O EMPIRE! WARD OFF THY ROT puts you in an abandoned, dithered world with a cursed object and asks you to do one thing: survive the journey

Do you remember, or do you even know, about the Game Boy Camera? It's exactly as it sounds, a little camera attached to an original Game Boy cartridge that you could plug in and take photos with. You could even get a printer! The aesthetic therewithin is a particular one, utilising a tiny 128x128 pixel sensor, the end result being an incredibly dithered and pixelated yet charming look. There are few games that capture such a vibe, but O EMPIRE! WARD OFF THY ROT, a game about carrying a cursed object through an abandoned world, might just manage to.

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"For a few weeks, women were just dropping their babies": The Witcher 3 lead on designing NPCs that react appropriately

Gone are the days where a developer could give an NPC maybe two lines of dialogue and call it a day. The steady shift to realism essentially enforces the idea that characters must behave realistically, which is why whenever some kind of glitch or bug makes an NPC move about in an impossible manner it does numbers on Your Favourite Social Media App. And according to CD Projekt Red quest designer Philipp Weber, getting The Witcher 3's NPCs to react appropriately was a tad tricky.

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Stalker 2: Heart of Chornobyl's meaty 2.0 update brings functional fog, a suite of A-Life improvements, and more when it arrives next week

Stalker 2: Heart of Chornobyl's big 2.0 update is right around the corner, and developer GSC Game World have shared a plethora of details of what you can expect from it. For starters, the shooter is getting a visual upgrade, with a particular emphasis on lighting adjustments. Indoor lighting should look more realistic, the general landscape and foliage should look more natural, and hundreds of items that were previously inadvertently floating have been fixed too.

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What are we all playing this weekend?

Bit of a quiet one this week, gang. Half the RPS team are on holiday, ill, or off at some preview event, maybe in a less melty part of the world like Scandinavia, the lucky bastards. Games, however, must be played, and if it happens to be over a weekend, well...

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I love the Dark Soulful architecture of The Canon of Balls, a rolling open world game inspired by Sega, Fumito Ueda and Minecraft parkour

What do Dark Souls, Super Monkey Ball, Shadow of the Colossus, and Minecraft have in common? They are all explicit inspirations for The Canon of Balls, a spooky and unforgiving new open world platformer in which you are a horrified statue's face with a fleshy pink tongue, floating inside a rolling cage. You can use your tongue as a springboard.

Look, stay with me on this. I think The Canon of Balls could be good. Yes, I know that we've done "Dark Souls in a ball" already this month, but I think this game stands apart. It reminds me a little of Straftat in being a very specific, even obstinate throwback project that's less about nostalgia - less about sheer recreation, and more the feeling that a deserted vein of weirdness has more to give, that there's another future down here somewhere.

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Total War: Warhammer 3 is getting a big free vampiric update in September, alongside the epithet-stuffed Lords of the End Times DLC

Creative Assembly have announced a release date for Total War: Warhammer 3 expansion Lords of the End Times. Consisting of four new legendary lords, each with a distinct retinue, campaign and battle map abilities, it's billed as "the biggest DLC that we’ve ever released in the series 10-year history". It'll accompany another, reportedly gargantuan free update with yet another legendary lord, the Vampire Queen Neferata, together with a rework for the Vampire Counts and Archaon The Everchosen, some new endgame scenarios, and updated victory conditions.

There are over a hundred legendary lords in Twarhammer 3 at this point. I feel like the legendariness is at risk of being diluted. Can we organise some kind of spin-off game where every Warhammer army consists entirely of legendary lords? How about the legendary lords all go live on a big New England college campus and solve mysteries together? How about a Warhammer legendary lord adaptation of Guess Who?

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Invisum Piscium 嫌魚 is a dreamlike walking sim about fragments of conversations and a deep craving for water fish haven't procreated in

I won't dive into why this is happening to me at the moment, you'll either need to pay me £20 or let me pay you to be my therapist to get that explanation, but I've been having some odd dreams lately. They're frequently temporally confused, mixing and matching people from across my life that should never have crossed paths. This has left me looking to ground myself a touch, so of course I decided to take a look at Invisum Piscium 嫌魚, a walking sim that's not quite about dreaming, but is about looking for distilled water that's free from fish sex contamination.

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