PC GAME

When I think back to most movie rigs I’ve played recently, it’s not the last part of their genre title that I remember the most, but the first. The lush panoramas of your Planet Of Lanas, the haunting backdrops of your Somervilles, and the gooey, malleable monstrosities of your Insides. These dramatic moments linger in the memory far longer than their respective runs and jumps, and if it’s a real platforming challenge I’m looking for, I usually look elsewhere, trading cinema for action with your Raymans, Trines and Oris.

Full Void, on the other hand, is a cinematic run and jump that manages to strike a good balance between the two parts of its personality. Following the Another World schoolhouse where gorgeous pixel art meets one-foot-wrong-and-you’re-dead-style platforming (albeit with much more generous checkpoints than its 1991 source material), there’s real athleticism to your teenage hero’s journey to bring down a despotic AI, making its intricate leaps and bounds just as memorable as its detailed game pieces.

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Unboxing is, for the most part, a casual puzzle game. I had a good time pulling out all of the protagonist’s items one by one and placing them in the various locations around his rooms. From her childhood bedroom to her first home, I love how relaxing and rewarding it is to decorate every room. But after replaying it for this month’s RPS Game Club, there’s one section that gave me quite the opposite reaction.

A big part of Unpacking is discovering characters’ personalities through their items: what clothes they have in their closets, what items fill their shelves, what kitchen utensils move from move to move, and so on. These contextual clues act as a subtle yet incredibly effective storytelling device. There is one level, however, where it’s not all casual fun times and that’s when the protagonist moves in with her first partner, who I’ll now call “finance boyfriend” – and wow, he’s the absolute worst. Spoilers ahead for those who haven’t played Unpacking.

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I never thought I would hear the words ‘roguelite’ and ‘Minesweeper’ together in the same sentence but here we are. Lets go ! Revolution! is a cheerful mix of minesweeper and roguelite, tasking players with tracking down a deliciously loathsome king through a series of increasingly complex tile maps to pull off their titular coup. With all the tiles face down on arrival, you’ll need to jump from square to square to flip them over and reveal the king’s hideout before moving on to the next level. But with several of his royal agents stalking the roads and highways, you’ll need to choose your route carefully, making good use of your character’s unique skills to arrive at your final destination of Beebom City. That, and using a bit of the old minesweeper noggin, of course.

You see, tiles are of two types in Let’s! Revolution! The aforementioned road tiles and the surrounding landscape tiles. These all have numbers indicating how many road tiles surround it, giving you just enough information to get an idea of ​​where the road (and the king’s lackeys) might be hiding. Be careful though. This lot is a tricky bunch, and can overwhelm pretty quickly if revealed too early and all at once. That’s it ! Revolution! in a nutshell, at least, but the real joy of this racing-based rogue comes from its gorgeous presentation and brilliantly crafted character classes that twist and shape its basic building blocks into new shapes every time. It’s great fun and I never get tired of it.

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It looked like the next PC version of Ratchet & Clank: Rift Apart had already exhausted its supply of brilliant Windows-exclusive features to show off; we already knew this would happen with DLSS, DLSS 3, FSR 2, and ray-traced lighting and shadows. Turns out there’s plenty more, as port developers Nixxes Software used a Sony blog post to detail a few new tech toys, including Rift Apart’s Microsoft DirectStorage 1.2 support.

DirectStorage is both one of the most exciting recent developments in gaming hardware and one of the most underutilized: it essentially adapts your PC’s process to read data from an SSD or HDD in a way that can dramatically reduce game load times, but has so far only reached prime time in Forspoken. I guess the upside is that once Rift Apart is released on July 26, DirectStorage’s list of compatible games will increase by 100%?

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We often hear that it’s even a miracle game, but that’s a statement I understand much better after talking with the developers of As Dusk Falls, one of my favorite games of the last year. “The script is the equivalent of twelve movies,” Caroline Marchal, CEO and Creative Director of Interior/Night, tells me. “Twelve hundred pages of script. It’s big, it’s very big.” As the team developed this script through countless drafts, they frequented writers’ rooms for three years for As Dusk Falls, but with frequent plot changes, backyard trailer shoots, and the sheer difficulty of reaching the finish line, Marchal and studio head Charu Desodt reflect on how ambitious that was for the studio’s first game.

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The big Diablo 4 Season 1 patch arrived yesterday and the response was rough. Not sure if these were justified comments or just general internet outrage, I scoured the patch notes, soaked up the forum chat, and jumped into the game itself to get a feel for things as we head into Season 1. The result? Yes, the feedback is very negative, but for understandable reasons, I think.

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Last time, you decided that breech-loading grenade launchers were better than creating blueprints. Ruin on creation. Mayhem on the order. Destruction on the structure. This week, I ask you to choose between joyful intrusion and shrewd preparation. What’s better: going to the roof, or one in the bedroom?

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Remnant II has a lot of moments that will have you saying things that aren’t suitable for children’s ears. Then again, given the mild horror themes in many levels and the general terror that the excellent enemy design invokes, you probably shouldn’t play it around kids in the first place. As a fan of this sequel’s predecessor, Remnant: From The Ashes, my hopes were unreasonably high, and not only did Remnant II completely meet my expectations, but it kept messing with what I thought. should to be waiting. It left me in a constant state of awe. It’s a furiously ambitious follow-up and has everything I could have wished for.

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I thought Exoprimal succeeded in creating dinosaurs against mechs, which is to say the coolest concept ever, boring in my current review. I held out hope that it would improve, however, as many reviewers assured me that its fun side would finally surface. “Just play several more hours and things really open up! Variety in dinos, in modes, in just about everything!”. To some extent, they were right. There are some fun times to be had when queuing for Dino Survival and suddenly, remarkably, things have changed a bit.

But the game does not respect your time. It forces you to spend hours killing repetitive dinosaurs and then only gives you luck, chance to kill dinos in ways that aren’t excruciatingly identical. Even as someone having fun in senseless carnage, I’d much rather ditch my robot costume and let the dinosaurs run wild. Dinosaurs don’t deserve this.

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It’s a universally recognized truth that when aliens threaten to exterminate your home, only the world’s most insufferable and unhinged scientists can help save the day. XCOM knows it, and now Xenonauts 2 is following suit. For example, your man up there. Look at that smug mullet and his unimpressed raised eyebrow. It doesn’t give two boos that you’re here to save the world from extinction, leading (probably multiple) teams of nine brave (unwitting) souls into the unknown (ie: repeated death by alien overwatch). He has research to do. Organs to marinate. Splicing dead alien carcasses. Yeah, the same ones you literally strapped into your troops’ tactical belts on the last mission so you could take them home. We had stinky brain monsters wrapped around our chests, man! The least you can do is condescend to make us a good cup of tea on our return. Honestly. You can’t get staff these days…

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