The Lord Of The Rings: Return To Moria got actual Gimli to narrate its mining gameplay trailer

Okay, so he’s not (I don’t think) going to be in the full game, and if he is it won’t be loads, but hearing John Rhys-Davies doing his Gimli voice over the trailer for Dwarf mining survival sim The Lord Of The Rings: Return To Moria is enough to warm the cockles of your 2001 self’s heart, isn’t it? Coming in that old favourite release window of “fall 2023”, Free Range Games’ Dwarf ’em up brought its first gameplay trailer to Summer Game Fest tonight, and we saw not only some examples of the building you can do on your quest to – hear me out – Return To Moria, but also the monsters that can emerge from the deep to stop you doing it.

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Magical FPS Immortals Of Aveum debuts extremely short clips of an epic battle on a steampunk mech

Some time back I made fun of the preview for Immortals Of Aveum because a) it was quite a silly hands-off preview and b) Immortals Of Aveum is very clearly a game that needs to be played to properly get to grips with it. It’s out on July 20th, so not too far away. Have I played it yet? No! Of course not! But we’re getting closer to a hands on, and after a six-minute video of the magic FPS in action last month, tonight’s Summer Game Fest threw us a big, bombastic boss fight on top of a steampunk Jaeger, or something. I dunno, it was hard to tell over the light show. Those sure are a lot of magical fireworks going off. I like it. Jangle some more keys in front of me, games man.

The video itself is, uh, well, it’s not long, and it’s quite choppy. While I enjoy a good setpiece, my concerns remain the same as before, i.e. the magic shooting, despite the different flavours of magic broadly corresponding to a different kind of gun, looks pretty weightless, and the enemies look bullet spongey. I do like the colours and the traversal, though.

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Jason Isaacs voices a baddie in Baldur’s Gate 3

Professional villain Jason Isaacs will voice a character of questionable morality in Baldur’s Gate 3, developers Larian announced today at Geoff Keighley’s Level Up Pool Party. The English actor who played Star Trek: Discovery’s Captain Lorca, Marshal Zhukov in The Death Of Stalin, and a whole load of other baddies has now lent his voice to Lord Enver Gortash, the creator of magical clockwork watchmen. Ooh it is a good voice.

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Prince Of Persia returns to its action platforming roots with The Lost Crown

Last week, Ubisoft teased they were going to unveil a new mystery game at their Ubisoft Forward conference on June 12th. Well, Geoff and his freshly pressed Summer Game Fest trainers have only gone and done it for them, and wouldn’t you know it, it’s a new Prince Of Persia game called The Lost Crown. Sorry, Sands Of Time Remake, you’re old news now.

But even before Geoff got his pristine reveal mitts on it (probably), I went to see and play this new Prince Of Persia game over at Ubisoft Montpellier – and if the reveal trailer hasn’t already convinced you this is something special, take it from me: this is rad as heck, and you can read more of my thoughts about it after its full reveal at Ubisoft Forward next Monday. Until then, though, here’s everything else I can share about it right now, so ready yourselves for some cold, hard factoids. Here we go.

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Pokémon TCG Live arrives on PC today, replacing TCG Online

After nearly two years in open beta, Pokémon Trading Card Game Live arrives on PC in full today, replacing Pokémon Trading Card Game Online as the primo destination for all digital Poké TCG players. Alas, with Summer Game Fest happening today, none of the RPS Treehouse are going to be able to enact their plans of being the very best like no one ever was until at least early next week at this rate, but if you fancy giving it a go yourself, you’ll be pleased to hear it’s free-to-play and is available for both Windows and Mac devices (and iOS and Android, if you want the full list of platforms).

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The Electronic Wireless Show S2 Episode 19: a Terraria board game, you say?

In a twist of serendipity, the Terraria board game was shown at the very same UK Games Expo that Nate himself visited! We couldn’t have planned it better (and indeed, did not) which means this week on The Electronic Wireless Show podcast we talk about not just that board game, but other PC versions of board games, and vice verse, and the games we think should have tabletop versions.

Plus, this week we have once again been playing current video games, and Nate returns with an extremely silly mini-game. In the hardware section James lets us in on the unlikely second wind for VR headsets, most notably Apple’s extremely stupid fake face projection thing. Please, Silicon Valley: stop.

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I’m not good Metroidvanias but you might like Islets because it’s a very cute one

This weekend I spent some time trying out a bunch of games that I meant to try earlier, but didn’t have the time to. I played through all of Superliminal, for example, and really enjoyed it until the very end when I got an inspirational lecture from an invisible scientist living in my ear – and I did not care for it. One game I played for literally half an hour and thought it was great, but I was not good enough to beat the first boss I came across. But I thought to myself, other people are better at Metroidvanias, and at least one of them might appreciate being nudged in the direction of a year old one I think is cute. Thus: Islets.

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Mask Of The Rose review: a lavish gothic dating sim that’s a little light on romance

I had one question for Mask Of The Rose: Can I smooch the Cthulhu monster? I mean, I assume you can, they’re one of ten characters you’re able to romantically pursue in the delicious depths of this Eldritch dating sim. But in actuality, I simply don’t know, because after ten-plus hours and multiple playthroughs, that all-important question remains unanswered. It’s not something unique to my dashing, tentacled suitor, either. Many of my romantic pursuits in the Neath totally fizzled out. It’s giving Berocca when I wanted Coke and Mentos.

Mask Of The Rose is Failbetter’s visual novel dating sim set in the Fallen London universe, an already established alt-history Victorian London that the studio has been building over a decade as a quite excellent browser game. In this alternative history, London has been dragged through the Earth’s crust by bats and now resides in a vast underground cavern called the Neath. With the economy literally in the pits and Queen Vicky refusing to leave her cushy palace, London has become somewhat unruly, turning into a lasciviously gothic underworld home to a whole parade of monsters, devils, living statues, cloaked beings with red eyes… basically the entire cast of the Goosebumps books.

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