Category: Rock, Paper, Shotgun

We’ve all seen it. The little spinning symbol cautioning players against impatient acts of powering down. “Don’t turn off your system when this symbol is displayed,” goes the message seen often while booting up a game (or some other version of these words). The implication is clear. The saving process is delicate and if you interrupt this invisible ritual the data that’s being written to some folder deep in your PC’s innards will become corrupted, wrecked, banjaxed. You will lose all your progress, all your precious swords and accomplishments.

But is this true? How likely are you to really suffer a catastrophic loss of shotgun shells? To find out, I decided to spend a very annoying afternoon of turning my gaming rig off and on again during multiple games. Was this a good idea? I don’t know. I’m a gamer, not an ideas man.

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Big large huge RPG The Witcher 3: Wild Hunt recently got a fresh set of official modding tools in the form of REDKit, a powerful bit of downloadable that helps you add whatever you fancy to the game, including entire custom questlines. Not two months on from REDKit’s release, ‘Tuber xLetalis and modder glassfish – a contributor to the cut-content-restoring Brothers in Arms mod – have put together a showcase containing around 20 minutes of cut content from the game’s ending. Cheers, cheery RPS fanzine PC Gamer!

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Elden Ring, you sneaky sausage, clandestine chorizo and, possibly, underhand cumberland! In keeping with Shadow Of The Erdtree’s tradition of hiding entire new systems behind tucked-away items, a hidden NPC quest in the DLC gives you access to a special raisin that allows Torrent. your steed, to charge your foes with its big fat forehead. A delicious ‘fruit and nut’ bar, if you will.

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Happy this week, everybody! Not going to lie, it’s a dry one. Drier than a doldrum dunked in silica gel packets, dustier than Death’s doorstep. There are precious few eyebrow-raising new PC games on the cards, but I have swaddled my head in wet blankets, braved the desert and returned with a small handful of dreams.

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Hello reader who is also a reader, and welcome back to Booked For The Week – our regular Sunday chat with a selection of cool industry folks about books! Words are amazing, aren’t they? I once put in a cover letter to a creative writing university course that I’d “even invented several of my own words” before my mate talked me down from it. Spoilsport. This week, it’s the creative director of Dread Delusion, maker of The Night is Darkening, and Lovely Hellplace director, James Wragg! Cheers James! Mind if we have a nose at your bookshelf?

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Dune Imperium is a fabulous strategy game about becoming the biggest spice boy on a sandy planet I presume is called Dune. I love it despite never having read the Dune books or watched the Dune movies, because the digital version taught me everything I needed to know about Barry Harkonnen, Oscar Isaac, the tall guy from Guardians Of The Galaxy, and their insatiable pursuit of space nutmeg.

Now the board game’s first expansion is headed to the digital version of the game, and it’s called Rise Of Ix for reasons I definitely understand.

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It’s said that every time Deus Ex is mentioned, someone reinstalls it. If that’s true and you read RPS, it’s possible you’ve reinstalled Deus Ex around six hundred times by now.

That’s where the comprehensive Randomizer mod comes in, which remixes the immersive sim’s levels to make the experience fresh every time. It’s also just received a major update which, among several other additions, lets you pet the game’s dogs and cats.

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Team Fortress 2‘s received its first major update in yonks last year, and then the nearly 17-year-old game promptly broke its concurrent player record. Still, talk to one of those players and you’ll find all is not well with Valve’s shooter, which is apparently regularly overrun by bots and cheaters.

Some players are now reporting “a large ban wave” targeting users of aimbots, however.

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Mika and The Witch’s Mountain appears to be an unofficial video game adaptation of Kiki’s Delivery Service, which is a Studio Ghibli film about a witch who decides to go postal, but not in the Running with Scissors sense. Created by developers Chibig and Nukefist, it’s a “mini open world” game about carrying packages by broomstick while investigating the titular mountain, flying through hoops a la Pilotwings, and savouring the balmy inconsequentiality of an island that reminds me of Super Mario Sunshine. It also now has an early access release date, 21st August, and a charming new trailer.

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We didn’t get to Sandfall and Kepler Interactive’s Clair Obscur: Expedition 33 while covering Microsoft’s summer showcase a couple of weeks ago. If memory serves, when they ran that particular trailer I was busy sponging swampwater out my eyes after writing up South Of Midnight, while Nic had become so vociferously agitated over the debut of Doom: Dark Ages that he was no longer solid and tangible enough to operate a keyboard. Graham, meanwhile, had absconded with Joanna Dark to Immersive Sim Land and Matt, poor Matt, had fallen into a Locust sinkhole while “omnimanouevring” around Black Ops 6. But if one of us had been free and willing we might have had enthusiastic thoughts about this “evolution of JRPGs”, in which you are trying to thwart a self-serious artist who is about to magically murder everybody over the age of 32. It is, alas, too late for me.

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