Category: Rock, Paper, Shotgun

Back when I played Path Of Exile 2 at Summer Games Fest, I fought a cave-dwelling boss who summoned hordes of grotty subterranean wildlife to swamp me. Fortunately, I was rolling a Witch – perhaps the best beginner POE2 class – so I could summon an army of skeletons in response. A similar horde vs horde encounter is underway at POE 2 developers Grinding Gear Games. The game launched in early access over the weekend, and has already drawn so many players that the developers are emergency-hiring additional staff to cope with the waves of support emails.

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In “non-violent and poetic” 2D platformer Symphonia, you’re an extremely fancy violinist exploring a realm of musical machines, where gas lanterns kindle fitfully as you approach, crotchets adorn vast cogwheels, and reams of what I really hope isn’t actual catgut feed through titanic pegboxes overhead. Sampling the demo, I was immediately enflamed by the orchestral score and placed in a mood of white-gloved sophistication only slightly spoiled by the familiarity of the underlying platform moveset, and by my repeatedly falling into pits.

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When I were a lad, you’d open an advent calendar and get a piece of chocolate shaped like a bell with an aftertaste so rancid you’d wish you’d eaten the little cardboard window instead. And you’d bloody well make do, too. Not these days. Now, you get a squadron of tiny automata with drills for noses that burrow through your battle lines and utterly wreck your vulnerable missile launchers. Country’s gone to the tiny robot dogs, I tell you!

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The Steam Deck OLED has joined Valve’s Certified Refurbished programme, offering a much cheaper way of getting your hands on the best handheld PC around. Provided you don’t mind it being in someone else’s first, anyway. As with official refurbs of the original Steam Deck, “certified” Steam Deck OLEDs are formerly-broken models that have been returned to Valve, fixed up and tested in-house, then put back on the market at steep discounts. You’re looking at £389/$439 for the 512GB spec and £459/$519 for 1TB, down from £479/$549 and £569/$649 respectively.

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I am a Winter baby. My birthday is very close to Christmas, and so you’d think this might make me immune to the serotonin-sapping effects of the greyest season in a “I was born of the cold. Moulded by it” kind of way. No such luck, I’m afraid. So, since there’s only so many Vitamin D supplements and delightfully festive lunchtime Gin and Tonics one can consume, I figured I’d ask: what are your favourite comfort games for the bleaker months? The special places you can always rely on for an escape when the weather outside is frightful, and the Cosy Fireplace Ambience 4K (10 hours) keeps getting interrupted by adverts for crypto scammers and War Thunder.

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While it’s always worth starting a new game of Cyberpunk 2077 just to hear Judy say “his own choomba shot him!” for the thirtieth time, there’s now a slightly more tangible reason to start a new journey into Night City’s open world. Update 2.2 went live yesterday, bringing with it a host of fixes, as well as some deeper customisation options for both your character and vehicles. The base game is also 55% off on Steam until the 18th of December, with the Phantom Liberty expansion at 20% off, or both in a 48% off bundle. Cyberpunk is on sale often enough, although these current discounts line up with the cheapest it’s ever been on Steam. Again: worth it for the line.

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It seems as if every “wholesome” game is either a Stardewlike or a Animal Crossingbut. Little Rocket Lab? Stardewlike. Piece By Piece? Animal Crossingbut. To be more specific, it’s Animal Crossing but your chibi fox protagonist is specifically running a shop, mending and painting objects to sell while maintaining cleanliness and the plants outside. If you can’t get enough of upcycling in Trash Goblin, here’s one more for you.

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Duck Detective’s first case was The Secret Salami, which paired its cosy mystery about stolen lunches with a protagonist whose divorce and destitution were played entirely straight despite his being a duck. The results were seemingly delightful, and here comes a sequel.

Duck Detective: The Ghost Of Glamping will offer a further 2-3 hours of mystery-solving and is aiming for release in 2025.

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Marvel Rivals, the free-to-play hero shooter from NetEase, launched late last week and is exceedingly popular. It’s currently fourth on the Steam daily most played, right between Path Of Exile 2 and the evergreen Grand Theft Auto 5. I think there are three reasons for this enthusiasm: 1) it’s free-to-play with the usual comet’s trail of microtransactables 2) it’s third-person Overwatch with Marvel characters, a straightforwardly enticing licensing sandwich, and 3) people want to have sex with a larger-than-usual proportion of the cast and especially awful tongue-monster Venom, who has a good butt in this one. No, I’m not going to share pictures. You’ll have to google that filth yourself.

But perhaps you are a sophisticated soul who has no time for such salacious nonsense. You’re more interested in hearing how they’re patching the thing. Enough with the butts already, dang it – this is a new multiplayer game so there must, of course, be patches! Fair enough: here’s what NetEase are changing or fixing in the first major update, out now.

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The demo for SNØ: Ultimate Freeriding isn’t that new. It actually came out in September, but I’m filing it under the secret best unspoken RPS site category of “News (To Me)”, a whizcrack piece of web 3.0 technology that allows us to travel back in time and ‘announce’ things that don’t seem any less noteworthy for their advancing age.

If you think that’s a desperately cavalier and confusing way to run a news section, I can only suggest that you email a complaint to our news editor. Spoilers: our news editor is me, and I have already thrown your complaint in the bin. Mate, I don’t tell you how to do your job, but I’d be more than happy to, if you let me know what it is. Anyway, what were we talking about. Oh yeah, skiiing!

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