Category: Rock, Paper, Shotgun

Times Of Progress is a special game for me, because is the first news tip I have ever received from Sin Vega, Prime Minister of Strategy Gaming, way back in spring this year. Sin once described writing news articles for our former news editor Alice0 (RPS in peace) as like practising backflips in front of the kung fu master. Writing about a new city builder at Sin’s suggestion is like being invited to budget the development of Londinium by Julius Caesar.

The terror of screwing it up – together with other, more trivial distractions, like international games industry conferences- has stopped me from writing about Times Of Progress for months. Today I bite the bullet, and emerge from my lodgings to issue a hesitant speech to the masses, hoping like hell that Caesar is too preoccupied with the latest Gaul uprising to notice my errors.

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Toy Box sounds like a very Xmassy game, but then you watch a trailer, and realise that it is not very Xmassy at all. It’s a free visual novel with a macabre puzzling element. The setup is that you’re a toy inspector working for a jovial Grand Toy Maker, his face hidden above the top of the screen. Your job is to disassemble toys – five in all – according to his eldritch written instructions, and either “salvage” them or “sentence” them to the incinerator.

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Great was the adulation last week when FromSoftware announced a new Elden Ring game, Elden Ring: Nightreign – and great the lamentation from certain quarters when it was revealed to be a co-op-focussed experience. If you missed the reveal, perhaps because you value sleep over the spectacle of Geoff Keighley’s fashion friends, let me catch you up: in Nightreign, you pick from one of eight preset characters and explore a parallel-universe version of Elden Ring‘s Limgrave map, fighting lesser foes and levelling up quickly so as to prepare for a boss battle at the end of each 15-minute in-game day.

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Uh, it’s probably not a problem – probably – but I’m seeing a small discrepancy in today’s advent calendar and… no, never mind… it’s well within acceptable bounds. Go ahead, open the door.

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Sometimes dogs are hard to shut up. Over a year and half after releasing Hrot from early access, the developer of the Quake-inspired shooter has fixed the dogs after discovering that a few of the canines have been, for some players, barking in a hideous and endless loop.

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At 9 years old, in the plastic seats of a Sega Rally arcade machine, I quickly learned that “automatic” is better than “manual” without understanding why. And now I know: changing gears is a fucking chore. This year, in my mid-thirties, I finally learned to drive. And weirdly, a racing game about destroying clapped-out old bangers helped me along. Thank you Wreckfest, for all the bottled road rage you allowed me to unleash.

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Today’s door has a big DO NOT ENTER sign, suggesting your immediate opening of it was in fact prohibited. Banned. Taboo, even. Yet it’s hard to see why, as it swings open to reveal a spectacular sunset view, interrupted only by the roar of a mechanical woolly mammoth.

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Can one sleep on a bookshelf? I’m going to find out. See you in the new year. Or, probably next Sunday with another minimum effort column entry. Book for now!

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Today’s advent calendar window is a window upon Xmas past. It returns us to the days of LAN parties and dial-up, of demo discs and Fileplanet – a more innocent era, before multiplayer shooters fell under the spell of progression. Not that innocent, maybe. There were plenty of arseholes back then. Some of them now run very large software companies. But at least there was no grinding to ruin your bunnyhopping.

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Squeezing through the advent calendar window into a sodden glade of flower and coral, you spy a curious organism on a ledge in the shadows. It’s a video game of some description, though it looks like a squirrel, with frantic white eyes. What’s it doing? Ah, whoops, you’ve startled it. Better follow it offscreen.

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