I used to email Brendan regularly trying to offer him freelance work, and he'd always be too busy with other jobs. Little by little we got him doing more and more for us, though - a weekly free games column called Free Loaders here, a weekly Premature Evaluation there, a monthly Ridealong, and plenty more besides. Eventually I looked at our list of freelance commissions…
Graham Smith
Valve are changing how your Steam library looks, and it's long overdue
Plus new tools for developers
9912 hours ago
1 week ago
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,…
1 month ago
Feature: Plus new tools for developers
Valve are changing how your Steam library looks, and it’s long overdue
Valve are introducing a set of long overdue new features to Steam over the next month. The first of these updates gives developers a new tool called Steam Events and will be released to developers today. New updates and additions to the Steam Labs experiments launched in July are due to follow tomorrow, and then sweeping changes to the software's game library launch into open…
Alexis Kennedy accused of abuse by multiple women, denies allegations
Alexis Kennedy, co-founder of Failbetter and writer and designer on Fallen London, Sunless Sea and Cultist Simulator, has been accused of being an abuser and "well-known predator" by several prominent women in the games industry, including an allegation from a former colleague at Failbetter. The allegations came as part of a recent wave of similar stories shared on Twitter, among them allegations made against composer…
2 months ago
Allegations of abuse have been made against multiple games industry figures in the past 24 hours. On Monday afternoon Nathalie Lawhead, developer of the IGF-winning Tetrageddon Games, wrote a post on her website alleging that Jeremy Soule, the composer of Skyrim, raped her while she was working for an unnamed Vancouver-based games studio. Seven hours later, comics writer and indie developer Zoë Quinn posted tweets…
3 months ago
Our video team is whole again! After an exhaustive search, we've hired the excellent Astrid Johnson to join Matthew and Alice L in making videos for the RPS YouTube channel. Come join me in welcoming her to the team!
Feature: Dead Cells meets Celeste
ScourgeBringer is a game that exists in your fingers. It's an action roguelite fidgetspinner about bish-bash-boshing across single screen levels of enemies. The protagonist Kyhra has a sword for slashing, a drone that can fire a blast of bullets, and a set of movements that feel sublime to control. I've been playing an early alpha ahead of an early access release planned for later this…
Feature: A game about death but not about killing
Spiritfarer is about death, but it’s how it treats life that makes it unusual
"We all die, everything dies, every living thing dies." Nicolas Guérin is reassuring me. He's the creative director at Thunder Lotus Games and they're working on Spiritfarer, announced at E3 2019 as a "cosy management game about dying." I need reassuring because I've played a 15-minute demo of Spiritfarer and I'm worried that a game that treats death lightly will make light of the suffering…
Elite Dangerous to get fleet carriers and new premium currency
Warframe wasn't the only game to have a fan event this weekend. July 5th-7th was also Lavecon, Elite Dangerous's smaller fan gathering. To coincide, Frontier revealed details of their coming September and December updates. The former is introducing a new premium currency and a revised start for new players, while a trailer showed the latter's fleet carrier ships for the first time.
This weekend was TennoCon, the annual Warframe fan event, and as is tradition Digital Extremes showed swathes of new updates coming to their free-to-play space ninja game. Matthew was there and has already written his impressions of Warframe Empyrean, which is adding spaceship combat to the game, but there were other announcements, reveals and releases. Those include: a new Warframe Prime release, a trailer for…
Mordhau dev statement clarifies ‘no plan’ for character filter, say artists “were ill-informed”
Mordhau developers Triternion have released an official statement responding to the claims they planned to introduce a toggle to hide women and non-white characters from their medieval murderfest. Those claims, I should say, were made by Triternion themselves, in an interview between two of the company's artists and PC Gamer. The official statement says that they never had plans for a toggle on non-white characters,…
4 months ago
"Would you like to write for RPS?" That was the subject line of the email I sent to Sin Vega on August 30th, 2014. After almost five years of intense contract negotiations, it has finally happened. Sin Vega is RPS's new staff writer.
Mordhau's developers Triternion have denied on Twitter that they ever "had plans to add a toggle to hide other ethnicities or 'disable characters that aren’t white'" in their hacky-stabby medieval multiplayer game. This is bold, given that they previously told PC Gamer explicitly that a plan to add such a toggle was their "current thinking." Let's unpick this mess.
There's a piece of paper by my desk that reads, "My work does not bring joy and is not so important for me and the people around me, but I cannot quit it. Otherwise, what will I eat?" Alright, Routine Feat, I know it's Monday but take it easy. This is the latest first-person prod-about by Alexandre "Sad3D" Ignatov, who earlier this year made Alice…
Feature: Tiny game, tiny price
1 Screen Platformer is a misnomer: the level might technically fit within 1920x1080 pixels, but the camera is zoomed in at all times. That means you never see the level as laid out above, with all the many deaths that await you on a single screen. Still, the idea is sound: a single level of tricky platforming challenges to be completed with 4 characters, each…
Feature: Katana Zero, My Friend Pedro nil
Katana Zero has the juiciest text boxes I've ever seen. During dialogue, words can imply the pace of speech by appearing letter-by-letter or thumping on screen one word at a time. Words and phrases can be highlighted in different colours, and can further suggest intonation by animating wavily or by each letter shaking as if terrified. When in conversation, there's a timer during every player…
Feature: Fails to attain Equilibrium
My Friend Pedro looks incredible in animated GIFs. That's how I first encountered it, via a short clip which showed a man in a mask, hanging upside down from a zipline while he fired twin pistols in opposite directions. Now that I've played this run-and-gun platformer for myself I can confirm that this is one of many spectacular moves it allows you to smoothly and…
Feature: Stop whooping at corporate acquisitions
Stop worrying about timed exclusives and worry more about games industry consolidation
On Sunday at E3 2019, Microsoft announced they had bought Double Fine. At last year's show, the tech giant announced they had bought Ninja Theory, Undead Labs, Playground Games and Compulsion Games, then added Obsidian and inXile in November. In the last 8 months, THQ Nordic has purchased Piranha Bytes, Bugbear Entertainment and Coffee Stain Studios, as well as the IP for TimeSplitters, Carmageddon, Outcast…
Forza Horizon 4 LEGO Speed Champions adds new world of blocks to last year’s best racing game
Forza Horizon 4 was fun, joyful and generous - one of our favourites of last year (scroll down) - and so this Lego DLC is in some senses the perfect colission. Forza Horizon 4 LEGO Speed Champions introduces a world of colourful blocks to the racing game, with Lego cars to drive and the same seasonal changes as the base game. It'll be out in…
5 months ago
Feature: BioShock: The Roguelite
If Gone Home is the answer to the question, "What if BioShock without guns?", then Void Bastards is the answer to the question, "What if BioShock without story?" On a series of post-disaster spaceships, each rendered in a slick comic book style, you fight or avoid grumpy mutants, circumvent security systems, hack turrets, and rummage through bins like yer da after that time he accidentally…
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