Category: Rock, Paper, Shotgun

I really, really like Is This Seat Taken? It might just be that this logic puzzler stick its thumb out noticeably from the omnipresent gaggle of post-roguelite survivalyptic soulsbuilder decklikes, but I suspect it’s also down to the deeply satisfying bloopy twinkle dink that plays whenever you drop someone into a seat with your floating hand cursor.

You’ve got a limited number of seats and a bunch of jolly demand-os, and it’s your job to make them all happy. “I want to sit with Bob”. “I need a window seat”. “I forgot to shower”. “I do not like bad smells”. So you quarantine the nostril bombers in the back of your limo, make sure everyone else is happy, and drive off to the next level. There, you’ll take the role of a cinema usher. Some punters want to sit next to someone with popcorn so they can steal it, and some want to wear massive cowboy hats that block those behind them. It’s all quite simple, but robust, and just thoughtful enough to lightly tickle your synapses, like a gentle grizzly bear wielding an illustrious peacock feather.

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During a house clearout I recently discovered a cache of creative writing from my teenage years. Naturally, I now consider most of it to be unbearable. Reading certain notebooks makes me feel as though my stomach is mounting an upwards assault on my brain. BURN IT, scream the parts of said brain that have learned the perils of starting poems with “O Muse”. BURN IT ALL. Nonetheless, I felt bad about being mean towards my adolescent self, so I popped all those misbegotten papers in a giant suitcase. It squats next to me right now as I type these words, like a mausoleum filled with dead albatrosses.

Similarly mixed emotions appear to inform Amphora Hell, in which you play an amphora (read: ancient species of vase) with legs. The amphora is the work of the Kilnmaster, a terrible Olympian force who is sort of one part Hephaestus to one part shmup villain. The Kilnmaster has just decided that he hates his amphora with legs and wishes to destroy it with flying hammers. “No evidence of my failure must remain,” he bellows in the Itch preamble. “Prepare to be scrapped!”

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Most writing tries to avoid cliché, understanding that an overused idea is one that has lost its power. It often feels as if video games take the opposite approach, gleefully piling tropes high upon their back like Labyrinth’s junk lady. Sure, they sacrifice the opportunity to say anything affecting or which feels true, but presumably the theory is that reminding you of a dozen other films, TV shows, books and games you like is just as good.

Enter Lost Records: Bloom & Rage, hunched over from the weight of all the teen TV shows and young adult novels stacked atop its shoulders.

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Sometimes to chill out I watch timelapse videos of ocean creatures such as starfish colonising patches of sea floor. Perhaps they’re gracefully devouring a seal’s carcass, or moving to escape a lethal descending finger of ice. Look, I’m quite a morbid guy, but ‘beauty of nature’ and all that.

It turns out there’s an equivalent in Warhorse’s recent RPG-palooza Kingdom Come: Deliverance 2: drop dozens of items in a random town square, and passing NPCs will gradually gather them all up according to preferences dictated by class. Here’s a video showing that in action, created by Redditor Mcloganator, with three thousand groschen worth of goods to harvest.

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Microsoft Gaming CEO Phil Spencer would like to know if video games journalism is OK. He is concerned that the “whole space is gonna go away or be corrupted by things”. He mourns the heyday of magazines, and is bemused by this “SEO” malarkey he keeps hearing about. Much like a Dickensian child holding out a bowl for more gruel, he wants to know if there’s still a “path” for “people with a real honest voice”.

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Among the dorkiest aspects of Bethesda’s winningly dorky The Elder Scrolls IV: Oblivion is the persuasion wheel minigame – also known as Persuasion Pie, also known as the Wheedlin’ Roundabout, also known as the Dartboard of Indoctrination. (Maybe not so much the last two.) This saw you choosing methods of gaining NPC affection from a disc with quadrants labelled “Admire”, “Joke”, “Coerce” and “Boast”, each of which elicits a different response previewed by the NPC’s gurnishly changing expression.

You have to choose all four options at least once per round, and the underlying “pie” rotates every time you pick one. The underlying segments are partially filled in to show how much they’ll affect the NPC’s opinion, for better or worse. The idea, then is to match responses that have a positive effect to the largest chunks of pie, by picking them in the right order. If you think all that sounds incredibly overwrought and an offence to the character writer’s art, then you are clearly not Don’t Nod Montreal’s Colin McInerney or one of the other hosts of Wheeljam 2025, a game creation jam dedicated to Bethesda’s ole Tart Of Cajolement. Here is a trailer.

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Presidents’ Day brings a wave of discounts on gaming laptops, desktops, and more, making it a great time to upgrade or invest in a new machine. Whether you’re after raw performance, high refresh rates, or a balance of power and portability, there are plenty of options available at lower-than-usual prices.

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One of video gaming’s great urban fabulists, Half-Life 2 art director and Dishonored visual designer Viktor Antonov, has died at the young age of 52.

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Afterlove EP is the new visual novel and/or broken hearts album from Indonesian developers Pikselnesia. It’s the sad, sleepy tale of a musician, Rama, who is trying to put his life back together and reconnect with his old bandmates in Jakarta a year after the death of his girlfriend, Cinta. The complicating factor is that Cinta isn’t entirely gone: she is a voice in Rama’s head, chatting to him throughout the game’s 28-day storyline as though sitting next to the player on the other side of the screen.

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In an ultimately failed attempt at cobbling some Elden Ring: Nightreign impressions together, I spent a little over three hours of my Valentine’s Day fruitlessly trying to get a match going in the roguelike spinoff’s doomed PS5 network test. I hope said test provided FromSoft with some helpful data, considering Nightreign releases in May, though it would have been a lot easier for everyone if I could’ve just sent Hidetaka Miyazaki an email saying “Sir, your server infrastructure is made of biscuits.”

In the interests of a more productive outcome, here are some lovely/interesting/terrifying little PC games that I could have started and finished while waiting for the closed beta to sort itself out, and that you might enjoy regardless of whether you’ve just spaffed away a perfectly good afternoon.

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