Category: Rock, Paper, Shotgun

Following on from the lovely space highjinks of Citizen Sleeper, Katharine has unwisely allowed me to take the wheel on this month’s RPS Game Club, and thus I am steering this baby right into fiendish puzzle town. Next stop: The Tartarus Key!

It’s only recently come out, so we’re fresh to death this time – literally, because in it you’re trapped in a mansion full of SAW-esque murder-puzzles. I really enjoyed this game, with its low-poly PS1 style, and its vibe of being an early 00s thriller that would probably star e.g. Morgan Freeman hunting down a twisted serial killer played by e.g. Hugh Jackman. But in this metaphor, I am the twisted monster, and I have trapped both you and my colleagues and am forcing you all to play this game I like.

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Itching to click on skeletons but not sure about Diablo 4? Have a gander at Halls Of Torment, a game I’ll broadly describe as ‘Vampire Survivors meets Diablo’. It lets you click on: so many skeletons. Halls Of Torment launched into early access last month and I’ve had a few hours of fun for a couple quid. The Diablo vibes are strong, it has some neat ideas for the genre, and it has a demo you can try for free. I only wish it drew a little more inspiration from Diablo and a little less from Survivors ’em up conventions.

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More fool me for thinking the Amnesia story (a now-complex horror sci-fi epic about Cenobite-esque weirdos who gain immortality by drinking pain-milk extracted from people via torture at the hands of specially engineered torture-monsters) was done with Amnesia: Rebirth. Although, I suppose it actually is, because Rebirth is set in 1937, and Amnesia: The Bunker is effectively a bottle episode taking place during the First World War. And what a bottle episode! You’ll spend 4-6 hours being chased around the tunnels of a maze-like bunker, winding up a dim, rubbish torch and reading increasingly unhinged diary notes from the French soldiers who’ve all been eaten, and boy will you have a great time.

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This year’s prettiest RSI machine Diablo 4 arrives on PC in full today, having spent the few couple of days in early access. But even though it’s barely out the gates of Hell, Blizzard are already thinking about the future of their mega RPG, confirming not one, but two expansions are already in the works.

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Our sister site Eurogamer is celebrating 15 years of EGX (aka: the Eurogamer Expo) this month, and they’re holding a charity pub quiz in its honour down in London this Thursday, June 8th. Yes, yes, we know that’s the same day as Geoff’s Annual Trainer Showcase (aka: Summer Game Fest), but hey, at least it’s for a good cause, with all proceeds going to the lovely folks at GamesAid. Tickets are on sale now, and RPS supporters can also get a special code to nab themselves a free drink. Details below.

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With the arrival of Nvidia RTX 40-series graphics cards in gaming laptops, models with previous-gen RTX 30-series cards are becoming super-affordable. Now you can get even high-models for less than £1000, including this HP Omen machine which includes a 16.1-inch 1440p 165Hz display, RTX 3070 Ti graphics card and Ryzen 7 6800H CPU for £972 on Amazon.

The same machine retailed for £1629 in March this year, so this is a huge bargain – especially given that this is still hugely a powerful machine for 1440p gaming. The spec even includes a 1TB NVMe SSD and 16GB of DDR5 RAM, so it’s a convincing machine from top to bottom.

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I’ve spoken on many occasions about my love for Cooler Master’s NR200 small form factor PC case, and today it’s gone on sale in the US for the first time in a while – so I thought I’d let you know!

Right now you can pick up the NR200 in white for $70, down from $115. To get this price, you’ll need to use code CMJUND2 at the cart and then use a rebate form for an additional $25 back. That’s a bit of a faff for sure, but in exchange you do get one of the best and most popular SFF PC cases on the market.

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People might have been sleeping on Swordship, which is as unfortunate as it sounds. It’s a dodge ‘em up about luring enemies into attacking each other while swooshing down waterways. Clean, is the word that comes to mind: a purity of purpose. Everything looks and sounds exactly like it should, while making little metal chumps shoot other little metal chumps is a fundamental joy.

It launched last December, but developers Digital Kingdom just shipped a 1.1 update that adds a new mode, overhauls unlock progression and tweaks loads more. There’s a free demo, if you don’t want to take the full plunge.

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If there’s a single upside to the collapsing standards of technical competence among big-budget PC games, it’s that when something like Diablo 4 comes along and simply performs well, there’s an almost pleasant relief to it. Like your bus arriving on time, a minute after watching the previous, late-arriving one flip onto its roof attempting a handbrake turn.

It’s not perfect, but Diablo IV does run smoothly for the most part (also sorry Google, but I’m going back to Roman numberals), and its system requirements on PC are as likely to involve museum pieces as they are the latest and priciest graphics cards. I’ve put some hours into the early access build and have come up with a best settings guide, but in truth, this will likely just optimise your framerates – Diablo IV’s higher quality settings rarely trouble it, especially at 1080p.

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For those in the UK, the latest “here’s what you could have won” bit of helpful EU regulation just dropped. Valve are now required to show Steam users in EU countries a game’s lowest price over the past 30 days, which means sellers can’t display deceptively high discounts by bumping the base price before a sale. Valve made the change in order to comply with the ominously named “Omnibus Directive”, which applies to all online stores.

Steam already enforces limits on manipulating prices around sales, but it’s nice that some people get to have a little extra peace of mind.

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