The new Spirit Swap demo introduces its hella queer cast

Spirit Swap: Lofi Beats To Match-3 To has been on our radar for a while now, and with its appearance at this year’s Wholesome Direct during Summer Game Fest, I knew I had to go and check out the new demo.

It’s different to the endless demo that Alice wrote about in February, which isn’t available here. Instead, you get a taster of the game’s story and versus modes. And with that, an introduction to some of the characters you’ll meet (and maybe even date).

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Fallout 76’s lead artist is building a creepy single-player open world in The Axis Unseen

Look at any image of heavy metal horror game The Axis Unseen and you’ll recognise an archetype: the stealth archer. For a certain sort of Elder Scrolls player, it’s the only way to travel through a fantasy open world – perma-crouched, bow stretched lazily across the lower third of the screen. And it’s an appeal that creator Nate Purkeypile understands perfectly, having spent the larger portion of his career working on Bethesda’s RPGs, from Fallout 3 and Skyrim all the way through to Fallout 76.

“It’s probably not the best idea for most people to do a solo open world,” he says. “But at the same time, this is like my sixth one. I’m pretty sure what goes into these.”

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Our pals at VG247 are giving away a custom Company Of Heroes 3 controller

Excellent real-time strategy game Company Of Heroes 3 came out on PC earlier this year, and now its console edition has arrived on yer Xboxes and PlayStations. Listen, I know such console talk is considered heresy around these parts, but our corporate friends/siblings at sister site VG247 are running a competition right now to win a custom Company Of Heroes 3 Xbox controller. Sure, you might not want to play Company Of Heroes 3 specifically with said controller, but controllers in general are useful things that we at RPS use a lot for playing other types of games, and hey, we thought you might want to know about it, just in case. You can enter here if you fancy your chances.

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Diablo 4 kills another high level Hardcore character, this time with a bug

Just one week after Diablo 4‘s first level 100 Hardcore character was killed by a lost connection, the game has brutally (and unfairly) claimed another Hardcore character. Unlike Carn’s Barbarian, Quin69’s Druid wasn’t level 100 yet, but he was pretty darn close at level 91. His Druid had 172 hours and 50 minutes of play time. That’s more than a week’s worth of playing and the game’s only been out for 10 days (or 15, if we’re including early access).

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Dordogne review: don’t brush off this sweet summer adventure

Memory can be a fickle thing. For thirty-something Mimi, everything before her thirteenth birthday is a blank. What happened before that point is never really interrogated during Dordogne‘s three-hour run time, but we do know her father is a stubborn old goat who cut ties with Mimi’s really quite nice grandmother Nora after a summer she spent there as a shy, sheltered twelve-year-old. It’s this summer that seems to be the cork in Mimi’s memory bottle, and it’s also the window in which Dordogne frames its sweet, coming of age tale. As Mimi in the present comes to terms with her grandmother’s recent passing, the objects she finds in Nora’s now-empty summer house trigger important flashbacks to that golden summer, and maybe also the answer to Mimi’s apparent amnesia. Dordogne never demands very much of you during these sequences, but it does know how to luxuriate in life’s little details, and find pleasure in a more leisurely lifestyle.

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Rockstar co-founder and GTA writer Dan Houser founds new company Absurd Ventures

Dan Houser, the co-founder of Rockstar Games and former head writer at the company, has founded a new company called Absurd Ventures. Houser left Rockstar in 2020, after co-writing some of the company’s biggest games including GTA V and Red Dead Redemption 2. He’s now returned with Absurd Ventures, headquartered in Santa Monica, California.

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Upgrade your Steam Deck or ROG Ally with this 2TB SSD for £160

The Steam Deck and ROG Ally are brilliant little devices – but you do end up paying a lot more for a high-capacity version, with a £220 difference between the cheapest and most expensive Steam Decks. If you opted for one of the smaller capacities to save space, then consider this deal for a Sabrent Rocket Q4 2230 NVMe drive that offers a massive 2TB of storage for £160 – down from a usual price of £205.

To get this deal, you’ll need to tick the box on the Amazon product page to get a 7% discount, then use the code SH4KDU9Z to unlock an extra discount.

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