Category: Rock, Paper, Shotgun

When I’ve had enough of fighting the dogs in a respectable, straightforward manner, I pick them up with my mind and – with a casualness that has to be extremely insulting if you’re a dog – drop them directly off a cliff. This ends the fight immediately. Sometimes I resort to this low move out of frustration, when a dull fight has dragged on for too long. Sometimes I resort to it out of panic, because I’ve accidentally set fire to every hard surface within ten feet, or frozen myself to a wall. Often it’s just for the pleasure of it.

In Eternal Strands, Yellow Brick Games’ debut title, you play the leader of a “weaver band”, a crew of freelance magicians, in a world where something extremely bad happened to magic. Some years ago, the Enclave, a city state acting as the isolationist heart of the world’s magic, exploded in a kind of power surge – one part tsunami, one part blown fuse – and just as quickly sealed itself off from the world outside. Somehow managing to breach the wall, your band finds themselves the first people to set foot inside the ruined capital since the calamity and sets about uncovering the mystery of what exactly went wrong.

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The first wave of Nvidia 50 series GPUs have arrived. Now they’re gone. So, if you need an RTX 5080-prebuilt gaming PCs are currently your best bet of securing. While Dell has got some overpriced $5000+ Alienware 51 desktops up for preorder, there other (considerably cheaper, but not necessarily affordable) options up for grabs right now.

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Vendrán Las Aves – “The Birds Will Come” – is a brief, quiet, hopeful game about burnout recovery. Summarised as a “slice of life tamagotchi” and available in Spanish and English, it’s a gamejam production from Francisco Riolobos, Chuso Montero and Deconstructeam, the Valencia-based developers behind The Red String Club and The Cosmic Wheel Sisterhood.

It’s free to download from Itch.io, and takes the form of a snowglobe perspective of somebody’s one-room apartment. The person in question has just left their job after a rough spell, and has impulsively bought a guitar. They are also, however, totally exhausted, with barely the willpower to do anything beyond getting out of bed, let alone make music. Your task is to help them through each day and rebuild their morale till they feel able to pluck a few chords.

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Hoo-eee! The sequel to the rootinest-tootinest gassiest-guzzlingiest racecar rasslin’ game is launching into early access in March this year. Wreckfest 2 is the follow-up to smashing racer Wreckfest, which came out in 2018 but which I only discovered last year while listing our best racing games. My friends, it got on the list. Developers Bugbear say they have “overhauled its physics engine to deliver the most intense crashes, deeper component damage, and absolute vehicular mayhem.” We can see a little bit of that in a new trailer below, which also gives us an exact early access release date.

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I don’t end up covering as many classic point and click adventures as I’d like on RPS. That’s a real shame, because every time I play a good one, I’m reminded how much magic the genre still has. Developer Blyts (Kelvin And The Infamous Machine) was kind enough to send me over a key for Slender Threads, which is out this Friday. My opinion as a complete non-expert on the genre? Yep, this one’s absolutely worth a look.

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Warhorse’s medieval muck-o-rama Kingdom Come: Deliverance 2 launches today. It’s an engrossing RPG, despite developer co-founder Dan Vávra’s tendency to throw his weight behind alt-right harassment campaigns. Also, a relatively bug-free one.

In the course of my 51 hours as reviewer, I’ve encountered only a smattering of more significant technical issues. Firstly, some heavy slowdown while roaming Trosky Castle, the centerpiece of the opening Bohemian Paradise region, which I resolved by quitting and reloading. Secondly, a mildly terrifying moment in a dugout when a wounded soldier I was supposed to be treating struck a T-pose, as though afflicted by lightning early onset arthritis. And thirdly a repeated crash bug which I feel warrants its own article given that, together with Deliverance 2’s eccentric saving system, it cost me several hours of progress.

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Several hours in, it’s become apparent that I lack the patience for much of Kingdom Come: Deliverance 2’s much-publicised historical accuracies, like needing to bathe yourself every six minutes or how 15th century Bohemians can take several consecutive sword swings to the neck without dying. Ah well! If you’re going to play it, know that it’s also a decent performer on PC – despite the almost threatening tone of its recommended system requirements – and, as far as I can see, isn’t anywhere near as bug-prone as the infamously unstable original.

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Dell’s new Alienware Area-51 Gaming Desktop lineup has landed, and if you’re struggling to find a Nvidia 50 series, or you just want an all in one PC gaming package at (albeit large) simple fee, then this could be the way to go.

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If, like me, you failed and failed and failed to get a decent score in arcadey reaction game Super Hexagon, then take solace in this: there are a bunch of other games by the same developer you can fail at. Terry Cavanagh, also the maker of VVVVVV and Dicey Dungeons, is releasing a collection of his freeware bits and bobs on Steam next week, called simply Terry’s Other Games. Looking at the games included, it summons a nostalgic giggle just to see just how many of Terry’s short, free games have been intriguing enough to grab the eye of an RPS writer over the years. I mean it literally. One game is called Grab Them By The Eyes.

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Peter Akemann – co-founder of Call Of Duty‘s Treyarch and recent president of The Walking Dead: Saints & Sinners studio Skydance Interactive – has pleaded guilty to crashing a drone into a firefighting plane assisting with the recent LA wildfires. The crash, which grounded the plane by damaging its left wing, occurred after Akemann ignored temporary drone restrictions in order to survey the Palisades fires before losing control. Thanks, Eurogamer. For first noticing the case, I mean. I’m not blaming Eurogamer for the drone crash. Not this one, anyway.

The drone was traced back to Akemann, who has agreed to plead guilty to one count of unsafe operation of an unmanned aircraft. That’s a misdemeanour that usually carries up to one year prison time, but he’s “hoping to escape the prison term in exchange for 150 hours of community service in support of wildfire relief and the approximately $65,000 USD it cost to repair the plane,” write Eurogamer, as part of a plea agreement.

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