Supporters

It has somehow been a year since I joined RPS. (Don't believe the date on my joining post, I'd been sneaking about in the back rooms for a couple of weeks before I announced myself.) In time's trickster way, it seems impossible because it feels both less than and longer than that.

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-

It's been a while since I set foot in Bioshock's Rapture. Yet, as I looked at the water running out of all the pipes under my sink, unsure what I had done to break literally every fastening, I wondered who on earth thought plumbing was anything like hacking? And, if this was truly the way of opening locked doors or reducing the prices in vending machines, then I would be well and truly stuffed.

Last week that carping louse James wrote a whole article about the "art and pain of professional screenshot-taking". He outlined a number of methods and tools, such as leaving Auto Screen Capture running for the rest of your life or adding F12 to every single combo string. As in so many other respects, I cannot relate to James' troubles, for all of my screens are discreetly captured as I play by my dependable butler, Smythe, hired earlier in the year on Mark's recommendation. Smythe and I would like to invite you to a little slideshow party.

It's the first in a new, irregular Supporter series where I discuss a few buried treasures from my review folder. It's called Holiday Snaps But For Videogames. Smythe, this is a terrible title! Mark assured me that you were a gifted raconteur. I guess we'll have to roll with it for now and hope the readers come up with something better. First slide, please!

Soldak are one of those tiny devs who know their thing and stick with it. Sometimes that means iteration, refining or gradually expanding and rejiggling a design or world, like Conquest of Elysium. Sometimes it means banking on a devoted audience. For Soldak, though, it means seeing what else their special thing can do.

Din's Champion is, to put it both accurately and unfairly, the dynamic open world action RPG of Drox Operative or Din's Curse, weaved through the familiar dig-explore-craft routines of, most obviously, Terraria. It is frustrating. It is a bit awkward. It is difficult to gauge how I'm doing.

It might be their most dangerously absorbing game yet.

Remember how taking photos of PC hardware involves varying degrees of dirty improvised fixes and, on occasion, unnatural bending of the arms? Well, snapping game screenshots isn't much easier. A Steam Controller may not stand upright by itself, but at least once propped, it stays put. Grabbing decent action shots in most games is like trying to nail a National Geographic-tier pic of a pouncing cheetah, while being the only other living thing in a cheetah enclosure, and dressed in trousers made of gazelle steaks.

The following contains major Big Walk spoilers, which without wanting to brag, takes quite some doing for a game without a story.

Big Walk has two endings, which means it’s managed to strike me into blinking, wistful silence on two separate occasions.

I've no clue what prompted the change. But after a decade of careful maintenance and regular culling down to just 10 or so wishlisted games, a year or two ago my Steam wishlist started to just... grow. It was like looking out of the kitchen window every few days, seeing your view blocked by a phalanx of two-metre weeds, and saying to yourself that you really must sort the garden out... another time, when you haven't just brewed a nice warm cuppa.

The unreleased games, I'm not so fussed about. But even discounting them, my Steam wishlisted games still number about 100. It's keeping me up at night. So I turn, dear reader, to you. Please cast a hungry eye over my wishlisted games below, and let me know in the comments what in the name of Christ is wrong with me, for A) not having played X game yet, and/or B) wanting to play Y game, which is actually shite.

Much to the frustration of every hardware editor I've ever worked with, I have very little interest in finding the perfect device. I'm an 'it does the trick' gamer through and through. For years, my preferred "cans" were a pair of free headphones I got on a Virgin Atlantic flight. My gaming chairs over the past decade have been a succession of seats I found on the street. And, despite having a gripe with my mouse for the past two years, I never attempted to fix it, read the manual, or Google the issue. Then, this morning, I accidentally pressed one of its many buttons and it solved the problem.

Oddly, the satisfaction of fixing the issue quickly morphed into the worry that I'm turning into my parents.

Typically, I'd take the title as a fair warning that this is roguelikey and thus Not My Bag. But it's been a while since I've played a good arcadey blaster, and I'm on a bit of a space kick lately and... ooh, go on then.

Rogue Eclipse fortunately leans more arcade than arbitrary, and shortcuts, alternative weapons, and ship tweaks come fairly quickly. You begin more than capable, and the action itself is the point, rather than masochistically testing yourself for the sake of it. It's pretty great action too, which outweighs some frustrations that even roguelike fans might concede could be polished down a little.

For the months leading up to September, there was a certain amount of steadying ourselves. Hovering over the month of November like a giant steel toe-capped boot, GTA 6's looming release date drove many developers to shift their game's launch to this month or simply pushed them back into 2027.

Now three weeks into the full flow of game releases – which has seen Mark up to his neck in Blood of Dawnwalker, James swinging a great big hammer in Control Resonant, while somehow also reviewing Valve's new VR headset, and Edwin diving into the horrors of both Roman Sands RE:Build and Silent Hill: Downfall, as well as two Jay Castello reviews, Moonlighter 2 and Nighthawks – we are almost through and out the other side.

You've hopefully already seen the desks of Julian, James, and Callum, and since Callum oh-so-graciously tossed the gauntlet down at my feet last time, it is now my turn to reveal the thing that I sit at each day.

Welcome to a deep dive into the setup that supports my aching frame as I tap keys in order to write the guides that most supporters do not peruse, for you are an educated lot who seem to use mystical magicks known as "RSS Readers" that provide you with only the best writing of RPS. Not, for instance, my examinations of how to make a giant toad happy in Mortal Shell 2.

But I digress! The last time I talked about my desk in these parts, it was to lament how a boss fight made me so pissed off that I bashed a chunk out of it. I promise there is more to me than dysregulated gamer rage, so let us embark now on a tour of my world; follow along with the numbers and arrows, class!

I emerge from my Batcave with a roar and ominously roll towards the streets of Gotham. Cloaked in jet black, I'm impossible to make out in the shadows, with only brief stretches of lit tarmac revealing my terror-inducing true form. I'm a rich playboy underneath, but to my foes, I'm a Dark Knight. My chariot sounds like thunder and goes like lightning. Tonight's bound to be a bad one for any opponent who crosses my path.

CORRECTIONS AND CLARIFICATIONS: I recently wrote that Vholume, that indie parkour game about sprinting through brutalist, unfinished-custom-Half-Life 2 Deathmatch-map-lookin’ megastructures, was "alright." This was incorrect. It is fact a "good game," with quote marks because I said it just now. RPS regrets the error.

Last night I was continuing my Sisyphean task of completing Star Wars: Zero Company so I can get down to writing the review. Judging by mission lists online, I am about two thirds of the way through the story. I don't know if that means I'm two thirds of the way through the playtime, however, as the missions seem to be getting longer and longer. Perhaps Sisyphus is the wrong comparison, and this is a case of Star Wars: Zeno's Paradox.

Early on in my time with Sprawl Zero, I entered an otherwise forgettable room containing the absolute best puddle. Just, the Dark Souls of puddles: delicately embossed with oil around its rim, frighteningly clear in the centre. The kind of puddle you don't get in videogames nowadays, with their funky raytracing. An icy reverse render of the breezeblock walls and girdered ceiling, with no hint of the metal beneath, no transparency at all. Not a puddle, but a portal. The kind of surface from which you'd expect a gauzy hand to emerge, offering a magic sword. Or more plausibly in context, a fully loaded gauss rifle with a pop-out holographic display.

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Awk awk awk awk, awk awk. (Awk, awk awk.) Awk awk awk awk awk, awk awk awk awk.

"I don’t think I’ve ever made a game you guys have entirely liked," solo Bulwark and The Falconeer dev Tomas Sala recently told me at a Gamescom side-event. I kind of wish he hadn’t, partly because it activated the part of my brain that fears being punched for something Sin wrote, and partly because me returning from Cologne, immediately installing the ShipShaper: Falconeer Chronicles demo, and enjoying it now looks like an untoward lapse into industry appeasement.

Nevertheless, I do, I’m afraid, like it – entirely. As a dedicated boat-building game, it’s smaller in scope than its strategy and aerial combat cousins, yet is quick to tickle your own creative bones by welding precise, Blender-style model tweaking to accessible, loosely Townscaper-esque snappiness. It also happens to be launching in early access today, with an aforementioned Steam demo that’s been updated significantly since Mark tried it earlier this year.

I’ve become convinced that every Gamescom attendee who posts a variant of "Great time, so exhausted!!!" as they leave the Koelnmesse is, in fact, putting on a front. Gamescom is not merely exhausting. Gamescom is a place in which thousands of people, who’ve dedicated their lives to an almost entirely sedentary pursuit, are forced to strap themselves with overstuffed rucksacks before walking distances equivalent to circumnavigating the god-damned Moon just to get from one side of Halle 3.2 to the other side of Halle 4.1. Gamescom is a public health menace, capable of reshaping the spines of its encumbered visitors and even, for those who occupy the business section, forcing them back into an earlier, hunter-gatherer stage of human evolution.

If you’re in the B2B area, see, it’s because you’re there to work, which inevitably means you have no time for anything else. Breakfast? Lunch? These concepts are powerless against the onslaught of preview appointments and developer interviews. Yet if one is to survive, let alone endure Gamescom’s physical trials, fuel is essential. That’s why an increasingly common sight at the world’s biggest games fair is the scavenging journalist, picking at the business section’s (ideally unguarded) selection of snack bowls and plates. The scavenging journalists of RPS are, of course, no exception.

As you might have seen me mention last week, I recently set about modding up Skyrim for my first proper delve back into it in a good few years. It's something of a ritual at this point, much like my biennial New Vegas playthrough or quarterly dips back into Cyberpunk 2077 simply because I like hanging out in a dystopian future that, unlike the one we're living through in the real world, can't hurt me.

We are a week out from Gamescom and there is an air of busyness all about the Treehouse. The trade show in Cologne will be a lot of work itself, but we roll straight from that into the most packed September I can remember, and that's followed by… well, I'll get to that in a minute.

Most people reading will have no, or a completely wrong idea of what it means to have huge Amiga energy. This is a catastrophic failure of game culture, obediently fixated as it is on the handful of corporations that had all the advertising money in the USA. But anyway.

Neofeud 2 radiates it. It's in the sound, of course. It's in the primitive, kind of bad animations (not because they're bad - variety was the watchword of Amiga culture - but because of why they're bad, and why they're not). The heart-on-sleeve extremes of its setting and dialogue, the direct and naked references and blatant influences. It is very punk, politically and artistically. It's rough and a little clumsy because that stuff isn’t why you make something.

In the wake of James and Julian showing off their delightful collections of prize hog pictures and ugly contoured mouse mats, I too have volunteered as tribute to announce to the world that I don't work in a fancy office. No, instead I sit in a seedy den in the corner of my bedroom, and I'm not protected by the watchful gaze of Caesar, the wise, benevolent pig, or an oceanic Cornish coaster. My friend Ugly Squidward keeps me company, whispering secrets into my ear.

After writing about Mortal Shell 2's approach to difficulty earlier, it got me thinking about why I bounced off Soulslike games. They're one of the biggest genres in gaming, adored and lionised by so many. I've tried many over the years, but never completed any of them.

But, it didn't have to be this way. And I'm going to lay the blame on the doorstep of my old boss, Keza MacDonald.

If you managed to make it to the end of Julian’s desk tour without being hypnotised by the terrible beauty of that plump, vast, prize-winning Sussex hog, you’ll recall that he (Julian, not the hog) challenged the rest of us to share our own workspaces. First cheekily, then mockingly. "Nice desk pictures, Captain No Desk Pictures," he’d sneer, before roaring out of the Ziff Davis office on his motorbike. Or it may have been a bicycle, I wasn’t sure. My eyes were too full of tears.

Well, fine. FINE. Here’s where I park myself, plus all the bits and bobs that keep me company, and yes - you can click the photo to make it bigger.

"That's an old meme!", condemned a long-ago group chat when I cheerfully linked to Cato colon Buttered Cat . Yeah, well, so are kissing girls and being weird, and I never let that stop me from enjoying those!!! Although admittedly, it’s not unheard of for them to conflict.

It's based on a gag, see. Cats land on their feet, and toast always lands buttered side down. Therefore, strap them together and you get a perpetually rotating hoverbeast. This forms one of those puzzle games about navigating two distinct characters through a series of 2D platformy rooms. I suppose it's technically three, since when combined they can essentially fly via multi-jumping. It makes for an easygoing little game that I haven't entirely fallen for, but wouldn't struggle to recommend.

My relationship with the Assassin’s Creed series has, for a long time, mirrored the relationship a quirky distant relation of the titular order might have with the young prodigy their chapter’s mentor is training up. Especially prior to getting into games journo, I’d make the effort to check in every two years or so and see what the whippersnapper looked like.

It’s finally here. Today, at long last, I take righteous vengeance on Hollow Knight: Silksong developers/publishers/inflictors Team Cherry. Every punt of double-mask contact damage, every Dark Souls 2-ass checkpoint placement, every single strand of life-giving silk that Bilewater’s muckmaggots have gnawed clean from my bone cavities, all will be repaid tenfold when I spoil their Sea of Sorrow DLC reveal by revealing – exclusively, for RPS Supporters – what I’ve seen of it. In my dreams.

With a remaster on the way from Nightdive, I've been revisiting 1998's Thief: The Dark Project and trying to work out what I find so magical about its stealth. In brief, I think of Thief's stealth as a form of dissociation - a kind of surging and ebbing, out-of-body experience. Dissociation is a clinical condition, of course - I don't want to trivialise the suffering of people who lose all sense of time and identity as a symptom of trauma. But dissociation is more than anguish and disarray. There is also the milder experience of dissociation as daydream and reverie, a gentle loosening of the screws. You glance down and find that your arms and legs are far removed, like roads or rivers along a sunny valley floor. You try to reestablish the connection to those vagabond, limblike geographies, and realise you have nothing to connect them to.

House of Legacy is baffling. It has almost no sound. Its many characters are entirely unmemorable. It's unclear and awkward, and its whole starting phase is repetitive grinding that makes your first milestone 'Made enough money to delegate this away.' It's a single-save game, so you can't really screw around to see what's possible.

But it's so pleasant to keep playing. There's always something to reach for, and always a gentle brush of soft leaves against your hand as you do. It lacks drama, but hints at it just enough for you to fill in the gaps yourself. The product of all that, somehow, is this:

You have to stop me. I have so much to do just to survive this summer. I can't lose another day to this bloody game.