Timeloop metroidvania Echo Weaver is the brave game that locks almost nothing off and challenges you to break it

Writing about new 2D timeloop metroidvania Echo Weaver is tricky because most - possibly all - of what you need to complete it is available to you the very second you first wake up, deep in the charnelpools of an ethereal and shattered lunar civilisation.

The plot in brief: you are a perpetually rewinding robot boy on a mission to work out what the hell happened. You'll explore overgrown biomes, investigate busted machines, run errands for a handful of scrappy, splashy-hued aliens, and conjure holographic flashbacks that cover the circumstances of your own creation. Developers Moonlight Kids stress that the only thing you really gain in the course of all this is knowledge. There are a few upgrades to gather, but no core skills to unlock. Instead, it's all there for you to learn, whether by reaching a tutorial area or just by hitting buttons at random and messing with terrain fixtures.

As such, my telling you about abilities really does risk ruining it, much like explaining the behaviour of celestial bodies in Echo Weaver's great influence, Outer Wilds. So if you're strongly inclined to buy the game – my verdict after four hours: a vivid and thoughtful, freeform Metroidy puzzler with refreshingly minimal combat and a few rough edges - maybe get your feet wet before reading on.

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All hail brand synergy, Cyberpunk 2077 is getting a live action adaptation from Paramount and the producer behind the horrendous Doom movie

Welp, Cyberpunk 2077 is getting a live-action adaptation! With the plethora of Hollywood adaptations of video games these days, this is one of those bits of news that has me thinking, "wait, that wasn't already a thing?" Apparently not!

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PlatinumGames CEO pauses a discussion on Stellar Blade's Bayonetta costume crossover to casually imply more Bayonetta may be on the way

It's been a bit since Bayonetta has had any time in the spotlight. 2022's Bayonetta 3 released to pretty good reception (although did earn ire for its depiction of the witch herself), but all's been quiet on the Umbral front since. With creator Hideki Kamiya having left PlatinumGames in 2023, it seemed even more unlikely for the series to continue. A ray of hope appeared in an unexpected place, though: Stellar Blade.

That game's Switch 2 port, due for release next month, will feature four new costumes based on characters from the Bayonetta series, demonstrating that Platinum are willing to do something with it (well, that and letting her be added to Sonic Racing: Crossworlds alongside Minecraft Steve and Spongebob.)

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AMD's handsome FSR 4 upscaler is coming to handheld PCs this year, though Steam Deck support could take longer

Handheld PC games could be set for a bit of visual spit 'n' shine, as AMD have confirmed plans to bring FSR 4 – their newest, prettiest upscaling tech – to the kind of dinky Radeon APUs used by portables. AMD Computing & Graphics exec Jack Huynh, speaking to Korean media including The Elec, detailed a two-pronged approach: they’ll make new APUs built with native FSR 4 support, as well as a special version of the upscaler that can run on older integrated graphics chips, both by the end of 2026.

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Star Wars Zero Company studio start to bring back devs furloughed prior to launch, with "more than half" of previous headcount reportedly returning to payroll

Star Wars Zero Company developers Bit Reactor have begun to put some of the developers they furloughed prior to the game's release back on payroll. Thus far, the number of staff on payroll at the studio has reportedly returned to "more than half" of what it was prior to the furloughs, with Bit Reactor boss Greg Foertsch asserting that they hope to "eventually bring as many people back as possible".

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Games industry investors are "sitting on the sidelines waiting for obvious slam dunks", says Undead Labs boss, with labour costs a key worry

Last month, State of Decay developers Undead Labs bought their own independence from Microsoft, after a deal with unnamed buyers fell through. The staff created a new holding company, Full Measure, to facilitate the buyout. Layoffs followed. Now, studio boss Philip Holt has offered an inside look on the transition, together with thoughts on the wider landscape of videogame industry investment. Short version: he thinks there's still money washing around, but the fatter cats are very much looking for "obvious slam dunks".

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ROTETRA is Tetris where the blocks fall from four different sides at once and lord almighty I don't have the brainspace to be good at it, but it sure is fun

Look, I'm pretty reasonable at Tetris. I'm not one of those grand masters or anything, but I can both have fun and get a score that would at least make my hypothetical nephew impressed (assuming he also wouldn't be in the Roblox mines). Sometimes, though, a take on the beautiful block game rocks up that makes me question any such skills I may have. Today, that is ROTERA, a block stacking game in which you must manage tetronimos falling from four directions at once.

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Cancelled MMO spin-off Borderlands Online is playable once again, and the team behind the unofficial project thankfully didn't use any genAI to get it running

Where there's a will (and some talented, incredibly passionate modders), there is always a way in the world of video games. Today said will has manifested in the form of Borderlands Online, an MMO spin-off that was planned to be released exclusively in China as a free-to-play game. A build of that game was found a year ago, and now, it is playable. Neat!

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Retro platformer series Dizzy is back for a new game from its original creators, who are really happy for you to know it's made with AI

For British people who were actively playing games in the late 80s and/or retro enthusiasts looking back at that period of the industry, the name Dizzy might ring a bell (it doesn’t for me, but what can I tell you, I’m 24). A prolific platformer series starring a bipedal egg, it spanned formats from the ZX Spectrum to the NES and Game Gear, and managed sixteen(!?) releases between 1987 and 1992 - before slowing significantly past the millenium. Still, that hasn’t stopped its creators, the Oliver Twins, from trying to bring it back in the current era, and so came the announcement of another new Dizzy game during their talk at last weekend’s Play Expo in Blackpool.

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After 12 years, Ultra Street Fighter IV gets not one, but two connection-stabilising rollback netcode mods aaaand they're both made using Claude

Street Fighter IV, the game that basically revived the fighting game genre back in 2009 and gave birth (not literally) to a new subset of players lovingly referred to as ‘09ers’, saw its final iteration in 2014’s Ultra Street Fighter IV. While it wasn’t the most perfectly balanced game, it’s remembered fondly by its players and is viewed by many as the last vestige of ‘honest Street Fighter’. It’s also burdened with being limited to delay-based netcode rather than the more modern and more stable rollback netcode, but this is something modders are attempting to fix. Using genAI. Sorry if I got your hopes up.

To quickly explain why the different netcode matters, delay-based netcode handles latency issues by variably delaying inputs to match unstable connection, while rollback netcode removes this delay by accepting inputs immediately and then reversing the game state (rolling back) if the connection instability causes inconsistency between players. All of this to say, rollback has become the industry standard for its stability since the mid 2010s, leaving delay-based to rot in input-eating hell.

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"Coders will never forgive me for this level": Warhammer 40,000: Boltgun 2 has a rotatable "fleshmetal" puzzle map that drove its own development team crazy

In the grim darkness of the far future, there is something far worse than war. There is: a level that is basically a huge, spinning lock full of tentacles, with your Space Marine or Sister of Battle protagonist naturally serving as the key.

Auroch Digital's new FPS Warhammer 40,000: Boltgun 2 launches next week, and I've been chatting to the game's principal designer Matt Bone about some of the more "creative" environments in store. It's a sturdy rule of thumb that all the best ideas in gamedev are the ones that make your colleagues want to fill your trousers with sea urchins. Bone certainly appears to have achieved this with the map comfortingly known as Vicious Circles.

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This week in PC games: Star Wars: Galactic Racer, Hellraiser: Revival, and a throwback tycoon game about turning utopias into carparks

Happy this week, all! I regret to inform you that the videogame developers have been at it again. Sometimes, I find that the promising new releases distribute themselves evenly throughout the week, like butter perfectly spread over just the right amount of toast. And sometimes, as with this week's haul, they congregate weirdly on Thursday and Friday. It's as though they were trying to get away from me, like rats ambushed in the pantry, pawing frantically against the weekend's closed and bolted door. Haha! Hahahaaha! There is no escape, cheese-filching squeakmonsters! Down you go! Down you go into the Maw!

If you think characterising new videogames as a rodent infestation is unkind, I quite agree. Rats are sociable, adaptable, and admirable creatures who deserve better than to be compared to stupid videogames. In any case, I am only being macabre because this is the month of Halloween – hence the conspicuous abundance of horror in the list below.

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"We opted out of some things really early on": How the small team making No Law plan to make it look as big as Cyberpunk 2077

If you've watched the trailers for No Law or the tech demo that developer Neon Giant showed off at Unreal Fest earlier this year, it would be easy to believe the game has a similar scope to CD Projekt Red's Cyberpunk 2077. After all, both games are open-world RPGs set in cyberpunk cities. Set in a beautifully realised mediterranean city that is somehow equal parts Lisbon and Kowloon Walled City – and with corner shops that are as stuffed with riches as the one down the road from my flat. But, the developers will happily tell you where they've scrimped and saved.

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The Sunday Papers

Sundays are for having the first lie-in in a month. No trips to visit family, no waking in unfamiliar beds, and, best of all, no having to wait until the hosts are up before you can get started on breakfast. I will be snoozing deeply in my own particular mattress before having a plate of toast and scrambled eggs at a time that I deem appropriate.

Once that's all polished away, I will return to bed with a fresh cup of coffee and peruse the week's best writing at my own leisure.

What's that? You want me to share? Fine. You can have a read of them when I'm done.

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The Other One: Jordan Magnuson's Game Poem jam is a fascinating collection of chimeras

Sometimes I Wonder About The Other Me is a 2D platformer created by "small game" developer Luis "Ludipe" Díaz Peralta, whose other works include A Place For The Unwilling. It's broken into a handful of single screen maps. On each screen, there's a Mario-brand exclamation mark block that burps a text fragment, forming an overarching monologue that begins with the title phrase. As you move between screens, you come to a signpost pointing left and right. Heading in either direction leads to a splitscreen area, with the player controlling duplicate characters. As you guide your charges rightward, one half of the screen flakes away to darkness. The remaining character returns to the starting screen, there to wonder anew about the Other Me.

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What are we all playing this weekend?

October, we meet again. You slip through my bedroom window as a cold draft on a crisp morning, both making my covers more welcome and the long walk to the kitchen for coffee that much harder. Still, your arrival signals the end of a month stuffed with game releases and, for me, at least, a lot of weekends of travelling. So your arrival is not unwelcome.

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AI-generated Fallout: New York browser game full of utterly cursed faces slapped with Bethesda cease and desist, its slop prompter claims

In perhaps the least surprising Fallout news since Raul from New Vegas confirmed that ghouls with dodgy knees don't enjoy sneaking, the person behind an AI-generated browser game dubbed Fallout: New York has claimed to have recieved a cease and desist message from Bethesda parent company ZeniMax. Their creation, if such a term fits, was generated using Anthropic's Claude Opus 5.5 tech.

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I'm not sure the "AI" in my chair's lumbar support actually counts as AI, but it has been smart enough to help my posture

Note from James, 02/10: We've heard your complaints that some of the wording in this piece - a lot of which, if I'm honest, was added/changed by me in the edit - overstates the chair's potential health benefits. The HBADA’s X7 chair may reduce back pain during long periods of sitting at your desk but it will not literally fix your spine. While it is and will remain the RPS way to indulge in some occasional hyperbole, we don't want to suggest that swivel chairs cure physical conditions, so I've clarified these bits to avoid confusion.

AI is everywhere, exhausting to keep up with, and increasingly perceived as harmful to games. But that’s mostly generative AI; the more limited, less media-scraping and energy-hungry breeds of artificial intelligence can still play a harmless, maybe even useful role, especially on the hardware side. Even if it finds itself in some unexpected places, as is the case with HBADA’s X7 chair.

While AI-powered lumbar support sounds like the kind of gimmicky nonsense that’s become all too common in 2026, I’ve been using an X7 for a week, and it’s... surprisingly effective? Definitely for straightening up my posture, which I'm hopeful will help with my recurring back pain issues. It’s been a very pleasant surprise.

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"We want people to try and outsmart the game": No Law aims for Arkane-style reactivity within a dangerous walled city

Port Desire, the hemmed-in city setting of immersive sim No Law, is hard to place. At points, it reminds me of walking around Lisbon. It shares that Portuguese city's verticality, where hill-straddling streets shouldered by colourful houses and corner shops can feel like tiers on a wedding cake. The strong sunlight and bursts of foliage reinforce the mediterranean vibes. Yet, the port city's structure and history is much closer to Kowloon Walled City, the ungoverned Chinese enclave that existed within British-owned Hong Kong.

Through the 1900s, with the British government taking a hands-off policy to the tiny district and the Chinese government exercising no control over its citizens, Kowloon became the most densely populated city on earth, with 33,000 citizens living in just 2.6-hectare borders. With virtually no official police presence, the city attracted anyone looking for a less-observed, less-regulated life – gangs, refugees, and a surprising number of unlicensed dentists.

As one of No Law's creative directors, Tor Frick, tells it, Port Desire is very similar. Not specifically the dentists bit, more the general, isolated lawlessness.

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The Division developers Massive are now "the global brand" in charge of Splinter Cell and Ghost Recon, alongside a new Ubisoft dieselpunk MOBA

Tom Clancy's The Division and Star Wars Outlaws studio Massive Entertainment just got, er, massiver. Parent company Ubisoft have announced that they're now "the global label" for several other series, including Ghost Recon and Splinter Cell alongside at least one original game, World War fantasy MOBA March of Giants.

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