Samstag, 31. Mai 2025

Phasmophobia will be getting a sound recorder, evidence revamp, and more with its Chronicle update next month

The next Phasmophobia update, Chronicle, is due out next month with a newly revealed June 24th release date, and developer Kinetic Games have offered up some details on what it calls one of the game's "biggest updates" so far. So, let's have a look at what that entails! The key addition with this update is the arrival of sound evidence, which as you can probably guess is a new haunting paranormal proof type that you'll acquire by using the newly added sound recorder.

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Cliffhanger's Black Panther game reportedly would have built upon the famously patented Nemesis System

Earlier this week, EA did the thing they oh so frequently loves to do, which is making a bad decision. This time, it was cancelling Marvel's Black Panther, alongside shutting down the two year old studio that was making it, Cliffhanger Games. As every single announcement like this over the past few years has been, it was an incredibly frustrating one that can't be justified. Now, a new report from Bloomberg has shed a bit of light on why it was cancelled, as well as what the game might have been like.

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While you wait for an official update, Elden Ring Nightreign already has a two-player co-op mod

Elden Ring Nightreign is, to the surprise of no one, off to a bit of a flying start (even if not everyone is completely in love with it just yet). I have no intention of diving into it just yet, in part because the solo experience doesn't interest me all that much, and I don't really want to be matched up with two other randos that would surely abandon me the moment I forget what my character can do. There isn't a duos option either, the thing I'm actually after, something that was a bit forgotten about during development, but might be coming further down the line. The power of modding always comes through however, as despite only launching yesterday, there's already a seamless co-op mod that allows for duos.

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What are we all playing this weekend?

An eerie wind blows through the treehouse this weekend. The floorboards creak, though no one stands upon them. The fairy lights flicker, though they have not been plugged in since January. The screens in the corner where we all pretend to work lie cracked and cold. Here's what some of us - those who remain - are clicking on.

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Freitag, 30. Mai 2025

Dandelion Void is a plant bastard survival horror from Project Zomboid modders

A sci-fi horror trope I quite enjoy is arboretums that provide oxygen to ships or structures, both because it's a nifty (if spurious?) idea, and because I like the concept of people who've only seen iron bulkheads for months staring wistfully at small trees. I think Alex Garland's criminally underrated Sunshine did it. Kenny Lentil's Biological Shock did it. Dead Space too. The derelict ark you'll be scavenging and surviving in Dandelion Void also has plants, but the caveat is that the plants can move. The other caveat is that the plants are bastards.

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Donnerstag, 29. Mai 2025

PowerWash Simulator's final update will let you live out your fantasy of giving a London underground train a good scrub

Anyone that's ever been on the London underground, no matter their background, can all likely agree on one thing: that place is nasty. I mean, it's all underground, where's the dirt meant to go? And it's not like anyone's putting any money into getting the place cleaned. But, if you've ever fantasized about hosing down a Northern Line train for yourself, one, that's possibly slightly odd, and two, you'll be able to do almost just that in PowerWash Simulator's next and last update.

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Reschedule those sailing lessons, as Mount & Blade 2: Bannerlord's War Sails DLC has been delayed

To be a person that looks forward to video games and DLC for video games is to also be a person that must do so knowing that, at this point in time, they are likely to be delayed. It is what it is! Perhaps the dismantling of our current economic system and rebuilding one that doesn't put profits first would mean developers could take their time, but that'll probably also take a while. As a result, we're in a situation where, earlier today, developer TaleWorlds Entertainment announced that Mount & Blade 2: Bannerlord's first bit of DLC, War Sails, has been delayed.

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Kathy Rain 2: Soothsayer review

Put me in the camp of point and click aficionados who fiercely believe that 1993's Gabriel Knight: Sins Of The Fathers is one of the best adventure games to ever touch a PC. First in a trilogy of thriller mysteries, it featured writing that was a cut above Sierra On-Line's usual fare, puzzles that veered on the side of sensible investigations rather than moon logic, and a glorious bastard of a Cajun protagonist.

The Kathy Rain series owes much to Gabriel Knight. Swap the '90s-era New Orleans author for a '90s-era biker chick/journalism student, replace the voodoo killings with a conspiracy involving the death of a grandparent, and you have the first Kathy Rain, which was released in 2016 and boasted the generic-but-still-memorable tagline: "A Detective is Born". But despite receiving fair praise from John back in the day, Kathy's first outing had a murky plot about cults, trauma, small town disappearances, and Elder Gods that was only made understandable via a spruced up Director's Cut in 2021. Kathy Rain 2: Soothsayer, I'm happy to report, needs no such re-release, though anyone who hasn't completed the first game is bound to still be a little confused.

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Cyberpunk 2077's sequel is now Cyberpunk 2, and is therefore about burial mounds, bows and pottery

Cyberpunk 2077's sequel has shed its Project Orion codename and will now be known as... Cyberpunk 2. CD Projekt revealed the name change in their latest earnings results, according to which the new Cyberpunk RPG has just entered pre-production - roughly defined, the point in a game's gestation when designers, artists, programmers and so forth meet to flesh out the concept, but before they've actually started making anything that's supposed to form part of the finished game. There are now 96 people working on the thing, versus 422 for The Witcher 4, 49 on multiplayer Witcher spin-off Project Sirius, and 19 for an unannounced original game, Project Hadar.

The grousing, dilettante reader will object that this is scant material for a news post, especially given that CD Projekt are offering no guarantees that "Cyberpunk 2" will be the project's final name - as they commented to the Verge, Cyberpunk 2 "just means it's another game in the Cyberpunk universe." But the dextrous maven of online news-mongering will notice that "Cyberpunk 2" is, in fact, an extremely compact and subtle piece of worldbuilding.

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EA shut down studio they opened less than two years ago, cancel Black Panther game

In 2023 EA opened a new studio named Cliffhanger Games, led by former Monolith head Kevin Stephens, and announced a new third-person, singleplayer game starring Marvel's Black Panther. They've now cancelled that game and shut down that studio, IGN report.

According to EA Entertainment president Laura Miele, via an email sent to employees, this has been done to "sharpen our focus and put our creative energy behind the most significant growth opportunities."

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Mittwoch, 28. Mai 2025

Two of the best skating games are back on Steam after being mysteriously pulled from sale months ago

Two very good skating games are back up for sale on Steam after disappearing for four months. Bright 'n' cheery skateboarding game OlliOlli World and dystopian rollerskate shooter Rollerdrome both vanished in a cloud of toxic corporate smoke in February this year, some time after the closure of the games' developers Roll7. But it looks like the poisonous fumes have finally cleared, and the games are once again available.

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Modern military medieval sandbox Kingmakers gets a release date this October

“The lyf so short, the craft so long to lerne," wrote Chaucer. But you'd trained hard with that crossbow, and let any man in bolting distance try to claim you hadn't mastered it. You never wanted to go to war, but the crops were failing, you'd just lost your seventeenth child to medium-pox, and dark portents swirled on the horizon like curdled goat's milk. Also, the actual goat's milk was curdling.

In that tent, you'd communed with angels, and the righteous fury of all the heavens coursed through every fibre of your being. You'd likely die today, you knew. But you'd die knowing you did all you could to put this fair kingdom to rights. You step outside, breathe deep the morning air, and immediately eat a point blank pump-action shotgun to the torso. Then you lose both your legs to the tank shell. Then someone runs over your corpse with a dirtbike. Bloody typical.

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Dienstag, 27. Mai 2025

Send kids to the past to save the world from a metallic rain hellscape in the captivating point-and-click Decade

Earlier this week, one of my industry peers James Bentley (they're over at that other site about PC games, GamerPCs I think it's called) put out a video essay titled "I Can Guarantee You This Game is Going to be Underrated". Trusting in James as a critic of varied and interesting taste, I clicked through and found that yeah, they're right, it probably will be. However, I also get to write about indie PC games for a living, so I'd like to do my part in telling you about this strange, point-and-click/ visual novel called Decade.

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Cronenbergian bear mutator Winnie's Hole gets a Steam demo

You may remember that in January of 2022, A. A. Milne's Winnie-the-pooh stories entered the public domain, inspiring deeply crap ideas like "what if children's character but knives?" in the case of Blood And Honey , and "what if children's character but mildly naughty word?", in the case of smirking billboardian human doppelganger Ryan Reynolds. Videogames were not immune. "What if children's character but Cronenbergian body horror?" asked the developers of Winnie's Hole when they announced a roguelike dungeon crawler based on the bear in 2023, and there's now a Steam demo available, should you wish to scoop up honey with arms-where-no-arms-should-rightly-be.

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Total War: Warhammer 3 fans reckon they've already guessed which faction is coming next in Tides Of Torment

Last week's Warhammer Skulls brought announcements for a new Mechanicus 2 ally faction, a strategy remaster in the form of the first Dawn Of War and all expansions, and a free Boltgun typing game in which you tap out phrases like 'emperor' and 'thin your paints' to chainsword cultists. Nestled away in the recesses of that skull, like a coiled snake on a tattoo with the name of someone's pug on it, was a teaser for the next Total War: Warhammer 3 DLC. Here's that teaser.

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The WRC games rally behind a new publisher weeks after being dumped by EA

The dirt-speckled WRC racing games that were dumped by Electronic Arts a few weeks ago have already found a new partner in Nacon. The French publishers are promising a "complete reboot" of the rally game series, and have exclusive rights on the grubby wheelspinners until at least 2032. This isn't the first time the publisher have had stewardship of the WRC either, so it all kinda makes sense.

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This week in PC games: Elden Ring Nightreign and a giantess dating sim

I woke up at 6 AM and wrote an entire news article yesterday before realising it was a bank holiday, only noticing when I entered the treehouse to find nothing but a solitary squirrel gnawing on a discarded Snickers. Today, that squirrel is dead, and it is time to work again. Here's a hissing tide of PC games slithering their way out of non-existence this week.

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Sonntag, 25. Mai 2025

What's on your bookshelf?: Civilization, Old World, and Offworld Trading Company's Soren Johnson

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 am still cross-referencing my way through Blood Meridian, both incredibly vivid prose-poetic alchemy of the profound and harrowingly mundane, and also a bit like if a bible ate a pulp paperback then shat out a second, stupider bible with at least twice the people getting severed dicks shoved in their mouths. I love literature so much.

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The Sunday Papers

Sundays are for doing all the errands and prep you won't have time for in the week because it's half-term. But we can also sneak in some downtime for reading and watching fine video games writing.

Criticism is cruelty, writes game developer Oma Keeling. This isn't an argument against criticism, but a plea for a more honest embrace of why we write and enjoy writing critically. As someone who, through The Sunday Papers, seems to forever be arguing for a more ruthless games press, I appreciated this.

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Samstag, 24. Mai 2025

Zenless Zone Zero version 2.0 is coming next month with a new city, 3D platforming and management minigames, and more

Almost a year on from its initial release, Zenless Zone Zero version 2.0 has been announced, slated for release next month on June 6th. There's a lot coming in this new update, namely a new area to head to, the Waifei Peninsula, a "remote yet vibrant district of New Eridu." The story follows on from where the Sacrifice crisis was left off in previous chapters, seeing you "uncover the hidden secrets of Phaethon and experience new Hollow exploration gameplay that harnesses the forces of Ether."

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Couples afraid of being third-wheeled rejoice, FromSoftware might add in a duos option to Elden Ring Nightreign

You know what the main thing that's holding me back from picking up Elden Ring Nightreign at launch is? The fact it doesn't have an option for duos. For the most part I'm a single-player only kind of person, and when I play something online I normally like to do so with just my partner. I imagine I'm not the only person this applies to, nor am I likely to be the only one who thought "I don't really want some rando called xX_fartmaster_Xx third wheeling my partner and me." Luckily, FromSoftware seem to be at least considering a two-player option for the upcoming Soulslike.

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Level-5 are so pleased with how Fantasy Life i: The Girl Who Steals Time is doing they're giving away a free bit of DLC

I wasn't expecting it personally, but it seems like the new hotness is Fantasy Life i: The Girl Who Steals Time, 'ey? Sure, it's from a studio like Level-5, who've made massive games from Yo-kai Watch to Professor Layton. I just didn't expect a sequel to a 3DS game from over a decade ago to do so well. In fact, it appears Level-5 is so happy with how much money everyone's given them, it'll be giving away a free bit of DLC for the RPG at some point in the future.

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What are we all playing this weekend?

It is said that all people of culture spice the nectar of their leisure by seeking out peculiar and invigorating company, that they may burgeon and prosper from their example. I, on the other hand, like to start my days off by soliciting opinions from some total barmpots to remind me that I'm pretty normal, actually. On which note, it's time to talk about our weekend gaming activities.

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Freitag, 23. Mai 2025

If you fancy an Elder Scroll, open world RPG Tainted Grail: The Fall Of Avalon hits 1.0 release today

If you are in the mood to play Skyrim or the recent Oblivion remaster, but you don't want to play a Microsoft-backed game for, oh, any number of reasons, the word on the grapevine is that open world RPG Tainted Grail: The Fall of Avalon is pretty decent. We don't have a review as yet, but Khee Hoon Chan called Questline's previous Tainted Grail: Conquest one of the best games you missed in 2021, and The Fall Of Avalon is currently humming along with an Overwhelmingly Positive Steam user consensus as it prepares to leave early access today. The Steam page also harbours a demo, plus the below, moderately thunderous trailer's worth of first-person spellcraft, shattered cosmic castles and fishing mechanics.

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Here's a new goblin booter RPG inspired by Dishonored and Dark Messiah Of Might And Magic

Alkahest looks very good. Emphasis on 'looks' because both trailers released so far have been very scripted. Also, emphasis on 'good' because you get to bully goblins with your feet. It's an open world RPG boasting a combat sandbox full of the sort of reactive flourishes you might find in an immersive sim. Crucially for fans of Dark Messiah Of Might And Magic (I've seen the words "spiritual successor" floating about, although not from the devs themselves) one of those touches is a boot. Here's the boot in action:

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Donnerstag, 22. Mai 2025

The Six One Indie Showcase had too many cool games, so here's a few I think look neat

The Six One Indie Showcase is a bit of a new kid on the block when it comes to video game presentations, but it's certainly working hard to justify itself. Early today the latest showcase was held showing off a huge range of indies, 48 in total, some of them being brand new reveals, others smaller showcases.

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The Splitgate 2 open beta is here, complete with a map maker and dev hunting

As much as I'm up for trying a new one whenever one arrives, I'm not particularly good at shooters. It just gets too sweaty for me, I prefer a good single-player shooter above all else because I can actually take down my opponents without the fear of embarrassing myself somehow. And yet here we are again, with the open beta for Splitgate 2, which started earlier today, leaving me thinking "well, I could give it a go I suppose."

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Lies Of P's upcoming easy difficulty modes have wonderfully unhelpful names

Which sounds like the more intense experience to you, dear reader - "Butterfly's Guidance" or "Awakened Puppet"? No, this isn't me workshopping titles for my latest range of exotic fragrances. I'm referring to the new easier difficulty modes Neowiz will add to Pinnochio-powered soulslike Lies Of P alongside the game's Overture DLC this summer.

The difficulty modes will arrive in a free Lies Of P update. The standard difficulty will be "Legendary Stalker", which honestly I think is a bit of a letdown, after "Butterfly's Guidance" and "Awakened Puppet". It barely sounds like an exotic fragrance at all. Possibly you could peddle it as some kind of feline musk.

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Dreamspring is an open world RPG inspired by Morrowind and King's Field

The Steam trailer for open world RPG Dreamspring contains: shooting spiders with a revolver. Hanging out near a green ocean. Fighting green skeletons. Most curiously, it features an armoured knight convulsing on a bed as if being shocked, from the inside, by some sort of magical electricity disease. Did this knight eat an entire pack of bad batteries? Do batteries even exist in this world, described as "a realm in ruins…beneath a twilight sky". It's a damn hell ass bum mystery, and mystery is exactly what I want from a game that lists both Morrowind and King's Field as influences.

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Mittwoch, 21. Mai 2025

AMD’s Radeon RX 9060 XT wants to be the cheapest 16GB GPU on the market

AMD have rocked up to this year’s Computex tech conference with a handful of new Ryzen Threadripper CPUs (not interested) and confirmation of a long-rumoured graphics card, the Radeon RX 9060 XT (cautiously interested). It’s a true mid-ranger in the RTX 5060 Ti vein, and like its Nvidia rival, will launch with both 8GB and 16GB versions – the latter of which will cost $349, the lowest MSRP of any current-gen 16GB gaming GPU, upon its release in June.

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Dienstag, 20. Mai 2025

Avowed director Carrie Patel has left Obsidian, and joined Oxenfree dev Night School as a game director

Whether or not we'll be getting any more Avowed somewhere along the line is still very much up in the air. But if we do, it seems it won't be under the leadership of Carrie Patel. In a quick post Patel shared on LinkedIn, the game developer shared that she's "starting a new position as game director" at the team behind Oxenfree, Night School Studio. Patel mentioned literally zero details outside of what her new role is, so it's not even clear why she left Obsidian.

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Cyberpunk 2077's sequel will see you return to Night City, and head to a new city described as "Chicago gone wrong"

CD Projekt Red's sequel to Cyberpunk 2077 is mostly a bit of a mystery, and it likely will be for a while yet given that they're currently full steam ahead on The Witcher 4. We know Anna Megill, who worked on Control and the upcoming Fable game, is attached as lead writer, and that the team wants to deal with some big topics, but there's been nothing like plot details shared so far. At the very least, Cyberpunk creator Mike Pondsmith shared some tidbits about it at Digital Dragons, namely to do with the game's map.

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Open your hands so I may plop in a nice frog game inspired by Doom and Resident Evil

"What if Resident Evil and Frogger had a boomer shooter baby?," teases the trailer blurb for FPS Frog Legs. Stop, stop. You had me at Frog. Then you had me again when I saw the frog using a super shotgun, and then once again when they used a BFG. Then, inconceivably, you had me twice more reading the Steam page. Once when I learned the game was about 40 minutes long, and then again when I noticed it costs two quid. Trailer? Yes. I already said there was. Please, keep up.

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We Harvest Shadows is both a rustic PT and a first-person Stardew Valley

About 30 minutes into the demo for We Harvest Shadows a picture appeared on my wall, just by the farmhouse main entrance. The picture is of a long hallway of nested door frames, with a sealed door at the end. Any mystery it offers is, in theory, cancelled by the tutorials, which briskly informed me that the picture is, essentially, an alarm system. It will change in subtle and less subtle ways when danger is nearby. Still, this blunt advertisement of mechanical purpose does nothing to dispel the artefact's menace. It's right opposite the stairs, so that I can't avoid seeing it every morning unless I walk down the stairs backwards, and if I do that, I'm leaving myself vulnerable to anything else that might be waiting in the front hall or the kitchen to the right.

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Warhammer Skulls returns amidst Dawn Of War 4 rumours

Now we're cooking with asbestos: Warhammer Skulls, the yearly power armoured excite-o-thon hosted by Boltgun actor Rahul Kohli, returns this Thursday. It's traditionally a time of reveals and revelry, with the Mechanicus sequel a likely contender for the spotlight this year. You can watch it live on TwitchHam at 17:00 BST/12:00 EST/9:00 PST. Here's a teasytrailyhypeyshouty in the meantime.

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Deliver At All Costs review

They say that if you ignore your detractors, you also have to ignore the praise. But I'm proud that my boss told me I'm a good courier. "I am a good courier", I think, ramming a remote control corvette destined for a local child's chimney into a pedestrian's shins, knocking them skyward, zipping away before the sound of soft bones on hard concrete catches up with me. "The best courier," I nod, reversing my truck into a beach-front bar on the way to fumigate a truckful of rotting melons. "The best damn courier in town!", I exclaim, honking my newly-installed cursehorn, shattering nearby windows and streetlights into glinting injury confetti.

Sometimes, confidence is more valuable than a measured perspective on things, and if you need to focus on the praise to block out the little voice telling you the way you're driving to these sun-kissed surf guitars is less Dennis Wilson, more Charlie Manson, so be it. Deliver At All Costs has me thinking a lot about confidence, in fact. It invokes GTA with a linked series of open maps, constantly devil-whispering your attention away from main and side missions with the promise of the hallowed fuckaboutsesh - smashable suburbia detailed down to the individual fence picket taking the place of rocket launchers and car pile-ups. But tragically, it's also cursed with a lack of confidence that this is enough. It wants to be something more.

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Montag, 19. Mai 2025

The Cave Diver blends the joyful physics of QWOP with the less joyful physics of being trapped underground

"What morbid force is calling you deeper into the heart of the caves?" asks the Steam page for The Cave Diver. It ain't calling me, developer Ovsko. I read the opening words of your description and immediately started running away from my laptop. I'm still running, in fact. This article is being breathlessly dictated to Oisin over the phone. I'm somewhere in the vicinity of Luton, now, and hope to make it all the way to Scotland by the weekend.

After that, there'll be the problem of securing naval travel as I continue my headlong flight. Then I'll have to worry about frostbite as I gallop past the North Pole and begin my long traversal of the Pacific. At some point I will reach New Zealand, which - according to this handy antipodal mapping site - is approximately as far away from The Cave Diver Steam page currently loaded on my laptop as I can get without venturing into outer space. I do not rule out venturing into outer space, which is notable for its complete and categorical deficit of caves.

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This week in PC games: Deliver At All Costs, Onimusha 2 reborn, more Monster Train and a touch of cat racing

Despite the best efforts of all concerned, there are once again new PC games this week. See how they frolic among the days ahead, trampling all over our life commitments and need for tranquility like boisterous, fugitive oxen. Please equip yourself with a broom, weighted net and klaxon and help me herd them back into the pens, for proper disassembly. Here are a few I've rounded up already.

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Avenge yourself on the icebergs that sunk you in Titanic Re-Christened: Maiden Vengeance

Pro tip: if you send RPS an email of your game with the hook "I know you like goofy stuff…" then, yes, there's a decent chance I'll take the bait, mirth-parched wanderer in the endless dessert left by a goofphagic modernity as I am. Titanic Re-Christened: Maiden Vengeance is almost unplayable in my browser - it can't seem to decide whether I'm clicking on the game on the itch.io page itself - but I'm writing about it anyway because it made my morning coffee a couple of mild chuckles better than it would have been otherwise.

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Sonntag, 18. Mai 2025

What's on your bookshelf?: why does crispbread exist and how can I stop this state of affairs edition

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! No cool industry person this week (I'd like requests though. No Classical Gas), but I want to get back into the habit of posting the column regularly regardless, since the comments are always a medium good time, which is the maximum amount of good time allowed on a Sunday.

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The Sunday Papers

I don't know what Sundays are for, or indeed any other moment of spare time. Listlessly re-watching YouTube videos and refreshing BlueSky then feeling bad that I'm wasting my time rather than playing the games I want to play or reading the books I want to read? Probably. At least this way I stumble across some articles worth reading.

For 404 Media, Nicole Carpenter - former Polygon reporter - wrote about how videogame sex scenes are made.

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Samstag, 17. Mai 2025

Warhammer 40,000: Speed Freeks enters 1.0 next week with a catch for those that didn't play in early access

It's been a little under a year since the vehicular combat racing game Warhammer 40,000: Speed Freeks launched into early access, and yesterday developer Caged Element Inc. announced that it'll be receiving its 1.0 launch next week, May 22nd. There are a couple notable changes that come with this launch though. For starters, Wired Productions are taking over from Plaion on publishing duties. As the devs explained in a Steam post, the reason this matters to you is the second change, which is that you'll have to pay for it when it arrives next week. Some of you, anyway.

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Formless Star is a charming creature cataloguing game set on an ever-changing planet

These days, when there's so many games coming out that I feel like an overwhelmed dog with free reign in a butcher's, there's no sweeter sentence to me than "this game will take you no longer than two hours." I know for some people length is everything (don't), but personally I love a short, good time (seriously, leave it out). So the second I saw Formless Star, an eclectic little creature cataloguing game, and read that it was one to two hours long, I was immediately in.

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Even 23 years on, Final Fantasy 11 is still getting updates, with one coming that'll let you change how your character looks

At a time where there is constantly word of this or that game shutting down, even successful ones, it will never fail to surprise me that Final Fantasy 11 is still going. You can't play it on PS2 anymore, but there's still an active community on PC even now. The MMO just celebrated its 23rd anniversary yesterday in fact, with a new update video and letter from the producer Yoji Fujito released to highlight some of the new and upcoming features.

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After a rough reception and evidence of art theft in Marathon, morale is reportedly in "free-fall" at Bungie

Bungie aren't having a very good week are they? First there were those accusations of Marathon using assets without permission from the artist 4ant1r34l (Antireal), which Bungie admitted to taking place. Then yesterday there was a livestream featuring game director Joe Ziegler and art director Joseph Cross which was filled with chat messages about said asset usage for practically the entire stream. Ziegler and Cross did at least address those messages, but with the response to the shooter already being quite mixed thus far, it doesn't amount to much right now.

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What are we all playing this weekend?

I write to you from the heart of an on-going emergency. Somebody or something keeps digging holes in the notionally shared lawn outside my block, and the neighbours who actually own their flats are mounting a witchhunt. It's brilliant! They’ve been taking photos from multiple angles and accusing the local kids. As far as I’m concerned, all this is divine vengeance on the building owner for having somebody mow the grass twice a month. It looks like the Bay Of Tranquility out there. The holes are an improvement. Anyway, here’s what we’re all playing this weekend.

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Freitag, 16. Mai 2025

Bungie used an artist's work without permission in Marathon

An artist has accused Bungie of plagiarising her designs and using them in upcoming first-person shooter Marathon. The artist, who creates futuristic posters under the name Antireal (or "4nt1r34l"), posted images of her own work alongside screenshots from Marathon's recent alpha playtest, showing that some designs have been copied. Bungie have confirmed this is the case, but lay the blame on one former artist at the studio.

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GTA 6 release won't be delayed again now that it has a "specific date", assures Take-Two boss

Take-Two Interactive's CEO Strauss Zelnick has served up some dutiful, investor-pleasing sentiments about GTA 6's delay from 2025 release to a 26th May 2026 launch date. Rockstar, he says, are "seeking perfection", and "consumer anticipation is unprecedented". As such, "affording Rockstar additional time for such a groundbreaking project is a worthy investment".

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Legacy Of Kain with parkour? Sure, go on then

Not actually a stealth FPS hybrid of Blood and Thief - although I'd pay good money for that - Bloodthief is closer to something like Ghostrunner but also, I think, much better. The Steam demo's opening levels are roughly as tricky and demanding as the cyberpunk parkour series but, perhaps to due to less concern with being stylish, the movement here feels a lot more caffeinated. You only have to look at the visuals to clock that Bloodthief isn't that sort of game that's precious about letting you do silly things with momentum.

Also you're a vampire, with a sword, exsanguinating armoured knights in a vaguely Germanic medieval town. Well, Vae my Victus. I do get very excited when anything reminds me, even a little, of Blood Omen: Legacy Of Kain. Here's a nice little video of the game in action. Warning: this trailer for the game Bloodthief has blood in it.

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Donnerstag, 15. Mai 2025

"PlayStation are great" says Arrowhead's CEO, but whatever the Helldivers 2 devs are making next, it's fully self-funded

Helldivers 2 developer Arrowhead Game Studios are cooking. I'm not exactly sure what just yet, but there's a faint aroma of a new game in the air, and it doesn't seem like they're ready to share anything about the game right now either. Still, after the runaway success of Helldivers 2, something new from the studio is still an exciting prospect. Interestingly enough though, whatever they're making, it won't have anything to do with PlayStation when it comes to funding.

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