Category: Rock, Paper, Shotgun

“Dune is unadaptable! It could never work as a film,” I cry, placing defiant fists upon my hips. “But what,” says Denis Villeneuve, “about two?”, shattering my physical form into one trillion shards. I have a difficult life.

But wait! What about as a strategy game? Denis glances nervously at the inexplicable open pools of molten steel all around us. I’ve got him now. He hasn’t even played Spice Wars. Except… I think Spice Wars is about as good as an adaptation could be. Imperium too. Damn it. Alright Denis, let’s have a truce and sort this one out.

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Can you believe we didn’t have a best JRPG list until now? Baffling. To be fair we did once tackle this topic with a preliminary blast of recommendations for those completely new to the genre. We also have a few familiar fantasys in our list of the 50 best RPGs on PC. But until now we haven’t addressed the genre in its own right. In an act of contrition, we offer you this: our list of the best JRPGs you can play on PC this year, according to our own tastes.

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Tiny Garden is bringing back the spirit of Polly Pocket with a cutesy farming sim game set inside a virtual plastic clamshell inspired by the nineties toy phenomenon.

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It’s been a good while since we last got a proper Transformers video game, with the four years since the XCOM-ish Transformers: Battlegrounds in 2020 only seeing long-in-the-works MMO Transformers Online finally biting the dust. That’s about to change, with the reveal of a curious new combination of racer and roguelike starring the robots in disguise.

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Surgent Studios, developers of this year’s fetching Afrofuturist platformer Tales of Kenzera: Zau, have laid off more than a dozen staff. The cuts come just over two months on from the release of the debut video game release from the multimedia studio founded by Assassin’s Creed Origins star Abubakar Salim.

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There’s no genre like the open world for inducing choice paralysis, so it’s fitting that I’ve been agonising over how to begin this irregular article series on open world games for months. I have a lot of material, oodles of interviews with developers of all shapes and sizes – big shops like Remedy and CD Projekt, smaller studios like Ace Team and Awaceb, all holding forth on such topics as whether Elden Ring or Zelda did bandit camps better, and how you make a forest feel endless. There is so much you could talk about, so many trails heading off in all directions, but perhaps it’s best to begin with the more personal and superficial question that inspired this investigation: how did the open world game get so boring?

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You might have seen that £10 will go a long way in the Steam summer sale, but let me do you one better. Indie game store Itch.io has begun its own summer sale, and for those willing to delve into its rainbow-coloured heap of throwaway toys and fun experiments, plenty of deals await.

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Wuthering Waves, that recent gacha RPG of anime styling and impenetrable jargonblasting, just didn’t work on the Steam Deck when it launched in May. It also doesn’t work right now. But for one brief, debatably glorious day on June 29th, it did. And thus, Deck owners who’d persevered through a slightly fiddly installation process (explained here by YouTubesmith Deck Wizard) could finally take their first joyous steps into Wuthering Waves like a David Hasselhoff-buoyed East German in 1989.

Unlike the Hoff, it wouldn’t last. Within hours, Steam Deck players were being booted back out of the game by a hitherto-unseen anti-cheat failure. What gives? Or gave?

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Alongside the usual standard and nightmare modes, upcoming RPG Dragon Age: The Veilguard (née Dreadwolf) will ship with a fully tweakable set of difficulty options called ‘Unbound’, letting you customise everything from parry timings to invincibility.

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The tabletop equivalent of “buying books and reading them are two different hobbies” is surely the difference between buying sexy tabletop RPG manuals and actually dragging your mates on to Discord for a few hours to stumble your way through a module. It’s the dogeared Fighting Fantasy from a carboot sale kid in me, I think. Something about reading worldbuilding snippets organised into numbered tables just hits in a way a novel doesn’t. Such tantalising ephemera is the name of the game in Microprose-published CrossOver: Roll For Initiative. It’s a wave defense where you play match-3 to collect dice, then spend them on fireballs and mace swings to stop tiny bastards from marauding all over your actual character sheet and attacking your stats.

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