-adventure" from Renegade Sector, a developer whose affection for pulp beams forth from every pixel.
Look at the blue tiles, pink pillars and sockety murals of that courtyard. Look at that grass - more like verdigris than vegetation. Look at the delightful tarantulas loitering in the low-poly orchards. Ugh, why don't I have a palace that looks a bit like a vintage four-colour horror comic. Why am I cursed to live in this world, with its vast plenitude of colours that all muddle together without contrast. Please, watch the trailer while I grieve.
Resident Evil Requiem makers Capcom have outlined their current stance on using AI in a summarised investor back-and-forth released alongside their latest financial results. The publishers plan on using the tech to try and improve the "efficiency" of their development process, but say no AI-generated content will make it into the final versions of their games.
Regardless of whether Intel would say it out loud, the Core Ultra 7 270K Plus and Core Ultra 5 250K Plus both represent an attempt to right the wrongs of the original Arrow Lake/Core Ultra 200S family. That bundle of chips was, necessarily, more power-efficient and cooler-running than the hotheaded 14th Gen models before them, though this came at the cost of hamstrung gaming performance. Rarely a desirable quality in a gaming CPU, that.
These two Core Ultra 200S Plus (or Arrow Lake Refresh) processors do, in comparison, achieve some appeal. They’re inexpensive and excellent multitaskers, and while they do still have efficiency on their silicon brains, Intel have looked to bump game speeds back up by rejigging their innards into a less latency-prone layout.
Alas, it’s not enough. Not only are Core Ultra 7 270K Plus and Core Ultra 5 250K Plus slower in games than AMD’s best chips, they once again fail to convincingly outpace Intel’s own back catalogue – the 2023 vintage 14th gen processors, included.
Diablo-ish Minecraft spin-off Minecraft Dungeons has a sequel, and said sequel's coming out at some point in 2026. What's it about? Well, Mojang say, "all was well until it wasn't". Wait, lads, that's pretty much the setup for every sequel and arguably story humanity's ever produced. Aye, Mojang say, but the mild-mannered villagers are on fire, so you'd better get your diamond sword polished.
Urgh! What's happening? The air feels dreadfully recycled all of a sudden. Food dissatisfies, music grates, punchlines flop like stunned seagulls - everything seems somehow overfamiliar. We have entered a Lull. There are few Big Games out this week - little in the way of Big Sequels or New IPs From Triple-A Veterans or other projects that make you say "oh! That one" - and the Maw is making up the shortfall by siphoning novelty from the building blocks of reality itself.
To the pumps, colleagues, before we become so jaded that our wrists and elbows lose all elasticity! There must be a meatier morsel down there. There must be a new PC game gargantuan enough to appease the creature.
Huggghh-puuuhhhhh. Hughhhhh-puhhhh. If you've decided to try pedalling away in attempt to master Crimson Desert's bike-like controls, Pearl Abyss' latest patch - which also brings the likes of camp storage quicker tree felling - is good news. The developers have also acknowledged the fact they forgot to mention prior to release that the game wouldn't run on Intel Arc GPUs, with support for those cards now in the works.
Final Vanguard is a real-time sci-fi 4X grand strategy game that puts an unusually big emphasis on migration. We've seen migration mechanics in many 4X games – pops can shuffle about in Stellaris as you slop your colonies across the map, populating the periphery and slowing the development of your homeworld – but Final Vanguard's creators Heavy Pepper Inc want the feature to be central.
It's part of an ambition "to model a civilization made up of interconnected systems that influence one another over time", with everything from fleet manoeuvres to industry forming part of "a network of dependencies", rather than treating planets as isolated upgradeable nodes.
Ah, it turns out the eyebrows raised by suspiciously AI generated-looking art found throughout Crimson Desert weren't wrong in their lanate liftage. Developers Pearl Abyss have aplogised for failing to disclose their use of asseets made using "experimental AI generative tools", claiming that these were just mockups created early in production and were never supposed to make into the final release version of the game.
Ed (RPS in peace) has, finally, posthumously, got his wish: another Screamer. This one’s gone all cyberpunk and/or anime-styled, with a heavy focus on story – it follows multiple, multinational merc-drivers entering a lightly murderous racing tournament – but can it still deliver on drifty driving thrills? After much practice, Mark and James both avoided clattering into the track barriers long enough to find out.