Category: Rock, Paper, Shotgun

The protagonists of two of my all time favourite RPGs share something in common. Both (the best Final Fantasy game) Final Fantasy 8’s Squall and The Witcher 3’s Geralt simply cannot get enough of leaving their friends and the entire world in mortal peril while they sneak in a quick round of cards, and I love them for it. Way back when the Wild Hunt released, there was a special edition kicking about that gave you a few decks for Gwent – the fleshed-out, playable card distraction that ended up being responsible for some of the game’s best moments. I pined for those decks, but I never acquired them. Now, Hatchette Board Games is putting out a full physical edition of Gwent next year.

The set contains “over 400 cards and a playmat” for £44/$39.99. I’m still recovering from various Fantasy Flight LCGs, so my value sense for this stuff might be a bit skewed, but that strikes me as incredibly reasonable. A good Gwent deck consists of only about 25 cards. They’re not bad cards, either! I’ve got a real pet hate for tabletop versions of videogames that just use in-engine screenshots for the cards, but these ones look to have the proper artwork from the game on them:

Read more

Where were you during the Summer of Doronko Wanko? Why, I remember it like it was March, and not actually Summer, when the delightful free game about a mucky pomeranian was unleashed into the world. Yep, yep. It was definitely March. Roughly translating to ‘covered in mud doggy’, the game set you the task of racking up tangible financial damage to your owner’s house by getting mud everywhere – first by normal dog means, and then with giant mud cannons. You can grab it for free on Steam here.

It stole our hearts, it did. And talking of stealing things and having a good time doing it, it’s also releasing on the Nintendo Switch soon, which means the Steam version of Doronko Wanko is getting some free DLC to celebrate. It isn’t arriving until next Spring, but it’s bringing three new mystery dog breeds with it when it does.

Read more

If you’d told me last year that face of all-out, GPU venerating, fully ray-traced PC game visual excess would be that of a de-aged Harrison Ford, I’d have asked which exact colour of paint you’d been eating. And yet here we are, with Indiana Jones and the Great Circle loving its ray tracing so much that the effects can’t ever be fully switched off.

Read more

Every fascist in this game has a cold. The Hitlerites and blackshirts of Indiana Jones And The Great Circle sneeze and cough as they patrol the dig sites of Gizeh, or the marble corridors of the Vatican. Although this is the Machine Games’ clever way of letting you know where your enemies are at all times, it is also mildly funny, as if all the Nazis have been secretly kissing each other, spreading the same rhinovirus from Italy to Egypt to Nepal and beyond. More than that, it’s a stubborn reminder that, despite the many hours of perfectly motion-captured cinematics that accompany all this, you are still playing a video game. A snotty tissue that separates the Indy of taut two-hour cinema and the Indy of a sweeping first-person punch ’em up that will take days to complete. All this is to say, you will notice the difference. But that might not matter; they’re both still Indiana Jones.

Read more

I think It’s safe to say that Trigger Happy Interactive’s upcoming survival horror Total Chaos is a bit of a palette change from their last offering – the frenetic, neon-drenched, chainsaw-legged Turbo Overkill. Still, it’s not often we see psychological horror combined with ultraviolence, and anything that gives off even a whiff of Condemned: Criminal Origins has my attention.

Total Chaos started life as a popular Doom 2 mod, and while I dare the say the limitations of that game sell the atmosphere a little better than this much sleeker update, I certainly trust Trigger Happy enough to make the most of the new engine. The game is set in New Oasis, a “once bustling haven for coal miners” that is now most definitely not bustling, nor haven-like.

Read more

Dogubomb’s Blue Prince boasts my favourite shapeshifting house in a video game, which admittedly isn’t setting a very high bar. Perhaps surprisingly, most video game houses do not shapeshift. Despite being made out of pure imagination and carbon emissions, they remain nostalgically shackled to the limitations of brick, mortar and Euclidean geometry. Blue Prince’s abode is different. It is a house made of house. You’ll actually design the layout yourself every time you wander through it, picking from a selection of mismatched room types whenever you open a door.

Read more

4X strategy and RPG stalwarts Shiro Games have announced SpaceCraft, a “massively multiplayer management and crafting adventure” set in Normandy during the Middle Ages, haha, of course not – it’s set in space. They won’t be winning the T.S. Eliot poetry prize with that title, but I guess it gets the job done. Here’s a trailer.

Read more

One of my favourite anime shows is Sakura Quest. It’s the story of an unemployed lady from Tokyo who accidentally gets herself appointed “Queen” of a struggling backwater village by the regional tourist board. From that case of mistaken identity proceeds 25 whole-ass episodes of Machiavellian haggling with crusty bigwigs over things like organising a concert. It’s playfully dull, heartily mundane entertainment. No supernatural flourishes here – just the magic of paperwork and the thrill of bureaucracy.

I’m reminded of Sakura Quest by Danchi Days, a forthcoming cosy adventure with irresponsibly enticing Game Boy Advance-style visuals. It casts you as Hoshino, a teenage girl who’s just moved to an old “danchi” housing complex and is trying to revive the yearly tradition of a summer festival. How will she do this? By means of haggling – haggling, and a bit of CSI.

Read more

Developed by Mistwalker, a studio founded by Final Fantasy dad Hironobu Sakaguchi, Fantasian was originally released on Apple Arcade in 2021 and locked within the big fruit’s exclusivity cage. Now, though, Mistwalker and Square Enix have come together to re-release the RPG for us PC heads, calling it Fantasian Neo Dimension. It’s actually out today, too, if you’re interested in an interdimensional journey to reclaim some lost memories.

Read more

The world is changing. Geopolitics are fractious and unnerving, environmental catastrophe seems more likely each day, and rampant digitally-disseminated disinformation further erodes our trust in one another. But I’ll let lesser reporters tell you about that stuff. I’m here to report that Capcom have made the big bonk feel good again. They’ve heard player feedback on the missing weapon oomph caused by the lack of hitstop in the Monster Hunter Wilds beta, and they’re bringing back the bonk.

Here’s a handy breakdown of the issue by X user Blue Stigma, but briefly: hitstop is the brief pause in an attack animation the moment the weapon connects with an enemy, giving you a real sense of bonkitude and making say, a hammer feel different from a dagger. As the video showed, the hitstop was greatly reduced in Wilds compared to previous Monster Hunters, and many players reported the combat just feeling a bit off as a result.

Read more