Category: Rock, Paper, Shotgun

S.T.A.L.K.E.R. 2: Heart of Chornobyl challenges you to survive the Zone, a land where the rules of nature are more like half-hearted suggestions and death may come from a mutant’s fang as quickly as a bandit’s bullet. But what if you could not only survive it, but tame it?

I am Bohdan Beastmaster, aspiring wrangler of all the radiation-twisted insults to God that occupy the Zone. One of its rogue Artifacts exploded my flat, and rather than find a place on SpareRoom, I’ve gone for the easier and safer option of venturing into the wilds of Chornobyl – armed not with rusty AKs or scavenged grenades but the teeth and claws of my mutant soon-to-be companions. The absence of any actual fauna-influencing tools or techniques only makes my plan even simpler: find beasts, aggro beasts onto human enemies, win.

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Another explosion sends the bodies flying. “Has anyone been here long enough to tell me what the hell is going on!?” the sergeant yells. He sounds annoyed. The field hospital is gone, probably blown to pieces. Troops keep wandering north and disappearing from view, only to come flying back as airborne cadavers moments later. The number of corpses and spilled backpacks on the road imply that someone in battalion headquarters (if such a place even exists) has made a terrible decision. If the Colonial forces want to win the persistent online war of Foxhole, suggests the sergeant with his many irritated noises, then someone needs to piece these dying fools together. As the only medic in a 500 metre radius, that means me.

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We’re now just one day out from Black Friday, so the savings are starting to seriously ramp up. You can grab our favourite Steam Deck dock in the sale for just $23.99 this year. That’s a full $16 off the usual price. The 6-in-1 option is also on sale and 20% off at Amazon today.

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The genre of ‘Action RPG‘ is supremely annoying to write about, because the term can mean different things to different people, but here’s how I see it: Diablo 4 and similar games, such as Path Of Exile, are ‘ARPGs’. Which stands for ‘Action RPG’. But Zelda games are ‘Action RPGs’, which is a totally different genre that you could, if you felt like it, also shorten to ‘ARPG’. So, to summarise: ARPGs and ARPGs are two different things, and both are Action RPGs. Got it? Great.

It’s because of this kerfuffle that I’m not exactly mad at Diablo boss Rod Ferguson recently suggesting that we just call games that are similar to Diablo ‘Diablo-likes’. I just find it very funny that he’s the one saying it, in a bold faced act of admittedly very inconsequential linguistic colonialism that carries the unspoken connotation that something is “like the game I make, but a bit crap”.

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I’ve gone on record as not being a huge fan of the artstyle choices used in the new Warcraft I & II remasters. It’s crisp and readable, sure, but I’m never exactly thrilled to see all the roughness of older sprites completely done away with, especially when I always felt some of that ruggedness was the point. The tendency of remasters to treat every characterful oddity as a blemish is a wider topic than the scope of this article, but one day, Bluepoint will remaster Bloodborne, and the world will feel my pain.

Anyway. Nowadays, I’d say Blizzard – or, World Of Warcraft, at least – is pretty much synomous with a softer, more colorful approach to fantasy worlds. While I don’t pine for a return to the more boobily ridiculous elements of Frank Frazetta‘s style, I do often wish that some of the more expressive, pained, and physically grounded elements of classic Sword And Sorcery art was a bit more common. I’m no art scholar, and there’s undoubtedly a bit of tunnel vision of my part to this assertion, but as far as as pop culture goes: I see the Blizzard version of fantasy more than I see the Frazetta version, and I don’t exactly love it. Same goes for the older, punkier, less uniform sci-fi art from things like 2000 AD and Warhammer 40,000. Edwin touched on some of this in his excellent Space Marine piece.

Anyway, a valued RPS community member on the Discord shared an older bit of art by Blizzard’s Chris Metzen, from the original Starcraft manual. I figured a few of you might enjoy seeing these older pieces, considering how much the overall look of their games has changed over the years.

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Picking things up. Putting the things in boxes. Setting prices. Managing employees. Wiping the sweat from your creased brow and knowing, even if your meagre salary doesn’t get you very far, at least you put in an honest day’s graft to acquire it. All things done by pathetic fools that don’t realise the true CEO grindset actually involves no-wifing Diablo 4 all day and subsisting entirely off the the Lucozade-bottled urine of overworked drivers forced to make the agonising decision between self respect and continued employment. I might be conflating billionaires here.

Also, coincidentally, all things you can do in the demo for Beff Jezos Simulator. Now, work simulation games aren’t my absolute favourite. But, hey, I do love a good fantasy game. And what spellbinding vision of a farflung reality could be more fantastical than a game in which a billionaire actually does some work?

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Way back in June, treacherous, fickle Larian declared that Baldur’s Gate 3 patch 7 would be their final handover to players of the well-good D&D RPG, with the focus then shifting internally to Larian’s two currently untitled new game projects. CEO Swen Vincke did, however, caveat that while the overall level of post-release support would be “diminished”, there would be a few more updates. We interpreted that to mean bug fixes and the like. Certainly, I wasn’t expecting brand new subclasses for every class in the game, which is what you’ll get with the just-announced Baldur’s Gate 3 patch 8, together with new crossplay functionality and a full-figured photo mode.

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Let’s face it, nothing important happens in December. I’m scheduling 24 advent calendar posts this week and then spending the rest of the year eating boxes of Cadbury Mini Yule Logs Triple Chocolate. So it’s no surprise that Devolver have announced their remaining slate of games aiming for release in 2024 are actually coming out in 2025.

The games that slipped are Baby Steps, Skate Story, and Stick It To The Stickman. Devolver released the news with typical style, via the 15th annual Devolver Delayed awards, which you can watch below.

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Slipways was the best grand strategy game I’d played in years, because it tossed out all the genre’s micromanagement in favour of a strategy puzzle where all your exploiting, expanding, et ceteraing could be squeezed into an hour’s play. That game began as a PICO-8 prototype by designer Jakub Wasilewski before being polished to a fine shine in its full release.

All of which is just lead-in to talking about Solitomb, a solitaire-based dungeon crawler in which you fight demons by building hands of playing cards. It’s currently – heywaitaminute – a pay-what-you-want PICO-8 prototype by designer Jakub Wasilewski where “all money earned goes towards making the bigger version possible.” Like Slipways, it already seems like a frightfully clever piece of design.

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I have one urgent request for Starward Industries, creators of the just-announced “anti-combat” survival RPG Dante’s Ring – don’t use the phrase “ring of fire” in your English marketing materials. I get that you’re going for a cocktail of Divina Commedia and FromSoftware associations, but you have to remember that this is the internet and we’re all desperately crude. I can’t speak for people from other English-language countries, but when I hear somebody talking about their “ring of fire”, I tend to assume they’ve been at the vindaloo.

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