Supporters (Page 2)

My goodness, what a close thing. Fading Afternoon is a game of excellent vibes as you stroll around the city living your faintly sad life. It's also an incredibly cool 2D beat 'em up that is, at its best, comfortably the best I can think of. But the boundaries between the two are too frustrating to make it the legend it ought to be.

It's a sequel to The Friends Of Ringo Ishikawa, a game I didn't really vibe with. FA is much improved, a sort of pared down Yakuza game about beating rival gangsters up in between story bits about an ageing Maruyama trying to get the band back together after leaving prison and apparently not caring that he's dying. I do recommend it, but be prepared for some friction.

I've really been trying with Starfield! I want to experience the space adventure that's been lauded by some critics as a 10/10 masterpiece, and by Bethesda as the most important RPG ever made. But I'm struggling, folks. I'm really struggling.

You see, I'd hoped Starfield's side quests would be a bit more fun than collecting magic space rocks. But basically every side hustle I've tackled have all been the equivalents of early MMO fodder and I'm so tired of them.

This week we wrote some articles about the hilariously comprehensive Microsoft leaks, and Alice0 wrote one in particular about Bethesda's plans to not remaster Morrowind. It is, she points out, understandable why the sanitised Bethesda of today would leave well enough alone: "2002's Elder Scrolls game is an overambitious, odd, scrappy, and spiky beast. It is a game happy to leave you lost, confused, misunderstanding, weirded-out, frustrated, and stuck."

Yet, Morrowind is loved! And in the comments of that article Nic Rueben mentioned the demo for Ardenfall, an RPG with no release date but a Steam demo. So off I toddled to have a look, and though I haven't played much of it yet, I'm confident in saying that if you liked Morrowind you should check the demo out.

I dunno if you've heard of this game Starfield, but there's a lot of talk about it at the moment. It is a roleplaying experience where the role you play is not "Viking-ish warrior who can shout with the power of a million metal frontmen" or "wasteland wanderer downing cans of irradiated coke" but "person in space following a broadly unexciting A-plot". Much of the most interesting stuff in Starfield is on the periphery of the main story, as is the case with most Bethesda RPGs, but I find Starfield to be much less whimsical (something I won't relitigate here). As an RPG, Starfield is taking itself seriously, and sometimes this collides with the design game systems and menus.

An example of this is that you are supposed to experience the vastness of space, but cannot do so without going through a lot of loading screens. Another is that you have two sets of clothes: a spacesuit for places that are hostile and have no breathable atmosphere, and street clothes for planets that do. And NPCs keep making fun of me for wearing my spacesuit when I don't need to, and I hate them for it.

Space Mechanic Simulator almost had me. The promise of jetpacking over to satellites and stations then tinkering in their innards is a solid one, and adjacent to my impossible space salvage game dream. Elements of it work. Others are within acceptable levels of wonkiness for me personally. But it needs a bit of an overhaul to fix some silly design choices it's hobbled itself with.

Friends, I am excited. A new trailer for Final Fantasy VII Rebirth dropped last night during the Playstation State Of Play stream, and holy cow, despite feeling a bit ill and exhausted and generally not firing on all cylinders at the moment, I think I might be more pumped for this than literally any other video game on the horizon right now. Even that long-awaited PC release of Final Fantasy 16 can't quite compare to this, if you ask me, and I might even be more enthused by it than the prospect of a Switch 2. And I don't even really like Final Fantasy VII! That's how much Nomura's mad, timey-wimey game child has sunk its teeth into me. I'm mostly here just to see what mad nonsense comes Cloud's way next - and from the looks of things, it's a lot.

Longtime readers will know that I really appreciate a good kick in a vide-oh my god I've been working here that long. Anyway, I like a kick, and I like a game that manages to actually be funny, and I have been playing Deathbulge: Battle Of The Bands. You do the math(s).

I actually wrote about Deathbulge in a round up of best demos in a Steam Next Fest back in 2020, at which time I enjoyed the RPG antics of a band entering a cursed Battle Of The Bands competition and finding out that it's a fight to the death. The full thing came out a month ago without my noticing, and got past the endpoint of the demo. It's fun! I'm enjoying the combat, which is both real-time and turn-based, and has some surprisingly deep tactics attached to it. But more importantly, the full Deathbulge game starts in a town where you enter houses by kicking doors in.

Hitting pause in a video game is like dropping a wall across it. On one side of the wall lies what is called the diegetic space of the game, aka the fictitious world, which is generally the aspect that receives the most interest, the aspect that tends to attract the weasel word "immersive". On the other side of the wall lie menus, settings and other features that form a non-diegetic layer of bald operator functions - technical conveniences and lists of things to tweak or customise, from graphics modes to character inventory, that are cut adrift in a vacuum outside of time.

In theory, the pause screen and its contents are not truly part of the game. There is no temporality, no sense of place, no threat, no possibility of play, no character or narrative, no save the princess, no press X to Jason or pay respects, no gather your party before travelling forth. As the scholar Madison Schmalzer points out in the paper I'm wonkily paraphrasing here, "the language of the menu itself emphasizes the menu's position as outside of gameplay by labeling the option to continue as 'resume game.' The game world is always privileged as the site that gameplay happens."

I first clocked the mysterious-looking OU when Japanese indie collective Asobu did their pre-Bitsummit showcase stream in 2021. It wasn't entirely clear what OU was going to be at that point, other than a sort-of-puzzle game about an amnesiac boy who'd found himself in a fantastical world of picturebook pages, and even when Alicia Haddick played it for herself at Bitsummit proper the following year, OU still had a strong, impenetrable sense of ambiguity about it.

But its striking art and rustic guitar soundtrack have stuck in my mind ever since, and finally, OU is now out in the wild. I've only played about two hours of it so far, but it's clear there's still a lot more to discover within its dreamy little vignettes. It's one of those games that's designed to be played multiple times to get the full extent of the story, and I've just hit the first of those Nier Automata-esque restarts. Honestly, I'm not quite sure what to think of it yet, but one thing is certain: I can't get it out of my head.

Although most of my favourite films are tragedies, games with a grim and heavy premise don't often appeal to me as much as you'd think. I wasn't quite expecting to enjoy The Man Came Around, then, as it's about a group of desperate people trying to cross the border to escape their authoritarian government. In Winter, no less.

It's actually rather light in practice, although not in a flippant or trivialising way. The message is clearly that these things are serious and our sympathies should be, well, basic concern for the wellbeing of other people. But it's not as miserable to play as games with such serious themes often are. The premise is serious, but the act of playing it is not. I'd call it "diverting" rather than "entertaining", but the bottom line is there's a good afternoon or two in there for you.

Maybe it was replaying Aperture Desk Job for the RPS Game Club, or maybe it was the sheer scale of Baldur's Gate 3 activating the ol’ fight-or-flight. Either way, I’ve recently developed an intense appreciation for teeny, tiny microgames, to the point where I’ve essentially been begging in the RPS Slack channel for recommendations. Just one more Steam link and I’ll be fine, promise.

And I don’t mean short games in the seven- or eight-hour sense. Not even film-length games like Portal or Jazzpunk. No, I seek to gorge on the slightest sub-hour canapés, games in which you can see and do everything in one or hour or less. "Irresponsibly large"? Another time, Mister Starfield, I crave something irrevocably small.

Hello folks. How was Baldur's Gate 3 August for you? Ready for Starfield September? I hope you are, because lemme tell you, it's coming all right. In truth, I was surprised (and somewhat saddened) by some of the comments we received around our Baldur's Gate 3 coverage. If you missed them, they were mostly in the vein of saying our increased volume of BG3-related posts felt like "spam", harking back to when we (and the internet at large) all went similarly bananas over Elden Ring last year. I know it can sometimes seem like writing about these games - particularly on RPS - feels like we're somehow neglecting everything else going on in PC gaming. But the truth is a little more complicated than that, so I wanted to take some time to talk a bit about this in this month's Letter From The Editor, because there are a number of reasons why this happens - and will probably continue to happen more generally as websites fight for survival.

People have talked about Baldur's Gate 3 going a bit wonk in the final chapter when you reach the titular big city. It was actually my favourite act of the whole game - not that I doubt other people saw things going on the wonk a lot, but I did, thankfully, escape more or less unscathed (apart from one instance where, for some reason, Gale the smug sex wizard had a conversation with me, and then immediately repeated the exact same conversation). For me, the final act of BG3 is the act when all my nonsensing in the rest of the game paid off. The part where it turned out it did matter that I spent a painstaking hour separating and killing a bunch of guards in a mine, so I could save the gnomes trapped in a cave-in. It was also where a genie turned me into cheese.

Spoilers, obvs, if you're that way inclined.

This week's news that the amazing Shadow Gambit: The Cursed Crew will be Mimimi Games' last hurrah has left me absolutely devastated. As the kids might say, I am shook. Besides being a bestest best in class tactics game with great characters, a witty script and deviously designed stealth puzzles to blast and backstab through, Shadow Gambit did that very rare thing that's seemingly eluded both other types of strategy game I've played recently (*cough*The Lamplighters League*cough*), and even Mimimi's own work in the past - and that's teaching you how to actually have fun with its large cast of murder pirates through its brilliantly-conceived bespoke tutorial missions.

Sometimes I open with "I hate x" because it's funny (and I'm right), but sometimes it's because I'm not sure if that's the source of my mixed feelings about a game. Verne Colon The Shape Of Fantasy is, at least in part, an adventure game, and weaker for it. Taken as 'pure' interactive fiction, it'd be shorter and simpler, but might allow its premise, atmosphere, and intriguing world to shine the way they ought to.

The premise actually takes some explaining. Jules Verne himself takes the place of Aronnax, the protagonist of Twenty Thousand Leagues Under The Seas, and instead of mere hermitry, his new submarine home/prison is devoted to a guerrilla war against The Nation, a Prussian-ish empire you might be able to stop using a techno-magical gubbins that allows you to edit reality. Intriguing, right?

We're in the midst of an unspeakably good couple of months for game releases, even if you ignore the boring corporate ones that we'll never hear the end of. The downside of such a bounty is there are even more gems getting overlooked than usual, because nobody has the time even when we're aware of them. Like, for example, Bomb Rush Cyberfunk.

It absolutely is the Jet Set Radio tribute it looks like, and it's a delight even if, like me, you never really liked the originals. Inspired by, rather than tracing over the rail grinding, spraypainting, all-dancing classic. It plays a little smoother, it clocks in shorter, and runs a little faster, but it's undeniably dancing to the same beat.

"Everything is floating islands and airships and we're not going to explain how or why" is a setting I nearly always respect, but fighting a campaign against pirates leaves me feeling distinctly uncool. This is the dilemma Black Skylands leaves me with.

You're a very young officer of... something, battlefield promoted to captaincy of the Fathership, essentially a giant floating base from which you set out on your airship in an open world kinda way to trade broadsides with baddies and land at occupied islands to do the twin stick shooter thing on foot. I… don’t like it as much as I want to.

I haven't played Dungeons & Dragons before, and I don't know much about it besides the obvious. I know there's a dungeon master, or DM, who directs proceedings behind a cardboard shield. I know you lob some dice to determine the outcomes of an adventure that's contained in the heads of everyone at the roundtable. And that's about it.

Baldur's Gate 3 is based on D&D's 5th edition and it's meant to honour its rules to the absolute tee. I'm sure it does! To be honest, though, I haven't exactly learned much about D&D by playing it. I don't even think of myself as playing D&D, instead I'm just playing an RPG whose complexity adds a nice mystery to proceedings.

Sclash is gorgeous. That's not the reason I'm writing about it, but it definitely helps. Style can't fix a bad game, but it can elevate a decent one about, say, a little hand-drawn 2D samurai running across the world stabbing dudes for peace. Little Jinmu does a lot of running to the right, a lot of slashing, and probably very little parrying and punching once you figure out the power attack.

There is, bluntly, not a lot to it, especially while its online mode is still listed as "coming soon". But even with remote multiplayer, I see this as more of a diversion for friends to enjoy than a serious competitive fighter and intentionally so.

I enjoyed it though. Actually, I think I enjoyed it more for that, though it does perhaps limit its audience.

This week I wrote a little post alerting you, my best friends, to the existence of Murdle. This weekend I went to town and bought a copy of the Murdle book - or, I should say, Volume 1, because you can already pre-order Volume 2. It's a chunky enough tome made up of 100 of the puzzles that form Murdle's daily little treat, split into sections of escalating difficulty. And, against my expectations, and despite basically being a vehicle for logic grid puzzles, Murdle has an actual plot. Which is more than many video games manage.

Rangers aren't everyone's favourite Dungeons & Dragons class, especially in the current 5th Edition ruleset, which is the one that smash hit RPG Baldur's Gate 3 is based on. I met another player who likes rolling rangers at a D&D table earlier this week, and I actually high-fived her because I was so excited at my one-woman ranger defense squad doubling its membership. Making your character a ranger in BG3 (which has some very slight differences) is even better; you can essentially brew a rogue that is better at taking damage, but can still do most other things you traditionally use a rogue for. Let me explain.

As a liker, consumer and person who used to work in print media, I always get a thrill out of seeing things like books in games, DVD shelves, magazines, you name it. If it's a bit of video game set dressing that has a legible spine with words on it, I will absolutely scrutinise it to the nth degree. Videoverse, the excellent homage to early 00s internet forums and Nintendo's Miiverse that came out earlier this week, doesn't have spine-filled book shelves, per se, but throughout the game you will see a collection of game magazines piling up on Emmett's desk, and readers, let me tell you, they are a delight.

It's been a while since I picked a game that irritated me quite so much. I quit playing Frank And Drake twice before even meeting its second protagonist, but something about it kept pulling me back.

It's partly the style. Some gorgeous rotoscoping gives its few characters a sense of constant motion that's unreal and very lifelike at once, and it's sometimes pushed further by having them decelerate to a blurred freeze frame when you stop walking. The backgrounds are static but interactable things shimmer a bit, like in old cartoons where you could always tell what was background and what was going to do something. More than that, though, it had me intrigued.

I'm not afraid to admit this, but it's become increasingly obvious over the last few days of playing Baldur's Gate 3 that my ability to create interesting custom characters is severely lacking compared to other members of the RPS Treehouse. Case in point, our Ed breezily announced yesterday in our team Slack that he was playing as a Dark Urge bard called, wait for it, Edders Sheeran like it was no big deal whatsoever. I'm not gonna lie, a tiny part of me died inside upon hearing this, simply because of its sheer (not a pun), unadultered brilliance. I mean, come on, it's so good it should actually be illegal.

But it also confirmed to me a deep dark truth about myself that I think I knew deep down, but had kinda been pushing under my equally drab mental carpet for years and years. I'm quite boring at the end of the day, and am the type of person who, no matter the game, always creates basically the same identical person every single time.

Liam and I have been playing looter shooter Remnant 2 in our spare time, as we realised we both couldn't stop thinking about it. Having been burned out of Destiny 2 and most live service games, we discovered Remnant 2 delivers all the benefits of blasting gangly creatures for skill points without all the live service baggage. What a refreshing thing.

Thing is, if two out of the three major bosses we've faced so far took us to court for cheesing them, we'd lose. And it brings us no greater pleasure, knowing we've carved powerful new weapons out of their remains. God, it feels good to be totally undeserving of any credit whatsoever.

Hello folks. It sure has been a while, hasn't it? Huge apologies for that. I would say it's been an unusually busy year, but then again, it's always a busy year, so I really have no excuse. Sorry about that. But! After some much appreciated feedback on how I can improve these Letters From The Editor, I return to you today with some notes and thoughts about how we're going to cover Baldur's Gate 3. I'll tell you now, it's going to be a while before you see our review, as review code only arrived a couple of days ago.

I have a complicated relationship with retro-style games in general, and no particular fondness for the Everything Was Nintendo school. Or platformers, or double jumping, or dashing, or neon, or being alive in general. Dislike is the wrong word, but "weary neutrality" about covers my feelings when another retro platformer comes down the game tubes.

Gravity Circuit, however, is good enough that I can't not mention it here. It's loud and bright without being obnoxious or overwhelming, fast and precise without being overly demanding, and generally just a damn good effort at creating a modern action platformer whose main influence is obvious, but isn't just going through the motions for the sake of nostalgia. I'm saying it's good, yeah? Maybe not quite for me, but good anyway.

Every year when I ask the team to vote for their favourite games of all time ahead of us putting together our annual RPS 100 list, I'm regularly astonished by the sheer breadth of games that fly into my inbox. Everyone on the team has such varied, individual tastes, and it heartens me to see so many different genres and types of games represented every year. This year's list (available to read now in Part One and Part Two is another great testament to that.

But as we (sometimes) jokingly say any time we compile a big list like this, the games that didn't make the cut are always at #101. Well, this year I thought supporters might like to see those games at #101 this year, and crikey, there are a lot. There are so many here, in fact, that we would have had to have stretched to an RPS 200 to include them all. So here are our honourable mentions this year (listed, for ease), and I'd love to see you try and guess which games belonged to which member of the team.

While I was on holiday last week I started playing Alan Wake for the first time ever in my whole life, due to a working theory that I might end up reviewing the sequel one day, who knows. I am furious because none of you told me Alan Wake is essentially Garth Marenghi in his Twin Peaks era, and if you had I would have played it ages ago. The game is such a knowing snake ball of mating tropes that it ouroboroses round into being brilliant, flawless, ridiculous. And also Alan is a terrible writer, I would hate his books. But also everyone should leave him alone because he's doing his best.

Crime O'Clock is a game that should (apologies in advance) tick (sorry) a lot of boxes for me. There's a time-travelling detective story at the heart of it, in which you and a very Minority Report-style AI work together to stop crimes that will disrupt the one true timeline throughout history, and it's all played out on gorgeous black and white tableaus like Adriaan de Jongh's wonderful Hidden Folks. You'll rewind and fast forward time to plot suspicious movements, track stolen objects as they move across town, and work out who (or what) is causing all this chaos. I'm having good fun with it, but I do wish it would stop whisking me away from its lovely maps to go and complete yet another tedious mini-game.