Category: Rock, Paper, Shotgun

You can’t fault the pitch. In Gunbrella you’re a sort of cowboy dude with a shotgun that’s also an umbrella. You use the umbrella to deflect enemy projectiles, block attacks, fly up into the air like a furious Mary Poppins and zoom along ziplines. You use the shotgun, as you might reasonably expect, to do the majority of your big murdering.

Gunbrella is a classic 2D platform shooter in the style of a steampunk western. It’s like Deadwood crossed with Singin’ In The Rain, if Gene Kelly ever used his umbrella to blow holes through anyone who didn’t sufficiently praise his tap dancing. Some light exploration bits have you travelling by train from frontier towns to mining villages, much of them decorated with giant spinning cogs – so you know it’s steampunk – and populated by a small cast of quest-giving locals, pill-dispensing shopkeepers and monologuing villains.

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One of my favourite TV shows is The Rookie, because you never have any idea what could happen next. No episode can go more than five minutes without some kind of twist, often with no relation to anything that has happened up until that point. Like, you think the stand-off between criminals and their victims in a courthouse nuclear bunker has been resolved, but it turns out that while the camera was off him, a lawyer got stabbed by someone else. Hauma is bringing that kind of energy to the visual novel space.

You play as Judith, a former detective and champion boxer who’s wrapped up in solving the case her grandfather was working on before he died. On its face, Hauma is therefore a detective game in a pretty cool 2D comic book-style, with a slightly worse version of the Frogwares Sherlock Holmes mind palace as your inventory of clues, which you combine to logic your way through puzzles. But at the point where you’re in a tunnel under the ruins of a Nazi temple in Munich, having discovered that the MacGuffin is a shin bone carved with the recipe for an eternal life drink (which was stolen by some nuns and taken to Bavaria, and then the nuns all got pregnant I guess?) – and, secondly, having recently survived a massive explosion at an Oktoberfest beer tent – you kind of think, well, things have gotten quite out of hand, haven’t they?

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Cor, has it really been almost half a year since we’ve done one of these? Apologies, readers. I honestly don’t know where the time goes. It’s probably because we’re spending too much time with our favourite guilty pleasure games, which is the subject of this latest Ask RPS column.

The question comes courtesy of ronzilla, who asked: What were your favourite guilty pleasure games of 2022? As in, I play this all the time and I’m semi-embarrassed to admit it?

A good question! In canvassing the wider RPS Treehouse for their responses, it quickly became clear that most of our guilty pleasure games extend way beyond the bounds of just the year 2022, so we’ve answered a bit more broadly than the original question perhaps intended. Still, hopefully there are still some entertaining answers in here nonetheless.

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Several game developers have called on their players to protest Unity’s recently announced new pricing structure, under which developers who reach a certain threshold of revenue or game installations will be charged every time somebody installs their game. A few teams have also announced plans to dump Unity and move their projects to other game engines, such as Godot or Unreal.

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The internet isn’t fun anymore. Actually, that statement isn’t severe enough to reflect how bad the internet is these days, so let me try that again: being online in 2023 is a fucking nightmare. There are only three websites. They are all designed to make you angry because it’s the most profitable emotion. Your aunt was indoctrinated into fascism by a page called “This country used to have real bin men” after she liked a meme about glass milk bottles in 2012. Every boy you went to school with has a podcast about football now. Your Mam once warned you about spending too much time on the computer but now spends eight hours a day playing Hay Day on her phone. AI was meant to let us lie in fields and read books, but instead it’s being used to show you what Breaking Bad would have looked like as an anime.

But it didn’t used to be like this! Obviously I don’t need to remind our regular readers about the glory days of the information superhighway because some of you are old enough to be my Dad (and I’m thirty-one) but just in case a member of Gen Z has stumbled upon this article by accident: the internet used to be fun. Like, really fun, and Hypnospace Outlaw is living proof of it.

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The next Sims game currently goes under the name Project Rene rather than The Sims 5, but that aside, we know a growing amount about EA Maxis’ next social simulation. During today’s latest Behind The Sims community update, they shared more, including the news that the next entry in the series would be free-to-play and without energy mechanics or a subscription.

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Today marks 20 years since the release of Steam, as we wrote about earlier today. Valve have now posted their own reminiscence about the history of their digital distribution platform over on the Steam site.

And in typical Steam fashion, it’s also a sale.

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While Starfield is the big sci-fi shooter on Game Pass right now, folks fancying shootier shooting should see another FPS owned by Bethesda: Quake 2. Id Software’s 1997 shooter was fancied up with a remaster released as a free update in August, complete with all the old stuff and one notable new addition. MachineGames, the studio behind the modern Wolfenstein games, have created a whole new story campaign for the remaster. I’ve really enjoyed playing it. It’s the old Quake 2 you know and have complicated feelings about, filtered through modern design sensibilities. I think both veterans and newcomers could enjoy blasting these biomechanical alien horrors.

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Logitech’s G305 Lightspeed mouse is one of my favourites, combining bullet-proof Lightspeed 2.4GHz wireless with a small, light and eminently moddable design. It normally retails for around $40, but today it’s down to $33.99 at Amazon US. That’s not the best price we’ve ever seen, but it’s still great value for a mouse that remains in my personal rotation a few years after it first debuted.

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The Creative Assembly and SEGA’s Total War: PHARAOH has a release date, 11th October 2023. There’s also a physical limited edition coming to Europe on 23rd October, for those of you who revel in such things as portraits of faction leaders, packs of cosmetics and posters of the game’s campaign map, which you can also check out in the new campaign flyover video below.

In case you’re wondering, I’ve checked with the authorities and yes, PHARAOH should be written in all capitals, makes a laughing stock of all previous RPS reporting. If it feels unnatural, try to imagine that you’re bellowing the game’s title from the summit of a pyramid, so as to remind your embattled subjects of your magnificence. RPS boss Katharine behaves similarly in morning meetings. “EDITOR-IN-CHIEF,” she roars at us repeatedly, until somebody rushes her the daily traffic reports, a steaming goblet of sphinx eggs and a gif of somebody pulling off a crafty kill in Shadow Gambit.

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