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The co-creator of magic puzzler Hidden Folks is making a sumptuous, spaced-out tower defender Riffing on the classics Image credit:Adriaan de Jongh Could tower defence be the ultimate “it’s Friday and I am here in body only” genre? I haven’t really thought about it before, but Rift Riff ’s effusively laidback crowd control has me pondering those optimal moments in any tower defender when the incoming horde hits the flamer-MG triangle just right, and you can settle back comfortably into the role of clockwatcher....

The creators of What Remains Of Edith Finch are making a weird and alarming biology game inspired by Ghibli and Attenborough “Disturbing but also fascinating”, hints Giant Sparrow founder Image credit:Giant Sparrow / New York Times What Remains Of Edith Finch is a very upsetting collection of interactive short stories about the brief, tragic lives of a cursed family who live in a monstrous treehouse. It’s also a wonderful show of experimentation , switching genres from story to story - one minute you’re a playable bestiary on shuffle, the next you’re beheading fish in a cannery as the worktable disappears beneath your scrolling daydreams....

The Electronic Wireless Show S3 Episode 1: our most anticipated games of 2024 Let’s start as we mean to go on: with nonsense Image credit:Double Dagger Studio New year, same us! The Electronic Wireless Show podcast returns and kicks off the new year with a look forward at what 2024 may bring. We chat about our most anticipated video games that may or may not be arriving this year, including some racing, some spac(marine)ing and some book selling....

The Electronic Wireless Show S3 Episode 2: speedrunning dogs for fun and (charity) profit Are slow runs a thing? Image credit:Games Done Quick Games Done Quick is busy raising loads of money for the Prevent Cancer Foundation , so we have a little chat about speedrunning, speedrunners, the benefits of breaking the game vs. the quality of a purist speedrun, and also a dog. We don’t have a Nate this week, but James has been playing Apelegs again and offers a surprising self-assessment of how he feels like he’s past his Apex Legends prime, and how confidence is a really necessary skill in competitive shooters....

The first act of Ambrosia Sky, an im-sim where you clean up fungi on a dead asteroid colony, is out now In the cadence of Among Us: A fungus Image credit:Soft Rains I don’t particularly like trends in genres all that much. They’re much too relied upon, and don’t really tell me much about a game outright. Even still, I do like to think about why a particular genre might be trending....

The Half-Life 2 RTX demo proposes a nice visual upgrade and not much else Rise and shine Image credit:Rock Paper Shotgun/Orbifold Studios Half Life 2 RTX , the Nvidia-backed graphical overhaul mod for Valve’s seminal FPS, has a Steam demo out today. It covers both the Ravenholm and Nova Prospekt chapters, for an extended look at how much ray-slash- path tracing , RTX Remix asset remastering, and DLSS 4 Multi Frame Generation is being packed into the decades-old shooter....

The making of Cobalt Core: how Tabletop Simulator and Inscryption were the secret catalysts behind this clever deckbuilding roguelike Rocket Rat Games walk us through creating a replayable and reactive card game with just two people Image credit:Brace Yourself Games Rocket Rat Games co-founder John Guerra remembers the exact day he started working on Cobalt Core ’s first prototype. He and his fellow co-founder Ben Driscoll had just spent a week playing Daniel Mullins’ mysterious roguelike deckbuilder Inscryption at the end of October 2021, but the combination of a bad storm and a power outage ended up forcing Guerra to decamp from his home in Massachusetts and stay with some family until it all blew over....

The Maw - 20th-25th May 2024 This week’s heartiest videogames, plus our weekly newsblog Image credit:Internet Archive Book Images This week on RPS: secret plans and clever tricks. Also, a bunch of new videogames, none of them particularly Enormous or Crocodilian. We open on Monday 20th May with the extremely Alice B-friendly combo of Little-Known Galaxy , aka Stardew Valley meets Star Trek , and A Tower Full Of Cats , a hidden object puzzler featuring a tower full of dogs, I mean cats....

The Maw: what’s new in PC games this week? Wizard schools, Lovecraftian tunnels, floating open worlds, and maw Image credit:Fulqrum Publishing Hello and happy this week all! Goodness, it feels oddly cramped in here. Strangely… abbreviated. Ah, I see: the Maw has eaten a couple of weekdays again. In accordance with what governments are even now hurriedly white-washing as “the Easter bank holidays”, we’ll be ending this week on Thursday 17th April and returning to work on Tuesday 22nd....

The Maw: what’s new in PC games this week? Star Wars, Supermoves, Visions Of Mana, many such cases Image credit:Johann Christoph Wagner / Rock Paper Shotgun If you live in the UK, you may have noticed that this week is shy a working day. Credulous fools attribute this to the existence of a “bank holiday” on Monday 26th, but true initiates like ourselves know the sobering truth: the Maw has eaten one of our weekdays ....

The Maw: what’s new in PC games this week? Space Engineers 2, The Stone Of Madness, Spider-Man 2 and maw Image credit:Tripwire Presents Continuing last week’s Maw merchandising roll-out , may I introduce by popular demand the first official Maw-endorsed letter opener. Now now, don’t act coy! I know some of you are old enough to know what a letter opener is, or even to own one. Statistically, most of the RPS readership are Lich Lords....

The RPS Selection Box: Edwin’s bonus games of the year 2024 100% uncompleted Image credit:RPS My selection box isn’t really a selection box. It’s a tray of barely-nibbled leftovers, hastily lifted from my Steam backlog. One of the disadvantages of being news editor, you see, is that I have developed a goldfish-grade attention span. In my hectic pursuit of the next scoop, or the next Elden Ring update changelog, I snatch and cast aside game demos like a pickpocket speedrunning the checkout line at Harvey Nichols....

The Sims 4 now has some tie-in jewellery, which I both hate and admire Don’t buy it though Image credit:EA As any fool knows, the age of girlies bulk-buying silver wire and making their own crystal jewellery at home is over, but EA always arrives precisely when it means to. This weekend saw the release of the Crystal Creations Stuff Pack , a DLC for The Sims 4 that takes the ability to find crystals (already in the game) and straps on your Sims making them into semi-precious, semi-magic jewellery that can be charged up by the moon....

The Steam Summer Sale is due this week and promises “deep discounts”, whatever that means Goodbye pounds and pence Image credit:Valve The Steam Summer Sale is kicking off this week, say Valve, purveyors of fine games and thousands of crap ones too (don’t worry, we help you tell the difference). The sale begins on Thursday June 27th and runs until July 11th. That’s a full two weeks of sun and soulslikes, beach balls and beat ’em ups, paddling pools and puzzle games....

The Sunday Papers Image credit:RPS Sundays are a day that arrives at the end of the week. Sometimes those weeks bring joy, and sometimes they bring uncertainity. That’s fine. There’s another one tommorow. Before that new week begins, let’s read this week’s best writing about games (and game related things!) For Jacobin, Cody Cava expanded on the wonderfully punchy title “Video Game Execs Are Ruining Video Games” Despite the industry being immensely profitable, video game executives have lost any compunction when it comes to imposing astounding layoffs on their workforces, wielding tens of thousands of firings as a blunt instrument to appease shareholders and boost short-term profits....

The Thing: Remastered review: a fantastic remaster of a game best observed from a distance Kurt Sussel Image credit:Nightdive/Rock Paper Shotgun Developer: Nightdive Studios, Computer Artworks Publisher: Nightdive Studios Release: Out On: Windows From: Steam / GOG Price: TBC Reviewed on: Intel Core i5-12600K, 32GB RAM, Nvidia RTX 2070, Windows 10 Nightdive, you done good. The Thing: Remastered is an ultra-sharp and commendably playable update to a game that history will remember as ‘actually a pretty good pick at Choices when you really just popped in to get some Revels but got embarrassed when the till staffer said “is that everything?...

Or, for that matter, in GTA 6, Civilization, etc Image credit:2K Games The statement gives a couple of examples of more innocuous data collection, such as sponging up player and device identifiers to ensure compatibility with platforms, or making usernames visible to other players, together with more ambiguous practices like gathering data “to better understand how players play games”. Take-Two have been caught deploying some pretty insalubrious data collection software in the past....

Thousands are playing Valve’s unrevealed shooter Deadlock, a blend of Team Fortress 2 and Dota with Bioshocky skyrails And do I detect a minty dusting of Dishonored? Image credit:Tim Eulitz Valve’s third-person hero shooter Deadlock hasn’t been officially revealed yet, but thousands of you unscrupulous devils have been playing it thanks to stolen development builds . Speculation abounds that these “leaks”, coupled with Valve’s obstinate silence about it , are a calculated publisher psyop....

Today’s new games struggle because “evergreen” hits like Fortnite “pull players towards them at all times”, says former BioWare GM Inflexion’s Aaryn Flynn on lessons learned from playtesting Nightingale Image credit:Rock Paper Shotgun/Inflexion Games Before founding Inflexion in 2021, Aaryn Flynn worked at BioWare. He’s got credits on some of the studio’s best-loved games, from Baldur’s Gate 2 through Star Wars: Knights Of The Old Republic to Dragon Age: Origins and the Mass Effect trilogy....

Total Chaos stitches Doom to Resident Evil, and it’s scarily good Rip and tear until your nightmares join the fun Image credit:Trigger Happy Interactive I thought I had Total Chaos figured out. Creepy ruined castle, ironically named Fort Oasis. Shambling undead enemies and scuttling monsters. Resource scavenging and simple crafting mechanics. Reeks of knock-off Resident Evil territory, I thought. Not bad territory to be in, mind, but familiar. And, odd, considering I was locking eyes with hellspawn rather than shuffling corpses....