Category: Rock, Paper, Shotgun

According to the wikihow page “how to fall safely”, the best thing way to minimise injury while falling is to stay loose, keep your arms and legs bent, and roll on impact. According to ragdoll-prone shooter Helldivers 2, however, it’s better to stand to attention in mid-air and perform a crisp salute. It’s long been known that the game’s emotes confer unexpected defensive advantages, with emergency hugs sometimes shielding you against artillery fire, but now, one redditor has proven via careful scientific experimentation that they also protect you against the force of gravity.

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From Zenless Zone Zero to The First Descendant, we seem to be experiencing a free-to-play explosion. Despair, ye time-constrained adults, for your carefully engineered shortage of pocket money offers no bulwark against the onslaught of games that want a slice of your evening or weekend. Today’s big release, Once Human, at least features a giant schoolbus on monster legs, together with a less exciting but customisable van that just has wheels. In this open world survival shooter, you are a “Meta-Human” making your way around a landscape corrupted by Stardust, which has warped the scenery and will slowly drive you nuts.

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Ever since the hat was invented by Valve Corporation in 2009, mankind has grappled with questions of fairness, worthiness, and pride – at least as they pertain to microtransations in free-to-play games. Shooty battle royale Apex Legends is the latest to posit an answer, that being “the Battle Pass should cost more money”.

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The studio-killing fallout of Embracer’s acquisition frenzy continues to fall like ash on the industry. The publishing giant has reportedly closed Piranha Bytes, the studio known for cult RPGs like Gothic, Risen, and Elex, according to a worker who spoke to Polish games site CD-Action. The studio’s existence had been under threat since early this year, after being targeted in Embracer’s purgatorial studio massacre. At that time the German studio were hopeful to avoid being closed down, insisting “don’t write us off yet!” Unfortunately, it looks like those who worked at the studio have since been laid off.

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The Ukrainian city of Mariupol came under heavy bombardment during the opening months of Russia’s invasion in 2022, a programme of artillery and air strikes that damaged or destroyed the majority of residential buildings and has killed or dispossessed thousands of people. It has now been occupied by Russia for almost two years, during which, as reported by the Associated Press, Russia has demolished, rebuilt and renamed much of the city, overwriting its Ukrainian heritage.

The Disco Elysium-inspired RPG Hollow Home is a memory of Mariupol from just before the war – not a 1:1 recreation, but a collection of details, colours, personalities and some familiar buildings, painstakingly amassed and offered up in the face of erasure. Speaking to me during a very brief demo at Digital Dragons in Poland this year, artist Anastasia Hlyniana called my attention to the plants jutting from old car tyres around the game’s isometric map, which she says are a common sight in Mariupol.

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They get knocked down, but they get up again, and you’re apparently never going to keep Eve Online studio CCP Games from trying to make an FPS set in the universe of their Excel(lent?) MMO happen. EVE Vanguard – the studio’s admirable fourth crack at it – was announced last September. Since then, it’s had several open betas and, according to a new and rather vague roadmap, should release sometime post this coming November. Here’s said infographic – more pork scratching-stained napkin scrawl than sat-nav.

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I don’t plan on having kids, but in the event that I change my mind, commissioning a forest Witch to grow one from a mushroom seems a lot easier than the usual human procreative process, though possibly just as abundant in screaming. I’ve been playing the demo for “cute-creepy” RPG and life sim Mushroom Musume, in which you – an unnamed “Recluse” – cultivate and play as a series of mushroom daughters. My current mushroom daughter is called Alia. She’s a Common Turquoise Truffle. She’s got a small pig acquaintance, who so far hasn’t tried to devour her, and a cute fuzzy hat, which she stole from outside a church – precise impact on character development still TBC.

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Time hopping in Berlin usually means queuing several hours for a club, only to magically find yourself either right back at the end of the line, or else waking up on the U-Bahn three days later with tinnitus and currywurst spilled down your Acronym jacket. Not so in cyberpunk tactics game All Walls Must Fall. Here time travel means dodging bullets, reversing flubbed hacking, and replaying that conversation you had with the bouncer that got you booted to the curb. “A bloody good time-troubling tactical shooter,” decreed Adam Smith (RPS in Peace) in his review. Well, now it’s a bloody free time-troubling tactical shooter. Take that, Monday!

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Have I ever bellowed breathlessly about how much I appreciate modders? If I’ve done it a thousand times, it still isn’t enough. Today’s saintly file tinkerers are MerseyRockoff and glassfish77, who’ve restored a series of boat racing quests in open world RPG The Witcher 3: Wild Hunt and made them available in a mod for your sailing pleasure. Cheers, PC Gamer!

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Hello reader who is also a reader, and welcome back to Booked For The Week – our regular Sunday chat with a selection of cool industry folks about books! “What’s with the politics? Stick to games!” is a common refrain you might hear from the sort of winning individual who thinks books are a communist plot to lower their sperm count. Luckily, those people are elsewhere, so I hope you’ll allow me a brief moment of relief that the Tories are no longer in power. This is a great thing, providing you have absolutely no follow-up questions! This week, it’s QWOP, Getting Over It, and Ape Out‘s Bennet Foddy! Cheers Bennet! Mind if we have a nose at your bookshelf?

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