Put your mortar and pestle down, my herb-smooshing friend. The peasant-quelling RPG antics of Kingdom Come: Deliverance 2 won't be releasing this year after all, say developers Warhorse in a video message to fans. "We aimed for the end of the year, and almost made it," said PR man Tobi Stolz-Zwilling. "Almost is not good enough though, so unfortunately we slipped to 2025." Never mind, it's easy to slip in the medieval era. There was mud everywhere.

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Put your mortar and pestle down, my herb-smooshing friend. The peasant-quelling RPG antics of Kingdom Come: Deliverance 2 won't be releasing this year after all, say developers Warhorse in a video message to fans. "We aimed for the end of the year, and almost made it," said PR man Tobi Stolz-Zwilling. "Almost is not good enough though, so unfortunately we slipped to 2025." Never mind, it's easy to slip in the medieval era. There was mud everywhere.

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Between Against The Storms’ critters, Manor Lords’s perfect oxen, and now Cataclismo, Hooded Horse’s roster of strategy games share a common thread that many guard-the-village-em-ups can fatally overlook: they present a civilisation that’s worth protecting. Even if the fallen culture you’ll defend against waves of gribblies offers fascinatingly few concrete details on its origins, there’s a lithe and impressionistic otherworldliness and use of colour in Cataclismo’s art that evokes unearthed layers of history. Also, everyone is just so gosh darn likeable, with their foppish hats plopped atop stretched bodies, and dialogue that remains resolute, chirpy, and eager, even when you’re click-marching these poor folk straight to their deaths.

Still, none of this will stop me will sacrificing every last man, woman, and child of these beleaguered warriors if it means preserving a single one of my immaculately crafted staircases.

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Between Against The Storms’ critters, Manor Lords’s perfect oxen, and now Cataclismo, Hooded Horse’s roster of strategy games share a common thread that many guard-the-village-em-ups can fatally overlook: they present a civilisation that’s worth protecting. Even if the fallen culture you’ll defend against waves of gribblies offers fascinatingly few concrete details on its origins, there’s a lithe and impressionistic otherworldliness and use of colour in Cataclismo’s art that evokes unearthed layers of history. Also, everyone is just so gosh darn likeable, with their foppish hats plopped atop stretched bodies, and dialogue that remains resolute, chirpy, and eager, even when you’re click-marching these poor folk straight to their deaths.

Still, none of this will stop me will sacrificing every last man, woman, and child of these beleaguered warriors if it means preserving a single one of my immaculately crafted staircases.

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Prince of Persia: Sands of Time's troubled remake has resurfaced during tonight's Ubisoft Forward showcase with the news it'll finally be arriving in 2026, some six years after it was initially revealed. More happily, Price of Persia: The Lost Crown and The Rogue Prince of Persia both have new updates launching today.

Ubisoft revealed it was remaking Sands of Time back in September 2020, when it was originally due to launch the following January. However, following a less than positive reception to its debut trailer, Ubisoft announced the first of several delays for the project, eventually moving it from original developers Ubisoft Pune and Mumbai to Ubisoft Montreal.

When we last heard from the remake at the end of 2023, Ubisoft announced it had "passed an important internal milestone", but things didn't sound especially far along given the publisher had revealed the rebooted project was still in the "conception" phase in May. A year on, it seems the Sands of Time remake still isn't a state that Ubisoft is confident to show; its re-appearance during tonight's showcase was anticlimactic to say the least, taking the form of a 30-second teaser trailer showing... a candle. We did, at least, get an updated release window, with Ubisoft confirming the remake is now targeting a 2026 launch.

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Stare into an abyss for long enough and, as Nietzsche wrote, a mostly naked man will wobble out of the abyss and try to murder you with a mattock. Inasmuch as can be told in the absence of dialogue or a text preamble, the naked man wants to murder you because you, and not he, are in possession of a hat. The hat makes you look like an eraser pencil from Forbidden Planet. It's the kind of headgear worn by the kind of criminal Batman's too grown-up to fight anymore. But it has, nonetheless, roused in this under-dressed stranger a sense of Dionysian frenzy. He will do anything for that hat - hewing your arms off, ripping your intestines out, tearing the skin from your ribcage. And you, in turn, will do anything to rob him of that mattock, because by the gods, it looks a lot more dangerous than the candlestick you're trying to fend him off with.

There are many such lost souls in the bleak, midnight world of the Half Sword demo - all lurking near candle-lit piles of randomly spawned hammers, stools, barrels, axes and lengths of wood, all subject to unforgivably authentic physics and cursor-based attacks that conspire to transform every scuffle into a Monty Python blooper reel.

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Sony's PlayStation State of Play May Showcase 2024 may have been announced at short notice, but packed within its 35-minute presentation we got a look at a whole host of brand-new PS5 games coming in 2024 and beyond. There were also two new PSVR2 games announced here, as well as the surprise return of one of PlayStation's most beloved mascots, Astro Bot.

Whether you missed the showcase or just want a handy round-up of all the trailers again, here's everything that was announced in Sony's State of Play May Showcase.

First up, we got a long-awaited look at Concord, Firewalk's upcoming PvP shooter, both in the form of a cinematic vignette and a proper gameplay trailer (embedded below). Big Guardians of the Galaxy energy, this one. Lots of big guns, lots of colourful moons and planets, and a very chatty cast. Could this be the perfect second course after Helldivers earlier this year? We'll find out when it launches on PS5 and PC on August 23rd 2024.

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I should be further in than this. My supposed rebellion has thus far eked out a territory that could be described as "where?". My personal reputation is great only among people who love mushrooms and hate deer. It's been long enough that I should probably be a fierce warlord running a large chunk of the kingdom in opposition by now, but instead, I have the skillset of fifty peasants, and the outstanding work of fifty three. And I know why. Bellwright has taught me what I already knew in theory, but had not truly appreciated:

Good managers are rare and precious. And I'm not one of them.

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Creative Assembly is reportedly working on three new Total War games, including an officially licensed Star Wars game.

The news comes from DualShockers, which has reported as of October 2023 Total War: Star Wars was one of three games in development at the studio.

The studio's most recent game was Total War: Pharaoh, but a Star Wars game would see it return to the more fantastical settings of Total War: Warhammer and (to an extent) Total War: Three Kingdoms.

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Indika, unhelpfully for a desperately devout Orthodox nun in early 19th Century Russia, is in communion with the Devil. Or maybe she just isn't as piously pure of thought as she'd like to believe. In the slippery, shifting world of Indika (I'm talking about developer Odd Meter's wonderfully confounding platform adventure now, not the character - brace yourself for some back-and-forth there), disorientating, uneasy ambiguity reigns over all.

Which isn't to say Indika the game is afraid to commit; this is an astonishingly confident experience, so full of swagger and style, so fearless in its presentation and thematic reach, it's hard not to be immediately taken in. Indika opens very much as it means to go on, beginning not with a dreary pan across the snow-battered Russian landscape, but with a dreamy, expectation confounding interactive free-fall through an inverted world, brazenly presented in the style of a 16-bit arcade game and accompanied by a muffled, insistent cacophony of song. Then, as the miserable reality of Indika's convent snaps back into focus with a crash of metal on parquet and the first of many striking directorial decisions - here, the cutscene camera remains firmly fixed on Indika's wretched face as the world around her tilts and swirls - Odd Meter deals its next hand.

Indika the character, as becomes immediately apparent when the game relinquishes control moments in and her idle animation takes over, is an extraordinary creation. Not only is she brought to life through a wonderfully nuanced vocal performance by Isabella Inchbald (the game's English translation is consistently strong and its voice cast superb), her complex, conflicting inner life is evident just from the way she moves. She's a twitching, restless ball of nervous energy; awkwardly shifting her weight from one foot to the other, eyes darting back and forth, occasionally chewing on her fingernails or wringing her hands.

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With Assassin's Creed Shadows having just been announced, now seems like a good time to catch up on prior entries to the long running Ubisoft open world series. The only problem, though, is that almost everyone has a different opinion on which Assassin's Creed game is best. Some laud Assassin's Creed 4: Black Flag for its pirate focus and naval combat while others recommend the grand adventure of Assassin's Creed Origins or the memorable characters of Assassin's Creed 3, Assassin's Creed 2, and their spin offs. Rather than try to narrow down which of these games to pick up, you can just grab a collection of all of them right now thanks to a Steam bundle that massively discounts the series.

The forthcoming The Rogue Prince of Persia has been delayed by developer Evil Empire to allow players more time with Hades 2.

The roguelite game was originally set for early access release next week on 14th May, but has now been delayed to later in the month, with a precise date coming on Monday.

Why? Hades 2 entered early access at the start of the week and Evil Empire doesn't want to compete.

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The forthcoming The Rogue Prince of Persia has been delayed by developer Evil Empire to allow players more time with Hades 2.

The roguelite game was originally set for early access release next week on 14th May, but has now been delayed to later in the month, with a precise date coming on Monday.

Why? Hades 2 entered early access at the start of the week and Evil Empire doesn't want to compete.

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As a lover of medieval history and swords, I was attracted to Manor Lords from the very first time I heard about it. Manor Lords is a city builder strategy game that has you fostering a thriving medieval village and ushering it into a new dawn filled with trade, farming, and - of course - at least one Manor. After picking it up for myself and getting fully into the medieval ambience thanks to some tavern ambience YouTube videos, I was surprised to find that on peaceful difficulty it could actually be considered a cosy game, just like Stardew Valley and similar farming simulators. Manor Lords also has surprising similarities to Cult of the Lamb, so if you're up for something less cult-like but still with lambs involved in one way or another, look no further.

Describing Manor Lords as a city builder is an oversimplification. It's much more than just putting buildings down and making the good numbers go up - over the seasons you can transform a bundle of tents to a thriving village in a thoroughly organic manner, from putting winding roads through the houses and workshops to planning out which of your fields are going to be fallow from year to year. At peaceful difficulty, Manor Lords really is a slow living cosy medieval game, with some valuable additions that make it novel amongst the typical city builder video game genre.

Don't believe me? Watch our video to see all the reasons Manor Lords should be your next go-to cosy game, or at the very least be in consideration - with a couple of caveats.

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The forthcoming The Rogue Prince of Persia has been delayed by developer Evil Empire to allow players more time with Hades 2.

The roguelite game was originally set for early access release next week on 14th May, but has now been delayed to later in the month, with a precise date coming on Monday.

Why? Hades 2 entered early access at the start of the week and Evil Empire doesn't want to compete.

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As a lover of medieval history and swords, I was attracted to Manor Lords from the very first time I heard about it. Manor Lords is a city builder strategy game that has you fostering a thriving medieval village and ushering it into a new dawn filled with trade, farming, and - of course - at least one Manor. After picking it up for myself and getting fully into the medieval ambience thanks to some tavern ambience YouTube videos, I was surprised to find that on peaceful difficulty it could actually be considered a cosy game, just like Stardew Valley and similar farming simulators. Manor Lords also has surprising similarities to Cult of the Lamb, so if you're up for something less cult-like but still with lambs involved in one way or another, look no further.

Describing Manor Lords as a city builder is an oversimplification. It's much more than just putting buildings down and making the good numbers go up - over the seasons you can transform a bundle of tents to a thriving village in a thoroughly organic manner, from putting winding roads through the houses and workshops to planning out which of your fields are going to be fallow from year to year. At peaceful difficulty, Manor Lords really is a slow living cosy medieval game, with some valuable additions that make it novel amongst the typical city builder video game genre.

Don't believe me? Watch our video to see all the reasons Manor Lords should be your next go-to cosy game, or at the very least be in consideration - with a couple of caveats.

Read more

The Rogue Prince of Persia, a game that is pleasingly candid in choosing its name for a roguelite Prince of Persia spin-off, has been delayed. It turns out that developers Evil Empire - they of very good roguelite platformer Dead Cells - saw the Hades 2 train steaming down the tracks, and decided to sensibly dodge-roll out of its way.

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Indika is a good game about a good nun, and I’ll talk about why in a sec, but first - a complaint. ‘Low’, ‘Medium’, or ‘Ultra’ graphics settings? Really, Indika? Where is 'High'? Where’s it gone, eh? This isn’t cute when Papa John's do it, and it’s not cute now. You’re lucky you’re an extremely interesting game, Indika. Let’s talk about that instead.

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Sega and Creative Assembly have announced a collection of new features and cultures coming to Total War: Pharaoh as part of an upcoming free update.

The game's campaign experience will be reworked to "improve existing gameplay foundations whilst providing players with a host of new content to better experience the turbulence of the Bronze-Age collapse", the Total War: Pharaoh team said today.

This reworking will include an expansion of the campaign's map, which will soon see the Mesopotamia and Aegea regions added to the conflict. And, as you would expect, these regions will be bringing their playable factions with them, as well. These are: Babylon, Assyria, Mycenae, and Troy.

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Hello and welcome back to What To Play! We've returned from a little hiatus, which you definitely noticed and have been very sad about, of course. It's finally edging towards spring here in the UK, but don't let that tempt you into going outside, there's video games to be a-playin'!

As ever, this is where we'll round up the best games from the month gone by, and the things we're most excited to play from the month ahead - plus, any other suggestions for what might complement it. Here's What To Play This May 2024.

Availability: Out now on PC, Switch, Xbox One and Xbox Series X/S.

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An iPhone version of Assassin's Creed Mirage will launch via the App Store on 6th June.

You'll need an iPhone 15 Pro or Pro Max or later to play the fully-fledged PC and console game on the go. An iPad version will also be available, for iPad Air or iPad Pro with M1 chip or later. (There's no word of an Android version.)

Mirage will become the first full Assassin's Creed game to launch on smartphones, following its initial release for PC, PlayStation and Xbox consoles last autumn.

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You might assume that Indika will be dour, given that it's a story-driven game about a nun in a grey, cold, alternative Russia. Then you watch its trailers and find surrealist imagery, genre-hopping, and a bleak sense of humour are part of its arsenal, and suddenly it seems, to me, irresistible.

It's out now.

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For someone who’s spent an embarrassing amount of my life staring at virtual maps, I am a downright directionless dunce when it comes to geography. Not ‘the country of Africa’ bad, but certainly not good enough that you’d want me on your pub quiz team. Also, I still do the Shredded Wheat rhyme internally when I have to follow directions. However, I do enjoy making maps turn a different colour in strategy games, Total War chiefly among them. Well, one such map is expanding before my confused idiot eyes, that being Total War: Pharaoh’s. It’s getting a new, distinctly Mesopotamia and Aegea-shaped bit. I believe that’s just south of Eastopotamia and Wegea.

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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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Last year's enjoyable back-to-basics Assassin's Creed entry is now available to play for free, thanks to a limited-time trial.

You can download Assassin's Creed Mirage now for no cost on PC, PlayStation and Xbox, and stab your way through the game's first two hours without paying a penny, from now until 30th April.

After that, you can cough up for the full thing and see your progress carry over.

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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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Last year's enjoyable back-to-basics Assassin's Creed entry is now available to play for free, thanks to a limited-time trial.

You can download Assassin's Creed Mirage now for no cost on PC, PlayStation and Xbox, and stab your way through the game's first two hours without paying a penny, from now until 30th April.

After that, you can cough up for the full thing and see your progress carry over.

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New expansion Besiege: The Splintered Sea is set to dramatically shake up one of the most iconic and beloved sandbox games on PC with the introduction of one of the most universal substances on Earth - water. The medieval-inspired building game and physics sandbox heads into the ocean in its imminent update, providing all manner of new ways to experiment. But if you, like I was, are worried about what might happen to its delicious explosions in the soggy new setting, developer Spiderling Studios is here to reassure you that they’re getting even better than before.

Cataclismo is the new game from Digital Sun, the team behind Moonlighter, so I was waiting for the twist from the moment I started. Moonlighter's a straight-up dungeon crawler, until you crawl out of the dungeon with all your loot and have to face a far more terrifying foe than any monster you encountered in the depths: supply and demand. Moonlighter was a dungeon crawler, then, and also a game about stocking a shop and making a profit. Risk your life to find stock, and then return to the surface and try to find the right price for it. The horror!

So what's the twist with Cataclismo? My recent demo began in a dark autumnal woods. I'm controlling an archer, clicking to move them through forest paths between spectral, bronzing trees and dark abysses that make the whole thing feel very claustrophobic. Is this an action RPG? No, up ahead I find another troop type, a lobber, who flings bombs or rocks or somesuch. Height and distance come into play as we fend off an attack by mysterious horrors, who all look like plucked but uncooked turkeys. Oh, this is an RTS!

And it is. But then we come to a clearing with a broken bridge and no way to get across. Here is the twist! It's an RTS in which you can build. It's an RTS in which you have to build, in fact. Pretty soon I'm fixing the bridge with wooden pieces, making sure that each piece I place is supported and safe. Further on I get a staircase that needs repairing with stone, so I'm dealing with cheap, flimsy wood, and heavy, more dependable stone. Next comes a proper castle, already built, and night is falling so I place my troops and fend off hordes of those turkey enemies. It's tower defence! Stop it already.

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Skull and Bones, the oft-delayed pirate game from Ubisoft that finally arrived earlier this month following almost a decade of development, has released its first season of post-launch content on Xbox, PlayStation, and PC - introducing, among other things, new world events, new contracts and bounties, plus a battle-pass-style progression track.

Raging Tides, as Skull and Bones' first live-service season is officially titled, predominantly focuses on new antagonist Philippe La Peste (AKA the Plague King) and his Fleet of Pestilence. By defeating La Peste's advance guard, the Plaguebringers, as they spawn throughout the world, players can raise the fleet's hostility level. Once past a certain threshold, they'll face a "mighty foe", which rewards a "rare item" when sunk.

That's the core of Raging Tides' new content, then, but Season 1 also adds two elite boss Kingpin Bounties - Jaws of Retribution: Introducing Zamaharibu and Anguish from the Abyss: Rode Maangodin - which run from 5-26th March and 26th March to 16th April respectively.

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I don't think I've fully recovered from my time with Skull And Bones, having suffered tremendously as a result of the review. There might be fun in some of its slower moments, but some of the generally positive, "It's actually quite a good game!" takes that I've seen honestly baffle me. The game is a series of long, annoying journeys, during which the most fun I had was turning my head to watch Catfish on my other monitor. MTV's show about people getting duped online was the perfect sailing companion, and perhaps, one of the only reasons I survived my brush with the live service seas.

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Ubisoft boss Yves Guillemot recently said Skull And Bones is a "quadruple-A game", which I think is very accurate, actually. "AAAA" is the sound that escapes my lips as I embark on yet another hour-long sail to retrieve some logs, or when I'm doing my little deliveries and a brigantine starts on me. After 11 years in development, Ubisoft's pirate game isn't necessarily a disaster, I just think its live service model has transformed piracy from a roguish lark on the waves into a tremendously dull series of shipping tasks.

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Pirates! Such an evocative word! But if it's swashbuckling tales of derring-do you're after, of sea monsters and high seas adventuring, of buried treasures on distant shores and smuggling escapades by the light of the moon, there are other, better ways to fulfil that classic pirate fantasy, because Skull and Bones' take is, regrettably, a bit of a bore.

It begins, though, as all good adventures often do, in the midst of battle, wood splintering and canons booming as your ship is pursued across the 17th century Indian Ocean by a British armada intent on delivering you to Davy Jones - a wonderfully cinematic opener slightly undone by the fact straying beyond an arbitrary boundary immediately presents you with a stroppy message to turn around. Fortune, though, is on your side, and you escape - after bobbing through shark-infested waters on a bit of flotsam - with the shirt on your back, a rickety old dhow, and a burning ambition to become the most renowned pirate in all the land.

In rather less romantic terms, it's a live-service progression track grind masquerading as a rags-to-riches story, but it's one that Skull and Bones, to its credit, tries really hard to sell. Over its near-decade of development and across countless iterations, Ubisoft's pirate adventure has doubtless taken many forms, but what I wasn't expecting to find - amid its live-service trappings and its flexible fusion of drop-in co-op and optional PvP - was quite such a lengthy, narrative-driven campaign. Granted, its story - a self-serious, by-the-numbers tale of factional warfare, populated by a cast of largely charmless characters that could have been wrenched from any number of blockbuster Ubisoft games - isn't a particularly engaging one, but it does at least give Skull and Bones' rather graceless tangle of underlying systems some narrative drive.

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There's no room for mistakes in Assassin's Creed Mirage's new Full Synchronisation Challenge mode, which arrives in the game via a fresh update due today.

The option essentially lets you try a permadeath run of the full game, which will end if main character Basim dies or commits any illegal actions (ie. killing civilians) that would normally see you kicked out of the Animus.

Full Synchronisation Mode will become available when you install today's patch 1.0.7 for Mirage, which launches at around 1pm UK time.

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Despite claims it is a "quadruple-A" live-service experience, Skull and Bones's user Metacritic score has taken a pummelling since the pirate ship game was released on Friday, 16th February.

Based on the 222 user scores recorded to date, Skull and Bones' user score is sitting at just 2.8 out of 10, making it the lowest-rated game of 2024 released thus far when ranked by user score alone.

Complaints are centred chiefly around its "underwhelming and lacklustre" gameplay, a "poorly designed" end game, and claims that it is "boring", with many players comparing it unfavourably to Sea of Thieves and even Assassin's Creed: Black Flag, the latter of which is now 11 years old.

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There's no room for mistakes in Assassin's Creed Mirage's new Full Synchronisation Challenge mode, which arrives in the game via a fresh update due today.

The option essentially lets you try a permadeath run of the full game, which will end if main character Basim dies or commits any illegal actions (ie. killing civilians) that would normally see you kicked out of the Animus.

Full Synchronisation Mode will become available when you install today's patch 1.0.7 for Mirage, which launches at around 1pm UK time.

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Despite claims it is a "quadruple-A" live-service experience, Skull and Bones's user Metacritic score has taken a pummelling since the pirate ship game was released on Friday, 16th February.

Based on the 222 user scores recorded to date, Skull and Bones' user score is sitting at just 2.8 out of 10, making it the lowest-rated game of 2024 released thus far when ranked by user score alone.

Complaints are centred chiefly around its "underwhelming and lacklustre" gameplay, a "poorly designed" end game, and claims that it is "boring", with many players comparing it unfavourably to Sea of Thieves and even Assassin's Creed: Black Flag, the latter of which is now 11 years old.

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The latest Assassin's Creed Mirage update is giving me flashbacks to that inglorious period in game design when every other action game had an insta-fail stealth segment to wind people up between cover-based shoot-outs and, I don't know, three-part glyph puzzles or what-have-you. Out today for PC at 12pm UTC, 1pm GMT, 7am ET and 4am PT, the 1.07 patch adds Full Synchronization Challenge, a permadeath mode (originally teased last year) that not only permakills you when you're slain by enemies, but also deletes your save file when you commit crimes such as slaughtering civilians, or going outside of "authorised map locations".

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Because it’s somehow my job to worry about the technical fidelity of electronic toys, I’ve been eyeing the long-overdue arrival of Skull and Bones with some nervousness. After nearly a decade of delays, you’d probably just want to get it out the door, right? Skip straight to the open-world pirate adventuring, none of that 'making it work on a range of graphics cards' nonsense.

But nope. For all its other shortcomings, Skull and Bones performs alright on PC, very often more smoothly than its system requirements suggest. Though I’d still recommend abiding by its SSD storage requirement – following the rules might not be very piratey, but installing on a hard drive will curse you to some pretty tedious load screen waits. Geoffrey Rush would hate it, honestly.

While Edwin sequesters himself in the starting area, let’s head below deck for a closer look at Skull and Bones’ PC particulars. That includes a full rundown of its graphics options – which include ray tracing and DLSS – and a quick guide to the best settings for an ideal prettiness-to-performance ratio.

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It's happening! Why I played Skull & Bones back when it wasn't even a live service game. But now it is, and it's out this weekend. We talk a bit about how long it has been coming out, why it's been in development this long, and why they didn't just release the sucker the two or three previous times they got close to doing so. Honestly, I hope it does okay. We also talk about the games we've been playing this week, and Nate challenges us with a game of Palworld Pal: real or fake? PLUS the giant game dildo and our recommendations this week.

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Last night I spent an hour in Ubisoft Singapore's Skull And Bones, the much-reconceived, nigh-mythical open world pirate game that has been in development since 2013. Taking a leaf from the book of feared intergalactic corsair Samus Aran, the prologue starts you off at the height of your bucanneering powers, with a mighty gold-and-scarlet galleon at your disposal that is shortly blown to bits by the English Navy.

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"Banishers took a while to kick in," I wrote in the RPS group chat last week, "but I fought a monster made of angry witch-hunting jam last night." It was a pivotal boss fight about half way through Don't Nod's ghost hunting action-adventure RPG Banishers: Ghosts Of New Eden, and typical of the over-the-top, slightly ridiculous, but entirely earnest drama of the game that joyfully pulls you along. Don't Nod - who I am starting to suspect make their magic teen angsthologies to fund their real passion for "grimdark grown-up fantasy that you sort of suspect should be a book series" - have followed up 2018's third-person action effort Vampyr with this new semi-epic.

Banishers has a lot in common with the interwar bloodsucker, including methodical investigations and stacking moral choices, but is a much more accomplished effort. Banishers combines a sweeping, tragic love story with some very decent swashbuckling, shooting possessed skeletons in the face, and being disappointed at Puritans. A perfect game, some may say. I'd elevator-pitch it to you as a sort of goth Uncharted where you find-and-replace "treasure" with "ghosts".

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