Maybe it was the past few months of RAMnarök hacking away at my optimism, but my first thoughts upon handling the fifty-buck Epomaker HE68 Lite fixated on how it might not just be cheap in the good way. Surrounded by a bezel of hollow, slightly...
A few months ago, I did something radical. For radical, picture me skateboarding ungainly while installing Linux - or, to be more precise CachyOS - on my PC.
Windows 11 had just been bugging me too much. On top of Microsoft's forced AI...
While Rockstar continue to delay GTA 6, there's at least one developer out there with the guts to release their open-world crime 'em up. In Samson you slip into the well-worn getaway driver shoes of the eponymous hero as he takes illicit jobs...
Aiming to do for Scrabble what Balatro did for poker, Beyond Words gives you the same framework of a rack of tiles and a board upon which to make words, and also a set of ridiculous power cards that see your scores explode with each passing turn. As...
It seems that every week we're reporting on news of another wave of layoffs at a big game studio. In March alone, we saw 1000 staff let go at Epic Games, 124 at Eidos Montreal, and over 100 at Ubisoft's Red Storm Entertainment. And those are...
Greetings, loyal Treehouse tenders and Horace huggers! Today is a bank holiday in the UK, which means we are probably asleep, but we've scraped together a little themed conversation piece article to comfort you in our absence. Specifically, it is...
Assuming I haven't gotten torn apart by wild boars, Sundays are for navigating the wooded valleys around Cadair Idris. I'm on a hiking holiday in Eryri till Tuesday 14th April, tramping up slopes and wading through lakes of heather without a...
Garth DeAngelis remembers being in the room when Firaxis chose to ditch XCOM: Enemy Unknown's procedurally generated maps. Despite being a feature of the original 1994 game, when Firaxis tried to build the tech for their reboot of the turn-based...
The human colony on Tau Ceti IV has been abandoned for half a century, as far as anyone can tell. The only exports leaving the planet are those nabbed by Runners in mechanical bodies, like fruit pickers at the end of the universe. But there are...
Surprise, Friday WAP attack! No, I've (hopefully) not mucked up the time the WAPs are posted, as I did last time this particular RPSponsibility was trusted to me. It's a long weekend here in the UK thanks to the bank holidays around Easter....
There is a tiny wild sun trapped inside my crystal tower. I hear its garbled voice and catch the yellow of its fire through the blinding white blocks of the summit. The tower itself is so bright on the outside you can barely identify objects placed on...
When James and I published our impressions of anime racer Screamer the other week, I mentioned I was keen to give its online races a go once it’d pulled out of the garage. Would the sights and sounds of sliding around its twisty tracks and slamming...
Sundays are for deciding to re-watch The Sopranos. Specifically that episode in which Tony gets a bad tummy and then talks to a fish. You wonder what you might fever dream of, if you too were to go and eat at an Indian restaurant, then have enough...
There is a significant danger that this article will have aged terribly. You see, I asked everyone what they were playing this weekend on Thursday, rather than the usual post-lunch scramble on a Friday. You see, I took Friday off to travel to Wales to...
I have two dreams as mayor of an island town in Nova Roma, the new early access city-building game from Lion Shield and Hooded Horse. One is to erect a fantastic water network for my people - a sturdy yet poetic lattice of aqueducts, following their...
House House were kind enough to keep a video of my hands-on session with Big Walk, filmed by one of the participating PRs. Generally, a full video of a preview event including player audio is a lifesaver for a journalist, struggling to keep notes...
Phwoar, look at that striking steeple on the horizon, I thought after arriving in Crimson Desert’s first town.
I was playing a man I was fairly sure I couldn’t give a toss about, embroiled in a conflict I also couldn’t give a toss about, but that...
Ed (RPS in peace) has, finally, posthumously, got his wish: another Screamer. This one’s gone all cyberpunk and/or anime-styled, with a heavy focus on story – it follows multiple, multinational merc-drivers entering a lightly murderous racing...
Sundays are for waking up in a Holiday Inn and finding that the breakfast buffet hash browns are glued to the bottom of the serving pan. Tarnation! I bellow like an enraged thunder god, like Vesuvius at full bloom, and stab the tray wildly with my...
I truly hope the sun has got his hat on this weekend as I'm cycling out to family in the countryside and I'd rather not arrive soaked through by rain. Granted, I will be arriving soaked through with sweat, but I am happy with this outcome. For...
The words "consensus" and "RPS treehouse" are normally alien to one another, as is apparent from all the blood splatter on every new RPS 100. Yet among those of us who’ve been playing open world everything-'em-up Crimson Desert, an...
It's easy to look at a walking simulator like Firewatch and only see what's been stripped out. After all, it's a genre that got its start when developers took the shooting out of first-person shooters. However, look a little closer and you...
Reviews of Crimson Desert, the new open world fantasy RPG from Black Desert Online studio Pearl Abyss, are surfacing across the internet as you read these words. Out on 19th March, it's the story of Kliff McDuff of the Greymanes, who is trying to...
By the time Campo Santo were reaching the end of Firewatch's development, Chris Remo was itching to start over. "I remember feeling, 'God, if we made this exact same game again now, we could take these ideas so much...
During a random dictionary delve last week I learned that "explore" once meant to cry out. It comes from an old Latin word formed from the prefix "ex-", describing outwardness, and "plorare", meaning to cry or weep. Compare...
In May 2014, the small team at Campo Santo were still in the early days of making Firewatch, a first-person narrative exploration game – you can call it a walking simulator, they do, and with no disparagement. The developers assembled at their San...
Extraction shooter is a fussy, intimidating name for what was once a fussy, intimidating genre. However, now, as you'll see below the pool of the best extraction shooters on pc is thankfully deeper, wider, and warmer.
The genre has a couple of...
Sundays are for lying in bed and thinking of ways to interfere with your downstairs neighbour's space as much as their loud music interferes with yours. Crucially the method cannot be one that can be immediately turned around and used back against...
Saturday. We meet again. I see you've brought your old friends Blustery Wind and Chill In The Air with you. I expected better of you, you know those two just bring you down. You've so much potential. What don't you hang out with T-Shirt...
I regret to announce that I have a theory. It involves handheld PCs, Project Helix – Microsoft’s next, PC game-running Xbox console – and least likely of all, an apparently sincere attempt at making Windows 11 less of a bulging, AI-infested colostomy...
Now that we’re about, ooh, six decades into the existence of PC mice, it’s become apparent that they don’t need a dedicated little screen to feed us stats about them, at all times. Nevertheless, I’m quite fond of the baby display that comes with the...
A man with a gun stands above the crowd at GDC, the barrel levelled at the words "Next Gen Raytracing Performance & Capabilities." Alas, he is not here to shoot the technojargon out of existence, nor to ballistically punish the...
Years ago I was lost in the Shaded Woods, a foggy forest full of moaning trees. I didn't have enough health to fight the invisible backstabbing murder ghosts, and every time I ran away from the spooky sound of their footsteps, I got lost in the...
A few weeks ago, I became so irked at a boss battle that I smashed my Xbox wireless controller upon my desk. A loud crunch resulted. My rage quickly melted into horror as I turned my head downwards and realised that lo and behold, my gaming table now...
When Emil Pagliarulo was growing up in South Boston, he lived in fear of Whitey Bulger: a local crime boss who had been shaped not only by street gangs but Alcatraz, and a stint in the CIA’s mind control program, MKUltra.
"He was basically the...
Sundays are for celebrating the 800th-est ever Sunday Papers. Happy big 8-0-0, Sunday Papers. Here are four fun facts about the number 800, followed by some quality writing from the past week.
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At the center of the labyrinth is a minotaur. He is bound with muscle. He is fearsome. He is… snoring. Asterion, bored with how long I am taking to place my traps, has gone to sleep. This is despite warriors armed with swords and bows lining up at the...
Marathon is set in a cyberpunk future in which the air is thick with data and information. You play a runner, a human that's given up their body to become a being of bits and bytes whose consciousness can be transferred into whatever artificial...
Oi, you! Yes, you, the sun. There's no hiding. I saw you creeping up over the hill at 6am and staying there for nearly a whole 12 hours yesterday. Stop looking sheepish, you're not in trouble. Why, in fact, I think I might spend this weekend...
Whiskerwood has made it undeniable: I have the opposite of a speedrunning problem. Give me a stretch of land, a supply of loyal builders, and a free hand to go nuts building some impressive metropolis, and I will, within mere dozens of hours, produce...
From Skyrim Together to the more recently released Witcher Online, modders bringing multiplayer to big single player games isn’t new. Folks spend hundreds of hours mucking about in Tamriel or on The Continent alone, so the idea of being able to do so...
It remains unfortunate that 'budget' wireless headsets can still set you back £60-£80 rather than, say, two shillings and a thruppence. But here we are, and so is the Logitech G325 Wireless, a cut-price pair of over-ears that still manages...
"As a kid, I’d sometimes go to work with my dad," Brady Bell tells me. "We’d drive onto the MGM lot, and I’d see coin-op games through the window of one office. 'That’s Mr Spielberg’s office,' my dad would say. I remember thinking,...
Over the past few years, I've been searching for the best audio option for my PC gaming setup. It’s been a battle. I have big, satellite-dish ears and the kind of Neurospicy that makes ear cushions and heavy headsets unbearable to wear. I've...
Here, put on this pair of reflective sunglasses. Now regard the 21st century so far. Doesn’t it look as if the ideas of Deus Ex have spread into the mainstream? Like fire propagating across a dry hillside, the prevalence of emergent action with...
Sundays are for wondering why the neighbour’s cat is mad at you. I thought we were getting along well – I’ve been letting her into the block regularly, and we have a little ritual where she runs partway up the stairs, and I do Mousey Fingers through...
Edwin got beat up the other day, so I suppose it’s up to me to ask what everyone’s playing this weekend. No extended joke here. He’s just absolutely battered. In pieces, really. God, that must have been humiliating for him.
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Among the first things you see in the Marathon reboot playtest is a close-up of a barcoded moth, gleefully chowing on some larval diodes. It’s not even the first cybernetic insect motif I’ve encountered in an FPS this week, but it speaks to me....
Resident Evil Requiem has, in terms of technical fidelity versus PC power demands, one of the best bang:buck ratios to come out of a triple-A'er in donkey's ages. It’s not terribly surprising, then, that Requiem can run well enough on the...
Been a while since I’ve done one of these. Been even longer since I didn’t have a complaint about wonky performance or some manner of debilitating stutter issue to open it with. Nope, Resident Evil Requiem is, on the technical side, a big and shiny...
Most of the time, life sucks. On rare occasions, however, the moons line up. Having spent a few hours this past weekend playing the Steam Next Fest demo of cosy campervan survivabuilder Outbound, I returned to my desk on Monday and stumbled across a...
Reigns: The Witcher narrative designer Oscar Harrington-Shaw thinks Geralt of Rivia has a promising future as a private eye. “Another source of inspiration which I quite like leaning on, which the games do and the books do, is hard-boiled crime...
As if we didn’t have enough to deal with between despotic regimes, habitat collapse, and dodgy new technologies, Konami are on a mission to turn everywhere into Silent Hill. The recent Silent Hill f took place in a fictional Japanese town from the...
Hello reader who is also a reader! It's time for another instalment of our winningly impromptu article series in which game developers discuss and marvel over books. Let us make the customary ritual sacrifice to Saint Nic Reuben, baron of words...
Sundays are for finally biting the bullet and spending some of your Christmas money on a boxset of 2000s British Touring Car Championship season reviews. You stick the first DVD in, a three hour trip back through the 2000 season of car touring around...
Saturday mornings are hopefully for not feeling hungover or beaten-up or assassinated. You see, it's Friday as I write these words, and I've just been invited out for drinks in the park with one Graham Smith, former RPS EIC and nowadays,...
So much of what the SteelSeries Arctis Nova 7X Wireless Gen 2 does, it does right. Its build quality is outstanding, having a thickness and solidity that most wireless headsets lack. Its stretchy headband, as on pretty much all SteelSeries headsets,...
My initial interest in the SteelSeries Arctis Nova 3X Wireless was sparked by it being, essentially, an over-ear version of the Arctis GameBuds, with a near-identical USB-C 2.4GHz receiver that lets it pull double duty with both a main PC and Steam...
The thing you need to understand about Fogpiercer is that this deckbuilding roguelike, in which you control a train battling Mad Max-style road bandits, knows the secret joy of artillery. It is one of the few games that recognises that while it's...
Valve currently have three Steam Deck models on offer: you've got the standard 256GB LCD variant (basically no longer in production), the 512GB Steam Deck OLED, and a beasty 1TB edition of the latter. All of them are lovely handheld PCs, but...
It’s always a pleasure to write about Frostpunk, but I’m glum that Frostpunk has boarded the Great Videogame Remaking Train. I don’t think the original Frostpunk is beyond improvement, but I do find it very complete. Chilly finitude, obsessive...
"Since the last round of EMTERR ‘stabilisation’, they’ve been trying to force us lifers out," the phantom line engineer tells Zero Parades protagonist Hershel Wilk. "We can’t be fired, not easily, but they can take away the work that made...
Ironically, considering the rampant dysentery moving through my campground in brown, sputtering waves, the problem I'm facing in Transport Fever 3 is a blockage. The trucks I've loaded with antibiotics are stuck in a traffic jam that stretches...
Far from ushering in a technological golden age, artificial intelligence is giving PC hardware its most trying time in years. As huge, hyper-rich tech companies go about building resource-intensive AI data centres in pursuit of future wealth, the...
Sundays are for lying in bed and listening to the persistent rain beating at the skylight. It's a comforting sound but one that's become all too familiar in this seemingly endless winter. This week has at least brought murmurs of sunlight in...
The second series of Amazon’s Fallout adaptation has now fully emerged from the vault, its eight episodes having been plinked out gradually, rather than whipped out in one fell swoop. Naturally, one of us has taken in the show how its distributors...
I thought I would make it all the way through winter without getting ill. We're practically touching March. Yet, despite being within spitting distance of the clocks changing and bright evenings returning, I have the lurgy. This weekend, I will...
Nvidia’s relationship with PC gaming doesn’t always feel like a loving one. Sometimes they’re gifting us a useful new version of DLSS, sometimes they’re helping drive RAM prices up to £300 a stick. Even so, it’s hard not to look at G-Sync Pulsar – a...
There’s an unpredictable “Necropolis” event in Darkhaven that will slowly turn the entire world undead. It generates a Lich sarcophagus that spills a sickly wave of gloom, rolling across the procedural map to clog player waypoints and fill the alcoves...
I’m planning to better balance the recent glut of high-end hardware reviews with some genuinely affordable stuff, but in the meantime, here’s something that’s a little of both. The Epomaker G84 HE is another Hall effect keyboard, meaning its...
WARNING: Major story spoliers for Yakuza Kiwami 3 & Dark Ties, as well as the original Yakuza 3, lie ahead.
It’s natural to spend a lot of time thinking about what games could have been, had different decisions been made. Whether the change is...
Like all white, middle-class Londoners, I subsist on a diet comprised mainly of salted caramel and katsu curry. It appears Grasshopper Manufacture, makers of maximalist action adventure Romeo is a Dead Man, appreciate that delightful marriage of rice,...
Romeo is a Dead Man, Grasshopper Manufacture’s eccentric new hack 'n' slash, is out today. I quite like it. I especially like its main menu screen, a strangely hypnotic fish tank in which captive planets float alongside a coral ballet trophy,...
Hello reader who is also a reader! It's finally time for another edition of our thrillingly erratic column on game developers and their bestest books. This week, we're having our ears bent by Marcia Shange, chief operating officer of South...
Sundays are for waking up and remembering you said you’d help your sister-in-law move house. A burning fear flares in your gut, not of the manual labour, but of how she said it was fine because she’d bought a flatbed trolley off a Chinese website for...
My Menace campaign hasn't been a rousing success. In my first mission, I failed a string of optional objectives and saw one of my squads gunned down by a group of heavily-armed, jetpack-wearing space pirates. I got revenge by running them over...
I'm likely going to be spending much of this morning preparing conversation topics for the two-year-old's birthday party I'm going to this afternoon. It's not the toddlers that are the issue - all the old standards go down a treat with...
Like the Turtle Beach Vulcan II TKL keyboard – except as astute readers will notice, this is a headset – the BlackShark V3 Pro is something I’ve welcomed into my everyday PC kit for months, yet apparently needed the invention of a new review format in...
Yapyap stands apart from other “friendslop” horror extraction games by giving you plenty of firepower to begin with. Airpower, anyway. You and up to four mates are the boggle-eyed, flap-jawed minions of an enormous, moon-masked wizard. You’ve been...
Videogames have given us many fascinating healing mechanics and ideas about healing, from the motley support playstyles of Overwatch to the musical cooldown management of Wild Growth, but one thing developers rarely capture is that healing is an...
I can only think of two reasons to get a 65% gaming keyboard instead of, at the very least, a tenkeyless: you either have a desk the size of a playing card, or you actually fell for the Alt+F4 trick once, and now harbour an everlasting bigotry towards...
There's an accidental element of roleplaying to the Early Access launch of Menace, the latest turn-based tactics game from Battle Brothers developers Overhype Studios. Like the newly-minted commander of the TCRN Impetus, thrust into leadership...
Sundays are for heading into your kitchen at 7am to find the neighbour’s cat squatting with her back to you on the windowsill. The neighbour’s cat spooks easily and every time you scare her away, you worry she’s never coming back. So let’s very...
In the past week, two keen cyclists I know have both ruled out getting on their bikes until March. Too cold, they say. Too wet, they say. I'm trying to put their warnings out of mind because I've seen a glimmer of sun and I am desperate to get...
The Turtle Beach Burst II Pro’s raison d'être is to bung a Valorant esportist’s Christmas list of premium features into an ultra-lightweight gaming mouse; a class of peripheral that’s more accustomed to jettisoning luxuries than hoarding them....
Hello you. Welcome to Quick Kits, a new series of PC hardware reviews for people who just want to know, with minimal preamble and probably zero bar charts, what a piece of gear is like to use. I’ll still be testing everything as if it were getting a...
If you spend much time reading Yakuza fans’ online discussions, you will see that all is not well ahead of the release of Yakuza Kiwami 3 & Dark Ties on February 11th. Fans are campaigning for publisher Sega and developer Ryu Ga Gotoku Studio to...
"We want to put Runescape back on the map," associate director of design Ryan Philpott says. But, reader, I need you to know the cost of this metaphorical cartography. Over the years, the Monty Python-infused medieval world of RuneScape has...
It feels anticlimactic to say so, and I don’t know why Geoff likes it so much, but Highguard seems decent. Adequate. S'alright. It’s a fine competitive FPS that’s capable of producing spirited, back-and-forth gun battles between spec ops wizards...
I like Hytale. I like how it plays smoother and weightier than Minecraft, while matching the explorative highs of creeping through an infested cave or stumbling upon some ancient, unplundered ruin. I like how it runs on the Steam Deck without trying...
Resident Evil Requiem director Akifumi Nakanishi has said the imminent sequel is "almost equally split" between its two protagonists, stealthy newcomer Grace and returning mass zombie murderer Leon S. Kennedy. After playing a few hours at...
Sundays are for waking up in a cold sweat at 6AM. It never ends. The monkey of life will never be off your back. You're trapped. You try to get up, and your legs don't work. You fall down, but don't feel anything. What hell is this, you...
When I gave extraction shooter Arc Raiders a glowing review in November, I wasn't certain it would keep me hooked.
Two months later and I'm 250 hours deep. Despite clear flaws – and developer Embark Studio's insistence on retaining...
Saturdays are for waking up, having a big stretch, and wondering where the hell you packed the electric toothbrush charger.
In that first three day grace period, I could tell myself 'Not to worry, there are only so many removal boxes. It will...
As we sink ever deeper into a squelching mire of memory shortages, price gouging, and abandonment in favour of AI fantasy farms, there is one word above all that game-playing PC owners should keep front and centre in our doomscroll-addled brains:...
Sundays are for walking around your home, looking for somewhere to install the home security camera you got for your birthday, and realising a) how few unused surfaces actually exist in this space and b) it was pretty stupid to ask for a home security...
Many of today's game designers have, like me, grown up with Japanese Y2K style - the style of the late 90s and early 2000s that gave us not only fear of the end of the world due to a calendar change, but also the WipEout series, futuristic...
Saturdays are for… drat, look at the time! I shouldn't be writing an article. I should be loading boxes into vans. Frantically disassembling furniture. And stopping the friends who are 'helping' me move house from pausing to sip cups of...