Auto Added by WPeMatico
We eight scribes from RPS are,
Bearing jokes, we wrote in the past,
Christmas crackers, god we’re knackered,
After twelve months of graft.
O, reader of wonder, loved the most,
Why not subscribe to Supporters posts?
January leading, still proceeding,
See you once we’ve munched our roasts.
But first, time to enjoy your lovely joke!
He’s making a list, he’s checking it twice, he’s checking it thrice, he’s checking it four times, he’s checking it five times, he’s checking it Six times, he’s checking it Six times, he’s checking it Six times… Hello reader who is also a reader. We don’t have a game developer contact for the final Bookshelf of 2025. Instead, I’ve called upon my occult connections to secure a last-minute interview with the very Father of Christmas himself.
How jolly his manner! How red his attire! How curiously squelchy the bag thrown over one shoulder! How unidentifiable the appendage he slowly extends from the fissured green immensities of your Christmas tree! Cheers, Santa! Mind if we have a nose at your bookshelf?
Clair Obscur gripped me within the first minutes of its dramatic prologue. A turn-based RPG with a Belle Époque, steampunky aesthetic and a bleak world of monsters and magic? I know they say not to put a hat on a hat, but when that hat’s a beret… magnifique. The story opens with the people of Lumière celebrating its annual get-together where the Paintress, a sobbing giant beyond the city’s shores, etches a number into a cliff, and hundreds of onlookers immediately evaporate into petals and smoke.
Every game has its limitations, there is only so many actions you can take, narrative threads to unspool, buttons to press. What about a game that you can only play one round of every day? A game where you “take up the sword against an NPC or another girl-esque thing irl and fight until one of you is holding the lifeless, bloodstained hand of the other.” This is the description of a tiny, visceral Yuri Game Jam game called Everyday Sororicide.
The thing about Big Business these days is that when you get Big Numbers, that normally leads to Bigger Business, right up to the point the well has not only dried up, but turned to dust. So, when you have a game like Clair Obscur: Expedition 33, now winner of many Geoff Keighleys and seller of many copies, you might assume that developer Sandfall Interactive would increase the size of their operations. Apparently, you would be wrong!
The end of a very short era is here! I guess, if you care about the life cycles of tech products made by multi-billion dollar companies. It appears that the days of the original LCD model of the Steam Deck is coming to an end, as a quiet notice from Valve suggests their focus will be with the slightly newer, shinier OLED line of handheld gaming devices.
I’ve always found PowerWash Simulator‘s Big Brand Collabs slightly odd, if a touch humorous. They don’t always make much sense to me, like the SpongeBob one, though I will admit that the Shrek one does feel like a good fit, even if I am loath to look at intellectual property. And now here we are with its sequel, PowerWash Simulator 2, with its first bit of DLC freshly announced, sending prospective powerwashers off to a distant land called Ooo from the seminal Adventure Time.
I mean, all you can do is laugh, right? You’ve probably already guessed at what based on the headline, but we’ll dig a little deeper into this all the same. Yes, Ark 2 has been delayed, the same Ark 2 that was revealed almost exactly five years ago, that was at one point in time promised to release in 2023, and then 2024, and then sort of half-heartedly slated for 2027, before landing where we are now, with the news that the game is currently planned for release in 2028. Uhuh!
I went into Dispatch with a goal in mind: Be a hard-ass. Seeing the trailers for Adhoc’s revival of Telltale’s signature cinematic, choice-focused story games, I figured it would be fun to roleplay its lead, Robert Robertson, as a straight-shooting boss who only deals in tough love.
I used to play every Telltale game with a character arc in mind, largely to see whether they could bend enough to allow my interpretation. And Dispatch’s world of superheroes caught in the corporate machine handed me the perfect set-up for my story.
Dave The Diver took over my PC around Christmas in 2023. I found Mintrocket’s wonderfully charming restaurant manager/ocean explorer a joy to flipper around the depths of, battling big fish, discovering ancient civilisations, and then returning to the surface to do some sushi waitering. I’ve honestly not thought about returning in a while, but the fresh look the devs have just offered at their upcoming In the Jungle DLC has me very much pencilling one in.
