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Spiritfarer studio’s 33-player roguelike gives us a closer look at its MMO-style raids A closed beta arrives next month Image credit:Thunder Lotus Games We first learned of Spiritfarer studio Thunder Lotus’ latest endeavour 33 Immortals at last year’s Summer Geoff Fest . They showed off some brief snippets of its 33-player cooperative roguelike-ing, where you’d beat up hellish monsters in a miniature take on MMO raids. If you were intrigued by it back then, I have good news....

Steam’s latest update to user reviews doesn’t find your “jokes, memes, ascii art and other content” as funny as you do This happened to my buddy Eric Steam’s seeing a good few sweeping changes of late. They’ve recently added a ‘Trending Free’ tab to separate the no money down and no, money down playables. And, as of September, they’re cracking down on links to other websites in store pages. Now, horror of horrors, they’re coming for your ascii gigachads and “nobody is going to read this review so I’ll just say I’m gay” bangers....

SteamWorld makers announce 100 layoffs, cancel projects, and say they’ll publish more games by other studios - but fewer of their own Little room for Leeway Image credit:Rock Paper Shotgun / Thunderful Thunderful Games, the developers and publishers that make the colourful SteamWorld series of games, have announced a hefty number of layoffs at the company, with anywhere between 80-100 people losing their jobs. It’s part of a “restructuring” that’ll also see an unspecified number of game projects cancelled, said the company in a press release yesterday....

SteamWorld owners Thunderful to fire 20% of staff due to “over-investments made in the last few years” “These investments have proven unsustainable given the current industry climate.” Image credit:Thunderful Publishing A round of videogame company layoffs following a period of “unsustainable” spending? It must be a Wednesday. Swedish conglomerate Thunderful Group AB - whose corporate possessions include Somerville developer Jumpship and several teams working on the SteamWorld games - have announced that they will lay off around 20 percent of their staff as part of a restructuring program that “stems primarily from over-investments made in the last few years”....

Strange Antiquities review Occult following Image credit:Rock Paper Shotgun/Iceberg Interactive A shopkeeping puzzle game that’s even denser and more satisfying to master than its predecessor, Strange Horticulture. Developer: Bad Viking Publisher: Iceberg Interactive Release: September 17th 2025 On: Windows From: Steam Price: £14.99/$17.99/€17.49 Reviewed on: Intel Core i7-12700H, 16GB RAM, Nvidia GeForce RTX 4060, Windows 11 During my first two hours serving Strange Antiquities ’ customers, I tugged the bronze pendulum of an ornate clock at least a dozen times, wondering what the resulting spin and settle of its hands meant....

Study into inverted versus uninverted controls suggests we can stop having pointless arguments about it Boffins say it’s all in the mind Image credit:Rock Paper Shotgun To invert or not to invert? The question of whether to flip the Y-axis in games is often answered with recollections of childhood habits and/or varyingly smug declarations of which joystick setting is ‘better’. Now, though, a cognitive research study posits that our control preferences are less about whether or not we played GoldenEye after school and more about the innate quirks of our brains....

Stylish sniper puzzler Children Of The Sun hits Steam in April Give the demo a shot while you wait Image credit:Devolver Digital Children Of The Sun instantly shot to the top of my personal most-wanted list when it was first announced at the start of February alongside its accompanying Steam Next Fest demo , and happily, publishers Devolver Digital have now set a release date. It’s coming real soon, with its single-shot murder bullet puzzles hitting Steam on April 9th - and to celebrate, there’s a flashy new release trailer to go with it....

Subnautica 2 studio will get their bonus, says Krafton, but it’s not the $250 million promised It’s been watered down Image credit:Unknown Worlds Publishers Krafton have told workers at Subnautica 2 studio Unknown Worlds they would still get a promised bonus if they ship enough of the game by the end of 2026. In other words, they’ve been given an extension to hit their targets. The bonus money was in question after the surprise firing of senior staff a couple of weeks ago, and the enforced delay of the survival game by Krafton....

Tamagotchi and Quake both join World Video Game Hall Of Fame It’s ‘videogame’, actually Image credit:Id Software New York’s Strong National Museum of Play has welcomed four new entries into its Video Game Hall Of Fame: Quake , Goldeneye, 1981’s arcade side-scroller Defender, and the virtual pet Tamagotchi. It’s that last one that’s by far the most interesting of the four picks, and I must admit, I’d never actually thought about Tamagotchi in these exact terms before....

Tasty platformer Pizza Tower’s free new character will bring “a sort of New Game+” experience You can’t avoid this non-copyright-infringing Noid Image credit:Tour De Pizza One game I heard and saw a lot last year but absolutely did not play was Pizza Tower , a fast and fiendish platformer inspired by the Wario Land games. A lot of people seem delighted to rocket around in the colourful adventures of pizzeria proprietor Peppino Spaghetti....

Team Fortress 2’s summer update is here, and a group of players have penned an open letter to Valve about matchmaking A new map called Cargo, and cargo to be delivered to Newell corp Image credit:Valve Team Fortress 2 , that shooter with wacky character intro videos so good I have to watch each of them at least once every six months, got its 2025 summer update late last week. There are a host of new community-made maps, items, and taunts, in addition to a fair few bug fixes from Valve themselves....

TerraTech Worlds “isn’t a sequel” to TerraTech, but does “supplant it in every way,” say devs Payload’s open world survival builder launches into Steam early access on March 22nd Image credit:Payload Studios Later this week, Payload Studios’ open world vehicular survival builder TerraTech Worlds launches into early access. As the name implies, it’s a bigger, bolder and more ambitious take on their still very popular sandbox game TerraTech , but according to Payload’s founder and CEO Russ Clarke, they’re viewing this new version as more of a successor to TerraTech than a full-bodied sequel....

The 20 best building games on PC Fortify your game library Image credit:Rock Paper Shotgun / Frontier / Paradox Interactive / Gamera Games From our first years we know what it means to build. As babies we’re given clacky wooden blocks and colourful Duplo bricks. We are architects long before we are capable eaters of raw carrot. If you’re anything like the staff of RPS, you’ve not outgrown the habit of child-like town planning....

The best Deus Ex game will soon be free to keep from the Epic Games Store From March 14th, for a week Image credit:Eidos Montreal [audience makes “wohhhhh” controversial noise] I know, I know! Some might argue that Human Revolution is the best Deus Ex game, but they’re wrong, it’s clearly Deus Ex: Mankind Divided . The last, new Deus Ex game to be made will be free to keep from the Epic Games Store for a week starting March 14th....

The best Steam Deck power banks Fast charging porta-batteries with the RPS-tested seal of approval Image credit:Rock Paper Shotgun In an ideal reality, power banks for the Steam Deck would not exist, and we’d all be able to play our portable PCs uninterrupted from sunrise to sunset. World peace, I imagine, would follow shortly thereafter. For now, however, there are plenty of games that will cut a Steam Deck and/or Steam Deck OLED ’s battery life to a couple of hours or less, so it’s worth getting them some help – especially for lengthy travels that would deny you the use of their own chargers....

The Callisto Protocol series returns as… top-down roguelike geezer shooter [REDACTED] Not only is it “punk”, they’re “cranking it to 11” Image credit:Krafton If you’ve been necromantically dreaming of a Callisto Protocol sequel, I’m afraid the monkey paw finger hasn’t just curled - it’s jammed itself right up your nose and scratched an FU on your hypothalamus. Developers Striking Distance and publishers Krafton have revealed [REDACTED] , a scifi roguelike dungeon crawler set in the same universe....

The Electronic Wireless Show podcast S3 episode 13: all work and no play? Let’s talk about free games No such thing as a free lunch Image credit:Rock Paper Shotgun/Animita Project This week you could get two horror games for free! Rental and Content Warning both launched for nada (albeit for a couple of days only in the case of the latter). Nate and I have both done work for free in the hope someone would retrospectively pay for it, so on this episode of the Electronic Wireless Show podcast Is it worth it?...

The existential dread of horror game Soma has been manifested in a plushie Oh good Image credit:Frictional Games The sinking terror that comes of having no fixed identity and being trapped alone thousands of metres beneath the ocean has been compacted into the soft, comforting (?) form of a plushie. Frictional Games, the creators of first-person horror game Soma , launched the soft toy depiction of the game’s protagonist Simon on Makeship , aka Kickstarter for plushies....

The Maw - 4th-9th March 2024 Our weekly news liveblog, with this week’s most appetising videogame releases Image credit:Wendel Dietterlin, the Younger/Rock Paper Shotgun New week, new videogames, new newsblog. It’s another relatively quiet week for big name PC releases - no mega-sequels or adaptations, unless you’re seriously into the Moomins - but if 2024 has taught me anything it’s that a breakout hit can come from anywhere, and I will accordingly be watching this week’s new games with deep suspicion and barely constrained panic....

The Maw: what’s new in PC games this week? Civilization 7, Afterlove EP and a touch of city-building and rogueliting Image credit:2K / Polygon This week is the week of Valentine’s Day, and therefore theoretically the most romantic week of the year even though it’s still winter here and the drizzle feels like it’s falling inside my bones and the thought of another human’s touch makes me want to wipe myself with sandpaper....