Supporters

For Magic Week, I wrote about Team Lazerbeam's upcoming dating sim Wrestling With Emotions: New Kid On The Block (WWE) and how you're able to romance a beefcake composed entirely of green ooze. There is, of course, far more to it than that. I asked Team Lazerbeam's Ben Rausch about how it tackles themes of queer identity and diversity in a kickass way, which I highlighted in my post, but wanted to highlight even more here. Their answers were too good not to share.

You ever see that Mastodon post where a guy explains why he now understands Elon Musk is an idiot, because he's started talking about software? I imagine you've experienced a similar thing with video games, whenever a columnist for a broadsheet writes about them and you can instantly tell that they have never played one in their whole dahlia-manuring, boot room-having, fox hunt-following life.

Tomorrow, And Tomorrow, And Tomorrow is a book about the decades-long relationship between two people who are game developers. And like the above, it would be impossible to explain to someone who doesn't work in the games industry why a small exchange between the two of them made me absolutely roar with laughter.

Quickplay strategy games have always been a thing, but they appear to be gaining in popularity lately. I will probably regret not keeping Ozymandias aside for the traditional "summer strategy game for when your brain is a gas" bit, but the scene is looking healthy enough to chance it.

You know that cliché feeling of "just one more turn"? Ozymandias is a bronze age 4X that builds momentum enough to turn that into "just one more game". It is incredibly easy to learn, and despite looking a little dry and number heavy, becomes more effortless, more pleasant the longer you play. It also becomes more clear how much depth there is hidden away in such a light design. It's about proving yourself the most prestigious civilisation, not through total conquest, but by exploiting the lay of the land, and leaning into your strengths.

Several times now, I have answered the What are we all playing this weekend? question with something like "I think I'm going to give Dwarf Fortress a go this weekend". Reader, I have not given Dwarf Fortress a go, and I'm starting to think I never will. It's too much, much too much. It scares me.

For three hours, Re:Call was high on my list of surprise recent indie hits. It has a great premise, for starters - change history by meddling with your memories and playing out different versions of events to arrive at the 'correct' solution - and executes it brilliantly. Its GBA-style visuals and larger-than-life character portraits give it a real sense of charm and personality, and its mystery story of murder and corporate conspiracy had hooked me in real good.

Then it abandoned its cool premise halfway through and became a different game entirely for its remaining run-time. I was heartbroken.

Maybe it's because I've been bouncing between a lot of weighty games lately, but I've found a great diversion in The True Slime King, a simple three button platformer that recently left early access.

Speaking pedantically, this isn't "as simple as it gets", but you'll get what I mean if I describe it that way anyway. You move and jump, dodging spikes and lasers and ISO 13370 compliant death pits, and ideally collecting all the hard to reach thingies along the way. These are far from my favourite genre, but I've played enough to realise I'm partial to a good one, and this is a great one.

As part of Steam Next Fest, I gave pixel-art, sidescrolling fantasy RPG Greedventory a go. It takes your mouse and turns it into a sword, or a shield, or an arm that's capable of swatting away an explosive potion. It may be like something you, dear reader, have played in the past, but me? Nah, never played anything quite like it! Well, that's a lie. If anything, it's the first fantasy RPG that's made use of my latent - and highly dubious - CS:GO skills and brought to mind a rhythm game called Osu! I am very impressed indeed.

Last week, I finished the free Tomb Raider DLC for PowerWash Simulator, in which you pressure-blast scum off Lara Croft's ancestral home. It's a great DLC, not just because it has loads of nods to the older Tomb Raider games, but also because if you're just in it for the powerwashing, you've got some lovely levels to clean, with nooks and crannies and satisfying walls to scour. My favourite thing about it, however, is that it kind of canonically confirms Lara is an ass.

Hello folks. Earlier this week, we unveiled some of the cool things coming up for RPS this year - many of which revolve around you, our lovely readers and supporters. If you haven't had a chance to check that post out yet, I'd love to hear what you think of it. And yes, fixing our comments nesting is still very much on the agenda as well. Our tech team have a lot of websites to take care of these days, and they're working as fast as they can to sort things out. As soon as I have an update I can share, I'll let you know.

But enough about techy bits. I wanted to use this Letter From The Editor to talk about some of the more supporter-oriented things mentioned in that 'What's coming up' post. Specifically, I want to kick off the inaugural Ask RPS - your chance to ask us, the editorial team, questions about games, the site, the way we do things, and other things we like.

I really do not play enough visual novels these days. Raptor Boyfriend has been sat on my hard drive for at least a year, and it won't be the last. Historically, I have fallen hard for two kinds of VN: emotionally probing character dramas like Eliza and Watch Me Jump, or gentle and slightly silly comedies like Laura Silver and Camp W. The jokey dating-sim-but-everyone's-a-talking-table type vein never quite grabbed me. Unless Monster Prom counts? Hmm.

Raptor Boyfriend is more the lighthearted comedy kind, but with through lines on social anxiety and navigating confusing coming-of-age relationships. It is also not actually about having a raptor boyfriend.

This year, I decided to make a New Year’s Resolution for the first time in my life. I’m 21 and my knees click, which means I must be turning into stone faster than someone having a staring contest with Medusa. So, I vowed to exercise a few times a week. Then, during my first week back at work, vid bud Liam told me to try Age Of Empires II. Never before has a New Year’s Resolution been abandoned so fast. I really wanted to stick with it. Promise.

But! After my first match, the following 30 hours vanished quicker than the Galaxy Caramels in a box of Celebrations. I became obsessed. I mastered AOE II's low AI difficulties and quickly used the Advanced Techniques tutorial to learn build orders. Before I knew it, I had a Google Doc filled with step-by-step plans for various playstyles, the perfect strategies for any scenario. But that Google Doc ended up ruining everything for me. If that recent Xbox release with the good gamepad controls has you tempted to revisit Age Of Empires II on PC, do not make a Google Doc. You’ve been warned.

Little fluffy stuffed friends exert a strange and unknowable power over me. These days we only occasionally get offered free stuff as part of our jobs, because we are not YouTubers or Twitch streamers. When I first started websites would get sent a lot of stuff - you know, statuettes and toys and doodads. I don't like these things, and I always wished PRs sent me cake instead. Neither thing would make me like the game more, but at least I can eat cake, and the same cannot be said for a figurine of some kind of big-titted space samurai holding a sword.

I have, however, discovered that plushies of game characters I like are an exception to this.

For Hayden and I's Ultimate Audio Bang podcast, we thought we'd do something a little differently this year. Instead of focusing on one theme and yapping on about it for a very long time, we're now splitting the pod into two segments: the first half on the hip and happening, the second on an FPS genre or subgenre that we're unfamiliar with. Our first port of call? theHunter: Call Of The Wild.

In our first sessions with the game, we both concluded that A) deer are incredibly athletic; and B) we're the most impatient people, perhaps ever. More than that, though, we hadn't realised how important it was to fixate on your prey. Not like, track them down. But like, track them down, you know?

You know what’s guaranteed to make me laugh every single time? A good visual gag in a cartoon. A little freak reading a newspaper, for instance. A hyper-realistic close-up of a character’s face. A weird rat, perhaps. Maybe it’s smoking a cigarette? Whimsical. I love it. This is the main reason why I keep returning to Pizza Tower, a 2D platformer by Tour De Pizza that released on Steam yesterday. It’s a bizarre homage to Nintendo’s lesser-known Wario Land series (specifically its fourth entry) that's jam-packed with goofy little drawings that make me laugh. It’s good, but not without its issues.

Ooh, I'm glad this made it to a full release. Power of Ten has rattled around my PC since ... I want to say "a year ago", but that could turn out to be any time in the last three years if I actually check. It didn't quite push me over the "Article Threshold" back then, but having given it a proper go now it's out of early access, it's time.

You're a little spaceship, with a simple but intriguing backstory, who's appeared near an inhabited planet. A transmission asks you to repair their defensive shield before "the Deadeye" arrives to genocide them, which, uh, okay I think I know whose side I'm on here, game.

Over the past couple of days, Book Twitter (and actually regular Twitter, because it's such a catastrophically mockable opinion to have in public) have been making much fun of this dude, who essentially pitched that AI could disrupt books. Another guy enthusiastically replied that you could add Metaverse features so you could "live the book". Don't bother adding to the pile on, because there are no more jokes to make. They have been deluged by people pointing out that TV, films and video games all aready exist.

This made me think about, firstly, that we'd be much better off as a society if techbro web3 enthusiasts were all siloed into one giant Truman Show-esque hamster ball where they can all scurry about together thinking they're achieving things. But secondly, that some people really put a lot of store on interactivity. Including me! Graham was the one who sent me those tweets, and he said he wouldn't want to live in any of the books he's been reading, because everyone in them is sad or angry for the whole book, until almost the end. I said I wouldn't want to be in them because you'd only end up being a side character, and that's boring.

Despite the name, Sailing Era isn't one of the sailing sims that have popped up recently. It's a little hard to describe, but let's see how we get on.

You steer your wee boat around a grounded anime age-of-sail Earth, looking for shipwrecks and treasures, fighting pirates (and possibly being one, although fairly peripherally),exploring, trading, and doing the usual Elite-style open world thing. I'll be honest: I don't exactly love this one, and it's spread a little thin. But I've played it for hours longer than I expected and enjoyed it more as it went on. It's doing a lot, in its own slightly roundabout way.

This past weekend, I ended an 18-month-long love affair. I managed to drag the experience out for all it was worth, but in the end, there was nothing to do but let go, and complete the fifth and final game in the Ace Attorney Turnabout Collection. And, oh, my heart, the post-game blues are real!

I was extremely late to the party when it comes to Capcom's long-running series of legal dramedy visual novels, which debuted all the way back in 2001. But I found my way here in the end, largely thanks to the aforementioned collection, which packages prettied-up versions of the original Phoenix Wright: Ace Attorney Trilogy and its prequel duology The Great Ace Attorney Chronicles onto modern systems.

I've been holding something in for 5 years. It first started as a deep joy, like a ray of sunshine in the palm of my hand. Then it became a deep sense of longing for something I'd lost, like a cascade of sand that fell from my palm as I wept gently on an empty beach. The "it" is a mobile and Nintendo Switch game called Pokémon Quest (don't laugh), which was the first - and only - mobile game I've actively obsessed over.

The game's an auto-battler where you gather a small trio from the original 150 Pokéfolks, level them up, and then tackle trickier and trickier stages. After a frankly disgusting number of hours, I'd finished all the stages. So, I thought, "Yes, of course they will add the 2nd generation of Pokéfolks with a bunch of new stages. This is its natural evolution, if you will". It still hasn't happened and probably never will. And I hate that I can't find anything else that'll replace it.

We had a discussion in our Monday meeting that got louder than things normally do, because The Last Of Us TV show came up, and we found ourselves divided into two camps. Well, three. Camp one was excited for the TV show and camp two posited that there's no point making an adaptation of something if your adaptation is just the same thing. (The third camp was "eh, I might check it out" and watched the other two camps duking it out). I was in camp two. If you're adapting something, adapt! Make changes! Otherwise I might as well just consume the original thing again! The Last Of Us has already been released, what, three times?

This was made funnier by the fact that nobody on staff had seen the TV show, so we were just arguing about tweets we'd seen that describe the show, the worst way to conduct a discussion outside of e.g. scrawling insults on the side of Teslas and self-driving them into each other's front doors. But it got me to thinking about adaptations, because there have been loads of adaptations of things that aren't games into video games. What goes wrong in the other direction?

What makes a good platformer? Christ, I don't know. Why would you open an article with that. Calling Kandria a platformer feels a little reductive, so there's a need to clarify why it works. You play as an android revived several decades after an apocalypse, by a tiny camp of survivors who inevitably need your help. A lot of this help involves, well, platforming. To the point of having nonsensical areas of pure platforming in between you and a destination or secret area. You'll climb, jump, do the little dash thing that recharges when you touch the ground or pick up a hovering lamp thingy. You'll land on a lot of thorny instakill spikes.

So yeh, lots of the old platforming, but it feels more like an exploration and scavenging game, with a side order of light-light-heavy-dodge combat too. And a plot with varied dialogue options and mysteries about the world and its history. It's immediately and consistently fun, but I'm not sure exactly how to recommend it. Hmm.

Writing up our big guide on all the upcoming PC games of 2023, I was introduced to a number of smaller games in development I hadn't heard about before. One of them was Broken Roads, an isometric RPG set in a post-apocalypse Australia. The gorgeous artwork was enough for me to click on the Steam page and read more, and while scrolling through the screenshots something strange caught my eye.

It was a screenshot of a fairly traditional RPG dialogue scene, with a panel at the bottom displaying all the possible dialogue options for the player. But what caught my eye was an unusual radial graphic on the right-hand side of the options. Reading on, I discovered that Broken Roads uses a rather unique Moral Compass, one which plots your overall moral stance towards the world and its people with a golden arc. Different decisions may rotate the arc, expand it, contract it, lengthen it, or shorten it. And in so doing, you'll unlock various traits dotted about the Compass, which only remain in effect for as long as that golden arc covers those traits within the wheel.

I can see a dozen different ways in which this Moral Compass may end up being a bad idea in practice. But I don't care. I adore it. And I'm going to play Broken Roads solely so I can see the consequences of my actions in satisfying radial form.

I've completed my first play through of Chop Goblins, a "microshooter" from Dusk and Gloomwood developer David Szymanski. All in all, it took me just under an hour to choppa' da goblins and I'm all up for more of the same, to be honest. I liked time-travelling between Dracula's abode and ancient greece, chopping a variety of killer goblins that squawked, "NICE TO MEET YOU!", in varying octaves.

While another FPS of the "micro" variety would be grand, I'd love a "microracer". Much in the same vein as my beloved Screamer, I'm desperate for a – linear or otherwise – arcade racer whose only concern is to burn rubber through all manner of world stages.

Last week I talked about how I spent my week off at Christmas playing PowerWash Simulator like it was my job. When I wrote that, I was about two thirds of the way through the story in Career mode, which turns out to be just before PowerWash Simulator goes as bananas as everyone's home baking in the summer of 2020. I can't believe I need to say this but: this article contains spoilers for the PowerWash Sim story.

I'll try not to bang on about it, but in the interests of transparency, it's important to stress how much I loathe most soulslikes. Even the name, to be frank. So when I say that I don't love Asterigos Colon Curse of the Stars, it's not as damning as it may sound.

You're Hilda, a stabby lass who, for reasons, must investigate and lift a curse from a big ol' fantasy city. By exploring its districts and stabbing lots of weird dudes. Aiding you is a network of semi-suspicious locals, and the kind of immortality that makes death more annoying than anything. It's a hybrid, really, of a Souls-ish game and a more traditional hack and slash action RPG. Regular attacks don't consume stamina, and instead of finding or buying weapons, you start out with a complete set, and swap their movesets in and out as needed. I respect that it picks and chooses soulsy elements instead of tracing over the whole design.

The only game I played over Christmas was a touch of Apex Legends with some pals, but otherwise, all I did was watch an eclectic mix of anime and TV: Mob Psycho 100, Better Call Saul, and Somebody Feed Phil. Granted, my gaming tastes wax and wane over a year, with lengthy JRPG stints rolling inevitably into junk food like Assassin's Creed Valhalla. No matter what, my one constant is an FPS or 'competitive' game, I suppose. Games like Apex, or Warzone, or even Fortnite.

And yet, for whatever reason, I don't consider them as candidates for the Bestest Best games of any year. I might pour hundreds, possibly thousands of hours into them and they won't even make it into my personal list of absolute faves. That's reserved for games, not games.

I had great plans for the games I was going to play over the Christmas break. Elden Ring! Tunic! Our game of the year Vampire Survivors! And I did try to play some of them, for a bit. Elden Ring and Tunic were both too hard for my state of mind, which was as robust as pink candyfloss. Even Vampire Survivors wigged me out because it's so visually busy by the end game, and I was in a more "Ferrero Rocher and jigsaw of the London Underground map" sort of place. My downfall was seeing PowerWash Simulator on sale on Steam. I bought it, and then played it for 40 hours.

It's a well known fact that there are "Too Many Games"(TM) these days. I have not done the maths, but I've seen enough graphs, tweets and analysis from people who have crunched the numbers to know there are more games coming out on Steam every day than a site like RPS could ever possibly hope to cover a single month, let alone every week. But gosh darn it if we don't try our hardest all the same.

Inevitably, though, time does get the better of us sometimes (or, in my case at least, maybe my eyes are just too big for my gaming stomach), and certain games end up slipping further and further down our to-do lists until they eventually fall away entirely. Not through any fault of their own, mind. Just... time. But as a final parting shoutout for 2022, I wanted to memorialise all the games that fell of my personal to-do list this year and say, "I'M SORRY, I DIDN'T MEAN IT, I PROMISE!" (For real, though, I still want to talk about all of these at some point. Maybe January...? Please don't hate me)

Serious racing games are not, as a rule, my thing. If the goal is to repeat a course 20 times to trim 0.2 seconds off a number, and not to cackle like a petty chaos gremlin as you slam someone off the track at a tight corner, I am probably not going to enjoy myself much.

Rush Rally 3 isn't all that serious, but it's still on the wrong side of the tracks for me, I thought, before accidentally playing it for 3 hours. This is an excellent bundle of rally trials, challenges, and simple circuit racing with a cheerfully mid-2000s feel. I might prefer the messy nonsense of Trail Out, but if you value actual driving skill more highly, this is well worth your time.

Can you hear that gentle rapping, tapping at your chamber door? 'Tis some visitor tapping at your chamber door - only this, and nothing more!

No it isn't. It's the Nate Files bonus podcast, funded by our supporters supporters, and we have an egg for you. Quoth the egg "Yolk!"