We can only presume Train Station Renovation is launching through early access owing to the enormous complexity of the project, which primarily involves the player – a kind of janitorial Fat Controller – picking up thousands of cigarette butts and tin cans and placing them in a big skip out back. Without the vital feedback of a small army of beta testers, who knows what kind of bugs and glitches might creep in?...

Having pondered my tree for a bit, I thought about trees in games and how they make for good side quests. Now join me by the bark, as I examine why this might be the case in a roundabout manner.

To that end, the American contingent of our corporate family, USgamer, are hosting a livestream this evening in support of Black Lives Matter. They’ll be playing games and having chats with journos and hosts from other sites within our network, as well as the good folks from IGN, Kinda Funny, GameSpot and more. You catch the stream on the USGamer YouTube channel when it all kicks off. Here’s their schedule (all times are BST): If you don’t have time to tune in but still want to show your support, you can donate directly to the Black Lives Matter Global Network right here, and give what you can to a really important cause....

In this guide, we’ll cover how to defeat the Garden Knight at the end of the West Garden in Tunic so that you can access the West Belltower and open the Sealed Temple. How to defeat the Garden Knight in Tunic The Garden Knight has three main attacks that you need to watch out for. These are all used from the start of the fight, so there’s no particular phase-change moment where the Garden Knight unlocks one of these moves....

The Trump Team channel is in trouble for two broadcasts of past rallies with his usual hateful rambling. In particular, Twitch objected to parts of a campaign rally from 2016 and June’s Tulsa rally, CNBC report. Exactly what he said isn’t worth repeating; you get the picture by now. While the length of the temp ban is unclear, Twitch say those videos are binned. “Hateful conduct is not allowed on Twitch,” the company said in a statement....

Of course, it wouldn’t be our podcast with doing a weekly theme - sorry, Point Of Interest. Yes, this week we’re talking festive stuff. What are we doing to celebrate the hols? Any games lined up? Any backlogs being cleared? It also veers off FPS discussion a bit, but what the hell, it’s Christmas so it’s fine. And to finish, Imogen presents three strange player names she’s encountered on her FPS travels....

The theme this week? Gaming merch and how we feel about it owning it, wearing it, and popping it on our shelves. We come to a consensus: body pillows are good. It was my turn to surprise Imogen with some names I’d plucked from in-game lobbies. Immediately, I divert proceedings into a chat about reality TV and food; this will never get old for me. Imogen’s turn next time, and I look forward to it....

It’s a good thing, then, that game director Joe Ziegler says they’d like to add in some modes where players can have a bit of “social downtime”. While the game already has (somewhat) more-relaxed game modes in Spike Rush and Deathmatch, Ziegler wants to put in areas where players can just do things like hang out, warm up and cool down together. He says these sorts of spaces help to create as “ecosystem” around the main game modes....

This new mode is a 5v5 team deathmatch. Players respawn when killed (or, when whacked with snowballs) and the first team to reach 50 kills wins. It takes place on the new Icebox map, which will have its halls decked in all manner of merry ornaments and giant candy canes. Now, you won’t be picking up snowballs with your bare hands, instead you’ll be using an icy version of Brimstones molotov launcher - so you’ll need to lead your shots to actually hit people....

As first spotted by German site HardwareLuxx, there’s no indication as to why Valve made this change, and it doesn’t look like anyone with an outstanding Steam Deck order will know which SSD bandwidth they’ll get in advance. However, Valve’s added note explains that “In our testing, we did not see any impact to gaming performance between x2 and x4.” It wouldn’t be surprising to see a negligible difference in game loading speeds, as most games simply aren’t built to take full advantage of PCIe 3....

Teased last year, Swansong is being developed by Big Bad Wolf - them of historical fanfic investigate ’em up The Council fame. The trailer was followed by a chat with quest designer Eliott Hipeau, who spilt more details on Big Bad Wolf’s upcoming RPG. There’s a new Camarilla Prince in town, one who’s trying to strengthen the clan’s presence by bringing together the cities of Boston and Hartford. Swansong follows three characters in the wake of a bloody shootout, switching between them over the course of the game as you unravel your usual web of conspiracies and dark deeds....

Anyway, the vampy reverse bullet hell will reveal the launch date for 1.0 on September 29th. In the meantime, today brought the release of minor patch 0.11.3, which includes a new weapon, a new secret character, and the final Arcana. Here’s a trailer for the patch: The new weapon in 0.11.3 is the “super rare” Super Candybox II Turbo, which you can see in the trailer above. The final Arcana - which are unlocks that optionally modify the game in some way - is Arcana XXI, “Blood Astronomia”....

For this week’s Mystery Steam Reviews both myself and Matthew had to choose three games that have other real playable games in them. A good non-PC example would be the Crash Bandicoot bit in Uncharted 4. Up to speed? Good stuff. If you’re new around these parts, you can see a full breakdown of the rules in the Mystery Steam Reviews Rule Bible™ below. Also, remember to boast about getting all six right in the comments....

Released over the weekend, Weird RPG is a small action-RPG tripping across dimensions. From fantasy forests to a post-apocalyptic modern city overrun with zombies, click-click-click to burst baddies and grab loot. Violence is a lightweight hack ’n’ slash, with four-hit combos, dodge-rolls, and an active ability or two determined by your weapon. You can unlock more weapon abilities and swap them in and out. All stats are determined by your gear too, no levels here....

Warzone weapon stats Below you can find full up-to-date stats on every single weapon in Call Of Duty: Warzone. The tables are organised by gun class. Below the tables is a quick walkthrough for those having trouble understanding what all the stats means and how we arrived at these values. Assault Rifle stats Check out the best Assault Rifles in Warzone here! SMG stats Check out the best SMGs in Warzone here!...

According to G Data, “malicious users” are specially crafting profile images to contain malware. Because of the way it’s created, the malware can’t be detected by antivirus software. These images can’t do much on their own though, G Data says it’s “payload” malware that requires even more malware to activate it. Basically, you’d need to have downloaded some other bit of nasty malware (from rotten websites or spam emails) that would act as a decrypter....

This year, unfortunately, Rezzed couldn’t happen because of all the everything (here I gesture at the world, futilely), and while we did do a cracking Rezzed Digital, and have an even more cracking EGX Digital coming up, we missed, you know, the experience. So we decided to make a Rezzed you can do at home for nothing. Yes, that’s right. We’ve made you a Rezzed tabletop RPG. For free! In collaboration with our pals at EGX, we commissioned Grant Howitt, tabletop game designer extraordinaire of Rowan, Rook and Decard, to make Rezzed into a TRPG oneshot that you can play with your friends at home....

It wasn’t entirely surprising to find out that the individual drawn to virtually abandoned games would work in the field in some way. Dashiell Wood, who writes for esports site Gfinity in the UK, popped his hand up on Twitter over the weekend to claim the honour of being Babylon’s Fall’s most dedicated player when the game’s exceedingly low player counts came to light. Wood quickly took to heart the title of “Square’s bravest soldier” bestowed upon him by one commenter, even briefly changing his Twitter profile to read “World’s only Babylon’s Fall player, 00:00, 04/05/22”....

While Vampire is focused on Machiavellian cityslickers, Werewolf is largely about big fuzzy murderhippies fighting forces that corrupt Gaia. In Earthblood, that’s the evil oil megacorp Endron (a classic bit of video game brand naming, that). So off you go, playing as some fella (of the Fianna tribe, if you must know), to duff up the baddies in your wolf, human, and fightwolf forms. Your lupus form is the sneaky one, the homid has hands for tasks like hacking computers and crossbowing nerks, and crinos form is for ultraviolence....

Well don’t you worry no more, sunshine. The name’s Ronald McNationalism, hardest bloke in DedSec, and I’m going to take you on a little bloppity-blip (that’s geezer chat for “trip”) round some of the city’s most iconic landmarks. We’ll start with the Shard, that massive tower full of money in Southwark. You can see behind me there, plastered with massive warnings about what an utter bloody danger I am....