The best PC games ever Best PC games of 2018 Best graphics card 2019 Best free games Dota Underlords strategy guide Teamfight Tactics guide
Feature: Get out of my dreams and into my car
Hitchhiker has left me in a small pickle. Alec already reviewed it over a year ago, when the first drive came out as a Humble Original. That drive is the bit I’ve played too. But I did really enjoy playing it, and got a small glimpse of where the game is going, and I’ve found I want to remind everyone it exists as a result.…
Feature: Oakmont, so good they named it once
How The Sinking City is built to make you notice your journey
I sometimes announce, to rooms at large, that I wished Assassin’s Creed Odyssey wouldn’t tell me what to do as much, and let me just explore. Imagine my shock, therefore, at the reveal of The Sinking City, a Lovecraftian detective game releasing just the other side of E3, promising “zero hand holding”. No objective markers on the map, and no trails on the street to…
Feature: Season of the witch
The Noita devs on how to make a fun game when everything is falling
Noita is a very giffable game. The official Twitter account for developer Nolla Games has a lot of cool gifs. Explosions. Acid. Ice. Rats. Noita is that game where every pixel in the word is animated. You can explode, burn, melt everything you see, as a little witchy character exploring a procedurally generated dungeon. I was sitting around a laptop on the floor with the…
Feature: Gotta lotta letters
Letters – A Written Adventure shapes the world with words and I liked playing it a lot
Letters - A Written Adventure is, say the developers, "a heart warming coming of age story about finding the right words." It's part puzzle game, part adventure game, part platformer, but all words. I got to play an early demo of it, and talk to the devs, and it made me think about the joy of writing a letter -- of physically putting pen to…
Feature: Eat, play, shoot
Four offbeat ideas from GDC’s Experimental Gameplay Workshop
The Experimental Gameplay Workshop is an annual showcase of the most interesting and outlandish ideas in game design, presented at the end of the Game Developers Conference every year. This year that included everything from an adaptation of an Eminem video to a game that's trying to trick you into quitting. Here are some of the highlights:
Feature: You may be seated
If you haven't heard of Alt.Ctrl.GDC, oh my gosh, are you in for a treat. Not the treat of actually going, because this happened two weeks ago in San Francisco. The treat of hearing about all the weird and wonderful games with alternative control schemes, including the Indiana Jones escape experience pictured above. There was also coal-powered train racing (with actual shovels), demonic couch co-op…
Feature: The 7th annual chat in the sun
GDC, or the Games Developers Conference, has a secret. Except it's not a secret, and it's not actually part of GDC. Every year, a group of people gather in a nearby park for Lost Levels. A book is passed around, and every gatherer is invited to jot their name down if they fancy it. When their name gets called, that person leads a five-minute talk…
Feature: Like evolution, only faster
Sing to a garden and make friends with happy jelly beans in Mutazione
It was explained to me that Mutazione is a difficult game to play on a loud and busy show floor. At conventions and trade shows, someone might notice a free demo station, pick up the controls, noodle around for a few minutes, and then run off because they only have half an hour in which to snarf down an overpriced sandwich. But Mutazione is quiet,…
Feature: No Man's Planet
Journey To The Savage Planet is cute, colourful, and a little bit evil
There is an alien bird in front of me, and it is adorable. It’s all pupils and cuteness, a squeaking, big-eyed blob snuffling happily away at my feet. Or rather at the feet of Alex Hutchinson. He's the creative director of Journey To The Savage Planet, and he's guiding me through his new studio's "optimistic and colourful" sci-fi exploration game. It's about finding a new…
Feature: Malady loves company
Divinity: Fallen Heroes is sort of XCOM for Divinity: Original Sin 2, but doesn’t have its guns yet
“Hot diggity daffodil,” says I, reading a GDC email two weeks ago. “A ‘new and unannounced Divinity: Original Sin 2 title’, what a day!” Eagle eyed readers will have already spotted that the email did not in fact say ‘hot new in-depth RPG Divinity: Original Sin 3 revealed’, and Divinity: Fallen Heroes is indeed not that. I got a hands on with an early alpha…
Feature: Let's get weird
Control is a delightfully strange shooter with outstanding telekinesis noises
The sphere is loose. A spiky black void, jittering between realities as it loafs towards me like a murderous billiard ball from a higher dimension. It's one of many paranormal horrors to break out of the Bureau’s containment, and I do not like it one bit. Except I do, because weird balls and their ilk are the main reason I’m excited about Control. Those, and…
Feature: But not why they didn't make the moon a big wheel of cheese
At GDC this week, Prey's lead level designer Rich Wilson explained why their team decided to change the immersive sim formula for its Mooncrash DLC. Mooncrash is a fascinating artefact: it blends the immersive first-person exploration and triple-A production values of its parent game with experimental, permadeath, randomised elements pulled from roguelikes. It's a marriage that could not be more targeted to my personal tastes,…
Feature: The show goes on
“It’s not Citadel Station as it was, but as you remember it”. So goes the pitch for Nightdive's System Shock remake, but to me the early demo I played at GDC was neither. I’ve tiptoed my way through the mutant-infested corridors of its sequel, but the original System Shock always lay beyond an impenetrable wall of 90s design sensibilities. I need mouselook, me. I’ve got…
Denuvo, the folks behind the much-maligned DRM-strengthening software Denuvo Anti-Tamper, intend to block more shenanigans. On Wednesday they announced Denuvo Anti-Cheat, a new doodad for developers to tie into their games to bust cheats. They say it partially uses machine learning to detect cheaty behaviour--a trick used by others, including by Valve in Counter-Strike: Global Offensive--but don't say much about its efficacy or any developers…
Feature: "This is the sequel you have been waiting for"
Vampire: The Masquerade – Bloodlines 2 is happening! It’s real!
Imagine, dear reader, my delight upon learning that Vampire: The Masquerade - Bloodlines 2, a game about which I have said “...but it’ll never happen” several times, is, in fact, happening. More than that, I have seen, hands off, the first half an hour of it and have spoken to senior writer Cara Ellison (late of this RPS parish), as well as Hardsuit Labs co-founder…
Continuing to copy the tastes of RPS, the Independent Games Festival Awards last night awarded Return Of The Obra Dinn the Seumas McNally Grand Prize during the Game Developers Conference, with a cheeky Excellent In Narrative award on the side too. We declared it our favourite game of 2018 so, y'know, good on ya Ian GF. Correct decision. The other prizes were won by Mirror…
Oculus Rift S isn’t the Rift 2, but no external sensors is a big thumbs up
The hardware news just keeps coming from GDC this week, with today's big headline courtesy of Oculus. They've just announced the Rift S, a new VR headset for PC that has a higher resolution display and built-in tracking to make it even easier to jump into your favourite VR games - and they've partnered with Lenovo to build it.
The Outer Worlds, Control, The Sinking City and others go Epic exclusive
Epic Games are getting serious about going head-to-head with Valve with their store, and have the war-chest to prove it. They've just announced a slew of exclusives, including Obsidian's highly anticipated The Outer Worlds, and Remedy's upcoming horror shooter Control. Frogwares's cthulhoid detective mystery The Sinking City will be making its debut on the upstart storefront too. This is on top of Epic's surprise announcement…
Heavy Rain, Beyond: Two Souls, and Detroit: Become Human coming to PC via Epic
You all called me paranoid, said David Cage wouldn't dare, insisted it would never happen, that the "threat" I spoke of was a joke, but it's true: Quantic Dream are bringing more games to PC, starting with 2010's Heavy Rain, 2013's Beyond: Two Souls and 2018's Detroit: Become Human. After years of PlayStation exclusivity, the Indigo Prophecy studio been lured back by Epic Games Store…
Google Stadia promises instant cloud gaming from your Chrome browser
Google have finally lifted the lid on their cloud gaming platform, Google Stadia. Promising instant access to massive games including Assassin's Creed Odyssey and Doom Eternal simply by clicking a link in your Chrome browser, Google Stadia aims to make download times and hardware upgrades (and apparently my job) a thing of the past when it launches later this year. Here's everything we know so…
Page 1 of 2
Older posts