Category: Rock, Paper, Shotgun

I was partial to a scrappy little strategy game even before idiot billionaires doomed the planet, and the UK to brain-steaming heat just when you thought we’d escape it this year. Khaligrad is plenty scrappy. Its edges are rough and you have to figure it out yourself, but it’s more intuitive than it appears, and easy to operate once you discern some basics. It’s scrappy too in that it’s, well. It’s Stalingrad. Not really: its world is so fictional it’s their 15th century. But the invaders are explicitly fascists and the defenders communists embroiled in a long and brutal semi-guerrilla city war with World War 2 technology. Thankfully, it’s stripped of any actual fashy or genocidal play-acting beyond each side doing “hail the empire/union” bits as a sign off.

I think that’s why, despite its brutal and difficult setting, it’s this year’s entry in the long tradition of Low-Intensity Strategy Games For When Hot Why Hot Please Stop You Cannot See My Begging Tears For They Evaporate.

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WolfEye’s debut game Weird West attempted to pack a little of Dishonored‘s immersive sim sorcery into a top-down action-RPG. For the studio’s next game, co-founders Raphaël Colantonio and Julien Roby are leaning into comparisons with their old endeavours at Arkane more earnestly. The new game – currently untitled and without a release date – is a first-person sci-fi RPG set in an alternate-1900s North America, which ostensibly combines the ingenuity and gadgetry of Dishonored and Prey with a “real RPG” experience redolent of Skyrim and modern-day Fallout.

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I’d initially assumed that puzzle game Sliding Hero counts was a Sokoban-like, until I realised that it’s actually you, not endless boxes, that do the sliding here. Still, I wasn’t entirely convinced. The only thing that’s fun to slide back-and-forth indefinitely is a lounging cat on a smooth kitchen worktop. Still, after messing around with Sliding Hero’s Steam demo, I think this one might have much longer legs than its restrictive-sounding concept suggests. All the better to endlessly slide with.

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At some point every proud ruler must ask themselves the question: what should I do with all this stupid, tiresome civilisation I’ve built? Do I let it spin on forever, a gleaming machine of prosperity bathed in an eternal twilight, or do I, as the case may be, unleash a horde of voluptuous hellwomen to gather spirit energy for the resurrection of my tragically slain beloved? If you picked option B you should probably play My Lovely Empress, a plush empire management sim with a dastardly twist, from Indonesian team GameChanger Studio. Find a trailer below.

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Facebook and Oculus Rift owners Meta are reportedly closing Ready At Dawn Studios, the outfit behind the excellent Echo VR and Lone Echo games, as part of wider reductions at the company’s Reality Labs division.

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Fallout London launched late last month, but the huge, long in-development mod is so buggy Nic had to abandon his attempts to play it. Its developers have already promised hotfixes, and now say a “huge” update is also on the way.

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UK arts and entertainment union Equity have unveiled a raft of “best practice guidelines” for video game developers hiring voice actors, including some suggested minimum rates that are designed to address “systemic low pay” for performers. Other measures are designed to improve voice actor working conditions, and stop companies using their voices and likeness as fuel for generative AI tools without their consent. It’s both a praiseworthy endeavour and an interesting breakdown of the voice-actor’s trade.

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Former Ubisoft and Eidos-Montréal developer Stevan Anastasoff has announced Tales from the Mabinogion, a third-person narrative game based on ancient Welsh folklore that’s written primarily in the Welsh language. The game puts you in charge of a wandering monarch, who is embarked on quest to save the realm from a horrible fog. Find a trailer below. Yes, there are English subtitles.

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What if the company that sold your cheese also sold your PC gaming hardware? This is not the murmuring of some poor sod on a nineteen-hour Dota 2 binge who’s started thinking that the crumbs in his keyboard resemble a viable snack, but a bold new reality, one I recently found myself staring down during a trip to Asda. The supermarket chain – third biggest in the UK by turnover and purveyors of ill-fitting clothes and surprisingly good doughnuts alike – has added light-up gaming mice, keyboards, and headsets to its mountain of own-brand wares.

Asda being what it is (Americans, if you’re unfamiliar, think Walmart with less gun violence), it’s all dirt cheap as well. £17 for a full-size keyboard. £16 for an FPS mouse. Overwhelmed with curiosity, I ended up taking home a complete starter set (keeb, different mouse, headset, and mousemat) for £45, or about a third of the price of the Logitech G515 Lightspeed TKL that I’d shortly kick off my desk. Could this be a new frontier in affordable PC hardware, bringing tech to the masses in a way no specialist retailer ever could, or should supermarkets stick to cereal and meal deals? Surely the Asda Tech (real name) 4-in-1 Gaming Kit would have the answers.

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Hmmm… it could be nothing, but the technomancers at Nvidia have just updated their graphics drivers, and among the list of game profiles now listed in their control panel tool is Final Fantasy XVI. The blockbuster JRPG isn’t out on PC yet, and developers Square Enix have not given a concrete release date for it, but this does seem to be prep work for the inevitable. And with Squeenix in attendance at Gamescom, it’s possible we’ll know more soon.

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