Here's a strong pitch:
Want a 2TB NVMe SSD for less than £60? You've got exactly that with this Amazon UK deal, courtesy of Lexar. The NM610 isn't the fastest drive around, with a PCIe 3.0 interface and sequential speeds that top out at 3300MB/s, but it delivers a huge amount of storage space for very little money - while being around six times faster than SATA SSDs.
Baldur's Gate 3's second major patch is here, as teased earlier this week. It expands Karlach's character epilogue, as the first of several such expansions that Larian have planned, as well as improving performance fixing hundreds more bugs.
I don't remember this at the time, but there were complaints about Skyrim's map when it came out, because it was just an extreme zoom out on the world. It wasn't dense with information; the map markers were often kind of an "it's in this area" guideline that were even less helpful if what you needed was in a barrow or otherwise underground. Starfield raises the bar by taking the bold step of having a map that is almost not a map.
I'm referring here to the planet surface map. The starmap is, like a couple of things I've experienced since being hustled through quite an accelerated inciting incident (Starfield's equivalent of Patrick Stewart dying in a sewer after he's charged you with saving the world), reminiscent of Mass Effect. You can select different galaxies, which have one or two solar systems in them, and then can zoom down and select specific planets or moons or whatever to warp to. Once you're wombling about on the surface being a naughty little space captain - or whatever, I don't judge what you're up to - well baby, I hope you like blue voids with a bit of topography.
Woah! Last week Gamescom 2023 happened, the biggest consumer event for video games in the woooooooorld! The Electronic Wireless Show podcast gives you our definitive take on what was hot and what was not from Geoffcom's Opening Night Live, and points you towards some of the previews and interviews our crack team has from the show floor. This week there's plenty to talk about re. What We've Been Playing as well, because James has been cramming in a bunch of small games. Fun!
Lord Of The Rings: Return To Moria is a survival game that certainly shares something in common with both Valheim and Deep Rock Galactic: you and a few buds sink pits and set out on expeditions to mine ore, batter monsters, and push further into the darkness. Having watched its game director Jon-Paul Dumont steer me through a 30-minute demo, I’ve come away with the impression it’s far more than just a cheap LOTR pretender. The game strikes me as a real competitor, with well thought out story beats and crafting treats to make Moria’s restoration a hearty adventure… or, if you'd prefer, the equivalent of a Powerwash Simulator.
Over the past week, dataminers have been rifling through Baldur's Gate 3's code and have discovered a dragon's hoard of alleged "cut content". It's hard to specify what they've unearthed without accidentally sounding the Major Spoilers trumpet and initiating Armageddon, but the supposed buried offerings include additional areas, swathes of dialogue, storylines, cutscenes, characters, romance opportunities and even deities. Given just how much Larian's gargantuan RPG gives you to play with, I am kind of thankful for a generous amount of stuff being "left out" - certainly, I don't need any more romanceable NPCs, I'm already fending them off with a broomhandle. But the news has gone down badly with a few players, and especially those who feel the game's overall quality takes a dive in acts 2 and 3.
Developers have come to Larian's defence, amongst them David Gaider, former Baldur's Gate 2 and Dragon Age writer, who is nowadays creative director of Summerfall Games, creator of the very earwormy STRAY GODs: The Roleplaying Musical. "Not surprised to hear of the amount of stuff apparently cut from BG3," Gaider wrote on Twix. "BG2 had a mountain of stuff cut over its development, some early and some even after lots of work had gone into it... almost every game does. Every DA game did. Heck, even Stray Gods had some considerable cuts."
It's a stormy night. The lights are off. The doors are locked. Somewhere, a woman is singing. Somewhere else, a phone is ringing. The sinks are full of gunk and there are children hiding in the cupboards. Oh, and the darker stretches of floor are covered with writhing tentacles. This is Holstin, a Polish survival horror experience in which you merrily rove an isolated town that, based on 14 minutes of fumbling around in exactly one very unwelcoming house, already seems a match for Silent Hill in terms of existential squalor. A public playtest is underway, and I've got a trailer for you through the jump.
Officially unveiled at this week's Panic Games Showcase, Arco is a triptych of revenge stories set across the deserts, plains and forests of a fantastical, South American-style landscape. It's a part of the world we don't often get to see in games, and its stunning pixel art (and tiny cute little llamas) instantly caught my eye when I got to play an early mission from it at last week's Gamescom. Made by four developers spread across the globe, the official genres listed on its Steam page describe it as a tactical turn-based action adventure RPG where you guide four separate heroes in their fight against the ominous sounding Red Company. But just saying it's turn-based is doing Arco a disservice, I think, as it's also a little bit real-time, a little bit simultaneous turns, and all pretty brilliant, if you ask me. Here are some very early impressions of it.
Today is Starfield early access release day, providing you bought the pricier editions, and senior Bethesda boffins are feeling appropriately festive, and probably also totally exhausted. Bethesda Game Studios director and executive producer Todd Howard has sent an email to staff thanking them for their efforts and ruminating a bit on Starfield's "long and winding" development, which began with Howard chatting to ZeniMax Media's now-passed co-founder Robert Altman in the wake of Skyrim's enormous success.
Where Winds Meet struck me as hugely ambitious action adventure romp set in vast, Ten Kingdom-inspired China. And it was hilariously impossible to summarise in the space of a short, sharp 30-minute appointment. While the elevator pitch started off fairly naturally, there came a point where the elevator rocketed up into the atmosphere and spiralled out of control. I won’t pretend to completely understand what the exact measure of the game is, but I'm both excited to see more and a tad worried it could end up being a disjointed, overstretched mash of things that don't form a cohesive whole.
The original Destiny storyline opened following the collapse of a vast Terran civilization at the hands of an invading, amorphous Darkness and its various alien accomplices - an advance stymied only by a benevolent Big Dumb Object known as the Traveller. It cast you as an ancient warrior, resurrected by a flying robot to reclaim humankind's old dominions together with their antique, storied weapons and gear. So much of its appeal for me, back in 2014, was the mystique of that reclamation process, bolstered by alternately zany, obnoxious, fragmentary and/or intriguing writing that expanded upon the viral mythological element in Halo.
Fast-forward nine years, and Destiny 2 has turned the destruction and loss of history wrought by the Darkness into a seasonal - or as it's shortly to become, "episodic" - content "cadence" (a term that stems from the Latin word for falling) of erosion and restoration, with areas, weapons and quests stripped periodically from the game due to a mixture of technical pressures and commercial priorities. It's sort of become the very thing you're fighting, but where the Darkness aims to engulf and extinguish the Guardians of the Light, Destiny wants to keep you engaged.
When The Lord of the Rings: Gollum was announced a few years back, the general response was "who on Middle-earth would want to play as Gollum". I'm wondering if Atari and Graphite Lab's "creative sequel" to Pong, aka Qomp2, will face a similar reception. Released in the 70s, the original Pong was videogame tennis. In this reinvention - which, confusingly, is also a sequel to Stuffed Wombat's Qomp, with the Pong branding sort of ladled on top - the homely pixel ball has shattered one player's paddle and escaped into an Axiom Verge-esque labyrinth of spikes, energy beams and floating T-Rex heads. Filing this premise somewhere on the "what if" spectrum between the Edge line about talking to the monsters in DOOM and people demanding to land on gas giants in Starfield. Find a trailer through the jump.
There are a lot of Picross-style nonogram games available on PC these days, but many of them fail to inspire the easy, compulsive fugue of Picross itself. I'm hoping Logiart Grimoire will achieve such numbing delights when it launches into Steam Early Access next month. It's got the pedigree for it, given that it's made by Jupiter Corporation, the creator of all those original Picross games for Nintendo devices.
If a strategy game gets its hooks into you, it can easily consume hundreds, if not thousands, of hours of your life. That either makes Steam's latest sale of strategy games absurdly good value for money, or an assault upon productivity everywhere.
Baldur's Gate 3 first patch was released last week and fixed over a thousand bugs, but Larian aren't done. In a new post on Steam, Larian have laid out their future plans for updates - including performance improvements, a new Karlach epilogue, and more bug fixes.
Apologies to Geoffey K and his GTA 6-loving stage invader, but for me, the torquiest head-turner of Gamescom 2023 was not a game but AMD FSR 3. The Radeon gang’s long awaited answer to DLSS 3 finally got a proper reveal, showcasing how its frame generation feature – called Fluid Motion Frames – could triple performance in supported games. And, while it was revealed alongside two new GPUs – the Radeon RX 7800 XT and RX 7700 XT – AMD general manager Scott Herkelman suggested that FSR 3 will work "on any graphics card" once it launches.
Sad news, folks. Munich, Germany-based independent developer Mimimi Games have announced that they're closing doors following the release of Shadow Gambit: The Cursed Crew, which RPS only recently described as the studio's best work yet. The developer plan to support Shadow Gambit with patches and additions, but are otherwise ceasing development and will "slowly ramp down" in the coming months. Founders Dominik Abé and Johannes Roth are even now trying to relocate the studio's few dozen employees, who will be paid a bonus taken from Shadow Gambit profits to ease the transition.
"What's better than gazing at the Milky Way?", asks Bethesda. The answer? "Savouring it as well." That's right folks, I may not have laid my hands on big Todd's mega RPG Starfield, but I've actually tasted its universe, in the form of a promotional drink handed out at Gamescom. It’s composed of cinnamon and stardust, with the boundless expanse of space taking on the form of a grey liquid goop. I’ve got to admit, I think it makes for an excellent beverage, and could perhaps have elicited more excitement from me than the game itself will on release.
You may have noticed a mounting squabble between Starfield fans and detractors concerning the game's planetary maps, triggered by some leaks or fake leaks over the past week. Said skirmish has now escalated to "-gate" status, with "Tilegate" doing the rounds on forums and even creeping into search results, presumably much to the alarm of innocent, unaligned ceramics company Tilegate Trading Llc in Florida. The nub of the dispute seems to be thus: some people claim the procedurally generated tiles that comprise many Starfield environments actually glue together into complete globes, so that you can see and walk from one to the other and, indeed, all around the equator, while others claim they're discrete maps with invisible walls, similar to those of the astonishing "dreamable" space sim Noctis.
Who knows, we might have an under-embargo Starfield review in the works that will lay matters to rest. In the short term, the uncertainty about whether Starfield's planets are actually planets puts me in mind of comparable celestial angst in Bethesda's Elder Scrolls games, where planets are more properly described as planes of existence, conjured by immortal beings, which sort of orbit the mortal world of Tamriel. I've been revisiting how Bethesda's mainstay fantasy games thought about outer space in the run-up to Starfield, and while I'm intrigued by the new game's portrayals of celestial mechanics (latest discovery: the Starfield starmap represents stellar and planetary gravity as dimples on a kind of galactic tarpaulin, as in old Stephen Hawking documentaries), I'll be very surprised if it offers anything quite as wonderfully bizarre.
Every weekend, indie devs show off current work on Twitter's #screenshotsaturday tag. And every Monday (well, unless it's a holiday), I bring you a selection of these snaps and clips. This week, my eye has been caught by decorating tapes, a wide range of wet worlds, a spread of cool violence, a murderous squirrel, and yes, immersive sims. Come admire these attractive and interesting indie games!
Vampires might be the themed threat for Diablo 4's second season, but it was arguably its own player base who drew first blood when season one started at the end of July. As you may have heard by now, Diablo's Season Of The Malignant didn't exactly go down all that well, with much of the hissing and fang-bearing directed toward its nerf-heavy balance patch that arrived a couple of days before the season started in earnest - a series of events that Blizzard's franchise general manager Rod Fergusson describes as "a perfect storm of a couple of situations" when I sit down to talk with him at Gamescom.
"Season one was exceptional, because we did something we'd never do again," says Fergusson. "As part of listening to players wanting to carry over their renown, we had to put the patch out a couple of days before the season. The intention is that a season and a patch would go [live] the same day, so at the time we make a balance change and you start a level one character, it feels differently to go through the progression with the new balance."
What's the first derelict and/or abandoned (but is it really abandoned???) spaceship you ever visited in a videogame? I'm struggling to pin it down through the growing white noise of early middle age - as with much else in my life, everything blends into a gritty soup of Metroid and DOOM beyond the turn of the millennium - but I suspect it might have been a level from Rebellion's amazing 1999 Giger 'em up Aliens versus Predator, which I now recall only as screenfuls of fangs illuminated by Smartgun fire.
Does Sonic 2's Flying Fortress Zone count as abandoned, given that almost every NPC aboard is robotic? Blargh. I'm more confident picking my favourite space derelict, which would include choice excerpts from the debris field of trashed starcraft you traverse in the otherwise-questionable Dead Space 3. I'm hoping for more of that kind of thing in Starfield, in which you'll encounter a wide range of scuttled vessels plus still-crewed, decidedly hostile "Legendary" ships that could play a part in the hotly upcoming Bethextravaganza's capacious endgame. There's fresh news on this front from senior level designer Zach Wilson, who has been waxing lyrical online about "the tragedies and perils of space travel".
Many attempts have been made to recapture the JRPG's glory days. In Tokyo RPG Factory, Square Enix founded a whole studio dedicated to the craft, and more recently Squeenix's "HD-2D" style has come to define both their own retro work and that of others. But it's arguably the RPGs from outside Japan that have been doing a better job of propping up the SNES nostalgia tent. Last year's Jack Move and Chained Echoes were both infinitely more refreshing to me than the slightly tired Bravely Default and Octopath Traveler sequels, for example, and now we have The Messenger studio's latest, Sea Of Stars, which is probably one of the few Japanese-inspired RPGs I've played in the last decade that's even come close to bottling the mighty Chrono Trigger and lived to tell the tale. If you're the sort to cry, 'They just don't make 'em like they used to anymore', well, you can dry your tears, because Sea Of Stars is the one that is.
But you know. In a good way. My waking hours are, currently, beset by stress and anxiety from a number of different directions, and I've only had time to play about about an hour of Mediterranea Inferno so far. It's quite a short game, though, and I'm sort of transfixed. It's about three men in their early 20s who, pre-pandemic, were the toast of their party scene in Milan, and after a couple of years apart enforced by a lockdown they're reuniting for a summer mini-break. Having blazed through my early 20s I no longer really remember that unique, potent mix of feeling simultaneously fragile and invincible, but it's captured in this almost occult, yet hyper-real visual novel.
I may be playing on a Steam Deck on a rainy day, but the bold colour contrasts and the desperate enthusiasm of the dialogue really get over the feeling of a too-hot summer, of trying to force fun and recapture a friendship when you all want different things. The most intense segments of Mediterranea Inferno are the Mirages, visions that merge past and present and metaphor, giving explicit form to each character's wants and anxieties. It's unreal and yet a distillation of reality. It's quite an intense ride so far, but it's a good one.
Avatar: Frontiers Of Pandora is due to launch December 7th, and Ubisoft have now detailed the graphics features that will set the PC version apart. The list includes raytraced reflections and shadows, "extended graphics settings" and an in-built benchmarking tool.
Warhammer 40,000: Darktide features fun, grisly, co-op combat, but at launch was criticised for live service cruft - from an incomplete crafting system to meagre progression rewards. Some criticism also fell upon its four classes, who lacked the 'career' subclasses of its developer's previous game, Vermintide 2.
Darktide's classes will therefore get an overhaul October 4th, when an update will introduce skill trees for each class.
Factorio developers Wube have been teasing an expansion for a couple of years, but they've now announced what it is. It's called Factorio: Space Age, and it's about constructing space platforms in orbit and then visiting four new planets, each with their own resources for you to exploit and challenges for you to overcome with conveyor belts and robot arms.
It's a three-day weekend for most of us here, so we'll be a bit quieter until Tuesday. Possibly a helpful time to play one of those giant games coming out amongst all those other giant games. Or to curl up on the floor with a kitten who can't decide if she wants to groom you or eat you. What are you playing this weekend? Here's what we're clicking on!
A new demo invites you to glide through fluffy clouds and slide down rolling fields in indie adventure Europa. The game’s deceptively dour setup channels Journey and Fumito Ueda’s work, asking you to explore outsized ruins as the last child left alive, but just like those gems, everything in Europa is wrapped up in a gentle atmosphere.
Consistent with the spirit of the game, Baldur’s Gate 3’s first “major” patch notes are too large to even fit into Steam’s usual text character limit. Developer Larian instead published a portion of the patch details on a Steam blog and the rest on their forums, which were briefly down - probably either due to an online traffic jam or just, again, the patch’s sheer size. Regardless, we have well over three thousand words worth of details on today’s patch, which addresses around one thousand bugs and graces us with “Short King Summer” before it’s too late. But beware: there are some spoilers in the patch notes.
Around 20-minutes spent with Like A Dragon Gaiden (technically Like A Dragon Gaiden: The Man Who Erased His Name) has helped me fulfil two Yakuza-specific dreams: reunite with Mr. Masochist and fight alongside Mr. Masochist. Having sampled a bit of the colosseum and switched up Kiry- sorry, Joryu's threads, I reckon Gaiden's side hustles are shaping up to be suitably bonkers and remarkably in-depth. Our boy literally has rockets in his shoes, I mean, come on.
Bandai Namco have announced a substantial 2.0 patch and the first DLC pack for their rollercoaster management game Park Beyond, both of which are dropping on September 29th. Prefabs and ride sharing are the big new additions coming with the free 2.0 patch, alongside the option to discover other player’s creations across platforms. Countdown to fiding the first penis-shaped coaster starts now.
The game already encouraged designing borderline cruel rides that pushed health and safety regulations, but the upcoming DLC Beyond eXtreme takes things one step further with contraptions that shake punters around like a fizzy drink, among new maps, rides and scenery items. On a side note, I’ve thought the game’s previous trailers were quietly creepy and the latest is no different. Maybe it’s the playground jingle in the background, or maybe I’m just sensitive to enthusiastic announcer voices. Take a look.
Even cursed years such as 2020 can occasionally hide small nuggets of greatness. One such nugget was the curious visual novel Milky Way Prince, which beautifully mixed surreal 2D images with even more surreal 3D backgrounds, all wrapped up in a toxic love story. Just when you thought a visual novel couldn’t get any more stylish, developer Lorenzo “Eyeguys” Redaelli comes back to one-up themself with Mediterranea Inferno, a rare game that makes you want to gobble its colours up with your eyeballs. Oh, and it’s out right now.
I’m not really one for patience in games. I’m definitely the hack and slash ‘em to bits kind of player rather than a slick stealthy player. My approach to games is pretty unruly is what I’m trying to say, but there has been one game that tamed my rampaging ways and that was Cappybara Games’ Below.
Below is a game that’s best played slowly. You’re tasked with reaching the bottom of an island’s subterranean caverns, trying to survive against monsters, traps, starvation, and dehydration. Each layer is shrouded in darkness meaning that you only have the small ring of light from your torch to watch carefully where you step. Charging through these levels is the quickest way of getting sliced and diced, and when you die, you begin back on the beach right next to the boat you arrived on.
The beeping booping SteamBots are back for the first time in four years, but the next outing takes them into a drastically different genre, as is now a tradition for the series. Publisher Thunderful have announced that their robo western citybuilder SteamWorld Build is coming out on December 1st. Here, take a look at the cuteness.
The Best Pitch I’ve Ever Heard award has to go to The Lord Of The Rings: Return To Moria, which sounds like it’s taking Deep Rock Galactic’s procedurally generated cave looting and squashing it into Middle-Earth’s fantasy world. Chef’s kiss, no notes. The only downside is that the co-op craft-y-survive-a-thon is coming out on October 24th, the same week as - sweatily checks calendar - everything else. I’ll find the time to raid mines with big-bellied friends anyway, though.
Armored Core 6: Fires of Rubicon launches tomorrow with the distinction of being a FromSoftware game that isn’t missing a bunch of PC tech basics, with ultrawide and 120fps support welded on as standard. As I’ve been finding out, it’s also a fine fit for the Steam Deck: performance issues are few, controls translate comfortably, and it won’t hog too much space on a microSD card. Handheld life is good for Fires of Rubicon, even if it likes to keep yours brutish and short.
I saw Creative Assembly's live service heist 'em up Hyenas at last year's Gamescom and came away unimpressed. I thought it was obnoxious and underwhelming, in all the ways you'd expect from a colourful hero shooter whose hook is stealing Sonic merch.
But this year I got to spend a good 30-minutes in a match against other players and have come away… pleasantly surprised. I like the way it eschews the sometimes slow, methodical pace of other extraction shooters in favour of a faster-paced team deathmatch. While it's way too early to make big judgement calls like, "the entire game will be good", it might have more of a chance at launch survival than I thought.
Blizzard tonight announced that Diablo 4's second season, named Season Of Blood, will begin on the 17th of October. Given that the first season is uninteresting, I'm not super fussed about that. What does sound good is quality-of-life changes coming alongside the new season. For starters, your inventory will no longer become clogged with six billion gems. Season Of Blood will also let you pick specific Unique and Uber Unique items to farm bosses for, which is most welcome given how vital Uniques can be for builds. Here, watch the trailer.
Interdimensional aliens have invaded with murderous intent. Humans are an endangered species. Our world is in ruins. That’s the setup in The First Descendant’s newest trailer, and yet, all I want to do is zip around with grappling hooks while wearing the most fashionable cyber-bunny exosuit available. Thankfully the Gamescom trailer has that on display, too. Ta!
As with Half-Life 2 RTX, Nvidia have taken to Gamescom to make a heap of DLSS announcements. Chief among these is an upcoming new version, DLSS 3.5, which will add to DLSS 3’s existing toolkit of upscaling and AI frame generation with a new trick named Ray Reconstruction. And it sounds pretty clever, if currently limited in application.
Nvidia are making an early start on their Gamescom announcements, which include the reveal of Half-Life 2 RTX. This incoming mod for the seminal 2004 FPS will, in the style of Portal with RTX, rejig the original game with modern technical goodies like ray tracing, updated environmental details, and Nvidia Reflex support. DLSS will also be on hand to absorb the inevitably mahoosive performance hit from bouncing all those rays around, and that includes DLSS 3, provided you have a compatible graphics card.
It’s being developed by a collective of experienced HL2 modders, Orbifold Studios, without direct input from Valve. No release date yet, as Half-Life 2 RTX – or to use its full name, Half-Life 2 RTX: An RTX Remix Project – is still in the early stages. There is a teaser trailer, though.
Videogame collaborations seem to be getting increasingly common and increasingly random. Nicki Minaj in Call Of Duty? Fortnite skins based on Mexican comedy shows from the 1970s? Pentiment characters in mediaeval strategy Inkulinati? Okay, that last one makes sense. But now, a team-up between management game Cult Of The Lamb and co-op survival gem Don’t Starve Together has joined the small club of fun but sensible crossovers. Games about cults and starving stick together, you know, so both games are celebrating each other’s birthdays with free updates.
In an attempt to appease the UK’s Competition And Markets Authority (CMA), Microsoft have restructured their proposed Activision Blizzard buyout. Should the deal finally close, cloud streaming rights to existing and future Activision Blizzard games released over the next 15 years will (surprisingly) fall under Ubisoft’s control. Those rights will then stay with Ubisoft “in perpetuity.”
As someone whose auto-battler experience has, up until now, only been limited to minor forays into the excellent Alice0-recommended Super Auto Pets, sitting down to play a run of Tales & Tactics was somewhat overwhelming. Recently launched into early access and made by the same team behind Slay The Spire's popular Downfall mod, this is a fantasy autobattler cloaked in the skin of a roguelike. That means that in addition to creating an army of tabletop-esque miniatures to do your automatic bidding on a grid-based board, you'll also be picking from randomly generated opponents on a lightly branching story map as you sword chop your way to your ultimate goal: The Grand Tournament.
It's an intriguing combo, but as a relative newcomer to the auto-battling genre, there's maybe a bit too much going on here for its own good. That's not to say I haven't had a good time with it so far, but there are so many things to juggle in my brain that I feel like I'm fumbling my way through it by chance rather than making confident and informed tactical choices.
Be Quiet's top-rated PC case, the Pure Base 500DX, is down to $99.90 at Amazon USA today following a $15 drop. This is the best price that this mid tower case has ever reached, and a great deal for a case that includes a mesh front, glass side panel, three Pure Wings 2 fans and RGB lighting.
I don't know anything about VTubers, aside from the fact they're virtual… YouTubers...? What I do know, is there's a Vampire Survivors-like called HoloCure: Save The Fans that's entirely fan made, entirely free, and revolves around Hololive, a VTuber agency replete with catgirls. I am taken aback by how good it is.
Calling a spaceship The Invincible might seem like an initially hopeful idea, but boy oh boy, does it open the door to some ironic and probably deadly occurrences. We’ll see just how lucky the ship is when The Invincible comes out on its newly-revealed release date, November 6th, though some readers may know how this story ends already, since it's based on Stanisław Lem’s 1964 science fiction novel of the same name.
When listing off my favourite games, I'm shamefully likely to neglect to mention Firewatch. This is probably because Firewatch isn't a game that had some huge formative impact on me, or reframed my entire relationship with gaming, or became an enduring obsession of my hyperfixation-prone brain. Firewatch is, quite simply, a very lovely game, and one that I happily revisit on a fairly regular basis.
I think the main draw of Firewatch, for me, is the forest. I am one of those people who's often happiest on a day-long hike into the middle of nowhere; and when life doesn't provide me with the opportunity to do something as often as I'd like, I'll turn to thematically appropriate video games to tide me over.
Don't get me wrong: Firewatch's central story of Henry and Delilah is a good one, and the marvellous Cissy Jones deservedly picked up a BAFTA for her performance as the latter. But the free-roam mode is, to my mind, just as important for ensuring Firewatch's enduring appeal.
The Sims 4 has long dominated the life simulation arena, but a pair of hopeful rivals are soon stepping into the ring to challenge the undisputed champ. Life By You and Paralives both have grand plans to unseat (or at least share it with) EA’s life sim juggernaut, and they both promise to set themselves apart with features that Simmers have long been asking for. But I only have one question for both of them: can I kill my Sims? Or Parafolk? Or… Lifers? In the case of Paralives, the answer is thankfully a big fat yes.
