Category: Rock, Paper, Shotgun

In Rue Valley you role play a guy with poor mental health. He wanders around a crappy motel, stuck in the same old patterns of life, seemingly unable to escape his inner demons. When confronted with the premise for this upcoming RPG you may have one of two reactions. The first: you will say “lol, it me” with enough humour to wishlist it on Steam and earmark it for the future. The second: you will mutter “ugh, it me” and be immediately put off by the idea of having to tolerate an entire second layer of psychological hangups.

There is a third secret reaction though… you might think: oh, this looks a lot like Disco Elysium, but in the real world.

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I’ve said it before, I’ll say it again: running away is the best feeling in videogames. More specifically, being chased is the best feeling in videogames, a sentiment I’d happen to share with my golden retriever if you replaced the word “videogames” with “the universe”. He is a purer being, but he’ll also never know the joy of executing a rail-dismount into a dashing corner-jump escape in Deadlock, and for this he deserves our pity.

It’s easy to miss if you haven’t played for at least a few hours, but Deadlock packs one of the most engaging movement systems this side of Tribes Ascend.

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Epic Games has given the OK for their 1998 shooter Unreal to be hosted on the Internet Archive, essentially making the classic sci-fi alien blaster free, and preserving it for the future. They’ve also given the same permission for Unreal Tournament to be hosted there too, making free the multiplayer muckabout that spawned speedier and speedier sequels throughout the early 2000s (not to mention the origin of one of the most memorable multiplayer FPS maps of all time, Facing Worlds).

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Well, that was quick. After artwork leaked last week for what looked very much like a remaster of classic real-time strategy Warcraft II: Tides Of Darkness, Blizzard sneakily dropped both that and a remaster of Warcraft: Orcs & Humans last night. They’re bundled together with Warcraft III: Reforged – itself with a new patch – in a ‘Warcraft Remastered Battle Chest’, which also includes the older versions of the first two games. The chest is available on Battle.net, where it’ll set you back £34.99 / $39.99. If you’re just after the older titles, they’re £9 / $10 and £12.59 / $15 respectively.

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Over the years, game retailers GOG have drifted from almost purely offering classic oldies to welcoming more and more modern blockbusters onto their storefront. In one sense, they’ve turned from a game preservation champion into a slightly dustier, DRM-less Steam. Now, though, GOG have declared a renewed focus on not just selling aged games, but on tweaking more of them to work on non-aged hardware. And you’ll be able to tell which games have got this restoration treatment from a fancy badge plastered on top of them.

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Theme park management sim Planet Coaster was all about making roller coasters that would push your park guests to the edge of puking up their overpriced burgers while making sure the excitement levels of your twisting rides remained high. Planet Coaster 2 wants to do that again, but this time adds water parks into the mix, with slides to design, pools to plop down, and raft rides that you can click together to form ambitiously speedy spirals. You can feel some creative pride when you look down on the watery wonderland you’ve made with these tools. But you may also wonder if it was worth the effort. As a newcomer to Planet management games, I’ve found this slippy sequel fiddly, cumbersome, and poorly explained.

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Dragon Quest III HD-2D Remake‘s premise is bluntly, delightfully simple. The Archfiend Baramos, as evil as he is mysterious, is up and about. He’s got ill designs on the world. Your Dad tried to stop him, and he died. He fell into a volcano. We absolutely can’t be having that.

This is, more than anything else, a game about Going On An Adventure. Well walked ground, of course, but it’s rare to see it embarked upon with such barefaced delight, or such a wholehearted commitment to going the distance. It is a very big and a very simple RPG that is as wide as an ocean and as deep as a pond; a game to curl up with and play lazily and—with some sour caveats—enjoyably, for an entire winter.

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I predict I likely won’t have fully gotten to grips with the strategy of Sultan’s Game for several more hours, but since I’m considering investing that time – after a morning spent card shuffling and deciding whomst to bone and whomst to murder in its Steam demo – I’m compelled to spotlight it. It’s deeply imperfect and willfully obtuse, but also absolutely fascinating. I’ll ground you with a slightly wonky and dull allusion to Cultist Simulator, then guide you through in more or less the order I experienced it. As we progress, you may feel steadily more disorientated. It’ll be like a brewery tour I’ve somehow inherited control of by murder-boning the previous owners. Onward!

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A stupid inside joke I had with a housemate once was asking each other if we were “born in Chornobyl?” as a play on “were you born in a barn?” whenever either of us left the lights on before leaving the flat. This doesn’t make too much sense now I think about it, but such things rarely do. A more accurate jab, in hindsight, might have been “you been running S.T.A.L.K.E.R. 2: Heart of Chornobyl at full specs or something?”, because based on the upcoming FPS’s new system requirements, you’re going to need a reasonably laissez-faire attitude to literally any other concern in your life that doesn’t involve acquiring a notably juice-guzzling rig.

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“Where’s my Neo-Volkite pistol, Warhammer 40,000: Space Marine 2?” was my perhaps slightly ungrateful reaction upon booting the action game up after the previous patch. “I didn’t even know what a Neo-Volkite pistol was until five minutes ago, but now this whole game is trash until I get one!.” As promised in the roadmap, the last big update added a whole new Operations map, complete with a gargantuan new pseudo-boss in the form of a hierophant bio-titan. It did not, however, give me my beloved pistol. It’s fine. It’s in now, along with a few, less Neo-Volkite updates to other weapons.

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