Sundays are for being on holiday, but that doesn't mean we can't produce a roundup of some links before we depart.
For The Guardian, Sarah Thwaites spoke to developers of indie game hits about the freedoms of success and the pressure to repeat it.
Right, anybody fancy a new Abiotic Factor update? Well, it's not ready just yet, but developer Deep Field Games did share a look at the game's upcoming Cold Fusion update that looks like it'll be a beefy one. As you can probably guess by the title of the update, there's a bit of a chill coming, specifically in a new area called the Residence Sector. This new locale has "something" going on that's making it a bit too cold for anyone to hang out in, though the mystery behind it is something you'll likely have to play to discover.
I think if you were to show someone the trailer for Mewgenics, complete with cats you-know-whating, a musical number, and a poop joke, they'd probably be taken quite aback. However, if you were to tell them that it's from the same people that made Super Meat Boy and The Binding of Isaac, I'm sure they'd be able to understand much quicker. Aside from coming from some pretty notable indie devs, there still might be the question of why it's such a big deal that Mewgenics finally got a trailer, and the answer to that is (kind of) simple: it was announced 13 years ago.
Fishing! It's a feature that's been included in many games over the years, one that varies in quality from game to game. Sega Bass Fishing? Probably top of the line, as long as you have that unique fishing rod controller. Stardew Valley? I like it, but I know plenty of people that hate it. Personally I normally find it quite a relaxing thing to do, particularly in games that are otherwise combat focused. Fallout 76 is one such game that's more about shooting rather than chilling out, but over on the public test server you can now try out its version of fishing.
This weekend, readers, there's an extra challenge for you. In addition to the excellent tales of game-playing and cat-contentedness we always get, I'd like anyone who's interested in partaking to tell me: what's the very best thing about that genre you don't like? What is it that always draws you back in before you remember that these aren't your sorts of games? For instance: Counter-Strike-style shooters. Clean, low time-to-kill gunplay: yes yes yes! Having to rely on belligerent teammates: no no no.
While you ponder, here's what we're all clicking on this weekend!
Everything is IP, all of the time, everywhere you look now, because big wigs in suits have got it in their heads that original, uniquely appealing content just can't win over a combination of pixels that resemble something someone already likes. Sea of Thieves is no stranger to crossovers, with big, thematically relevant ones like Monkey Island and Pirates of the Caribbean, as well as some smaller ones like Halo and Banjo Kazooie. Today's crossover is one of the smaller ones, this time with, uh… Destiny. The sci-fi, first-person shooter. Huh.
Tomb Raider, Soul Reaver and Perfect Dark developers Crystal Dynamics are laying off 17 "talented team members" in order "to better align our current business needs and the studio's future success". According to a social media statement, they "did not take this decision lightly". Oh, and "this change does not alter our current project plans."
It's not clear who exactly has lost their jobs, but going by this Xitter post, senior combat designer Mark Vernon is one of them. "Call me Mark S the way I just got severed, from employment," he writes. Best of luck finding your way to the black elevator hall, Mark V. (If you haven't watched Severance, I promise this reference is more hopeful than it sounds.)
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In the latest Minecraft Live, developers Mojang revealed a "Vibrant Visual" overhaul for a game that is now older than many (most?) of the people playing it. Initially planned for the game's Bedrock edition, with a Java version update to follow, it garnishes Minecraft's blocky wilderness with directional lighting, volumetric fog and other gimcrackery you might recognise from more recently published open worlders.
Back when I was a mod-phobic Vanilla player, I would have sneered at all this. Minecraft is not supposed to have "subsurface scattering", whatever that means to regular mortals. It is not supposed to look high fidelity, or high tech. It is supposed to look like, well, Minecraft. These days, my reaction is less outrage and more curiosity, mingled with vertigo at the entangling of these trendy flourishes with the pixelgrain of what is still, on some level, Infiniminer touching grass. Whatever you think of these Vibrant Visuals, it's interesting to follow Mojang's efforts to tinker with and flesh out an aesthetic that was arguably 'perfected' in 2009. It’s also interesting to think about what “vibrant” might look like, 16 years from now.
The makers of cardy roguelike Monster Train 2 announced a release date yesterday, revealing that it'll be pulling into Steam libraries and honking its big "all aboard" horn in less than two months. Do you have the capacity to allow another deckbuilder into the overcrowded dining car of your brain? I probably don't. But I do have fond memories of the first game's crunchy runs and over-the-top card combos. Hmmm, maybe another rail trip or two hundred would be nice.
There are few things more heartwarming than a solo developer seeing breakout success, especially if their game is a wholesome testament to community spirit, entrepreneurship, and innovative street cleaning solutions like Schedule I. Pretty close, though, is a solo developer pulling a 'Miyazaki lying about Elden Ring', and underselling just how big their game actually is in the run-up to release.
Developer Tyler has been updating the bud flinging simulator steadily throughout the demo release and into the current early access, and they've also got a roadmap over at Trello here (featuring: raids, parkour, jukeboxes, and controller support among other things). Some of the most relevant communication is actually in the Steam forums though. Tyler revealed yesterday that he's currently working on getting the game Steam Deck verified. It's also where he first revealed the full list of planned sellables that are now in the roadmap (Marijuana, Meth, Cocaine, Shrooms, MDMA, and delicious + cool Heroin), with plans to take community suggestions once they're all in.
Dungeons & Dragons company Wizards Of The Coast have apologised for "mistakenly" sending a legal takedown to the creator of a free Stardew Valley mod that adds a village inspired by and featuring characters from Baldur's Gate 3. The mod has attracted praise from Larian CEO Swen Vincke, who was naturally a bit piqued when it was taken offline.
75 people have been let go by Eidos-Montreal, the studio announced yesterday. The Deus Ex and Tomb Raider developers laid off the workers because they didn't have the "capacity to entirely reallocate them", according to a statement. It's a further blow to the workforce at the Embracer-owned company, following hefty cuts last year.
Dwarf Fortress co-creator and programmer Tarn Adams has made fleeting, whimsical allusion to the possibility of an Elf Fortress game in a new interview - a fleeting, whimsical allusion I will now pounce on and make an enormous deal of, because my goodness, man, you can't just say "Elf Fortress" and walk off whistling into the sunset.
The topic arose during a discussion of why fantasy dwarves are a "fortuitous" archetype for a maddeningly system-driven game like Dwarf Fortress, in which half the fun is enjoying the tunnel vision of characters who will cheerfully neglect their duties and doom their brethren because, for example, they're obsessed with crafting a mug that menaces with spikes of bituminous coal and alpaca wool. According to Adams, this is relatably "human", though he muddies things intriguingly by dropping a reference to androids, and allows to weave stories around technical eccentricities and outright bugs, which can be read as instances of "dwarfy" fixation and excess. Elves? They don't work the same way.
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IGN Live was already confirmed to return this June, but now RPS's corporate papa has put a date on it. The in-person fan event, with streams for those who can't attend, will return on June 7th-8th in LA, and tickets are on sale now.
"Alien Ant Farm or we boycott," reads the top comment on Activision's recent reveal of the next wave of tracks for Tony Hawk's Pro Skater 3+4 - a response to the revelation that the upcoming remasters have both been hit and struck by some soundtrack changes, which hasn't gone down completely smoothly with fans. You could almost say they feel making alterations to such classics is criminal. OK, I'll stop. For now.
It turns out these changes come straight from the large Hawk himself. “It was my choice to pick some different songs by the same artists featured in THPS3+4 OST,” he wrote on Instagram, as spotted by Very Gary Computing. “I’m hoping that discovery is half the fun, and a big reason that these soundtracks resonated in the first place. So listen and enjoy the ride. More to come… both old and new.”
OK you gutless punks, you've had this coming for a long time and now, you're gonna get it. Time to pay the piper, you miserable freaks. Oh, excuse me! I should explain. We've been doing some research into boosting site engagement, and it turns out the quickest way to engage people is to abuse and threaten them. We've also been reading up on seduction techniques - frankly, I wanted to try these out first, but the genAI poltergeist in my phone camera keeps misidentifying my nudes as Edvard Munch's The Scream, and Sotheby's now claim I owe them 120 million dollars. Anyway, here's what's new in PC games this week.
Hello reader who is also a reader, and welcome back to Booked For The Week - our regular Sunday chat with a selection of cool industry folks about books! I woke from a terrible nightmare last night. I'd just released a book and every three or so pages, the publisher had inserted a double page spread trying to sell the reader a wireless mouse with Minecraft movie Jack Black's gormless, gouty grin on it, turning my carefully curated atmosphere to shit! Phew. Thank goodness it was just a nightmare! Just an utter, utter nightmare.
Anyway, never mind all that. The sun is out, and books still exist and are and mostly advertisement free! Here to talk about them this week is game maker, Dicey Dungeons writer, Now Play This festival founder, and The Husbands author, Holly Gramazio! Cheers Holly! Mind if we have a nose at your bookshelf?
Sundays are for nursing a sore throat into nearly its third week of activity. I wish I wasn't such a tiny widdle baby, but I strongly feel that no person has ever suffered as I now suffer. Let's do some links.
Edge Magazine has launched an industry newsletter, called Knowledge. You can signup here. Edge has long been a stealth B2B product, so an explicitly B2B newsletter makes sense. This is also promising because it's being written by Marie Dealessandri, former deputy editor of GI.biz.
There's a lot we still don't know about GTA 6, but probably the most annoying thing that has gone unanswered is just when it's coming out. Not annoying in the sense of, "oh golly gosh I'm so excited please I need to know", more "come on now, just get it over with!" It's just a whole thing, and I wish it wasn't, but Rockstar and their owner Take-Two also clearly know it's a whole thing, and are riding on that very fact. Take-Two CEO Strauss Zelnick recently spoke with Bloomberg about a whole bunch of bits, and of course the question of when GTA 6 is coming out came up.
We can probably all agree that planting trees is pretty much universally good, right? I can't really imagine a scenario where planting a tree is a bad thing, we need them to live after all. If you're not into planting trees you're probably an oil tycoon, or a squirrel with incredibly bad survival instincts. If you are, though, might I interest you in Treeplanter, a game whose name is exactly what it says on the tin? It was announced just yesterday, and looks quite, quite lovely.
Bah, it's never fun writing one of these, but unfortunately Myst and Riven developer Cyan Worlds have laid off 12 of its staff members this week, supposedly cutting the studio by about half. Cyan shared the news on its social media accounts yesterday, noting that "industry conditions" have "forced" the studio to "weigh the future health of our studio against the month-to-month realities of game development in 2025."
Have you been Everywhere? Not like, literally, everywhere, but Everywhere, that sort of Roblox, sort of Fortnite, everything game from Build A Rocket Boy, a studio founded by ex-Rockstar dev and GTA 3 to 5 producer Leslie Benzies. That whole, uh, interactive experience or whatever you want to call it still seems to be in beta. But the first project spun off from it, MindsEye, a near-future action game that really just looks like slightly sci-fi GTA, now has a release date: June 10th, later this year. Except, I'm a little bit confused by it.
This week RPS has been racked by staff absences due to illness, family affairs, press trips, and a dire force of negation called “holiday”. For a while, on Friday, I thought I might be the only one left. “Is there anyone alive out there?” I howled, guiding my lifeboat among the frozen gobbets of discount gaming keyboard. “Can anyone hear me?” Then, I heard a few, faint voices on the wind. Good news: RPS still has some writers and what’s more, they have plans for the weekend.
Horizon: Zero Dawn composer Joris de Man has expressed a tentative interest in the return of Guerrilla's Killzone shooter series, which was once touted as PlayStation's answer to Halo, Call Of Duty, and Gears Of War.
Everything is IP, all of the time, everywhere you look now, because big wigs in suits have got it in their heads that original, uniquely appealing content just can't win over a combination of pixels that resemble something someone already likes. Sea of Thieves is no stranger to crossovers, with big, thematically relevant ones like Monkey Island and Pirates of the Caribbean, as well as some smaller ones like Halo and Banjo Kazooie. Today's crossover is one of the smaller ones, this time with, uh… Destiny. The sci-fi, first-person shooter. Huh.
These days, most sequels to even the most popular of games are announced a good while after whatever the latest title is. I mean, just look at The Witcher 4, we've known it's been in the works for a while now, but it only got a formal reveal last December, almost a full decade after The Witcher 3. Saber didn't wait around to announce a follow-up to last year's very popular Warhammer 40,000: Space Marine 2, though, revealing that a third game is in the works just this month, about half a year on from its release. Even still, Saber would like you to know that this doesn't mean it's "abandoning" Space Marine 2.
MicroProse or whatever currently prospers under the decades-old MicroProse banner have announced that they're publishing Strategos, a real-time tactics wargame set in classical antiquity. I hadn't heard of the game before, and my first reaction to the above screenshot was "oh hey, Total War: Rome". Then I veni, vidi, vickied on over to the Steam page, and it turns out that might be a flawed comparison, not least because Strategos is the creation of a single designer and programmer with artists working on contract. Here's a trailer.
Tomb Raider, Soul Reaver and Perfect Dark developers Crystal Dynamics are laying off 17 "talented team members" in order "to better align our current business needs and the studio's future success". According to a social media statement, they "did not take this decision lightly". Oh, and "this change does not alter our current project plans."
It's not clear who exactly has lost their jobs, but going by this Xitter post, senior combat designer Mark Vernon is one of them. "Call me Mark S the way I just got severed, from employment," he writes. Best of luck finding your way to the black elevator hall, Mark V. (If you haven't watched Severance, I promise this reference is more hopeful than it sounds.)
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Carrying your Steam Deck without a case is a bold move. Not the good kind of bold either—the “why is my joystick clicking funny now” kind. I’ve seen enough scratched screens and mystery stick drift to know that a decent case isn’t optional. It's armor. And right now, a bunch of great ones are discounted during the Amazon Big Spring Sale.
LiDAR or "light detection and ranging" is a way of working out and picturing the distance to an object by shooting laser beams at it, and timing how long it takes the laser to bounce back to the scanner. It's been used for a bunch of Hard Science-y purposes, from mapping cave systems to measuring changes in the Amazon forest canopy. It's also become popular among artists, who use it to create high-fidelity yet abstractly coloured and ethereal visualisations of, for example, rivers. Now here's LiDAR Exploration Program, a "relaxing atmospheric horror" game from KenForest, in which you roam maps with a handheld LiDAR gun scanning the geography into being.
Fancy a bit of Left 4 Dead in your Warhammer 40,000: Darktide? Oh, well that's convenient, as the game's Nightmare and Visions update just dropped today, adding in Mortis Trials, a new wave-based game mode. The wave-based nature really is what it says on the tin: scores of enemies come after you round after round, but in this mode you'll get Indulgences, which is just lorespeak for upgrades you can unlock on different runs.
Having spent a good chunk of this morning window-shopping SSDs, I’m prepared to point knowingly at the Samsung 990 and mouth "That one", thus crowning it as the best NVMe drive deal of the Amazon Spring Sale. Especially so, if you’re concerned about the swelling storage footprint of contemporary games, as the sale is focusing on the most cavernous 2TB and 4TB capacities.
The 990 Pro has popped up on RPS a few times, but if you’re unfamiliar, this basically forms a triumvirate with the WD Black SN850x and the Crucial T500 as the three finest examples of game load-time cutting in the mainstream PCIe 4.0 SSD space. Newer PCIe 5.0 drives can just about edge them, but not to the degree that their far higher price is justified, and with some help from the sales that gap gets even wider. All three of these deals, in fact, drop the 990 Pro to its lowest pricing since at least last year’s Black Friday.
Amazon’s Spring Sale is back, and upon first inspection, it’s not looking like a vintage year. There are some discounts on quality PC gear, but a deals collapse has left them buried under forty thousand tonnes of overcomplicated toothbrushes and collagen peptide powders. So, so many collage peptide powders. I didn't know there was this much collagen on Earth.
It’s still my job – it is still my job, right? Okay just checking – to dig through the Paltrow-adjacent junk and yank out the good stuff, so let’s start small with a few quid/bucks off one of my favourite Steam Deck docks. The JSAUX 6-in-1 Multifunctional Docking Station may have a clumsy name but it’s a keen bit of accessory design, with the port-adorned central block (which acts as a stand in docked mode) able to detach and pull double duties as a portable USB-C hub. It’s perfect for Steam Deck/Asus ROG Ally/Lenovo Legion Go/Zotac Zone etc. owners who want to keep employing that extra connectivity when taking their handheld away from home, and the Spring Sale has chipped the already-aggressive price down to £38 / $31.
Come with me into the sexy world of UI. Chunky 4X strategy game Civilization VII is getting an update today that will let you move units from one hexagonal space to another much more snappily than before. The patch also adds the tallest mountain on earth to the game, but I know what Civ fans really want, and it's not Everest. It's a tickbox in the options that removes the animation of your little dudes sprinting across the map, saving you entire seconds of precious existence.
If there's one thing I know about you sickos it's that you love a good city builder. No, don't try to deny it. I have the site traffic data right here and the numbers do not lie (unless they make me look bad to people who outrank me). You people are never happier than when you're wallowing in a bathtub full of upgradeable cottages, taxation sliders and pop satisfaction metrics. It's a disgraceful habit, but I'm not here to judge - not when there's a Steam City Builder & Colony Sim Fest underway.
Sorry Australians, you can't confront the horrifying psychological manifestations of your inner turmoil. It would be too much for you, according to the government. The country's classification board recently refused to grant upcoming horror game Silent Hill f an age rating, essentially preventing it from being sold in the country unless certain elements of the game are toned down or altered by Konami. But it's possible the developer will do just that, as the classification board has retracted their ruling. At least for the time being.
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I want to believe the GPU gods are finally throwing us a bone. MSI RTX 5070 Ti 16G Shadow 3X OC is actually available on Amazon UK right now for £729. That’s not a typo. It’s in stock, sold and shipped by Amazon, and somehow not priced into orbit. When scalpers are still charging north of £1000 for this card, seeing a legit listing for retail price feels like someone left the vault door open and forgot to sound the alarm.
Hello reader who is also a reader, and welcome back to Booked For The Week - our regular Sunday chat with a selection of cool industry folks about books! As a reward for sticking with this column for so long, I'm delighted to announce that we'll soon be rolling out the chance for you to write in with a detailed list of all your most subversive ideas and which books inspired you to hold them, and in return I'll send you an email alerts if those books ever appear in this column. Cormac McCarthy's The Road is widely considered a classic so I'll just call it 'McCarthyism' for simplicity.
This week, it's the co-founder of Finji - publisher of such luxury games as Tunic, Wilmot's Warehouse, and Night In The Woods - Bekah Saltsman! Cheers Bekah! Mind if we have a nose at your bookshelf?
In his irregular newsletter, Culture: An Owner's Manual, W. David Marx wrote about the age of the double sell-out. His argument is that, by the end of the 20th century, it was deemed acceptable for artists to sell-out because commercial activities were understood to pay for creative work, but now culture's most successful creators sell-out simply to sell-out further.
Everybody loves a good fairytale, but I'm sure you can agree that some kind of twist on a Brothers Grimm story is a bit overdone by now, so how about a game based on folklore from Normandy? Carimara: Beneath the forlorn limbs is exactly that, a self described "short and creepy fairytale" that has a look about it where I can easily imagine walking around its world and think "cripes, it smells a bit around here, 'ey?"
Minecraft is the best-selling game of all time, but it's looked pretty much the same for the entirety of its almost 14 year run. There's an argument to be made that it's showing its age in places, an argument I won't make because I don't think so myself, but all the same, as revealed during today's Minecraft Live, Mojang announced that the sandbox game is getting a pretty big visual overhaul update called Vibrant Visuals. Now, don't worry, it'll still be all blocks and squares 'n' that, but it will be changing up how lighting looks.
Keita Takahashi is probably one of the most recognizable names in games, in no small part thanks to a game that needs no introduction, Katamari Damacy. That game was made at Namco, before it became the Bandai Namco we know today, and Takahashi actually left the studio back in 2006 around the time they merged, and in a recent interview with GameSpark (as translated by Automaton), the developer has shared the reason behind his departure.
I'm going to let you in on a little secret: I love Silent Hill 4: The Room. It was actually the first game I played in the series, and when I did I wasn't aware that it wasn't universally loved or even liked at its release. Not that knowing other people's opinions would have changed my mind about it, I'm the kind of person that will ardently defend a 6/10, but still, I think there's a lot to love about it… unless you played the game on PC. For a long time, it was missing a few things that were featured in the PS2 version of the game, but GOG's Preservation Program is adding them back in.
Here, take a look at this very pleasing fossilised instant coffee. Doesn't that just make you want to start your weekend off right? It was presented to me on Tuesday like a ceremonial offering, and since then I've kept it on my window sill and just turn my head to look at it every once in a while. There's something powerful but also mournful about it, like it's holding itself together through sheer force of will, long after its time is due. Puts me in mind of crumbling castle battlements under siege. It's maintaining its shape well so far. I'm excited to see what the next week brings.
So that's my weekend largely sorted; but what are you all up to? Here's what we're clicking on this weekend!
Frosthaven - the sequel to Cephalofair's knock-a-horse-out massive board game - is getting a digital version from Julian Gollop's Snapshot Games. You can sign up here to its closed beta kicking off March 27th, and it's coming to Steam early access later this year.
Like predecessor Gloomhaven, Frosthaven is a tactical RPG where you'll resolve story events and encounters between dungeon delving, retiring old characters and unlocking new classes as you progress. New to Frosthaven is a fleshed-out management game that has you build up and protect an outpost, while dealing with harsh seasons and invaders.
What's the going rate for a flight to attend GDC these days? I ask because I'd have loved to be buzzing my merry way about the convention walls when Snail Games USA unveiled this doozy of an AI-generated trailer for Ark: Survival Evolved's Aquatica expansion. I'd give it a solid nine on the "we're not even trying to disguise it any longer" scale. How bad is it? Bad enough that original developers Studio Wildcard hastily and firmly distanced themselves from the project, reiterating that their focus was on ARK: Survival Ascended and Ark 2.
If I had to sum up the trailer in a single word, I would attempt to write that word out with four-day old regurgitated Alphabetti spaghetti, invariably failing to give voice to my flailing disgust before retiring to the corner to fart at god. This would still take approximately fourteen times more effort than whoever got paid to write "like the ocean, but worse" into their phone to tease out the following results.
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I want a good gaming monitor for cheap, and this KTC 27-inch QHD gaming monitor is ticking all the right boxes. Amazon just dropped the price to $92.99 when you stack a $40 coupon with the promo code "05DMKTC38", making this one of the best budget gaming monitor deals I’ve seen in a long time.
What's the pettiest reason you began to distance yourself from an old friend? I once casually suggested to a mate that I found toast more filling than bread, which prompted them to bang on for far too long about how I was actually wrong, since the act of toasting necessarily diminishes the structure of bread or somesuch. I'm not sure whether that's true and I don't care. I was speaking my truth about toast and you undermined it. Jog on, toast denier.
Fallout 76's new Ghoul Within update is 18.9 GB, which may well conclusively prove that searing ghoulification actually ends up with the victim weighing more than they did previously. I wish I'd known this at the time of my yeasty bust-up, because I'd have probably tried to make the same argument about toast. We might have stayed mates then. Maybe we could have played Fallout 76 together? Why, that's the subject of this very Steam blog! Incredible.
You've crossbred Pokénots in Palworld, now get ready to crossbreed... players! Pocketpair have taken a break from their packed schedule of saloon brawls with Mario's lawyers to update their monster-catching survival game with a new Crossplay mode, together with new storage options, a Photo Mode, a cosmetic armour system, and a new Drafting Table feature. That and a multitude of smaller tweaks and fixes.
Witness the crossplaying in the below trailer, in which a base-vandalising Astegon gets its bell rung by a group of visitors presumably running foreign hardware. That'll learn 'em to step on my Lamballs.
It's been four months since Stalker 2 was released, starting life as a really great shooter that had more tech issues than you can shake a stick at, but GSC Game World have kept themselves busy with some hefty patches. The first one alone had almost 2000 fixes, with the second one following that up with more than 1700. As of today, patch 1.3 is here, this time bringing in over 1200 changes, fixes, and improvements. Obviously quite a bit less than the previous two main patches, but a sizable figure nonetheless, and hopefully a sign that the game is getting to a healthy point.
