Category: Rock, Paper, Shotgun

Confession time, readers. Before a couple of weeks ago, I had never played the original Doom. As a child, my family didn’t have much money and I didn’t get my first laptop until I was 16. Thus, I missed out on a lot of what are now considered PC staples. With dread, I’m often met with the accursed exclamation, “You’ve not played insert game before?” followed by a good dose of judgment. But what do you do when you need to play through a backlog of games all while keeping up-to-date with new releases for work? With games now stretching out at 100+ hours apiece, where is the time for old classics like Doom?

For me, approaching Doom was cathartic. Playing a game that’s older than myself was certainly an experience, but I was shocked at how well it holds up.

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Once again, we have reached that point in the year where we come to you with a warm grin and outstretched hands, saying: “Please, dear reader, will you fill out the RPS readership survey? It’s very quick, and will only take 5-10 minutes of your time, so please consider filling it out if you find yourself at a loose end. It will be a big help for us in the year ahead.

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Take the Fleischer-style cartoons behind Cuphead’s stunning visuals, slam them together with a classic first-person shooter in the vein of Doom and you’d likely end up with something that looks like Mouse, an upcoming FPS with a hell of a stylish look.

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Fallout 4’s “next-gen update”, announced just over a year ago as part of the series’ 25th anniversary celebrations, has seen its release date pushed back into next year – meaning it will arrive close to a decade after the last major entry in the franchise.

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Escape Simulator has added a free virtual escape room based on Among Us, letting you puzzle your way out of the backstabby party game’s spaceship The Mini Skeld in a bit of crossover DLC.

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A good parry mechanic is a kind of redemption. Where blocking – aka holding a button to avoid damage – is a concession to the tedious attritional undertow of many action games, parrying – aka pressing a button on cue to cancel damage and often, prep a counter – is the act of cutting through the bullshit. It passively reduces any and all visual and thematic overwhelm the game would have you experience to a question of timing.

In the face of a good parry mechanic, the grandest of bosses are equivalent to rank-and-file mobs. You’re a monster the size of a building? You’re the demonic manifestation of a protagonist’s mother issues? You’re capitalism incarnate? You’re wielding eight chainsaws at once? Ehhh. I’m not just going to survive your onslaught. I’m going to dismiss it. All of it: your absurd DPS, your multiple elemental modifiers, your screen-blanketing special effects, your overcooked core concept, the very laws of physics – poof, gone, as though they had never been. Blocking is akin to maintaining a poker face while you’re being harangued by your boss over Zoom. Parrying is politely pointing out that your boss has left his camera on, and that he should probably wear trousers when he’s at work. It is “nope” said so quietly that it shuts everything else up.

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What’s that I hear behind today’s Advent Calendar door? A sweet guitar riff and a sick drum beat that makes me want to snap my fingers forevermore? Man, I’m tapping my toes just thinking about it!

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Spider-Man 2 studio Insomniac Games have reportedly been hacked by ransomware group Rhysida, which has led to the release of docs and screenshots purporting to be of the Sony-owned developer’s mysterious Wolverine game. Sony are “investigating” these reports and say that “they have no reason to believe that any other SIE or Sony divisions have been impacted”, which reads to me like an acknowledgement that the leaks are legit. Colour that speculation for the moment, however.

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Legendary-tier monster cards on the table time: I do not like video game loot. I think that the popularity of “looting”, an English word itself looted from Hindi during the time of the East India Company, is one of the worst aspects of the modern games industry and especially of the blockbuster live service game, which strives to keep its audience coming back by means of fresh loot injections at regular intervals.

I distrust how the randomisation element of much video game looting flirts with actual gambling mechanics. I hate that structuring games around the acquisition of loot creates a framework and an appetite for microtransactions and arguably, NFTs. But I am kind of fascinated by the art of designing loot, and especially when it comes to action RPGs such as Diablo 4 and Path Of Exile 2, because it seems to trade on some irresolvable contradictions.

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I’m not normally in a rush to post marketing videos in which developers talk about how great their new game is, but I need all the help I can get in understanding Metaphor: ReFantazio. The new RPG from the makers of Persona looks stylish, dense, exciting, and almost entirely baffling in its trailers, so 14 minutes of the folks from Atlus just describing it is welcome.

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