I regret to inform you, I am once again in the grips of an idle clicker. Feed The Reactor was only released last night, but I've already become one of the 0.1% of players to prestige its tech tree. In my defense, there's something a lot more active and engaging at the core of this 'idle' clicker than I'm used to.

Though, it also helps that Feed The Reactor's theming has me picturing myself as a lab boffin, carefully crafting the mix of fuel and ignition sources that will fire up the heart of a fusion reactor...

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I'm a bit tantalised by FPS Quest, but I do worry that it has already defanged its most interesting ideas. Developed by Farlight Games Industry, it's a dungeon crawler in which your frame-rate "is your health", with mistakes and damage causing slowness and stuttering.

To regain health/frame-rate, you must do what you do when running any game on a potato PC - fiddle with the settings like you're bargaining with an especially recalcitrant devil. This extends from lowering the quality of wall textures and characters, to plucking out whole pieces of environment. The more you do this, of course, the stranger the world becomes and the harder it is to navigate. The killer line from the Steam page: "optimizing is risky". You'll also have to keep a lid on a simulation of your PC's temperature, and there are faux-prototype off-map areas to explore via noclip-style abilities.

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The Soulslike is dead. The age of the Souplike has begun. Indie developer Kite Line has just published Soup Rooms - a sequel of sorts to dong yarhalla's videogame concept album from 2007, in which you visit small square rooms with feverdream aesthetics and a peculiar entity in the middle.

What was I doing back in 2007? Alas, I was not playing Soup. There's a high probability that I cooked soup in 2007, but it wouldn't have been very interesting soup. It would not have featured any spirit wolves, whiny fallen clouds, consumptive Casio men, "boinglers", or Willem Dafoes.

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Of steel is my spirit, of thunder my bones. I am the hawk's justice, the quadrupedal crucible of oil and atrocity in which the future is forged. BEHOLD, ye strategy simulation enthusiasts. Behold my unabashed phallic symbolism menacing the gates of heaven, while my hissing hydraulics uncipher the coordinates of my prey.

Many are my supplicants, strangers from near and far who seek to beguile me and aim my blessed ordnance, but mine is the judgement, and mine the tactile gratifications of levers and gears and dials. You were getting bored of turrets in war games? Fools! You have never experienced one from the inside. Come, surrender yourself to the dieselpunk folds and surprisingly jaunty background music of my ironclad majesty. (Here's a trailer.)

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If you've been struggling lately with the thought that everybody you interact with online is a closet serial killer, why not fire up Killer Chat, which will remove all uncertainty from your brain and flood it with delicious, sexy fear. Hitherto available on Itch.io, and just released on Steam, it casts you as a reporter researching a book on serial killers.

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