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Just when you thought it was safe to go back into the Palwoods and hunt large, electric yellow animals of entirely original design whose names rhyme with "peekaboo", Nintendo and The Pokémon Company have announced that they're taking Palworld developers Pocketpair to court for "infringement of patent rights".

Lethal Company was one of last year's surprise horror hits. It was a brilliant dystopian scavenging sim in which you searched cellars for bolts while avoiding the attentions of creatures that hate being looked at, or which only move when they're not being looked at, or which look like your friends, from a distance. The developer's next game, Welcome To The Dark Place, is more about hearing. It's an "open-world, auditory text-based adventure" which mostly takes place in pitch blackness.

Farm life sim snowclone My Time At X is getting a third entry. My Time At Evershine looks to feature more sowing, reaping, kissing and combat, similar to the previous games My Time At Portia and My Time At Sandrock, but with a new art style, campaign co-op and citybuilding elements. You'll get a glimpse of the new art style in the announcement trailer below.

I don't think I'm going out on a limb by saying that Ubisoft's best game of this year won't be Star Wars Outlaws or the as-yet unreleased Assassin's Creed Shadows, it'll be Prince Of Persia: The Lost Crown. The sidescrolling metroidvania is a rich, expansive, and surprisingly challenging take on a genre typically dominated by indies, and it's precisely the kind of game I wish mega-publishers produced more.

It's also now got a story expansion, Mask Of Darkness, which came out yesterday.

We don't write much about board and paper games around these parts, not since Cardboard Children was sent to the dissolving pits. I still feel that roleplay and strategy gaming has a home here on RPS even when it's not digital though, and doubly so when it's the work of our former comrades.

Enter Gold Teeth, a tabletop RPG "of piracy & occult horror" which just cleared its Kickstarter funding goal, and which is designed by Marsh Davies and Jim Rossignol (RPS in peace).

Yesterday I watched a Youtube video about Warhammer 40,000: Space Marine 2, in which sundry, gesticulating milords of the internet opine that they had "forgot what it's like to be the target audience" for games, hailing the new (and for our money, fairly good) Warhammer 40K shooter as a throwback affair that "oozes masculinity", with no excess feelings or real-life social relevancy. I then combed through several thousand comments below said video, many of which expressed similar longing for the hypothetical Good Old Days, before those wily feminists invaded the medium, transformed every game into a LGBT+ weeping simulator, and threw all the Real Men into a big hole. I did this because I was searching for one particular comment written by somebody claiming to be Matthew Karch, CEO of Space Marine 2 developers Saber Interactive.

As I’m sure as is the curse of anyone who’s watched the entirety of Peep Show multiple times, I cannot read the name ‘Marko’ without hearing it in a nasally Australian accent, inquiring about cocaine. This is probably a disservice to the hero of colourful metroidvania Marko: Beyond Brave, who a quick goog tells me may be based on Krali Marko - a popular character in the folklore of Studio Mechka’s native Bulgaria. Folk hero or not, Marko certainly has some heroic facial hair: his moustache floweth so bountifully that it can’t be contained in his character portrait. Extremely powerful of him.

As per EA’s recent generative AI tugathon, the third game in Respawn’s action adventure Star Wars trilogy has been confirmed again to be in development. According to EA, it’ll be the “final chapter" in the now-trilogy, following 2019’s Jedi Fallen Order and 2023’s Jedi Survivor.

The existence of the game was first confirmed by Cal Kestis actor Cameron Monaghan, during an Ocala Comic Con panel. “We’re working on a third and we’re in the process of doing that right now,” said Monaghan, which is about as straightforward an affirmative as one could want. It was also double-confirmed this February, following news of layoffs at EA, via Eurogamer.

The upcoming skate. game now has an (admittedly vague) early access release date of 2025, according to a post by the developers on Xitter. It's difficult to write about the new skate. game because if you choose to write skate. with the imposed stylings which skate. publishers Electronic Arts insist, you end up putting a full stop after every instance of skate., which makes your sentences about skate. sound fucking stupid. and. belaboured. with. pauses. Game makers, please stop putting punctuation in your game names.

People waiting impatiently for The Sims 5: you have sinned against Simming and must do penance. In your temerity and ignorance, you have cried out unto developers Maxis and publisher EA for another sequential helping of the cuddly/sociopathic neighbourhood-building game - a "sequel", if you will. Know ye not that we live in the time of Disrupted Models? Sequels are archaisms devised by the old gods in their dotage. Let us all join hands and set forth into the sunny uplands of the Connected Cross-Media Cross-Platform Universe.

Having gone to bed last night with Final Fantasy XVI installed yet unplayed on a Steam Deck, I awoke to find Valve have slapped the moody RPG with Unsupported status for the handheld. Its crime: an inability to "run well" on the Steam Deck’s internals, regardless of settings changes. Dammit, Clive.

What are you LYMBUS? In what vat were you grown? I feel like I’ve sluggishly ambled my way down to the fridge and tried to scoop a gherkin from the jar, only to find a disconcertingly tasty sliver of my own brain - like a creature from Flatland trying to play 4D chess, and all the pieces are just tiny carvings of my face with “lol get a load of this prick” whittled into the forehead. I quite like it.

“We combined your favorite genres into one grotesque piece of software! You're welcome, game journalists,” reads the Steam page for the demo. That is a very polite way to kick me in the head and call me a bitch, LYMBUS.

It's been long suspected (if not officially confirmed) that the first Red Dead Redemption will be getting a PC remaster some time in the near future. We've already seen a description for the PC version appear briefly on the PlayStation store (of all places). And earlier this year a snoopy fan of the studio who monitors the backend of Rockstar's launcher found similar game descriptions buried amid metadata. Yesterday, that same practice yielded yet another clue - the game's Steam app number.

Last month, Helldivers 2 studio Arrowhead thrust a white flag out from their shelled position in an attempt to placate mutinous fans of the co-op shooter. In response to a community sentiment best summed up by a popular Reddit post titled “Let the super earth burn”, Arrowhead released a statement. “In short, we didn’t hit our target with the latest update…what matters most now is action. Not talk.” Said action (which, it must be pointed out, felt a bit troublingly reactive to the loudest and most histrionic voices in the roo..uh, subreddit) was foreshadowed in a list of issues to be tackled over the coming months.

Frostpunk 2 was an ambitious gambit. With survival achieved, and the introduction's excellently sinister advisor whispering evil Tory ideas, the whole city you built in Frostpunk is now just the headquarters for a sprawling expansion effort, and your rule is no longer absolute. Rather than retread the same "prepare for ultra-Winter" ground, your biggest obstacle will likely be your own people, now formed into shifting political parties, and looking outward with colonial eyes. The result is a complicated, laborious survival citybuilder that's two parts compelling, and one part frustrating for the wrong reasons.

As the end of the UK workday approaches, and the last few grains of sand trickle through the neck of the huge, obsidian hourglass our overlord Graham keeps on his desk, let me bid you goodbye by writing up Some Goodbyes We Made.

I really wanted to like action adventure The Plucky Squire more than I do now, having given its charming 2D to 3D platforming a proper whirl. Yes, it's lovely to look at. Yes, hopping out of a storybook and making friends with an illustration on a coffee mug is cool. And yes, everyone can have a mildly fun time with its puzzles and fights. But that's the problem: who is everyone? At first I thought, "This game is for young kids and that's fine!", given its relative simplicity. Then I hit some puzzles and thought, "Ain't no kid figuring this out".

Then it hit me. It struggles to balance the fine line between being approachable for tiny tots and layered enough for people who've graduated from "goo goo ga ga" to "oo oo aa aa my back hurts". And that's down to how plucky you're allowed to squire at any given time, because it can be surprisingly limited and, sadly, a bit underwhelming.

You can't travel back to the 1980s. But what if I told you it was possible to gently warp your memories of that time? UFO 50 is a kart of 50 games that once existed for an old computer system, all lovingly restored by a gang of coders. The old console, of course, is a fiction. The LX-I never existed. But it's a fun pseudo-history against which to create a grab bag of small games (some throwaway, others mighty) all designed with a distinct 80s look. It's an exercise in adhering to an aesthetic. Like an oil painter working with a limited range of colours, the developers of this bundle have stuck to a 32-colour equivalent of the Zorn palette. Yet play a little of each game, and you start to sense the smirk of chronos. These games aren't stuck in the past, but they are enjoying a holiday there.

Having played the opening hour of Altus’ Metaphor: ReFantazio – now mere weeks away from its October 11th launch – I think it’s high time to correct a games previewing injustice. Namely, that the majority of its pre-release buzz has centred around its proximity to Persona, and not its far more entertaining quality of having the most gleefully bizarre RPG enemy design this side of Elden Ring’s horn-tooting orbpeople.

Why is every blockbuster video game now some kind of live service game? Speaking as a clueless idiot, the explanation I find most convincing is that it's an attempt to bridge the gap between the returns publishers want from video games, versus how much we're able or willing to pay upfront. "Triple-A" projects now cost exorbitant sums to develop, partly thanks to wider economic inflation, but also because publishers have spent decades teaching players that every sequel has to be More and Shinier. Premium game prices have not risen in proportion, and investors want growth, as they do.

Live service games sneak around this difficulty by dragging out the time we spend playing them. Whether premium or free-to-play, they seek to install themselves as habits by means of regular, planned updates and additions. This is time that can be monetised by way of a subscription model, time in which other products may be sold to you, like skins and paintjobs, and time that becomes a commodity in itself, "engagement", which can be transmuted and exploited to various end. I'm not sure it's ever been expressed this way in any press release boast about longevity, but the unspoken principle/logical extrapolation seems to be that ideally, a live service game should keep us plugged in and plugging away till we die.

Strange Scaffold’s newly released FPS I Am Your Beast is very fun for quite a few reasons, but chief among them is a deep appreciation for the poetry of good videogame violence. I’m not using the big P word just to throw out an overly worthy comparison to something we might associate with craft or beauty, but as a nod toward the game’s playful application of what I previously called ‘a euphoric splurge of murderous game verbiage’ one morning where I had clearly eaten my wordy Weetabix. The way its hurled knives and curb stomps and inexplicable decapitations flow together have an assonant, almost Suessian quality to them.

But it’s also, well, just a bit like Mad Libs. You play as Harding, a man who’s mythical lethality is established very early on. The showing is there in the moment to moment, but the telling is conveyed through cute tricks like how everyone you meet is so deeply afraid of Harding that they loudly keep track of exactly what weapon he’s holding at all times. The Mad Libs comes in through the fact that you can draw Harding a route between A and B, and it’s a given that multiple heads are going to come unstuck from necks along the way. You’re sort of just casually filling in the verbs that seem the most fun to you in the moment. One of the verbs is ‘hornet’. Hornet is a verb now.

I started playing and enjoying battle royale wizarding sim Spellbreak just in time for Spellbreak to get shut down. Developers Proletariat, Inc announced plans to yank the servers back in August 2022 in the course of being acquired by Activision Blizzard, bringing an end to many happy hours spent skating on conjured ice ramps and hurling boulders around like bunny rabbits. Yes, I am the kind of wizard who hurls a bunny rabbit, if there are no boulders to spare.

Happily, it transpires that Proletariat have resurrected their creation and handed it over to posterity in the shape of a free standalone Community Version, available on Itch.io. You’ll need to host your own server or join another group if you want to play multiplayer, but all the same, this is a lovely gift and one I’m delighted to transmit unto you, the active and efficient Magenauts of Rockus Paperus Shottegonne.

Having shot up the near-future in Battlefield 2042, DICE and EA are using a modern-day setting with the next instalment of their military FPS series. According to EA studios group general manager and Respawn chief Vince Zampella, the new, currently untitled shooter will be one of those "back to basics" sequels that tries to rebottle the lightning of Battlefield 3 and Battlefield 4 - these being the "peak" Battlefield games, in Zampella's view.

I am sure gladiator roguelike RPG We Who Are About To Die’s latest update is very nice, and its accompanying 30% celebratory discount even nicer. You can find the full patch notes here, and I’d be interested to hear how significant they are from the more fascina-pilled among you. They mean nothing to me, however, because We Who Are About To Die has been taunting me from my wishlist since it launched in early access a few years back. Well, no more. Throw me to the lions! Oh, this one has a Steam demo in its mouth. Great stuff.

ECHOSTASIS is the third entry in Enigma’s Studio’s horror trilogy, and it’s one of the more interesting games I’ve played this year. There’s a demo on Steam, and you should grab it if you're interested, since everything I have to say about it is going to be a spoiler of some kind. I’ll attempt a brief description below, but a lot of the fun here is discovering how all its parts fit together, and how even its more prosaic game conventions are defamiliarised through a spooky, static-drenched ensorcellment.

In theory, vampires and immersive sims go together as naturally as bats and caves. Immersive sims tend to involve a balance of stealth, acrobatics, raw strength and crafty manipulation, and vampires are celebrated for all of these things. Despite this, actual vampire-themed immersive sims are rare. My list starts with Vampire: the Masquerade: Bloodlines... and sort of ends there. In a devastating betrayal, Arkane Austin's Redfall wasn't an immersive sim but an open world co-op shooter (a not very good one). The much-delayed Bloodlines 2 was recently downgraded from immersive sim to RPG by new developers The Chinese Room. Arkane Lyon's Blade adaptation seems promising, but it's a ways off.

Here to paper over the immersive vamping gap in the market is Byte Barrel's Trust, "a new first-person shooter with immersive sim elements". It takes place in a world where the vampires are hunted for their blood, which has become an everyday human energy source, used for everything from car batteries to streetlights. The irony! I feel like, in the circumstances, the ideal solution would be for humans to let vampires suck their blood in return for vampires letting humans use their blood for electricity, but that wouldn't make for a very thrilling shooter. Anyway, here's the trailer.

If you’ve played Battle Brothers, you’ll know that Overhype Studios have a way of making you care for an underling, no more so than when you inadvertently send them onto the wrong end of a sharp blade. Menace, their upcoming turn-based tactical RPG, will also put the wellbeing of your chosen fighters at the forefront of your mind – along with a dramatic shift from 2D medieval sprites to the fully 3D battlefields of a unruly space frontier.

To survive in looter-booter Pacific Drive you have to keep the paranormal station wagon you drive around in good nick. You're constantly repairing corroded doors and swapping out busted engine parts with cobbled-together technology. But maybe this tinkering was a little too much. Our review praised the game for its "trunk loads of atmosphere" but called the constant need to craft stuff "laborious". If you also felt this, then good news. An update now lets you fiddle the difficulty options a generous amount, say developers Ironwood Studios, making the game easier and bringing crafting needs right down.

Buuut... if you thought the opposite - that the game wasn't hard enough - you can now tick a box that makes hitting yourself with the trunk door kill you stone dead.

If you're a fan of rhythm games and fun bops, then you might want to bookmark ol' Hyperbeat. Set in a wireframe world, you're to chop, dodge or ride notes as you slam your "hyperknight" through a tunnel at high speed. There's a subtle, dreamy story element to your musical journey, with confusing dialogue and a nice cherry blossom tree. Hmmm, curious. Anyway yeah, it looks rad.

Tiny Glade has been a constant presence on TikTok for the last year or so. It's never far away. In between burrito recipes and hymns to the Fujifilm X100v, this gorgeous toylike art tool's gamely turning stretches of balmy meadow into semi-ruined castles, semi-ruined villages and semi-ruined citadels.

Dreamy and slightly haunted, it's conjured words like "bewitching" and "spellbinding" in the comments sections, too. It makes sense, really. Tiny Glade's a game about making rustic dioramas and then photographing them. It's not hard to imagine some exiled magical person might live in here among the rocks and reeds and wild heather.