So ends another month of the RPS Game Club, which means another chance to gather together and swap video game opinions like scary stories ‘round the campfire. The topic, comedy rock RPG/door-kicking sim Deathbulge: Battle of the Bands, was picked by a sadly absent Alice B, but you know what they say when beloved colleagues become ensnared in the kind of Kafkaesque employment limbo that only a corporate acquisition can engineer: the show must go on. We’re therefore sticking to the schedule, and will launch the liveblog at 4pm BST today, Friday May 31st.

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The first scene in RPS Game Club pick Deathbulge: Battle Of The Bands - a genuinely funny and innovative riff on turn-based RPGs - sees candyfloss n’ superglue-haired guitarist Faye frantically search for her missing guitar as the crowd for the titular battle grow impatient. You’ll quickly realise this a school-with-no-trousers-esque dream sequence, but the matted mess of thick black cables that carpet this dingy side-stage is painfully accurate. Pissing around with gear is roughly 70% of the band experience, in my limited experience of being in bands. This probably changes when you’ve got roadies or dedicated tech people, but we did not, because we were skint. And also terrible. Several hours of Deathbulge has brought me more joy than several years of being in actual bands. I had some isolated good times in some of those bands, but I’m having a very good time with Deathbulge.

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I may have winced a bit, initially, at Alice Bee’s choice of RPS Game Club game for this month. Deathbulge: Battle of the Bands looked funny and all, but it’s a turn-based RPG, a subgenre that usually elicits the same amount of enthusiasm from me as the phrase "by Ernest Cline" does from Alice. Deathbulge, however, is a clever little sod of a game, managing to devise not only a turn-based combat system that avoids the usual waiting-around tedium but one that’s outright good fun in itself.

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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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Lethal Company is a fun game but I know what you're thinking: it lacks feline energy. Whilst the simplistic game loop of collecting scrap on monster-infested moons and selling it to an equally monstrous company is enjoyable at first, it can get old pretty fast. As both Alice and James have attested with their experiences of this month's RPS Game Club pick, Lethal Company is a game that lacks a certain direction the more you play. I soon found myself settling into an existential crisis, reminiscent of my tumultuous stint in retail. A recurring thought back then was why bother stacking shelves, only to have someone buy the products and make me re-stack them again?

In the vain hopes of gaining a higher purpose in Lethal Company, I stumbled across the 'Needy Cats' mod. Essentially this mod adds a variety of cats to your game that will wander around the facilities and yelp for attention.

Perhaps I'm just a glutton for heartbreak, but I decided that the game needed a galactic sanctuary full of adorable balls of floof. I hearkened back to my time playing Stray, the adorable cat adventure set in a post-apocalypse where humanity was all but wiped out. Could this be the prequel to Lethal Company? What if all Apocalypse games share the same universe, all orchestrated by The Company secretly pulling the strings of fate? Or maybe I just wanted to look at cute cats instead of terrifying mannequin monsters. Either way, the cats needed help. What follows is a diary log of my adventures which soon lead to increasing madness and ultimately, disaster.

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It's finally time for this month's RPS Game Club live blog. This April, we've been tackling the comedy-horror Lethal Company. Whilst some of us have enjoyed the nonsensical hijinks Lethal Company can offer, others have been less enthused with the progression system and prefer the shiny newbie experience.

We've had some good chat on the matter. Although, I've mostly been preoccupied by the various hardworking monsters in the game. Now, it's your turn to hit us with your questions (or your shovels). Let's chat about all things Lethal Company, today (April 26th) at 4pm BST.

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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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Well before anointing Warhammer 40,000: Darktide as this month’s RPS Game Club game, I’ve wanted to talk about its rock. The rock. The best rock. Best Darktide rocks 2024, number one: the rock.

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Hope everyone enjoyed the RPS Game Club returning with Cobalt Core, though personally, I’ve always found deckbuilders a bit short on the screaming slaughter of unclean heretics. Put down the cards and pick up a boltgun, then, as this month’s Game Club pledges eternal service (until April) to Warhammer 40,000: Darktide.

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Today's the day of the RPS Game Club liveblog, where we'll all pile into a single article to talk, in real-time, about February's game pick, Cobalt Core. We'll be kicking off shortly at 4pm GMT today (Thursday February 29th), so go and grab a cuppa, switch on some appropriate music, and we'll get this liveblog started.

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Rocket Rat Games co-founder John Guerra remembers the exact day he started working on Cobalt Core's first prototype. He and his fellow co-founder Ben Driscoll had just spent a week playing Daniel Mullins' mysterious roguelike deckbuilder Inscryption at the end of October 2021, but the combination of a bad storm and a power outage ended up forcing Guerra to decamp from his home in Massachusetts and stay with some family until it all blew over. "I got back late on Halloween, just in time to put out a bowl of candy for some kids, and then the next morning we started Cobalt Core," he tells me.

The pair had been working on a range of different prototypes in the months leading up to this lightbulb moment. As development on their debut game, the spaceship building puzzler Sunshine Heavy Industries, began winding down, "we were throwing all kinds of stuff at the wall," he says, including games in 3D, a platformer, with Driscoll revealing they even had "a Terraria-like one for a couple of weeks" with a grid-based world that characters bounced around in. But it was playing Inscryption that brought everything to a head. Both had spent hundreds of hours with Slay The Spire, but "Inscryption proved to us that there was still a lot of space to explore in the genre," says Guerra. And with increasing calls from Sunshine Heavy Industries players begging them to let them fly the ships they were creating in its shipyard sandbox, "you can kind of see how that went from A to B".

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I seem to be on a highly irritating "refuse to play games as they were intended to be played" spree lately. A couple of weeks ago, it was "I refuse to leave the prologue area in Skull And Bones", a decision that has sadly been born out by Ed's review. Then it was "I refuse to play Helldivers 2 as a co-op shooter", which again, is a stance I am sticking with, even as I am overrun and sat on by Terminid Chargers. And now it's "I refuse to play Cobalt Core as a roguelike deck-builder, because it secretly isn't one". Come now, squint at the header image so that the text and numbers fade away, and all you can see are coloured shapes. Pay attention to certain underlying rhythms while playing. Need I say any more?

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Hello folks. With the end of February fast approaching, here's a reminder that we'll be diving into our reader liveblog discussion for February's RPS Game Club pick, Cobalt Core, this coming Thursday, February 29th, at 4pm GMT (which is 8am PT / 11am ET for our American friends). Looking forward to seeing you there!

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There's a little masochistic streak in me that croons with joy whenever I reach the moment of impending doom in turn-based strategy games. You know the moment I mean. The one where the world fills with enemies patiently bobbing and snarling while you try to conjure up an impossibly perfect set of moves that'll keep things going for one more turn? Cobalt Core is great at this. I've only played a couple of runs so far, but boy, you'd better believe I know when the end is drawing near. It's hard to miss, because the entire screen fills up with rows of damage numbers beaming down onto your hapless little spaceship.

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As promised last month, a new thing we're doing for RPS Game Club this year is asking you, our dear readers, what you think of each month's game pick in dedicated posts like this. Not just to foster some good old fashioned discussion among your good selves in the comments, but also as a way for those who aren't able to join us for the end-of-month liveblog session to still take part in what everyone has to say about it. We'll also try and stuff as many of your thoughts and observations into the liveblog discussion proper, too, to try and make it feel as communal as possible (and not just us waffling on about it for a full hour).

So, folks, tell us what you think about the excellent Cobalt Core below. What you like, dislike, your favourite moments (or your most hated moments)... Anything goes.

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Every year, there are a couple of game soundtracks I become properly obsessed with. In 2022, I more or less had the music of Tunic and Citizen Sleeper on repeat whenever I left the house. In 2021, it was Chicory. In 2020, it was Coffee Talk and Signs Of The Sojourner, and in 2019, it was all Mutazione, all the time. 2023 was a pretty great year for game music as well, as we not only got Alan Wake 2's exquisite musical set-piece that's honestly just been getting better and more insane as time's gone on, frankly, but also the toe-tappingly brilliant soundtrack of Cobalt Core, which has somehow risen even higher on my forever playlist after revisiting it for this month's RPS Game Club.

Composed by Aaron Cherof, Cobalt Core's music alternates between high-energy battle tracks and calmer, more relaxed ambience. It's so dang good, and an absolutely perfect backdrop for sliding in and out of oncoming missile fire in its roguelike spaceship fights. So come along and jam to some of its best tracks with me below as I pick out some of my musical highlights.

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I promise I'm not trying to turn RPS into a Soggins the Frog fansite, but... If you have a) been enjoying Cobalt Core as part of RPS Game Club this month, and b) especially like it when Soggins turns up with his ship of malfunctioning missile launchers, then I implore you to make Sunshine Heavy Industries your next port of call in your Steam library. It's what the Cobalt Core devs Rocket Rat Games made first, and you can immediately see a lot of shared DNA between the two games - not least its chunky, charming pixel visuals and some crossover between its cast of characters - including our pal Soggins.

It is, I should stress, a very different game to Cobalt Core - it's a sandboxy spaceship builder with zero combat involved, for starters - but I've been playing it again this week ahead of some other Game Club-themed articles I've got cooking, and I've been having a lovely time with it. Not least because I get to spend more time with Soggins the very smug frog, all while listening to even more excellent chill tunes from Cobalt Core composer Aaron Cherof.

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If you've been enjoying the excellent Cobalt Core as part of this month's RPS Game Club, you may well have stumbled into Soggins the frog along your travels. Running into this hapless buffoon is always a delight in Cobalt Core, as he's one of the few special characters who doesn't instantly attack you on sight. Rather, the task here is always to try and save him from his own idiocy - namely, his malfunctioning ship that keeps firing his missiles right back toward him. He's an ungrateful little sod if you do rescue him from certain doom, but I kinda love him for it anyway - and thanks to an industrious pair of modders, you can now have Soggins join your crew to inflict his own special brand of personal chaos on you.

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