Category: Rock, Paper, Shotgun

The first time I died in Beyond Citadel, the game treated to me a close-up shot of my character’s scantily clad, bisected body lying in a pool of guts and ripped underwear. It turns out you can turn off a lot of the gore and nudity. You can also swaddle yourself in some nice, sturdy, PG-13 body armor. But you’re seemingly stuck with a certain base percentage of bulging, softcore gratuitousness in both the character portrait on bottom left, and in the mildly boobulent background art of the world. I’m not sure I can put up with all that, which is a shame, because Beyond Citadel is otherwise a promising, eerie FPS that mixes ideas from 90s shooters in pretty appealing ways.

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“I sometimes joke about it, but it’s like I need a war to start a new game,” Rasheed Abu-Eideh tells me over a call. “The specific thing that made me make Liyla And The Shadows Of War is the attacks on Gaza in 2014, and the specific thing that made me make Dreams On A Pillow is the attacks on Gaza in 2023.”

Dreams On A Pillow is a stealth adventure that tells the story of a young mother during the Nakba – the 1948 ethnic cleansing, displacement, and cultural suppression of Palestinian Arabs by Israel. As its funding campaign puts it, it’s a game about “a land full of people being made into a people without land.”

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A long, long time ago I became obsessed with watching people play rally games beautifully. It was a blessing to see those disembodied hands sling virtual cars around with grace and precision, kicking up dirt in a way I could only dream of.

Now, though, I am going through a different phase. A less blessed phase. One where I watched the popular streamer and influencer Ludwig attempt to climb to Platinum rank in League Of Legends, all because he wanted to prove another popular streamer, who thought he couldn’t do it, wrong. I know I’ve already put you off, so I don’t blame you if you stop reading. Just know that I couldn’t stop watching his streams, even as it conjured up terrible memories of a time spent doing the exact same thing at uni.

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One for Obra Dinn and Golden Idol fans, this, although also for anyone who just loves a gorgeous map of an alien environment. Locator is a detective puzzler where you play an interstellar cartographer tasked with tracking down a missing archeologist named Abigail Lidari on an alien world. It takes inspiration from browser geography game Geoguessr. You’ll be studying sets of photos and comparing them with notes from Abigail’s journal, then pinpointing her location on a series of lovely maps.

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Marvel Rivals Season 1 is about to begin, adding the Fantastic Four to the free-to-play hero shooter’s roster so that they can beat up Dracula, who has swamped the Earth in eternal night. It launches January 10th at 1 am PT / 4 am ET / 9 am GMT, and developers NetEase are paving the way in the traditional manner by rebalancing the character line-up so as to simultaneously win the adoration of certain player groups, while plunging others into apoplectic fury.

Do you like running rampage as Hela, goddess of death? Was that you who shot me full of crows on Klyntar last night? Well, how does 25 points off your base health suit you? Yeah, that’s what I thought. Screw you too.

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Over the Christmas break, I took a brief hiatus from reporting on every time a Total War developer breathes or spills tea on their shirt. The year ended, the world did not, and no Thanquol DLC was announced, but I did miss what I reckon is the strongest hint they’ve yet freely given that strategy game Total War: Warhammer 40,000 is both real and due an announcement very soon. Here’s the skinny.

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Dell has slashed prices on two configurations of its Alienware m16 R2 gaming laptop, offering significant value for those looking to upgrade their gaming setup. The model equipped with an NVIDIA GeForce RTX 4060 GPU is now available for $1,299.99, while the RTX 4070 variant can be yours for $1,499.99.

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Gears Tactics and Wolfenstein: Enemy Territory developers Splash Damage have cancelled Transformers: Reactivate, the Hasbro action game they announced in 2022. They will also be “scaling down to refocus our efforts on other projects”, and “a number of roles across the studio are now potentially at risk of redundancy”.

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As someone who believes in the ideal of the trim, tidy PC interior, I do applaud the intent behind MSI’s Project Zero X. Currently on show at CES 2025, it’s a prototype desktop build that uses clever geometry and an unconventional motherboard I/O layout to hide practically every single wire in the joint, for a clean design that’s housed for your viewing pleasure within a four-sided glass chamber. It’s the closest PCs have come to the simple Victorian pleasures of a nice terrarium, and honestly, good on it.

The problem is that if Project Zero X’s components ever actually go on sale, there becomes a non-zero percent chance that I will come into possession of that see-through case. And there is a one hundred percent chance I will ruin it.

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The more I tell you about Stimulation Clicker, the less funny it will be, so let’s keep this brief. It’s an idle clicker, obviously, which starts with a single button in the centre of a browser screen. The more “stimulation” you accrue through clicking, the more options become available. It escalates. And escalates. And escalates. I found that my feelings of delight grew roughly in proportion to the toll taken on my computer’s processor. After 30 minutes, I was huffing and hooting like a drunken horse to a soundtrack of disintegrating laptop fans.

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