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Over the past couple of weeks, I've been conscious of an eerie background humming and hissing. For a while I thought it was just tinnitus, brought on by one too many listens of Control's Ashtray Maze OST, but then I realised that it was actually RPS regular quasiotter whispering in my ear about Hot Wax, which launches on Steam this week after a spell of Itch.io exclusivity.

It's the new arcade puzzler from PUNKCAKE Délicieux, otherwise known for inflicting shotguns on chess and forcing the alphabet to wear trousers in the name of archaeology, somehow. Hot Wax is actually quite straightforward by PUNKCAKE standards. It's Tetris, but all the blocks are candles, and rather than filling a line on the grid to clear blocks, you have to plant unpredictably dropped flames on wicks to slowly sizzle the mass away. Relatively straightforward, yes, but fiddly in practice. Did I mention that you're doing all this in a temple, under the eye of a "not unfriendly" eldritch god?

State of Decay 3 was announced with a snazzy cinematic trailer all the way back in 2020. The open-world zombie game was due to move to colder climes, where you would face undead deer and survive the frigid elements. We've since learned that the teaser bore very little resemblance to what was actually being worked on, and was pushed out the door to plump up a Microsoft showcase.

However, what the teaser also didn't reveal was that Undead Labs' ideas for the game were much larger in scope than the two survival games that came before. For several years they were trying to make State of Decay 3 into an MMO that captured the scale of a global zombie apocalypse.

Magnificent, depressing plague colony fable Pathologic 3 has received a sizeable game update that adds some new difficulty modes, a photo feature, and some new, worryingly folkloric methods of defeating a murky embodiment of disease. Developers Ice Pick Lodge have also staunchly refused to remove an invisible apple tree, describing this apparently "famous" bug as a hallmark of a game whose "symbolic nature has almost overtaken its function as a product". This appears to be the last major update for Pathologic 3, so that invisible apple tree is staying in the game forever.

I confess, when I first read the Steam blog in question, I doubted. The thing about invisible apple trees is that they are quite easy to confuse with apple trees that are simply not there. Pathologic in general is a house of lies: as Quintin Smith (RPS in peace) put it in his legendary Butchering Pathologic trilogy, "absolutely everybody has an angle, everyone's bending the truth and trying to twist you round their fingers." Pathologic 3 especially is a purgatorial time travel story that must be continually rewritten, a crock of festering rumours enclosed by an enormous, phantom theatre. As such, I read Ice-Pick's typically professorial account of the "invisible apple tree" with intense suspicion.

One of the composers who contributed to the scores of the original Mass Effect trilogy has decided to re-soundtrack the Mass Effect Universe trailer which leaked following the game's cancellation and BioWare's closure. Sam Hulick's aim, aside from making this year's N7 Day a tiny bit less depressing if he can deliver as planned, is to share some of his "musical vision" for the RPG.

When Edwin talked about Moon Sweepers yesterday he focused on the artisanal approach to space rock cleaning. Like the puritan he is, he wants to wipe away all the dust on the moon using a toothbrush. He says you should take pride in your work, stick one spacesuit-clad middle finger up to the machines and say 'Fuck off, robots. Let me show you my art!" as you get down on all fours and brush away moon dust.

I've taken a different approach.

None of us have any bloody time any more, do we? The economy being in the toilet is obviously part of that, but the other part is that we're all adults and now we have to do responsible adult things like our laundry, and buying toilet paper, and buying toilet paper again because it simply never ends. It all makes playing games just that little bit trickier, especially when it comes to lengthy strategy game runs. If you're longing for a quick dose of some 4X strategy, though, Monarchs at Play, a turn-based city-builder that only takes an hour, might be the thing you're after.

You might want to hold off on that horny posting in your favourite discoverable Discord server. The chat service announced today that any servers that are listed as discoverable, meaning anyone can find them simply through Googling, no invite link required, will now also show messages and discussions posted in said servers on Google.

November is potentially going to be big for Rockstar Games, and not just because of that GTA 6 thing they're doing. As shared in a press release from the Independent Workers of Great Britain (IWGB), recognition of the IWGB Union at Rockstar will be voted upon by staffers at the studio, with votes being held from November 12th (a week before GTA 6's launch date) and November 26th.

Back in 2022, Gears Tactics studio Splash Damage revealed that they were working on a Transformers game. It was called Transformers: Reactivate, and at the time was set to be a 1-4 player co-op action game, but come 2025 and the game gets canned all while parent company Tencent was going on a funding withdrawal spree in the games industry. Nothing substantial was ever really shown off of the game, but a trailer has now been leaked featuring what was apparently meant to be an internal look at it in action.

Assassin's Creed Black Flag Resynced is setting sail for quieter pastures. That's because the game's last big update arrived today, with Ubisoft explaining that there are only plans for quality-of-life updates for the game going forward. Still, it's a meaty enough sounding update, and one that could in theory keep you going forever if you'd like to torture yourself by relegating your life to a single video game.

We're not in a very cheap era for PC parts. A (possibly manufactured!) GPU shortage making cards that can actually run modern games near-inaccessible to the vast majority of people, combined with RAM and SSDs just generally being horrifically expensive due to demand for their use in data centers, is making contemporary games with high performance requirements very difficult for some people to justify even trying to run, let alone buy. S-Game's recent reveal of wuxia action game Phantom Blade Zero's preload guide and system requirements has brought this to mind, alongside bringing tears to my eyes, as the game requires not only an SSD to run at all, and 145GB to install, but 300GB of free space to pre-load.

Kingdom Come Deliverance 2 developers Warhorse, who're also working on a Lord of the Rings RPG, have revealed that they've been targeted by a cyberattack aiming to access their systems and data. The studio are currently working to make sure their locks are all clicked back into place and tolearn exactly how the incident happened.

Though Street Fighter 6 has been the most popular fighting game in the world for three years running, there are still dedicated soldiers playing Street Fighter V right now. Be that due to its much larger character roster (thanks to many more years of updates, obviously, but I do personally miss G), its unique V-Skill and V-Trigger mechanics, or people just not liking Drive Rush or throw loops in 6, the playerbase is still very much there. Unfortunately, that playerbase is currently facing the consequences of the PHP programming language vulnerability and subsequent security-led shutdowns across online services from the last week onwards, as Street Fighter V's online functionality has been shut down until it can be ensured to be secure. It's also been temporarily delisted, effectively taking it off sale, from Steam.

It’s been well over a week since my final swing of Virtue and a Sledgehammer’s righteous whacking stick, and I’m still finding it difficult to shift the game from my thoughtspace. Having tempted me in with promises of cathartic, base-instinct vengeance against a town of roboticised arseholes, it’s since had me picking through the rubble of my own demolition spree, not so much looking for meaning as trying to parse the abundance of it. I’d gladly invite you to join me in the wreckage.

First announced back in March, Dark Messiah of Might and Magic: Community Edition is a fan-made mod (for Dark Messiah of Might and Magic, obvs) that spruces up Arkane's 2006 RPG, including upgrading it to a newer version of the Source engine. Details have been scarce since then, but an updated Steam page confirms what other additions the mod – which is being made with the blessing of both Valve and original publishers Ubisoft – is making.

Across the plains of South Dakota a bullet flies. Lights blazing, speedometer reading 130 MPH, gearstick only in third. It weaves perilously between highway traffic, narrowly missing families in transit and rigs rolling from A to B. By night, it eats up the miles on a pilgrimage to see the sights. Mount Rushmore awaits, scattered among a slew of local landmarks that’ll fill out a postcard this turbo-boosted tourist plans to staple right to his dashboard.

Right, not too far to go now. Oooh, look at that sunr-

STALKER 2: Heart of Chornobyl has a new update out, 2.1, which builds on the excellent 2.0 patch by upgrading that most beloved and contentious of STALKER series features: the A-Life system that governs simulated NPC behavior. With the 2.1 update. It's now possible to whack up the distance at which A-Life NPCs (who, unlike scripted characters, will wander around, fight others over faction turf, and sometimes hunker down for a campfire-side guitar sesh) are visualised, while audio tweaks can make these unplanned shootouts audible from further away. The effect, in theory, is a better sense of the Zone's inhabitants going about their bang-banging business, even if Mr. Main Character here isn't close by.

Both the updated game and the accompanying blog post warn that cranking this A-Life bubble up beyond the lowest, default 'Recommended' setting may have adverse effects, ranging from lower framerates to "story quest instability" and crashes. Fearing a return to STALKER 2's bug-ridden early days, I tried out the new A-Life distance options on the RPS test rig, and found they're not actually that perilous – though they might do strange things with binoculars.

Le Syndicat des Travailleureuses du Jeu Vidéo, a French game workers union, have released a statement detailing the current status of Don't Nod, the studio behind Life is Strange and Lost Records: Bloom and Rage. The studio's fate has been precarious for some time, but STJV now say that the studio has announced ("to financial press before the employees, as has been its MO") that it is under a "safeguard procedure" to avoid complete insolvency due to an inability to pay off its debts.

Even with the importance of physical media ownership in the current era of digital product ephemera, it's often unlikely your PC will actually be able to play the CDs, DVDs or Blu-Rays you have around the house. Internal disc drives aren't common amongst desktops or even laptops anymore, so your only recourse is often an external drive.

One Steam Frame user was hoping to connect his own detachable disc drive to watch movies and play Need For Speed Carbon (valid!) using the headset, which can run both VR and 'flat' games without a separate PC, but found that the Frame lacked the drivers to read a disc. In a very earnest community post, user Aiodensghost lamented that this fact "KILLED MY ABILITY TO INSTALL MY ABANDONWARE FROM 2006. You don't sell NFS Carbon anymore (fuck you very much EA) [...] May I PLEASE have the ability to use an optical drive?" So polite!

Update: According to Vertical Slice and The Verge, an unspecified number of Xbox staff are among those who've been offered voluntary buyouts by Microsoft.

Original story follows:

Staff at Microsoft continue to recieve emails they'd probably rather not be getting. After telling some the other week of plans to mandate four days in the office starting in February and presiding over multiple rounds of layoffs at their gaming division Xbox, Microsoft are now offering volutary buyouts to 60,000, roughly 25% of their overall headcount.

The gradual drip of details about and glimpses at what BioWare were looking to cook up with the cancelled Mass Effect 5 continues, this time thanks to a composer who was in talks to come aboard to put together the RPG's soundtrack. Said songsmith, Austin Wintory, has opted to share around 20 minutes of tunes he put together just as an attempt to explore where he might take things if he did end up being hired to score Commander Shepard's next adventure. Naturally, with BioWare's closure, that hasn't come to pass.

Not long after releasing boomer shooter Warhammer 40,000: Boltgun II and right before Warhammer Survivors launches in November, developers Auroch Digital have unfortunately given a public statement confirming that roughly a quarter of its current staff will be laid off as part of a restructuring. What's strange — to the point that layoffs are, unfortunately, expected — is that the initial social media posts, on both LinkedIn and Twitter, have now been deleted.

Here's some upbeat news to end the day on (unless one of the other awful people working here posts something diabolical, once I'm done) - you'll soon be able to publish games created using the latest GameMaker tools for free on PC alongside web and mobile.

How could someone do this to you, fruit, meat, and other foods on the shelves of this shop? You've been forced, in a horrific crime against the companies responsible for you, to reveal some details about how you were produced. No, this isn't reasonable information to offer a would-be purchaser, so that they can feel more comfortable and confident in knowing what they're about to spend their hard-earned money on. It's a bat signal for the anti-battery farming hate mobs and is robbing innocent food producers of their ability to rake in cash without having to reveal some basic info about their products. You might as well stick "mandatory political essays" on the packaging of frozen peas!

The word "BioWare" does not appear in a recent Change.org petition asking EA to "save Mass Effect", which has gained around 220,000 signatories as of writing. The nearest the petition gets is an allusion to "recent revelations" that have "cast a shadow over its future", which is a remarkably gentle way of saying that the parent company shanked the creators to balance their books, after going into historic debt.

Still, one can hardly reproach the petition organisers for not mentioning BioWare - after all, EA announced that they were closing BioWare a whole four days ago, and the funeral baked meats must coldly furnish forth the pitchdeck. There are other videogame studios, aren't there? Just get one of them to make the thing. Maybe Owlcat, developers of the Mass Effect-flavoured The Expanse: Osiris Reborn, who've shared the Change.org petition on their socials.

One of the days last week was October 23rd. It's the date in the Fallout universe when the bombs dropped and has morphed into a time for yearly community happenings plus, in Bethesda's case, usually some marketing. Sometimes, modders behind long-running projects time up standalone releases with it, as has been the case this year with the folks behind Fallout: The New West, the project aiming to make their own version of Black Isle Studios' cancelled third Fallout game. They've released a few guns inspired by the canned entry, which you may know by its codename Van Buren, but the headliner from this gear drop for New Vegas is a funky new Pip-Boy design.

I don't much go for PowerWash Simulator-likes, but there is something appealingly unwholesome about a game in which you have to wipe the dust off an entire moon. Using a toothbrush. True, you can upgrade to beefier hoovering equipment in Moon Sweepers by cashing in shipments of lunar dirt, but that strikes me as a dangerous concession to brute mass production thinking – it risks consigning centuries of artisanal knowledge to, well, the dustbin.

Take pride in your craft, colleagues! If we become over-reliant on hoover-me-dos, we'll lose the skill of cleansing celestial objects by hand, and sooner or later, they'll give our jobs to the bots. You can keep your new-fangled vacuum mops. If anybody needs me, I'll be over here in the Sea of Tranquility, collecting individual motes with a pair of tweezers.

I've been tricked. Deep within the fine print of the Health and Safety and Wild Eldritch Creature Control License Edwin convinced me to apply for is a stipulation that I alternate shifts of Maw care with him. I've unwittingly signed up to cleaning the beast's cage out once a fortnight, bringing you news of upcoming PC games while not hosing down the creature from a distance.

Well, as is my regulatory obligation, here are some of the PC games coming out this week that caught my eye while scrubbing out the the sluices.

One of my favourite hobbies is digging up older pieces of gaming tech or software know-how and asking myself: "man, what would the world have been like, if every GPU were made out of Gorgonzola?" Or less silly words to that effect. Nostalgia aside, it's useful to revisit historical alternatives in the face of very rich people who would have us believe that only their trillion-dollar boondoggle is "the" future.

The code running 1994 horror game Ecstatica probably isn't going to topple Unreal Engine anytime soon, but look at this article's header image, and tell me you aren't fascinated. Why is everything so… pert? I will tell you why: Ecstatica's graphics make heavy use of ellipsoids. They're the basis for everything from werewolf buttocks to the grain of castle flagstones. You can experience this terrifying bubble-wrap reality for yourself in today's Steam and GOG re-release of both Ecstatica and its sequel, care of SNEG Games.

Update: A Microsoft rep has told PC Gamer that the company have "extended the consultation period by one additional month as we explore options, including finding a partner to support [Arkane] through the development work still ahead." "This is a defined extension," they added, "and we remain committed to keeping the Works Council informed throughout the process."