Hello reader who is also a reader! It's time for another instalment of our winningly impromptu article series in which game developers discuss and marvel over books. Let us make the customary ritual sacrifice to Saint Nic Reuben, baron of words and founder of this column. Excelsior! And now, I turn the lectern over to Mariia Grygorovych, executive producer at GSC Game World, developers of S.T.A.L.K.E.R.: Shadow of Chornobyl and S.T.A.L.K.E.R. 2: Heart of Chornobyl. Cheers, Mariia! Mind if we have a nose at your bookshelf?

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Saturday mornings are hopefully for not feeling hungover or beaten-up or assassinated. You see, it's Friday as I write these words, and I've just been invited out for drinks in the park with one Graham Smith, former RPS EIC and nowadays, co-founder of disgraceful champagne socialist operation Jank.cool, an indie joint the rabble-rousers among you are already calling "RPS when it was good". What's the matter, aren't we feeding you enough Deals posts?

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Midsummer Studios announced their existence in May 2024 with a promise to “revitalise the life sim genre”, but now, they’re closing down. Co-founder and former XCOM developer Jake Solomon confirmed the news on social media this week, saying goodbye with some brief pre-alpha footage of Burbank - a build-your-own-TV-series project with a lot of generative AI in it.

“We built a studio, we made a game, and I'm really proud of both,” Solomon writes. “Before we close the doors at Midsummer Studios I'd like to share a glimpse of Burbank, the game we poured our hearts into.”

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Nightsoil is a sombre little top-down narrative adventure about a gong farmer – that is, a collector of human waste – in 1854 London, at the height of the cholera epidemic. Gong farmers were, I understand, required to work after sunset, to avoid causing revulsion among the decent folk. In this case, you’re a gong farmer at the end his tenure, working his final shift alongside his trusty carthorse Ol’ Boy, while reminiscing about his bygone youth and the happier days that might have been.

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Ubisoft are laying off around 40 people at Ubisoft Toronto, the studio behind the forthcoming remake of the original Splinter Cell. That’s approximately eight percent of the studio headcount. It’s all in the service of Ubisoft’s drive to cut costs after restructuring their operations around a big dollop of Tencent funding, which has elsewhere seen Ubisoft propose to lay off up to 200 people in Paris, and chop fixed costs by €200 million over the next two years.

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Embark are continuing their meteorological experiments in extraction shooter Arc Raiders with a rousing injection of wind. There’s a hurricane coming to the game on February 24th, a new map condition that limits visibility, degrades shields, impedes movement, and makes you suck even more at shooting things. Still, this stormcloud has a few silver linings. With the gale at your back, you’ll naturally move a lot faster. Also, you may find it easier to avoid detection in the open if you disable your shield.

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It’s always a pleasure to write about Frostpunk, but I’m glum that Frostpunk has boarded the Great Videogame Remaking Train. I don’t think the original Frostpunk is beyond improvement, but I do find it very complete. Chilly finitude, obsessive symmetry are its narrative ethos and aesthetic. It’s a three-act story in a genre that tends to be exhaustingly open-ended. Its dramatic stakes are stark and inescapable – who and what will you sacrifice so that everybody else can survive? In place of the hopelessly indulgent, always-extendable gridiron of SimCity it gives you an Omelasian foxhole, with construction rigorously defined by distance from the coal burner at the heart. The Last City's inner configuration may vary, but it must describe a perfect circle, because it has to dissipate heat evenly against the apocalyptic winter. It can’t afford to sprawl.

But sprawl Frostpunk has - firstly in the form of DLC expansions, and then in the shape of Frostpunk 2: a looser, fragmented game of expansionism, bickering council members, tangled ideologies, and petrol politics. And now here’s Frostpunk: 1886, an Unreal Engine “remake plus plus”, as game director Maciej Sułecki puts it, in a sector saturated with boutique revivals, some of them landing a handful of years after the original game - a forcing of embryonic nostalgia, huffing on embers, that suggests an industry running out of fuel, giving itself over to cycles of regeneration.

Still, perhaps I’m being too gloomy. I’m definitely being melodramatic. As you’d expect, Sułecki has a more hopeful analysis.

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Former staff of Enotria: The Last Song developers Jyamma Games have revealed to RPS that they’re owed months of unpaid salary, following layoffs at the company last year. They've shared an inside look at a troubled independent studio dealing with payment delays, multiple changes of direction, and general confusion that stretches back to spring 2025.

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I’ve been shying away from The Killing Stone because it’s a deckbuilding card battler, and we do get a lot of emails about those. The game launches into Steam early access today, so it’s time to have a proper gander. Ho now! This is a deckbuilding card battler… set in a mansion somewhere in the Arctic during the 17th century… created by Question Games, developers of ‘unfinished game’ game The Magic Circle and weird suburbia sim The Blackout Club. Yes, the same Question who were founded by people who worked on Bioshock, Thief and Dishonored.

What’s more, The Killing Stone reminds me of Inscryption, in that it appears to be divided between a hellish table-top game and hellish goings-on in the world around that table-top game. To be specific, you’re playing that table-top game against a series of demons, with the souls of the cursed Svangård family hanging in the balance.

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Why is everything rolling sideways on my desk all of a sudden? What’s this mysterious force, dragging my chair towards the wall? Why are all the cars in the vicinity tumbling and rolling in the direction of *checks press release* ...North Carolina, USA? It can only be gravitational disturbance caused by the impending 1.0 release of a massive strategy project. This time it’s Heart of the Machine, a “4X-style”, “dimension-busting” sci-fi game developed by Arcen Games and published by Hooded Horse.

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Moon Beast have released a pre-alpha demo for their action-RPG Darkhaven. You know, the one from the former Blizzard North devs, which harkens back to Diablo 2 while stirring in a dynamic world and terrain destruction reminiscent of Minecraft. I did a big interview feature about it. Now, you can play a very early build and decide whether I've been quaffing the Kool Aid.

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Battlefield 6’s Season 2 thunders onto PC today, a three-month festival of Battlefoolery that begins with a new map, Contaminated, new modes for the Redsec battle royale component, a dinky yet deadly helicopter, and some new guns and gadgets. The EA shooter’s Steam playerbase has slumped following its chart-topping release last year, but don’t worry, ye Battlefaithful, because Season 2 has officially recaptured my interest by filling my lungs with psychoactive vapours.

In new limited-time mode VL-7 Strike, available in regular multiplayer and Redsec, you must wear a gas mask and replenish its filters to avoid falling victim to clouds of funky fumes. Idiot! Why would you want to avoid falling victim to clouds of funky fumes. It’s got to be more intriguing than flipping the objective yet again.

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Back when Star Trek: Voyager – Across the Unknown was announced, we knocked it for offering zappy muzak in place of the TV show’s official theme. Gamexcite and Daedalic have added the theme, now, and I sort of wish they hadn’t. “Help!” I screeched to my bedroom walls, as the rousingly sorrowful opening bars wafted from the speakers like nitrous oxide. “A videogame is making me feel something! It is making me feel like 31 years have passed, and I can still remember Neelix getting drunk on water. I still remember the Doctor’s first words. I still remember blowing up the Caretaker Array rather than using it to insta-warp home.”

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Creative Assembly have just detailed Total War: Warhammer 3’s first character pack, these being “smaller, focused content drops built around a single character with their own unique feature, supported by a handful of exciting new units”, priced (in this case) at £3.99, $4.99 or €4.99 apiece.

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The first thing I noticed about turn-based tactics game Dobbel Dungeon is that you can see fingerprints on the playdough character models. Even hard metallic objects such as swords are decked with faint, glimmering whorls. I’d have liked the game to let me leave my own prints on those playdough characters, care of the biometrics functionality I assume is secretly built into my work laptop. Perhaps they could have made this part of a proper degradation system, with high level characters looking all greasy and smooshed.

Alas, Dobbel Dungeon has no time for such Crysis-grade simulation elements. Going by the demo, it is simply a cheerful and well-made, tabletop-style game of leisurely flanking and special ability usage with a gentle twist. The twist is that every time a character takes a turn, they fling a bunch of dice. These dice are then slotted into ability boxes to perform them. Some abilities deal effects proportionate to the dice score – stick a dice roll of 5 into a fireball and you’ll inflict 5 points of damage. The three starting characters also have the ability to reroll one die per turn.

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“Get me somebody who’s played The Chinese Room's Vampire: The Masquerade – Bloodlines 2 STAT,” I yelled, barging through the double doors of our seedy news saloon. “I need 300 or more tasty words on these leaked videos of the older, unreleased Hardsuit Labs version.” A grim silence fell across the chamber. Mark furtively donned a pod-racing helmet. James hid himself behind his latest tower of graphics cards, with an apologetic murmur that while he had played a few hours of Bloodlines 2, he was very busy right now building towers of graphics cards.

“If you want something done, do it yourself, STAT,” I bellowed, swivelling on my heel while looking up the origins of the term “stat” on my phone. It turns out it’s something medical doctors say to convey urgency, and comes from the Latin “statim”, meaning “immediately”. “What a perfect way to introduce this video showing a hospital level from the aforesaid leaked Hardsuit Labs version of Bloodlines 2,” I roared to myself. “Why, I’ve accidentally written 177 words of the news post already.”

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Discord have belatedly confirmed that they're working with Persona, an identity detection firm backed by a fund directed by Palantir chairman Peter Thiel, as part of Discord's new global age verification system rollout. The collaboration is described as an "experiment" involving people in the UK specifically, whereby Persona will store user information on their servers for up to seven days.

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Happy this week, all! It’s time once again to load the Maw up with new PC games, that we may stave off the apocalypse till next Monday. This week covers a wide spectrum of flavours and textures: papery, Dodo-ish, ducklike, inky, formaldehyde-y, pasty, furry, feculent, and fishy. Once you’re done throwing up, get back here and run your protesting eyes over the full list. As ever, we welcome your urgent suggestions.

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There’s an unpredictable “Necropolis” event in Darkhaven that will slowly turn the entire world undead. It generates a Lich sarcophagus that spills a sickly wave of gloom, rolling across the procedural map to clog player waypoints and fill the alcoves with bony minions. Let the gloom thicken for long enough, and in theory, there will be nowhere safe for your character to spawn. A true apocalypse. You can transfer your character to a freshly generated world, but you might encounter something even harder to dispel: a volcanic eruption, rising floodwaters that breed Lovecraftian fish creatures, a sweeping ice age. Worse, you might encounter several apocalypses at once.

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At least 1,200 Ubisoft developers have gone on strike across Paris and Milan in response to the company’s recent massive cutbacks and change of policy towards remote-working. That’s the figure given for yesterday’s bout of strike action by Marc Rutschlé, Ubisoft Paris staffer and a representative of the union Solidaires Informatique, in a statement to the socialist agitators of GamesIndustry.biz.

The primary inspiration for this week’s strike is Ubisoft’s cancellation or closure of several games and studios, with total job losses still to be confirmed but likely to be in the hundreds. The strikers are also pissed off about delayed or inadequate pay rises, together with Ubisoft’s new ban on remote or hybrid working (employees will get a yearly allowance of homeworking days instead). In general, they incline to the belief that Ubisoft CEO Yves Guillemot is a big smelly bumface who should be looking for a new job.

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