Rock Paper Shotgun

Truth be told, I'm still not sold on "bullet heaven" as a genre. Name notwithstanding, the genre is certainly here to stay, and there always seems to be funny new takes on it despite the fact that Vampire Survivors did kind of start it off without much room for improvement. While I'm not sure if Wanderburg is an improvement (I haven't played it yet), I do conceptually like its approach being to hand you a modular medieval castle tank that can suck up sheep and blast cannon fire at your enemies.

I find it to be quite rare that when a game says it has a graphic novel art style that it actually has one. There's often just something that reads as slightly off, like it's not quite cut from the same cloth. I'm happy to say that isn't the case with Stack Order, a deckbuilding roguelike with a story all about layering your cards just right to maximise their effects that looks like you could find it in a hip and trendy French comic book shop. Read more

Terrible news, folks, it's time for another episode of "Edwin secretly watches a lot of anime and has bad anime opinions". Although I don't know how anybody could reasonably disagree with my affection for The Apothecary Diaries. It's kind of a Sherlock Holmes story, if Sherlock Holmes were a young female alchemist in a world broadly inspired by Tang Dynasty-era China. Read more

Being a vampire is a pretty raw deal... or so the vamps inform us when they are not having freaky gothic sex, shapeshifting into wolves, enjoying the slimming effects of a uniquely low-carb diet, or enduring through marvellous future epochs we foolish cattle can only dream of. I find most stories about vampirism tend to do a poor job of convincing me that vampirism is to be avoided. "Immortality is no gift, but a curse," breathe the bloodsuckers, like parents telling kids that staying up late on

No Man's Sky is a decade old. Let that sink in. No, seriously, you'll need plenty of water to survive the trips that the massive space game's 10th anniversary update allows you to embark on. It's now possible to get up close and personal with the stars that serve as suns in each system. Or, if the risk of fiery death's not your cup of tea, you can establish a new home by taking over as director of a space station or building an orbital base that floats among the stars. Read more

Touhou Project is Schrödinger’s shoot-em-up series: simultaneously a decades-running, 20-game strong (not counting spinoffs) multimedia juggernaut spawning one of the most active fan communities of the post-Trekkie age, and also some weeb curiosity that no-one I’ve ever spoken to has ever heard of. Either way, it’s been around for yonks, and has just seen the launch of its first official remake, of foundational 2002 entry Touhou Koumakyou: The Embodiment of Scarlet Devil. Read more

Unionised Blizzard workers have voted to ratify a new contract with their employer that will "require" Blizzard to negotiate with workers over any usage of generative AI tools in their workplace, in addition to giving laid-off workers the right to be "recalled" into open positions across Blizzard for 14 months after the date of their layoff announcement. Read more

Look, I know it's way to early to be talking about sequels to The Blood of Dawnwalker, given Rebel Wolves' vampire RPG hasn't even been out a week as I write this. However, the game's devs are already putting pieces in place to get on with making such a game, so with help from strong spoiler tags, I'm doing it. THIS IS A VERY STRONG SPOILER WARNING FOR THE BLOOD OF DAWNWALKER, YOU HAVE BEEN WARNED. Read more

It's probably poor form to do another "what I said in a group chat" (this time, to culture critic Rowan Kaiser. Hermits can namedrop too, shut up) intro, but "Oh i already liked menace, that's why I hate it" feels too useful to spurn. I don't really hate Menace. You've been there, though: a game you enjoy, perhaps even begin to love, but it keeps aggravating you, forcing you to vent before you can play it more. This one is carried through that by a core of turn-based shooting, with some interest

It's hard to know where to start when talking about Stupid Never Dies. An action RPG built on style, excess and punk ideology. I mean, within the first minutes of my demo starting, I am flushing undead protagonist Davy down a toilet in an abandoned shopping mall to arrive in a hellish arena. There is a lot going on. Read more

In my experience, the few minutes a live band take between songs to recover a bit before plunging into the next riff are generally quite uneventful. At the most, you might get an amusing story about what they've been up to in your city prior to getting on stage, chatter about the song they're about to play, or some light comedy night-esque crowd work. Or, if you attended a recent gig American rockers Breaking Benjamin played in Holmdel, New Jersey, a four minute promo segment for a Fallout 4 mod

It's a lovely morning in the village, and you are a horrible house. Wait, let's start that again. As Gregor Samsa awoke one morning from uneasy dreams he found himself transformed into a horrible house. Wait, let's start that again: "You wake up as a House. Your limbs stretch through endless rooms filled with grotesque creatures. You can never see outside of yourself, never feel the world that lies beyond the fleshy walls of your body. You manage your insides as best you can, but you wonder: are

From Software and Bandai Namco have released a hasty new Elden Ring patch to stop people getting their hands on items from the game's Tarnished Pack DLC for free. Read more

What came first, the chicken or the egg? I know, it's a tough one. I'll put it another way. What came first, Todd Howard's lone desire to make a space RPG or what the devs working under him had initially anticipated they'd be working on once Fallout 4 shipped? Well, according to a fresh account given by long-time Bethesda developer and Skyrim co-lead designer Kurt Kuhlmann, those among the latter who'd mentally prepped to be making The Elder Scrolls 6 right away were rather whisked along on an i

Uh oh. Steam achievement lists for a smorgasbord of unreleased and unannounced PC games appear to have leaked via trophy tracking site Exophase. Atlus RPG Persona 6, RGG brawler Stranger Than Heaven, and Thief: The Dark Project Remastered have all seemingly had their trophies blabbed by the leak, with more imminent releases like Control Resonant, Silent Hill: Townfall, and Ace Combat 8: Wings of Theve also affected. Read more

Is Katamari Damacy an evil game? I realised as soon as I wrote the heading for this one that calling one game an evil version of Katamari might not be quite right, given the level of destruction you can enact in that series. Perhaps we're getting into an ontological argument there, so I'm going to move past it and properly introduce you to ROLLA, a game where you play as a mobile mass of flesh that seeks to wreak havoc upon the world by rolling around and destroying everything. Read more

"Low-poly dogs!" I hear you chant in the distance. "Low-poly dogs!" The war cry gets louder. "Low-poly dogs!" It's inescapable now, the low-poly dogs requested by the masses are here… Or, well, in the digital world of Old School RuneScape at the very least, as Jagex have added in a new members-only quest that allows you to pick up your very own puppy. Read more

It's another one of those layoff days, unfortunately. This time the studio in question is PowerWash Simulator developer FuturLab, who have laid off seven staff members with little fanfare after cancelling a project that has been in development for several years. Read more

Bit of an anticlimax, really. After months of (justified) revulsion and anti-anticipation over Nvidia DLSS 5’s AI rendering, it’s now available in a live game - license laden b-baller NBA 2K27 - and it looks... maybe not that bad? This not-that-badness does come at an enormous cost to performance, and I’m still sceptical of how DLSS 5 will handle something more stylised than 2K27’s devotedly realistic depictions of varnished court floors and face-scanned athletes. But given how artistically botc

The final hearing in the legal battle between a group of former Rockstar workers and the GTA 6 studio over the latter's decision to fire the former last year kicks off this week. It'll get underway on September 10th, and the Independent Workers’ union of Great Britain (IWGB) - who're representing the fired staff - are organising a rally to take place first thing on that opening day. Read more