Warner Bros' licensed free-to-play fighting game MultiVersus - aka, the one where Velma Dinkley and Arya Stark can team up to kick Superman's face in - will no longer be playable online as of 30th May. It'll be pulled from Steam, the Epic Games Store and the PlayStation and Xbox stores at the end of its next season, though you'll still be able to get your fill of Bugs Bunny bashing offline against either friends or bots.
The post-launch update and DLC schedule for Sid Meier's Civilization VII slightly discombobulates me, because the image above is weirdly reminiscent of Civ 7's own historical Age progression screens. But that uncanny similarity also pleases me, because I can now do the intro joke "all roadmaps lead to Rome".*
In case you missed it, the new 4X strategy jobbo is out 11th February. Developers Firaxis have now sketched out plans for updating it, which extend from the usual balancing and bug fixes to a variety of new map types, possible multiplayer features and Age settings.
Hidden away on NASA's Golden Record, an interstellar archive of music, image and sound, there is a recording of a poem by Charles Baudelaire, Élévation, which describes the astral ascent of the soul. Well, part of a poem. Both to free up room on the disc and perhaps, to edit out "the vast sorrows and all the vexations" of the second half, only the first two stanzas appear. The recording in fact ends halfway through a line, which conjures up an intriguing problem for the listener, inasmuch as the thwarted rhyme scheme reveals that the piece is incomplete. A poetically-minded alien might be tempted to fill in the gap. A fancier alien who took a module in postmodernism might hail the poetics of the fragment. A resolutely practical alien who thinks poetry is for losers might read the whole thing, instead, as a set of incoherent navigational prompts, made up of loose prepositions - au-dessus, au-dessus, par delà, par delà.
The last Minesweeperalike I wrote up was a sparkling slurry of mind-altering pop-ups and resinous AI cleavage. It was David Cronenberg's Minesweeper: The Substance Edition, and I was sincerely worried that I'd put you all off Minesweeper for life. But before you mop your last munition and turn in your index finger for good, give Dragonsweeper a try. It's Minesweeper with an altogether less atrocious twist which you can hopefully deduce from the name.
The layoff train has come for BioWare. A number of Dragon Age: The Veilguard staff are leaving the celebrated RPG company in the course of plans to become "a more agile, focused studio", as BioWare move ahead with the next Mass Effect game. Posting on Bluesky, senior systems designer Michelle Flamm, producer Jen Cheverie, editor Karin West-Weekes, lead writer Trick Weekes and narrative designer Ryan Cormier have all announced that they're looking for work.
All of which feels like it warrants a mention in general manager George McKay's recent blog about BioWare's future, but he comments only that they're "taking the opportunity to reimagine" how BioWare operate between projects, and "have worked diligently over the past few months to match many of our colleagues with other teams at EA that had open roles that were a strong fit." Which is a very slippery way to say that you're making a load of people redundant.
Mere hours before it’s January 30th release – wait, that’s today! – Sony have finally spilled the beans on system requirements for Marvel’s Spider-Man 2, as well as the eye-blistering, GPU-rending special features that more powerful rigs can support. Happily, all these ray tracing and frame generation accoutrements seemingly won’t preclude Spidey 2 from working on older, slower PCs as well, as the minimum specs are surprisingly reasonable.
Granted, they’re only rated for 30fps at a lowly 720p, and you’ll still need to find a honking 140GB of SSD space, but the basic GPU and CPU requirements aren’t too lofty at all. The likes of an RTX 3060 for 60fps/1080p are quite reasonable as well, though you’re staring down the barrel of Nvidia’s pricey RTX 4080 and RTX 4090 cards for high-rez ray tracing.
Looks like they finally got the message. "An account for PlayStation Network will become optional for these titles on PC," said PlayStation in a short and quiet blog post that includes the upcoming PC release for Spider-Man 2, and The Last Of Us Part II. It's been eight months since PlayStation provoked mass annoyance among PC players by making a PSN account mandatory to play Helldivers 2, and later Horizon Zero Dawn Remastered. They soon walked back the decision for Helldivers 2 after a rough review-bombing but the company didn't seem to fully take the hint. It looks like they've now conceded that, yes, the obligatory sign-up was an unpopular move.
Sniper At Work is the work of Cherrypick Games, hitherto known for "soothing merge-2 experiences" featuring puppy-eyed princes. The only "twos" you shall be "merging" in Sniper At Work are bullets and faces. The only "cherries" you shall be "picking" are hoodlums in sore need of a skullful of lead. The only princes you shall acknowledge are their royal highnesses Distance, Wind, and Timing.
You may or may not find all that "soothing" - I won't judge. I will only repeat Nic's observation from the Maw that Sniper At Work look "a bit like Commandos, a bit like Hitman", which I would translate to "my comrade in PC gaming, if historic audience trends are any indication you shall do well here". Right, that's enough quotation marks for one article. There won't be any left for the next interview feature at this rate. Here's the trailer.
Peripeteia feels like what I'd get if I asked a wasp to describe Deus Ex to me. It has sharp, insectoid qualities. Unwelcoming but oddly comfortable in its rusty soviet Ozymandism. The first sign of sentient life this immersive sim offers me is the greeting of a gasmasked freakdroid as I leave a warehouse. Tinny propaganda songs play from TVs too big to comfortably fit in anyone's car. The warehouse is so huge I thought it was outside until I looked up and there was writing on the sky and I realised it was a roof. I'm still messed up about it, honestly.
Outside The Blocks is a diorama building game so beautiful I was initially distrustful of it, as if it was some sort of dazzling carnivorous plant trying to lure me in to munch on my hands. I've had a play of the Steam demo now, and am happy to report that it's still very beautiful, and also that I still have hands: an incredible victory on all counts.
The developers of free-to-play monster hunting game Dauntless have laid off "the majority of the studio" less than two months after the game's troubled launch on Steam. "Today is another difficult day at Phoenix Labs," said the company in a post on LinkedIn, which called the sweeping layoffs "part of unfortunate but necessary changes to our operations." It's the fourth time in two years that the studio has seen job cuts.
Painkiller, Bulletstorm, and Outriders studio People Can Fly will be co-developing Gears Of War: E-Day, the upcoming shooter in the long-running series of games about large men doing large violence at large bugs from behind medium walls. This is good news! People Can Fly have a pedigree for serving chunky gun chutney with a smile. They've also worked extensively on the series before, notably Judgement Day. E-Day itself is aiming to have a pronounced horror slant, with the 'Emergence Day' of the title referring to the insectoid Locust's first visit above ground.
Pogs are something I never consciously think about until something reminds me of Pogs, at which time I am instantly very excited about Pogs. The latest reminder being Snow Town Geek Store, a shopkeeping sim brimming with 2000's non-tude. Like the 2000's themselves, it feels both alive with promise and liable to turn bad at any moment. But I do very much enjoy both its energy and soundtrack, based on what little information is currently available. A tray-tray for you, the discerning tray-tray viewer:
After making headlines last December for what was, in context, an entirely fair and even-handed request to Final Fantasy 7 Rebirth modders to "not to create or install anything offensive or inappropriate," director Naoki Hamaguchi was recently asked to clarify his stance by Automaton.
Sundays are for playing some video games, I think? Seems unlikely but let's find out.
Jonathan Nash died. That name might not mean anything to you, but Nash was a writer for the much-beloved British games mag Amiga Power in the '90s, and he was influential on the generation of games writers that followed - including several founders of this website. RPS co-founder Kieron Gillen wrote about what made J Nash unique in his newsletter:
It's been a busy week of prep here in the treehouse! At least, I assume so. Nothing's broken or in flames around me, so I can only assume we're waiting for the next big thing to break down or burst into flames. In the interim, here's what we'll be clicking on this weekend!
A performance and settings guide for a ropey PC port of a Final Fantasy game? Sweet, I haven’t done one of these in four whole months. In fairness to Final Fantasy 7 Rebirth, which Nic says can be great as a game per se, it does make some effort at settling into Windows. It has rebindable M+K controls. It has DLSS. It has generally more consistent framerates than FFXVI, which could bait you in with silky visuals before grabbing your head and shoving it into the cold ice bath of sub-30fps.
Yet it also steps back from that game on its supported tech, while raising its hardware requirements so far above Final Fantasy 7 Remake that it won’t even launch on a lot of older graphics cards. Even so, hitching and microstuttering issues from FF7 Remake return once more, along with plenty of other signs that this PC version didn’t get the love that a lot of other erstwhile PlayStation exclusives – like Horizon Forbidden West or God of War Ragnarök – did for their ports.
How many times can video games riff on that one Dr Who episode with the weeping statues? At least once more. Surgeon Simulator devs Bossa have just announced Don't Get Got, in which you and up to seven of your so-called friends are trapped in a large school with randomised objectives and safe rooms. Also in the school: a bunch of horrifying little boys in shorts and braces.
It's out in early access today. Yes, they've sprung this one on us like a ghastly Jack-in-the-box. Steady your nerves and watch the trailer.
Good news for anyone eager to meet a big talking catfish. A new trailer for action adventure game South Of Midnight sees players battering monsters from the folklore of the US' Deep South. It shows hero Hazel arguing with her mum before a supernatural hurricane cuts off the family drama and sends Hazel wandering the swamps to encounter giant alligators, giant fish, giant dolls, and giant people. Maybe Hazel is just very small. Either way, it also dangles an important morsel in front of our snapping jaws: a release date. Come see.
You'd think Talha and Jack Co would have earned themselves a nice custard cream and a sit down after having just released Judero last September, but they're back already with a crowdfunder for Mashina - a robo-stuffed adventure where you'll "Dig, build, discover and mend in a chill, stop-motion world." Now I think about, you could probably eat quite a lot of custard creams in five months, although less so if you were using your hands to build model robots. Have a trailer. It's got robots in it.
Back in December, a bunch of cool games had the extreme impoliteness to sneak onto digital shelves while we were losing our hair, souls and marbles covering various gaming award shows. One of those games was Escape From Castle Matsumoto - which can be excused, admittedly, because it's a game about ninjas, and we expect ninjas to be sneaky.
The creators of All Will Fall are pariahs, as far as I'm concerned. You should warn your children to avoid them. If you encounter them in the street, you should jerk away with a muttered oath, making a sign to avert evil spirits - for these are the scumbags who've decided to develop a city-building game in which all the buildings and building materials are subject to realworld physics. A city-building game that takes place on small, post-apocalyptic islands, where the only way to expand is upward.
"Playing Jenga with human lives" is how they summarise it, the wastrels. Here's a trailer.
Celeste and Towerfall creators Extremely OK Games have announced the cancellation of their pixelart exploration platformer Earthblade, in what studio director Maddy Thorson calls a "huge, heartbreaking, and yet relieving failure". The decision to call it quits follows a bust-up within the development team, though this isn't, apparently, why they pulled the plug. Thorson and programmer Noel Berry have found making something "bigger and better" than Celeste exhausting, and have decided to work on smaller projects in future.
Halo has a history of embracing wacky game modes, and Halo Infinite players are seeing that tradition continue this week with a new playlist of game modes. "Action Sack" is a returning playlist for the series. It first appeared in Halo 3 as a rotating set of modes that would see you quickly cycling through various deadly minigames, from chaotic rockets-only nukefests to panicky punch-ups with ammoless pistols. This time, the playlist includes a familiar geometric hazard that has seen the death of many a bean: the "hex-a-gone" level from Fall Guys.
Each year, the Game Developers Conference (GDC) release the results of their State Of The Game Industry Survey, which collects responses from over 3000 developers. The 13th annual survey - which you can find in full here - queries respondents on topics including layoffs, generative AI, the live service boom, and funding. As is the nature of our times, it's a big grim salad with a few bright crouton sprinklings. From the report's introduction, which does not mention croutons even once:
Steam are throwing a Real-Time Strategy Fest this week, encompassing discounts and demos, and people who like clicking on Orc-emitting huts are eating well. Of the new strategy game demos I've spotted so far, the one that interests me most is Calyx, in which you are at war with a mass of alien vegetation, which expands toward your base in a blossoming, suffocating avalanche of green moss and purple tendril. It seems a bit raw at the level of controls and performance, but the concept is very promising: basically, imagine if Creeper World 4 were a bit more like Ground Control. Here's a trailer.
One piece of worldbuilding advice I've always found useful is to go at least one level deeper than the obvious. To wit: why have a lantern, asks FPS Mohrta, when you can have a horrible vulture-esque creature called a lantern beast that lives on your head to light up the dark for you? "Found a good'un," I wrote in Slack shortly after playing Mohrta's Steam demo. "It's so rad and strange!". Well, that's the pitch, reader. It's a "nonlinear FPS game blending action, exploration, and light dungeon crawling". Very rad. Very strange. Nom nom.
As much as I'd like to dredge up an old RPS tradition and write "Severance is back!" repeatedly for 500 words, I'll resist the urge and instead just slide a nice free game over to your side of the table, hidden underneath an inconspicuous pile of photocopies. Lumon by Mark Gomersall is a free number clicker based the fourth best television show ever made (Succession, Hannibal, Scavenger's Reign, discuss). It's not a rip-roaring videogame time or anything, but it is cute. More importantly, it's topical. More importantly, it means I get to write "Severance is back!" a bunch. It's back! It is!
In a bid to shore up the Treehouse finances following several staff departures, I'm announcing a new line of official Maw spin-off products. Presenting: New Viscous n' Delicious Mawflakes! The ultimate cosmic breakfast cereal, available in all the colours of the rainbow plus 666 others that aren't fit for human eyes! Simply pour over molten ichor and leave to stand - you'll know they're ready to eat when you can no longer hear yourself weeping. "Ready to eat" is a phrase that cuts two ways, of course - and what better way to accompany being eaten by Mawflakes than by reading about this week's new PC games.
Ok, let's get it out of the way up top: I probably won't be losing any sleep over dinosaur horror game Code Violet not coming to PC either. While I've still got a pavlovian response to anything that reminds me even a little of Capcom's sadly abandoned Dino Crisis series, the trailer below doesn't inspire all that much confidence this one will pick up the mantle.
Sundays are for resting, supposedly, but it can also be for mopping the floors, washing the bedding, and catching up on work because you simply have too much to do.
Remember the Electronic Wireless Show? Two of its hosts, Alice Bell and Nate Crowley, have started a new podcast "about video games (mostly)". It's called Total Playtime and an introductory episode 0 and a Patreon are live now. The third host is Jon Hicks, with whom you may be less familiar, but he used to be my boss and thus may be considered the 5th Beatle of RPS. Anyway, go give it a listen.
I don't think we've ever written about Intravenous 2, but the topdown shooter has been on my radar since its release last year. It's a blend of tactical stealth and frenetic Hotline Miami spraying, and it just got a major update to add Steam Workshop support and a map editor.
Sons Of The Forest is about being chased by fithy cannibals who cannot swim, so the latest update ought to be useful to players. Its major new feature is the addition of rafts, which players can construct and then float about on like a 2000s Tom Hanks.
Genshin Impact's developers have agreed to pay a $20 million (around £16.4m) fine to settle charges brought by the US Federal Trade Commission. The FTC allege that HoYoverse "unfairly marketed loot boxes to children that obscured real costs and misled all players about the odds of obtaining prizes." HoYoverse will also be banned from selling lootboxes to children under 16 without parental consent.
Look there, my friends. The almighty and sombre Hippopotamus Of Farewell has graced our presence again this weekend. Whether you do it in the comments below or on his actual leaving post (or indeed his other leaving post), let's all give our resident Edders a good send-off. And now we shall drown our sorrows in digital worlds. Here's what we're all clicking on this weekend.
Superheroes often conceal their identities behind masks, capes and in my case, a pungent snood-and-hoodtop combo that makes me look like I've crawled out of a drain. No, don't ask what my real superhero identity is. After all, knowing my secrets might expose you to the wrath of my enemies. And in any case, I don't trust you. It turns out some of you people have been keeping secrets from me, as well. You have been furtively playing superhero shooter Marvel Rivals with a keyboard and mouse adapter, which makes it look as though you're playing with a controller, so that you can take advantage of controller features such as high-sensitivity aim-assist in competitive play.
The wallpaper on my phone is of a nondescript street in Shibuya. If I hold my thumb down on the photo in my phone's gallery, it actually springs to life for a few seconds and rewinds time in the process. It shows me wobble the phone into position and take the snap: a giant crab clings to a restaurant, a lady totters towards us with a white plastic bag looped around her arm, colourful signs stacked like Legos jut out of grey, "The Body Shop" lies in the distance because of course it does.
It means a lot to me, this photo. It's the precise moment I felt excitement shoot through my chest, a pang of "I can't believe I'm back". Then the next morning, a jolt that, in hindsight, definitely altered my brain chemistry. A wave of, "I finally get to disconnect and in many ways, I get to reconnect, too".
Like many JRPG series, it feels as if the Tales Of series has made strides in popularity in recent years. Both 2016's Tales Of Berseria and 2021's Tales Of Arise had charming worlds and flashy combat, and the latter has found a home on our picks for the best of the genre.
Now the series is adopting the other dominant JRPG trend of late: remakes and remasters. Tales Of Graces f Remastered, a revision of the 2009 entry in the series, is out now.
Last year's defining indie smash hit, Balatro? Not nominated for the IGF grand prize. Animal Well, which turned damn near every games journalist into a tiresome obsessive? Not nominated for anything. UFO 50, an impressive, important, big boy achievement snubbed by our own 2024 list? It did get a Grand Prize nomination.
I don't disagree with any of the nominees or absences in this year's Independent Games Festival Awards, so I don't mention any of the above to stir up trouble. Instead I look at this list and think: wow, video games are more varied than ever, so much so that there's no longer a dominant cultural narrative even within the specific niche of indie gaming.
Making a game about emotionally wayward 20-somethings in a band? You have my sympathies. Night In The Woods nailed the assignment so thoroughly, and is so beloved, that you're in for some tough comparisons. Afterlove EP has plenty going for it that makes it seem like it might be able to hold its own, however. It's set in the city of Jakarta, Indonesia, for one. It was conceived of by the creator of Coffee Talk, another beloved game, for another.
It's now got a release date: February 14th.
Stray Kit Studios, a studio that includes former developers of Age Of Empires, Borderlands and Bioshock, have revealed Wartorn, a real-time tactics roguelite in which two elven sisters pit spells and minions against a brace of fantasy opponents, including ogres. It's a smaller-scale, squad-managerial affair reminiscent of the ancient Myth: Fallen Lords, though the "painterly" art direction reminds me more of the impressionistic World War 1 fable 11-11: Memories Retold.
The current sole creator of immersive sim-shooter Fortune's Run has abruptly announced that the project will be going on hiatus, because they are going to jail. Team Fortune's lead developer, Dizzie, has been handed a three year sentence for a "violent crime", following around five years of legal proceedings. The other developer, Arachne, recently left game development after recovering from a mishandled surgical procedure last year. According to Dizzie, her departure doesn't have anything to do with the aforesaid violent crime, which pre-dates their relationship.
There are currently 35 heroes in Marvel Rivals, split between the roles of Vanguard (tanks), duellists (DPS) and Strategists (support). That's plenty to get your head around, and the roster is expanding rapidly. NetEase have announced that they plan to introduce a new hero approximately every six weeks - in other words, twice per three-month season. I wonder how long it'll take them to probe beyond the obvious Marvel headliners and start seriously abrading the bottom of the Connected Universe barrel. Nagneto, for example. Or how about J. Pennington Pennypacker, who shoots coins out of his wrists?
You know when you drop your nice, shiny pen and it rolls under your bed, and you look under there and see it winking from the depths of a stygian expanse of superannuated dust bunnies, lakes of mildew and anomalous debris that absorbs far too much light? Just me? I need to get out the mould spray more often.
OK, how about when you were a kid and you lifted up a nice, round stone and the damp, fertile soil beneath writhed away from you in a fervent knotting of pellucid, boneless bodies and the tickling of a thousand little legs? Right. Anoxia Station is that and also, a turn-based strategy game about drilling for oil. The recently released Itch.io demo is rough around the edges, but I do adore the vibe.
We often get sent so many games from publishers and developers that we simply don't have the time or capacity to play. But 'tis the start of the year and I felt like I had a duty to give some of them a proper whirl and see what's what. Thus I was lured once again into the roguelike genre, for which I am an eternal sucker.
Developed by Wave Game, Magicraft sees you play as a kid who's isekai'd into another dimension (or at least, I think he is, because I chose the option to "skip the story" when I selected new game and only later deduced the situation) and tasked to mince all the demons within it. It's typical fantasy fare with an interesting twist: you can combine any number of spells within your inventory, which made me feel very clever, even if I had no idea what I was doing.
Like it or not, horror gaming is often built on jump scares. Deriding a good cheap scare ignores the endorphin rush that draws so many players to the genre, in the same way that the "elevated horror" trend forfeits some of the soul of schlocky slasher flicks and ghost movies. Don’t get me wrong, Silent Hill and Alan Wake deserve their flowers - but even those games would wither on the screen if Pyramid Head didn’t bust through a wall from time to time.
One unsung jump scare game in particular pioneered horror in the internet age, blazing everywhere from nascent social media to major television networks. In fact, if you had an internet connection circa 2005, there’s a good chance you played it. Alas, it was too ahead of its time, too successful at leveraging virality before viral horror was sought after. Next time you see a streamer throw their headphones across the room in fright, beware: the spirit of Scary Maze Game is right behind you.
Here be your first moving-picture look at The Blood of Dawnwalker, the dark fantasy RPG in the works at Rebel Wolves – the studio founded by a bunch of former The Witcher 3 and Cyberpunk 2077 devs. As hinted at a couple of times over previous years, when it was known simply as Dawnwalker, you’ll be playing as a vampire, employing various spooky powers to fight militiamen (and, it seems, at least one giant mechanical spider-thing) amidst a deadly plague outbreak.
Unsurprisingly, in retrospect, the trailer also has big The Witcher vibes. The stringy orchestral music? The dramatic monologues? The horrible things happening to armoured grunts? This thing’s really playing the Polish fantasy hits.
The "spance" of Annihilate The Spance is apparently “an ancient, roiling storm of matter and energy” that harbours both “extreme and inexplicable phenomena” and “unfathomable riches”. I’m happy to discover this explanation, because at first I thought that “spance” was just a litigation-avoiding, supermarket rebrand of “space”. I was bracing to send the good news to developers Skyglow Softworks that, so far, nobody has managed to copyright “space”, though I’m sure somebody’s tried. Maybe, um, God?
It’s a relief to know that God won’t be suing Skyglow Softworks for breach of copyright, because off the back of two demo missions, Annihilate The Spance is worryingly compelling. It’s a mixture of space RTS and autobattler, wherein you construct bases that produce spanceships who autopilot towards the nearest and largest concentration of enemies. According to the developers, it’s inspired by the 2011 Flash game Obliterate Everything by CWWallis (RIP), which I dimly recall playing while I was running a browser game blog for AOL. Anyway, here’s a trailer.
I've always wished there was a game workers equivalent of gobbing in an especially rude customer's cheeseburger. Not that anyone should need the lingering threat of getting served a McLungButter to be polite to service workers, but it seems good to have the option. Possibly spurred on by reality-challenged goblins hounding Final Fantasy 7 Remake Aerith actor Brianna White, Square Enix have shared a new policy outlining how they plan to respond to harassment from customers toward their staff and partners. It's obviously a vastly more proper and legally sound approach than the aforementioned sandwich tampering, but I support it nonetheless.
Happy mid-January all! The year is picking up pace in terms of new PC game releases, and the symptoms of the Maw's hunger are everywhere. For example, my fridge has started bleeding an iridescent fluid. Peering into the oily green depths, I see a much older, cyborg version of myself dressed in spiked leather against a background of burning oceans. The other Edwin mouths and gesticulates urgently, but I have no time for his dire warnings of global calamity. There are new entertainment products to discuss! Here's what's coming down the pipe this week.
