Category: Rock, Paper, Shotgun

The PC and console market grew by 2.6% to $93.5 billion in revenue last year, according to a new report by video games date company Newzoo (cheers, Kotaku!) That’s good, right? Growth is universally a good thing, otherwise all those nice, dead-eyed men in suits wouldn’t keep saying it was. You can’t just lie about growth, that’s a business crime. However, here’s some slightly more worrying news, depending on how much you value new ideas: Of all the game time that gamers spent gaming in quantifiable Big Year for Gaming 2023, just 20% of that time was gamed on games other than the 66 specific games mentioned in the report.

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Evil Empire, the studio responsible for the previous five or so years of updates to Motion Twin’s roguelite metroidvania game Dead Cells, are set to release a new roguelite set in the Prince of Persia universe “later this year.”

That’s according to Insider Gaming, who were told by sources that ‘The Rogue Prince of Persia’, as the game is rumoured to be named, will first release in Steam early access. It’s reckoned to have been in development for the last four years or so, and supposedly came about after a talk between Evil Empire and Ubisoft at GDC 2019.

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RPS was on holiday yesterday, which is fortuitous timing because it was April 1st and it meant we missed all the “jokes” (lies) the games industry likes to spread on that day each year.

Credit to Arma developer’s Bohemia Interactive, however. Their April 1st announcement was that the latest update for Arma Reforger was Tiny Wars, a game mode in which you controlled tiny toy Army Men as they waged war around a proportionally huge home. As ever, this isn’t really a joke, but it also wasn’t exactly a lie, because you can actually play Tiny Wars for real now.

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Former Dragon Age director Mike Laidlaw is making a new fantasy game. Eternal Strands is third-person adventure pitched as a mixture of Shadow Of The Colossus and Monster Hunter with Tears Of The Kingdom’s physics powers. The trailer, which you’ll find below, certainly has giants you can clamber across and spray with goop.

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Hey, do you like going shoulder-to-shoulder with a pal to battle in same-screen local multiplayer games? Follow-up question: do you enjoy deceiving your pal while trying to uncover their own deceit? Last question: do you want to throw knives at your pal’s face? If so, check out Neon Knives, a fun free same-screen game for two players where you must both try to blend into a crowd of NPCs while identifying and assassinating your mate.

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In Keepsake’s co-op four-player space game Jump Ship, née Hyperspace, you can scuttle your own vessel by overcooking a pizza. There’s a cooking minigame in your ship’s canteen which grants a health boost if you nail the timing, and sparks off a fire if you don’t.

It’s a pretty minor fire, mind you. A combusting deep dish doesn’t place very highly on the list of possible ship emergencies next to, say, your reactor coughing up nuclear rods, or your engines running out of juice because some oaf hooked up too many turrets to the aforesaid reactor. But if you leave the fire unchecked, perhaps because you’re busy disposing of radioactive waste or vengefully unplugging half the point defences, it’ll eventually singe your ship’s health to nothing – insert appropriate Steam achievement pun and/or Klingon proverb. It’s an agreeable little note of idiocy in a game that takes cues from Valve’s timeless anecdote generator Left 4 Dead, Sea Of Thieves, FTL and, perhaps most surprisingly, Diablo.

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Every weekend, indie devs show off current work on Twitter’s #screenshotsaturday tag. And every Monday, I bring you a selection of these snaps and clips. Well, on Tuesday this week, thanks to the four-day Easter weekend. But the games look just as attractive and interesting as they did on Saturday, so what’s the hurry? Check these out!

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Like an aggressively competitive thane at a reindeer-piss guzzling contest, 2D tac-and-slash roguelite Sons Of Valhalla never lets up the pace for even a moment. Whether you’re charging across its pixel-art battlefields slashing and burning increasingly tough-to-crack strongholds, or making quick decisions to get the upper hand in its tug-of-war tactics, the only times Thorald is not doing cool violence, commanding others to do cool violence, or upgrading his camps so that he may act in cooler and more violent ways, is when he’s restoring stamina with a cool slug of mead or violently gnawing at health-boosting meat.

Viking Thorald Olavson is a man possessed. A rival Jarl burnt his village and nicked his wife Raya. In his quest to find her, he’s prepared to do anything – even visit England. As Thorald, you’ll butcher your way up a chain of command in your search for Raya across six stages, each of which sits somewhere between the side-scrolling tactics of Kingdom Two Crowns, the lane strategy of a Warpips, and the slashy/blocky/shooty/dodgy of any 2D ARPG you care to name.

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So, how was everyone’s long weekend? I don’t want to alarm anyone, but I think I may have even sensed the fading ghost of an immeasurably whisper-thin ray of sunshine at one point. Enough! Says a new patch for co-op shooter Helldivers 2. You know who else enjoys basking in the pleasant glow of mildly enjoyable weather when there’s freedoms that need fighting for? Bug sympathisers, that’s who. As such, the developers have gone and added new planetary hazards in the form of blizzards and sandstorms, alongside the usual balance tweaks.

Alongside these reminders that the war for democracy is never comfortable, the efficiently-named Patch 01.000.200 also includes a host of tweaks. Notable among these are balancing changes to the mission type ‘Retrieve Essential Personnel’, which now sounds more manageable. Enemy spawn points have been placed further away from the objective, “to give players a fairer chance of defending the location.” Additionally, fewer civilians are needed to beat the mission on higher difficulties.

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If you’re partial to the grim delights of Phasmophobia and not averse to the sicko enjoyments of Lethal Company, you might like new horror game Content Warning, which kind of blends the two and has the additional virtue of being free on Steam till 9am PT/5pm UK on 2nd April.

In this spooky co-op treat from Landfall Publishing, you play a bunch of amateur filmmakers – or tubers, as the kids possibly still insist on calling them – who must board a spaceship, travel to another planet and film anything monstrous they stumble on.

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