Category: Rock, Paper, Shotgun

As Graham pointed out earlier this year, A Difficult Game About Climbing is a difficult game about climbing. A Bennett Foddy’s Getting Over It-inspired limb-flailer, where hoisting yourself up a mountain as a bald man is painfully moreish. Well, let me introduce you to A Difficult Game About Driving, a difficult game about driving. Again, you play as a bald man (called Jeff) who sits in a 4×4 bathtub and must ascend a series of difficult roads. There’s a demo out now and let me tell you, it’s awfully good.

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Every now and then, somebody has the marvellous idea of developing technology that makes video games smell. I have never been more grateful for this recurrent Quixotic daydream’s mass market failure than when watching trailers for Urge, an open world survival shooter that is both fuelled and plagued by piss.

“But hold your horses, young Edwin,” you sternly interject. “I do not wish to hear about, let alone play an open world survival shooter that is both fuelled and plagued by piss, on a website that children might read. It sounds like a cheap, taboo-jabbing gimmick.” Friend, I once thought as you. But then I did a little research, as is my journalistic responsibility, and it turns out Urge’s notions about piss – bladdergold, as they call it in the West Country, or Crusoe Cola, as it’s known in the States – are rather in-depth. I’m still very glad I can’t smell the game, but I definitely have the urge to play it.

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Anyone with the need for a new CPU and even the slightest inclination towards tech envy is currently waiting for new stock of the AMD Ryzen 7 9800X3D, the unbeatably powerful new chip that our boffin friends at Digital Foundry are calling the fastest gaming CPU ever. If, however, you’re hoping to switch to the 9800X3D from an older system with DDR4 RAM, you’ll need to upgrade that as well as the motherboard, as the entire Ryzen 9000 series only works with newer DDR5 memory.

Cyber Monday won’t help materialise more processors into retailers’ warehouses, but it can help you make this RAM switch on the cheap. Relatively speaking. And I can recommend a nice, fast 32GB kit of Corsair Vengeance DDR5, which is down by £43 in the UK and $22 in the US.

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Netease’s free to play open world gacha RPG Project Mugen now has a proper name: Ananta. As Edwin points out in the Maw, it is very much like Spider-Man meets Zenless Zone Zero, with its mixture of cityslinging and unabashed anime teens with long, flowy hair and a penchant for metal accessories.

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Have you ever been pretty deep into a Steam Deck session playing a very gra[hically extensive game like God of War: Ragnarok and realised just how quickly the battery gets drained? It’s a familiar and frustrating feeling for many Steam Deck owners. Luckily, there’s a solution!

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Got yet another quality PC storage deal for ya, this time courtesy of Cyber Monday and the Samsung T7 – an almost comically dinky portable SSD that can, nevertheless, stuff itself senseless with file backups and game installations. The 1TB model in particular is going mighty cheap, falling to $88 in the US and £67 in the UK.

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Today’s advent calendar window has an entire cult inside of it. Also, an alcoholic knight speaking in plummy prose between mouthfuls of booze and porridge. What’s more Christmassy than booze and porridge, eh? Not much, we’ll wager. You could pour the booze in the porridge, perhaps? You could call it ‘inebrioats’!

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One of the many high concept ludonarrative experiments I’d one day like to bring to fruition is an immersive sim in which the player has access to many guns, but their default arsenal selection is an open packet of crisps which they hold out in front of them, in first person, and offer to NPCs. Some NPCs wouldn’t be swayed by this, but some would lower their weapons at the offer of a prawn cocktail treat, and so you’d be constantly playing chicken with various guards: edging closer toward them, your shaking hands rattling the delicious disks inside the oily packet, mentally weighing up whether it’s worth risking them turning hostile at the last second.

Obviously, I’d scan some real crisp packets and just alter the logos for maximum immersion. One game that’s already taken this scanned bricolage concept and run with it to beautiful effect is Hyperdrive Inn. It’s an avant garde point and click adventure from Finnish studio Horsefly, where the entire world is constructed from scanned fabric samples. Have a looksee.

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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! As both Ollie and this immaculately-crafted Green Stuff Slann butt have already foretold, Kiera Mills is leaving RPS for pastures more dog-like. As such, she’s joining me to talk about books! Cheers Kiera! Mind if we have a nose at your bookshelf?

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December is here! It has snuck up on us once again, hidden as it always is behind November’s back. It’s arrival heralds the beginning of the RPS Advent Calendar 2024, the yearly list of our favourite games of the year. Step inside, open the doors, and celebrate another year’s gaming survived.

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