Category: Rock, Paper, Shotgun

Confession time: if you’ve been keeping up to date with Colossal Order’s feature highlight video series for Cities: Skylines 2 over the last couple of months, you’re probably not going to learn a huge amount from my experience of playing it at Gamescom a couple of weeks ago. I spent most of my hour-long demo session steadily working my way through its extensive tutorial, as I have not, in fact, played Cities: Skylines before now – although I can at least confirm that its tutorial is very newbie-friendly, and that I now feel more prepared to give it a go properly when it comes out in full on October 24th.

But the thing that really impressed me was just the sheer scope of its playable spaces. We’ve known since the end of July that its maps are roughly 5x bigger than those in the first game, and when I saw Colossal Order’s Maps & Themes video, I thought, ‘Yes, those sure look enormous!’ But actually seeing them in person really put things into perspective for me, especially when I tried zooming the camera out and it just kept going and going and going and…

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Paradox have announced that Star Trek: Infinite is coming out on October 12th. Infinite’s previous trailers already made it look like a “Stellaris in a different version of space” affair – which is by no means an unfavourable comparison – and the latest footage shows off more grand strategy shenanigans. Planet management. Lotsa menus. Expanding factions, sometimes peacefully if you prefer a clear conscience.

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On today’s installment of Bad Calls I Have Made, I will cop to never really buying the idea of Starfield needing an SSD. Even among its astronomical system requirements, an inflexible demand for solid state storage seemed like a stretch; after all, Ratchet & Clank: Rift Apart runs mostly fine on a hard drive, and in a previous life that game was employed as a cheerleader for the PS5’s SSD. Starfield would probably just have rubbish load times or texture pop-in or something, and all would be revealed once I could try it on mechanical storage. Which I now have.

So, can you play Starfield on an HDD? No. It’s bloody awful.

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Some would say the best way to wind down after a rough day down the Content Reactors isn’t to play a grotty occult horror game, but I caught a trailer for Tenebris Somnia earlier, and couldn’t help myself. In this foetid offering from Argentinian devs Andrés Borghi and Tobías Rusjan of Saibot Studios, you play a young woman, Julia, who is visiting her film-maker ex-boyfriend to drop off their old apartment key. Julia’s having a hard time getting over the break-up, but she’s clearly doing better than her ex: his apartment is full of broken glass, anomalous red gloop and creepy occult books.

The game’s twist is that it’s two visual styles thrust into the same frame. On the one hand, you’ll explore an 8-bit world of unpleasantly bright colours, finding and combining objects adventure-game style (I say adventure-game-style, because this is a bit more energetic than most adventure games – you can equip and swing a wrench, and there’s a run button). On the other hand, well. Click the headline to find out, if you dare. Yes, this is me trying to do a jumpscare. Brace yourself!

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Early access action RPG Last Epoch has just received update 0.9.2, which adds a new class of mage called the Runemaster. The Runemaster has five new spells they can use to tear through the game’s monsters, and each spell can be customised via its own skill tree.

The update, called “Runes Of Power”, also adds eight new languages, and a new type of event called Rune Prisons. Developers Eleventh Hour also announced that Last Epoch’s 1.0 release would happen in December this year.

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Kung-fu brawler Sifu‘s final update is out now. It mostly adds new content for previously added modes, including 75 Challenges, six Arenas, two Outfits and 27 cheats and modifiers. There is also a new Custom Mode, however, which lets you “play and replay the Arena Challenges with your own twist.”

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Maybe it was replaying Aperture Desk Job for the RPS Game Club, or maybe it was the sheer scale of Baldur’s Gate 3 activating the ol’ fight-or-flight. Either way, I’ve recently developed an intense appreciation for teeny, tiny microgames, to the point where I’ve essentially been begging in the RPS Slack channel for recommendations. Just one more Steam link and I’ll be fine, promise.

And I don’t mean short games in the seven- or eight-hour sense. Not even film-length games like Portal or Jazzpunk. No, I seek to gorge on the slightest sub-hour canapés, games in which you can see and do everything in one or hour or less. “Irresponsibly large”? Another time, Mister Starfield, I crave something irrevocably small.

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Space will neither save nor free us. Like Starfield, it will not be glamorous or exciting. As billionaire jebends plot to establish their own corporate fiefdoms amongst the stars, our descendents’ potential spacelives are looking as miserable as collecting 5 spacewolf livers. But I find some hope in spaceship salvage sim Hardspace: Shipbreaker, both in the overt plot about unionisation and in the small satisfaction of doing a job well. Head down, shut up, and focus on dismantling this spaceship carefully and efficiently. It’s an attitude that won’t save the world but can get you through one more day, and sometimes that’s enough.

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Hello folks. How was Baldur’s Gate 3 August for you? Ready for Starfield September? I hope you are, because lemme tell you, it’s coming all right. In truth, I was surprised (and somewhat saddened) by some of the comments we received around our Baldur’s Gate 3 coverage. If you missed them, they were mostly in the vein of saying our increased volume of BG3-related posts felt like “spam”, harking back to when we (and the internet at large) all went similarly bananas over Elden Ring last year. I know it can sometimes seem like writing about these games – particularly on RPS – feels like we’re somehow neglecting everything else going on in PC gaming. But the truth is a little more complicated than that, so I wanted to take some time to talk a bit about this in this month’s Letter From The Editor, because there are a number of reasons why this happens – and will probably continue to happen more generally as websites fight for survival.

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Sometimes, a game sits at such a cross section of my interests that it almost feels made specifically for me. In the case of Affogato, it’s three of my favourite types of games mashed together: it’s Coffee Talk by way of Persona by way of any card-based tower defence game – only here it’s sort of “reverse tower defence”, as the game’s Steam page is keen to point out. It’s your own card units that are the ones moving along pre-defined tracks wreaking havoc on stationary enemies, not the other way around. Maybe tower assault would be a better term, but that’s by the by. Served with a dollop of anime froth on the top, Affogato should be my exact cuppa joe. But despite its intriguing ingredients, I wouldn’t say it’s been wholly successful in slooshing them all together.

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