Studios like Rockstar can capture the essence of New York in a video game, but New York is a city full of famous landmarks. SCS Software, by comparison, have become masters at capturing the essence of places of no significance. The long freeway, the vacant parking lot, the anonymous storage warehouse, the nowhere town; all are rendered with such care and detail in American Truck Simulator that they become as compelling to me as any virtual Times Square.
The latest example: Oklahoma, now available in ATS’s latest DLC. Watch the launch trailer below and see if it doesn’t make you want to take a road trip.
It is oncemore that time of year when the searing heat drives us underground, to subsist on raw snacks, re-read The Book Of Phoenix, and play this year’s Low-Intensity Strategy Game For When It’s Actually Refreshingly Temperate And Rainy Out But We’re Committed To The Bit Now.
Myriads Colon Renaissance is not quite the break from the 4X that I’d tried to get us, but it is a hybrid. You build up a city, explore and conquer new lands, unlock research and ultimately push everyone’s faces in, but its other main pillar is tower defence, a genre I very rarely align with. Which is a good sign, right? Two good reasons not to choose it, but I am anyway.
Baldur’s Gate 3 is launching with a relatively clean bill of technical health, so long as you’re playing it on an honest to goodness Windows PC. Larian Studios’ RPG also happens to have earned Valve’s Playable rating for Steam Deck compatibility, which usually signals a game that’s most fine on the SteamOS handheld – it might just have some small text, or no 16:10 display support.
That Playable certification will have been granted off its early access performance, and now that I’ve wandered around the review build for a few hours, I can confirm that playable it most certainly is, with some especially smart control tweaks to accommodate a lack of mouse and keyboard. Actually getting to that point, however, was a minor nightmare, plagued by hard crashes that took one of the Steam Deck’s most obscure tools to fix. As such, before we get into how Baldur’s Gate 3 runs on the Steam Deck or which settings you should use for it, I hope you’ll afford me a rant.
Portal 2 is obviously brilliant, in part because each of its chapters possesses a distinct charm. GLaDOS’ return, for instance, is a stretch of pure puzzling with just a dash of dread, while your first steps into the abandoned 1960s Aperture facility interrupt a fairly hopeless tone with an upbeat sense of discovery. For me, though, Portal 2 peaks late. So late that by the time it begins, your journey through the ‘true’ puzzle chambers are essentially over, leaving you as little more than a loose end in the big glowing eye of a former buddy. It’s Chapter 9: The Part Where He Kills You! Mmm, love that part.
Diablo 4 is walking back several changes from its big Season 1 patch which had made the game an even bigger slog and proved to be overwhelmingly controversial with fans. Blizzard had previously spoken about the upcoming 1.1.1 plaster update during a developer livestream, but the new patch notes detail everything we can expect, including crucial fixes, tweaks to mounts, and big buffs for the Sorcerer and Barbarian classes. The patch drops on August 8th.
Striking Distance, the studio behind last year’s alien horror stomp ‘em up The Callisto Protocol, have suffered layoffs affecting 32 employees in what their publisher calls an effort to “realign the studio’s priorities to better position its current and future projects.”
Return Of The Obra Dinn is, quite rightly, one of the greatest video games of all time. It’s certainly one of my personal favourites, and as this year’s RPS 100 has proven, it’s also greatly beloved by the rest of the RPS Treehouse. A brilliantly conceived murder mystery puzzle box (boat?) that not only has you working out whodunnit, but howdunnit, Obra Dinn is one of those detective games that really thrusts you into the thick of its deduction process. As you set about working out the identities and causes of death for each of the 60 souls onboard, it places you firmly in front of the ship’s wheel before giving you free rein to steer its hull of supernatural horrors into whatever port of judgment you deem fit.
There are no truly wrong answers in Obra Dinn, but due to the nature of how you go about solving it, it’s also one of those games I can’t play too often without feeling like I know all the answers already. It’s only now, five years later, that I feel like I could probably go back to Lucas Pope’s nautical masterpiece and marvel at it afresh on a second playthrough, but there’s one particular set of crew unmaskings that even its time-travelling stopwatch can’t erase from my memory banks. Spoilers to follow obviously, but if you know, you know. I’m talking about the shoe and hammock revelation.
Vampire Survivors‘ snazzy new engine upgrade is coming this month, but developers Poncle seem to be cooking up something even more exciting for their dopamine-fuel bullet heaven shooter. Vampire Survivors: Directer’s Cut is supposedly a major overhaul to the smash hit roguelike, although it unfortunately “may or may not” ever be released.
Last time, you overwhelmingly decided that going on the roof is better than one in the chamber, you little rapscallions. You’re going to get in so much trouble when someone finds out! This week, I have death on my mind ahead of the much-belated scattering of my dad’s ashes, so let’s talk about death. ‘The long sleep,’ some say. ‘Making the little flowers grow,’ Lee Hazelwood will tell you. ‘Big D,’ I think is what several anonymous e-mails I’ve received were referring to. Let’s compare several very different afterdeaths. What’s better: in-game memorials to players, or Dark Souls bonewheels?
Acer’s Nitro lineup of monitors have proven reliable in my estimation, with a unit I bought in 2019 still being used daily in 2023. There’s another Nitro model discounted on Amazon US today, the XV271U. This newer Nitro model comes with a 27-inch span, 2560×1440 resolution and 180Hz refresh rate. That, combined with G-Sync/FreeSync support and a solid Fast IPS panel, make for an awesome monitor – especially at $200, following a $100 discount.
