I was mixed on Dambusters’ Dead Island 2 – I thought the combat had flair but not much depth, loved the game’s decadently disastrous Los Angeles, but hated how exploration boiled down to nosing around for crafting materials. The game’s first story DLC expansion, Haus, amps up the weirdness of the environments by transporting you to a “surreal, psycho-horror dreamscape” in blissful Malibu.
There are flashes of Glass Onion and The Menu here, but I was reminded just as much of the eerier parts of Bioshock, that underwater monument to crackpot billionaires with far too much time on their hands. Here’s a video of the opening.
Lords Of The Fallen is a reboot of CI Games and Deck 13’s 2014 action-RPG called… Lords Of The Fallen. We thought the original was average and largely forgettable, so how does the new LOTF stack up against it nine years later? Well, it’s definitely going to appeal to more folks by being a fairly enjoyable soulslike that ticks most checkboxes, and that rises above most of the competition by popping a magic lantern in your hands.
Raise a light to the dark fantasy world and it’ll reveal a more dribbly parallel universe you can warp between at almost any time. This spooky lantern might open up some cool realm-hopping twists on your grim adventure, and the game as a whole might instil a sense of exploration sure to please souls fans after a familiar hit of uncertain peril, but its finer details chip away at your patience. It’s not long before your tentative pushes through horrible towns and creaky walkways soon give way to wild sprint finishes born from pure frustration.
EGX 2023 is upon us, and you may recall that RPS is sponsoring the Rezzed Zone this year. That means we’ll be tucking into the 50+ indie games that will be there over the coming days, and we can now confirm the full and final line-up of what’s going to be on the showfloor. Most of these are only playable at the show, but you may still find some of them have demos available on Steam thanks to this week’s Steam Next Fest. In any case, read on below to come and see what’s coming up.
Whereas most games begin by getting you into the action as quickly as possible, Saltsea Chronicles opens with a quick note about its save system. It’s a small, but important detail in this story-driven adventure game, as throughout its nine-to-ten-hour run time, you’ll be faced with various decisions about where your crew of post-apocalyptic drifters will explore next, as they set sail in search of their missing captain Maja. By choosing one island at the end of every chapter, you’ll naturally miss out on visiting another – and with 14 locales to explore in total in the Saltsea archipelago (and only 12 chapters to do it in), each playthrough has the potential to end up being quite different from the last.
But up front it tells you “There are no wrong choices, only your choices” in Saltsea Chronicles, and that ultimately this is a tale about “tracing different pathways” using its clever branching save system. While you can, of course, play it through from start to finish in a single swoop, you also have the option to purloin its additional save slots to take those roads less travelled (presented here as delightful, wiggling seaweed tendrils), and all without overwriting your existing adventure. Immediately, that sense of FOMO is dispelled, and instead of worrying about ‘seeing everything’ or making sure you get a ‘good’ playthrough, you can simply enjoy its enthralling tale of high seas soap opera, curious exploration, and the knotty drama that comes with trying to forge connections in an increasingly fragmented world. It’s a journey well worth taking, even if what lies at the end of it didn’t quite come together in the way I’d hoped.
Overwatch 2 is getting new skins that clothe Moria and Pharah in the outfits of Diablo 4’s Lilith and Inarius. Those skins are part of a new wave of cosmetics incoming for the game’s Season 7: Rise of Darkness, but they’re not part of the standard premium battle pass. Instead, they’ll cost you another $40 – as much as the whole of Overwatch 1 did when it was first released. As you can imagine, people aren’t too chuffed.
XCOM-y pulp strategy adventure The Lamplighters League has been written off as a ‘disappointing’ flop costing publishers Paradox almost $23 million, a mere week after the game’s launch.
Whenever a friend asks for help in speccing out their upcoming PC build, I almost inevitably go to check if the Cooler Master Hyper 212 Evo V2 is in stock. Because, for lower-end and mid-range builds especially, do you truly need any other CPU cooler? The Hyper 212 Evo V2 near-perfectly balances simplicity, effectiveness, and affordability; it’s like the PC component equivalent of Charles Eames’ museum-beloved leg splint, only less stackable. More to the point, it’s down to £33 in the Amazon Prime Big Deal Days sale, equalling its lowest price of 2023 thus far.
Ara: History Untold‘s headline gimmick is actually a couple of centuries old. In this deceptively Civilization-esque 4X strategy game, all player turns unfold simultaneously, once you’ve decided what to build or research, where to move your units, and so on. As Oxide Games design director Michelle Menard tells me over Zoom, this approach takes inspiration from an ancient military simulator, Kriegsspiel, which was devised by the Prussian army officer George Leopold von Reisswitz, aka the “father of wargaming”, in the mid-1800s.
“It was to train their generals, it was a legit apparatus of war, it was not for funsies,” says Menard. “And they basically created this massive table that had a modular terrain system. At first they used sand, but that was kind of messy, [and so] they developed a system where they had interchangeable tiles, like hills and valleys and plateaus.
“They would build out this table, literally drop a sheet down the middle, and it’d be like, OK, you guys on each side, you can’t see what the other person’s doing. There was an actual game master, who was the referee who you would report your moves to. He would then re-set up the board and basically call people back into the room and be like, tada! It’s the next turn – let’s see what people did. Was it what you expected?”
In terms of usefulness to the average PC owner, sales events like Amazon Prime Big Deal Days aren’t just for knocking hundreds off big-ticket hardware. They can also make already-affordable kit even more of a bargain, as is the case with the Logitech G413 SE mechanical keyboard: a snip at £60.
This has been on our best gaming keyboards list for a while now, specifically for delivering all the satisfying finger-feel (and durability) of a true mechanical board with a pricing that puts it closer to high-end membrane and hybrid switch models. The G413 SE employs the bumpy ‘tactile’ style of mech switches, so it’s good for accurate typing, and it’s easily fast and agile enough for gaming duty as well. I actually ended up using this as my main keyboard for a while, despite having more expensive linear-switch boards piled up in a nearby cupboard, and I’d extra-extra-recommend it at this price.
