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If you’re a Mac user holding out for a chance to play Norman Reedus Walking Simulator, you’ll need to wait a little longer: the release date for Death Stranding: Director’s Cut has officially been pushed into next year. The good news is that it’s “early 2024”, so hopefully it won’t be too long.
Hear ye! This month marked the 25th birthday of Thief: The Dark Project. While not as infinitely mutable as other 90’s icons like Doom (which just turned 30, and can be played on a pregnancy test), stealth gaming’s grandpappy has maintained an enduring appeal and influence, especially for those more inclined to sneaking than slaughter. Buckets of digital ink have already been spilt examining this legacy, so I won’t dive into the weeds of a hagiography. What I want to highlight is a major event that marked the 25th anniversary – one that makes today as great a time as any to explore Thief’s still-thriving mod scene.
Notable: After a quarter-century, stealth fans were gifted a new, 10-mission Thief campaign called The Black Parade. Pitched as a prequel to the first game, it features a new protagonist, new story, and new heists, built by some of the most lauded modders on the scene. More notable still: The team lead is Romain Barrilliot, a fan-turned-pro designer at Arkane, where he, alongside other former Thief acolytes, iterates the immersive sim tenets in their patented im-sim laboratory. Mostest notablest? One of Thief’s original designers, Daniel Thron, joined The Black Parade’s team – and simultaneously released a new Thief short film, featuring the original game’s voice actors.
Chinese regulators have announced far-reaching curbs on monetisation and reward systems for online games, in a move that has wiped almost $80 billion from the market value of the world’s biggest videogame publisher Tencent and their rival NetEase. Under the new government restrictions, which are pending final approval, online games in China will be banned from giving players rewards for logging in every day, spending money within the game for the first time, or spending money several times consecutively.
Welcome to door 22 of the RPS Advent Calendar. To enter, you must prove your identity by answering a simple question. Who are you? A human… or a puppet?
Like a circus strongman’s barbells, 2023’s year in VR has been heavily weighted toward either end. The last twelve months were bookended with the launch of two excellent VR headsets (although only one is truly relevant to us PC gamers) and a whole bunch of great VR titles. The summer, however, was the quietest I’ve known for a long time, to the point where I ended up playing two VR minigolf games in the absence of anything better to do. Fortunately, the last few months have made up for it, providing enough fantastic VR games to feed us well into next year. So it’s an unevenly weighted set of barbells, the kind that would give our moustachioed muscleman a slipped disk.
I’ve long been a fan of NZXT’s AiO liquid coolers – in fact, I’m building a PC with one tomorrow. You might be joining me on that, as today NZXT’s Kraken 240mm AiO is down to £90 at Scan UK after a £40 discount. That’s an excellent price for an all-in-one liquid cooler that sports an LCD screen for monitoring your temps or showing off your cat.
I think I might just like games in which lots of particles fly around the screen. That’s was a big part of the appeal of To The Core, an incremental game with the spectacle of Vampire Survivors. I think it’s now the reason I want to play the oddly named (the) Gnorp Apologue. It’s an incremental town builder about… gnorps.
If you’ve opted in to the Steam client beta, you can now mark games in your Steam library as private so that they’re invisible to other users. That means that if you’re – as a hypothetical – a games journalist who once had to buy and install some games with questionable names and subject matter for an article you were writing, you can now hide that so it’s no longer visible to your friends or – hypothetically – your child.
Hypothetically!
I’ve recently returned to Warhammer 40,000: Darktide, one year after the grimdark Left 4 Dead ’em up launched and eleven months after I stopped playing. It was always fun to tear through the grubby guts of a Gothic industrial megacity with your chainsword, but it became repetitive and its whole loot-o-crafting mess sucked. A year on, the loot and crafting still suck, but I’ve really enjoyed the variety added by new levels and weapons and the polish from a year of tweaks and quality-of-life changes. If you played Darktide on Game Pass (or bought it), consider another look.
Dominions is a series where you can build the Ark Of The Covenant, which blinds everyone on any battlefield it appears on. Games where any soldier can receive a horror mark, which attracts unspeakable phantoms from beyond reality to randomly attack them, and if they survive, they’ll probably receive more horror marks. Games where I once deployed my entire military against an evil raven so large and powerful that I lost, leaving behind corpses that it fed on to grow even stronger. Games where a frog could, mathematically, kill god with one blow.
Dominions 6 is due out in January, bringing with it changes so esoteric that I’d be better off talking about Dominions 3 to Dominions 5 instead. So let’s do that.
