Category: Rock, Paper, Shotgun

A platoon of Tingi, strange mutant babies that a goose with a very long neck keeps vomiting out, march along in Santa hats. As they crawl, fall, and drop into drinks which serve as orange-hued progenating pools where they merge with others to form bigger tingi, they earn money. Millions and billions of cash bills a minute at this point. It collates in a piggy bank far below, beneath the base of the goose’s neck, which just out of the stomach of a rather bemused beachgoer. Everything’s as it should be in Tingus Goose. Well, nearly everything.

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The nights are heavy, the sun is frail. The mountain moans its hunger. The rivers are frozen scars and the trees are become hard flashes of black lightning. Bells haunt the wind and peculiar bearded men appear in the fireplaces, to be chased away with pies and brandy. The roses, strangely, are in bloom.

Put on your slippers. Stoke the embers. Pull up a chair. It is time to remember. It is time to renew. It is time to succumb to a growing addiction. It is time… to play Skeal.

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I wasn’t sure if I wanted Command & Conquer to come back. Some things are just gone, a product of their time, your fondness for them tied to some ephemeral capacity or limitation long since stretched out or hammered in by time and, in the case of games, a wealth of fresher and more convenient alternatives.

But Tempest Rising is not C&C again. Even though I’ve summarised it as such in a few emails, given the clear similarity of its design and setting. It feels more like an original work made with modern tools by a second team with roughly the same remit, and while I don’t love it, I enjoy and respect it so much more than a flat remake.

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Larian hope to offer “more insight” into their usage of generative AI via an ask me anything session set to take place in the new year. It’ll also be a chance to ask more general questions about Divinity, if you fancy. Naturally, this all comes after the Geoff announcement of the Baldur’s Gate 3 devs’ next RPG was swiftly followed by comments from CEO Swen Vincke which revealed the studio are making limited use of generative AI.

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You are standing in the Dark Room, pockets full of gems and keys, eyeing up the eastward door. The three silhouetted templates on your drafting screen all seem equally unpromising. You go for broke and pick the one on the left. Ah nuts, you’ve drawn the Videogame Journalist’s Bedroom. It contains nothing save rotten coils of USB cables, the stink of bad coffee, and a single active computer screen, displaying a just-written article about an esoteric strategy puzzler.

Which strategy puzzler? The one that rhymes with “blueprints”, of course.

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League of Legends is set for some big changes as part of an overhaul targeting a 2027 release, Riot Games have confirmed following a report on the coming revamp by Bloomberg. Yep, the MOBA’s devs have pulled the trigger on their official announcement a little earlier than planned, waxing lyrical about laying “the groundwork for League’s next era” now, rather than waiting to reveal all in the new year.

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Last year, myself, Brendy and Graham got fearfully excited about Straftat, a bountiful free 1v1 FPS with map designs calibrated to nostalgiafuck anybody who ever played Quake over an LAN or hoarded shareware CDs. Our fever burned all the hotter for knowing that Straftat is the work of them wot did Babbdi, the amazing Brutalist exploration game from 2022.

Brendy and Graham have now left the Treehouse, alas, so there is nobody here to get excited with me about VHOLUME, a first-person parkour game from one of the Straftat developers. I am sitting alone in my room, sorrowfully punching the air, tears pooling around my ankles and threatening to short-circuit the PC. Just as well it’s a single player experience, I guess.

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Having launched with plenty of tarmac and dirt spaghetti for your car to be violently spit from into a tree or hedge, Assetto Corsa Rally now features the usual third type of surface that’s rallied along. Supernova Games Studios have let snow and ice encrust their sim in its biggest update since it took off from the early access start line.

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“That’s not a minotaur, that’s a stand-in for the child star of a classic 90s Christmas movie,” I yell while playing Minos’ free holiday reskin, Minos: Home A-Labyrinth. Devs Artificer have temporarily transformed the demo of their maze-building roguelike – due out in full next year – into a legally distinct parody of Home Alone’s burglar-hurting antics you can play for free.

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Silent Hill f is one of the few Silent Hill games set outside Silent Hill itself. It transports players from the eternal doldrums of Maine, North America to 1960s Japan, and casts you as a school student in the foggy village of Ebisugaoka. It’s very good, thanks not least to a thoughtful and poignant story from Ryukishi07. Appetites are now whetted for a Silent Hill package tour, and Konami producer Motoi Okamoto already has a few ideas about where he’d like the series to go next. Ideas that, admittedly, make me nervous about the possibility of ham-fisted cultural misrepresentation.

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