RuneScape co-creator returns with a new free-to-play fantasy MMO, a decade in the works Brighter Shores aims to offer a cosier, less grindy experience than the genre’s classics Image credit:Fen Research The co-creator of long-running free-to-play fantasy MMO RuneScape has revealed the project his new studio has been working on for the last ten years. Surprise! It’s a new free-to-play fantasy MMO. But Andrew Gower and developers Fen Research insist that Brighter Shores will balance its nostalgic feel with a fresh approach to the well-worn genre that Gower himself helped wear in over two decades ago....

S.T.A.L.K.E.R. 2’s first big patch is out with 650 fixes for crashes, progress blocks, physics and AI bugs Still waiting on a proper A-Life overhaul though Image credit:Rock Paper Shotgun/GSC Game World Is your Zone more Anomaly-rich than it should be? Are your corpses uncannily airborne? Do your comrades have dodgy teeth, and not in a good way ? Do bits of your HUD keep disappearing? Be of good cheer, for GSC Game World have released the first proper S....

Sapphire’s excellent RX 7800 XT 16GB Pulse card is down to £480 One of the best value GPUs hits a new low price. Image credit:Sapphire AMD’s RX 7800 XT is arguably Team Red’s best value graphics card from this generation, offering great performance for 1080p and 1440p gaming with the ability to stretch to 4K in titles that offer FSR 2 upscaling. Relatively few cards have been available at the launch RRP of £479, but today you can pick up the excellent Sapphire Pulse 16GB model for exactly that much rather than the £519....

Sims challenger Paralives is out in December, so it’s time to scientifically assess those flirting animations Nothing’s sexier than science Image credit:Rock Paper Shotgun / Paralives Studio “What does flirting actually look like?” is one of several, quintessentially Friday-afternoon questions raised by the latest development footage for Paralives , the upcoming life sim with its heart set on stealing yours away from The Sims . We last covered Paralives in October last year, when the devs confirmed an early access release in 2025 ....

Sins of a Solar Empire 2’s AI will now only hate you if you give it a good reason How to win friends and influence aliens Image credit:Stardock Entertainment As players got their teeth in Sins of a Solar Empire 2 at launch last year, they began to report odd behaviour from the galaxy’s computer-controlled factions. It wasn’t that the NPC commanders resisted human expansion, but it was as though they hated humans....

Spectre Divide is a new tactical shooter with one big gimmick: controlling two bodies at once Is it enough to separate it from Valorant or CS? Image credit:Mountaintop Studios With Valorant , Riot set out to integrate a bit of hero shooter into the Counter Strike template and made it a little more accessible than CS in the process. Now Mountaintop Studios, a new studio whose ranks include ex-Bungie and Respawn devs, have chucked themselves into the tactical FPS gauntlet with Spectre Divide ....

Square Enix turn an RPG into a town-builder with Octopath Traveler 0 Wishlistvale Image credit:Square Enix Square Enix have announced Octopath Traveler 0 , a prequel to the genteel 2019 RPG Katharine Castle hailed as… “a bit of a slog”?? “A big old anticlimax”??? I thought it was quite good! This is an outrage! I’m going to tell Katharine she sucks at writing and is terrible at video games. What do you mean, she doesn’t work here any more?...

Starfield will get at least one more expansion after Shattered Space, Todd Howard says Studio hopes to follow their annual DLC release cycle Image credit:Bethesda Starfield ’s first expansion, this year’s Shattered Space, won’t be the only major DLC for the sci-fi exploration game, Bethesda bossman Todd Howard has confirmed. Was Starfield worth the wait? Liam and Alice B discuss this question - and more - in the video above.Watch on YouTube...

Steam Rhythm Fest is underway with discounts and demos for games with a good beat The rhythm is gonna get ya We’ve been distracted by Gamescom, several game releases, the rapid dwindling of the British summer. Or I assume we have, for why else would we not have yet posted about the Steam Rhythm Fest, which began on Monday and runs until August 26th at 10am PT/6pm BRDST*. *British Rapidly Dwindling Summer Time....

Still Wakes The Deep’s authentic horror aims to channel Ken Loach by way of Stanley Kubrick “In obscurity comes horror,” says lead designer Rob McLachlan Image credit:Secret Mode Set in 1975 on an oil rig in the Scottish North Sea, horror game Still Wakes The Deep is less about supernatural events, and more about the people who experience them. Here, that’s Scottish electrician Caz McLeary and the crew of the Beira D rig....

Subnautica 2 will have a bigger map and a silent protagonist, say devs More to sea Image credit:Krafton Get yer flip-flops out and dust last year’s sand off the boogie board. Subnautica 2 ’s world map will be bigger than previous games in the soaking survival series. At least that’s what the developers say in a recent Q & A video . They’ve also said they’re returning to the storytelling style of the first game, with a silent protagonist and “player discovery” being the big driver of the story....

Supernatural spaceship shooter Underspace shows admirable ambition in its Next Fest demo A self-described “spiritual successor to Freelancer” Image credit:Rock Paper Shotgun/Pastaspace Interactive I respect a game with wild ambition. Declaring your game “the spiritual successor to Freelancer " is bold and ambitious, considering how the spaceship sim is still so beloved after 20 years that our readers voted it your 16th favourite space game of all time . This ambition is wild when the tiny development team is led by someone best known for replacing Skyrim’s dragons with Thomas The Tank Engine ....

Team Ninja’s Rise of the Ronin blends Nioh’s combat with Assassin’s Creed-style exploration New trailer walks us through the historical Japanese action-RPG Image credit:Sony Well look at that, a new trailer for Rise of the Rōnin - the fancy samurai action- RPG from Ninja Gaiden household Team Ninja. Set in 19th century Japan’s Bakumatsu era, the game is a mixture of open-ended exploration, sneaking and agile traversal that puts me heavily in mind of Ubisoft’s Assassin’s Creed series....

Tekken lead Katsuhiro Harada is leaving Bandai Namco at the end of this year, bows out with hour-long DJ mix “I felt this was the most fitting moment to bring one chapter to a close” Image credit:Bandai Namco Long-time Tekken director, producer, and general advocate for the virtual graps Katsuhiro Harada has announced he’s leaving Bandai Nanco at the close of 2025. Harada’s opted to step away as the fighting series turns 30, though he does have one more guest appearance at the Tekken World Tour finals lined up early next year....

The Alters review Middle management sim Image credit:11 Bit Studios / Rock Paper Shotgun Developer: 11 Bit Studios Publisher: 11 Bit Studios Release: June 13th 2025 On: Windows From: Steam , GOG , Epic Games Store Price: $32/£27/€32 Reviewed on: Intel Core-i7 12700F, 16GB RAM, Nvidia RTX 3060, Windows 11 11 Bit Studios have a thing for circles. Their 2018 hit Frostpunk had you plant rings of buildings around a massive coal-fired generator in a frozen crater, picking research paths to steer your fully overlapping class/temperature Venn diagram of a city toward either fascism or theocracy....

The creators of Jett and Sword & Sworcery are making a 2D mystery action game Might be out in 2027 Image credit:Superbrothers Jett: The Far Shore and Sword & Sworcery developers Superbrothers are making a new “2D mystery action pixel videogame”, in partnership with an unnamed publisher. In what feels almost like a pivot away from the developers’ previous, magnificently hipster experiments, it’s billed as “satisfyingly finite, immediately legible, entertaining, funny, and generally satisfying for a broad audience”....

The Don’t Starve devs’ new cutesy co-cop dungeon crawler is out in early access today Rotwood allows you and up to three friends to kill a tree Image credit:Klei Entertainment “If only you could talk to these creatures” is never more funny or true than in games like Rotwood , where you play cat people and orcs sent to biff snail worms and flies with scythes. From Klei Entertainment, the gang behind Don’t Starve, Invisible Inc....

The First Berserker: Khazan review Bossy in a good way Image credit:Rock Paper Shotgun / Nexon Developer: Neople Publisher: Nexon Release: March 27th, 2025 On: Windows From: Steam Price: £50/$60/€60 Reviewed on: Ryzen 7 7700X, 64GB RAM, Nvidia RTX 4080, Windows 10 When Lords of the Fallen came out in 2014, it was interesting to see another developer daring to mimic From Software’s Souls formula. But now that it’s a whole genre, seeing another big-budget soulslike just doesn’t feel special anymore - even Star Wars has had a crack at it ....

The HyperX Cloud Alpha Wireless, my gaming headset of choice, is over £70 / $70 off for Black Friday Big savings on a headset that just won’t die All that writing about gaming earbuds yesterday has reignited my appreciation for the HyperX Cloud Alpha Wireless, the PC headset I’ve been donning every day for… ooh, maybe two and a half years now? It sounds lovely, is comfortable enough to wear for hours, and has such a long battery life that we should probably just consider it witchcraft by now....

The NYT Crossword answers for Monday, September 1st 2025 Get a bit of help with the NYT Crossword puzzle Image credit:The New York Times This guide is for a previous day! Looking for today’s NYT Crossword guide? Check out the NYT Crossword answers for Sunday, October 19th 2025 ! Need a hint for today’s NYT Crossword on Monday, 1st September? It has officially begun! A whole new week of NYT Crosswords....