Alice Bee

Mayors in RPG games are rarely given the spotlight. They're mostly just there to give you an early quest involving goat banditry or windmill rats or some such other domestic drudgery. Or, in the case of Tristram’s mayor in Diablo, to fret behind the scenes about how to properly fit considerable cathedral repairs into this month’s budget. Well, no more must this valuable civil servant hide behind balance sheets, occasionally popping out to cut a big ribbon in celebration of a nearby mausoleum being turned into a Wetherspoons. Tristam is a 72 hour Ludum Dare project where you play as said town’s mayor. And this time: It’s ceremonial!

Today is Tuesday, statistically the day of the week least rife with wacky hijinks, whimsical calamity, or even, dare I say, madcap antics. However, if you want to buck tradition, you could do worse than playing What the Car?, the upcoming absurdist physics game from What the Golf? and What the Bat? devs Triband. You can do it right now, actually. It’s just gotten a free demo on Steam, alongside a proper release date of September 5th 2024. Don’t do it if you’re actually driving, though. That’d be lunacy. We only promote the fun kind of lunacy here, like the type shown off in What the Car?’s trailer at the Triple-i initiative.

Look up to the skyline, and tell me what you see. It is me, standing on a hill, uttering firmly with my dying breath: Mass Effect: Andromeda was pretty good. For anyone currently gathered around the hill, searching the pockets of their N7 hoodies for more heavy objects to fling at me, however, here’s some good news: the as-yet unnamed Mass Effect 5 is in the capable hands of “trilogy vets”, according to project director Michael Gamble, via Le Epic Musk Zone (OP didn’t steal), formerly Twitter. The team heading up the space game franchise’s next entry comprises of veterans of the first three games in various leading roles, namely: Art Director, Game Director, Creative Director, and Executive Producer.

Microsoft have confirmed the waves of games coming to Game Pass in late March and early April, headlined by the expected addition of Diablo IV. This is the first Activision Blizzard game coming to Game Pass since Microsoft's ridiculous $69 billion acquisition, with more due to follow. Beyond that, look forward to games including mech-riding farming game Lightyear Frontier and the colossal alien invasion strategy game from the XCOM Long War team, Terra Invicta.

Having launched out of almost five years of early access last week and quickly become one of Steam's current most-played games, fantasy action-RPG Last Epoch has laid out initial plans for post-1.0. Expect bug fixes and quality-of-live improvements soon, then new challenging fights later. The developers, Eleventh Hour Games say they're "going to have a heavy emphasis on expanding end-game content". But first, yes, more fixes and improvements to the servers which suffered and stumbled.

Hello folks. With the end of February fast approaching, here's a reminder that we'll be diving into our reader liveblog discussion for February's RPS Game Club pick, Cobalt Core, this coming Thursday, February 29th, at 4pm GMT (which is 8am PT / 11am ET for our American friends). Looking forward to seeing you there!

Just when you thought it was safe to go back in the water, Microsoft are bringing Maneater back to Game Pass. Yesterday they unveiled the next batches of Game Pass additions and two are returnees, with the delightful fighty platformer Indivisible accompanying brutal shark 'em up Maneater. What's more important is that it's adding the game with the cutest little Nurglings, grimdark retro-styled FPS Warhammer 40,000: Boltgun. The rhetoric of 'purging xenos and heretics' surely doesn't apply to these darling babies. Read on for all the games coming to (and going from) Game Pass over the next few weeks.

Today I'm just tickled pink seeing an excellent Deus Ex cosplayer fully step into the role of JC Denton, funny walk and weird talk and all. Seeing as you voted the seminal immersive sim your seventh-favourite RPG of all time, I thought you might like to see it too. It's very good.

Four months after the troubled launch of Payday 3, developers Starbreeze have announced they've formed a "strike team of veteran developers" with the goal of bringing it "up to where it will meet your expectations". The cooperative heist FPS got off to a right bumpy start when the ever-unpopular decision to only be playable if you're online collided with server issues that saw Starbreeze take the game down for a while. Since then, it has failed to rise above 'Mixed' review rating on Steam, not helped by Starbreeze releasing a £15 DLC pack when many players were unhappy with the game they'd just bought for £35.

Xbox have revealed their first haul of games headed to PC Game Pass in 2024, and there are some corkers. Among the selection is one of - if not the - best horror games ever made, a whopping Assassin’s Creed that ranks as one of the better entries in the series and some other interesting picks, too. Let’s get stuck in.

Finji, the publishers behind Tunic and Night In The Woods, have revealed their next internal development project at tonight's Game Awards. Usual June is a new action adventure game where you play as the eponymous June, a college student who happens to be able to talk to ghosts. Hang on a second, has someone been reading Alice Bee's very good book? Sounds quite familiar if you ask me. Come and watch the reveal trailer.

As the end of October approaches, it's time to gather in the RPS Game Club space port to talk about this month's game pick: Starfield! We'll be assembling in our traditional liveblog format on Friday November 3rd at 4pm GMT (9am PT/12pm ET) to chat about our intergalactic adventures, catalogue all the grey rocks we've landed on, and generally have an earnest (and hopefully fun!) chinwag about Bethesda's latest. So come along with your favourite biscuits and beverages as we discuss all things Starfield.

If Starbreeze themselves were actually a Payday 3 heisting team I suspect they'd be verging on putting money back into the vault at this stage - retracing their steps with bulging duffel bags, while apologising to security guards not so much for the whole bank robbery thing as for smashing so many utilities on their way out. Shortly after announcing plans to make the four-player PvE shooter less online-dependent, the developers have announced that they're also reworking Payday 3's much-reviled progression system.

A new month means a new RPS Game Club pick, and since a lot of us are still playing Bethesda's epic space RPG, albeit to varying degrees of success, I thought I'd anoint Starfield as our selection for October. And yes, that will probably mean more creepy dad adventures are in the offing. Apologies in advance.

With release just a couple of weeks away on 13th October, Lords of the Fallen has a new gameplay overview trailer. It's a dripping, cheesily VO-d cinematic layer cake of gore and gristle that introduces you to the game's god-blighted fantasy world and the many different ways you'll expire within it - from having a boss inconsiderately drop a load of golden swords on you, to getting mobbed by underworld spooks according to an escalating "dread" level, which is sort of GTA's old heat system but with more Grim Reapers.

Like most people, I had assumed EA shut down Anthem soon after dashing BioWare's hopes to overhaul and revive the sci-fi looter-shooter. I was surprised to see Anthem on Game Pass while poking around checking out space games which are not Starfield. It did shut down, didn't it? Surely it did. So why's it on Game Pass? If an 80GB download is the price I pay for a ha-ha-hilarious joke post where I review a spinning loading ball or server error message, so be it. Let's go. Wait. Hang on. I'm playing this. This is a game. This is still a game!

You may have read that always-online crime caper Payday 3 has had a disastrous launch, with players forced into long queues for the privilege of playing by themselves. The chaos continues this week, as developer Starbreeze has now elected to take the game wholly offline for several hours at a time across Tuesday 26th and Friday 28th September, while exploring ways to minimise the game's reliance on internet access.

There are many unsightly euphemisms for the various stages of game development. My favourite used to be "sunsetting", aka cancelling a live service game, aka "we dragged the servers outside and smashed them with bats, gangland style". But now there's a new front-runner, "simmering". You know what's simmering? Quantic Dream's Star Wars: Eclipse, that's what. "Can I say it still exists? Because it exists," the developer's Lisa Pendse has revealed in a new interview from this year's Tokyo Game Show. "It's just not ready. It's simmering." Hmm.

Alan Wake 2 outfit Remedy Entertainment have "always" felt pressured to make their games longer, creative director Sam Lake has observed in a new interview which also picks apart the differences between the forthcoming midwestern spookalot, out this October, and the 2010 original. Lake added that, Remedy's sense of audience expectations notwithstanding, he himself has difficulty setting aside hours for longer games. "[It's] just struggling with finding time and you know, being interested in a story, wanting to see it through," he said. "So it can even be daunting at times to start playing a game that you know is really, really long."

Developer Galaxy Grove have announced that the minimalist railway game Station To Station is wheeling to release on October 3rd. That’s an already packed month for exciting games, but I’ll forgive this one based on how damned good those voxels look. Plus, a relaxing railway management game might be the perfect antidote for Big Game Burnout in the coming months.

Whenever my eyes see the phrase “it's like Stardew Valley, but…” sparks pop off in my brain, imagining futures farming in the zombie apocalypse or courting my favourite pixel caveman. The next one of those instead focuses on the game’s lovely fishing mini-game and is basically Stardew Valley but Wordle, the other bite-sized juggernaut that’s inspired countless others.

As with Half-Life 2 RTX, Nvidia have taken to Gamescom to make a heap of DLSS announcements. Chief among these is an upcoming new version, DLSS 3.5, which will add to DLSS 3’s existing toolkit of upscaling and AI frame generation with a new trick named Ray Reconstruction. And it sounds pretty clever, if currently limited in application.

In an attempt to appease the UK’s Competition And Markets Authority (CMA), Microsoft have restructured their proposed Activision Blizzard buyout. Should the deal finally close, cloud streaming rights to existing and future Activision Blizzard games released over the next 15 years will (surprisingly) fall under Ubisoft’s control. Those rights will then stay with Ubisoft “in perpetuity.”

The Sims 4 has long dominated the life simulation arena, but a pair of hopeful rivals are soon stepping into the ring to challenge the undisputed champ. Life By You and Paralives both have grand plans to unseat (or at least share it with) EA’s life sim juggernaut, and they both promise to set themselves apart with features that Simmers have long been asking for. But I only have one question for both of them: can I kill my Sims? Or Parafolk? Or… Lifers? In the case of Paralives, the answer is thankfully a big fat yes.

Striking Distance, the studio behind last year’s alien horror stomp ‘em up The Callisto Protocol, have suffered layoffs affecting 32 employees in what their publisher calls an effort to “realign the studio’s priorities to better position its current and future projects.”

The Saints Row reboot received quite a cold reception when it came out last year, with our Alice Bee calling it fun but ultimately confused in her review. Now, developers Volition are closing out their post-launch plans for the game with an extensive update, a third paid expansion, and a Steam release. All coming this month.

Thief-but-with-guns game Gloomwood continues its early access crawl with today’s update, adding a delightful market district to the game. You can get your hair cut, buy a new outfit or two, and generally have a nice time. There definitely won’t be any murder or dangerous reasons to skulk through the shadows. And that dog? He doesn't bite, honest. Take a look at the bustling shopping centre below.