Supporters

There were these games your grandparents used to play off CDs on the gramophone or whatever. A vein within a mountain range of games history utterly ignored by North American ideas of "retro", because it wasn't approved by the Nintendo Corporation. Little 2D shooter/flight games derived from Thrust, with the simplest concept: fly around a bit. Don't crash.

Evoids is that. More specifically, a 2D flight game focused on caverns and dodging/shooting hostile turrets, with a drop of Choplifter (or the way more frantic and less inertia-based Golden Hornet) as you shoot prisons and carefully land nearby to rescue little guys. It is maddeningly difficult precisely because its simplicity makes almost everything your own fault. And that makes me go back and try again.

I got a "You must install or update .Net" before running Beltlife Colon Prospector. How quaint. When was the last time I had to install one of those incomprehensible package things? Thankfully it was as easy as before, and didn't demand that I pay rent or inform on everyone I know.

I was already intrigued for a low-frills sim about making a living in space in a most undramatic way. Where Triangle Vee blazed a trail, Beltlife scanned that trail, and spent two days polishing its scanner. It is not glamorous. I don't even love it, and I have some complaints. And yet, I enjoy it anyway. Confusing.

Of course I thought I was tremendously clever for loudly wishing someone would make a game about breaking into imperial museums to restore all their stolen artifacts. But it never even occurred to me to imagine it like this.

Instead of the self-serious 3D stealth/heist game I pictured, Relooted is a bright and upbeat platformer and puzzle game, with a narrative framing that I want to call "adventure", but in the more film meaning than the game genre one. A better description from the lead dev themself is "making your own speedrun", but I held that back because it might put you off if you're not a speedrun person. And then you'd miss out.

There are many costs to carrying an all-access pass to the Treehouse. I have accidentally walked in on Edwin wielding a hosepipe and hard-bristled brush as he cleans down The Maw's nether regions. A scene of grease, hair, and teeth that I shall not be forgetting soon. I have seen The Maw vomiting Edwin up after one of the several occasions our news editor has been caught unawares and been swallowed by the tricksy beast. Another scene of grease, hair, and teeth chiselled into the mind's eye. I have seen The Maw… I'm realising now, I should probably just keep out of The Maw's quarters.*

However, one perk of the pass is that I can access the forbidden section of the RPS archives. The shelving units where we keep the cut content. Stuffed into boxes, folders, and scattered in loose leaves on the floor are the articles considered not fit for public consumption. Sometimes they're not even whole articles, they're single paragraphs and lines that a writer has decided could cause an uproar if let out into the wild.

But what's the fun of an all-access pass if you can't brag about it by showing off what you found?

I still haven't talked about it. Not really. Not aloud at all. It's not what you probably think.

When I was first in love, circumstance made it difficult for us both. One night, in Hyde or Regent's Park (I forget which), she almost broke with the pain of it, and I told her "If you have to end it, I understand". Except, I got as far as "under" and my throat closed. It wasn't a choice. I didn't falter. My body just seized the channel shut.

Trust works like that too, when it's been betrayed enough.

She danced in the wind like a holographic dream before the world died is not about the same thing that was done to me. But I recognise its voice.

"I did not take oil through Hormuz, but only because of the plague" is not a sentence that gets less topical as it goes on. Okay, sure, it was olive oil, and it was the year 1296, but work with me here.

Silk Roads II Colon Paths of Fortune is a little trading game about planning journeys. You're a trader (named after your father, so, variations of "Dad") from 13th century Venice, with no particular goal other than wealth and the travel that demands. Much of it is kind of hands-off months on the road, and I'm not entirely sure how I spent three hours on something not that complicated or demanding. None of its decisions are agonising, nor very frequent. It's a relaxing game, neither heavily narrative or obsessively numerical.

I like Pragmata so far. It’s a slower, more methodical breed of shooter, where the need to manually hack the armour firewalls of every enemy means even the lowliest henchbot forces you to interact with it in a more involved level than merely aiming and blasting. I also like the unpexpectedly lighthearted, not remotely Murder Daddish relationship between leading astronaut Hugh and cheerful android ward Diana. I also also like Diana’s coat.

I do not claim much, satorially – I’m currently wearing a wash-faded Uniqlo tee and some shorts my wife bought me, from somewhere. But I feel it is, almost objectively, a nice coat. It’s practical, strongly silhouetted, and the most primary-colour-ass shade of blue to ever exist in visible light. Capcom, of course, have form here. While the exact game it started with is up for debate, at some point, Capcom decided that cool jackets should appear in all their games. Or, at least, all their Resident Evils.

How, then, does Diana’s stack up? Let us remind ourselves of some of Capcom’s finest stitching work.

Now that STALKER 2 isn’t quite so crash-happy and bug-riddled, I find I’m really not wanting for much from it. I’m deep in my second playthrough at the moment (third, if you count the doomed Beastmaster run) and am still discovering new little corners of the Zone I’ve never explored, and with anomalously snapped arms, am bagging valuable new artifacts that I’ve never seen before.

Not that I won’t welcome the upcoming Cost of Hope expansion making STALKER 2 feel wider still, something it’s promising to do by kicking down the gates surrounding currently locked-off regions (including Chornobyl’s ground zero power plant itself). With the DLC’s story centred around a reignited faction war, however, I’m more interested in what Cost of Hope can do for depth than breadth – specifically, whether it can fill out the base game’s ropey reputation system.

Hello readers. Just a quick one to share that yesterday was my last day as RPS hardware editor, as I am now deputy editor instead. Thus, while I’m not technically to blame for all this, I may become to blame for all this whenever Julian goes on holiday, so we figured it probably bears a note of some kind.

If I was sending an advanced starship on a last-hope effort to find the planet that held the key to saving the Earth, I would send a decoy one out first, for when it's inevitably derailed to trillions of space furlongs away instead.

Dead in Antares feels very familiar, yet not enough to be a problem, or to provide a reference that feels accurate enough. Oddly, it first recalled 60 Parsecs, but rather than a punitive roguelike, this is a somewhat story-led game about gathering resources and managing the needs and stats of your space castaways. With turn-based combat, too. I'm struggling to get across exactly how I feel about it.

"I am going to figure this bastard out. It is going to read the thing over here, then check it against that, and then it will either behave, or light up a sign saying 'MOTHER WHY' and shut down. It is a trivial process, but code begets code. I will be at this all night. I no longer care how unnecessary it is."

(One night passes)

"I have no idea what I'm doing."

So yeah, Desynced probably isn't for me. But it is unorthodox, and god help me, I had questions. It's a factory/automation game whose main twist is the modularity of its buildings and robots. It also has a programming system, which it tells you upfront is optional. It would be unwise to spend several hours obsessively overthinking a function that I'm pretty sure is already hardcoded into my robots' firmware. And still getting it wrong. Do I know anyone who would do that?

If I start trying to explain how I know, it'll probably immediately fall into confirmation bias. For every deceptively great little treat, there are a dozen tiny games I take a punt on just in case they're not as crap as they look. Most of them are, of course.

I'm glad it's the good ones I remember. Not forever, probably not even for long. But every so often, some visibly "this could be rubbish nonsense" game like Wizards & Summons brightens my day, and I get to share it with you lot, and hopefully whoever made it gets to eat this week. It is, I hate the entire world, a deckbuilder. But! It's a sort of hybrid of that, and whatever Chaos was. And perhaps technically an autobattler? When did game words all get so unhelpful.

Resident Evil’s history of handcannons is so storied – and so reliably extended with each new game – that the wiki page charting it takes eleven fully-stretched mousewheel scrolls to skim through. Yet currently, it’s also incomplete, missing what might be the best big iron of them all: Resident Evil Requiem’s namesake revolver Requiem.

It's time for Axis Football 2026, and a correction to the fundamental order of the universe. You see, Axis Games historically released an Americaball sim/arcade hybrid every year. My tradition was to report back every two years.

You may remember that I apologised in 2023, after confusing a name change for a shift to bi-annual releases instead. Well, now they *are* doing that. So I'm retracting that apology, on the grounds that it was clearly not me who was mistaken, but reality itself.

I am a very popular coach.

Some spurn match-3 games as "casual", but those rubes are missing out on a colourful dopamine hit that Crusader Kings 3 can't touch. I'll happily sink hours into Bejewelled, my eyes fixed on the screen filled with glittering gems. Sliding the stones around the grid, looking for moments to line up identical jewels and watch as they pop in explosions of colour. Every time hoping the blast will begin a cascade of other gems falling into place and bursting themselves. It's magical.

Though, recently, that love and my constant need for a fresh fix has taken me to hornier places than I intended.

"Stop colliding with the ground, you oafs" is the kind of management pep talk that explains, in part, why I am not the overseer of a World War 2 airfield.

Ground of Aces is an interesting idea, not just for that premise, but for using it to pull a colony builder design closer to a more traditional management game one. Instead of profitability, your goal is meeting the increasing demands of a (mostly) distant war, and you must plant crops and Gather Resources. But serving that specific purpose feels very distinct from the usual dwarf fauxtress, and the random bullshit of Rimworld feels much less artificial and obnoxious in a wartime context.

There's a bit early on in Xenopurge where you're prompted to check your email, and instead of another menu, doing so has you physically step back from the bank of screens you've been periodically swapping between. Those are, it turns out, suspended high above a workstation that's covered in knobs and lights and - bless us - flicky buttons. Remember buttons? God I miss buttons. The ancients and their unreproducible, superior technology.

This little 3D section contextualises the alien-dodging you've been putting your hapless drones through, sets up the world a bit, starts a plot hook. It's not a problem. But it means that, sandwiched between the arrow-key-and-enter-based, remote mission control bit that's basically the whole game, there's this thing covered in clicky turny chunky bits. I couldn't help but think that I wanted to be playing with that instead.

It is, I thought some way through the first hour, sort of an escape room.

No no, don't leave. I don't think I've ragged on escape rooms before, but I would have, if doing it hadn't meant recommending one. No Signal is only sort of one, but I'm not sure it counts. You start out trapped in one room, see, and must search and logic your way out. Gradually expanding access to a space station results as you repeat this process.

But it doesn't feel like one. Partly because it's the story that pulls you along, not just the innate satisfaction of solving. And partly, I think, because it's not (ugh) abstract.

The phrase "Steam backlog" is one that’s often passed around PC gaming circles in guilty whispers, like a barely mustered-up confession to a Catholic priest. Forgive me father, for I hath bought five different Anno games in the Christmas sale, and do not know when I’m going to play them. I have no such shame, because my personal backlog is even more damning – formed not by a lack of time to play, but an inability to create art. And, apparently, to read.

Christmas is sleeping for another year. The trees' candles are put away. The wrapping paper that covered the floor like hay in a barn has been recycled. The SAM site that monitors the skies above the Treehouse has been switched back on, restoring our protection against airborne interlopers but also ensuring there is no horrible mishap when Father Christmas travels through our airspace. So it is time to get into the post-Christmas analysis that the festivities are truly all about.

We can at last reveal how the team voted in this year's Advent Calendar.

One of the myriad unaccountable thoughts that prolonged bedrest let me indulge was "I haven't looked up Stijn van Wakeren for a while". This led immediately to "Oh! They have a new album," then "Oooh, they got Stijn back for the Isopod soundtrack", which in turn took an embarrassingly long while to become "Oh! Isopod came out while I was in hospital!"

Mere months later (look, I had a lot of thoughts, it’s hell) I am finally playing the 3D platform adventure about a woodlouse who smashes things. Yes, it's spun off from Webbed, the little swingy spider game that brought me unrivalled joy for a few weeks. Yes, Wakeren's work is criminally overlooked by people who would go mustard if Nintendo published it. But that kind of worked against it, you know? It's a high bar.

I've probably mentioned before that RPGs are difficult to scout. They share a deposit problem with strategy games, plus the burdens of story and a tendency towards slow, frustrating starts.

Banquet for Fools goes the prologue route. Fortunately, my few gripes with that solo mini-adventure were mostly quelled by the main event. In fact, in hindsight most of those complaints boiled down to "this is awkward without backup", teaching me how to use my party before I knew they existed. More fortunately still, Banquet for Fools is original and intriguing, channeling the ancient ways of RPGs without losing itself to them. I was delighted to learn who made it, because this feels like the game that will finally let their imagination and talent shine.

Eheughhhh. Ack. Eheughhhh.

I’m dying. The dreaded Song cough has gotten to me. At just 36 years old, I, the ambitious, diplomatic, and scholarly Qin Guan, am about to snuff it. It’s not fair. From my deathbed, I rasp out indignant poetic verse about game mechanics and balance. It packs an unnerving meta punch, much to the discomfort of my dear second wife, Wu Junxin, who wonders what this Crusader Kings 3 of which I speak could be.

A while back, I tipper-trucked a few thousand words of Gamescom demo impressions onto the RPS lawn, with the assurance that I’d now duly covered every game I’d played there. However, there was one more, ACAB rhythm actioner Unbeatable, and I left it out on the grounds that I didn’t so much play the preview build as much as I got into a fight with it. And lost.

And with that, this year's edition of the RPS 100 is complete. At least, ours is. We'll be opening up the vote for the 2025 RPS 100: Readers' Edition on Monday. I'll then collate the results and give it the full article treatment to go out over the Christmas break.

I've loved reading through the lists shared in the comments, and I hope many of them survive the gamut of the public vote. (Invisible, Inc in particular. I'm kicking myself for not including it in my submissions.)

For the supporter post this week I thought it would be good to go into a little more depth on how the list was assembled, some of the things I've learned about the team and what people expect from a list, and, potentially of most interest of all: what did each team member submit in their original 25. Including those that didn't make the top 100...

RPS is an acquired taste. We know it, you know it, and some loud portions of the internet complain about it. But what that means is that every day there are people who visit this site, see the games we cover, and read how we cover them and decide it's not for them. Maybe they don't like our tone, our taste, or our humour. Whatever it is, they see it, they leave, and they may never come back.

And that's fine.

Because for others, and as supporters of this site you are among them, there is something here that can't be found anywhere else. It's what brought me back to the site every day as a reader, and now as its editor it's what I hope to foster.

Can PC hardware have soul?

Not a soul, in the immortal spirit sense, though if anyone wants to comprehensively prove the existence of the divine in the comments then feel free. But I’ve long believed that inainimate objects can possess the same kind of loveable, if intangible and barely describable, quality that we look for in more purely creative works of art. Stuff where you take one look and know: yes, that’s special. The Fender Stratocaster. Rubik’s Cubes. The Space Shuttle Discovery. Soulful as fuck, all of 'em.

Unfortunately, whatever this quality is, it’s one that seems to elude PC hardware: a field of design that’s never been better, practicality wise, yet consists almost entirely of cold, black, do-yer-job plastic. Functional to a fault. It’s a shared shortcoming I’ve been thinking about since the flight home from seeing Valve’s new Steam gear, and from first impressions, they’re mostly the same story. The Steam Controller feels like a good controller, technically and practically, but I don’t think it has the charming hum of true soul. The Steam Frame definitely doesn’t. The Steam Machine? That, I'm still figuring out.

As you may have seen, I've not been having the best time with Wall World 2. While the sequel retains the half Missile Command, half Manic Miner roguelike goodness that made the first game so compelling, a shift in its structure has surfaced the dull minutes that dominate the start of each run. It's an unexpected change, and one which has really dampened my love for this robotic-spider good-time.

In the distance, I catch a brief glimpse of two streams of light. Then, the road’s empty, aside from the splayed glow of my own headlamps. The Mulsanne straight is beautiful at night, but as I fly along it atop a wave of V10 screams, I’m distracted. My steering wheel is pointing slightly to the left. I’ve knocked the tow out by clumsily meandering too close to a barrier. Miraculously, it seems to be the only damage my Courage C60 has sustained, but it makes catching the distant cars that taunt me so unlikely.

The year is 2005, and I’m on track for the sort of deeply lonely fifth place finish the Le Mans 24 hour race is wont to deliver. I’ve only been behind the wheel for an hour, but Automobilista 2’s latest expansion is great at taking the sim’s long-brilliant racing foundations and using them to meld your mind with that of a mid-2000s endurance driver.

It is a delicious irony that at the end of Hardspace: Shipbreaker, a game about carving junked spacecraft into their constituent parts, lies a moment of fusion: a final mission that perfectly joins together your actions to its overarching narrative.