I'm a sucker for a good first-person runabout. I don't need to shoot, but it's sometimes nice to get a sword, or a big whip. As long as I get to be immersed in an adventure. I think that's the big theme of my selection box: being grounded within my player character. I want to feel what it's like to hike through canyons with too much sellable loot in my backpack. I want to park my soul in the head of a scared Scotsman way out of his depth, hundreds of miles from shore. The closer I can comfortably fit in my character's shoes, the more I seem to buy into the world they inhabit. Even if that world is constantly glowing a magnificent crimson.
]]>"A tactically rich turn-based game with some meaty role-playing elements", was how Staff Sergeant James Archer characterised his Menace hands-on, back in September. The only thing missing from his account of the game was the bread needed to make that rich, meaty concoction a tasty, nourishing sandwich.
And by bread, I of course mean the strategic layer - the parts between the turn-based battles where you pick your next mission, improve your squads, deal with pop-up story events, appraise your standing with each NPC faction, and equip your strike cruiser with auxiliary systems. Developers Overhype have now shared a few details of how it all works. Mmmmm, such malty, yeasty strategicalness.
]]>Clambering deep out of the Contemplation Pit, where reading reviews or opinions or, god help you, Takes, is forbidden, I am curious to learn how people have been categorising Songs of Silence. Its structure most resembles Songs of Conquest or Heroes of Might and/or Magic, but with little RPG emphasis or base building, and minimal tactical fighting.
Taxonomy is arbitrary and often unimportant at the end of the day, but I am very glad to firmly rule it out of one category: It's not a bloody card game. It looks like one, sure. You do most things with cards, and characters acquire more cards over time. But even if you absolutely, utterly, and correctly loathe card-based systems, this game has none.
]]>"We are a people who honour democracy," said the dog, scratching himself. "Per our custom, you may drink of our fresh water." The dog was called Senator Umeshefaat, and he was very civil, even if he was shedding his black and white fur everywhere. We spoke in his home village at dawn. Later, I examined the senator's personal history more thoroughly and discovered he was "hated by bears for cooking them a rancid meal." I suppose every politician has their enemies.
That Caves Of Qud creates fun anecdotes out of simple encounters shouldn't be a surprise. It has had 15 years of early access to establish itself as a small-but-mighty story generating roguelike of repute (there's a reason it sits deservedly side-by-side with Dwarf Fortress in the same publishing house). After creating many characters, and dying and dying and dying again, I understand why it grips the brain with such fierce glee. It is a machine of grand imagination and adventuresome comedy. A deceptively powerful RPG that isn't half as obtuse to newcomers as the screenshots make it out to be. Qud's low-res bark is just a complement to its bite.
]]>When I were a lad, you’d open an advent calendar and get a piece of chocolate shaped like a bell with an aftertaste so rancid you’d wish you’d eaten the little cardboard window instead. And you’d bloody well make do, too. Not these days. Now, you get a squadron of tiny automata with drills for noses that burrow through your battle lines and utterly wreck your vulnerable missile launchers. Country’s gone to the tiny robot dogs, I tell you!
]]>This happened on Thursday, but we were busy with other, less interesting news. Late or not, I can't let it pass unremarked upon: Caves Of Qud, the vast, weird roguelike which has been in development for 17 years, hit version 1.0. It brings multiple endings to the game, a revised UI, improved tutorials and much more.
]]>There was a crowded second there when I read the press release and thought they’d militarised the Beano, but Menace is not, in fact, about Dennis the Menace joining the Colonial Marines. It’s the new turn-based tactics RPG from the creators of Battle Brothers, and look at that, it has a freshly deployed gameplay trailer.
]]>Tactical Mutant Ninja Turtles? Turn-based Mutant Ninja Tactics? I'm undecided, but its actual name is Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles: Tactical Takedown, so maybe I should just call it that. It's just been announced and it's coming to PC next year.
]]>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.
]]>We don't know yet if the AI revolution of our reality will go full Skynet or simply end with the robots unceremoniously dumping us like a sad Joaquin Phoenix. But at least video games can help us speculate. Heart Of The Machine is a cyberpunk 4X strategy game that will let players choose how a newly awakened AI sentience might behave once set loose upon a big future city. Developers Arcen Games call it a "turn-based sci-fi 4X RPG", which is a lot of genres fighting for supremacy in one small phrase. It was announced last year, but today it gets a release date and an updated demo.
]]>Are there any sights more quintessentially Christmassy than a street lit up by warm and glowing decorations, as seen through a snow-graced windowpane? Why, I could gaze through this wonderful window all day. Let’s just hope no-one decides to smash through it, eh? Why, I’d get bits of glass in my lovely warm milk, which would massively downgrade my biscuit-dunking experience. Wait. What’s that? Oh no!
]]>While Mechabellum’s disparate roster of roast ’em riddle ‘em robots might initially seem to lack the characterful coherence of a writhing Zerg ecosystem or ancient Greek phalanx, this strategy autobattler’s array of lumbering tanks, hulking automata, and zippy fliers do share a common thread: each one of them has the potential to be either the most terrifying nuisance on the field, or to instantly crumble like a soggy strudel in an angry washing machine. With each mech able to become another mech's worse nightmare, it becomes a game about stretching tight budgets to balance reactive counters with devastating offensives; about identifying the butterfly wings that can send tornados through your opponent’s ranks. It’s about the moments that eat up the hours like nothing else.
]]>Last week, Brendy left a note in our weekly Maw liveblog about a player-made map of Caves Of Qud, the reportedly excellent sci-fi roguelike RPG that lets you "chisel through layers of thousand-year-old civilizations", represented as 2D Dwarf Fortress-esque layouts. Glancing over that map as a newcomer to the game, my eye was caught by the creator's casual mention that Caves Of Qud is technically 2,147,483,646 levels deep.
"Is Caves Of Qud really 2,147,483,646 levels deep?" I asked Brendy, like a wide-eyed child asking whether there is such a thing as dog heaven. Brendy wasn't sure. (About Caves Of Qud, I mean, not dog heaven.) So I put the question to one of the developers, Freehold Games co-founder Brian Bucklew. In brief, the answer is yes, but with some significant caveats.
]]>If the surprising number of you brought scurrying out of the woodwork by the announcement of Redwall-style survival game Hawthorn is anything to go by, the medieval rodent fanatic to RPS reader pipeline is a sturdy one, despite being constantly nibbled at. Here’s some more delicious bait for you, then. Mossflower TW is a campaign mod for Medieval II: Total War expansion Kingdoms that lets ranks of mace-wielding mice, helmeted hedgehogs, and ornery otters skitter wildly all over the venerable strategy game. It’s been about since Summer, and the team have been working on patching since. It seems very playable, if the footage of people playing it is anything to go by. Here’s a video by YouTuber Tharshey so you can see it in action:
]]>I am a very casual enjoyer of Metal Slug games. I've never actually paid for one of these side-scrolling shoot 'em ups, except for all the countless coins I happily pumped into arcade machines as a child. To this day, if I see a rare glittering cabinet running one of these crunchy shmups, I will go ham for twenty or thirty minutes, and walk away satisfied that I have seen a lot of very good pixels. These games, I am convinced, were never really designed to be completed, but to be played exactly like this, as a coin-gobbling invitation to become a bandana-wearing sisyphus, a tiny Rambo pushing a bouncy, juddering tank up a hill occupied by cartoon nazis. You die a bunch and say: "ah, that was good."
So what happens when you rearrange the molecules of this run and/or gun 'em up into an isometric turn-based strategy game? You get Metal Slug Tactics, an off-kilter nod to Into The Breach and other grid-based turn-takers, but secretly housing the aggressive notions of an unhinged pyromaniac. You still die a lot. And you still walk away feeling fairly happy about it.
]]>Thunderful Games, the developers and publishers that make the colourful SteamWorld series of games, have announced a hefty number of layoffs at the company, with anywhere between 80-100 people losing their jobs. It's part of a "restructuring" that'll also see an unspecified number of game projects cancelled, said the company in a press release yesterday. As if this is not dispiriting enough, they also say it's an intentional move that'll see them making fewer games of their own and instead publishing more work by other developers.
]]>Just when I thought I was out, they pull me back in. This is a lie, of course. I haven’t been 'out' of strategy autobattler Mechabellum since I started playing around the 1.0 launch back in September. There I was, just starting to get to grips with the card-house-careful balance between each of its units when, bam, makers Game River dropped a Jenga block on top of it. It’s a stealth block, too. Didn’t even see it coming.
Update 1.1’s new unit is the Phantom Ray, which Game River describe as "a medium-sized aircraft with high HP that excels at striking enemies at close range with high-damage missiles". It’s a mid-tier flier, costing 50 to unlock and 200 to field, and for that you get three of them per unit. As for default tech, you’ve got some range and fire rate unlocks, alongside an oil drop. The headliner here is the stealth buff, which cloaks the Phantom Ray by default until it attacks. When it does, it all gets a nice 40% bonus to damage.
]]>In all honesty, Toads Of The Bayou could have been several notches less ribbet-ing than its Steam demo ended up being, because its stylised pixel fly-snatchers are just that good. There’s only one of the three characters available in the freebie (one of the others is a toad nun with a shotgun), but he’s got a little cutlass, a flintlock pistol, and a can-do attitude - at least when it comes to either stabbing or shooting things. The game itself is a little bit deckbuilder, a little bit Into The Breach: turn based strategy with perfect information and various tricks you can pull to make enemies hit each other instead of the thing you’re trying to protect. Indulge yourself on the gourmet tray-tray below.
]]>Amplitude Studios, developers of many a game with "Endless" in the name, have split with publisher Sega to become independent again, with ownership of the studio reverting to its original founders and "other members of the team". The developers say everyone is parting "on good terms" and that the last eight years of getting published under Sega has been "amazing". But there are other businessy reasons, of course. Namely, Sega have been trying to trim down their European studios for the past year, and Amplitude is just the latest bunch of devs affected by that.
]]>The Elder Scrolls: Legends, the free-to-play card game set in Bethesda's fantasy world, has been removed from sale on Steam. Its servers will shut down for good on January 30th, 2025, after which it will no longer be playable. The closure comes five years after the game was last updated.
]]>Classic god sims like Populous and Black & White teach that deities love to reach their horrible holy hands into our world and mess with us directly. They teach us to see 1-1 divine intervention in every random house fire and every lightning bolt that miraculously strikes our enemies. By contrast, the forthcoming Zero Orders Tactics teaches that god prefers to operate via covert means, because after all, personally lobbing some electricity at somebody would be inelegant. It's far more graceful to trap them behind a mountain, instead.
]]>Update: Looks like the prophets were right. A press release today confirms that the game is getting a 1.0 release on December 5th. It'll cost $30 on Steam, Itch, and GOG.
Original story: The Caves Of Qud developer has posted a cryptic riddle that sounds a bit like a release date in disguise. A post on the game's Steam page yesterday reads: "{n} purple wardens beseech the Chair, What is death, if one rose is fair? How long from beetle moon to beetle moon?" That means absolutely nothing to me. But at least one fan in the comments knows their lore enough to have translated it, resulting in a specific date later this year. If their solution is correct, this could be a characteristically cryptic way for developer Freehold Games to announce the date for the roguelike's 1.0 release. So, let's double check those numbers.
]]>In a climactic scene of the original Final Fantasy VII, hero and amateur snowboarder Cloud Strife stands with his fellow adventurers as they are about to face a final, possibly fatal battle. With the steely glare of a polygonal warrior on the verge of killing god, he turns to them and says: "Let's mosey!" It's an unintentionally comical moment - an easy-going phrase, as if they're all going to the shops and not jumping into a big glowing pit at the end of the world.
It's a result of the RPG's famously rushed translation. But maybe not in the way you think. A fan translation of Final Fantasy VII has now fixed a bunch of mistakes that were present in the original, and "let's mosey" is one of them. The fix? Have Cloud say it way more often.
]]>Last October, Paradox Interactive announced that they and development studio Harebrained Schemes were breaking up, following underwhelming sales of Harebrained's 1930s-set XCOMlike, The Lamplighters League. The publishers had already made layoffs at Harebrained in the run-up to release, implying that preorder numbers were low; ultimately, Paradox wrote it off as a $22 million flop. At the time of the "parting of ways", Paradox chief operational officer Charlotta Nilsson washed her hands of XCOMlikes entirely, commenting that "a new project or sequel in the same genre was not in line with our portfolio plans".
]]>Swedish video game publishers Thunderful are selling some steam, which is terrific news for those of us who don't live near saunas and are thus cruelly deprived of their widely-accepted health and wellness benefits, which date all the way back to the ancient Mayans. Oh wait, I read the press release wrong. Thunderful are actually having a Steam sale, with up to 90% off such well-regarded games as Laika: Aged Through Blood, Swordship, Viewfinder and, just to confuse me further, several SteamWorld games.
]]>I am puzzled by Ara Colon History Untold's priorities. At its heart are a couple of interesting ideas undermined by its own determination to put the wrong thing on centre stage. Make a rich and elaborate resource management game with an unorthodox research system, but then spend so much time on a simultaneous turn system and detailed animations that you're left with a cumbersome interface and lifeless AI, and you too might wind up making Ara.
There's an almost great game here, but it's all neglected and bruised from being shoved into the packaging of a lacklustre 4X.
]]>There's a new trailer out for that there Like A Dragon: Yakuza TV show that Amazon's spinning up. And being one of RPS' foremost Yakuza sickos, I can say that I remain cautious about it, with perhaps a hint of optimism. It doesn't look like it's going for goofy, but instead opting for largely gritty and serious and almost entirely unrelated to the Yakuza games. Still, though, I do know how the show ends. It's really obvious, actually, when you think about it.
]]>Throwback turn-based RPG Sea Of Stars will get the free update that adds a local co-op mode next month, letting up to three players waddle through the game's story side by side (by side). The update will also include commonly requested features, say developers Sabotage Studio, like tweaks to the combat and a "revamped prologue" that'll see players able to get stuck into the action quicker. We'd previously heard about this update, but now we know the actual release date.
]]>When the trailer for steampunk RPG New Arc Line released in April, I was immediately taken in by its premise. To my shame, I’ve never gotten around to the social tensions and magic-meets-technology world of Arcanum: Of Steamworks and Magick Obscura. A newer, shinier journey to a similar setting sounded like just the ticket. After spending a few hours with the preview build, I do have at least one bit of very positive news to share: I’m definitely going to play Arcanum now, because despite some fetching environments and potentially interesting social systems, New Arc Line just isn’t doing it for me.
]]>I don't know why we haven't written about Mechabellum before now, but we haven't. Let's correct that. It's an autobattler in which you plonk down squads of stompy robots then watch them win or lose against your opponent's army based on the formations and upgrades you've chosen. After more than a year in Early Access, it's just released version 1.0.
]]>A week ago, while belabouring the nuances of Arco, I expressed a wish to play more bullet hell games with time freeze mechanics, the better to savour the intricacy of their projectile patterning. Now here's Moon Watch, a Vampire Survivors-ish pixelart shooter in which you have a watch that stops time when you stand still. Snug within that frozen instant, you're free to laugh in the gurning faces of the living dead while you idly choose and aim garlic grenades, stake launchers and bouncy ice comets.
]]>Dead By Daylight developers Behaviour Interactive have announced that they're acquiring Red Hook, the creators of Darkest Dungeon. This is the same Behaviour Interactive who recently laid off a bunch of people, cancelled a game and closed a studio, Midwinter Entertainment, after bagging themselves a bunch of developers (the others are SockMonkey, Codeglue and Fly Studio) over the past two years. Darkest Dungeon is a horror game like DBD, so I guess the acquisition chimes from that perspective. All the same, my snap judgement is "yikes".
]]>Like a samurai poised patiently for an opening in their opponent’s defences, Shogun Showdown understands that focus and finesse are the means to delivering an impactful blow. This rare roguelike distils the genre down to its purest components, all in favour of amplifying its dizzying combat that plays gracefully with the concepts of positioning and patience. Highly refined, stylish and complex, Shogun Showdown is a delight.
]]>MTG Arena lets players play Magic: The Gathering on mobile and PC for free, giving the classic TCG a much lower barrier to entry. In MTGA, you’ll build up your virtual card collection, create the decks of your dreams, and face off against friends near and far.
]]>If you’ve played Battle Brothers, you’ll know that Overhype Studios have a way of making you care for an underling, no more so than when you inadvertently send them onto the wrong end of a sharp blade. Menace, their upcoming turn-based tactical RPG, will also put the wellbeing of your chosen fighters at the forefront of your mind – along with a dramatic shift from 2D medieval sprites to the fully 3D battlefields of a unruly space frontier.
]]>I am torn between being deeply annoyed at the fact roguelike deckbuilder Bramble Royale: A Meteorfall Story allows me to poison skeletons, and actually finding it very funny. I suppose it would take an unnecessary amount of setup to lampshade that my dexterity brawler, Mischief, actually switches out her regular poison for bone-hurting juice when fighting skeletal undead. So, you get a pass for now, game. Here’s a trailer:
]]>Todd Howard recently said that he wanted people to experience Fallout 1 and 2 as they were, rather than remake them. Well, this'll make things easier: both games are currently free to keep as part of the Fallout Classic Collection over on the Epic Games Store.
Fallout Tactics is free, too, but I don't know whether Todd's cruel enough to want people to experience that one as it was.
]]>Darkest Dungeon 2's Kingdoms mode - a free turn-based boardgame reimagining of the hellish roguelike roadtrip RPG - will release in three modules, Red Hook have announced. The first of this fearful trio, Hunger Of The Beast Clan, is down to launch in Q4 2024, which translates to sometime during the period 1st October to 31st December.
It'll accompany a new paid Darkest Dungeon 2 DLC, Inhuman Bondage, which introduces a new region, a new hero with "...unique" mechanics and a fresh faction of seemingly excrement-themed fiends to slaughter.
]]>Baldur's Gate 3 publishing director Michael Douse has reopened the topic of video game prices being very modest for what those games offer, commenting that the pricing of blockbusters like the recent Star Wars Outlaws has not kept pace with rising development costs and general economic inflation.
]]>Everything I know about the French Revolution has hitherto come from two literary works: Hilary Mantel's excellent doorstopper A Place Of Greater Safety, and Kate Beaton's webcomics. Neither Mantel nor Beaton mention mechs, which are a core feature of Studio Imugi's new "ideology driven" turn-based strategy game Bonaparte: A Mechanized Revolution. I, for one, feel like I've been grossly ill-informed. Kate, Hilary - I've been quoting you for years at parties and it seems like all this time, people have been silently judging me for my ignorance of the role giant clockwork soldiers played in the fall of the Bastille.
]]>I’m still a little giddy over how much I enjoyed lucarne-lobbing puzzler Tactical Breach Wizards. So much so that I mentioned in my review how I’m well up for another run of its fifteen hour campaign. I’d already got a few missions into hard mode. There's no more starting mana points! It’s a real...pane.
Now, I might have to start again, even if going out of my way to grab the tapes added in its developer's commentary mode is going to be extra tricky. Ah, but will being able to chuck the recorders at my enemies for a point of knockback afterwards make up for it?
]]>Ubisoft have announced Heroes of Might & Magic: Olden Era, a fresh instalment in the exceedingly olden turn-based strategy RPG series, which began life under New World Computing in 1995. The new game will “return to the world of Enroth and the origins of the legendary saga”, inviting “both veterans and new players” to go on a quest to Jadame, “a mysterious continent in turmoil”. Expect new factions, biomes and creatures, together with such M&M standbys as castle management, army clashes, hex-based maps, and, who knows, maybe some heroes.
]]>I've yet to discover a SteamWorld game I don't like. Whether plundering the earth in SteamWorld Dig 2 or mucking about with magic in SteamWorld Quest, these are solid and approachable adventures that enthusiastically embrace whatever theme the developers have decided upon. Cowboys? Sure. Wizards? Why not. It barely matters, as long as it results in some good puns. As a studio, Thunderful have a reputation for hopping from one style of game to the next, boiling entire genres down to their essence, and reconstituting them with competence and style to exist within a now-familiar steampunk world of colourful pals and Saturday morning cartoon jokes. The studio is a perpetual notion machine. Yes, with SteamWorld Heist 2, they're revisiting the sci-fi bullet-bouncing of their 2016 tactics game SteamWorld Heist, but they're also introducing significant changes to create a compulsive XCOM-like full of sea-faring submariners that may be their best work yet, even against a back catalogue of blinders.
]]>Tactical Breach Wizards is a tactics game for people that don’t like tactics games. Magically, it’s also a tactics game for people who love them like nothing else. It’s permissive and demanding; playful and tense. Its globe-spanning plot covers conspiracies, PMCs, and brutal theocratic dictatorships. It also features a traffic-summoning warlock named Steve wearing a hi-vis robe. It’s finding that one absolutely, perfectly ridiculous XCOM turn, every turn…and at the same time knowing it’s absolutely, perfectly fine if you don’t. In short: it’s one of the most enjoyable tactics games I’ve ever played, and the only tactics game with a pyromancer so rubbish he relies on making his enemies pass out from heatstroke.
]]>There you are, rambling through the woods of Interactive Entertainment with an empty pack and a spring in your step. Here I am, lying in wait behind a tree. Wham! Bam! You reel back in consternation as I bounce into the path and clobber you with a sack containing no less than eight venerable RPGs, from Baldur's Gate to Warhammer 40,000: Rogue's Trader - well over a thousand hours worth of dungeons, dragons, dicerolls, dwarven shopkeepers and many other things I refuse to spend time alliterating, all of which will (currently) set you back just £32.07.
Were you planning to spend this weekend playing some cute two-hour artgame sideshow, without any levelling at all? Shut up, you DOLT. You will play what the nice journalist tells you to play! Best lay in extra caffeine tablets, because it's going to take you till Monday just to get through the character creators alone.
]]>The next advance in video game graphics technology is not ray-tracing or tray-racing or any variation thereof - it's janky stop motion and rubbish plastic dolls, and it actually began about 30 years ago, when I watched the Adam and Joe show for the first time. If you never watched the Adam and Joe show, they used to do home movie recreations of famous films like Titanic and Saving Private Ryan using stuffed animals and action figures. I found these "Toymovies" hysterical as a kid - I suspect they are less so now. Probably, they are full of jokes we might tentatively class as "of their time". The point is, Reptilian Rising is sort of Toymovie: The Game.
]]>I was partial to a scrappy little strategy game even before idiot billionaires doomed the planet, and the UK to brain-steaming heat just when you thought we'd escape it this year. Khaligrad is plenty scrappy. Its edges are rough and you have to figure it out yourself, but it's more intuitive than it appears, and easy to operate once you discern some basics. It's scrappy too in that it's, well. It's Stalingrad. Not really: its world is so fictional it's their 15th century. But the invaders are explicitly fascists and the defenders communists embroiled in a long and brutal semi-guerrilla city war with World War 2 technology. Thankfully, it's stripped of any actual fashy or genocidal play-acting beyond each side doing "hail the empire/union" bits as a sign off.
I think that's why, despite its brutal and difficult setting, it's this year's entry in the long tradition of Low-Intensity Strategy Games For When Hot Why Hot Please Stop You Cannot See My Begging Tears For They Evaporate.
]]>As reported by Gematsu yesterday, SEGA have filed a trademark in Japan for the term “Yakuza Wars”. This happened on July 26th, and while Gematsu speculate this might be related to the next game in the Yakuza: Like A Dragon series, I have other plans. For the imaginary game. That I have nothing to do with.
]]>Flippin’ heck, what a journey it’s been for Baldur's Gate 3, eh? It seems just yesterday I was getting very jealous at Matthew Castle (RPS in peace) for getting to preview the sequel to my beloved Shadows Of Amn. Fast forward several turns, Larian’s RPG banger is officially one year old since release, and there’s now a much higher chance that strangers at pubs will understand why my failed romance with Jaheira as a youth was such a deeply heartbreaking experience. Baldur’s Gate 3 itself looks to be done and dusted following the upcoming patch, but Larian now seem to be gearing up for their next charm offensive with a new “community focused” YouTube channel, as well as further teasing their two games currently in development.
]]>Baldur's Gate 3’s latest patch was due to launch in closed beta yesterday, but Larian have decided to give it a bit more time in the oven due to bugs. Namely, a bug that caused passive rolls - like those that detect traps - to stop working.
Happily, if you hadn’t already registered to take part in the beta, you now have more time to sign up. Scroll down a bit on the RPG’s Steam page and click the ‘Request Access’ button.
]]>Crow Country, Conscript, and now Vultures - Scavengers Of Death. We really do seem to be living through a craze for PS1-style horror games. Vultures is different to the others, though, in that it's turn-based zombie crunching combined with roguelike scavenging to survive and get more powerful. It's arriving on Steam sometime soon and it's probably worth a looksy if you're after biohazard disposal with a tactical twist.
]]>The word "kiss" occurs 10 times in the latest blog post for the seventh major Baldur's Gate 3 patch, while the word "bug" occurs 14 times. I think this ratio captures how BG3 updates at large walk the line between dealing with stuff like progression blockers, and sating the inexhaustible horniness of the fanbase. There's more to patch 7 than glitch-hunting and snogs, however. Due in September, it introduces dynamic splitscreen functionality, expansions for Honour mode, modding tools, new endings for evil playthroughs, and a brace of tweaks for Origin characters.
]]>Time hopping in Berlin usually means queuing several hours for a club, only to magically find yourself either right back at the end of the line, or else waking up on the U-Bahn three days later with tinnitus and currywurst spilled down your Acronym jacket. Not so in cyberpunk tactics game All Walls Must Fall. Here time travel means dodging bullets, reversing flubbed hacking, and replaying that conversation you had with the bouncer that got you booted to the curb. “A bloody good time-troubling tactical shooter,” decreed Adam Smith (RPS in Peace) in his review. Well, now it’s a bloody free time-troubling tactical shooter. Take that, Monday!
]]>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.
]]>A former developer at Total War studio Creative Assembly has written a lengthy personal account of his time at the studio, in which he details development troubles on strategy game Total War: Rome 2 and Total War: Attila, and alleges that these issues were exacerbated by an inflexible and counterproductive leadership structure and “chronic mismanagement,” sometimes resulting in what he calls a “toxic work environment.”
]]>Chaos and comedy. Death and rebirth. Luck and, uh, running out of luck. A good roguelike doesn't treat the player like other games do. Roguelikes won't guide you helpfully along a path, or let you cinematically snatch victory from the jaws of defeat. They're more likely to dangle you deep between the jaws of defeat and fumble the rope until you go sliding down defeat's hungry gullet. This is their beauty, and it's a part of why we keep coming back for another go. Next time everything will go right. Next time you'll find the right pair of poison-proof loafers, the perfect co-pilot for your spaceship, a stash of stronger, better ropes. Next time.
Here's our list of the 19 best roguelikes on PC you can play in 2024.
]]>Like many I’m sure, I have extremely fond memories of the original Fallout games, 2 especially. I bought my first laptop for uni, barely suitable for much except typing long literature essays in which I’d complete assignments using my favorite university trick of writing “ah, but to answer this question, we must first explore (whatever I actually wanted to write an essay about.)” Faltering, bricky turnip that it was, I still had some of my favourite gaming memories on that thing, mainly around aging RPGs: Baldur’s Gate 2, Planescape: Torment, and the old Fallouts.
]]>Revealed at yesterday's Nintendo Direct stream - but absolutely coming to PC because there's a Steam page for it - The Hundred Line: Last Defense Academy seems like a mash-up of visual novel and Fire Emblem-y RPG battles on grids. And it's by the folks behind Danganronpa and Zero Escape, which means there will be lots of consequences and decisions that lead to copious amounts of despair, no matter how you finish the game apparently. If there's one thing that really gets me going, it's a game devoid of happiness and cheer.
]]>There is very little in this world that would get between me and playing an RPG made by Final Fantasy dad Hironobu Sakaguchi, double for one with a soundtrack composed by Nobuo Uematsu. Unless, of course, that game was exclusive to Apple Arcade, which Fantasian has been since its 2021 release. I will not speak poorly of Apple, for I already have several other cults out for my blood. Instead, I’ll simply celebrate the fact that, as per Tuesday’s Nintendo DIrect, the game that Sakaguchi developed “thinking it could be [his] final game before retiring” is coming to PC later this year, in ‘Neo Dimension’ form. Have a trailer.
]]>Baldur's Gate 3’s upcoming mod support update, which will introduce official modding tools to the sprawling Dungeons & Dragons RPG later this year, will effectively serve as Larian’s swan song for their work on the game.
]]>League Of Geeks are going "into hibernation". The Australian developers behind fantasy strategy games such as the animal-themed Armello and hellish remake Solium Infernum said that their remaining staff are going to take an extended break, and they're not sure "when (or if)" they will revive the studio.
]]>A remaster of Final Fantasy Tactics, the grid-based strategy spin-off from the RPG series that easily ranks as one of the best Final Fantasy games ever made, is reportedly in the works - giving hope of its first official PC release.
]]>Back in February, Graham wrote about potential redundancies at Disco Elysium studio ZA/UM following the cancellation of a standalone expansion to that game, codenamed X7. Now, PC Gamer’s Ted Litchfield has spoken to 12 current and former employees about the circumstances surrounding the cancellation, notably the details of the layoffs, the expansion, and the “humiliation campaign” suffered by writer Argo Tuulik as apparent retaliation for his participation in last year’s extensive People Make Games documentary. You can, and should, read PC Gamer’s report here.
]]>Excuse me, sorry, pardon me, can I just, thank you, ah, sorry, thanks... Phew, made it. Steam Next Fest is pretty crowded, eh? As if the unholy swarm of trailers and game announcements from Summer Game Fest was not enough, this week the fearful megalords at Valve decided to drop their regular cavalcade of coming-soons onto their megastore. The beautiful (and terrifying) thing about Next Fest, of course, is the overwhelming number of demos that come out during the event. A small herd of video games are standing on my toes as we speak. But that's okay, we are expert curators. Here's a handy list of our nine favourite demos of the lot.
]]>Caves Of Qud has been under development for over 15 years, but it's finally reaching a 1.0 release later this year. Ahead of that happening, it's received a final major content update which seeks to make the complex, detailed roguelike more approachable. The Spring Molting update, which is out now, makes the user interface work with both mouse and gamepad, adds Steam cloud saves, and more.
]]>Shown off at the PC Gaming Show the other day, Generation Exile is a sustainable turn-based citybuilder with some real talent behind it. It's being developed by Sonderlust Studios, headed up by Mark Of The Ninja's lead designer Nels Anderson, alongside other talented developers like Karla Zimonja, who worked on Gone Home. Yeah, it's definitely one to watch.
]]>We continue to rummage through the debris caused by the horrendous pile-up of summer video game announcements. Among the wreckage, a release date for Tactical Breach Wizards, the funny strategy game in which you play a ragtag crew of uniformed magic-zappers clearing enemies in confined spaces. It's not XCOM, but it is XCOM-ing soon. That's about as good a joke as I can muster on a Monday morning. Don't worry, there are funnier ones in the trailer below.
]]>The way not-E3 games showcases work is that you open with something attention-getting an unexpected, end with the biggest game of the show, and pack the middling and mundane in the middle. Sid Meier's Civilization VII is surely one of the biggest announcements of this year's (in-progress, as I type this) Summer Game Fest 2024, and yet it was buried in that middle section, as unassuming as Sid himself.
]]>It's a new month, which means Microsoft have detailed a new batch of games arriving on Game Pass. Not all of the games themselves are new, mind you: they include Octopath Traveler, the HD-2D RPG released in 2018, and its sequel.
]]>Mods are to Baldur's Gate 3 what butter is to bread, that unreadable squiggle-font is to death metal bands or wheels are to the bottom of trainers when you’re a kid: not necessarily essential, per se, but so harmonious and well-suited that they feel essential. In the case of the D&D CRPG, it’s a natural extension of playing dungeon master around the table, crafting the world and its characters as you see fit - typically by making everyone in Faerûn even hornier somehow.
]]>Amazon will air a live-action TV series based on Sega's Yakuza games in October this year, says the streaming service. Like A Dragon: Yakuza will be a six-part series following characters in the criminal underbelly of Kamurocho, set to straddle between two time periods: 1995 and 2005. The series "showcases modern Japan and the dramatic stories of these intense characters, such as the legendary Kazuma Kiryu, that games in the past have not been able to explore,” said Amazon, who are releasing it through Prime Video, just like their Fallout series.
]]>We’ll never know exactly what sort of fiction Tom Clancy would have written if he was less interested in the calibre of specific bullets and their effiency at dismantling burgeoning socialist governments, and more so in the specific sigils required to blast a riot cop through a third story window. While charity shops across the land mourn this devasting loss to their paperback shelves to this very day, we do at least have a glimpse into what such a literary venture may have looked like. Oh, did you like that door? Was it your favourite door? Soz, pal. Strategy game Tactical Breach Wizards just hexed right through it with a new demo as part of Steam Next Fest. I’ve played it, and it’s very exciting stuff, not least for how differently it plays than what I’d expected.
]]>I'm sure you could fill a bottomless pit with the things Larian decided not to add to Baldur's Gate 3. One of those things was, in fact, a bottomless pit. Not just a bottomless pit, but a conveniently portable, Looney Tunes-esque hole into which you could seemingly chuck everything from items and equipment to characters. Speaking to me during the same interview in which they discussed long-abandoned plans for bringing back Baldur’s Gate 1’s Candlekeep, Larian CEO Swen Vincke and Baldur’s Gate 3 lead writer Adam Smith (RPS in peace) touched on the subject with tantalising brevity. Argh, if only I hadn’t had to run off and catch a taxi, I’d still be there now, discussing the many applications of a portable hole. Bypassing carrying capacity limits would just be the start of it.
]]>Turn-based tactical RPG Wildermyth is one of the best games Sin has ever played. It got a second DLC, Omenroad, which turned it into a roguelike earlier this month.
Omenroad turns out to be the end of the road, however, both for Wildermyth and - for now - for the team that made it, Worldwalker Games.
]]>Many moons ago, premiere wordsman Nate Crowley reviewed shark ‘em up Maneater, decrying its incurious perpetuation of anti-shark propaganda, and calling it “an ecstatically violent simulation of being a fool's idea of a shark.” My own frothing penchant for the plan-schemes of Warhammer’s Skaven ratboys has been documented in these pages to the point of rabidity, but I do feel broadly similarly about media that sullies rats - clean, smart and good folk that they are. Lively tactics Trash Of The Titans does not aim to emancipate its villainous vermin. But, like Warhammer, it gets a pass for its evident affection towards its antagonistic dumpster diving scuttlers. Also, it's just plain fun.
]]>The director of Baldur's Gate 3 and CEO of developers Larian has revealed that the studio experienced crunch in order to get the sprawling Dungeons & Dragons CRPG finished. While Swen Vincke admitted that “it would be a lie to say that we didn't [crunch]”, he insisted that it was less than on past Larian games such as Divinity, staff were paid for the overtime and it seemingly didn’t go as far as working late nights or weekends (for the most part, anyway).
]]>Videogames and especially role-playing games are chock-full of sheltered upbringings that go tits up. Innocent times and places like the prologue for Baldur's Gate, which unfolds in the vast, fortified monastery of Candlekeep (beware spoilers from this point on).
BioWare's first ever RPG opens with your unsuspecting Chosen One learning the ropes from the old sage Gorion. There are fetchquests that take you around the enormous citadel, bits of combat training to do, cosy formative chinwags to have with characters like your childhood friend Imoen. But it's not to last, of course: Gorion is murdered, and you must rove the Sword Coast in pursuit of his killer. When you return to Candlekeep later in the game, this once-proud bastion of learning has been filled with doppelgangers of Gorion and other acquaintances, a parade of chatbots waiting to stab you in the back.
]]>Baldur's Gate 3 and Divinity Original Sin developers Larian today announced the opening of a new studio in Warsaw, Poland. This is RPG outfit Larian’s seventh studio worldwide, and the latest to contribute to their "24-hour development cycle" model. That’s even more hands on deck to a) keep Swen Vincke’s armour polished to a fine sheen and b) ensure smooth sailing for the two new games that Larian currently have in the works.
]]>War never changes, and either does Fortnite's love of a crossover. Thus, Fallout and Fortnite are colliding as the post-apocalyptic RPG heads to the battle royale shooter’s upcoming next season.
]]>Being offered a 4X game for free is definitely one of those cursed-monkey-paw situations. Sure, you’re saving physical currency, but at what price in terms of that most treasured and least tradeable of commodities, time? In the hours it takes to properly clean out a 4X game, you could probably build an empire yourself. OK, not a huge empire. An empire the size of the Vatican or the Principality of Sealand, perhaps. Maybe an empire that only covers the distance between your desk and your fridge. But an empire nonetheless. Go on, pronounce yourself God-Tyrant of your bedroom while you download Amplitude’s Endless Legend, which is 100% off on Steam till 10am PDT, 1pm EDT and 6pm BST on May 23rd.
]]>It’s coming up on three years since the sequel to Darkest Dungeon hit early access, and over a year since it exited early access into 1.0. That means, however you count the days, it’s been a long time coming for one of the original game’s features to find its way into Darkest Dungeon 2: mod support.
]]>Excessively brilliant fantasy RPG Wildermyth is getting a new DLC pack which both embraces the fad for adding roguelike modes to games, and tugs against it in the shape of what the developers are calling "our most extensively written campaign, by far". The pack is called Omenroad, and if nothing else, it's an opportunity to remind you that if you like campfire yarns and droll webcomics and haven't played Wildermyth then you should get that seen to immediately.
]]>The original SteamWorld Heist was an absolute treat, slamming the charming robotic world of the SteamWorld series together with a 2D take on the turn-based strategy of your XCOMs and Valkyria Chronicles and such. With SteamWorld Heist 2 recently revealed for an August release on PC, developers Thunderful have teased some more details on the sequel’s shiny new job system.
]]>For someone who’s spent an embarrassing amount of my life staring at virtual maps, I am a downright directionless dunce when it comes to geography. Not ‘the country of Africa’ bad, but certainly not good enough that you’d want me on your pub quiz team. Also, I still do the Shredded Wheat rhyme internally when I have to follow directions. However, I do enjoy making maps turn a different colour in strategy games, Total War chiefly among them. Well, one such map is expanding before my confused idiot eyes, that being Total War: Pharaoh’s. It’s getting a new, distinctly Mesopotamia and Aegea-shaped bit. I believe that’s just south of Eastopotamia and Wegea.
]]>While they ponder which developers should face the difficult task of following up one of the most acclaimed games in a long time by making a sequel by Baldur's Gate 3, the makers of Dungeons & Dragons are also putting their own money into making video games themselves. Over a billion dollars of their own money, in fact.
]]>A team of enterprising modders are looking to unite two of the internet’s favourite dating games - Baldur's Gate 3 and Stardew Valley - in one beautiful thirst trap. The mod set to launch a thousands AO3 ships is Baldur’s Village, which transports your favourite adventuring companions to the pastoral climes of Stardew’s farming towns.
]]>The developers behind Fable card game spin-off Fable Fortune and the digital adaptation of dungeon-crawling board game Gloomhaven have revealed a new upcoming co-op RPG… only to announce at the same time that the upcoming game’s development has been put on pause amid layoffs at the studio and difficulty finding funding.
]]>Speaking to RPS regular Jeremy Peel in a new feature about RPG design, Amazon's Fallout TV show and his time working on Pentiment and Pillars of Eternity, Obsidian's Josh Sawyer has reflected a bit on what Fallout: New Vegas owes to Black Isle and Interplay's very first Fallout from 1997. "A lot of the philosophy that I approached New Vegas with was the philosophy of Fallout 1, or how I interpreted it," Sawyer observed. "Fallout 1 was foundational for me in understanding how role-playing games should be made."
]]>The Fallout TV show effect continues. This time, it’s popular mod site Nexus Mods on the receiving end of the double-edged Shishkebab, as its servers struggle under the weight of people rushing to play through the series again - and mod its latter entries into games worth playing, presumably.
]]>In the most unsurprising news you might read today: Amazon are going to make a second season to their very popular Fallout TV show. That means one more season until we get Liam Neeson, right?
]]>Larian aren’t just not making Baldur’s Gate 4 – they’re treating Baldur’s Gate 3’s success as an opportunity to develop their own intellectual properties, with two new games in the works. These games will build on the “sensibilities” of Baldur’s Gate 3 in being “immersive experiences shaped by your choices”, but by the sounds of things, they won’t be adaptations of anybody else's narrative or setting. Divinity: Original Sin 3? It’s the obvious call, but come now, free your mind. How about a kart racing game, Larian, or a banging old school mascot platformer? When are you going to make a platform game, Larian?
]]>Here at the Electronic Wireless Show podcast we're nothing if not ready to jump on a bandwagon, and the hottest wagon in town right now is the Fallout TV show. We've watched varying amounts of Amazon's new adaptation of Bethesda's favourite post-apocalyptic RPG baby, so there are some mild (but not total) spoilers within, as we talk about the show, the show biffing the leaving-the-vault-moment, the best things about the games, the Righteous Gemstones, and how good Walton Goggins is just, like, in general.
]]>I briefly posted about this in The Maw, but was unsure at that point if SteamWorld Heist 2 was coming to PC day and date with the launch on Switch. That date is August 8th, by the way, and the answer is: yes it is! Though it was revealed at Nintendo's Indie World Showcase earlier this afternoon, strategy action-adventure-with-robots sequel SteamWorld Heist 2 isn't a timed platform exclusive, so that's fun!
SteamWorld Heist 2 is, if you hadn't guessed, a sequel to SteamWorld Heist, which came to PC in 2016. The first was a side-on tactics game where you, leading a team of robots, shot teams of other (bad) robots in turn-based skill-heavy tactical battles. While that all took place in space, the sequel has achieved splashdown, and you'll be chuntering about the seas with a new lead character (Captain Leeway) and a new bunch of crewmates. It's a robot pirate game, in other words.
]]>With the arrival of Amazon’s Fallout TV series last week came the dropping of another bombshell: the possible truth behind a mystery that’s gone unanswered in the video games for over 25 years. Before you read on, please bear in mind that spoilers for the Fallout TV show’s season one finale follow!
]]>With Larian having now officially handed the reins of the Baldur’s Gate series back to Dungeons & Dragons owners Wizards of the Coast (and their Monopoly-making parents at Hasbro) - with the developers saying they have no plans to make any DLC or a sequel - the ball for a Baldur’s Gate 4 now sits in Wizards’ court. The good news is that, yes, they also want to make a follow-up to one of the most acclaimed and successful video games of the last few years. Just don’t expect that to necessarily be anytime soon.
]]>If you've been narked about favourite bits of Fallout not yet appearing in Amazon Prime's unexpectedly good live-action show, hold your horses. In an interview, the showrunners have talked about holding back certain "iconic elements" to do them in a hypothetical second season right rather than cram in all the greatest hits—and also so the show didn't "seem like it was written by people who just like spent 10 seconds reading the Wikipedia page for Fallout and didn't bother to like bring in some deeper cuts."
]]>I sort of reject that the Fallout TV show has Easter eggs hidden in it because it, as a whole, is the equivalent of one of those fancy Hotel Chocolat ostrich-sized patisserie collection bastards that cost 40 quid. However. Eagle-eyed viewers of the Fallout show noted that episode 6 gives you a number for Valt-Tec that you can actually get in touch with - 213-25-VAULT (or, 213-258-2858). Charges apply, as well as international codes if you're outside the US, which makes it 001-213-258-2858.
If you text the number you get a reply from Vault-Tec saying "The next available appointment is 33 weeks from now, please stand by!" (handily captured by X user FanaticalGuy cos my response hasn't come through yet). And then the significantly less immersive "Reply Y to get recurring marketing and other texts from FallOut", which is quite funny. There is speculation that this is just a reference to Vault 33, the vault where main character Lucy was born and raised. On the other hand, 33 weeks from now is November, the month when both Fallout 4 and Fallout 76 came out.
]]>Crawl out through the fallout, baby! I've watched two episodes of Amazon's recently released Fallout TV show, a series for and about Walton Goggins' rizz (a thing the kids say). I've been on the Goggins hype train for over a decade at this point, and it's great that - oh sorry, I'm being told that the Fallout TV show is in fact about Bethesda's post-nukepocalypse RPG series of video games, and as such has given a massive player bump to said video games on Steam.
Posted on Xitter by SteamDB yesterday (HT to our pals at Eurogamer), it appears Fallout has more than doubled its concurrent players on Steam since the show dumped all its episodes last week.
]]>In the world of strategy and management game Goblin Stone, the goblins are nearly extinct. Getting murdered in large numbers by adventurers hungry for a quick experience point and a slack handful of coin will do that. I cannot tell you that you will want to bestow protection and prosperity on these gribbly green niblets. They exhibit a tweeness that you’ll either find charming or despicably manipulative, even when they’re showering in the blood of their enemies. Should you want to, though, Goblin Stone offers you the chance to rescue these maligned misfits from the brink of extinction, rebuilding their kingdom and leading them on outings to take the fight to all those heroes that have spotlight-hogged the left side of your screens for far too long.
]]>As if you needed more proof that Baldur's Gate 3 is, in fact, a pretty damn fine video game, Larian’s D&D RPG swept through the video game BAFTA awards yesterday, picking up five of the British entertainment org’s top trophies. Even more impressively - after all, Baldur’s Gate 3 winning a shedload of awards is old hat by now - its latest Best Game triumph means that the sprawling RPG-slash-fanfic machine is now the first video game to win all five of the industry’s major Game of the Year awards.
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