If you turn 33 years old in the next couple of months then, sorry, you are dead. I don’t make the rules, that’s just how Clair Obscur: Expedition 33 explains the lack of elders in its very French yet very JRPG world. The fantasy game will see you journey across a dangerous landscape to stop the mad “paintress” who’s magically culling humanity at younger and younger ages every year. We’ve been keeping a weary middle-aged eye on its development, and yesterday it got a release date. It’s too late for most of us in the RPS treehouse. But watch the trailer for yourself, maybe you’ll make it.
Good news for anyone eager to meet a big talking catfish. A new trailer for action adventure game South Of Midnight sees players battering monsters from the folklore of the US’ Deep South. It shows hero Hazel arguing with her mum before a supernatural hurricane cuts off the family drama and sends Hazel wandering the swamps to encounter giant alligators, giant fish, giant dolls, and giant people. Maybe Hazel is just very small. Either way, it also dangles an important morsel in front of our snapping jaws: a release date. Come see.
Team Ninja and Koei Tecmo have surprise-released Ninja Gaiden 2: Black, an Unreal Engine 5 version of Xbox 360 hack-and-slasher Ninja Gaiden 2. It’s out right now on Microsoft’s Game Pass service. I’d say it has materialised from the darkness like a ninja, but there are a lot of ninjas in circulation right now and my analogy-jitsu gauge is running dry. So instead, I’m going to say that it has materialised from the darkness like a resurfacing duck, its beak stuffed with pond vegetation. The pond vegetation, here, stands for “tweaks to the weapons upgrade system”. Here’s a trailer.
Where were you on October 11th last year? If you were Edwin, Brendy, or myself – which, statistically, you are not – you were writing news articles about one of three aspirant spiritual successors to detective RPGDisco Elysium. It was an “I’m Spartacus”-ass day of press releases, culminating in the announcement of a project from former ZA/UM writers Argo Tuulik and Olga Moskvina.
Before that came sci-fi RPG XXX Nightshift, and before that was an unnamed “psychogeographic RPG” from newly formed Longdue. We now know that it’s called Hopetown, and Longdue are set to launch a crowdfunding campaign which you can “pre-register” for here, should you wish. Here’s the sell:
Dwarf Fortress‘s Adventure mode – a procedurally generated campaign that lets you approach the famously dense colony sim like a more traditional roguelite – is now out as a free update on Steam. The game represents perhaps the most cavernous, yawping blind spot in my entire pile of shame. I do own it, but I’m yet to play. I’ve already read a great deal of extended wordery on its merits – please, sell it to me in the comments in seven words or less. Here’s a trailer:
Readers, I have spent two full days in the benchmark pits to tell you what you’ve already guessed: the GeForce RTX 5090 is very fast, too expensive, and laden with more AI tech than Philip K. Dick’s cheese dreams. At least two of those points will, I’m sure, send the average graphics card shopper running, especially at a time when even game developers are growing suspicious of generative AI and its many-thumbed, robot-voiced nostrums.
Yet while there’s not much to be done about the RTX 5090 costing at minimum £1939 / $1999, hundreds more than the infamously spenny RTX 4090, its suite of more purely performance-focused artificial intelligence tools is – dare I say it – quite neat. These range from Multi Frame Generation (MFG), which is basically DLSS 3 frame gen but up to twice as fast, to DLSS 4’s general upscaling enhancements and even the ability to apply newer DLSS versions to older games. All this will come to the rest of the RTX 50 series as well, with some trickling down to the enter RTX range, so maybe the RTX 5090 is best understood not as a practical GPU purchase in itself but as a Picadilly Square-filling advert for its more affordable siblings can do.
Some eager beavers who bought the GeForce RTX 4090 at launch were, quite infamously, rewarded for their investment with a defective power adapter, one that that could melt the plastic in their £1679 graphics card like it was Ronald Lacey’s face. Nvidia reckon that won’t be an issue with for the imminent RTX 5090 and RTX 5080, though, even with the former’s drastically increased 575W power limit.
You’d think Talha and Jack Co would have earned themselves a nice custard cream and a sit down after having just released Judero last September, but they’re back already with a crowdfunder for Mashina – a robo-stuffed adventure where you’ll “Dig, build, discover and mend in a chill, stop-motion world.” Now I think about, you could probably eat quite a lot of custard creams in five months, although less so if you were using your hands to build model robots. Have a trailer. It’s got robots in it.
Back in December, a bunch of cool games had the extreme impoliteness to sneak onto digital shelves while we were losing our hair, souls and marbles covering various gaming award shows. One of those games was Escape From Castle Matsumoto – which can be excused, admittedly, because it’s a game about ninjas, and we expect ninjas to be sneaky.
The creators of All Will Fall are pariahs, as far as I’m concerned. You should warn you children to avoid them. If you encounter them in the street, you should jerk away with a muttered oath, making a sign to avert evil spirits – for these are the scumbags who’ve decided to develop a city-building game in which all the buildings and building materials are subject to realworld physics. A city-building game that takes place on small, post-apocalyptic islands, where the only way to expand is upward.
“Playing Jenga with human lives” is how they summarise it, the wastrels. Here’s a trailer.
