Friday was my final day at RPS, after ten years, so how come I'm posting this on Saturday morning? Reader dear, I'll let you in on a little trade secret: I do not wake everyone up at 7am to ask them what they're playing. I actually make them tell me on Friday. I have felt tremendously guilty about deceiving you across the 353 previous WAWAPTW posts. The weight of that is honestly why I've left. It feels good to finally come clean. Whew! Alright, now tell me, what are you playing this weekend? Here's what we're clicking on!

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When I tick the box telling your unwanted launcher to remember my password, make it remember my chuffing password.

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What I like about browser games is that clicking on a word in this mundane piece of software could take you anywhere, to anything. For example, if you click on this link to the domain corru.observer, you'll find yourself in a dark room before a strange glowing device. Apparently it's your job to do... something with it? So begins one of the most surprising and delightful games I've played all year, a sprawling, shape-shifting sci-fi story which is still unfolding through updates. I didn't even know all this was possible with HTML and CSS.

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I don't remember much about my grandfathers anymore, only that they were once there and they loved me, and now they are gone. So if I were a small child with quarreling parents and I stumbled across a hidden abandoned lab housing a horrifying shapeshifting psychic lifeform, perhaps I would also try to want this maybe-a-demon to be my grandpa. That's the premise of Growing My Grandpa!, a delightful little indie horror game about feeding, teaching, and caring for "a grandpa-like entity". It came out in 2022 and I kept forgetting to post about it, but it's still great so I'm telling you now, okay.

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If you'll be hiding from the sweltering sun in July (I say, daring the fates to try to spite me by delivering a cracking summer), good news: you won't be the only shadow-dweller. The fascinating Schim finally has a release date, July 18th. It stars a little shadowy soul trying to reconnect with its human by hopping from shadow to shadow through city streets, farms, factories, and parks bustling with life and moving parts. See how it works in the new trailer below!

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Last time, you decided that gliding powers are better than Dragon's Dogma 2's Unmaking Arrow. Honestly I'm surprised it was that close (66% vs 33%—don't sweat the rounding), and I'm proud of your ability to weigh a whole concept against a single-game implementation. We are so good at this. Onwards! This week, I ask you to choose between placing things in two very different ways. What's better: a 'put back' action, or standing atop another player's head in an FPS?

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If you can't wait to start rummaging in The Witcher 3: Wild Hunt's guts with its powerful new modding tools, you can now shoot for early access by signing up for a playtest on Steam. The new REDkit suite is based on the actual tools that CD Projekt RED themselves sued to create one of the best RPGs, and will let folks make a much wider range of mods. We'll be able to make new quests, new characters, even whole new worlds.

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If you've been narked about favourite bits of Fallout not yet appearing in Amazon Prime's unexpectedly good live-action show, hold your horses. In an interview, the showrunners have talked about holding back certain "iconic elements" to do them in a hypothetical second season right rather than cram in all the greatest hits—and also so the show didn't "seem like it was written by people who just like spent 10 seconds reading the Wikipedia page for Fallout and didn't bother to like bring in some deeper cuts."

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Five years after LawBreakers shut down, we're getting to play the gravity-defying multiplayer FPS again thanks to fans. LawBreakers was the first game from Boss Key Productions, a studio co-founded by Gears Of Wars lead designer Cliff Bleszinski, and it had delightful ultraviolence beneath its uninspiring genric look. Alas, it did not sell well. Boss Key closed less than a year after launch, and the game soon followed. But after years of work, a group of fans this weekend successfully ran the first public test for a workaround to play the game again. While there's no clear launch plan yet, more playtesting will follow.

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Every weekend, indie devs show off current work on Twitter's #screenshotsaturday tag. And every Monday, I bring you a selection of these snaps and clips. This week, my eye has been caught by the slow (yet speedy!) reload of a flintlock, feathered dinosaurs, parrying bullets, snowboard stunting, an underslung chainsaw, and heaps more. Check out these attractive and interesting indie games!

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Please excuse my lack of pleasant chitchat today; my kitten has decided I no longer get to sleep. This week she's woken me up by sprinting down the full length of my body, licking my armpits, dropping toys on my face, and generally shouting. Baby, I love you, but night is when I do my sleeping. You wouldn't be happy if I came and licked your armpits at noon when you're snoozing in your hanging radiator bed, little cat. But go on, do tell, what are you playing this weekend? Here's what we're clicking on!

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Need anything from the shop? Mushroom milk? Fresh tarts? Mystical bejewelled skull? I'm just popping out to Dépanneur Nocturne, a lovely little game which came out in 2020 and I kept forgetting to post about. It's a small first-person explore-o-chatter set within a corner shop in a magical, mystical Montreal, full of things to admire, find, poke at, and chat about with the owner. And it'll only cost you about as much as a pint of semi-skimmed and loaf of Kingsmill from your own local shop.

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With the Fallout live-action show now out and honestly far better than I was expecting, are Bethesda also brewing an adaptation of their other big RPG series, The Elder Scrolls? Not at present, according to Bethesda executive producer Todd Howard, and he says he'd "probably say no" if approached. Mind you, that was the stance he had until Fallout finally fell into place.

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Just to check: you've already sent a Mother's Day card, if necessary, right? Because the final post pickup is noon and you know that won't even arrive until Monday. So. Just so you know. If you need to know. Anyway! What are you playing this weekend? Here's what we're clicking on!

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Ahead of launching Dragon's Dogma 2 later this month, Capcom have released its character creator for free as a separate standalone doodad. You can create your character and your main Pawn (NPC sidekick) and save them to use in the full game. Or, if you're like me and cannot resist playing for hours in a character creator, you can enjoy fiddling with its many sliders and marvelling at the breadth of options like 334 different colours for its four eye colour settings and the ability to remove individual teeth. I made my kitten as my pal, because I guess that's what I do now.

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The two-person studio behind 2021's tip-top top-down action-RPG Unsighted yesterday announced their next game, a 3D metroidvania named Abyss X Zero. It's not out for a while yet but its look already reminds me of two things: the pleasingly clean art style of Mega Man Legends and the edgy anime schoolgirl styles of Kill La Kill. See for yourself in the announcement trailer below.

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Last time, you decided that removing a card from your deck is better than enemies stopping respawning after you kill them loads. The result wasn't close but was closer than I expected, which shows why it's important to ask. We're doing important work here, you and I. This week, it's a question of mitts. What's better: left-handed FPS options or a little hand for a cursor?

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Following game concepts including Max Payne with vampires, Kojima's Strands with witches, organ trading, and an airport for aliens currently run by dogs, Xalavier Nelson Jr's Strange Scaffold studio are back with another doozy. They've announced a release date of April 16th for Life Eater, a game about a modern-day druid who must kidnap and sacrifice people every year to sate a dark god and keep the world from ending. I know what you're thinking: surely he's insane in the membrane, insane in the brain. But what if he isn't?

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After several months on the Steam beta build, Valve last night officially launched an update which revamps the shopping experience and lets you hide your shame. Two universal conveniences: your shopping basket is now shared across devices, so no losing track of things you meant to buy later; and buying gift copies is now less faffy. More conditional: you can now choose to make individual games private, meaning no one will ever see if you own them or are playing them. I won't ask why you might want to hide any particular games.

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Every weekend, indie devs show off current work on Twitter's #screenshotsaturday tag. And every Monday, I bring you a selection of these snaps and clips. This week, despite Twitter throwing a wobbly and doing its best to keep me from taking a good look at the tag, I still found plenty of interesting and attractive indie games to admire. Check 'em out!

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The fast-paced flag-capturing FPS series Tribes will return from the dead once again next week with the early access launch of Tribes 3: Rivals. Over the weekend, developers Prophecy Games announced March 12th is the date, with the full launch to follow after up to a year. Prophecy are spun off from Hi-Rez Studios, the folks who who made Tribes: Ascend, which officially shut down a few years back. I hear this next one's pretty fun.

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I hope you had a thrilling Leap Day, reader dear! I hope you, like me, went absolutely wild with loans and credit cards and bets and threats, knowing that it'll be at least four years before anyone can come remotely near you with consequences. I bought a life-size solid titanium statue of Bigfoot on Klarna, just because I could. What did you get up to? And what are you playing this weekend? Here's what we're clicking on!

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I'm not surprised that I'm playing so much Balatro, because the deck-building poker game is fantastic and it seems just about everyone is playing it. What surprises me is that I'm playing in a way I rarely play roguelikelike games: launching enthusiastically into Endless mode. Turns out, what I want from Endless modes is an end. A brutal and hilariously sudden end.

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Your most commonly visible bones are your teeth, so what better way to worship at the fleshy altar of Doom than by polishing those bones with an electric toothbrush whose little LCD screen is running Id Software's seminal satanic shooter? The latest delightfully weird device rising to the eternal question "Can it run Doom?" is a WiFi-enabled 'smart toothbrush', which is juuust powerful enough to run a version of Doom. You can even control it with your mouse. Here, check this out.

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As the video games industry violently contracts to ensure shareholder satisfaction at the cost of making thousands upon thousands of people unemployed, Skylanders studio Toys For Bob have announced they're splitting from Activision Blizzard and Microsoft to go independent. Good for them, but maybe too late for some. Earlier this month, the San Francisco Chronicle reported that it seemed Activision Blizzard were closing Toys For Bob's California headquarters and laying off 86 people. Still, the new independent Toys For Bob say they're working on something new and "exploring a possible partnership" with Microsoft.

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Almost two years after announcing a survival game based on the Terminator movies, Nacon today revealed the game is named Terminator: Survivors and will enter early access in October. It's set in 2009 after the end of the world, and will see us scavenging to get by as a fledging resistance begins to form. Expect cooperative multiplayer, solo play, base management, and a trailer which doesn't show much of anything.

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Last time, you decided that cosmetics unlocked by challenges are better than characters making 'bdbdbdbdbdi' noises while talking in text. This was a close one but your voices were, regrettably, heard clear. This week, I ask you to choose between two different ways to clear your path of obstacles. What's better: enemies stopping respawning after you kill them loads, or removing a card from your deck?

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If you were to buy every Stellaris expansion and content pack separately at full price, it would run you £227.62. To make that perhaps a little less daunting, Paradox have launched an optional monthly subscription service that gives you access to all the expansions. They've done this for several of their other grand strategy games before. It starts at £8.50 for one month then offers discounts for longer terms. While I can see niche uses for the option, I certainly wouldn't want to pay for this regularly. Would you?

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Having launched out of almost five years of early access last week and quickly become one of Steam's current most-played games, fantasy action-RPG Last Epoch has laid out initial plans for post-1.0. Expect bug fixes and quality-of-live improvements soon, then new challenging fights later. The developers, Eleventh Hour Games say they're "going to have a heavy emphasis on expanding end-game content". But first, yes, more fixes and improvements to the servers which suffered and stumbled.

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While players have scoured and stained every inch of the Lands Between in the two years since Elden Ring launched, they might not have uncovered every secret just yet. With a June release now confirmed for Shadow Of The Erdtree, the long-awaited expansion, director Hidetaka Miyazaki has now hinted that we Tarnished may have missed something. One small secret may yet remain, assuming he's not pulling another prank, or maybe not. Honestly, Miyazaki should say it has hundreds of undiscovered things. Keep everyone guessing. Communal Internet knowledge has ruined the mystique of video games.

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Every weekend, indie devs show off current work on Twitter's #screenshotsaturday tag. And every Monday, I bring you a selection of these snaps and clips. This week, my eye has been caught by hugging pocket monsters, schoolyard violence, a "weirdass, janky imsim... thing" with teleporting cigarettes, and more. Check out all these attractive and interesting indie games!

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The roguelikelike deck-building poker game Balatro is frankly the only game I care for right now. My head fizzes with ideas for fiendish combos and deeply illegal hands. I'm delighted by its deserved success, with the makers boasting that it sold enough to become profitable within one hour then sold 250,000 copies in 72 hours. In a recent interview, the developer claims that part of why it's so damn successful is because they've barely played other roguelikelike deckbuilders so it's free to do its own thing outside genre conventions. What's interesting to me in this is how Balatro has built on a game which did influence it, the slot machine-building game Luck Be A Landlord.

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Look, I know you've come here purely to read my trite wittering about weather and daylight, but I don't have time for it today. I need to go play Balatro. Every additional word I type is another half-second I could have used to play Balatro. Oh god that was 8 seconds of unBalatro, and for nothing. That's another 6! I must stop this. Go on, tell me, what are you playing this weekend? Here's what we're clicking on!

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When dramatic parents panicked over the satanic influence of Doom in the 90s, maybe they had a point. Doom has burned through people's souls and minds, filling them with a desire to play Id Software's seminal shooter on every device they can. The question "Can it run Doom?" has driven these demonic vassals to make it playable on everything from tractors to teletext. These hellbound hearts are even daring to corrupt the totemic device of American liberty: the lawnmower. Come April, you will be able to play Doom on the Husqvarna Nera line of robotic automowers. Is nothing sacred?

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What happens when you combine two great puzzle games? You get one puzzle game which makes me, an accredited professional fool, feel dizzy with noncomprehension. That game is Sokobond Express, which launched yesterday and combines the atom-shoving chemistry of Sokobond with the route-planning puzzling of Cosmic Express. So you have to draw paths around a grid to gather atoms to correctly build a desired molecule. That's all. Just molecular chemistry and pathing, at the same time. Oh, my poor foolish head.

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After launching Nightingale into early access on Tuesday, developers Inflexion Games (led by former BioWare CEO Aaryn Flynn) have quickly realised a big miscalculation: lots of players want an offline mode. The gaslamp fantasy survival game requires you be online even if you want to play by yourself, which dovetailed poorly with server issues at launch to frustrate folks. Inflexion say that early in development they needed to make a choice between focusing on co-op or offline first, and now think they made the wrong call. They plan to remedy this, but it's not yet clear when they'll actually add an offline mode.

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As expected, Microsoft yesterday confirmed that four of their games are headed to rival consoles: Pentiment to PlayStations 4 & 5 and Nintendo Switch; Hi-Fi Rush to PS5; Grounded to PS4, PS5, and Switch; and Sea Of Thieves to PS5. It's nice to see barriers between systems coming down and all, and it'll likely have consequences of note to serious businessheads, but what relevance does this have for us as a PC gaming website? Well! Grounded and Sea Of Thieves will support cross-platform multiplayer, so we'll be able to play them with our consolatory chums. That's nice.

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Last time, during our special Valentine's Day experiment, you decided that Doomguy's pet rabbit, Daisy is better than health pick-ups looking like cartoon hearts. This one was decided by a Brexit-narrow margin, which shows me two things: 1) every vote counts; 2) love truly grows stronger once someone is gone (RIP Daisy). This week, I need you to decide between cheery chat and couturial challenges. What's better: characters making 'bdbdbdbdbdi' noises while talking in text or cosmetics unlocked by challenges?

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Just when you thought it was safe to go back in the water, Microsoft are bringing Maneater back to Game Pass. Yesterday they unveiled the next batches of Game Pass additions and two are returnees, with the delightful fighty platformer Indivisible accompanying brutal shark 'em up Maneater. What's more important is that it's adding the game with the cutest little Nurglings, grimdark retro-styled FPS Warhammer 40,000: Boltgun. The rhetoric of 'purging xenos and heretics' surely doesn't apply to these darling babies. Read on for all the games coming to (and going from) Game Pass over the next few weeks.

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A colossal new update for Warhammer 40,000: Rogue Trader launched last night, hitting the grimdark space-aristocrat RPG with so many changes that the patch notes are almost 17,000 words long. Fitting for a game that our Rogue Trader review called "engrossing, obscure and absolutely exhausting". It adds loads of new voiced lines, fixes everything from wonky abilities to broken quests, reworks balance, improves performance, and so much more. Enough is changed that developers Owlcat are giving everyone in your party a free respec to adjust to what the game has become.

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New arcade shoot 'em up Nidus first caught my eye with its psychedelic bug blast on Screenshot Saturday Monday. Three months later, it has now launched, and for a mere £6 we can all fill our eyes with so many colourful insects. You'd have to pay at least £57 for that sort of fun down the pet shop.

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Every weekend, indie devs show off current work on Twitter's #screenshotsaturday tag. And every Monday, I bring you a selection of these snaps and clips. This week, my eye has been caught by handcrafted art, intense fighting game violence, cosy management, and heaps more attractive and interesting indie games. Check these out!

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I respect a game with wild ambition. Declaring your game "the spiritual successor to Freelancer" is bold and ambitious, considering how the spaceship sim is still so beloved after 20 years that our readers voted it your 16th favourite space game of all time. This ambition is wild when the tiny development team is led by someone best known for replacing Skyrim's dragons with Thomas The Tank Engine. So while I'm not much of a spaceship sort, I had to check out the demo for Underspace, which aims to combine Freelancer shoot-o-trading space action with a dash of Lovecraftian horror.

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The studio behind Homeworld 3, Homeworld: Deserts Of Kharak, and Hardspace: Shipbreaker have cut a number of jobs, explaining this is "part of a realignment plan that's necessary because of new projects that were shelved by some of our partners". Blackbird Interactive haven't confirmed the number of people who lost their jobs, nor have they said what the mystery projects were. It's been a grim year for people working in the video games industry, with thousands losing their jobs, and we're only halfway through February.

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Last time, we conducted citizen science with a rare suggestion from a reader, and you decided that being able to reroll your build is better than instant-death bottomless pits. May you live a long and happy live refining by degrees, rather than slamming into hard lessons. This week, in celebration of Valentine's Day, we turn to matters of the heart, of loves and organs. What's better: health pick-ups looking like cartoon hearts or Doomguy's pet rabbit, Daisy?

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A new update for The Sims 4 has added options to give characters vitiligo, the autoimmune disorder which causes patches of skin to lose pigmentation. Rather than a handful of preset full-body patterns, The Sims 4's vitiligo impressively comes as loads of patterns for separate bodyparts, so you can create a wide range of effects. And no, you don't need to buy an expansion for it.

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One of the best things in games is the freeform ability to type commands for another character, then having them respond with voiced dialogue recognising your weird directions. That's one of the joys of Cryptmaster, an upcoming typing-driven dungeon crawler where one of the first things you can do in the demo is get your disembodied necromancer pal to lick a mysterious metal object to help identify it (it's a helmet). He's like if Hand Of Fate's dastardly dealer was a bit of a dingus and also your only hope of escaping the underworld. I love this guy.

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Hey, you know that idea for an RPG you've been kicking around your head for years now? Maybe it's time to give it a crack. Right now on Steam you can grab a free copy of RPG Maker XP, an older version of the wildly popular (and quite accessible) game-making tool. It might be fun to kick around an idea or—who knows—maybe you've even got the next To The Moon (made in RPG Maker XP, don't you know?) rattling around up there, waiting to manifest.

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As a big fan of moody first-person games where you follow procedures to do a job, I'm quite interested in the recent announcement of Threshold. Made by a former Arkane level designer, it's about a train maintenance job at a border post atop the world's tallest mountain, where the air is so thin you need to huff top-ups from cans. Concrete information on Threshold is a bit thin at this point but I can tell you that you have a bucket and some planks, so what more do you need to know? Check out the announcement trailer, below.

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Every weekend, indie devs show off current work on Twitter's #screenshotsaturday tag. And every Monday, I bring you a selection of these snaps and clips. This week, my eye has been caught by high-speed platforming, a creative use of your own corpse, a contribution to the yellow paint discourse, and more. Check out these attractive and interesting indie games!

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