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Throne of Bone has a name that just rolls off the tongue and, from the look of it, this roguelike-cum-deckbuilder-cum-autobattler will roll off the ol’ mouse-clicking finger plenty nicely when it releases into Early Access next month, too.
I wasn’t too hot on Lies Of P when I played its first demo way back when. I felt it was so close, too close, to Bloodborne in everything from the cadence of the Chalamet puppet’s jog, to the “duhhnng” noise of pickups, and the gothic sheen of its streets. At the time I thought it was a bit of a duff pretender, honestly.
But a good chunk of time with it at this year’s Gamescom has swivelled my head back in its direction. Having clacked through some dingy streets, fired blue gloop from my arm, and fought the literal King Of Puppets, I’ve come to realise it has the potential to be a magnificent Soulslike in its own right.
Since joining the good ship RPS I’ve had to readjust to the daily reality of a corporate inbox, overflowing with internal Reedpop messages about Best Practices, expense claim guidance and other fiendish gambits designed to keep me from the holy labour of finding new games and telling you about them. On absent-mindedly firing up one such new game this morning, Heretic’s Fork, there was a terrible moment when I thought Reedpop had outsourced its middle management to Pandemonium.
A quick heads-up for those you hopping aboard the Starfield interstellar express today: there is a non-zero possibility that one of the game’s elevators has a shark in it. That’s according to Bethesda’s head of publishing Pete Hines, who encountered the displaced piscine trouble-maker while playing the game before release. He’s “almost positive” the shark isn’t there any more – and just like that, my understanding of Starfield has been transformed. This isn’t a 150 hour RPG treadmill of resource extraction, artefact investigation and base-building, wherein you give spaceship tours and put +5% on your accuracy, or what-have-you. It’s an extremely slowburn horror game, with every innocent elevator potentially housing a Great White jumpscare. All of which, Hines feels, is true to how Bethesda “embraces chaos” in their games, though he does feel the company’s popular association with jank and bugs isn’t “particularly fair”.
Hello folks. If you’ve been wondering whether to take the plunge on an RPS Premium subscription, I have some excellent news for you. This September, we’re running a free month trial for our Premium supporter tier, which means no more ads, extra exclusive articles every week, free game keys and more.
All you need to do is use the promotion code RPSFreeMonth when you sign up for a monthly Premium subscription. You should give it a try! It’s nice here.
The SteelSeries Arctis Nova Pro is down to £169 with this deal at Amazon UK – a great price for one of the best wired gaming headsets for PC and PS4/PS5, which debuted at £249 and normally costs around £200. I’ve been using one of these headsets with my PS5-based racing setup for months, and I’ve found it comfortable, good-sounding and very convenient to use thanks to the included second-gen GameDAC.
The Case Of The Golden Idol is a fabulous, point-and-click detective game, and one of our favourite games of 2022. It’s got a brand new expansion which adds three new cases out today, which is good news if you’ve already played the rest of it.
If you haven’t played any of it, there’s now a new demo that lets you play the first three cases in your browser for free.
Dota 2 summer update is out now, and among its many additions are several designed to make “Dota a better place to play, together.” It includes a “dislike” button that lets you filter out people you’d rather not play with in future, a new reporting system, real-time review of toxic chat, and more.
Embracer Group have announced that they’re closing down Volition, the Illinois, US-based developer best known today for Saints Row and Red Faction. The announcement – which coincided with the predictably uproarious lifting of Starfield’s review embargo, though I’m sure the timing is purely accidental – comes as part of broader restructuring at Embracer Group following a multiple-year acquisition spree, which Alice0 reported on in June.
I don’t remember this at the time, but there were complaints about Skyrim‘s map when it came out, because it was just an extreme zoom out on the world. It wasn’t dense with information; the map markers were often kind of an “it’s in this area” guideline that were even less helpful if what you needed was in a barrow or otherwise underground. Starfield raises the bar by taking the bold step of having a map that is almost not a map.
I’m referring here to the planet surface map. The starmap is, like a couple of things I’ve experienced since being hustled through quite an accelerated inciting incident (Starfield’s equivalent of Patrick Stewart dying in a sewer after he’s charged you with saving the world), reminiscent of Mass Effect. You can select different galaxies, which have one or two solar systems in them, and then can zoom down and select specific planets or moons or whatever to warp to. Once you’re wombling about on the surface being a naughty little space captain – or whatever, I don’t judge what you’re up to – well baby, I hope you like blue voids with a bit of topography.
