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With release just a couple of weeks away on 13th October, Lords of the Fallen has a new gameplay overview trailer. It's a dripping, cheesily VO-d cinematic layer cake of gore and gristle that introduces you to the game's god-blighted fantasy world and the many different ways you'll expire within it - from having a boss inconsiderately drop a load of golden swords on you, to getting mobbed by underworld spooks according to an escalating "dread" level, which is sort of GTA's old heat system but with more Grim Reapers.

As friends, family and long-time RPS readers can probably attest, reverse Alleyway puzzler Holedown became a mild obsession of mine a few years back. Every spare idle moment I had, I'd be bouncing balls down its infinite planetary mining silos, mesmerised by the vacant stare of its iconic white Holedown worm (my record is still 1090m, in case you're wondering). It's a most joyous day, then (as much as it can be on a day like today), to hear that solo developer Grapefrukt will soon be back with another ball-bouncing beaut in the form of Subpar Pool, which is coming to PC (and phones) on October 12th.

Cocoon is a puzzler where worlds are contained within orbs, and it's your job to unpick puzzles with your ability to hop in and out of them, as well as carry them on your back. While it might sound complex, the worlds these orbs contain steer you carefully towards a clear goal every time: solve the problem, then grab your orb on the way out. Before you know it, you're carrying orbs within orbs and you're unravelling a cosmic mystery where the floor might be a biomechanical stingray or the path forward a spinal cord composed of ferns. I am convinced everyone should spring to action and hoist an orb on their shoulders. I couldn't put mine down.

Creative Assembly's Hyenas - a sci-fi extraction shooter about robbing Martian billionaires, which Ed deemed "a surprising amount of fun" when he saw it at Gamescom - is no more. Sega have cancelled the forthcoming looter FPS together with several unannounced titles - a stripping-down of the publisher's European business in response to financial losses Sega are blaming partly on Covid.

As a child of the early internet, games like Hypnospace Outlaw can't help but resonate quite deeply with me. This was the internet as I remembered it, goddamnit, and the fact it mixed in a compelling corporate conspiracy story in between its pages was just the icing on an already fine cake (in GIF form, naturally, with a MIDI tune of Vivaldi's Four Seasons blaring out from your internet browser for good measure). But in revisiting Hypnospace for this month's RPS Game Club, there was one page in particular that really brought the rose-tinted shutters down on me. It was beautiful, lovely April, Hypnospace's virtual pet hamster, who can live, snooze and poop on your desktop, and maybe turn a slightly sickly shade of green if you don't pay enough attention to her.

As with most things in Hypnospace, I can only assume that April and her fellow gaggle of virtual pet friends are riffs on real-life virtual pet games Catz and Dogz from the late 90s, which, yes, as a ten-year-old girl at the time, I was absolutely obsessed with. Developed by the now defunct PF Magic, Catz and Dogz 3 were arguably two of my most formative PC games growing up, and cor, I miss those dumb beasts so very much.

This week we at the Electronic Wireless Show podcast look at two contrasting tales of games being always online: Payday 3's overloaded launch servers, and Sea Of Thieves' triumphant reveal of season 10 additions. Is always online good? Is it bad? Or, much like the radiator in your living room, is it basically invisible as long as nothing breaks? Plus we dive into the games we've been playing recently (Nate is still plugging away at Baldur's Gate 3), recommend a bunch of unrelated short videos, and answer a question that has plagued humanity for years: would you punch a gorilla for a cheeseburger?

Prime Day 2023 only came and went in July, but that hasn’t deterred Amazon – who presumably own a number of oversized clocks with the word "DEALS" replacing all twelve numbers – from announcing another, functionally identical sale. This time it’s Amazon Prime Big Deal Days, it’s happening this October, and god, I am so, so very tired of writing about these things.

Still, as much as Prime Big Deal Days is sillily named and oddly timed (is Black Friday not just a month later?), it may yet prove useful as a source of cheap PC gaming hardware. Amazon sales usually are, with SSDs, gaming mice, keyboards, and even graphics cards reliably among their discounted wares. Here’s everything we know so far, and some tips for the big day(s) on how to secure the best stuff and avoid shady rip-off tactics.

Counter-Strike 2 released last night and has duly taken over from Counter-Strike: Global Offensive as Steam’s most-played game at the time of writing, but individual player reactions are a bit mixed. Valve’s new/revamped free-to-play FPS sports a range of exotic features and fixtures, from swirlier, reactive smoke to new server architecture, but it has launched without many of the modes, maps and functions Global Offensive diehards are accustomed to, after a decade of updates.

There's been a certain amount of confusion and alarm over the announcement of Nakwon: Last Paradise, a dingy third-person zombie survival adventure with a big emphasis on stealth, from the creators of Dave the Diver, a bright, breezy uramaki roll of a game that mixes restaurant management with side-on undersea exploration. Is this kind of like when Prince of Persia went all edgelord with Two Thrones? Do I need to call Mintrocket's parents and ask for an intervention?

Thing is, if you take a step back from each game they're actually very similar. Both are fundamentally about scouring dangerous places for resources and ferrying them back to a safe area where you can sell them off. Both pit you, a mediocre human, against strange and unearthly creatures. Both are sort of about redeeming scenario concepts we all hate - in Dave the Diver's case, the water level, and in Nakwon's case, the stealth mission. See, this is practically a remake! Let's have a look at the trailer.

Look alive, jarheads! Grab your Glocks and drop your - well, whatever you're holding that isn't a gun, unless it's a kitten or something, in which case tuck it gently under your arm and brace yourself for the news that Valve have finally released the public version of Counter-Strike 2, the long-awaited free-to-play technical upgrade (and replacement) for perennial Steam chart-topper Counter-Strike: Global Offensive, after six months in limited access. You can download it here.

Last time, you decided by 72% against 28% that setting unit waypoints is better than receiving waypoints yourself. Given how loudly people decry receiving waypoints, I'm a little surprised it was that close. And that's how we know we're doing science. This week, I ask you to choose between mastery of place and mastery of time. What's better: improvised environmental weapons, or skipping across a timeline flowchart?

Gaming on Mac becomes more of a reality every day, with powerful Apple Silicon processors and the Game Porting Toolkit unlocking surprisingly decent performance in a wide range of modern games and emulated titles alike. We don't normally cover Mac gaming here, but I thought you might want to know that the latest M2 Mac Mini is down to $499 at B&H Photo in the US, a $100 reduction on the base-spec unit that makes it quite a powerful computer for the money.

NZXT's H1 v2 is one of my favourite small form factor PC cases, but a high price point (and a manufacturing defect in the V1 model) kept it from seeing widespread adoption. It's now possible to pick up this Mini ITX case from Best Buy for $200, half its usual price and a good deal for a case that includes a 750W SFX power supply, 140mm AiO and top fan.

Cyberpunk 2077’s 2.0 update arrived last week alongside new (and truly excellent) expansion Phantom Liberty, bringing a host of tweaks and improvements in an impressive climax to the originally technically-troubled and artistically-questionable game’s quite staggering redemption arc.

One of the lantern fish lures dangled in the face of anybody losing momentum in Starfield is "mate, you would not believe the weird stuff that happens in New Game Plus". I won't say too much - not in this opening paragraph, anyway - but there's a playfulness to the post-completion options that you don't really find in the rest of Bethesda's much-ballyhooed RPG. It's the kind of thing you expect from modders, not the developers themselves.

I like small things - models, and what not - but I'm not patient enough to build them from scratch myself. Lego sets represent an ideal, if monstrously expensive, solution. I can build the thing without having to make all the constituent parts of it. I've recently gotten well into the modular city sets, to the extent that I look up discontinued sets on eBay and other such secondhand vendors. I don't actually get sets very often, but last week I built a police station, which can slot next to the bookshop I got for my last birthday. And while the bookshop has cute details - like a book called Moby Brick with a white block leaping from the sea on the cover, and an attic flat with a pet iguana in a glass tank - the copshop has some secret secrets that are the Lego equivalent of leaving a skeleton in a toilet stall. But better.

EA is moving away from its decades-long FIFA series with the release of EA Sports FC later this week. It seems that the publisher is taking the idea of replacing FIFA quite literally, too, as it has pulled every previous FIFA game from sale on PC storefronts Steam and Epic.

Horizon Forbidden West will follow its predecessor Horizon Zero Dawn away from former PlayStation exclusivity with a PC release early next year.

Chris Metzen, one of Warcraft’s longest and most influential lore-crafters for more than two decades before he retired back in 2016, has returned to work at Blizzard full-time.

A friend recently found her old floppy disks from the 1997, uncovering a treasure trove of poetry, MS Paint art, homework, screensavers, and fanfic. Delightful finds which I feel privileged to have seen. I very much do not have my old floppies. They're all long-gone, chucked along with all my old websites and blogs and CDs and everythings in strict sentimentality purges. I don't know if I now regret that. So with vintage Internet simulator Hypnospace Outlaw being our game of the month in the RPS Game Club, I'm wondering: do you have your old sites and stuff? Dare you share it with us?

Larian have released a new Baldur's Gate 3 hotfix - lucky number seven - which fixes several crash bugs while also stopping characters and items cloning themselves when you move between levels, under certain conditions. Gosh, I do love patch notes for massive RPGs. Even the relatively minor ones read like failed alchemical experiments plucked from a mage's workshop, like the one you find behind [REDACTED] in [REDACTED] in Baldur's Gate 3 Act [REDACTED].

Neowiz have released Lies of P update 1.2.0.0, a major patch for the puppet-ridden action-RPG which educated souls are describing as the closest we may ever get to a Bloodborne PC port. It introduces Dualshock 4 and DualSense controller support alongside a host of changes to enemies, the execution of the game’s Fable Arts or gear-specific special moves, item drop rates and the duration of stagger windows. The overarching aim seems to be to make the game easier, and as I’m sure you’re expecting, a few Lies of P fans - and, it turns out, RPS staffers - are ticked off about that.

I've been greatly looking forward to Fortune's Run, despite absolutely sucking at the demo. Scandalously, we don't appear to have covered this indie sci-fi FPS on these golden pages, so here's a quick overview: you're the high-jumping, sword-wielding, bullet-pumping lovechild of Deus Ex and DOOM, galloping through a world that recalls the Imperial bases and sewers of Dark Forces, taking down grungy pixelart sprites by means of precision parries, grabs, combos, headshots, terrain traps and much more besides. Between dust-ups, you can play basketball and leave crayon graffiti for other players care of a Dark Souls-style messaging system. It's a feast!

The game was due to launch into Steam early access tomorrow, 27th September, but unfortunately, there's been a delay. Valve's testers have denied Fortune's Run approval to launch on the platform. Among the reasons, according to developer Team Fortune themselves, is that Valve don't feel the game's content warning for sexual assault is actually necessary.

Shadows Of Doubt is in many ways my ideal game: a procedurally generated detective sim set in an open, rain-slick noir city. I'm waiting for it to get further along in its Early Access journey, and to that end, its first major content update is here now.

The Cheats And Liars Update, as its called, adds new "infidelity cases" to investigate, alongside simpler lost-and-found side jobs.

It's one in, one out this November. Don't Nod's Banishers: Ghosts Of New Eden has been delayed until February 13th, 2024 from its original November release date. That's because its developer and publisher want to avoid the busy release season.

The Talos Principle 2, not so much. The philosophical puzzler is launching November 2nd.

If you land and go exploring on one of Starfield's many planets, you might become afflicted with a status effect. It won't bother you too much, though, and you can cure the effect with an item or a quick trip to a doctor.

It wasn't always so easy. In an interview with Game Maker's Notebook, Todd Howard says that environmental damage was initially "punitive", until they "nerfed the hell out of it."

We've already covered a few RX 6800 XT deals that have come across as a result of the recent release of the 7700 XT and 7800 XT, and now it's time to look at the slightly smaller RDNA 2 card: the RX 6700 XT.

This model is a good option for 1440p gaming and examples are now significantly cheaper than they were a few months ago, including the ever-reliable Sapphire's Pulse RX 6700 XT 12GB model. This used to go for $340, but is now available for $309 when you use code SSCW2574 at the cart at Newegg.

While DDR5 RAM is the future now, there are still millions of DDR4 systems out there used for gaming, content creation and much more. Happily, the advent of DDR5 means that DDR4 prices have nose-dived, bringing extremely high capacity kits into much more reasonable price points. For example, this 2x 32GB kit of DDR4-3600 RAM from Viper, is down to £98 on Amazon - after retailing for over £130 as recently as July.

This is an awesome kit for RAM-intensive applications, like video editing, 3D rendering or scientific computing, and comes at the fraction of the price of even the cheapest 64GB kit of DDR5 (~£150).

On the latest-but-one revision of their About page, Metacritic describe the process of calculating a videogame's aggregate "Metascore" as a kind of "magic". The FAQ cheekily invites you to "peek behind the curtain", evoking the figure of the theatre conjurer beckoning the audience on-stage to inspect the props, before performing the trick. You're only shown so much, however. There are tables for conversions between different review scoring systems, demonstrating how a B- becomes 67/100, but the "weighting" Metacritic gives to each source publication when producing the combined Metascore is a closely-guarded mystery.

You could argue that the secrecy is necessary to avoid heavily weighted publications being targeted and pestered by fans to deliver positive reviews of forthcoming games, so as to swing the average (though in practice, Metascore soothsayers have long since sussed out which outlets have the most votes). But I think it's better understood as a mixture of basic trademark protection and a mechanism of enchantment, a means of both deterring imitators and keeping avid readers guessing about the output. After all, no professional magician seriously wants to give away how the trick is performed, much as no meat magnate wants to show you the inside of a sausage factory.

Like most people, I had assumed EA shut down Anthem soon after dashing BioWare's hopes to overhaul and revive the sci-fi looter-shooter. I was surprised to see Anthem on Game Pass while poking around checking out space games which are not Starfield. It did shut down, didn't it? Surely it did. So why's it on Game Pass? If an 80GB download is the price I pay for a ha-ha-hilarious joke post where I review a spinning loading ball or server error message, so be it. Let's go. Wait. Hang on. I'm playing this. This is a game. This is still a game!