Supporters only:In search of soul with the Steam Machine

Je ne sais quoidware

James Archer

1 week ago

Can PC hardware have soul?

Nota soul, in the immortal spirit sense, though if anyone wants to comprehensively prove the existence of the divine in the comments then feel free. But I’ve long believed that inainimate objects can possess the same kind of loveable, if intangible and barely describable, quality that we look for in more purely creative works of art. Stuff where you take one look and know:yes, that’s special. The Fender Stratocaster. Rubik’s Cubes. The Space Shuttle Discovery. Soulful as fuck, all of 'em.

Unfortunately, whatever this quality is, it’s one that seems to elude PC hardware: a field of design that’s never been better, practicality wise, yet consists almost entirely of cold, black, do-yer-job plastic. Functional to a fault. It’s a shared shortcoming I’ve been thinking about since the flight home from seeingValve’s new Steam gear, and from first impressions, they’re mostly the same story. TheSteam Controller feels like a good controller, technically and practically, but I don’t think it has the charming hum of true soul. TheSteam Frame definitely doesn’t. The Steam Machine? That, I'm still figuring out.

Supporters only:Why Hades delightfully fools my simple lizard brain and Wall World doesn't

Give me chaos

Julian Benson

1 week ago

As you may have seen,I've not been having the best time with Wall World 2. While the sequel retains the half Missile Command, half Manic Miner roguelike goodness that made the first game so compelling, a shift in its structure has surfaced the dull minutes that dominate the start of each run. It's an unexpected change, and one which has really dampened my love for this robotic-spider good-time.

Supporters only:Congrats, Automobilista 2, your latest DLC has convinced me to spend 200 more hours driving in circles

To be fair, I barely needed convincing

Mark Warren

3 weeks ago

In the distance, I catch a brief glimpse of two streams of light. Then, the road’s empty, aside from the splayed glow of my own headlamps. The Mulsanne straight is beautiful at night, but as I fly along it atop a wave of V10 screams, I’m distracted. My steering wheel is pointing slightly to the left. I’ve knocked the tow out by clumsily meandering too close to a barrier. Miraculously, it seems to be the only damage my Courage C60 has sustained, but it makes catching the distant cars that taunt me so unlikely.

The year is 2005, and I’m on track for the sort of deeply lonely fifth place finish the Le Mans 24 hour race is wont to deliver. I’ve only been behind the wheel for an hour, butAutomobilista 2’s latest expansion is great at taking the sim’s long-brilliant racing foundations and using them to meld your mind with that of a mid-2000s endurance driver.

Supporters only:If only more games ended like Hardspace: Shipbreaker

Julian Benson

4 weeks ago

It is a delicious irony that at the end ofHardspace: Shipbreaker, a game about carving junked spacecraft into their constituent parts, lies a moment of fusion: a final mission that perfectly joins together your actions to its overarching narrative.

Supporters only:The self-defeating silliness of refusing to finish a game

It's mine, mine is the silliness

James Archer

1 month ago

I don’t normally have trouble saying goodbye to things. I replace wall art when I’m bored of it. I threw away my signed last-day-of-school shirt because it smelt of dust. I don’t even remember where my first bass guitar is. So why have I spent over two weeks noncommittally ambling aroundHollow Knight: Silksong, looking foranything to do besides seeing it to a final conclusion – even if that means not playing it at all?

Supporters only:Amid the purple haze of Fallout: London I rage, mocked by the violet vistas of my own stupidity

Old Blighty was actin' funny, but I don't know why

Mark Warren

1 month ago

A newborn fist smashes through the glass.

The unholy creature to which it belongs slithers from the tube and sprints past the slumped shapes of slumbering scientists. It runs through the lab at breakneck pace, an engine pumping as quickly as it can, but in total silence. Some cockney-accented shadows turn out the lights and it lurches on through the dark, knuckles dripping with irradiated shrew innards. A posh lady tries to talk to it, but even when forced to pause, it will not listen.

As it lumbers through the turnstiles of London bridge station, a single thought crosses its mind.Please. Not Again. Not this time.It clambers up the escalator of dread and passes through the invisible membrane into London.

Supporters only:I am a huge impatient baby but ReWire is still good

Fuse yon power

Sin Vega

1 month ago

One day I will learn some genre terminology, instead of clumsily describing puzzle games for several sentences. But not today! Today I am being not a professional critic but a loveable scamp. That's what they pay me for, probably.

Today it's time for ReWire, a mildly aggravating game lying somewhere between Pipe Mania and a tile-moving puzzle. It has a story, and you might expect me to bang on here about how it uplifts something modest, the power of narrative, and emotional investment. Perhaps I would, if I hadn't immediately started skipping the entire thing because it's so damn slow and I am going to die, we are all decaying mass, I feel myself age and wither and the dust gather in my mortal pores at every moment and oh my god, games, will you please, please let us skip to the next line of text at will.

It's a fun game, though.

Supporters only:Passant makes chess a roguelike, exposes my oafish brain

It's good to beat king

Sin Vega

2 months ago

I am terrible atPassant Colon A Chess Roguelike.

As a tiny baby I was good at chess, but may have plateaued there. Or maybe it's the game's fault? Yeah it's the game's fault. Bad game. 0/10 thumbsdown unsubscribe.

Supporters only:Chunky, bouncy car blaster Fumes is a straightforward good time

We are all exhausted here

Sin Vega

2 months ago

3D vehicular combat games ought to be a whole subgenre, but they're surprisingly sparse for something whose appeal seems so obvious. Presumably they're a nightmare to make, given how many different directions the concept can pull in.

Fumes is not a racing game, or a simulator, or a brutalMad Max hell world. Its main pull is towards the mid-late 90s action of Destruction Derby or Driver, although even those were harder and heavier. But it's doing its own thing, not nostalgia mining, and though it's not quite my thing, I'm struggling to name a driving-and-blasting game I got into faster and swore at less.

Supporters only:Befriend ghouls and poison cats in griddy retro RPG Cyclopean: The Great Abyss

We fought a Zoog

Sin Vega

2 months ago

Three in a row forSchmidtWorkshops! We should start giving out awards.Cyclopean Colon The Great Abyss is a modest little monster bashing RPG, comparing loosely to the early Ultimas, although much neater. You skip squarily around a top-down fantasy world, walking into people to get their attention, and into dungeons to become a real 3D boy skippingcubily around.

It's more robust, if less novel, than last year's cryptid-tracking puzzle-simAberration Analyst, and less colourful than Islands of the Caliph. But you'll pick it up within minutes, and probably not put it down for a few hours of optionally green fun.

Supporters only:Lovely Lady RPG gave me mixed feelings, but in a recommend-y way

Mea tulpa

Sin Vega

2 months ago

There's a type of depiction of self-loathing that mostly gets on my tits. Yes, yes, you did all the slurs at yourself, well done. You turned every sentence or thought into a means to repeat a dig at yourself, we get it.

It's not something I'm proud of. Thankfully, this has only happened through fiction, notin person*. It's one reason I don't have space to articulate my feelings about Lovely Lady RPG. They are mixed, partly because it's such a personal game, and it feels especially cruel to be hard on works like that. But loving each other doesn't mean perfectly mirroring them, or having only good things to say. It means accepting. I suppose that's sometimes true of criticism, too.

Supporters only:Quantum Witch is a sweet gay choose-your-own-adventure all about the replay value

Tomorrow is another deity

Sin Vega

3 months ago

A few times early on inQuantum Witch I was put on the spot, and forced to make a choice that seemed quite definitive. I felt put out, wanting to go and check something else first, or at least to save the game, which wasn't an option (yet). Both of these are a problem when covering a game, especially in a limited, impressions-y way. I don't know what possibilities I'm blocking off by making this choice, or which will be left to me later!

This is, however, the whole point of the design. You're given save slots after your first ending, and encouraged to go through again and try something else. Which you will, because wow, changing that one little choice took me some places.

Supporters only:The frontline is a capricious seesaw in budget autobattler-RTS Operation: Polygon Storm

Asset strapped

Sin Vega

3 months ago

Autobattlers might be replacing laborious tactical fights inrecentandupcoming strategy games, but they can still carry a lot of fun on their own merits too, without any of that context.

Operation Colon Polygon Storm is a simple concept. You're on the left, they're on the right, so clearly you have to let them kill anyone they want while you exhaustively research a factual rebuttal of that one thing they said last week. Or you can summon some wardudes to shoot them first, whatever.

Supporters only:Blobun is a simple but very solid wee space-fillin' puzzler

If I could turn back slime

Sin Vega

3 months ago

There's surely a name for this type of puzzle game. I could look it up, but then what would I do with the intro the next time I cover one, huh? Did you even think about that? It's a "fill all the squares" thing, so intuitive that it barely needs explaining. Move around the level square by square until you've done them all, and that’s that.

You are a good little gay bunny girl with a thing for slime. Sorry, wrong window.Blobun is about a gay bunny girl who's made of slime now, but that's really a "sure, why not" bit you can forget about. The puzzles are the point, and considering how fussy and easily bored I usually am by puzzles, it's a damn fine point.

Supporters only:Alright, I'm getting Archons of Doom out of storage

Feelgood hit of the summoner

Sin Vega

3 months ago

For no reason, I putArchons of Doom aside years ago, likely distracted by a bird, or cleaning the flat, or the crushing despair of living in an empire's corpse. It's sat on my PC ever since. One of the many "I'll play that one at some point" games to survive purge after purge, despite its relatively hefty install size. Sometimes, after doing this for long enough, you just get a feeling. This has something. This might be Good.

I've played it properly now and yeah, Archons of Doomis good. Humble, and imperfect, and budget through and through. But it's getting its spot here, at last.

Supporters only:Monomyth isn't just Arx Fatalis again but it also is and that's good

Cave adaptation

Sin Vega

3 months ago

Funnily enough, I went back toArx Fatalis for a few hours in early 2023. It'sstill one of those tragic near dead ends, doomed by a lacklustre sales and the later success ofDishonored guaranteeing Arkane would never get a chance to bring it back.

So here'sMonomyth. It's unfair to call itArx Fatalis again, but the influence is undeniable. Here's your Easily Escapable Dungeon cell, complete with friendly neighbour helpfully suggesting you press the conspicuous brick, you dolt. Here are gloomy but not unpleasant caverns with ferns and mushrooms and boring rats. Here's the worry that archery and stealth are poor choices in a series of tunnels. Here's cooking fish by placing them next to an open fire and waiting and yes, yes, yes, here we go!

Supporters only:Utter A Name is a tightly packed mini murder mystery

Speak and dispell

Sin Vega

3 months ago

Shaking off the urge to say "oh no a mansion full of rich people all killed each other oh no", I'm surprised by how interested I was in the motivations and movements of everyone in Utter A Name.

Spectral silhouettes stand ominously around a fancy house dotted with bodies and glowing things. This is the kind of nonsense I'd expect from fancy house people, but your candle-toting woman expects you to steer her around to figure out what happened instead of looting the place. Weirdo.

There were some servants as well though so ugh, fine. Fiiine. Sometimes class solidarity means ghost nonsense I guess.

Supporters only:I'd love a good foraging simulation, thanks

Thorny subject matter

Edwin Evans-Thirlwell

4 months ago

One of the UK's more disagreeable "weeds" is the bramble. It's a spiky, resentful snakeweasel of a plant that gets in everywhere and refuses to be gotten out. It pokes ravenously through fence gaps and broken glass panes, sneaking through long grass and using its thorns to haul itself over barriers and become inextricable from any structure in its path. It forms wiry entanglements that will strip the flesh from anything larger than a rabbit.

Supporters only:Assorted lessons from a 40 hour Baldur's Gate 3 honour mode run that ended in fire and failure

Sword coasting on vibes

Nic Reuben

4 months ago

About ten hours in, my recentBaldur's Gate 3 honour run (effectively ironman, you lose on party wipe) almost ended in fire. There's a stash of smokepowder barrels in the Goblin camp, quite easy to steal from the Zhentarim guards outside the room. This time, however, the Zhent were already hostile since I'd got a bit loud killing the Goblin priestess.

What I didn't know, because I'd never seen it before, is that the Zhentarim leader is programmed to always kick off the fight by launching a flame spell at the barrels. Also, there's a lot of barrels and they're packed together quite tightly. Also, they're very explosive. Luckily, I'd picked up some initiative perks and had managed to move most of my party away from the blast. I think Gale got got, but Gale is always going and getting himself got, so I brushed it off and continued the run.

Supporters only:Good work Cyber-Mastiff, I think you just solved all my problems with Darktide

Grimdog future

Nic Reuben

4 months ago

Darktide reminds me, more than its imposing and lavishly fuckawful environments invoke the 40K universe itself, of a birthday party at an independent laser tag thing I went to when I was maybe 11. Two floors of rooms and hallways, crenulated nooks and crannulated crannies, done up like industrial backalleys in a sickly cyberpunkish glow. We got geared up and entered through different doors. The doors closed, and I was suddenly alone in a labyrithine shitebunker. Above me was graffiti that asked, in the most menacing shade of cyberpink, "which way now?".

So anyway I started crying. Or doing that thing you do when you're small where your cheeks get all hot and you're crying inside anyway. Deeply disorientated; all the crushing weight of sudden mumlessness in the biggest of big Tescos. Not worried about the other kids with guns as much as the environment itself, which felt - just like Darktide so brilliantly pulls off - malevolent and industrial and impatient and vast.

Supporters only:A compact Choose Your Own Adventure about trying to clean yoghurt off the bin

It could happen to YOU

Nic Reuben

5 months ago

You are standing in your kitchen, ready to cry. You start with 3hp, 3 gold pieces, a torch, a half-eaten Curly Wurly bar, and a heavy iron shield. Made withElectric Zine Maker. The pages not the shield I don't think it can do that.

Supporters only:Anti-challenge runs are my new favourite way to play Baldur's Gate 3

Drown't want to talk to anyone

Nic Reuben

5 months ago

Couple of spoilers, innit

Something Larian'sBaldur's Gate 3 shares with Bioware's predecessors is a sort of invisible hierarchy of quests and enemy encounters, which is great in the sense that it avoids level scaling and offers satisfying "I'll come back later with a bigger sword" moments, but does present a bit of an issue for roleplaying.

Supporters only:9 Kings and other useful games

Functional monarchy

Nic Reuben

5 months ago

I've been feeling spiritually, physically, and cognitively exhausted recently - jelly of limb, soul, and mind - and9 Kings is picking up the slack something tremendous. The idea is that each king has a themed card deck, used to build structures and units to defend your base against the other 8. Each king's deck contains its own synergies (a bad corporate word we've somehow adopted in lieu of the superior 'interfuckery' or 'mingle-jinks', but I'll use for simplicity's sake), and the cards you gain from fighting other kings create even more. You'll even get chances to make peace or wage war on new kings to chase certain playstyles.

Supporters only:I might go back to Core Keeper instead of Minecraft

Machine mined

Sin Vega

5 months ago

Minecraft-ish games are a tricky prospect for a summary piece. Hours intoCore Keeper, I still have little idea how to activate the Core, or the three shrines with ominous names surrounding it. Am I missing something? Am I searching in the wrong direction? Am I not supposed to even think about that until another ten hours in? Or did I keep forgetting they exist, because it's so easy to get distracted wandering and mining and poking stuff? It's probably that. It's that.

Core Keeper excels at leaving you to do your own thing without becoming lost or overwhelmed, or fixated on one thing until a month goes by and grinder's remorse begins to haunt your soul. It hasn't grabbed me, but gently taken my hand, where its peers quickly become rote or annoying.

Supporters only:Working Model 1

Update needed

Edwin Evans-Thirlwell

5 months ago

A poem is a news article is a video game is coordinate and procedure for extending a space. The space begins when the first line ends, folding a sentence back on itself to produce serried rows of straight and faceless flowers. This is the two-dimensional workfloor of the poem. Between the stems, the eye is a little animal or adventurer following the sentence as you would cobblestones through a clever wood made up of many, half-seen triggers and hinges that move or breathe according to the motion of your passage.

Supporters only:Musings on cat (mine)

Cat good

Nic Reuben

6 months ago

It's been interesting learning the things that disturb or frighten my cat and those that don't. Putting crumpled bits of plastic and tissue in my bin right next to where she sleeps in my bedroom? Fine. Opening a new recycling bag for hanging in my kitchen? She bolts as if hunted by a roaring hellbeast. I wonder, too, if I am this capricious in my fears, and what silent stories I have invented to convince myself that they are fears worth having. Still, I cannot call her irrational, because I cannot know her reasons.

She will never know the myths and memes our kind make of hers. This is fine. Her heart and head started full and she does not need fame or stories to fill it, nor widespread adulation when she has the unadorned companionship of a singular dickhead (me).

Supporters only:Reviewing the cheese train ride that arrived in the RPS inbox without context

I choo-choo cheese you

Nic Reuben

6 months ago

"Take a journey on The Kent Cheese Train", enticed a recent email we received in the RPS inbox. Ah, I thought, now there's a niche that videogames have neglected to even attempt to fulfil. There's not even been a roguelike survival game set in Kent, nevermind the theoretical cheese-serving, engine-repairing management sim that this email's header alludes to. This'll be fun!

Nope, it's an actual train journey between Tunbridge Wells and Eridge, partnered with a local cheese shop. The cheese shop is named 'The Cheese Shop'.

Supporters only:The joy of bestiaries

Creature collector

Nic Reuben

6 months ago

One of my minor hobbies is reading medieval writings on animals. Here's an example of the sort of unbeatable bear lore you're missing out on by not doing this:

"The bear gets its Latin name 'ursus' because it shapes its cubs with its mouth, from Latin word 'orsus'. For they are said to give birth to shapeless lumps of flesh, which the mother licks into shape. The bear's tongue forms the young which it brings forth. But this is because they are born before they are mature: the birth is only thirty days after conception, and this hasty fertility creates unformed young. The bear's head is weak, and its greatest power is in its arms and loins; for this reason they often walk upright."

Supporters only:Object-ive review: proof of death trinkets

Bring me Flavor Flav's watch so I may know the deed is done

Nic Reuben

7 months ago

Welcome back. I see you're carrying a box of my hated rival's favourite supermarket brand chocolate cereal. Thus, I have no choice but to conclude that the dark deed is done. Also, I promise not to chase you down for my 50 gold back when I see my hated rival alive and well in the cereal aisle next week.

Supporters only:I'm starting to worry I'll never be graced by the Ultimate Gaming Experience

Never

Nic Reuben

7 months ago

Each day, I am met with a new reminder that the Ultimate Gaming Experience will forever elude me. I'm fucking distraught over it, I tell you.

How can six products of the same type all offer the Ultimate Gaming Experience? I can't use six mice. I own a mouse. It's cheap, ergonomic, and I like it. Yet, as it made no promise to deliver the Ultimate Gaming Experience, I must conclude that it does not.