The Maw: what's new in PC games this week?
Festive wind-down edition
Live
Seasons greetings, reader! It's almost time to hang your stocking by the crackling fireplace and post your handwritten letters to Santa up the chimney. If you don't have stockings, a fireplace, or a pen, rest easy. I've had a word with Santa's elves, and they say it's permissible to hang a trash bag by your George Foreman grill or local equivalent, and leave a comment on an RPS article instead. Wot you want for Wintermas, then? Extra trash bags? New George Foreman grill? Whatever it is, Santa will provide. If he doesn't, I'll feed him to the Maw.
There's not Much Ado this week, the final RPS working week of 2024, but I have a few last yuletide PC game bonbons for the banqueting table. On Monday 16th December, it's time to march up and down the streets of Neko Odyssey, photographing cats. Alternatively, get your teeth into Idle Colony, a powerfully sinister fruit-picking simulator. As for Thursday 19th December, let's recommend a VR game for a change. It's Alien: Rogue Incursion! I don't own a headset capable of rendering those xenomorphs, but it seems promising. And on Friday 20th December, settle down for the weekend with The Midnight Crimes, a hard-boiled point-and-clicker that whiffs of The Wolf Among Us.
It should be a quiet few days as we ready the Treehouse for hibernation. Nic's already vanished into the forests till new year aboard an Orc-drawn sleigh. I'm away Monday, as per the traditional pre-Xmas rite of using up leftover holiday allowance like I'm scraping carbonised potato out of a roasting tray. We'll be focusing on scheduling things to go live over the break, but I do have at least one feature I'd like to publish before Horace puts us into cryostasis. Find our last news liveblog of 2024 below - Merry This Week, all!
I can't think of a festive song for the outro, so instead, here's some old school punk rock from Patti Smith.
Friends, RPS is officially done for the year. We've got some stuff going up over the break, including the remaining advent calendars, our annual Selection Boxes, and a brace of features from Sin, but this is it for Mawposts and news articles until 2025.
It's been a rough year, between the layoffs and the stresses of the ZD acquisition, but it's been a blast to write for you all. Somebody recently observed in a shadowy corner of social media that RPS comments threads are the most sacred places on the internet, and I heartily agree. I wish you all the best for the rest of December.
Hooded Horse are doing a publisher sale on Steam. The steal is probably Old World for 75% off. Here's a snippet from Steve Hogarty's early access review from 2020: "It’s a story engine as much as it’s a strategy game, one that revels in the playful details of the past, and represents history’s ancient rulers not as the pompous set of weirdos we’re all familiar with, but as capricious drunks, disastrous idiots and beautiful freaks with monkey butlers."
Hot Wax is a sensuous riff on Tetris from PUNKCAKE Délicieux. The tetronimoes are candles: to remove them from the board, you must drop a flame onto each candle's wick to burn it away over time.
A quick video tour of World Of Warcraft's forthcoming Undermine update, which adds an underground goblin city.
THE HOLLY AND THE FRIDAY
It's the last RPS working day of the year! The Maw is looking very rosy-cheeked this morning. Don't ask which cheeks. One last time - FEED IT.For the pen-and-paper gamers, here's a brand new Tiny Tome of single-page A5 RPGs to regale your banqueting guests with over New Year. I own the first one and it's a lovely thing. I recommend buying the physical incarnation.
Tower Of Mask seems a promising first-person dungeon RPG, with some nicely unnerving monster designs and a lot of hidden traps.
Begone Beast is like Little Nightmares meets Overcooked. Control one of four flashlight-wielding toddlers searching shadowy maps for bogeyfolk of various kinds. Includes an all-important SCREAMING function.
After much speculation about an acquisition, Sony have announced "a strategic alliance" with Kadokawa Corporation, parent company of FromSoftware. They're now Kadokawa's largest shareholder. The two companies are looking at various forms of collaboration and "potential joint investments", such as making live action films and TV based on Kadokawa's intellectual property.
The active and efficient Chris Tapsell has an interview at Eurogamer about The Witcher 4, which focuses on the choice of Ciri as a protagonist and how that fits in to Witcher booklore.
HARK THE HERALD THURSDAYS SING
The beast has manifested under the mistletoe! No, don't kiss it - FEED IT.Arrowhead have announced the first Helldivers 2 crossover - they're bringing back Sony and Guerrilla's Killzone series.
Roman city builder Citadelum has received a free DLC campaign in which you sally up to northern Britannia to teach those Caledonian tribes a jolly good lesson. We missed this game when it launched in October - community response seems positive, and it's got some fetching cutaway buildings. Also, giant god avatars strutting about like they own the place.
Here's the first proper gameplay trailer for Exodus, Archetype's Mass Effecty space RPG shooter.
GOOD KING WEDNESDAY
More yule logs for the Festal Engine! Ready the tinsel harpoons! FEED THE MAW.Here's a free floating island creation tool for Bossa's Lost Skies - you can sculpt the geography and fill it with traps, treasures and Lore. I wasn't particularly anticipating Lost Skies, but I do like floating islands.
"Almost great survival horror game" Hollowbody has received a comprehensive update that adds a third-person mode with its own set of moody camera transitions, among other things.
I had missed that there's a Porsche spaceship in Naughty Dog's upcoming new game Intergalactic. Where is my third-hand Reliant Robin, Naughty Dog? Where's my space jalopy?
Here's David Murrieta and Chris Redfearn-Murray's latest round-up the year's best video game music. I always pick up an earworm or two from their recommendations.
Borderlands 4 will have less "toilet humour", according to narrative director Sam Winkler. Specifically, it won't have a skibidi reference and no, there isn't a gun called Hawk 2A. That still leaves a lot of Dank Memes that could potentially make the cut. Tread cautiously.
Toy Box, released earlier this month, is a "pull apart puzzle visual novel" in which you disassemble toys. "At the end of their shelf life, it’s up to clever inspectors like you to decide which of the Maker’s creations are worth salvaging," explains the blurb, non-menacingly.
A Number From The Ghost is a collection of interactive music videos, playable in a browser. I've just tried "Atomize", and it's like a blissed-out walking simulator. Thanks to game designer Natalie Lawhead for circulating it on Mastodon.
ONCE IN ROYAL TUESDAY'S CITY
Come in! And know me better, man! FEED THE MAW.The Balatro developer is annoyed that PEGI (the European organisation that decides age ratings) has rated the card game for players of 18+ years. They've done this because it teaches "skills and knowledge that are used in poker".
"Since PEGI gave us an 18+ rating for having evil playing cards maybe I should add microtransactions/loot boxes/real gambling to lower that rating to 3+ like EA sports FC," joked the game's creator.
Capcom is "focusing on re-activating dormant IPs" according to a press release intended for investors. Basically this is Capcom hyping the recently announced Okami 2 and Onimusha: Way Of The Sword, but it also gives further hope to anyone praying for a Dino Crisis reboot or remake.
DING DONG MERRILY ON MONDAY
One last fattening of the Maw before the snows claim us. FEED IT- but in a laidback way. There's unlikely to be much New this week. As for me, I'll talk to you properly tomorrow.