Category: Rock, Paper, Shotgun

Fifteen months on from its PS5 release, Final Fantasy XVI – that actiony RPG of emo-fringed hack ‘n’ slashing and disquietingly sexy Ralph Ineson characters – is now on PC. Enough time, you’d think, to do a proper job of rejigging it with Windows spanners, especially after Final Fantasy XV’s port got so much stick for its lack of features and performance issues.

FFVXI does make some improvements, adopting a full set of DLSS and FSR upscalers and frame generators, and its mouse and keyboard integration feels generally slicker than XV. Sadly, it’s still no first-rate adaptation, neglecting numerous PC features and giving low-end systems an even deeper kick in the plums. Cutting the quality settings can help, as per the guide down below, but overall performance is so up-and-down than you’ll likely never achieve a perfectly smooth ride.

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Rather sheepishly, I must admit that my own experience with Armenian art begins and ends with System Of A Down. Cheers then, The Bird Of A Thousand Voices, for showing up in my inbox and giving me a second reference point next to Sugar. This one’s a simple though very striking platformer, inspired by folk legends and scored by composer Tigran Hamasyan. It’s part of a multimedia project based Armenian folk tale Hazaran Blbul (Firebird). It’s completely free, and you can find it here.

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The mad lads at Square Enix have released a demo for their remake of 90s RPG Romancing SaGa 2: Revenge Of The Seven, in which you play a whole dynasty of customisable protagonists fighting vengeful ancient heroes. It’s a turn-based battler with an empire-building component in which you play as several emperors in succession, passing on abilities and knowledge to your heir. In what I consider to be a poetic complimentary flourish, you can also pass on save data from the demo to the full game. Look, this is what counts for “poetic” just before lunch on a Thursday.

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Lethal Company was one of last year’s surprise horror hits. It was a brilliant dystopian scavenging sim in which you searched cellars for bolts while avoiding the attentions of creatures that hate being looked at, or which only move when they’re not being looked at, or which look like your friends, from a distance. The developer’s next game, Welcome To The Dark Place, is more about hearing. It’s an “open-world, auditory text-based adventure” which mostly takes place in pitch blackness.

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Just when you thought it was safe to go back into the Palwoods and hunt large, electric yellow animals of entirely original design whose names rhyme with “peekaboo”, Nintendo and The Pokémon Company have announced that they’re taking Palworld developers Pocketpair to court for “infringement of patent rights”.

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Farm life sim snowclone My Time At X is getting a third entry. My Time At Evershine looks to feature more sowing, reaping, kissing and combat, similar to the previous games My Time At Portia and My Time At Sandrock, but with a new art style, campaign co-op and citybuilding elements. You’ll get a glimpse of the new art style in the announcement trailer below.

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We don’t write much about board and paper games around these parts, not since Cardboard Children was sent to the dissolving pits. I still feel that roleplay and strategy gaming has a home here on RPS even when it’s not digital though, and doubly so when it’s the work of our former comrades.

Enter Gold Teeth, a tabletop RPG “of piracy & occult horror” which just cleared its Kickstarter funding goal, and which is designed by Marsh Davies and Jim Rossignol (RPS in peace).

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Yesterday I watched a Youtube video about Warhammer 40,000: Space Marine 2, in which sundry, gesticulating milords of the internet opine that they had “forgot what it’s like to be the target audience” for games, hailing the new (and for our money, fairly good) Warhammer 40K shooter as a throwback affair that “oozes masculinity”, with no excess feelings or real-life social relevancy. I then combed through several thousand comments below said video, many of which expressed similar longing for the hypothetical Good Old Days, before those wily feminists invaded the medium, transformed every game into a LGBT+ weeping simulator, and threw all the Real Men into a big hole. I did this because I was searching for one particular comment written by somebody claiming to be Matthew Karch, CEO of Space Marine 2 developers Saber Interactive.

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As I’m sure as is the curse of anyone who’s watched the entirety of Peep Show multiple times, I cannot read the name ‘Marko’ without hearing it in a nasally Australian accent, inquiring about cocaine. This is probably a disservice to the hero of colourful metroidvania Marko: Beyond Brave, who a quick goog tells me may be based on Krali Marko – a popular character in the folklore of Studio Mechka’s native Bulgaria. Folk hero or not, Marko certainly has some heroic facial hair: his moustache floweth so bountifully that it can’t be contained in his character portrait. Extremely powerful of him.

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As per EA’s recent generative AI tugathon, the third game in Respawn’s action adventure Star Wars trilogy has been confirmed again to be in development. According to EA, it’ll be the “final chapter” in the now-trilogy, following 2019’s Jedi Fallen Order and 2023’s Jedi Survivor.

The existence of the game was first confirmed by Cal Kestis actor Cameron Monaghan, during an Ocala Comic Con panel. “We’re working on a third and we’re in the process of doing that right now,” said Monaghan, which is about as straightforward an affirmative as one could want. It was also double-confirmed this February, following news of layoffs at EA, via Eurogamer.

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