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Feature: Veni, videogame, vici
Imperator: Rome finds the difference between obstruction and intimidation
Bugger me, Paradox Interactive’s grand strategy games are a lot, right? If I could put that even more in bold, I would have fattened up like a sacrificial pig before god-appeasing slaughter, because they really are. My experience with Crusader Kings II, for example, mainly involved me staring at menus for half an hour then crushing half a pack of ibuprofen into a fine powder,…
Feature: I'm so sorry, GLaDOS
Playing Observation has made me question my treatment of rogue AIs
Whenever I ask Siri -- other virtual helpers are available -- to do something for me, I always say please and thank you. I tell people this is because I don’t want to get into the habit of barking orders at Siri, and thus people in real life. The actual reason is that I want Siri to think of me kindly when they gain sentience…
Feature: Apoc Epoch
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…
Feature: Lfg
For a WoW veteran, World of Warcraft: Classic is like coming home
When I was in my late twenties, I went back to visit the house I’d grown up in. It felt strange, walking into rooms filled with memories, where everything felt smaller, older. It wasn’t a bad house, but my view of it was compromised by all the other places I’d lived since. It was also the house where, on Christmas Eve 2005, I came home…
Feature: Pretty vacant
I am so torn by the huge stretch of Gris that I've played. Vastly more than we'd usually expect from a preview, given to us peculiarly close to its 13th December release. I've seen an awful lot of this enemy-less platformer, and yet I still can't tell whether it's beautiful enough to forgive all else, or just too dull to excuse.
Feature: Taking a Nova shot at it
‘You can’t just apply Eve onto an FPS’ – Hands on with Project Nova
“It’s the most hyper capitalistic place in the world.” I’m sitting at the Las Vegas Linq hotel bar with Snorri Árnason, game director of Project Nova, the sci-fi shooter spin-off of Eve Online. We’re here to talk about the tactical shooter he's showing off at Eve Vegas, a yearly gathering of spaceship scoundrels. But first, I have to know. Of all the places in the…
Feature: Armored Brigade inspected
Before the Su-17s showed up, the defence of Großenlüder was going like clockwork. Dug in behind wire and minefields, my Chieftains were dominating. Their poppy-brushing 120mm guns had barcoded the eastern horizon with pillars of black smoke. Nothing of Soviet manufacture had made it as far as the village, and nothing looked likely to. But then the napalm came. Tumbling canisters of molten lava delivered…
Feature: Choose your own adventure
Metro Exodus wants you to feel liberated from all those trips through the tunnels
It’s deathly quiet in the forest. Then the silence gives way to a man shouting for help. He's tied to a post and trying to fend off a ravenous wolf. A single crossbow bolt takes the feral creature out. The shirtless man pleads for my help to free him, cussing as he explains his predicament. I choose to cut him loose. “I owe you my…
Feature: Latin beats
Watching all of Imperator: Rome’s wars, trade deals and politicking play out is a lot like viewing a highlight reel of Paradox’s current generation of grand strategy epics. The upcoming strategy game has Crusader King 2’s detailed characters, Europa Universalis 4’s broad national scope, Victoria 2’s demographics and even Hearts of Iron 4’s wargame sensibilities, all transposed to the world of antiquity. It's the latter…
Feature: Suspending disbelief for another year
Football Manager 2019 preview: a meaningful step forward for the series
“When you’re working on annual iterative titles, it is difficult,” says Miles Jacobson, Studio Director at Sports Interactive. “You’re always going to get people turning around saying ‘you haven’t added anything.’ And no matter how much you add, you’re still going to get people saying that.” That’s the challenge that the Football Manager series faces every year. It remains, as it always will be, a…
Feature: The hands that threaten doom
3 Minutes to Midnight points and clicks but doesn’t hold your hand
3 Minutes to Midnight is not, as my brain keeps suggesting, a sequel to a classic Maiden track, but a point and click adventure game. I played it at EGX last weekend, because I really like PnCs, as we purists definitely call them (do not check that). Those old Lucasfilm/LucasArts ones like Day of the Tentacle and the Monkey Island series were some of the…
Feature: Walking a mile
A good writer should know when to deliver an old cliché or familiar idiom, and when to hold them back. They can give the reader a sense of comfort, a lifeline to cling to in a sea of unfamiliar or complex verbiage, or be the anchor that drags them down into boredom. I knew I was going to like Disco Elysium, because people I trust…
Feature: Leave those kids alone
The Book Ritual is a game about shredding a book, made by someone I was at school with
At EGX this year, I went in the Leftfield Collection and I saw a shredder. A paper shredder with a face, and a big pile of books next to it. And a big pile of shredded books underneath it, too. So I ambled over, eager to destroy some literature. It was, it turned out, The Book Ritual, currently free on Itch. The Book Ritual is…
Feature: Slave to the rhythm
I like puzzle games because they expose how our brains process the world differently from one another. I love words, but am terrible at anagrams. When I look at a cloud of letters I can’t process how they might fit together into a neat line again. Other people are the opposite, or are good at logic puzzles where you must conform to a specific set…
Feature: Could everyone please stop calling Matt a monster
Matt: After four days of hosting panels, interviewing developers, streaming games on camera and poking at as many as we could on the show floor, Team RPS has returned from the hallowed halls of EGX. Now that we’ve nestled back into our treehouse nooks, it’s time to talk about the best things wot we saw. So, Katharine, Dave and Alice 3.0. Which game won the…
Feature: Luck Dragon unconfirmed
The Endless Mission defies exact genre but you can change gravity in it
The Endless Mission is a game that is all games. Or none. It’s going to be annoying to write about, because when we put stuff on the website we have to tick a little box to associate the article with a genre, and the eventual plan for The Endless Mission is: all of them. For now it’s got platformer, RTS, and racer. It’s not that…
Feature: All work and some play
The Suicide of Rachel Foster asks “What if Firewatch, but also The Shining?”
Midway through totemic 80s skin-crawler The Shining there's a scene where Jack Nicholson's disheveled caretaker, scouring the Overlook Hotel for the antidote to writer's block, stumbles on a scale model of the hedge maze his wife and son are exploring outside. He glares down at it (Nicholson's eyebrows really deserve an Oscar apiece) and the film cuts to a slow zoom from above, showing us…
Feature: Duck, duck, pig
CTRL C XCOM: Enemy Unknown CTRL V XCOM: Enemy Unknown Mutant Year Zero: Road to Eden
Feature: Blobby blobby blobby
Oh no, the village bridge is broken. But that's okay, I'll ask for help from the spider in this tree. Come down mister spider, and help me fix the bridge. “Did you break it?” he asks. Yes, I say. I walked across the bridge – really just a piece of string – and it snapped. “Fix your own damn mess!” I consider his words carefully.…
Feature: Escaping the grind
There’s something about Mosaic. Maybe it‘s the dark colour palette, the poignant use of lighting or the low poly aesthetic of Krillbite Studio’s second game, but I’m transfixed. Krillbite’s first title, exploration horror Among the Sleep, was an unexpectedly big success, a… sleeper hit, if you will. Mosaic is supposed to be a departure in every way, but it retains a gloomy atmosphere that makes…
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