Category: Rock, Paper, Shotgun

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.

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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.

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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?

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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.

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I feel a little bad for the AMD Ryzen 9 7900X3D. This 12-core 3D V-Cache processor sits in the middle of the 8-core Ryzen 7 7800X3D (that ranks as the fastest gaming processor) and the 16-core Ryzen 9 7950X3D (that combines excellent gaming and content creation performance).

However, being overshadowed by your siblings is no bad thing, as the 7900X3D has fallen significantly further in price, bringing it back into contention for users that want a lot of cores for content creation tasks and excellent gaming performance. It launched at $600 and now retails for $510, but today on Ebay you can get this processor for just $439 – an amazing price. You even get a free copy of Starfield in the bargain.

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“We don’t go to Ravenholm…” Half-Life 2‘s sixth chapter heading warns, and when you arrive at the outskirts of this abandoned mining town, you immediately see why. This headcrab and zombie-infested cess pit is an absolute horror show right from the off. Moans and screeches assault your ears from every nook and cranny of this dark murder hole, and if the hoarse crow calls and suspiciously high number of propane barrels weren’t enough to put you off, the bloodied torsos lodged against its log cabin walls by deep set saw blades certainly will. Every fibre of your being is telling you to get the hell out of this place, and that surely, the Combine forces chasing you down here can’t be worse than what’s in front of you.

But I’d also add an addendum to that heading that goes something like this: “We don’t go to Ravenholm, and definitely not with just a gravity gun.” This is a place that demands you to have as much firepower as you can possibly muster, such are the monstrosities that lie in wait here. But what did baby Katharine decide to do when she was playing it alone on her terrible university laptop in the dead of night back in 2010? She decided to have a go at that old Zombie Chopper achievement for no good reason whatsoever. And what followed was even more horrifying than Ravenholm had any right to be.

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I don’t know about you, but I’ve been immensely enjoying the seeming renaissance of tower defence citybuilding games recently. The grimdark horrors of Age Of Darkness: Final Stand might be a bit too hard as nails for my personal liking, but there’s something about the act of building up my little settlements and defending them against ever-larger nightly hordes that just unlocks something in my brain that says, ‘Yes, more of this, please’. It’s the same feeling I got from the blocky delights of Diplomacy Is Not An Option and the deckbuilding, comic-book stylings of ORX, too, but now there’s a new kid that’s ridden into town who I think might be the king of the lot.

Thronefall is a more minimalist take on the citybuilder tower defender, but while its bright colours might look like the distant cousin of a Townscaper toybox (it is, after all, made by the same dev wot did the equally charming Islanders), this deadly little thing is absolutely genius. It’s only just come out in early access today, but I’ve been having a great time with a pre-release build of it, and can feel it sinking its claws into me with every attempt at its final level.

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Civil Protection officers are shorter than I thought they’d be. Don’t get me wrong, I’m very much a Short King myself, but I assumed the gas mask-wearing enforcers of City 17 would be more vertically intimidating. As I defiantly refuse to pick up litter in Half-Life 2’s opening sequence, I find the approaching officer and his raised electric baton to be weirdly adorable. Until he hits me, of course. The resulting crack gives me such a fright that I fling my arms out and smack my hand against the corner of a bookcase.

This has been my experience of playing the first few hours of Half-Life 2’s excellent fan-made VR mod, a completely free add-on that transforms Valve’s 2004 masterpiece into a full virtual reality experience. Under my direct control, Gordon Freeman is less a time-displaced MIT graduate with a penchant for murder and instead a gawking tourist who’s more interested in staring at canal architecture than liberating humanity. I spend the majority of my time leaning in really close to walls and muttering, “That’s interesting,” before a leaping headcrab shocks me so severely that I damage some more furniture and scare the cat.

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If you own Half-Life 2 but never bothered with its freebie tech demo, Half-Life 2: Lost Coast, do give it a whirl. Its showcase of HDR lighting might have lost the “Huh, nice” factor it had in 2005, but it’s still a satisfying slice of punchy HL2 combat, with a nod to the original Half-Life that Valve regretted not making in the main game. I know this because Valve told me, via Lost Coast’s other innovation: its developer commentary.

I love these things, these spinning speech bubbles inflated with knowledge straight from the FPS coalface. So do Valve, judging by how dev commentary has appeared (in identical, node-activatable form) in most of their games since. They’re interesting and illuminating, don’t interfere with the game unless the player wants them to, and help build design literacy. Why, then, don’t more games offer commentary as well?

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Developers Alkemi Games made quite the impression with their lush card-battler Foretales, but they’re now pivoting into the roguelike action realm with An Ankou. The game’s explore-a-craft-y-slasher mix gives it some flavour from Hades and V Rising, only this time with a shadowy French-folklore skin attached. An Ankou hits early access on August 17th, and I’m very excited to juggle it alongside the zillion other games dropping this month.

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