Earlier this month, we asked you to vote for your favourite space games of all time, and man alive did you lot come out swinging for this. Hundreds and hundreds of votes have been beamed in over the last few weeks, resulting in an overwhelming favourite that was (no word of a lie) several thousand points ahead of its nearest rival. Not hundreds. Thousands. When you see it, you’ll probably go, ‘Of course, of course that’s number one!’ but let’s not get ahead of ourselves. Come and find out what other games made the cut as we count down your 25 favourite space games of all time.
You know who you shouldn’t trust? Hotel cleaners. Not in real life, I should add – where they are hardworking and one time one helped me catch and kill cockroach even though we didn’t speak the same language – but in the game This Bed We Made, a third person mystery set in a slightly grimy 1950s hotel. The reason why you shouldn’t trust this particular cleaner because it is, in fact, you, in the kitten heels of Sophie here, as you rifle through their belongings and ogle at their undies. There’s a demo of one such room on Steam now, and it plops you right in medias of some juicy res.
Take one good look at the upcoming Catch & Cook: Fishing Adventure and you might just mistake it for 2023’s other third-person cartoony fishing sim: Dredge. The big-toothed mutants and otherworldly horrors in Dredge can get quite overwhelming though, especially when they start to chomp at your ship beneath the surface. After playing Catch & Cook’s recently released demo, I’m happy to report that it’s the ideal fishing sim for people who find Dredge’s spooky undercurrents, erm, too spooky. Just a very chill, very good time.
Continuing their annual tradition, developer Don’t Nod have announced that all three episodes of Tell Me Why will be free to keep for the rest of June. Rather than spending money on the game, the team asks that you might consider donating that money to “trans creators, trans-inclusive charities local to you, and trans people in need,” in honour of Pride Month. Regardless, the supernatural mystery is one of the best recent adventure games and is well worth the time.
The Ukrainian studio working on S.T.A.L.K.E.R 2: Heart Of Chernobyl, GSC Game World, have confirmed that early development materials from the game have been leaked online, following “about a year and a half” worth of attacks from a Russian hacking group. GSC say that the materials aren’t “release-ready,” but looking at the leaked clips may “ruin your experience of exploring the Zone.”
The season of big video game announcements – otherwise known as NotE3 season – is in full swing and Ubisoft have decided to join the trailer festivities by teasing their own showcase. The Ubisoft Forward show will be broadcast live from Los Angeles on June 12th at 6pm BST/10am PDT, with a pre-show starting 15 minutes earlier. The publisher also released a small clip to confirm that AssCreed, Avatar, and The Crew: Motorfest will all make an appearance, alongside a non-descript mystery game. Take a peek below.
Redfall suffered from a tumultuous development cycle where developers from Arkane Austin hoped that Microsoft would either reboot or cancel the project, according to a new report from Bloomberg. The co-op shooter launched to mostly negative reviews last month, which was uncharacteristic of Arkane’s usually excellent pedigree.
EPOS make some of the best gaming headsets in the business, so it’s great to see a deep discount on one of their best Sennheiser co-creations. The GSP 600 offers extremely good build quality, great audio and incredible noise isolation too.
Its list price is a faintly ridiculous $219, but right now you can pick up a brand new set of these headphones for $54.99 at Woot. That’s a solid $15 off the same set on Amazon, and a great price for headphones of this level of quality.
Intel’s mid-range Core i5 processors have long been some of the best choices for gaming PCs, versus Core i7 and Core i9 models that require much more cooling while not providing much more performance in GPU-limited scenarios. Their 13th-gen models are a particular favourite, and today we have a US deal on perhaps the best value gaming CPU in that lineup: the Core i5 13400F is now down to $164.99 at Best Buy following a $50 discount.
When RPS awarded Kentucky Route Zero the title of Game Of The Year in 2013, only two episodes out of an eventual five had been released. If this sounds like a bland statement of fact, just think about it for a second. I can’t recall any other time an episodic adventure game has received GOTY-level praise before it was even concluded, let alone only 40% done.
Episodes three through five arrived sporadically: in spring 2014, summer 2016, and — after what must have been an agonising hiatus — the start of 2020. Having bypassed this wait to play the game for the first time only recently, I feel wistfully as though I’ll never share quite the same fond feelings for it as contemporary fans (like our own reviews ranger Rachel, who recently named KRZ one of her all-time favourite indie games). But I’m also quite relieved that I didn’t have to exercise that kind of patience. I mean, I’m very good at neglecting to carry on with games for years at a time despite thoroughly enjoying what I’ve played so far. But I like doing it on my terms, you know?
I initially attempted to do something a bit clever with this retrospective. I wanted to play the first two episodes that earned KRZ our GOTY nod in 2013, and write up on them as a discrete entity as far as possible. Only then did I plan to carry on the game and add some follow-up impressions, perhaps assessing whether I thought RPS would still award the big chocolate medal to the full game as it finally came to be in 2020. But, after sitting with my feelings about Episodes 1-2 for a couple of weeks, any intelligent observations I might have made were drowned out by an increasingly loud, insistent voice in the back of my head howling: “I WANT TO KNOW WHAT HAPPENS.” Actually, that might be a good impression to just let stand on its own merits.
