Category: Rock, Paper, Shotgun

There is a time for perfect clarity in a shooter, for clean walls and clear-cut character silhouettes. But this is not it. Retro first-person gunwaltzer Selaco is a messy machine gun dash through an office exploding with glass, concrete, splinters, and sparks. The glock-toting wreckage ’em up first hit our radar when it was announced as a modern combination of F.E.A.R. and Doom, promising both the fiendish AI enemies of the former and the satisfying blasting of the latter. Well, it’s out today. Bursting forth into the corporate lobby of early access with uzis akimbo, peppering the walls with angry bullets. Good, I say.

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In Mike Judge’s 1999 cult comedy Office Space, there’s a scene where Ron Livingston’s Peter – a programmer working a tedious corporate job – visits a hypnotist. “Is there any way that you could, sorta, just zonk me out so I don’t know that I’m at work, in here,” Peter asks of the hypnotist, pointing to his head. “Could I come home and think that I’ve been fishing all day, or something?”. That’s basically the high-level concept for brilliant sci-fi comedy show Severance, right there. Not wanting to spoil any more than I absolutely have to, I’ll present you with two facts up top. 1. It features a touching queer relationship between John Turturro and Christopher Walken and 2. It’s some of the best television I’ve seen in the last few years. Throw in some Stanley Parable, Control, Gilliam’s Brazil, and some more meta undertones of general musing on gamified reward loops, and you’ve got Severance.

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Between this, my supporter post later, and the fact I decided to watch Office Space again this week, I’d like to make it clear to any colleagues or management reading that I value and love them all dearly, and am 110% committed to the eternal grind machine of covering videogames online. Workday malaise is universal, however, whether or not you’re lucky enough to enjoy your job as much as I do. Enter Office Fight, a stylish physics action game where you, a ghost, posess office equipment to cause as much physics-based chaos as possible. The PR did some Office Space jokes in the email, so I pretty much had to cover it. At least once I realised what they were doing, after initially just thinking they were being a massive donkey.

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Riot games have committed to a series of new measures to curtail harassment and hate-speech in the Valorant community. In a video entitled ‘Keeping Our Community Healthy // Dev Updates,” studio head Anna Donlon took to Xitter to outline the new measures for the competitive FPS. Below is a graphic detailing the changes, which include new penalties such as hardware bans for offenders, and an expanded role for the game’s Voice Evaluation tech, which monitors chat for bad behaviour. “If you want to make evil statements under the guise of ‘[naughty word SEO doesn’t like being in the first paragraph] talk’, you aren’t welcome here,” writes the official Valorant account.

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Capcom’s upcoming entry in the lizard pants-making sim, Monster Hunter Wilds, got a new trailer at last night’s State Of Play. It showed off more of how its lovely desert environments morph to fit the weather and how its inhabitants largely don’t get on. We also got a look at some cursed lions, an armoured frog with an unsettling tongue and a rideable Chocobo-esque mount that lets you ping arrows on the fly. Let me break it down for you readers, as someone who is increasingly excited at the prospect of more colourful pants.

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My PC has a big white case, and sometimes, I sit and think: “big white box good!” But other times, I glance over to my PS5 and think: “other big white box also good!” Then I start getting fanciful and imagine a lovely future where they can both combine into one. Keeping track of two big white boxes is hard! Luckily, I only have to write about one of those big white boxes for RPS the vast majority of the time. Today is one of the rare occasions I do have to cover both, so here’s everything announced at yesterday’s Playstation State Of Play that you, the discerning big white box owner, might find relevant:

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I should be further in than this. My supposed rebellion has thus far eked out a territory that could be described as “where?”. My personal reputation is great only among people who love mushrooms and hate deer. It’s been long enough that I should probably be a fierce warlord running a large chunk of the kingdom in opposition by now, but instead, I have the skillset of fifty peasants, and the outstanding work of fifty three. And I know why. Bellwright has taught me what I already knew in theory, but had not truly appreciated:

Good managers are rare and precious. And I’m not one of them.

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KILL KNIGHT, the silly-named twin stick action game you may have caught at similarly silly-named event The Triple-I Initiative in April, is joining this year’s Steam next fest with a demo ahead of its expected release date later this year. I’ve played it, and I feel must apologise, Mr. Knight. I still think it’s a silly name, but with frantic flowing action this immediately gratifying, you can call yourself whatever your killy little heart so desires. For this knight is not like other knights: this is a knight who kills. Wait, they all do that? Oh. Well, this one has four guns. Suck it, literally every other knight.

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Destructive third-person action game Just Cause is getting made into a movie, produced by the men behind The Fall Guy and Nobody, according to the Hollywood Reporter. This isn’t the first time the over-the-top explode ’em up has been in line to get the big screen treatment. Another version spent years in development hell until the rights lapsed. But it’s been picked up again by Universal, who are no strangers to turning video games into box office burger bucks (they did The Super Mario Bros. Movie). So, it might result in an actual movie this time.

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The demo for puzzle game Schim, in which you play as a boy and his frog that only exists in the shadows, is out now on Steam. I’ve given it a whirl, and its pretty froggin’ delightful. The game has you progress through different scenes set in a chill, colorful townscape. You can switch at any time between boy and frog. The boy can go anywhere, but is frequently blocked by environmental puzzles. The frog has the means to solve such puzzles, by hopping between shadows naturally cast by the environment. They act like little inky puddles, and simply jumping from one to the other is a rare joy.

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