The best PC games ever The best PC games of 2018 so far Best graphics card 2018 Best free games Rainbow Six Siege operators guide Monster Hunter: World guide
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…
Feature: One cool customer
HP Omen’s ear-cooling Mindframe headset is actually sort of brilliant
The HP Omen Mindframe headset is quite possibly the most bonkers piece of audio equipment I've ever seen. It's called MINDFRAME for a start, which is both brilliant and ridiculous in equal measure, but what really sets it apart from other headsets is pretty damn cool - as in literally cool thanks to its thermoelectric ear-cooling earcups. I'll admit I was a bit skeptical when…
Feature: In space, no one can hear you dream
At Gamescom I had a (hands off but up close and personal) preview of Shortest Trip to Earth, a roguelike space survival game that is due to go into Steam early access later this year. The team lead, Edvin Aedma, who also wrote RPS favourite Teleglitch, played, whilst I watched and made demands about what our crew should do next. I wondered why I couldn't…
Feature: Did you know octopuses have three hearts?
Lovecraftian preview Top Trumps: The Sinking City vs. Call of Cthulhu
Lovecraft seems to be the theme du jour at the moment. 2018 trends: pair tailored suits and details inspired by fetish wear with cosmic horror and old school '20s racism. I saw probably the two most prominent games inspired by Lovecraft at Gamescom, Frogwares' The Sinking City and Cyanide's Call of Cthulhu (though there were others, including a turn based, tactical affair called Stygian: Reign…
Feature: Birkin with convention
Resident Evil 2’s remake is like playing with a beloved and battered old toy
I was beaten to death by the bloke with the big eye. If you went through the zombie gauntlet of Resident Evil 2 back in 1998, you will recognise this large, gurgling sod. William Birkin is the zombified antagonist whose pharmaceutical experiments have turned Racoon City into a shambling shantytown. That’s fine. The same experiments also turned him into a bloke with a giant case…
Feature: And is very cross
Graham said that, generally, RPS staffers at Gamescom write up the most important game they saw each day, at the end of that day. Welp, it’s almost midnight and I’m writing about Ape Out. I played Ape Out on day one and I'm screaming at everybody about it being game of show, game of show, game of show. Here is the elevator pitch for Ape…
Feature: Bear with me, children
“Get lost or pay wit ur life,” says the note. Normally, I would not be threatened by such a poorly spelled message from – let me see – ah yes, the “Brezeren of the Coast”. After all, the note is written with the tone of a brat in a treehouse. That said, it was also delivered by a scarily accurate crossbow bolt, piercing the wooden…
Feature: Based on what we saw at Gamescom
It’s difficult to give a hugely meaningful preview based on hands-off footage, especially if that footage was all pre-recorded. What I can definitely tell you, if this will be any surprise, is that if you really liked or disliked Life Is Strange, you will probably have the same reaction to Life Is Strange 2 because it is Life Is Strange but more.
Page 1 of 27
Older posts