Rock Paper Shotgun – PC Game Reviews, Previews, Subjectivity

The world ended this week. We documented the whole thing. But the RPS podcast, the Electronic Wireless Show, will not go quietly into the abyss of human history. It's not going to be felled by the atomic blast of Fallout 76. It’s going down screaming. Screaming about the best post-apocalyptic games out there, that is.

I’ve built an army of inflatable flesh bags that puff themselves up to three times their normal size and then launch into the air like oversized, leaky balloons. They’re called Gasbags, and they’re my favourite dinosaur in Extinction, the latest expansion to Ark: Survival Evolved. Whenever I don’t fancy aimlessly floating around on the back of one, I can load any metal I’ve collected into their giant inventories and puff my way back to base. They’re brilliant.

Extinction’s new creatures are some of the best in Ark so far: alongside the Gasbags you’ll find new friends including the lumbering, sloth-like Gacha, which drop semi-randomised loot from giant crystals on their back, a teleporting robotic raptor/spider hybrid called an Enforcer, and a Velonasaur, which can fan out its facial fins to transform into a walking machine gun that shoots quills, shredding armour in seconds.

Well, this is a surprise, isn't it? After all the hoo-hah of Nvidia's new and shiny Turing RTX graphics cards, AMD have gone and snuck in another mid-ranger right under our noses in the form of the Radeon RX 590. Alas, it's still not one of the long-awaited AMD Navi GPUs everyone's been whispering about - it's fundamentally a Polaris card just like the rest of AMD's RX 500 family - but it is the first one to use a 12 nanometer (nm) manufacturing process, which AMD say gives it a 12% performance boost over the still very much alive Radeon RX 580. Let's take a look, shall we?

I’m really excited about Void Bastards. I mean, it’s a new deeply systems-driven FPS made by some of the people behind System Shock 2, Neptune’s Pride and Captain Forever. Of course I’m excited. You play as a desperate crim boarding extremely hostile derelict spaceships to loot stuff. It’s got cool guns and a striking comic book art style, and it’s the result of some extremely qualified unfinished business. I reckon that’s the best reason to get into making something special.

Waking Mars is possibly the most chilled out 2D jetpack game in existence. I came across it during that lazy, turkey-stuffed interim between Christmas and New Year's Eve back in 2013, and I've never felt such inner peace while playing a video game. It's a story of quiet wonder, where the aim isn't to destroy, evade or do battle with hostile, alien creatures, but to watch them grow and flourish as you venture further and further into the depths of our neighbouring red planet.

Over the course of my six or so hours with it so far, Fallout 76 has revealed its certainly a game that's more fun for what you see and come across than for how you act and what you do. It's lucky that the world itself, a bruised edition of West Virginia, is beautiful, putting Bethesda’s previous post-apocalyptic sets to shame in both its overall topography and in the details of colour and shape in everything from its trees and leaves to its burned out cars and anonymous cadavers.

Certainly, posing next to a freshly slain mongrel has never given me as much cause for a smile.

One of the post-apocalyptic games that many people think was overlooked was Mad Max. Created by Just Causers Avalanche, it's an open-world driving/punching realisation of the long-loved, thankfully now Gibson-free franchise. Sand, mutants, spiky cars, and explosions. So many explosions. So to celebrate this first day in our newly destroyed Earth, I've put together a gallery of things going boom.

I doubt it's just me who finds it incredibly hard to take in the infodump that begins most games. I try! I read, "It was the final day of the third season of the Sharmani, so Reslator gathered his bag and made his way down the Triamblate Path..." and I'm already just staring at letters, not absorbing information. It's just made up names in made up places doing made up things, and I've no chance whatsoever of retaining it, and worse, understanding it in context when the action begins.

Which makes the opening of post-apocalyptic blobber Aeon Of Sands, due out early next month, one of the most brilliant pieces of design I've seen in forever.

It wouldn't be a post-apocalypse without a diary piece. Cataclysm: Dark Days Ahead is an old-fashioned roguelike that drops you into a crumbling world full of grumpy walking corpses. These zombies may be represented by a shambling ‘Z’, in keeping with the game’s ASCII origins. But they can also be rendered in gooey sprite form for ASCII-phobes. This is a cleaner-looking version that makes grass look (a bit) like grass and cars look (a bit) like cars. It’s still perplexing to a new player like me, but I won’t let an antiquated bunch of keyboard shortcuts get in the way of a good apocalypse. Especially when that apocalypse includes a “skater boy” in the character selection screen.

Warning: Contains spoilers.

The first robot to be built in Japan, in 1929, was named Gakutensoku, meaning “learning from the laws of nature”. Its creator, biologist Makoto Nishimura, would later say of his mechanical progeny: “If one considers humans as the children of nature, artificial humans created by the hand of man are thus nature’s grandchildren.” The robot was unveiled at Emperor Hirohito’s ascension ceremony and later taken on tour. At one show was novelist Hiroshi Aramata, who wrote that when the machine shook its head it was “as if to express the agony of creation.”

To the android 9S , when we first meet him in Nier: Automata, such agony would be unthinkable.

It has become increasingly difficult to play games that aren’t about the end of the world. The apocalypse and its chaotic aftermath has grown into a collective obsession. We seem to have a cultural fascination, desire, perhaps even lust, to see things burn, violently breaking with the past. Even games that weren’t originally about living in the end times, like Minecraft, have been twisted into apocalyptic shapes.

Minecraft’s 2b2t server is notorious for its unprecedented levels of destruction (and for its offensiveness). It offers players a “neverending” sandbox that’s existed for almost five years, with “no rules”. That’s half a decade of Armageddon. This is gaming’s ultimate badlands, a fiery place of eternal apocalypse where the bombs are other people.

After our end of the world festivities, we at RPS have counted our living. I have wired Brendy's head into the workings of a fun retro robot, Alice O has presumably taken to the high seas like in Waterworld, and we are roasting Matt Cox's limbs for sustenance while he's on a press trip and can't complain about it. Break open the spam, because it's time for a Post-Apocalypse party! Thank goodness we prepared some more themed articles, just in case. We've always been optimistic types.

Elegy for a Dead World is what happens when a story starts too late. When no hero appears to defeat the evil aliens, to assassinate the corrupted president, to warn the world about the impending natural catastrophe. All that remains is silence, ruins, and a morbid curiosity to know how it all went down. The game lets you walk through the ruins of three different planets, but you can't interact with the environment in any way. Those worlds are already dead: no NPCs to rescue, no quests to complete, no monsters to kill. There’s nothing to do but write about what you see. You can go freeform, and write whatever (and whenever) you want. Or you can choose a starting prompt, and let the game fill the ruins with phrases to tweak and complete. After completing your tale, it gives you options to share it.  You can publish it within the game itself, or export it to a web page.

Or you could write it up for RPS, I guess.

I really really really like The Flame In The Flood. I am terrible at it, rarely reaching even the mid stage of the river, but I love it. The flood of the title is one that has swept through America, swelling the banks of a regular river until it’s a wide and treacherous one. Only small islands of safety are left - an old fish bait shop, a homestead, a patch of wilderness - and they’re not even always safe. Sometimes there’s a big angry boar or a starving wolf.

The flame is you. And your little dog.