Category: Rock, Paper, Shotgun

As part of my commitment to hating everything, I have a minor grudge against “idle” games. Because they’re not, are they? You have to supervise them constantly, not relax and watch them grow organically while eating a sandwich and only occasionally intervening like a neglectful goddess.

Writer’s Rush is sort of, sort of an idle game, I’d argue. It’s a low pressure, low stakes, super light sim that takes the barest hint of the clicker and crosses it with sort of-sort of-sort of score attack, and somehow works without quite feeling like either. Because, I think, of its charmingly, intentionally daft representation of what being a novelist is like.

Read more

One game I heard and saw a lot last year but absolutely did not play was Pizza Tower, a fast and fiendish platformer inspired by the Wario Land games. A lot of people seem delighted to rocket around in the colourful adventures of pizzeria proprietor Peppino Spaghetti. People who are younger than me. People whose hands aren’t gnarled claws. People who don’t have one foot in the grave. It’ll happen to you too. In the meantime, I hope you’ve enjoyed it, and suspect you might be keen to see more of the new playable character coming free in a future update.

Read more

Good news, Horizon likers. Not only have Sony announced a release date for the PC version of Horizon Forbidden West’s Complete Edition – mark your calendars for March 21st, folks – but they’ve also released a new trailer showing off all the various PC features. Chief among them for me is proper support for PS5 Dualsense controllers, which means you should be able to benefit from all the same haptic feedback ripples and adaptive trigger pulls of Aloy’s bow as folks did on PS5.

Read more

Now see here Ollie Toms, supposed guides editor of this supposed videogames website – if Enshrouded really does have “the best building system in the survival genre” then why does the floor of my hovel look like a petrified sneeze? I was innocently carving myself a nice stone foundation last night when the Devil jogged my elbow and I dug a massive, raggedy trench straight through it. I’ve spent an hour now trying to fill in the trench and flatten it out, to no avail. There’s always a jaggedy bit right in the middle, and I’m getting displaced trypophobia from the awareness that my efforts have seeded the terrain beneath with random cavities.

What’s worse, there is no mention of enhancing the floor-levelling functionality in this Keen Games forum post on Enshrouded’s various launch issues, which they are even now racing to fix. Instead, it’s all talk of frame rates, multiplayer stability and dedicated servers not appearing. Somebody rush me a cement mixer, stat, or I’m moving back to Valheim.

Read more

What do you do after running away from the big city to start a new life in the country? You run away from the country to start a new life in the big city, obviously. Former Stardew Valley developer Arthur “Mr. Podunkian” Lee has announced Sunkissed City, a life simulation game set in a delightful coastal burb that’s reportedly “pumping with funky vibes and quirky characters”, together with migraines, stretches of dead water and horrible sewer monsters.

Read more

Like a Dragon: Infinite Wealth isn’t exactly spawned from the most hardware-bothering of game series. Most previous LADs, be they Kiryu’s Adventures in Punching or the more turn-based reboot have all been technically gentle affairs, and Infinite Wealth is ultimately another one. At the same time, it shares with Like a Dragon Gaiden: The Man Who Erased His Name a newfound interest in PC-specific tricks. That means a full selection of DLSS, FSR and XeSS upscalers, plus DLSS 3 frame generation. Real yakuza might use a gamepad, but it seems real fuzz-haired RPG fantasists use graphics cards.

Let’s take a closer look, then, at how RGG’s latest crime caper performs on PC. We’ll also work out its best settings, to keep it running smoother than a legally distinct Segway.

Read more

Adventure mode was one of my favourite things about Dwarf Fortress, mainly because it made the infamously complex management game more approachable by letting you play it like a more traditional roguelike. I’m excited, therefore, that Adventure mode is coming soon to the Steam version of the game, and excited even more so that it’s aiming to make it even more accessible.

A new update on development which outlines exactly how the new premium version of Adventure mode differs from the original, including its plan for tutorials to guide new players.

Read more

It’s been a good few years for relaxing, puzzle-strategy games about spreading nature’s glory. The future looks bright, too, thanks to Preserve, which seems to blend Dorfromantik’s lush hexes with Terra Nil’s gradual ecological recovery. You’ll find the announcement trailer below.

Read more

Back in 2022, Blizzard announced that they were working on a survival game set in an “all-new universe”. Not much more was known about the game except that the studio were actively ramping up recruitment, seemingly after having been working on the project since 2017.

This survival game has now been cancelled alongside today’s news of sweeping layoffs across Blizzard and other divisions of new owner Microsoft.

Read more

When I sat down at my desk after lunch today, I thought, I’m just going to give this demo for Balatro a tiny go, just to get my head round its poker-based roguelike deckbuilding. Cut to several hours later and I’ve had to forcibly shut the game down and wrench myself away from it just to write this post, because listen, you need to go and play Balatro’s demo right now, because hot damn this is the good stuff if you’re into roguelike deckbuilders. I also say this as someone who’s never played or understood a game of poker in her life, because let’s face it, regular poker is quite boring. Balatro, on the other hand, is poker that’s turbo-charged with magic Joker cards, tarot card multipliers, and blind conditions that make a successful hand increasingly tricky to pull off. And it’s coming out in full real soon, too.

Read more