Category: Rock, Paper, Shotgun

MMO raids can be some of the most satisfying experiences in multiplayer gaming, so it’s a shame that they’re so often one of the last things you gain access to after a whole lot of time and grinding. That makes me very interested in 33 Immortals, the newly announced next game from Jotun and Spiritfarer studio Thunder Lotus. It’s a 33-player cooperative action roguelikelike which they say offers “ultra-fast runs through a streamlined distillation of the MMO raid experience,” with “pick-up and raid” matchmaking. Huh!

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Welcome to our PC Gaming Show liveblog, where we’ll be bringing you some extremely live coverage of PC Gamer’s contribution to the current NotE3/Summer Game Fest proceedings. If it’s anything like last year’s, the 2023 PC Gaming Show will be a breathless barrage of PC-focused game announcements, reveals, and trailers – and myself and Liam will be on hand to relay them all, one or two lines at a time.

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Mortal Kombat 1 is surely going to delight fans of fighting games and fans of Mortal Kombat. Having given it a whirl for around 45 minutes at Summer Game Fest, I’m convinced it’s gorgeous, gory, and guaranteed to please a demanding electronic sports audience who can actually memorise inputs and string together combos. Yet, the entirety of my time with Mortal Kombat 1 had me desperate for an equivalent to Street Fighter 6‘s modern control scheme: a simplified remap of the buttons which enables anyone to hop in and do cool moves.

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Right folks, listen up: from just 30 minutes of Cocoon, I’m already convinced it’s one of the best games here at Summer Game Fest 2023. It’s the Annapurna one masterminded by Jeppe Carlsen, the lead gameplay designer for Playdead’s Inside. And in the 30 minutes I spent with it, I actually sat up on the sofa and did a colossal goblin lean towards the telly in full view of everyone. I needed to commune properly with the mighty insect lad, who hoists orbs that contain entire worlds onto his back in the game’s wonderful mix of puzzler and top-down action. He commanded my full attention and he got it all.

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I’ve never been a Sonic fan, but I thought Sonic Superstars looked pretty good at Geoff Fest earlier this week. It’s an old-fashioned sidescrolling platformer rendered in a 3D art style faithful to the original games, and it’s playable in co-op.

Now there’s ten minutes of gameplay footage to let you watch a couple of levels played through in nearly their entirety.

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Airborne Kingdom was about constructing a floating city in the sky; you figuratively and literally balanced your construction of homes and industry as you floated around and interacted with settlements on the ground to gather resources. Nate called it an “absolute delight” two years ago.

Now there’s a sequel on the way. Airborne Empire starts with the same basics of citybuiilding, but now your constructions will be under siege from sky pirates.

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Wholesome Direct is my favourite showcase from not-E3, because I feel like it’s a show directly catered to my interests. Cats, cooking, seaside towns, pretty landscapes, magical girls – Wholesome Direct has it all. This year we from the RPS Indiescovery Podcast watched the show and have plucked out a handful of games that we’re looking forward to the most, which was pretty difficult. There were a lot of great games this year.

There were around 70 games spotlighted during the showcase, so there was no way we could possibly list them all, but we’ve done our best and here are our bestest best picks. If you’re after more gaming news and announcements from this year’s not-E3 check out our coverage of not-E3 2023, Summer Game Fest round-up, and Day Of The Devs round-up. For now though, have a pleasant scroll through which wholesome games we have our eyes on.

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Adorable exploration and platformer game Smushi Come Home has just been shadow-dropped as part of this year’s Wholesome Direct, meaning you can play it right now. The game follows the titular Smushi, a small mushroom, as it makes its way out of a forest to get back home. Along the way, it’ll meet and help out many of the forest’s inhabitants. If the combination of tiny shroom guy, chill exploration, and light puzzling hasn’t convinced you, take a look at the game’s launch trailer below.

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Earlier today, Mr. Diablo at Blizzard Rod Fergusson tweeted what the most played class was in Diablo 4 so far. To my great surprise, it wasn’t the Rogue, which is currently sitting at the top of our tier list. Rather, it’s the Sorcerer, which currently sits at the bottom of our class rankings. Presumably, everyone loves watching ice shards and lightning bolts leave their fingertips. So, is the majority of Diablo 4’s player-base wrong, or are we? Feel free to come defend your spell-slinger in the comments.

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The glut of “old school” shooters has largely passed me by, not least because I can easily play Doom today if I want to. But Kvark looks to Half-Life instead of the Doomquake clone era, and is all the better for it. You’re a worker/prisoner in a sinister nuclear facility deep under 1980s Czechoslovakia where things, as you might guess, have gone terribly wrong.

The satirical Soviet posters and propaganda reels are here, but used sparingly, and more convincingly than the usual “Russia, haha! Vodka! lol!” fare, and although all its parts are fairly familiar, Kvark feels distinct enough that I had a hard time actually putting it down.

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