Category: Rock, Paper, Shotgun

Even cursed years such as 2020 can occasionally hide small nuggets of greatness. One such nugget was the curious visual novel Milky Way Prince, which beautifully mixed surreal 2D images with even more surreal 3D backgrounds, all wrapped up in a toxic love story. Just when you thought a visual novel couldn’t get any more stylish, developer Lorenzo “Eyeguys” Redaelli comes back to one-up themself with Mediterranea Inferno, a rare game that makes you want to gobble its colours up with your eyeballs. Oh, and it’s out right now.

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The beeping booping SteamBots are back for the first time in four years, but the next outing takes them into a drastically different genre, as is now a tradition for the series. Publisher Thunderful have announced that their robo western citybuilder SteamWorld Build is coming out on December 1st. Here, take a look at the cuteness.

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The Best Pitch I’ve Ever Heard award has to go to The Lord Of The Rings: Return To Moria, which sounds like it’s taking Deep Rock Galactic’s procedurally generated cave looting and squashing it into Middle-Earth’s fantasy world. Chef’s kiss, no notes. The only downside is that the co-op craft-y-survive-a-thon is coming out on October 24th, the same week as – sweatily checks calendar – everything else. I’ll find the time to raid mines with big-bellied friends anyway, though.

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Dragon Age and Mass Effect’s storied developer BioWare have laid off around 50 employees, including veteran devs who had been with the company for 20 years, in what they call a “shift towards a more agile and more focused studio.” The reasoning behind the job cuts has a now-rote focus on efficiency that sadly echoes other redundancy announcements from this year – including ones from other widely admired studios like Firaxis and CD Projekt Red.

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Armored Core 6: Fires of Rubicon launches tomorrow with the distinction of being a FromSoftware game that isn’t missing a bunch of PC tech basics, with ultrawide and 120fps support welded on as standard. As I’ve been finding out, it’s also a fine fit for the Steam Deck: performance issues are few, controls translate comfortably, and it won’t hog too much space on a microSD card. Handheld life is good for Fires of Rubicon, even if it likes to keep yours brutish and short.

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I saw Creative Assembly’s live service heist ’em up Hyenas at last year’s Gamescom and came away unimpressed. I thought it was obnoxious and underwhelming, in all the ways you’d expect from a colourful hero shooter whose hook is stealing Sonic merch.

But this year I got to spend a good 30-minutes in a match against other players and have come away… pleasantly surprised. I like the way it eschews the sometimes slow, methodical pace of other extraction shooters in favour of a faster-paced team deathmatch. While it’s way too early to make big judgement calls like, “the entire game will be good”, it might have more of a chance at launch survival than I thought.

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Existing in the intersection of puzzle game, platformer and level editor, It’s A Wrap! casts you as the director of a low-budget, probably bad Hollywood flick that’s surely about to be sued for workplace injury claims. Essentially, you rejig platforms and background props and obstacles in the level (as the director) and then you zoom in for some dangerous side-scrolling goodness (as the actor). Oh, and did I mention that it’s out now? Shadow-drop!

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The third Turok game will join its predecessors in escaping the Nintendo 64 (and a weird Game Boy Color spin-off) for the first time as a 4K remaster of 2000’s Shadow of Oblivion heads to PC later this year.

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Last time, you narrowly ruled that mimics are better than tactically sealing doors. Why would anyone want to lock away a beautiful pearwood chest that surely contains oodles of treasure and absolutely no consequences? This week, I ask you to choose between stress and pressure and panic and mistakes, and simply having a nice time helping a friend without a care in the world. What’s better: timed dialogue choices, or a stress-free co-op helper?

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Star Wars’ nineties first-person shooter Dark Forces is returning in a 4K-ified remaster from Nightdive Studios, the folks behind the recent System Shock remake. The upcoming Dark Forces Remaster will see its visuals bumped up to a crisp 4K, running at 120 frames per second, along with a number of quality-of-life improvements.

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