Donnerstag, 30. Juni 2022

Our favourite games of 2022 so far

Against all possible odds, we're officially halfway through 2022. What a year it's been so far! After one of the busiest starts to the gaming calendar in recent memory (looking at you, Elden Ring), my backlog is barely keeping it together right now. I've started so many things on as many different services that just keeping track of what I've played when is fast becoming a second job. If you, too, have been feeling overwhelmed by the sheer number of new and exciting releases coming out, then why not have a gander at this freshly compiled list of all our favourite games from the year so far? Maybe you'll find something that will similarly catch your eye, just as it's done ours. I'll warn you now, though. It's a big list.

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This parody of The Witness is funny, fun, and free

Video game parodies are often ropey, being neither funny nor fun to play. I am delighted that The Looker is both, and free too. It's a loving send-up of The Witness, inviting us to a strange island to solve more line-drawing puzzles and listen to more audio tapes. Some of the puzzles are quite clever, and many of the jokes made me laugh—plus it's only an hour or two to complete.

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Much-delayed expansion Cuphead: The Delicious Last Course is finally out today

Classically animated platformer Cuphead will finally get its Delicious Last Course with the release of the expansion on Steam today. The DLC adds a new character, Ms. Chalice, the third beverage-container bonce you can play as. Once you’ve unlocked her in the DLC you’ll be able to play as her in the base game too. There's also a new island with mountains, icy tundra and desert to navigate. Watch the trailer below, although it’s getting on a bit now.

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Cult Of The Lamb is like The Binding Of Isaac had a cute colony sim, but with more Satan

It wasn't until I played a hands-on preview of Cult Of The Lamb this weekend that I realised how much ovine imagery is knocking around Christianity. All them lambs being sacrificed in the Old Testament, shepherds, flocks, the lion and the lamb. In Cult Of The Lamb, which is sort of a dungeon-crawling roguelite with a colony sim bolted on, you are a literal rather than metaphorical lamb. Although possibly also a metaphorical lamb. Point is, the game makes great hay from the juxtaposition of cute fluffy animals and a violent cult.

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Valve halve Steam Deck SSD bandwidth on some models, say games performance is unaffected

Steam Deck production might be ramping up again but it turns out more recent orders could be something of a lucky dip, SSD-wise. Valve have quietly updated their Steam Deck tech specs page with a note that the NVMe SSDs in “some” 256GB and 512GB models might now use the PCIe Gen 3.0 x2 interface, meaning the drive has half the usual bandwidth of the Gen 3.0 x 4 SSDs that previously featured as standard.

As first spotted by German site HardwareLuxx, there's no indication as to why Valve made this change, and it doesn’t look like anyone with an outstanding Steam Deck order will know which SSD bandwidth they’ll get in advance. However, Valve's added note explains that “In our testing, we did not see any impact to gaming performance between x2 and x4.”

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Mittwoch, 29. Juni 2022

Dead By Daylight devs are plotting to end the game’s grind, permanently

Survival horror slash ‘em up Dead By Daylight’s progression and perks systems are being overhauled to dramatically reduce the amount of grind, developers Behaviour Interactive have announced. The changes to Dead By Daylight’s progression and perks were first touted during the grindhouse game’s sixth anniversary broadcast back in May, but are finally arriving in the mid-chapter update for the current ‘Roots Of Dread’ storyline in July.

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Hell Is Us wants to make its action-adventuring more "old school" than Elden Ring

When action-adventure game Hell Is Us was first announced a couple of months ago, we thought it had Annihilation vibes and appreciated the team's attempts to invoke Annihilation... and its vibes. Developers Rogue Factor didn't provide many other details, besides a few buzz words: "semi-open world", "true adventure", "third person".

So, I sat down with the game's creative director Jonathan Jacques-Belletête in the hopes he could shed some light on the aforementioned vibes, perhaps even turning them from ethereal gusts of Annihilation-ness to concrete info on just how the game aims to be a "true adventure". Lo and behold, I think it worked!

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Devs behind Steam wishlist hit The Day Before defend use of unpaid volunteers

Fntastic, the studio developing Steam’s most wishlisted game The Day Before, have issued a statement to RPS explaining their policy of using paid and unpaid volunteers to make up their dev team. Metaphorical alarm bells began ringing earlier this week when it emerged that Fntastic are composed entirely of “volunteers” – although full-time volunteers, kindly dubbed "employees" in the statement, do receive salaries.

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Monster Hunter Rise: Sunbreak review: A delightfully difficult expansion that doesn't disappoint

I loved Monster Hunter: Rise when I first played it on Switch last year, but I’ll admit that I sort of sleep-walked through its entirety, dreamily kicking the tails off a couple of raptors before making them into a fashionable pair of hot pants. This wasn’t a bad thing, mind. Far from it. I found Rise to be a substantially better-paced MonHunt entry compared to its predecessors, the series’ steep barrier to entry readjusted to a gentle incline that was more palatable for newcomers like me. Monster Hunter’s particular flavour of RPG design has always felt like trying to find a fork in a friend’s kitchen while they’re in another room. Nothing is where you expect it to be and there are a lot of things here you just don’t understand. Admittedly Rise wasn’t much better, stuffed as it was with endless text-based tutorials, but at the very least it pointed out the right drawer this time around.

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The Fallout TV show has cast David Lynch's muse Kyle MacLachlan as a regular

Amazon’s upcoming TV adaptation of post-apocalyptic RPG series Fallout has cast veteran sci-fi actor Kyle MacLachlan in an undisclosed role as a series regular. You may remember him from such roles as future emperor of the universe Paul Atriedes in David Lynch’s Dune, cafficionado Special Agent Dale Cooper in David Lynch’s Twin Peaks, and for his turn in David Lynch's Oscar-nominated Blue Velvet. Please tell me David Lynch will at least direct the pilot.

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Pop-punk coming-of-age rhythm game Loud looks cute

Pop-punk is not my musical (brand new) bag but I can't resist a coming-of-age story about a teenager who finds their place in the world by picking up a guitar. Give me Pugwall, give me Ladies And Gentlemen, The Fabulous Stains, give me Loud. Announced yesterday, the rhythm game will tell the tale of teen girl who goes from playing air guitar on a broom to wailing on the world stage. Loud looks cute, somewhere between Life Is Strange and Guitar Hero, and you can see a bit in the trailer below.

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Sony return to PC hardware with premium gaming monitors and headsets

PlayStation masterminds Sony have made an unexpected jump into PC gaming hardware, announcing their InZone range of desktop-focused gaming monitors and headsets. It’s Sony’s first big attempt at PC kit, in any form, since mothballing their Vaio laptop and all-in-one brand way back in 2014.

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Dienstag, 28. Juni 2022

The legendary HyperX Cloud 2 gaming headset is down to $60 from HP after a $40 discount

The super-comfy HyperX Cloud 2 gaming headset, beloved by esports pros and casual gamers alike, is going cheap at HP's US store. Today, you can pick up this legendary headset in a stylish pink/white colourway for $60 after a $40 drop.

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Overwatch 2's second closed beta kicks off today

Overwatch 2 sees the start of its second closed beta test today, which runs until July 18th. You’ll need to wait for 7pm BST/11am PST to arrive before you can jump into the beta though. It’s also the first proper opportunity to play as the new tank Junker Queen, revealed at the Xbox & Bethesda Games Showcase earlier this month.

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Sonic Frontiers' Cyberspace stages are refreshing blasts of classic Sonic

I thought Sonic Frontiers was less Breath Of The Wild and more Super Mario Odyssey after I'd given it whirl in LA at Summer Geoff Fest. Despite its rough edges, Frontier's open-ish world was a joy to blitz around as a hedgehog renowned for going particularly fast. But there was one thing I couldn't talk about – Cyberspace stages: Bite-sized levels à la classic Sonic. And here's why it might've been one of the best bits of the demo.

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Hearthstone’s next expansion invites us to a murder mystery party in August

Fantasy CCG Hearthstone is asking players to solve a macabre mystery in its next expansion, Murder At Castle Nathria, due out on August 2nd. Prepare to venture once again into Warcraft’s home of the afterlife, the Shadowlands. Just remember to grab your rhyming dictionary and your fanciest deerstalker before you watch the trailer below.

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RPS Time Capsule: the games worth saving from 2005

Every month I throw half a dozen broken shovels at the sleeping forms lying around the RPS treehouse floor. I demand they dig a new hole for the monthly RPS Time Capsule of games we'd like to save from a certain year, and usually it isn't a problem. This time, however, the staff complained a lot about the year choice: it's 2005, baby, and they struggled. I'm okay with it though, because we ended up with a lot of cool abandonware and interesting choices I couldn't have predicted. Especially because, since I got to the Time Capsule first, I got to stuff in the most obvious choice.

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