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Samstag, 28. März 2026

"I think it’s unfair to kind of geofence the genre": Original Stalker designer talks Eurojank in not-so-Euro games

Video games, or more so the people who play them, I suppose, have this annoying thing where they assign a genre name as an insult. I don't want to reignite the discourse around JRPG as a term, but it certainly was used in quite a derisive and othering manner in its earlier years. The term walking sim was used more as a point of ironic degradation, even though it was perfectly apt in many ways. Then there's Eurojank, a sort of real but not technically real genre that describes ambitious but imperfect games made by European developers. And Andrii Verpakhovskyi, designer on the original Stalker games, doesn't think such jank should be geologically categorised.

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Steam's latest update sounds like a step in the right direction for regional pricing woes

The mystery of what you should price your game is one that I am sure will continue to remain mostly unsolved. There's just no right answer, and to make matters worse, there's currencies other than your own to consider. On Steam there have been plenty of occasions where regional pricing differences haven't gone down well, primarily due to games costing too much based on local wages. However, a new Steam update should now make it easier for devs to set better regional prices.

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Embark devs playtested Arc Raiders too viciously, so they found a system that let them be Care Bears one day and aggressive the next

The problem with playtesting is that it is impossible to predict every last thing any given person may do once a game is out in the wild. It's an imperfect science where you do the best you can in the moment. I imagine a live service game like Arc Raiders to be extra difficult, given how many playstyles need to be accounted for. And based on a recent interview, it sounds like some of the team at Embark took an approach that involved a randomiser determining their own playstyle from day to day to make sure they weren't just playing one way.

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A year on from launching Wanderstop, Ivy Road are closing their doors after struggling to fund their next game

It's been a little over a year since the release of Wanderstop, the debut game of Ivy Road, itself a studio made up of Stanley Parable, Gone Home, and Minecraft talent. Since then, the developer has been trying to find funding for its next game, Engine Angel, but in January announced that this had been unsuccessful, with layoffs taking place as a result. Now, the studio has announced that it is, unfortunately, shutting down.

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What are we all playing this weekend?

There is a significant danger that this article will have aged terribly. You see, I asked everyone what they were playing this weekend on Thursday, rather than the usual post-lunch scramble on a Friday. You see, I took Friday off to travel to Wales to spend a long weekend with my family. Who knows what happened between my polling of the team on Thursday and Friday? Perhaps Valve surprise released Half-Life 3 and everyone is playing that instead. Maybe they all went off videogames in the interim.

I can only hope they thought to go into the CMS and update the article accordingly. Otherwise, I'll look like a right plonker.

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Freitag, 27. März 2026

Rebellion return to their AvP roots with Alien Deathstorm, an 80s sci-fi FPS with apocalyptic winds and some slightly naff aliens

Alien Deathstorm is the new sci-fi FPS from Rebellion, developers of skull-popping shooter series Sniper Elite and the recent, Very English survival game Atomfall. What is Alien Deathstorm about? Why, it's a visual novel about a neurodivergent person growing up in the big city HOHO OF COURSE NOT, it's a game about aliens in which there is a storm that will make you dead, set in another collapsing extra-terrestrial colony full of dependably phat, lived-in 1980s technology. Here's the announcement trailer.

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Donnerstag, 26. März 2026

If Pragmata's fake New York looks AI-generated to you, good, it's meant to, but the tech itself hasn't touched the game

The appearance of AI in art is nothing new, hell, Mr. Movies himself Steven Spielberg literally made A.I. Artificial Intelligence near the start of the millenia. But that was the Cool AI, where robots could be people, too, if we let them. Now what we have is the Donkey Bollocks AI that produces garbage facsimiles of things we know and actually like. But that doesn't mean it's not worth considering AI, and I really need you to bear with me here, within our art, as that's exactly what the team behind Pragmata did (without touching the stuff).

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Just in time for Bethesda's Terran Armada DLC and Free Lanes update, seamless Starfield custom animation mods are finally possible

Up until Bethesda's announcement that it'll be getting some robot army DLC next month and the yassification of its faces by Nvidia's DLSS 5 tech, I'd not thought about seeing how Starfield's modding scene is getting on for a little while. That's now changed, because they've finally gotten seamless custom animations working.

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Forza Horizon 6 system requirements confirm it’s no RAM guzzler - and it’ll run on Steam Deck too

Perhaps sensing competition in the field of Japan-flavoured arcade racing games, Forza Horizon 6 devs Playground Games have revealed the open-world vroomer’s system requirements. Agreeably, they’re a sensible balance of attainable low-end fare – at 1080p, a GTX 1650 and 16GB of RAM are apparently all that’s needed for 60fps – and the kind of hulking graphics bricks that you’d expect for 4K ray tracing. Only the most baby-oiled of hypercars for the RX 9070 XT owners, you understand, though support for lil’ handhelds like the Steam Deck is confirmed as well.

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"At this rate, why make game art at all?": Nvidia DLSS 5 demands a sale damaging and stock tanking fightback, argues New Blood boss

Players and developers should boycott Nvidia's AI-stuffed DLSS 5 tech, with hopes that it'll force the compny to "think about going back to giving us what we want". That's the appeal being made by Dave Oshry, CEO of indie studio New Blood Interactive, who's been asked for his take on the neural rendering gubbins Nvidia exec Jensen Huang's recently been adopting a multitude of tones as he's tried to convince critis that they've just got it all wrong.

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Mittwoch, 25. März 2026

Imagine GTA with AI-generated characters "just going along with whatever insane thing you say," muses Valve writer, absent-mindedly spotlighting what terrifies me about genAI

Like many people at companies preoccupied with discovering the next "goose that lays the golden egg", Half-Life 2 and Portal writer Erik Wolpaw has been "poking around" with generative AI. He and a small team at Valve have been testing out different applications, in what Wolpaw assures us isn't a "concerted" effort at implementing the soul-regurgitating, workforce-abrading gadgetry in any particular new game.

Wolpaw's current feeling is that generative AI isn't very good at anything "creative", like cracking jokes. But he does think Large Language Models could make for entertaining NPC voice reactions in games such as Grand Theft Auto and, indeed, Wolpaw's own Left 4 Dead, because AI is marvellous at being a fawning little gopher. It is fantastic at "going along with whatever insane thing you say and kind of adjusting to the flow of that".

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Only a "skeletal crew" are left working on Fallout: London, and the massive mod's next DLC will miss a planned April release window

Around the turn of the new year, Fallout: London developers Team FOLON teased plans to drop the second of the brilliantly British Fallout 4 mod's second DLC in early 2026, assuming no hiccups got in the way of those plans. Sadly, it seems that's exactly what's happened, necessitating the "skeletal crew" still working on the mod to push Last Orders beyond a projected April release window.

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Dienstag, 24. März 2026

Cornwall is overrun with mutant fish people and you are a fisherman with a nailgun in the boomer shooter BRINE

I've heard Cornwall is quite lovely this time of year. Still cool enough for a fresh pastie, warm enough to have fish and chips by the beach. Shame about all the mutant fish people that are hungry for death! Ah, no, sorry, I think I've gotten myself too enveloped within BRINE, a fast and heavy footed boomer shooter where you play as an angry fisherman who must defend the strange country from "crustacean cultists and piscine horrors."

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As seminal oddball indie Superbrothers: Sword & Sworcery EP hits 15 years of age, you can pick it up for less than a coffee

Let's travel back in time, roughly to the late 2000s and early 2010s. It was a time where indie games were becoming more of a defined Separate Thing from blockbuster games. It certainly wasn't the birth of indie games, but with the release of certain notable games like Fez, it did mark a change in who got to make money from them at the very least. But to me personally, there is no more quintessential indie game from that era than Superbrothers: Sword & Sorcery EP, which against my wishes has turned 15 today.

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It Has My Face, my favourite sci-fi assassination sim about being stalked by a clone of yourself, has a 1.0 release date

Roguelite clone-stabber (and upsettingly effective paranoia generator) It Has My Face is skulking out of early access this month, a Steam news update confirming its 1.0 release for April 3rd 2026. Hooray, and also, arrrrrrgh. I’ve been following IHMF since its impressive first demo under the name DoubleWe, and its short, highly-strung bursts of deduction and one-hit-kill violence are as cleverly staged as they are stressful.

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"The thing we are trying to stop keeps happening": Highguard and other high-profile demises keep making the argument for Stop Killing Games

Having reached the point of making their case to the European parliament, the Stop Killing Games's organisers are having to think about keeping their campaign going in the long-term. For example, they're setting up set up NGOs to advocate on the issue of server shutdowns rendering online-only games impossible to play.

Ironically, though, one of the factors the group see as helping ensure their efforts don't end up fading into background noise is the depressing regularity with which games like Highguard are dying in a fashion that's difficult to ignore.

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Arcade racer Screamer’s first update nerfs AI difficulty, with an "additional balance pass" coming soon

If you read our verdict over the weekend, you’ll know that Mark and I found the anime-flavoured Screamer reboot to be a delightfully exaggerated bit of slidey arcade racing – albeit one that, in the story-based Tournament mode, sometimes becomes randomly, viciously hard for no readily apparent reason.

Judging by Screamer’s first update, which launched yesterday alongside game access for Digital Deluxe pre-orderers, those difficult spikes were an oopsie on the part of developers Milestone. Rather than send themselves on a Driving Awareness Course, though, they’ve "tweaked AI behaviors in various events to bring them closer to the intended difficulty," while announcing a future balance pass for the game’s difficulty settings. That’s good news for controller-chuckers and desk-smashers, though obviously as someone who progressed through Screamer before this update, I claim entitlement to the same Smug Bellend rights as those Elden Ring players who beat Pre-Patch Radahn.

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"I can see where they’re coming from, because I don’t love AI slop myself": Nvidia boss plays DLSS 5 good cop after criticism

Nvidia CEO Jensen Huang has decided to try something a bit different in his latest defense of the company's recently revealed DLSS 5 neural rendering tech. No longer does he throw cold coffee in the faces of critics and bellow 'you're dead wrong, and you better give me something on this guy or you're toast'. Instead, he sits on the desk like a teacher playing it casual - saying that he understands where critics are coming from, but still insisting that the tech's benign.

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Montag, 23. März 2026

This week in PC games: a new Hooded Horse city-builder, some PS2-style horror, a school-day RPG and an absolutely tremendous catfish

Urgh! What's happening? The air feels dreadfully recycled all of a sudden. Food dissatisfies, music grates, punchlines flop like stunned seagulls - everything seems somehow overfamiliar. We have entered a Lull. There are few Big Games out this week - little in the way of Big Sequels or New IPs From Triple-A Veterans or other projects that make you say "oh! That one" - and the Maw is making up the shortfall by siphoning novelty from the building blocks of reality itself.

To the pumps, colleagues, before we become so jaded that our wrists and elbows lose all elasticity! There must be a meatier morsel down there. There must be a new PC game gargantuan enough to appease the creature.

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Crimson Desert devs Pearl Abyss take a first stab at control improvements with their latest patch, say Intel Arc GPU support's in the works

Huggghh-puuuhhhhh. Hughhhhh-puhhhh. If you've decided to try pedalling away in attempt to master Crimson Desert's bike-like controls, Pearl Abyss' latest patch - which also brings the likes of camp storage quicker tree felling - is good news. The developers have also acknowledged the fact they forgot to mention prior to release that the game wouldn't run on Intel Arc GPUs, with support for those cards now in the works.

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Your citizens don't stay put in Stellaris-style 4X strategy game Final Vanguard - start a war and "entire waves of refugees can emerge"

Final Vanguard is a real-time sci-fi 4X grand strategy game that puts an unusually big emphasis on migration. We've seen migration mechanics in many 4X games – pops can shuffle about in Stellaris as you slop your colonies across the map, populating the periphery and slowing the development of your homeworld – but Final Vanguard's creators Heavy Pepper Inc want the feature to be central.

It's part of an ambition "to model a civilization made up of interconnected systems that influence one another over time", with everything from fleet manoeuvres to industry forming part of "a network of dependencies", rather than treating planets as isolated upgradeable nodes.

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Oopsie, Crimson Desert's weird AI paintings weren't supposed to left in for release, Pearl Abyss claim, outlining plans to remove them

Ah, it turns out the eyebrows raised by suspiciously AI generated-looking art found throughout Crimson Desert weren't wrong in their lanate liftage. Developers Pearl Abyss have aplogised for failing to disclose their use of asseets made using "experimental AI generative tools", claiming that these were just mockups created early in production and were never supposed to make into the final release version of the game.

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Sonntag, 22. März 2026

RPS Verdict: Anime racer Screamer slides sideways into success with its colourful, characterful driving

Ed (RPS in peace) has, finally, posthumously, got his wish: another Screamer. This one’s gone all cyberpunk and/or anime-styled, with a heavy focus on story – it follows multiple, multinational merc-drivers entering a lightly murderous racing tournament – but can it still deliver on drifty driving thrills? After much practice, Mark and James both avoided clattering into the track barriers long enough to find out.

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The Sunday Papers

Sundays are for waking up in a Holiday Inn and finding that the breakfast buffet hash browns are glued to the bottom of the serving pan. Tarnation! I bellow like an enraged thunder god, like Vesuvius at full bloom, and stab the tray wildly with my knife and fork. I am dragged away by heavyset teenagers, who are about to heave me into the canal when I protest that I haven’t yet finished writing the weekly Sunday Papers article for prominent videogame website Rock Paper Shotgun. Shocked, the outsized urchins release me, and I scurry back to my typing desk with a mugful of baked beans. I’ll be back for those hash browns. I will have my vengeance.

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Samstag, 21. März 2026

Crimson Desert is raising some AI-brows with a bevy of suspiciously generated-looking art

Crimson Desert is, by many accounts, a video game. A not necessarily good one, a perhaps just ok to occasionally baffling video game that appears to be big for the sake of winning a pissing contest. It is also potentially a video game that is not being entirely honest about certain art assets being human-made or not.

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God is dead and I am a bullet hell boss of my own making in the physics-based dicerolling roguelike DeeSicks

I'm going to say it: bullet hells are more stressful than Souls-likes. Why are there 10,000 orbs approaching me, promising me misery and death! And I have to both tactfully dodge them while also staging a front myself? The visual information alone is enough to deteriorate the mind, memorising a list of attack patterns from some big dude with a sword seems like chump change by comparison. So this leaves me quite sweet on DeeSicks, a roguelike take on the game with physics-based dice rolling where god has died and you become your own boss.

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"This progress will not be linear": Mega Crit outline their patching process for Slay the Spire 2 after ruffling some feathers

Slay the Spire 2 is, quite notably, a game in early access. This means many things, but most importantly it means that any changes that are made aren't necessarily final, they're just more tests to see what does and doesn't work. The roguelike deckbuilder's first proper update went live yesterday, adding in a phobia mode with some bespoke assets and making a whole bunch of tweaks. It's that second part that has riled up the feathers of some spire slayers (just have a brief trawl of recent reviews), prompting developer Mega Crit to take a moment to explain just how they go about their "patching methodology."

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What are we all playing this weekend?

I truly hope the sun has got his hat on this weekend as I'm cycling out to family in the countryside and I'd rather not arrive soaked through by rain. Granted, I will be arriving soaked through with sweat, but I am happy with this outcome. For reasons I can't quite fathom, self-wetted clothes are bearable, weather-wetted clothes are intolerable.

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Freitag, 20. März 2026

Crimson Desert patch stops bosses attacking you mid-revival, also takes aim at crashes and UI problems

Pearl Abyss have released the first proper update for their grand and obfuscatory open world RPG Crimson Desert, introducing a slew of tweaks for the game's many, many systems. The developers have added new finishing blows or follow-up attacks and skills for certain moves, and a new tutorial quest for a particular section in chapter 3, but the most important changes, I think, are the bug fixes and general attempts to make Crimson Desert less "like a product exploding at the waist with far too much stuff and an irritating tendency to avoid communicating anything to the player", as one critic put it. In particular, you may be relieved to hear that bosses can no longer beat you up while you're reviving.

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Donnerstag, 19. März 2026

Marathon's Cryo Archive drops tomorrow and it sounds like almost every aspect of it will be a pain in the shell

Well, you all did it, Cryo Archive has been unlocked in Marathon. Bungie detailed the new mode in a blog post earlier today, where it shared an important thing to keep in mind with the new map: it's only available to attempt on weekends. Aye, you'll need to forgo any social plans you have out in the real world to tackle this one.

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"Departures are necessary," Crystal Dynamics say as they yet again lay off Tomb Raider staff, but they're "fully committed" to the reboot and sequel

Tomb Raider developers Crystal Dynamics have announced their fourth round of layoffs in 12 months. A total of 20 staff across development and central operations roles have been let go this time, with Crystal Dynamics emphasising they're still "fully committed" to Tomb Raider: Catalyst and Tomb Raider: Legacy Of Atlantis.

In March last year, 17 Crystal Dynamics staffers were given their marching orders, with an unspecified number of others being let go in August, and "just under 30" following in November.

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Valve say Counter-Strike 2's reloading needed "higher stakes", so you now dump all the ammo left in a clip when you reload early

Bang. 29 bullets left. Bang, bang, bang, rattatata. 14 bullets left. I'd better reload, in case someone comes around that corner and I need a full clip on hand to empty into then. NO. THINK ABOUT THE BULLETS YOU'RE USING, Valve yell from their giant Steam-powered tower looming high above the battlefield. I look at my magazine and notice that following the latest Counter-Strike 2 update, it now bears a post-it note saying that if I reload early, the leftover ammo will be lost to the mists of time.

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Mittwoch, 18. März 2026

Our early verdict on Crimson Desert: bad bugs, great cats, and an open world that could use a big bucket of yellow paint

Reviews of Crimson Desert, the new open world fantasy RPG from Black Desert Online studio Pearl Abyss, are surfacing across the internet as you read these words. Out on 19th March, it's the story of Kliff McDuff of the Greymanes, who is trying to rally his scattered comrades following a vicious attack by their rivals, the Black Bears. It's one of those Much-Anticipated games, possibly because it appears to have inhaled the entire third-person action genre, with mechanics that range from sorcerous air-hopping through momentum-based damage to Dynasty Warriors-style crowd control. Predictably, this glut of ideas can feel a smidge… inelegant and unwieldy.

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Nvidia DLSS 5 critics have the tech "completely wrong", CEO Jensen Huang insists, arguing it's somehow "very different than generative AI"

As you're probably aware, Nvidia unveiled DLSS 5 earlier this week, showing off the tech via a slideshow of game characters' face being transformed by its neural rendering into the sort of unnervingly yassified visages you get in dodgy internet ads nowadays. Naturally, the overwhelming response from players the company and its partners had seemingly assumed would be wowed by the tech has landed on a scale capped by annoyed sighs and middle fingers.

It's ok, though. Nvidia boss Jensen Huang has now said those whose socks haven't been blown off are just "completely wrong" about what DLSS 5 is.

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Dienstag, 17. März 2026

A day after Unknown Worlds' ousted CEO gets reinstated, Subnautica 2 gets an early access release date

Welp, it's only been a day since we got wind that a judge has ordered Krafton to reinstate the former leads of Subnautica 2 developer Unknown Worlds into the same positions, but here we are with the news that the deep sea exploration survival game now has an early access release month.

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Helldivers 2 update is set to unleash new missions to combat Illuminate alien exostorms and battle some fresh squid enemies this week

Update: Arrowhead have just shared a graphic outlining what's coming in the next couple of months of Helldivers 2 updates. April's Terminid-themed update 6.2 will deliver two new biomes, fresh galactic war campaigns, and a new enemy variant. May's update 6.3, meanwhile, will come with a single new biome and its own fresh galactic war twists. Both months'll also boast the usual warbond and bug fixing patches.

Arrowhead have opted against sharing too much in terms of what the future holds in Helldivers 2 so far, ostensibly to avoid galactic war spoilers, but it looks like this sort of roadmap - which is deliberately short on specific details - will be commonplace going forwards.

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MSI plan 15-30% price hikes for their hardware, report claims, as the memory crisis' consequences continue to rumble back to your wallet

RAMnarök, the ongoing memory shortage which keeps fuelling price hikes and has had us watching whether Steam Decks are out of stock like hawks, continues to cause headaches. MSI are reportedly planning to hike up the prices of their hardware by 15 to 30% as a result of the shortages.

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An experimental Marathon duos mode is set to rock up for just two weeks, with Bungie warning "some things will be a bit jank"

Marathon's set to see how well it can cater to folks who only have one friend, with Bungie having announced plans to add an experimental duos mode to the extraction shooter. It'll stick around for two weeks or so, be "a bit jank", and hopefully give the studio a firm idea of whether they should put resources into developing a fully fleshed-out version of paired play going forwards.

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Montag, 16. März 2026

This week in PC games: Crimson Desert and Death Stranding 2 plus frogs, cubes and one amazingly menacing chicken

Last week our resident novelty-guzzling elder god the Maw ate me, as Julian sorrowfully reported. Well, I'm back in the waking world, and not as smelly as I could be, all things considered. I've been eaten by the Maw a few times now, but this is the first time I've managed to escape via one of its mouths, rather than by way of… other orifices.

"ARE YOU NOT ENTERTAINED," I bellow, straightening heroically with my shoulders braced against the cyclopean gums, as chunks of rancid Call Of Duty DLC sluice between my ankles. "MY OTHER CAR'S A MOTHRA", I roar, as the other RPS staff hastily gather with a jump net. "HERE ARE SOME NEW PC GAMES," I add, throwing myself into the waiting arms of my brethren.

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Gotham Knights studio Warner Bros. Games Montréal appear to have laid off staff

Warner Bros. Games Montréal, developers of Gotham Knights, look to have laid off an unspecified number of staff late last week. At least three former workers at the studio took to LinkedIn on Friday to post about their departures, with one explicitly mentioning that they'd been cut as part of a round of layoffs.

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Fallout Chicago, a DLC-sized New Vegas mod about the Brotherhood of Steel fighting a union mob, has a first demo out now

A chunky Fallout: New Vegas expansion mod which sees the courier set off east to the post-apocalyptic Illinois has released its first demo. No prizes for guessing where this mod - Fallout Chicago - is set. Though, you might want to brush up on your knowledge of Fallout Tactics' lore before you dive in.

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Sonntag, 15. März 2026

Skyblivion project lead says the massive Oblivion remake mod is "in a great place" during its first proper showcase of 2026

The team behind Skyblivion, the massive mod remake of Oblivion in Skyrim's engine, have shown off a few late-stage Mages Guild quests in the project's first proper showcase livestream since its release was delayed to 2026 late last year. According to project lead Kyle 'Rebelzize' Rebel, Skyblivion's currently "in a great place" and its team are still aiming to release it "as soon as possible".

If you missed it, last year's Skyblivion delay followed an ex- level and world designer on the project alleging that the mod's previous 2025 release goal was "unachievable", in a post which also accused Rebel and Skyblivion implementation lead Heavy Burns of mismanaging communication within the mod's team. In response, Heavy Burns asserted that "many" of the claims in the ex-dev's post were "either misrepresented or just untrue".

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The Sunday Papers

Sundays are for lying in bed and thinking of ways to interfere with your downstairs neighbour's space as much as their loud music interferes with yours. Crucially the method cannot be one that can be immediately turned around and used back against you. Perhaps taking up the aim of walking up and down the creaking stairs 100 times a day or investing in a door bell with a very loud and long tune.

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Samstag, 14. März 2026

Embark have been replacing Arc Raiders' AI voice lines with real people, but that doesn't mean they've sworn off using it behind the scenes

The biggest stain on Arc Raiders is easily the use of AI voice acting. It stinks! There's no soul to it, and it deprives actors from being able to perform their craft. But, based on some comments from CEO Patrick Söderlund, it sounds like Embark are finally starting to realise that, oh yeah, it is actually better to work with a real human being (though this doesn't mean they're not using AI any more).

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Eye of the Match is Papers, Please, Severance, and Pro Evolution Soccer 2 mixed up into an enticing concotion

"Popular game, but you do this instead," is a tale as old as time, birthing efforts that range from rote to deliciously fresh. Making comparisons like that is always a gamble, as you're immediately pointing towards the gold standard that your game has to at least be almost on par with, perhaps even better, to make any real headway. And while I haven't played Eye of the Match, it being billed as Papers, Please, but you're a virtual referee for football matches is certainly a pitch I can get behind.

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Hunt witches and question what's right in the murky but compassionate sounding WITCHHUNTER.exe

You know, I wish there were more morally dubious protagonists in the world of video games. I know why there's not, many people want to identify with the characters they're embodying. But then I think about every other storytelling medium out there and how some of my favourite pieces feature people that aren't supposedly good or heroic, and long for the same in games. So, I'm quite interested in WITCHHUNTER.exe, a throwback text adventure game that actually has quite a lot of pretty pixel art where you play as a priest that must uncover witches in a rural town while the Devil tempts you astray.

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Marathon's next update will help your vault feel roomier, and Bungie outlines their plans for higher-end PCs

Marathon has entered its second week of existence, even if it somehow feels like it's already been around forever (perhaps that's the discourse I'm remembering now that I think about it), and Bungie have been ticking away at updates bit by bit. Just this week an update was introduced that made UESC enemies a tad weaker, and now Bungie have outlined what you can expect from update 1.0.5 which is coming to the shooter next week.

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Fear not, phobia havers, Slay the Spire 2 will be catering to you in a future update

Broadly speaking accessibility features still have a long way to go in most games, however, one that has been cropping up more and more are phobia-sensitive options. It cannot be understated how many don't like spiders! So the increase in such features is welcome as someone who perhaps doesn't have a phobia but would still like the option to not look at the eight-legged devils. And according to March's Slay the Spire 2 newsletter, sorry, neowsletter, a phobia accessibility mode is on the way.

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What are we all playing this weekend?

Saturday. We meet again. I see you've brought your old friends Blustery Wind and Chill In The Air with you. I expected better of you, you know those two just bring you down. You've so much potential. What don't you hang out with T-Shirt Weather and Gosh, That's Bright anymore? They've got their personified heads screwed on right.

No? We're stuck with this chilly winter for one more weekend? Fine, I didn't want to go outside anyway. I'm happy to stay in and play videogames.

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Freitag, 13. März 2026

Trump administration's "cruel and unnecessary" acts called out by Titanium Court developer during IGF award speech

AP Thomson, developer of surreal strategy game Titanium Court, has expressed solidarity with those affected by the litany of "cruel and unnecessary" practices currently being employed by the Trump-led US government. Taking to the stage to give an acceptance speech after Titanium Court was awarded the Independent Game Festival (IGF)'s Seumas McNally Grand Prize for the Best Independent Game, Thomson shared a message that ended in hope future awards shows will be able to see everyone come together "safe and thriving".

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