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Hytale won’t be on Steam right away, as its devs want to avoid “overindexing on negative reviews” from players who “aren’t as well-informed yet” “Steam is a great marketing tool, but one that we might never need” Image credit:Hypixel Original story follows: Revived Minecraft y survivabuilder Hytale got a fresh early access release date of January 13th the other week. However, the team behind it how now confirmed you shouldn’t expect to see it hit Steam at that point, with the game’s executive director not seeing the need to knock on Valve’s pipe-laden door yet and keen to avoid an early access spent drowning in negative reviews....

Hytale’s early access release date set in stone for January 2026, but its devs admit “the first impression will be rough” “The game isn’t good yet; eventually, it will be” Image credit:Hypixel Still fresh off of being bought from Riot and revived by a team lead by Hypixel co-founder Simon Collins-Laflamme, Hytale now has an early access release date. The Minecraft y sandbox emerges from the cave it’s spent years exploring early next year, with pre-orders kicking off next month....

I shouldn’t feel this at home in the nightmare office world of Pager Beep beep Image credit:bilge Is it bad that I find the office labyrinth of Pager rather cosy? Is it a sign that I have finally gone full 9-to-5 zombie? Or have I simply been mugged on Memory Lane by a composite of 90s aesthetics and technologies - pebbly Macintosh wallpaper patterns, mock-Bauhaus prints and yes, pagers, though I never owned one of those as a kid....

If Inscryption was a fantasy-themed roguelike dungeon crawler, it might look a lot like this Pyrene is another budding deckbuilding obsession Image credit:Indie Asylum Apologies if I’m starting to sound like a broken record these days, but here I am, back with another edition of “Have you heard about this cool new roguelike deckbuilder?” I swear I’ll find a new/another niche one of these days, but listen, Pyrene is very cool indeed, and I lost a good hour to its free demo last week on Steam....

In lyrical limbo RPG Three Verses, you ask gods to help poets finish their poems Takes a certain type Image credit:D-MAG Hidden away on NASA’s Golden Record , an interstellar archive of music, image and sound, there is a recording of a poem by Charles Baudelaire, Élévation , which describes the astral ascent of the soul. Well, part of a poem. Both to free up room on the disc and perhaps, to edit out “the vast sorrows and all the vexations” of the second half, only the first two stanzas appear....

InCARceration is a free minigame “carlike experience” for parole breakers everywhere “Drive your life back” Image credit:Crayon / kit bloodgutters / Rock Paper Shotgun Soberly breaking down the plot, mechanics and presentation of InCARceration would be like trying to cook a meal, win a spelling bee or perform a sneak-attack after being welded inside a car. So I will say only that this is an amusing bizarro take on WarioWare that makes me yearn for other, bizarro takes on WarioWare....

Insect RTS Empires Of The Undergrowth leaves early access in June, adding savannahs, termites and stink ants Highly ant-icipated Image credit:Hooded Horse 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....

It’s hard to like the heroes of Wuthering Waves when they keep soiling you with dictionary vomit The Lament <img loading=“lazy” src=“https://assetsio.gnwcdn.com/wuthering-waves-impressions-1a.jpg?width=690&quality=85&format=jpg&dpr=3&auto=webp" onerror=“this.onerror=null;this.src=‘https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/a/AVvXsEhe7F7TRXHtjiKvHb5vS7DmnxvpHiDyoYyYvm1nHB3Qp2_w3BnM6A2eq4v7FYxCC9bfZt3a9vIMtAYEKUiaDQbHMg-ViyGmRIj39MLp0bGFfgfYw1Dc9q_H-T0wiTm3l0Uq42dETrN9eC8aGJ9_IORZsxST1AcLR7np1koOfcc7tnHa4S8Mwz_xD9d0=s16000';" alt=“Rover faces the camera, saying “I don’t know what I’m doing here”. - 1”> Image credit:Rock Paper Shotgun / Kuro Games Understanding any given sentence in Wuthering Waves is like trying to discern sensible meaning from the back of a rain-bleached Doritos packet you found while cleaning your gutters....

Keanu Reeves to play Shadow in the Sonic 3 movie as Sega announce the Year of Shadow I’ll take it over another year of mass layoffs Image credit:Sega I’ve been watching this year’s ostensible “major” news developments - the launch of a Fallout TV show , the impending release of Shadow Of The Erdtree , to pick a couple - with a sense of zealous disapproval and weary resignation as to the hubris of human beings....

Kingdom Hearts is coming to Steam in June, giving Goofy the broader audience he deserves Get your Gabe-endorsed keyblade fix next month Image credit:Square Enix I could pretend I understand Square Enix’s action- RPG series Kingdom Hearts , but I don’t need to, ‘cos what I do understand is how popular it is. Until fairly recently the nearly 15-game-strong series, where Disney characters cross over with Final Fantasy and go to war alongside a child wielding a key (I said I don’t properly understand it), wasn’t on PC....

Lethal Company’s next monster “does things that make absolutely no sense, just because it can” Can’t be worse than the masks, surely Image credit:Zeekerss Ho, Lethal Companions! Put down your airhorns, let fall your precious armfuls of plastic fish, and prick up your freakin’ ears. Something is coming to 2023’s breakout horror multiplayer game. Something that will make the music boxes and springhead marionettes look like child’s playthings! I mean, like the child’s playthings they already look like, but without the parts that make them horrifying....

Manor Lords publisher reassures players struggling to buy at launch that “we’ll run those 25% discounts often” Developer, meanwhile, is planning to rebalance the archers Image credit:Rock Paper Shotgun/Hooded Horse Historical strategy sim Manor Lords - which budding feudal despot Nic Reuben has deemed “a sturdy and immersive builder that feels incomplete yet alive with promise” - is now available on Steam, the Epic Games Store, Microsoft Store and GOG. It was Steam’s most wishlisted game before launch, and it’s so popular right now that Steam’s servers are struggling to keep up: there’s an official developer post on the game’s Steam forum warning that “the store is overwhelmed from all the people buying, it may take a couple tries for a bit while things calm down”....

Marvel Rivals tier list of best characters Discover the strongest characters in the current meta with our up-to-date Marvel Rivals tier list Image credit:Rock Paper Shotgun/NetEase Games What are the best characters in Marvel Rivals right now? It’s always a tough question with games like Marvel Rivals , not only because the roster and hero abilities are ever-changing, but because a tier list of heroes naturally changes over time as you climb higher up the player skill ladder....

Medieval city builder Farthest Frontier says good knight to early access with its 1.0 release today Get it? Good knight? Like good nigh- Image credit:Crate Entertainment A new day, a new city builder ! Today the particular entry in this far reaching genre we’re talking about is Farthest Frontier , because it’s leaving early access after more than three years in development. If you’ve never heard of it before, the simple answer is that Farthest Frontier is a medieval city builder....

Minecraft Enchantments list: how to make and use an Enchanting Table A full list of Enchantments available with a Minecraft Enchanting Table Image credit:Rock Paper Shotgun/Mojang Studios Want to know more about Enchantments in Minecraft? Enchantments are incredibly useful for any Minecraft player. You can gain a range of effects, including an increased amount of resources gathered, or increased power to defeat powerful enemies like the Wither and the Warden ....

Monster Hunter Wilds: Charge Blade weapon tree The full list of all Charge Blades in Monster Hunter Wilds Image credit:Rock Paper Shotgun/Capcom Looking for the full Charge Blade weapon tree in Monster Hunter Wilds? The Charge Blade, much like its cousin, the Switch Axe , can transform between two different modes: a Sword and Shield for mobility and faster combos; and a giant Axe for powerful debilitating swings. Play around with it a little, and you might fall in love with its versatility - and just the sheer coolness of its transition animations....

More than half of gamedev professionals see GenAI as harmful, according to GDC’s latest survey Only 7% think it’s having a positive impact Image credit:Embark Studios GDC have released their 2026 State of the Game Industry report , comprising survey results from thousands of quizzed developers on the craft and business of gamesmaking. As in the 2025 report , this year’s responses signal a growing discontent with generative AI tools, with opposing sentiments tipping into simple majority status for the first time: 52% now say GenAI is having a negative impact on the industry, up from 30% in 2025 and 18% in 2024....

MSI’s panoramic PC case severely underestimates how bad at cable tidying I am Foolproof? We’ll see about that Image credit:MSI As someone who believes in the ideal of the trim, tidy PC interior, I do applaud the intent behind MSI’s Project Zero X. Currently on show at CES 2025 , it’s a prototype desktop build that uses clever geometry and an unconventional motherboard I/O layout to hide practically every single wire in the joint, for a clean design that’s housed for your viewing pleasure within a four-sided glass chamber....

My Summer Car trundles out of early access with version 1.0 after nine years in the chop shop Wheeling it out Image credit:AmisTech Games Someone deep in the bowels of the internet once betwittered that Dark Souls was “the My Summer Car of RPGs”. The joke stuck with me enough to try the car mechanic sim when it was released into early access back in 2016 . I didn’t know it would take another nine years to bring this ambitiously hostile Finnish life simulator to a full release....

New Elite Dangerous spaceship is advertised as a space trucker’s dream, but it’ll cost ya For ten? Ten-four Image credit:Frontier Developments Ah, that was good. No action. No shooting aliens. No drama. Just a man and his space truck on the open space road, occasionally accompanied by the presence of large letters. LOAD MORE. God, yes. DELIVER FIRST. Maybe I will! As for the ship’s design, some fans have playfully made fun of the fact that the ship looks a bit like Eve Online ’s ubiquitous mining ship, the Venture , simply flipped upside down and given a few slinky angles....