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Feature: I am not a number
In one of the dark, combative corners of my mind there's been a post brewing for years now about how levels are wrong and bad and hold back far too many RPGs. It wasn't really until playing Wildermyth that I could put forward a strong enough game to prove it, though. I've played a lot of it over the last couple of months. I remember…
Feature: It's my party and I'll die if I want to
It's good to know that the rest of RPS will play anything if I call them "cowards" enough. Kicking off 2020 with a strong start, the game we Can't Stop Playing this January is Wildermyth. Three farmers defend their village from invading monsters. They go on to travel the land, looking for the source of the invasion. It's difficult not to boil it down to…
Feature: Chillin' out maxin' relaxin' all Cal
A guide to enjoying Star Wars Jedi: Fallen Order when the game isn’t being very enjoyable
Writing guides about a game usually means playing a rather disgusting number of hours of said game every day, until the sight of it compels you to dry-heave over a keyboard whose WASD keys have long since worn away. I remember, for example, a point where I realised that Star Wars Jedi: Fallen Order had been out for 100 hours, and I'd spent 60 of…
Feature: Only a list deals in absolutes
The 5 best and worst things about Star Wars Jedi: Fallen Order
The Star War is the only thing I have been playing outside of work for weeks now. I am becoming intimately familiar with its workings: the push and pull combat, and also of the Force Push and Force Pull powers. It is a brilliant game that I love, but that I also find full of contradictions. Here are my five best and worst things about…
Feature: Forceful fun
Let's not pretend that Star Wars isn't good. Answer me this: if Star Wars isn't good, how come they got away with having BB-8 branded oranges?? Less reliably good are the official Star Wars video games. Despite throwing out some absolute bangers in the LucasArts days, or stone cold classics like Knights Of The Old Republic giving us big Force energy, the more recent quality…
Feature: It isn't too late.
In the yard below, a corpse hangs from a pine tree. It is my failure and my shame for all to see, rotting in plain sight. Martainaise, the broken-down home of Disco Elysium’s broken-down police story, is an excoriating light shone not just upon its broken-down policeman, but also upon me, and my failure to be the person I thought I was. It is my…
Feature: Speedy resolution
How to deal with Disco Elysium’s twelve-year-old drug addict
The first proper obstacle in amnesiac police RPG Disco Elysium, if you don’t count your ceiling fan, is a small child who has taken a lot of speed. He stands outside your hotel, chucking stones at your corpse. Your case’s corpse. The one you need to investigate. This won’t do.
Feature: They can survive almost anything
Let me tell you about my cockroach obsession in Disco Elysium
So Disco Elysium is an RPG, yes? And you have to solve a murder, because you're a cop. Except you also can't remember anything whatsoever, including your own name or where you badge and gun are (how are you supposed to hand them over to your chief when you break the rules to get results??) or even, initially, that you're a cop. This creates the…
Feature: Lukewarm takes incoming
Don't come any closer, pal. I've got a gun. Oh wait, maybe I don't, because I pawned it when I was extremely drunk, and I didn't do a deal with the corrupt union boss to get it back. Oh dear, now a voice in my head that says it's Electrochemistry is trying to convince me to get drunk. I must be in bleak but lovely…
Feature: Let us play
Castle Shotgun has been ringing with the sound of spells, explosions, and squelching purple monsters thank to the chaotic mountain-delving nightmare that is Noita It is, of course, a game that we Can't Stop Playing this month. It's also a roguelike. You get one save, and once you're dead, that's it and you start again from the beginning with a new level. Well, you do.…
Feature: Burn it all down
Noita is a big firework show, where the fireworks are heaps of gunpowder, exploding barrels of acid. The acid turns into steam in the heat of the blast and rises to condense on the cold cave roof, eventually falling back down as acid rain. Argh. This is a very dangerous firework show. In this roguelike spellslinger where you play as a flying witch, every pixel…
Feature: Life and death advice
Noita rewards you for being reckless, so set everything on fire
Noita is a game about searching for a good death. This is the conclusion I've come to after two weeks of playing it each day. I try and I die and I try again, and when I stop for the evening, it's not because I've reached further than ever before. It's because I have crafted a suitably satisfactory demise.
Feature: Successful experiments
From falling sand to Falling Everything: the simulation games that inspired Noita
"Ants. Cover them in ants." The RPS treehouse is gathered around my screen, where several dozen stickmen are currently duking it out in a blank 2D void. This is not nearly violent enough for Sin, who has seen the Ant button. I obligingly sweep my mouse across the screen, summoning a haze of insects. Some of the stickmen jump into them, and get stuck there.…
Feature: Die and retry
Noita might have come from an alternate universe: one in which we harnessed the forward progress of computer power not to render 3D polygons and open worlds, but to apply greater degrees of simulation to the pixels of a Lemmings or Worms-style 2D world. It's a roguelike in which 'every pixel is simulated', which in reality means that wood burns one pixel at a time,…
Feature: The important thing is we all liked it
Alice Bee: Hello Brendy and Nate! We're here to discuss what we ultimately think of Wilmot's Warehouse, our Can't Stop Playing for the month of September. Next week we will choose a brand new game, so as a final tribute we are here to deliver an RPS Verdict for the sweet organise-a-warehouse 'em up that is Wilmot. We'd been planning to do this verdict chat…
Feature: The absurdity of work
Clowns, dog food and Christmas Miracles: the secret history of Wilmot’s Warehouse
You might not be surprised to learn that Wilmot’s Warehouse, the charming object-categorisation game we’ve been banging on about this month, was inspired by (wait for it) working in a warehouse. Co-creator Richard Hogg worked in warehouses for Asda and Boots in his teens, before moving on to work for a film stills library after graduating. “I loved that job,” he recalls, wistfully. “In fact,…
Feature: Listen now and sort yourself out
You are handed a box. Inside, another hour of ceaseless chatter from three folks on the RPS podcast, the Electronic Wireless Show. Oh no, where re you supposed to put this? Maybe it should go next to the knives in the "dangerous items" pile. Or you could store it beside the tennis rackets in "hobby equipment". Oh hell, let's just make a whole new…
Feature: Unboxing the message
Wilmot’s Warehouse’s motivational posters are a deadpan anti-reward
Could you pass me that block of cheese? No, the other one, the blue one. No, that's a slice of cake. The chee-- oh, for heaven's sake, I'll get it myself. Honestly, you shouldn't be playing sorting simulator Wilmot's Warehouse with an attitude like that. You're clearly not enthusiastic about the minimalist pile 'em up we can't stop playing. Maybe a few of its motivational…
Feature: This is your brain on Wilmot
For the first three and a half billion years of its history, life on earth was fairly dull. It was, essentially, a load of little blobs mucking around in a great big sea. But then, five hundred million years ago, the Cambrian Explosion happened. Despite its name, it was not a sick wrestling move, but a sudden evolutionary riot, in which life diversified into a…
Feature: Reader beware, you're in for a ware(house)
Time, once again, to reveal our Can't Stop Playing for this month. The announcement is coming a bit late because we had some trouble deciding for September, but then we looked at what we'd been writing about and, shockingly, playing, and there was really only one option. Who could have thought that pushing boxes around a black room would have us so completely in its…
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