Rock Paper Shotgun News, Tips, Tricks, Ideas

It’s been barely a month since the reboot of horror classic Alone in the Dark arrived, but it looks like developers Pieces Interactive are now making a number of layoffs in the wake of its release.

The creators of Escape from Tarkov may be looking for their own escape at the moment, after enraging the extraction shooter’s community with a new top-tier edition of the game that’s come under fire for its extortionate cost, “pay-to-win” offerings and for U-turning on the promise of free DLC for buyers of a previous bundle.

Tucked away in the corner of this year's Day Of The Devs at GDC I discovered a lavish, strangely unattended action-RPG, in which austerely beautiful young women in elaborate skirts kick the bejazus out of each other on fields of whirling flowers. That game was Aikode, the work of Spanish solo developer Ace.

Historical strategy sim Manor Lords - which budding feudal despot Nic Reuben has deemed "a sturdy and immersive builder that feels incomplete yet alive with promise" - is now available on Steam, the Epic Games Store, Microsoft Store and GOG. It was Steam's most wishlisted game before launch, and it's so popular right now that Steam's servers are struggling to keep up: there's an official developer post on the game's Steam forum warning that "the store is overwhelmed from all the people buying, it may take a couple tries for a bit while things calm down".

Sometimes there’s a game that’s just a delight to write about, however you slice it. That’s how I feel about getting to tell you about Oyster Wars, a platforming game that melds the fluid movement of Celeste with the puzzle dungeons and hookshot traversal of Zelda. Oh, and top of that it’s about rebelling against capitalism via oyster farming - and it’s made by a real-life oyster farmer. Let’s get into this package of joys.

A collection of five Phoenix Wright games - including some of the greatest visual novels of all time, in my opinion - is about to be discontinued on Steam, making it slightly less convenient to pick up the original Ace Attorney trilogy and its recent prequel games. That’s the bad news. The good news is you’ve got a month’s notice - and it’s on sale for the next week or so.

Escape From Tarkov, the extraction FPS from developer Battlestate, recently put up a new Unheard edition of the game for pre-order, and tarkov escapers aren't happy about it. The price for this bundle - which includes a new mode, a bigger stash, and assorted gubbins - comes in at $250, or around two actual hundred actual pounds, but the price alone isn’t necessarily what’s got a section of the player base so tarked-off that a few of them are even loudly considering a lawsuit.

Left-handed Counter-Strike 2 players, time to raise that left hand in what could be interpreted as a celebration. In the game's latest update, Valve have added the ability to swap from the default right-handed viewmodel to a left-handed one. There's also an update to the buy menu, making it easier to track your bank account and grab weapons your mates have dropped. Alongside further UI improvements for grenade line-ups, and a tweak to the Active Duty map pool.

Eco-conscious village builder The Wandering Village sees you raising a settlement on the back of a huge wandering creature called Onbu. For the most part, you live in a symbiotic relationship with this gentle giant, as your villagers keep the gargantuan trundlesaur healthy while being ferried about on its back. Awww. Well, the wholesome city-builder now lets you feed villagers to the creature and start a cult in the great devourer's name. Okay. Why not?

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!

We haven't written much about Korean MMO ArcheAge since reviewing it nine years ago, and there won't be many future opportunities to write about it, either. Its developers have announced that its European and North American servers will shut down on June 27th.

Manor Lords is obviously this week's big survival-citybuilder game release, but I suspect Diluvian Winds is more my pace. It's a "relaxing management game" about building a town for anthropomorphic animals around the foot of a lighthouse, although exactly how relaxing will depend on your ability to prepare for tsunamis and other weather emergencies which can strike and destroy your buildings. It's out now.

People Can Fly, the developers of Bulletstorm and Outriders, have cancelled development of a co-op action RPG codenamed Project Dagger. The Polish company informed investors of the decision to cancel the game, which was initially to be published by Take-Two, earlier this month.

BlizzCon, Blizzard's annual get-together for fans of their games, was halted by the pandemic in 2020 and only returned as a physical event last year. One year later, it is cancelled again, Blizzard have announced.

I never expected to feel genuine affection for Dr Robotnik, whose various level-ending wrecking balls and spiked doodads have killed me a million times over, but here I am sobbing like a banshee over the release of Dr Robotnik's Ring Racers, a free Mario Kart-alike created by Kart Krew, the fangamer team behind Sonic Robo Blast 2 Kart, using the Doom Legacy source port.

The announcement trailer for Lost Legions opens with a Roman Emperor bellowing “GIVE ME BACK MY LEGIONS” like a kid who’s just had his pudding taken away. I'd just had a big swig of coffee before watching, and was instantly swept off by visions of an apoplectic Roman bigwig rampaging through the forests of darkest Germania, gluing abducted legionnaires together into a sort of Octavian katamari... and then they revealed that it’s another open world survival game, with no less than two trailer beats dedicated to the act of hacking down a tree.

Pine: A Story Of Loss, which stars a bereaved woodworker and thus may be a play on the double meaning of ‘pine’, is a gorgeously animated interactive fiction game that sees you performing farming chores and wordlessly reminiscing upon cherished memories. It’s short - designed to be played in a couple of sittings - and while the fiction is the focus here, you’ll spend time gardening and whittling in bespoke minigames as you find out more about the woodworker’s relationship. The publisher describes it thusly:

As genre mash-ups go, I didn't see this coming. But maybe I should have, knowing how once things like battle royales pop off, they will always spawn curious mutations. Inferni: Hope And Fear is one of these curiosities, being an online co-op, deckbuilding, battle royale, with a 90s theme.

Fallout 4's "next generation" update goes live today. Timed to capitalise on the Fallout TV show's mad popularity, it'll encumber the 2015-released open world wasteland RPG with widescreen and ultra-widescreen support, Creation Kit fixes, and a "variety of quest updates" across Steam, Microsoft Store and GOG. There will be new items for the Creation Club, including the Makeshift Weapon Pack, which lets you blast people with a piggy bank like Elon Musk, and a new quest, Echoes Of The Past, in which you try to "stop The Enclave from spreading their dangerous ideology and gaining a foothold in the Commonwealth".

Alien-infested submarine sim Barotrauma has received a chunky update, bringing two new-ish monsters into its lethal aquatic world. The shrimp-looking Mantis may be recognisable to veterans (it once appeared in pre-Steam builds). And the Viperling is a venomous variant of the existing Spineling (a thorny seaworm with hull-piercing porcupine-like spikes). But don't worry, the medical systems have also seen a "mini-rework", which means drugs like morphine are "less of a 'solution for everything'". Wait. What?

The closest I have come to having any interest in sport is when I got really into reading about football hooligans, or like, Blood Bowl, but I do absolutely recognise the romance of it all. SUDDEN DEATH is a delicious free slice of playable art-pie that celebrates that romance. It is - says dev Cécile, who co-made the project with Nat Pussy and MOTHER GOOSE for collective Domino Club - “a game about love and sports. it's gay, it's very australian, and it's great.” You can tell it’s Australian quickly, because people call chips ‘chippies’, which makes me chuffed.

As an Assassin's Creed girlie, I enjoyed Assassin's Creed Mirage, a pared down (but still big game, which is really just proof of how bloated AAA games have gotten, but I'll stop because it's not time to take my personal bugbear for a walk) Ass Creed game that was closer to the simplicity of the older games in the stab 'em up stealth-action series. Yesterday creative director Stéphane Boudon and art director Jeal-Luc Sala took to Reddit for an AMA, and in response to a question about plans for Mirage DLC, Boudon said no - but that they have ideas for more stories for Basim.

My experience with actual flight simulators typically amounts to approaching the runway far, far too quickly at far, far too perpendicular an angle, so perhaps I’m better off just flying folded-up bits of A4. Happily, that’s exactly what Paper Sky, a "semi-open world paper plane adventure" from solo indie dev Brute Force, is offering.

In a rare case of a wild Nintendo being spotted having somewhat of a point, actually, in regards to being protective over their IP, Facepunch announced yesterday that they’re removing all “Nintendo stuff” from Garry’s Mod’s Steam workshop, following takedown orders sent straight from ninty themselves.

I can feel some kind of sore throat bug coming on. It must be the baleful influence of Creative Assembly's latest free update for bellowing strategy bonanza Total War: Warhammer 3. Out 30th April, the update introduces Epidemius, Proctor of Pestilence - a new Nurgle Legendary Lord who gains rewards based on how many ickle diseases you’ve spread to other factions (already my favourite aspect of playing Nurgle in the game). Does Epidemius also get buffs if the player is infected by something? I hope so. It would be a consolation to know that my ailing trachea is contributing to the Nurgle cause.

The developers behind Fable card game spin-off Fable Fortune and the digital adaptation of dungeon-crawling board game Gloomhaven have revealed a new upcoming co-op RPG… only to announce at the same time that the upcoming game’s development has been put on pause amid layoffs at the studio and difficulty finding funding.

PlayerUnknown’s Battlegrounds - aka the game that inspired and then was overtaken by Fortnite’s Battle Royale mode - is seemingly borrowing a leaf from its cartoony cousin’s playbook by resurrecting its original map.

As a somewhat deflating example of the money-churning might of GTA Online becoming the sole focus of Rockstar’s Grand Theft Auto 5 efforts over the last decade, the actor who played Trevor in the ridiculously well-selling crime epic has teased some details of planned story DLC that would have turned the controversial protagonist into a James Bond-style spy. The pack supposedly got as far as shooting with the actors, only to end up cancelled and folded into a GTA Online heist.

Dark Souls, one of the most widely acclaimed video games of the last two decades - perhaps all time - and progenitor of one of modern video gaming’s most influential and oft-copied-rarely-bettered genres, the Soulslike, would’ve been a better game had it launched into early access. That’s the suggestion from the head of Ori and the Blind Forest developers Moon Studios in the wake of launching their own early access Soulslike, No Rest For The Wicked.

Armadillos, the grumpy pistachio nuts of the animal kingdom, have been added to Minecraft in a recent mob update. You can brush them to harvest "scutes", the boney armour plating of the animal's back, which you can then use to craft armour for pet wolves. Speaking of wolves, this update also sees an explosion in canine diversity, with eight varieties of the wolf now appearing across different biomes. Awoooooo!

"If only you could talk to these creatures" is never more funny or true than in games like Rotwood, where you play cat people and orcs sent to biff snail worms and flies with scythes. From Klei Entertainment, the gang behind Don't Starve, Invisible Inc. and Oxygen Not Included, to name but a three of their fine games, Rotwood is out later today in early access, ready to provide co-op highjinks in a roguelike dungeon crawl that is really a forest. A forest crawl. You'll get muddy knees.

Players that put more than two hours into pre-purchased or advanced access games will now be exempt from Steam's refund policy, says Steam, the maker of said policy and thus the final word on how it is implemented. As spotted by the Verge, this change is intended to combat a loophole where filthy time criminals could fill their stolen boots with ill-gotten fun pre-release, then get their money back.

Lords Of The Fallen, an action RPG that was a mixture of fun and infuriating when it first launched, has received its final free update. It introduces the "Advanced Game Modifier System", which sounds like something creepy bachelors would pay an extraordinary monthly fee for. No, it doesn't provide terrible advice on how to talk to women. Instead, it allows you to customise LOTF with modifiers to turn it into a roguelike.

Zenless Zone Zero is the next action-RPG from Genshin Impact developers HoYoverse. Where Genshin is all Zelda-style pastoral greens, Zenless is an urban fantasy. It's expected to release sometime in the first half of 2024, and you can now pre-register on all platforms.

Songs Of Conquest is a strategy-RPG with some of the most handsome pixel art around. Steam tells me I've played its Early Access release for 0.7 hours, which was long enough to know that I wanted to play more and would wait for version 1.0. I won't have to wait much longer. It's now got a May 20th release date.

Against The Storm's latest update adds a a River Kelpie, a "legendary water demon" that can mesmerise villagers in your rain-slick settlements. I've been mesmerised myself by another part of the update, however: the ability to zoom out 66% further than before.

Royale-battler Fortnite will soon allow players to hide a handful of emotes the developers concede are "sometimes used in confrontational ways". This includes the emote reported as the most-used in Fortnite's seven-year history. That's either a worrying indictment of the game's players, or a (more?) worrying indictment of universal human psychology. What is the offending animation? Well, turns out people don't like being laughed at.

Stand by for a missive from RPS corporate parent ReedPop. Transmission begins! Ah, it's about gaming events. So, Reedpop's EGX expo and MCM Comic Con are joining forces. They'll both take place side-by-side in the ExCel London this year, on 25th-27th October.

Nestled within a seemingly ho-hum patch for Horizon Forbidden West’s PC edition is a change I’ve been crossing fingers and ritualistically sacrificing metal dinosaurs for since release. At last I can behold those glorious words: "Resolved performance regression when enabling Nvidia Reflex On+Boost." Finally!

I'm the kind of awful person who looks at the background actors in TV shows and wonders what life is like for e.g. the old woman who sells birdfeed in Trafalgar Square in Mary Poppins when said upper-middle class domestic isn't singing about her. What fate the Warcraft grunt when he is too old to work work? It's probably pretty bad, right? Now let me slop Innkeep down in front of you like a big bowl of rat stew. Developer Daniel Burke furnished me with a little playable slice, and boy, Innkeep is a grim old time. I mean that as a compliment.

Afternoon, conveyor belt fans! Good news, I think I may have discovered the first genuinely cosy automation game. Attempts have been made at cosy automation and automated cosiness in the past – Satisfactory is on the sunnier side, providing you enable the right settings, and Shapez 2 has lots of rounded edges. But IDK, there’s something about the ravages of mass industry that doesn’t quite gel with zoomorphic raccoon baristas and other such wholesome trappings. Have you ever encountered a cuddly smokestack? How about a cuddly just-in-time network?

Sometimes, I hear critics describe something as ‘actively hostile’ to the act of playing it, but with something close to admiration in their voices. I've always felt that I, too, would like to one day find an artwork that I could describe in the same way. Partly because it sounds like an interesting experience, but mainly so I could steal that line and feel like one of those elite, urbanely perceptive, multiple trouser-owning critics.

No Rest for the Wicked launched into early access as a bit of a fixer-upper, even by the standards of its 'buy now, play finished game later' model. The good news is that the grim action-RPG’s wonky performance is already being straightened out, with two of its three hotfixes thus far delivering a noticeable improvements, even on older graphics cards.

Last week, a government hearing took place between representatives of the Video Game History Foundation, the Rhizome project, and the Software Preservation Network among others, with legal representation for the Entertainment Software Association (ESA) and the AACS among those in opposition. The hearing was a follow-up to the SPN petitioning the US copyright office, last year, for a DMCA exemption that would allow researchers to access games in libraries and archives. As reported by Game Developer, ESA legal representative Steve Englund said in the hearing that, currently, there’s “[no] combination of limitations [ESA members] would support to provide remote access."

As one of the Treehouse's resident Atlus sickos, I was incredibly happy to wake up to 25-minutes of Metaphor: ReFantazio's director Katsura Hashino talking us through some new footage. We get a look at a new rural town and the activities you can get up to, like bounty hunting. Travel on your magic mech is compared to "camping", which I wasn't expecting. And there's lots of combat on show, with transitions from real-time to turn-based battles outlined in a bit more detail. Oh and it's coming out in October, which gives me plenty of time to clear my JRPG backlog before this inevitably takes over my entire existence for the foreseeable.

Valheim, the popular norse-inspired survival game, is set to get even deadlier and at least several percent more volcanic with its upcoming Ashlands biome. The new biome is due to enter public testing as we speak.

I often regret that I didn't get into football as a kid (note for people across the pond: football is what we call soccer in these here accursed, eternally post-imperial isles). The trouble was, all my friends liked football and I have an abiding hatred of popular things, a hatred that has obviously served me well during my later career as an online news journalist. I played hockey instead, which is the superior sport in that you get a big nasty stick, but also relatively niche because you need more equipment.

At the end of last year I played the demo for An English Haunting and got very excited. I like horror that has a generally spooky, creeping dread vibe rather than being wall-to-wall cheap jumpscares and gore, and that sort of stuff is thin on the ground. But it'll be less so from May the 15th, cos that's when this ghosty point and click puzzle adventure is out! Hooray! The demo is still on Steam if you want a taste before then. In the meantime, the release date announcement comes with a new trailer to enjoy.

Former developers of futuristic racing classic WipEout - including the series’ co-creator - have formed a new studio with the co-creator of Skate to work on a new sci-fi sports game.

Ugh, I do not have the energy to feed the Maw this week. Sometimes the creature manifests as a proper monstrosity, with B-movie prosthetics and sound effects, and sometimes, it's more of an... unfathomable annoyance, like a nose that won't stop running, or a single player game that requires an internet connection. In either case, the Maw must be sated, and fortunately, there are quite a few appetising video-or-computer games out in the next seven days, with at least one behemoth landing on Friday.

The Fallout TV show effect continues. This time, it’s popular mod site Nexus Mods on the receiving end of the double-edged Shishkebab, as its servers struggle under the weight of people rushing to play through the series again - and mod its latter entries into games worth playing, presumably.

As you may know, the network this site belongs to is for sale.

Famed mass-layoff-manufacturing corporation Embracer Group are dividing into three companies, which will be listed separately on Sweden’s stock exchange. Those companies are: Asmodee Group, which comprises Embracer’s tabletop games biz; Coffee Stain & Friends, an evolution of the existing Coffee Stain publisher, who will pursue "a dual focus on indie and A/AA premium and free-to-play games for PC/console and mobile"; and Middle-earth Enterprises & Friends, “a creative powerhouse in AAA game development and publishing for PC and console, as well as the stewards of The Lord of the Rings and Tomb Raider intellectual properties, among many others”.

Well, that didn’t take long. After tech demos from the likes of Nvidia inviting us to chat with NPCs whose entire conversations are generated by AI, it looks like the first game built wholly on that controversial idea is due to arrive this year. Uncover the Smoking Gun puts its ChatGPT-powered dialogue front and centre, as the player’s detective interviews robot suspects to solve a murder case.

The former multiplayer lead for RTS giant StarCraft 2 is working on a new real-time strategy game that he promises will mark a “paradigm shift” for the storied PC genre.

I spend a portion of my every week surviving and crafting. And in the game, where the game is called Minecraft. I still have appetite left for Tinkerlands: A Shipwrecked Adventure, a demo that offers topdown, 2D construction and fights with giant frog bosses, among others.

The sequel to The Ur-Quan Masters has more than tripled its Kickstarter funding goal in four days. Free Stars: Children Of Infinity, which is a sequel to the series formerly known as Star Control, has so far raised $332k (£268k), although it's still shooting for several stretch goals - including one as high as $4.4 million.

Rising Up is a free, sub-fifteen minute browser game that’s a bit like Streets of Rage, where you play a balding office worker and beat a giant scanner to death within the first 30 seconds. This, I believe, should be enough to tempt you into dunking it enthusiastically into your next break coffee, but if you need more convincing, let’s do it.

Capcom are working on another Dragon's Dogma 2 patch, and this one takes as its target the dreaded dragonsplague, which causes the game's AI-controlled pawns to go nuts and murder everybody, including story-critical NPCs, if you allow it to go untreated for long enough. It'll reduce the infection frequency of dragonsplague, which is spread when pawns mingle with other pawns online, and make the symptoms more obvious. Pawns already get glowing eyes when they're dragonsplagued - I guess they'll be all the glowier in future.

Perhaps you are fatigued by orcs and swords. Maybe you yearn for a simple life of bucolic betterment to recover from your addiction to spicy wedding bands but still fear to stray too far from your beloved fantasy franchise. Oh look, it's Tales of the Shire, a game set in Middle-earth which features not a single ounce of stabbing nor - as far as I can tell - any gigantic spiders at all. It's a life sim about building a home in Hobbiton and keeping up with the Proudfeet. Maybe you will also get to lie around getting totally blazed on halfling reefer. Although I did not spot that in this hearthful new trailer.

It seems that Prison Architect 2 is going method in its approach to launching the 3D sequel to the jailhouse management game, as - like its inmates - it just can’t seem to secure a solid release. Originally due to arrive in March, before being pushed into May, developers Double Eleven have now shunted it all the way back to September.

We've suffered some body blows recently, but perhaps none will ever be as winding as the news I now deliver to you: Alice0 is leaving RPS. She recently celebrated 10 years here, so that should tell you something about how much of an influence she's had over the tone of the site over it's lifespan. Truly, the site won't be the same without her - so let's take the opportunity to celebrate here work here.

Ahead of Final Fantasy 14’s next massive expansion, Dawntrail, arriving this summer, Square Enix recently put out a graphical benchmarking tool. Dawntrail’s benchmark is especially noteworthy as it’s the first time we’ve really been able to put the MMO’s much-anticipated graphical update arriving with 7.0 into practice and see what sort of demands it might make on our hardware by overhauling the 10-year-old game’s visuals.

No rest for No Rest For The Wicked's developers, it seems. The punishing action-RPG launched in Steam Early Access last week with performance issues, among other issues, and Moon Studios have now deployed their first hotfix.

The Palestinian Relief Bundle on Itch.io contains 373 items for a minimum cost of $8. 213 of the items are are games, including greats such as Wandersong, A Short Hike and Coffee Talk. All proceeds go towards the Palestine Children's Relief Fund (PCRF), a non-profit working to provide food, water and medical treatment in Gaza.

It's starting to feel like ConcernedApe (aka Eric Barone) may in fact be a modern day Sisiphus, destined to work on Stardew Valley forever. Following on from the mega update of 1.6 a month ago, and 1.6.3 soon after that, the hardy perennial farming game has a new 1.6.4 mini update. The key addition this time is more new layouts that will appear after you reach the bottom of the mines, and more layouts for the volcano mines too. If you've not played Stardew Valley you might wonder why there are deep mines and volcanos, and to you I say "Pah! You should play Stardew Valley."

Eiyuden Chronicles, the RPG series that’s effectively a sequel-slash-spiritual successor to nineties and early noughties JRPG classic Suikoden, will continue with a sequel despite the death of its creator earlier this year.

In the most unsurprising news you might read today: Amazon are going to make a second season to their very popular Fallout TV show. That means one more season until we get Liam Neeson, right?

Lured like an unsatisfied sailor by the siren song of alleged performance woes, I’ve been giving No Rest for the Wicked a cursory benchmarkin’, and yes! The isometric ARPG does suffer from all the early access wonkiness you’ve likely heard about already today.

No Rest For The Wicked, the top-down soulslike that released yesterday in Steam early access, is already seeing its fair share of performance and QOL issues, including instability, lack of keybinding options, and players losing their progress. In response, developer Moon Studios have put out a blog saying that, yes, they’re aware of the problems and, yes, they’re actively looking to address the most common hiccups.

Neverlooted Dungeon is an rpg game in which you can shoot a crossbow from a first person perspective. This, I imagine, was the pitch it used when trying to blag its way past the thermodynamically powered golem wearing a Daikatana t-shirt that guards the gates of Steam’s currently-running FPS fest. Whatever the excuse, this silver tongued rascal succeeded, and is now nestled comfortably between umpteen boomer shooter revivals, trying to squeeze Ultima factoids into the conversation.

While Cities: Skylines 2 has made progress on the performance front, not everything about the troubled citybuilder is on the up. In fact, player reception to the recently released Beach Properties DLC has proven so un-sunny that both developers Colossal Order and publishers Paradox Interactive have issued a joint statement apologising for the state it launched in.

Star Wars: Outlaws isn't just an open world retread of existing Star Wars locations, like Tatooine. It contains a whole new moon of developer Massive Entertainment's creation - Toshara, which is home to the Pyke criminal gang and visually defined by huge deposits of crystalline orange material and cities hacked out of mountains. What's it like adding a whole bloody world to Star Wars? Here are some quick thoughts from Massive Entertainment's creative director Julian Gerighty.

Timed perfectly off the back of the Fallout TV show's success, Fallout 76 players can start testing out Skyline Valley, a new woodland area in the game's upcoming major update. There's a new public event to try, as well as combat readjustments that'll be drip fed over the course of the test period. Anyone who owns the game on Steam can give these things a go, which is a bonus, too. I think I own it? I genuinely can't remember. Anyway, yes, maybe I'll hop in and see how things have changed since, errr, launch.

Despite military sim series Arma and its zombie survival spin-off DayZ having their de facto home on PC, developers Bohemia Interactive opted to snub us keyboard-and-mousers for their post-DayZ game Vigor. The free-to-play survival shooter hit early access on Xbox way back in June 2018 - almost six years ago - and subsequently made its way to PlayStation and Nintendo Switch. And yet, for more than half a decade, no whisper of a PC release was heard - until now, that is.

Former PS4 hit Ghost of Tsushima is the next big PlayStation exclusive to make the leap to PC, and it’s bringing some extra PS-shaped features with it. The game’s Director’s Cut - representing the fact this re-release will include its Iki Island expansion and co-op mode - will be the first game that lets you earn PlayStation trophies from your PC, if you so wish.

Warhorse have revealed Kingdom Come: Deliverance 2, sequel to the 2018 open world action-RPG which you will likely remember for a couple of reasons: 1) its ostensibly faithful but inevitably skewed representations of race, gender and class in medieval Bohemia, which were amplified by its creative director Daniel Vávra's qualified endorsement of Gamergate, and 2) being a moderately entertaining, buggy and mucky chivalric fable in which you have to worry about keeping your sword sharp and eating food before it rots.

If you somehow haven’t fallen down the Balatro hole just yet, that slope is about to get a whole lot slippier. The mesmerising roguelike spin on poker is easy enough to lose an entire afternoon to by itself, but now it’s been combined with the granddaddy of all computer-related procrastination: classic Windows Solitaire.

Larian aren’t just not making Baldur’s Gate 4 – they’re treating Baldur’s Gate 3’s success as an opportunity to develop their own intellectual properties, with two new games in the works. These games will build on the “sensibilities” of Baldur’s Gate 3 in being “immersive experiences shaped by your choices”, but by the sounds of things, they won’t be adaptations of anybody else's narrative or setting. Divinity: Original Sin 3? It’s the obvious call, but come now, free your mind. How about a kart racing game, Larian, or a banging old school mascot platformer? When are you going to make a platform game, Larian?

The Anniversary Edition of Braid was originally announced almost four years ago, and originally meant to be out sometime in 2021. As such, the latest delay to Jonathan Blow’s time-rewinding puzzle-platformer - which sees its date pushed back two weeks into the middle of next month - feels like a relative drop in the hourglass.