It’s so stormy where I live that a house in the town next over lost its roof this morning, which must mean it’s the season for cosy life sim games. After having fun in Fae Farm recently, this week I’ve been taking Moonstone Island for a spin. The twist for this Stardewlike is that it has collided the farming and having a nice house business with Pokémon-style death battles involving whimsical Ghibli-esque Spirits. After a few scant hours I think I sort of… like it…? But I also have some problems with it.
Cyberpunk 2077’s update 2.0 makes its RPG combat better than it’s ever been. The new perk system means that you can easily create a brutal killing machine, one capable of deflecting bullets with samurai swords and air-dashing like an anime hero to punch enemies apart.
Phantom Liberty, the expansion released right after update 2.0, makes its combat better in one extra way: by making most of it optional.
Worrying signs on the horizon for fans of sci-fi stories told a long time ago in a galaxy far far away. Sony have quietly yanked posts and videos for Embracer’s Star Wars: Knights of the Old Republic remake, in what could be the first indication that the publisher have finally cancelled the game, after shuffling developers and delaying release indefinitely last year.
Corsair’s recent Airflow cases have been great, mixing smart and stylish designs with huge cooling potential, and now you can pick up the mid-size 3000D Airflow for just £58 from TechNextDay via Ebay using the code SAVINGS20. By comparison, this case costs £80 on Ebay, making it a sweet little discount.
Delightful destructive heist sim Teardown is getting four paid DLCs, with the first to be released on November 15th. It’s called Time Campers and will transport players back in time with a caravan to tackle new heists with “old-timey tools and architecture” in the Wild West.
It’ll be followed by a second DLC, the destruction derby-focused Folkrace, and two more before the end of 2024.
Bloodsucking build ’em up V Rising got its first major Early Access update earlier this year. Its next major update will be its 1.0 release and it will arrive sometime in “the second quarter of 2024”, according to a new developer post which also details underway engine upgrades and details features-to-come.
Unreal Engine and Fortnite publisher Epic Games are making an absolutely enormous round of job cuts. As announced by founder and CEO Tim Sweeney in an email to staff today, the company will lay off approximately 830 people, totalling “around 16%” of their workforce, in order to achieve “financial sustainability” following a period of heavy investment and lower-than-hoped returns from Fortnite.
With release just a couple of weeks away on 13th October, Lords of the Fallen has a new gameplay overview trailer – a dripping cinematic layer cake of gore and gristle, which introduces you to the game’s god-blighted fantasy world and the many different ways you’ll expire within it, be it having a boss inconsiderately drop a load of golden swords on you, or getting mobbed by spooks in the underworld according to an escalating “dread” level, which is sort of GTA’s old heat system but with more Grim Reapers.
As a child of the early internet, games like Hypnospace Outlaw can’t help but resonate quite deeply with me. This was the internet as I remembered it, goddamnit, and the fact it mixed in a compelling corporate conspiracy story in between its pages was just the icing on an already fine cake (in GIF form, naturally, with a MIDI tune of Vivaldi’s Four Seasons blaring out from your internet browser for good measure). But in revisiting Hypnospace for this month’s RPS Game Club, there was one page in particular that really brought the rose-tinted shutters down on me. It was beautiful, lovely April, Hypnospace’s virtual pet hamster, who can live, snooze and poop on your desktop, and maybe turn a slightly sickly shade of green if you don’t pay enough attention to her.
As with mostthings in Hypnospace, I can only assume that April and her fellow gaggle of virtual pet friends are riffs on real-life virtual pet games Catz and Dogz from the late 90s, which, yes, as a ten-year-old girl at the time, I was absolutely obsessed with. Developed by the now defunct PF Magic, Catz and Dogz 3 were arguably two of my most formative PC games growing up, and cor, I miss those dumb beasts so very much.
Counter-Strike 2 released last night and has duly taken over from Counter-Strike: Global Offensive as Steam’s most-played game at the time of writing, but individual player reactions are a bit mixed. Valve’s new/revamped free-to-play FPS sports a range of exotic features and fixtures, from swirlier, reactive smoke to new server architecture, but it has launched without many of the modes, maps and functions Global Offensive diehards are accustomed to, after a decade of updates.
