Ahead of the announcement, developers Owned By Gravity invited me to take a sneaky peek, and I was treated to a hands-off demonstration from producer Jan Wagner. While the game was in a pre-alpha state, it was already looking pretty swish, especially the rather lovely (and lovingly hand-crafted, I later discovered) world map. It all looks very 4X-like, and all four of the exes are present and correct in varying amounts - but there is one significant departure from the formula that Wagner was keen to emphasise....

After spending a few days testing out the game on the Deck I’m thrilled to confirm that Spider-Man Remastered plays great on Valve’s handheld with only a few very minor caveats. Hooray! I can finally punch a Vulture in my back garden without getting shouted at by local bird protection services. What a time to be alive. In the video above I provide a broad analysis on how the game performs on a Steam Deck, but the short answer is: very well....

Coincidentally, this is the precise emotion that actor Jake Gyllenhaal is so gifted at conveying. So he’s gonna help me out every now and then in this post. Spring Falls is an extremely pretty little puzzle game about irrigation. The aim is to manipulate the terrain of each miniature hex-based level, redirecting bodies of water in order to make all of the flowers on the level bloom. The way this is done is quite simple - but if you’d asked me to explain it while playing, I would have had no idea....

Getting clicking on her tweet for the full-size version and close-ups: Very good contended chicken, down there in the field. The aquarium wall in the lounge is a dream come true. I like the plants climbing the walls of the witching attic. I’m feeling inspired to plant a rockery of my own on my next farm too. Lots of small details to coo over here. Stardew Valley’s creator, Eric “ConcernedApe” Barone, seems impressed too: To see this content please enable targeting cookies....

State of Decay 2 has visited Trumbull Valley before, back in 2019 with a standalone story DLC named Heartland. This time, Microsoft say, players will return to it as “a fully remastered, open-world playable map”. They say the new version reflects the passage of time, with new developments in the area, new characters and storylines to discover, old plot threads to resolve, and new bases, missions, and cheevos, and unique weapons and outfits....

Not that the Steam Deck is a nostalgia exercise, given it’s built to run the very latest AAA games as much as it is indies and retros. And it certainly isn’t twee: from its no-nonsense, all-black design to the performance-tweaking options in its OS, the Deck is a serious device, even and especially when it’s serious about giving you a good time. That’s in spite of some imperfections, to be sure – the software, screen and battery life may disappoint anyone expecting another top-end Valve hardware masterclass to follow their Index virtual reality headset....

Google mentioned in interviews in early 2020 that they were working with Valve to support Steam on ChromeOS, the operating system that powers their range of lightweight, low power laptops. There was then no further mention of it until this past week, when Google’s product director for games, Greg Hartell, announced during a keynote at Google’s Games Developer Summit that “the Steam alpha just launched.” It turns out that was premature....

Based on panicked posts and inevitable memes, it looks like the trouble started a couple hours ago at around 5pm GMT. Down Detector shows a similar timeline of user reports flowing in. As for right now, success seems mixed. Alice0 helpfully attempted a purchase and was given the message “There seems to have been an error initializing or updating your transaction. Please wait a minute and try again or contact support for assistance....

It’s a familiar routine by now: download plenty of demos and peruse the latest discounts on games. This time around, it’s all about survival games, obvs. Steam say that includes some survival horror and open-world crafting games along with your average survive ‘em ups. That’s as long as they’re mostly focused on the survival of the player. You’ll be able to check out what’s on offer when the storefront page for Survival Fest goes live later on today....

These dates were announced alongside changes to how Steam manage sales. The changes are developer-focused, but significant. For one, the cooling-off period between sales, during which a game needs to be set at its normal price, has been reduced from 6 weeks to 4. That means developers can now discount their games more often on the service. Valve are also providing developers with new tools for managing their discounts, including sales across catalogues, and firming up the process by which developers are invited to participate in relevant sales....

“About 80% of the team are cat owners, or are being owned by a cat depending on how you see it,” says producer Swann Martin-Raget. “We actually have two cats that are joining us almost everyday at the office and are working with us. The main character is based on one of the director’s cats called Murtaugh. He’s not an exact copy, but he’s the main reference. We also have Oscar, who is a Sphynx, a furless cat, so he’s a very good reference for animation because we can clearly see all the movements....

It’s been just over a year since we relaunched our RPS Supporter programme. Back then, we introduced two different tiers: Standard and Premium. Our Premium tier has all the same benefits as our Standard one, but also throws in exclusive articles and podcast episodes, early access to our RPS@PAX videos, as well as free game keys while stocks last. This introductory offer is for our Standard tier. This normally costs £4 / $5 a month, and gives you a glimpse of what RPS looks like without all the loud, shouty adverts and auto-playing videos....

Here’s the tweet with the JPG: And here’s another request for the games industry to write alt text for these images for accessibility reasons. “We’ve made the difficult decision to delay Nightingale’s Early Access release to the first half of 2023. We’ll have more news on specific timing at a later stage,” says the statement. “The move is based on two considerations: The first is an upgrade to Unreal Engine 5....

In this guide, we’ll explain how to get every Temtem evolution, including the exact levels required to evolve every Temtem and other criteria that you might need to fulfil to evolve some rare Temtem. Temtem evolutions There are many Temtem evolution requirements, but the most common is through simply leveling up your Temtem. To reiterate what we said above, Temtem species do not evolve at certain levels. Instead, they must gain a certain amount of levels from the point of capture, meaning you and your friend might have the same Temtem but see them evolve at slightly different levels....

It was recently revealed that Dead Space is going to be remade “from the ground up” by Motive (who previously did Star Wars Squadrons and Star Wars Battlefront II). I assume this means that it’s going to have, just, loads of lightsabers in it, and the main character is now Baby Yoda. My boiling hot take is that they should only really bother redoing that first bit - the cut off their limbs section - because that’s the best bit anyway....

Here we stand in the dark neo-year of 2020. The spam bots have risen to prominence, the governments of the world are bickering over follower counts, and history class has been renamed “meme studies”. Somewhere, in a dusty room in the RPS treehouse, a rogue human is compiling a list article for a crumbling PC games website. It is a warning to all those who read it. A prophecy of the terrible things to come....

Now, this isn’t a ‘best games of all time’ list. We have our RPS 100 for that, which is where you can find the big guns of PC gaming from across the ages. The list you’re reading right now is designed to give you a handy one-stop shop of what the best games are over the last few months, with a sprinkling of genre bests that haven’t been beaten since their release....

Raider - For Honor They large, they barge, they very much in charge. The Raider is your vanilla warrior of Norse lineage in Ubisoft’s ahistorical arena fighter. They are bigger than a bear and they have an axe that is not used for trees. They also think it’s funny to bonk you between the eyes with the stick-end of this axe, dazing you and making it hard to see where the next fatal swing will come from....

Hey, even shipbuilders have slow days at the office. This week’s update is the second of Squadrons’ Holiday Supply Drops, the first adding a brand new map and an arsenal of new weapons. Now, we’ve got some properly strange new ships to attach those experimental explosives to. I gave the two ships a quick shot the now, so let’s start with the big bad B-Wing. It’s a strange one, a staggeringly tall ship that, through use of a new gyro auxiliary, can rotate the rest of its body around the central cockpit....

Still, it was nice to have some company for a bit, even if the entire exercise proved that the BB Boys are better off going it alone in the long-run. Seriously, what’s a man gotta do to get a lady to crack a smile every once and a while, eh? Honestly, it’s enough to make you despair for this extremely socially-distanced world where everyone’s hanging out in underground bunkers we live in....