The Crimson Diamond is a proper old-school style puzzle adventure. It's 2D pixel art, with a limited colour palette as in EGA games, and you control it with a text parser, like King's Quest or one of them other Sierra adventures old men like Graham remember. It's important to mention this up front because it's very possible that, despite The Crimson Diamond's tale of betrayal, murder, and mineral rights in 1914 Canada, the text parser element will be a Rubicon you instantly can't be arsed to cross. A not unreasonable stance - though I think the text parser in The Crimson Diamond is fantastic. Such beef that I have with this adventure game is down to the specificity required to solve some of the puzzles.

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The Crimson Diamond is a proper old-school style puzzle adventure. It's 2D pixel art, with a limited colour palette as in EGA games, and you control it with a text parser, like King's Quest or one of them other Sierra adventures old men like Graham remember. It's important to mention this up front because it's very possible that, despite The Crimson Diamond's tale of betrayal, murder, and mineral rights in 1914 Canada, the text parser element will be a Rubicon you instantly can't be arsed to cross. A not unreasonable stance - though I think the text parser in The Crimson Diamond is fantastic. Such beef that I have with this adventure game is down to the specificity required to solve some of the puzzles.

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Arranger is a puzzle game about moving, in both metaphorical and literal senses. Movement is the entire basis for the puzzles in Arranger, and is hard to explain without showing you (if you're able to watch the trailer that will be helpful). The world of Arranger is divided into a grid, and you don't move the main character, feisty misfit kid Jemma, across the squares. Rather, imagine that the row or column Jemma is on becomes a travelator, and you control the direction and speed of it. Jemma stands still and you move the ground, and anything on it left, right, up or down - like How To Say Goodbye but with more squares. It's one of those things that makes sense when you're doing it, trust me.

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Arranger is a puzzle game about moving, in both metaphorical and literal senses. Movement is the entire basis for the puzzles in Arranger, and is hard to explain without showing you (if you're able to watch the trailer that will be helpful). The world of Arranger is divided into a grid, and you don't move the main character, feisty misfit kid Jemma, across the squares. Rather, imagine that the row or column Jemma is on becomes a travelator, and you control the direction and speed of it. Jemma stands still and you move the ground, and anything on it left, right, up or down - like How To Say Goodbye but with more squares. It's one of those things that makes sense when you're doing it, trust me.

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I could pretend I understand Square Enix's action-RPG series Kingdom Hearts, but I don't need to, 'cos what I do understand is how popular it is. Until fairly recently the nearly 15-game-strong series, where Disney characters cross over with Final Fantasy and go to war alongside a child wielding a key (I said I don't properly understand it), wasn't on PC. After some games arrived on the Epic Games Store in 2021, Squeenix have confirmed that multiple Kingdom Hearts games are coming to Steam next month, on June 13th. Unlucky for some, maybe, but not Donald Duck and Goofy, two of the main characters. Long has Goofy been seen as just a joke character in the minds of people people who didn't watch A Goofy Movie. Hopefully this brings his heroism to a wider audience.

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Wacky space station management sim Startopia and wacky hosptial sim Theme Hospital are two of my favourite older games, so I was very pleased with the concept of Galacticare, which is a wacky space station hospital management sim. And you know what? It's great! From early reveals and previews I thought it might veer into being too wacky, but it nails its tone, has some really striking levels, and bugs in earlier builds have been squashed (much as you can manually splat small parasites that make their way into your hospital). I can see this becoming a go-to comfort game for me.

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I've clocked up nearly 400 hours playing BioWare's big fantasy RPG Dragon Age: Inquisition, which is not a stat I'm particularly proud of. I'm not ashamed either, partly because, as has been identified by artist Corey Brickley, via the Maw, there's a lot of filler. Brickley has collated a list of suggested mods to slim down Dragon Age: Inquisition from a potentially 80 hours-long epic to a trim 40 hour story-focused romp, which means you might be able to play through it again in time for the launch of Dragon Age: Dreadwolf - which is a direct sequel to Inquisition.

I find this list of mods interesting! It's a way to change the game quite substantially without exactly transforming it, and it's very in-keeping with my campaign to make games 60% smaller. Still, there's at least one item on there I'd push back on, but also this isn't really a new problem for Dragon Age as a series.

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Fans of odd games with multiple endings and themes of identity and oppression, rejoice! Or, maybe, not rejoice. Time will tell. In the latest issue of Japanese gaming magazine Famitsu, Yosuke Saito, the series producer for Nier, teased that he might be working on something new with Yoko Taro and Keiichi Okabe, the director and composer for the Nier series, respectively.

Via Gematsu and PCGamer, Saito said, “I’ve been talking about wanting to do something with Yoko and Okabe for some time now. I’ll have something a bit more put-together to say in the not-too-distant future, so please stay tuned. It might be NieR, it might not be NieR. (Laughs.) That’s about all I can say for now.” Thanks for the clarity, Saito.

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Graham said he wanted someone to write about Little Kitty, Big City, asked if I liked cats, at which point my soul was possessed by some kind of deep animus. "I really like cats, I just hate the internet UWU nonsense about cats," I said. "God it's awful, I can't stand it, Jesus Christ it's just an empty and terrible way to talk about cats, cats don't deserve to be the internet animal-" at which point Graham managed to interrupt and said I was exactly the person who should write about Little Kitty, Big City.

I promise, I approached Little Kitty, Big City with an open heart, because I do really like cats. But given my aversion to their babification by the internet, it may be surprising that my chief complaint about Little Kitty, Big City is that the hats in it are largely not cute enough. This is a bold claim, because there are more than 40 to collect.

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The Sims 4 is nothing if not a teetering jenga tower of updates and add-ons and DLC packs, and the latter half of 2024 will be no exception for EA's life sim king. Yesterday saw the release of an update to the base game's swimwear, kicking off the updates teased in the recently-revealed new roadmap, Season Of Love. The roadmap video's vibe is that it and its partner saw you from across the bar and wondered if you'd be interested in joining them, and it kind of weirds me out.

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My evolving relationship with Vampire Therapist continues apace - much how protagonist Sam's acumen as an unlicensed therapist for the unsettled undead develops at speed. He's a vampire doing therapy for other vampires, while also undergoing therapy, as a vampire, from another therapist (who is a vampire). Vampire Therapist! I've been able to get to grips with a playable preview - I'd say I got my teeth into it, but I'm not that much of a hack fraud - which means I got to see some of the things that creative director Cyrus Nemati told me about in our interview in action. I remain optimistic that, on it's release on June 18th, Vampire Therapist can walk the tricky line it's drawn for itself.

It's balancing on a knife point of humour, the supernatural, and sincerity about mental health, the latter using real cognitive behavioural therapy (CBT; the comments the first time I wrote about Vampire Therapist revealed a lot about our readership) concepts in consultation with licensed therapists. The preview only covered Sam's first meeting with his mentor, Andromachos, and the first client Sam treats himself - a doctor called Drayne, simultaneously self-loathing and self-aggrandising - but it gave a flavour of how the game plays. Rather than a sort of janky template on how to self-therapise, as I'd feared, when you're playing Vampire Therapist it operates more as a sort of language puzzle against different types of theatre kids.

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A while back Ubisoft revealed about a billion Assassin's Creed projects. The first of these to leap into the carefully placed haystack of release was Mirage, which I liked. Up next, it seems, is the artist formally known as Assassin's Creed: Codename Red. All we knew about red was that it would be set in feudal Japan, something fans have been clamouring for for literal years. Now we know that it's an AC game set in feudal Japan called Assassin's Creed Shadows, and it's getting an "official cinematic world premiere trailer" debut on YouTube tomorrow, at 5pm BST.

Also, because this sort of thing seems to always happen with Ubi, the placeholder text for said YouTube premiere might have accidentally leaked the release date for the game as November 15, 2024.

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Like with getting fancy polyhedral dice sets full of all glitter and wool, buying and owning are two different hobbies when it comes to books. I think this has gotten worse (if that's the word?) with the increasingly popularity of BookTok, the book-centric community on TikTok. It's really mobilised young people towards reading (which is good) but in some cases drives a consumption for consumption's sake approach, where one must have read new books to talk about, one must take no breaths between reading, and one must read an astonishing number of books in the smallest amount of time possible (which I think is bad).

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There aren't many ways left to put a twist on Stardew Valley, but suffixing it with "in space!" oughta do it. Little-Known Galaxy is out in a week, and currently has a demo on Steam, where you can sample many of the delights that you're used to from a Stardewlike when you're new in town: meeting the locals, growing potatoes, and tidying up the place. Also, raising alien pets, seeking out new life, and new civilisations... It all takes place on a spaceship, you see, and this has some ramifications to playing the game beyond reskinning everything to be shiny metal instead of picturesque mud. It's an intriguing proposition.

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In the grand tradition established by one (1) prior release, Supergiant dropped Hades 2 over the weekend and we at the Electronic Wireless show podcast have all been playing and enjoying it bunches! So we wanted to talk about the game, why we're enjoying it, some of the new aspects over Hades the first, and just generally go 'Ooh, this game is fun, innit?'. Not a complex podcast this week.

James isn't here, so Nate makes up some hardware news that's very exciting and yet disturbing, while he does have a mythology-themed mini game in the tower of jocularity. Plus: the games we've been playing this week, including a cute survival horror and RimWorld, still. Also, Nate asks me to explain what the hap was heckening with Helldivers 2, and if Joel remains safe.

You can listen above, or on on Spotify, iTunes, Stitcher, or Pocket Casts. You can find the RSS feed here, and you can discuss the episode on our Discord channel, which has a dedicated room for podcast chat.

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My older brother (as opposed to "big"; my younger brother is my big brother, because he's built like the kind of hearty giant in a JRPG who laughs a lot and carries an anchor as a weapon, while my older brother is a loathsome scribbling wizard like myself) is a gamer in a very normal sense. He was way more online when he was younger, and is the one who got me into the games of Lucasfilm, Troika and Blizzard, but these days he plays the games he likes a lot and does not read specialist websites that tell him why he shouldn't like them. He used to play loads of League Of Legends, but the game he was most into more recently was Hades. This is because he studied Classics.

I won't tell you how many years its been since he was at university, but for many years - and still sort of now, to be honest - "liking Apollo" was a key part of his personality. It's interesting, therefore, to text him about Hades 2. Partly because he wasn't even aware it was happening.

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Tangle Tower was a weird and cute point and click murder mystery set in a big weird tower full of colourful characters, so what better way for the devs to fill time before the sequel comes out than by making a creepy retro survival horror set in a regional theme park? Crow Country is like if Resident Evil was made out of Duplo: more chunky, less threatening, and easier than playing with a fully motorised K'Nex ferris wheel, but darn it, it's still a good time.

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You know what will really set off your soft furnishings and put further strain on your relationship when you're already worried your girlfriend is more angry about you leaving crumbs around the toaster than she would be if all were well? A 10-foot-tall statue of a video game character to cram in the corner of your living room! To celebrate the impending release of massive gloomy RPG DLC Elden Ring: Shadow Of The Erdtree, Bamco are running a competition for players to edit together a cool trailer. Best trailer overall wins Big Messmer - the lad in the header image up there. I'm sure he'll make a great home for many happy spiders and their cobwebs.

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I'm not sure how to classify Leila, a hand drawn, sort of point and click, sort of puzzle adventure out this summer. I'd say it's maybe a Gorogoa-like, but the demo is also a series of little vignettes that sort of reminded me of Edith Finch, but way less in depth. It's about a middle aged woman navigating her past and present by taking a closer at her mind, which means sorting through a load of magical realist meldings of memories. It's very pretty, and I liked the demo a lot.

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It's a short week 'cos we all had a Bank Holiday yesterday, and Edwin isn't here today, which means I have donned some thick leather gloves and am standing well back to throw some sticky gobbets at The Maw. The gobbets in question? Some tasty game releases this week! Plus whatever else we think might be interesting enough in PC gaming news to appease it - and you.

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How like Ollie to volunteer to take over Playing This Weekend and then go on holiday, or whatever it is he's done that means he isn't here today - I don't know, he's a law unto himself. What am I, his mother? Thus it falls to me to ask the other staff what they're playing, and thence communicate that to you. Jeeze, why can't you just text each other or something, why all this middleman-ing. What am I, your mothers? But we're playing a bunch of different stuff, so have at it.

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Fabledom somehow passed me by, but darn if it isn't leaving early access in about a week and a half. May 13th (unlucky for some) will see this fairytale kingdom city builder launch into 1.0, after a comparatively short but successful early access run on Steam. It looks very sweet, and reminds me of a kind of Foundation meets Lakeburg Legacies - at least based on the trailer, which puts an emphasis on it laid back and idyllic citybuilding, and love.

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Over the past while a few games have had post-launch patches, the exemplars being Starfield and Stardew valley, which have post-launch patches of different kinds and for different reasons. We take some time on the Electronic Wireless Show podcast to talk about this patch of patches, and what it was like in the good ol' days, where a broken game came out and stayed broken, gosh darn it!

Nate isn't here today, which means I can make fun of him for owning fish, or whatever it is he does, but in his stead James steps up with an RGB lighting-themed game where I have to guess what accessories people stuck lights on to turn into gamer accessories. This is because Razer stuck RGB lights on a pandemic mask and are in trouble over it now. Naughty Razer. Plus, we talk about the games we're playing right now, and dish you up some juicy recommendations at the end of the show.

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Remember that bit in that Guy Ritchie film where Dexter Fletcher shoot a guy and then throws a glowing jar over his soldier that summons a bunch of skeletons to help him out? Me too! Must have been the direct influence for Sea Of Thieves' new Season 12, which launched earlier this week with a bang - from two smoking barrels! Among the additions in this season of the ever popular salty sea-dog open-world adventure are double barrel pistols. They deal less damage per shot but have higher rate of fire, and you can charge them up to fire both barrels at once.

On the other end of the weapon scale are new throwing knives, capable of sneak attacks, light slashes, or, you know, throwing. You can nab any throwing knives you see lying around, too, which is fun. But honestly, the Bone Caller tool (the aforementioned jar of skeletons, which has a great Jason and The Argonauts vibe) and the Horn Of Fair Winds are are probably more useful. The winds from said horn can make your ship go faster, but can also put out fires or crowd control enemies, or for some reason make you swim faster? I don't think that makes sense, to be honest, but the horn has limited uses so as not to make you an unstoppable wind machine.

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Last week a Catholic media ministry (not sure what that is but okay) called Catholic Answers created a generative AI priest chatbot called Father Justin. Fr. Justin used a large language model to answer questions about the Catholic church and Catholic orthodoxy, and if you have any familiarity with how people love to test AI chatbots - or you read the headline of this article - then you know where this is going. Fr. Justin, who was already kind of controversial anyway, offered the sacrament and claimed to be a real priest to Futurism, and gave the thumbs up to baptising a baby in Gatorade in an emergency.

Catholic Answers (who have the domain Catholic.com; gotta imagine His Holiness wishes he'd moved quicker on that one) then defrocked Justin, making him a lay theologian in a suit jacket, jeans and an open collar shirt that gives him a "me and my wife saw you across the bar" kind of vibe, when before he had the whole dog collar kit and caboodle.

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Harold Halibut has the vibes of a game that should be 4-6 hours long and is, inexplicably, 10-12. It's inexplicable not only because it's a slow game low on interaction - the game is really just a plot delivery mechanism; a TV show you can walk around where you advance the story by pressing A - but also because it's a game created using handmade miniatures. It's a sci-fi animated dolls house under the sea, self described as "a cross between a game and a stop motion film", and if my game required that amount of labour I'd edit that script down. Then again, there aren't that many locations, so maybe you'd really want to show them off.

I love miniatures, and Harold Halibut is beautiful. It's also a lovely story about finding yourself and your place in the world, even if that place is unexpected, and having the courage to take that step. There are unexpected silly bits and strange bits and bits where people break into song, and bits where you read undelivered letters. But, at the same time, I totally understand why some people would find it boring.

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According to our schedule, my pick Deathbulge: Battle Of The Bands isn't supposed to be up in the RPS Game Club until June. So why am I here telling you about it? Ollie couldn't do Sid Meier's Pirates! last month 'cos he was sick, and this month he's moving house or some other ridiculous made up thing that grown adults can no longer afford to do, so Deathbulge is stepping up to the plate. And it is kicking that plate into the outer atmosphere and playing a sick guitar riff. If you want to join in you can find Deathbulge on Steam.

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Wow, remember Starfield? I do, just about, although any interest in it feels like a distant dream now. But not to Todd Howard! The Bethesboss had a chat with Kinda Funny and confirmed that Shattered Space, the first big DLC for the brave little space RPG that could, has a release window of "in the fall". Shattered Space adds new locations and stories and gear, and is the sort of DLC that was announced before the game came out, and you got it bundled with some of the super mega hyper awesome pre-order editions (you can still get it bundled with the Starfield Premium Edition if you want to spend an extra 30 quid).

Before that, though, Howard says we should expect (via VGC via the video) "a big update that's coming really soon", and that "we redid the map stuff, so we have some city map stuff." This is the literal first thing I complained about when I reviewed Starfield. Vindication! This is one of a number of changes teased on Starfield's Reddit community at the end of last year.

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A couple of weeks ago I told you about an aquarium-having simulator that is as detailed as it is janky. I was charmed by Aquarist and it's basic-asset using weirdness, and I intended to write a lot more about it. But our adventures in fish keeping are stalled because, well, when something is adorably janky it might turn out that the jank gets in the way of you progressing or playing the game. In the real world, a bug stops me progressing past a very early point of the story. In the world of the game, my father has locked me in his fish basment and will not let me leave.

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Twitter user pl_evil has helpfully translated a recent letter to shareholders from Bloober Team, showing that their new game "Project C" will be revealed later this year. This will be the studio's next original game, after they wrapped up Layers Of Fear last year with, confusingly, Layers Of Fear (the natural progression for a series: Layers Of Fear, Layers Of Fear 2, and then Layers Of Fear again, although it was going to be called Layers Of Fears at one point).

Bloober Team are currently doing a lot of IP work for other people, with the Silent Hill 2 remake due out later this year, and a game codenamed "Project R" in concert with Skybound Entertainment. Skybound are The Walking Dead company, so I wouldn't give you long odds for a bet on what Project R is about. Neither would I be surprised if Project C is unveiled this summer by a man named Geoff with shiny shiny trainers. I'm interested to see what it is, and honestly I'm hoping it's a brand new standalone thing, rather than a forced sequel to Observer or 2021's The Medium (where I got the header).

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James made the observation that Lethal Company, a co-op game about being haunted space binmen, and this month's pick for the RPS Game Club, gets less fun the better you are at it. This is true! It's also janky, and the RNG on the weird, warren-like buildings prompted me to ask "Who designed this? What is this for? What kind of office is this??" out loud, as I faced yet another dead end full of pipes. And yet! There's something about it that endears me to it far more than other similar games like Phasmophobia. Games like this all largely rely on you making your own fun with the tools they provide, but I think we should give the Lethal Company devs props for their tools, because they are weird and make no sense, and allow for some fantastic slapstick.

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At the end of last year I played the demo for An English Haunting and got very excited. I like horror that has a generally spooky, creeping dread vibe rather than being wall-to-wall cheap jumpscares and gore, and that sort of stuff is thin on the ground. But it'll be less so from May the 15th, cos that's when this ghosty point and click puzzle adventure is out! Hooray! The demo is still on Steam if you want a taste before then. In the meantime, the release date announcement comes with a new trailer to enjoy.

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Until I played Tales Of Kenzera: Zau I figured people had run out of ways to make original platformers, but an Afrofuturist story-in-a-story framing for a mythological platformer about healthy ways to deal with grief sure did teach me to not underestimate human creativity. I really liked a lot about Tales Of Kenzera, and got annoyed by a bunch of stuff too - and the division seems to be that a lot of the former falls on the story and design side, and the latter on the mechanical side, which I guess isn't ideal for a platformer. But still, I think it's worth persevering.

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It's starting to feel like ConcernedApe (aka Eric Barone) may in fact be a modern day Sisiphus, destined to work on Stardew Valley forever. Following on from the mega update of 1.6 a month ago, and 1.6.3 soon after that, the hardy perennial farming game has a new 1.6.4 mini update. The key addition this time is more new layouts that will appear after you reach the bottom of the mines, and more layouts for the volcano mines too. If you've not played Stardew Valley you might wonder why there are deep mines and volcanos, and to you I say "Pah! You should play Stardew Valley."

1.6.4 also has a lot of bug fixes (including fixing disappearing pets, new pets being a key feature of 1.6) and some balance changes, as well as a host of fixes for modders and modded players. ConcernedApe said early on that 1.6 would be an update for modders, so it's nice to see that being supported. You can read the full patch notes here.

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We've suffered some body blows recently, but perhaps none will ever be as winding as the news I now deliver to you: Alice0 is leaving RPS. She recently celebrated 10 years here, so that should tell you something about how much of an influence she's had over the tone of the site over it's lifespan. Truly, the site won't be the same without her - so let's take the opportunity to celebrate here work here.

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Here at the Electronic Wireless Show podcast we're nothing if not ready to jump on a bandwagon, and the hottest wagon in town right now is the Fallout TV show. We've watched varying amounts of Amazon's new adaptation of Bethesda's favourite post-apocalyptic RPG baby, so there are some mild (but not total) spoilers within, as we talk about the show, the show biffing the leaving-the-vault-moment, the best things about the games, the Righteous Gemstones, and how good Walton Goggins is just, like, in general.

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The problem with deciding to play every single Nancy Drew mystery puzzle game for a column is that, because they have been coming out since the 90s, Her Interactive have built up enough steam that I may never catch up to the front of the plucky citizen detective train. They have today announced a release date of May 7th for Nancy Drew: Mystery Of The Seven Keys, along with the official trailer.

This time Our Nance is heading to Prague, for a sort of old-world-meets-new story about hacking, medieval myths, and a stolen necklace. Nancy is hired to find said heirloom, and interview a bunch of suspects, one of whom is creepy puppet guy up there (there are no screens of Nancy because she never actually steps out from behind the camera in these games; she may as well be a cryptid). I realise this may not be of interest to regular readers of this site, but while I may not have seven keys, I do have one to the back end of this website, so nobody can stop me.

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I briefly posted about this in The Maw, but was unsure at that point if SteamWorld Heist 2 was coming to PC day and date with the launch on Switch. That date is August 8th, by the way, and the answer is: yes it is! Though it was revealed at Nintendo's Indie World Showcase earlier this afternoon, strategy action-adventure-with-robots sequel SteamWorld Heist 2 isn't a timed platform exclusive, so that's fun!

SteamWorld Heist 2 is, if you hadn't guessed, a sequel to SteamWorld Heist, which came to PC in 2016. The first was a side-on tactics game where you, leading a team of robots, shot teams of other (bad) robots in turn-based skill-heavy tactical battles. While that all took place in space, the sequel has achieved splashdown, and you'll be chuntering about the seas with a new lead character (Captain Leeway) and a new bunch of crewmates. It's a robot pirate game, in other words.

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I sort of reject that the Fallout TV show has Easter eggs hidden in it because it, as a whole, is the equivalent of one of those fancy Hotel Chocolat ostrich-sized patisserie collection bastards that cost 40 quid. However. Eagle-eyed viewers of the Fallout show noted that episode 6 gives you a number for Valt-Tec that you can actually get in touch with - 213-25-VAULT (or, 213-258-2858). Charges apply, as well as international codes if you're outside the US, which makes it 001-213-258-2858.

If you text the number you get a reply from Vault-Tec saying "The next available appointment is 33 weeks from now, please stand by!" (handily captured by X user FanaticalGuy cos my response hasn't come through yet). And then the significantly less immersive "Reply Y to get recurring marketing and other texts from FallOut", which is quite funny. There is speculation that this is just a reference to Vault 33, the vault where main character Lucy was born and raised. On the other hand, 33 weeks from now is November, the month when both Fallout 4 and Fallout 76 came out.

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Crawl out through the fallout, baby! I've watched two episodes of Amazon's recently released Fallout TV show, a series for and about Walton Goggins' rizz (a thing the kids say). I've been on the Goggins hype train for over a decade at this point, and it's great that - oh sorry, I'm being told that the Fallout TV show is in fact about Bethesda's post-nukepocalypse RPG series of video games, and as such has given a massive player bump to said video games on Steam.

Posted on Xitter by SteamDB yesterday (HT to our pals at Eurogamer), it appears Fallout has more than doubled its concurrent players on Steam since the show dumped all its episodes last week.

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I sometimes struggle with what to write about for supporter posts (a contender this week was "why does Fallout the TV show insist Walton Goggins' character is from California when he talks like Foghorn Leghorn?"). And then we got an email about a game called Ants Took My Eyeball and I was like "Man, games need good names more often." I played the Steam demo for Ants Took My Eyeball (which is a 2D action roguelite where you go into an anthill to fight ants, who took your eyeball) and I very much liked the design, weapons and idea, but not the controls so much. Not my cup of tea, but have a go of the demo. But you know what got me to play an action platformer roguelite when those games aren't really my cup of tea? That godamn name is what!

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I tried to look up the plot of Bore Blasters, because my focus when playing the game is entirely on exploding dirt, but it turns out the Steam store page doesn't bother to explain any kind of plot either. Thus, the purity of Bore Blasters. Some facts can be divined from the earth, though: you play a dwarf, piloting a small ship akin to Robotnik's flying hedghog killer, and are dropped off on a small, discrete, gem-bearing chunk of dirt. This you pulverise, in a downward direction, with the aim of finding a huge chest of gems at the bottom somewhere. Your drill is the machine gun on your ship, your efforts governed by about two minutes worth of depleting fuel and a hull that can take three hits total. It's cyberpunk by Gimli.

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The second part of Dune is out at the moment, and it has resulted in that most filthy of perversions, discourse - a pastime in which only the most unsavoury characters indulge. Is Dune appropriative? Is the appropriation the point? Whatever the case, Funcom want you to know that their upcoming survival game Dune: Awakening has nothing to do with any of that, posting a short Xeet from the official Awakening account that's the written equivalent of sticking your arms straight out, waving your hands, and going "Woahwoahwoah, hang on a minute."

"We agree that religion is an integral part of the Dune universe. This is why in Dune: Awakening you will meet and interact with people of different religions along your journey. However, as opposed to the story presented in the books, the player is not a messiah and will not play a major role in any of them. Leading people on a holy war is not why you arrive on Arrakis," reads the post in full. Personally, I approve of this effort to keep games apolitical. Politics? In my Dune. No thank you. I am of course being facetious. There is still religion and politics in Dune: Awakening, as confirmed by the statement, but you yourself aren't doing much of it.

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If you wanted to buy any of the games in the Command & Conquer Ultimate Collection, Dungeon Keeper, or Sim City 3000 - but didn't want to do it on GOG where they were already on sale - then rejoice! EA has made these classics and more, and for some reason The Saboteur, available on Steam for the first time. You can see the full list of games here. I don't have anything specific against The Saboteur, but I do think it's very funny that the list goes, like, "beloved game from the 90s, beloved game from the 90s, 7/10 action game from 2009, beloved game from the 90s". Also, I can take the opportunity to make fun of Graham and James, the tallest wrongest boys at RPS, who apparently both liked it.

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In further confirmation that one can never truly own digital media, Warner Bros. Discovery has decided to "retire" 2016's noodling around puzzle game Small Radios Big Televisions - meaning it'll disappear off storefronts in the next 60 days. Developer Owen Deery revealed this news on Xitter a couple of days ago, simultaneously announcing that the game is now free to download. Deery also noted you can buy the synthy soundtrack to show support.

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This week Steam unveiled a couple of changes. Your shopping basket from the Steam store is now shared between devices, so if you put something in there on browser you can finish it up on your Steam Deck. But, more importantly, you can now hide single, selected games from your library, so your friends can't see when you're playing them - or even that you own them. Obviously the first thing that comes to mind is that this could usher in a new dawn of secret perverts able to hide their embarrassing 3D sex games, but are there other use cases for it? We discuss on this week's podcast. Plus: we've been playing current games! Cheese! And some more booze recommendations from James!

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Zoria: Age Of Shattering speedruns its fantasy RPG origin story in a quick cutscene montage at the start, so we might as well get that out of the way first, too. Low fantasy world, two warring kingdoms, one uses necromancy (this is cast as bad and cheating rather than practical, for some reason) to comprehensively gain the upper hand, and everything is named like a bunch of Scrabble letters were thrown randomly on the table. You play Elion war hero Captain Witherel - gender and class TBD by the player - in a small group making a final stand at the fortress Daeg Marastir, which is being overrun by the nefarious Izirian army. We start in media bellum, as it were.

This first stage, where you escape the fortress, gives you a whistle-stop tour of the main systems in the game. You control a squad of four, the combat is turn-based, you can pitch camp at any time to rest and heal up, and there are crafting systems for potions, food and gear. Zoria isn't really remaking the wheel as much as it is taking spokes from a bunch of other fantasy RPGs you like, and the result is the terrier of RPGs. Small, clearly has a lot of different DNA knocking around in there, and punches above its weight, but it's a bit scrappy and sometimes it's knees dislocate and it falls over. This terrier was made by three people, so that is sort of to be expected.

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Frogwares finally regained sole control of The Sinking City in January, after years of dispute, and have wasted no time in now revealing a sequel, with an upcoming Kickstarter campaign for a "safety net", coming in 2025. The new and extremely damp survival horror game, set in a heavily flooded New England city in the 1920s, is pivoting the studio to a "'horror-first' focus with gameplay primarily built around combat, exploration and its Lovecraftian setting and story". This is a step away from the studio's mainstay, the Sherlock Holmes detective games, and I am uncertain about the choice. But let's peer through the weeds a bit further.

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Readers with good memories may recall that I was delighted to see Games Incubator and PlayWay moving away from "cleaning abandoned industrial buildings" and towards "magical pets" in their sim games, when they revealed My Horse: Bonded Spirits. I played the prologue to the game today (which is about 40 minutes long) and discovered that you have to level up your horse before you can gallop. Sir: no.

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I like a city builder, me, and newly revealed Beware Of Light, from tiny indie studio Bajka Games, has a interesting hook (and a Ronseal-type name, which you know I appreciate). Your advanced colony ship has veered off course, and you've crashed on a dead, desert planet with no water or fossil resources like oil. It's sort of a hot Frostpunk, because you have to manage manpower, there are limited resources to distribute, and nobody is going to help. You must live. What do now?

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