We had booked in an appointment with a mysterious baddie who lives across the sea, but one of our clan, Dunder Mifflin, was absent for this planned trip (tattoo removal, an unfortunate double-booking). To prep for our kinsman’s return, we attempted a little practice sail instead. A pleasant skim across the ocean, which left us naked… and afraid. In Valheim you are tasked by an uppity raven with killing several horrible monsters....
It’s a mythological adventure where you play as young Fenyx (which I have only just realised is pronounced like “Phoenix” and not “Fennix”) who has to save the Greek gods from some nasty curse. I’ve had my eye on this one for a little while. I bounced off of BOTW pretty quickly, but Immortals seems to have nabbed the good bits from it and mixed in a load of cool mythology, which is right up my alley....
Imogen joined RPS in January 2020 as our full-time news writer after impressing us from afar as Eurogamer’s news intern. Working together with Alice0, Imogen’s excellent reporting has touched every corner of PC gaming imaginable. She’s covered it all, from the big, night-long E3 and Geoff Fest conferences all the way through to the weird and wonderful delights of things like Demon Deleter, a Google spreadsheet MMO, and the dangers of baking banana bread while playing Valorant....
5D Chess, on the other hand, makes me feel like that uncle likely did. This is not possible. How. What. HOW DID THIS HAPPEN? I have yet to experience a single defeat or victory that I understood. And I don’t like it. The basic idea of 5D Chess is that instead of moving your pieces around as normal, you can (sometimes) send them back in time, to add them to an earlier state that the board was in....
So, you get to work. Talking to Unid allows you to build a rapport and understand their motivations. You learn about their past. They talk of their difficult childhood, pets, a lack of support - broken systems that left them behind and put them on their current path. It doesn’t matter. You have a job to do. And now, with that bit of knowledge, you’ve found the ‘bug’ in their programming....
At the start, Inscryption is like a hostage situation, where you’re forced to play a card-based roguelike against a sinister games master. Then, just as you start getting the hang of things, the game evolves into something way more complex. If you’ve played Mullins’ other games you’ll know his work can go to some weird, meta places. I won’t say more above the cut, because I’d hate to spoil it....
Turns out, the concern was for naught: the Core i5-12400F is a cracking slice of silicon, both for the money and for games specifically. Although the sole reliance on Performance cores (or P-cores) puts it behind the Core i5-12600K for desktop multitasking, if it’s just the frames per second you’re after, this cheaper chip can match and sometimes even surpass its big brother. The Core i5-12400F does have a good pedigree, in fairness....
The Half-Life 1 VR mod has been in development for years, with the most recent update at the end of last year. There are a lot of games that users have hacked VR support into, but HLVR is better than most because it goes the whole hog. You can see your hands in-game; you can pick up objects using the grips of your motion controllers; you can use every weapon, including guns, as melee objects....
Itch is already pretty darn generous with their revenue split. Since 2015 they’ve been using their “open revenue sharing” option that lets creators determine what split they want to have with the store, anywhere from 0% to 100%. The default setting is 10%, which is still lower than both Steam and the Epic Games Store’s take. For today though, they’ve set every creator’s share of the split to 100%. Over in their announcement post, Itch keep it short and sweet....
There are already more JRPG releases on the way to PC, with Bravely Default 2 arriving next week and ’90s cult classic Moon: Remix RPG Adventure due to follow soon. At this point though, if there’s an obscure console JRPG you love, it feels like there’s a decent chance of there being financial justification for porting or translating it. The rest of the bestseller list speaks to the general health of PC gaming, with a good spread of genres....
See, most jigsaw games - and I idly toy with the idea of playing a bit of any new one I find on Steam, before realising that is a fool’s errand - are just kind of 2D, put together this flat JPEG of a flower that I have cut into triangles. There’s no tactile pleasure to be had. But Jigsaw Puzzle Dreams is a little one bed mezzanine flat in which you do puzzles - on the floor, on the kitchen table, on the rug - and each puzzle piece is a little 3D thing you can pick up and drop and turn around....
After the leak happened, Carmack posted the full text of the memo to Facebook, with some additional context. “This is the end of my decade in VR. I have mixed feelings,” Carmack begins. After writing that the Quest 2 “is almost exactly what I wanted to see from the beginning,” he explains that his problem is with the company’s “efficiency.” “We have a ridiculous amount of people and resources, but we constantly self-sabotage and squander effort....
End of an era, that. For a while now, Kongregate has been moving away from web game hosting in favour of publishing, going so fas as to launch launching their own Kartridge storefront back in 2017. This week, the Kongregate announced that their days of hosting free browser games have come to an end. Effective immediately, the site will no longer be accepting new game submissions. “As most of you know, Kongregate....
You can do this this hard way (working down the pub and gradually saving up to buy the cement, bricks and tools you need) or the slightly easier way (nicking stuff from unattended building sites around the town using only your two hands and your trusty wheelbarrow). I dipped into Landlord’s Super when it first appeared, because it is a brilliant concept and I love a lot of the stuff it does....
He’s one of those comedians who uses a lot of multimedia in their sets, playing daft, self-made videos to help deliver punch lines. There’s plenty of that nonsense in Ewins’ set here, but for this occasion he also created an entire video game companion piece, styled up as a mid-90s, almost N64 / PS1-style affair in which - unsurprisingly - comedy antics ensue. Matthew and I love it to bits, and I thought that in this, the 25th anniversary year of Lara Croft, we should remember the incredible Adventureman and all of the brilliantly-bad video games he was in we never got to play....
It’s in this vein that Banishers: Ghosts Of New Eden seems to continue. It’s an action RPG about “two proficient ghost hunters and lovers” set in the haunted, frozen wilderness of 1695 North America. You can watch the reveal trailer below. Banishers was revealed tonight during The Game Awards, which we’re liveblogging over here. The protagonists in the trailer are ghost hunters Antea Duarte and Red mac Raith. Antea was fatally wounded in the pair’s previous mission and is now “one of the spirits she loathes”, which seems sure to set up some inevitable ethical quandaries as you continue to work together to rid the world of what the press release calls “the threat of lingering ghosts and specters”....
Spirited Thief’s heists are split into two halves. First up is the recon, as the spirit Trin floats through the level scouting enemy positions, spotting traps, and most importantly, locating the treasure. Next is the execution with Elaj the thief, and you’ll need to use everything you’ve learned to successfully grab the treasure and get out. It’s a setup I’ve never thought about before, but enacting a well-thought plan sounds like it could be very satisfying....
In my brief five hours with Lost Ark, I got to sample some classes, some quests, some dungeons, and some co-op, and I can only describe it as a Diablo-like MMO crossbreed without all the grimness that comes with it. But rest assured that it has familiar trappings from both genres. From a top-down perspective, you click on the environment to move your character forwards and you’ll cleave through enemies in their dozens....
It’s made by some of the same developers behind the lovely walking sim Pattern and desktop plant sim Viridi. It’s a step away from those more peaceful pretty experiences, however, because Tenderfoot Tactics is more about goblins doing lots of fighting. The combat sounds super interesting, too. It’s turn-based tactics with no random miss chances or damage ranges, and you can manipulate the elements to help you. That won’t always work in your favour, though....
