Supporters

Now where's my editor's pen, I know I left it here last time I wrote one of these. Ah, here it is, under all the dust and cobwebs…

A frustrating result of early access becoming entrenched as a concept: players condemning such a game for being unfinished, or awkward, or very wobbly. Some completely unrelated game by entirely different people was fine straight away, was it? Well we should definitely punish these people for not having those resources. That'll definitely encourage others.

Spacefleet Colon Heat Death is perhaps not the best candidate to start that argument over, mind. Its awkward and opaque parts make it more potential than game at this stage, and it's cursed to appear in the shadow of Nebulous, despite their very different designs and aims. It's not good, and it's not a janky but loveable underdog. But I want it to get there.

James and I began heading into the Ziff Davis offices this week. It's a strange place of coffee machines, personal lockers, tasteful scandi decor (except for the gurning Vault Boy statue giving a big thumbs up in the cafeteria), and, most importantly in a heat wave, air conditioning.

While pleasant overall, Ziff operates something I find anathema to my very soul: a clean desk policy.

We’ve reached the point in the year when we on RPS remember oh, yeah, we should probably start thinking about the RPS 100. Which means it’s time for me to start thinking about both Team Fortress 2 – the best game ever made, including over that one you like – and, by extension, the grey little corner of TF2 in which I spent about two years squatting in.

"Are we eating their babies?" asked my brain a few seconds before I would have fallen into the most blissful sleep ever achieved. Well yeah, probably. I'd explain that I'm being forced to, if I somehow could. Maybe work out a plan to smuggle them into the government/finance centre of the evil Australian feudostate, or tell them something we could... well anyway, the point is, life isn't like that most of the time. The system is not an episode of Star Trek, it's the thing that'll kill your family if you don't harvest enough crabs.

Which all sounds far more bleak than Crabmeat feels in practice. It is somewhere between an Actually Useful Job simulator and low-concentration suspense horror. It won't take more than an afternoon, and it won't wreck your nerves or demand a lot of skill or intensity. It's almost fun, in that "getting things done" way that physical work can be. The danger is manageable.

So far.

Talk of the new Steam Machine’s living room PC bona fides usually come down to its size or its noise, both of which could be described as "very little." In third place, I’d argue, must come its tidiness. Whereas my big-lad Windows PC has enough wires spilling out to strangle the Colossus of Rhodes, I rarely need to add to the power and display cables hidden behind Valve’s SteamOS cube; in particular, its integrated Steam Controller antenna means I get gamepad and (near enough) mouse input without so much as a USB receiver.

In a lounge environment, this is appreciated cable-cutting. But I’ve also discovered that it denies, or at the very least discourages, one of the Steam Controller’s most gratifying interactions: magnetically snapping on its cabled charging puck.

I don't particularly care that the rotors can upgrade to have a special power that hacks apart everyone standing nearby. I just want to stand under them for a while.

I thought I'd be comparing Megacopter Colon Blades of the Goddess to something like the Strike series, but it's much more of an arcade blaster deal. There are a few details I grumbled and whinged to myself about, and yet I was quickly way more caught up in it than I'd expected.

It was Ansel Adams, the pioneering landscape photographer, who once declared: "You don’t take a photograph, you make it." Evidence suggests he was talking about pictures of mountains and cool-looking sticks, rather than computer components and handheld game devices, but we in the PC media biz could still stand to learn from Adams’ timeless wisdom.

All of which is to say: my hardware photos are full of bullshit.

Helicopters are insane machines and should not exist. Yes, I'm sure they have unique and valuable uses, even outside the murder industries. I don't care. They are ludicrous devices and we should not tamper with their like again.

Hardware sims are a bit of a blind spot for me, as a player. I see the appeal of some, but machines generally get less interesting to play with the more automated they become. So I might not normally have paid much attention to Hijong Park’s Defender Patrol.

But Hijong Park is the maestro behind the best reinventions of ancient arcade games around. And rather than jump to modernity, they've applied their usual treatment to early 90s aerial combat sims. I had to know.

I don’t think I’ll ever truly love Mina the Hollower – the nostalgic charm of its retro-mandated clunkiness is lost on me, a man who’s only played Zeldas under duress, and never the GameBoy Colour ones. Liking it, though? Ah ha, now that’s something I can do. I like the character of its pixel-built castles. I like the skittishness of its chiptune melodies. I like how much of a character’s voice comes through in its brief snaps of dialogue. I like the sad beeping of defeated foes as my oversized hammer thwacks them so hard, their corporeal form ceases to exist.

I especially like the difficulty modifiers. Because they let me see more pixel forts and extract more agonal beeps, yes, but also: is filling one’s own game with Action Replay-degree cheats not the most brazenly self-assured stunt that a developer could pull? It’s brilliant. Just a lack of insecurity so absolute that the resulting void is incapable of reflecting light.

There were these games your grandparents used to play off CDs on the gramophone or whatever. A vein within a mountain range of games history utterly ignored by North American ideas of "retro", because it wasn't approved by the Nintendo Corporation. Little 2D shooter/flight games derived from Thrust, with the simplest concept: fly around a bit. Don't crash.

Evoids is that. More specifically, a 2D flight game focused on caverns and dodging/shooting hostile turrets, with a drop of Choplifter (or the way more frantic and less inertia-based Golden Hornet) as you shoot prisons and carefully land nearby to rescue little guys. It is maddeningly difficult precisely because its simplicity makes almost everything your own fault. And that makes me go back and try again.

I got a "You must install or update .Net" before running Beltlife Colon Prospector. How quaint. When was the last time I had to install one of those incomprehensible package things? Thankfully it was as easy as before, and didn't demand that I pay rent or inform on everyone I know.

I was already intrigued for a low-frills sim about making a living in space in a most undramatic way. Where Triangle Vee blazed a trail, Beltlife scanned that trail, and spent two days polishing its scanner. It is not glamorous. I don't even love it, and I have some complaints. And yet, I enjoy it anyway. Confusing.

Of course I thought I was tremendously clever for loudly wishing someone would make a game about breaking into imperial museums to restore all their stolen artifacts. But it never even occurred to me to imagine it like this.

Instead of the self-serious 3D stealth/heist game I pictured, Relooted is a bright and upbeat platformer and puzzle game, with a narrative framing that I want to call "adventure", but in the more film meaning than the game genre one. A better description from the lead dev themself is "making your own speedrun", but I held that back because it might put you off if you're not a speedrun person. And then you'd miss out.

There are many costs to carrying an all-access pass to the Treehouse. I have accidentally walked in on Edwin wielding a hosepipe and hard-bristled brush as he cleans down The Maw's nether regions. A scene of grease, hair, and teeth that I shall not be forgetting soon. I have seen The Maw vomiting Edwin up after one of the several occasions our news editor has been caught unawares and been swallowed by the tricksy beast. Another scene of grease, hair, and teeth chiselled into the mind's eye. I have seen The Maw… I'm realising now, I should probably just keep out of The Maw's quarters.*

However, one perk of the pass is that I can access the forbidden section of the RPS archives. The shelving units where we keep the cut content. Stuffed into boxes, folders, and scattered in loose leaves on the floor are the articles considered not fit for public consumption. Sometimes they're not even whole articles, they're single paragraphs and lines that a writer has decided could cause an uproar if let out into the wild.

But what's the fun of an all-access pass if you can't brag about it by showing off what you found?

I still haven't talked about it. Not really. Not aloud at all. It's not what you probably think.

When I was first in love, circumstance made it difficult for us both. One night, in Hyde or Regent's Park (I forget which), she almost broke with the pain of it, and I told her "If you have to end it, I understand". Except, I got as far as "under" and my throat closed. It wasn't a choice. I didn't falter. My body just seized the channel shut.

Trust works like that too, when it's been betrayed enough.

She danced in the wind like a holographic dream before the world died is not about the same thing that was done to me. But I recognise its voice.

"I did not take oil through Hormuz, but only because of the plague" is not a sentence that gets less topical as it goes on. Okay, sure, it was olive oil, and it was the year 1296, but work with me here.

Silk Roads II Colon Paths of Fortune is a little trading game about planning journeys. You're a trader (named after your father, so, variations of "Dad") from 13th century Venice, with no particular goal other than wealth and the travel that demands. Much of it is kind of hands-off months on the road, and I'm not entirely sure how I spent three hours on something not that complicated or demanding. None of its decisions are agonising, nor very frequent. It's a relaxing game, neither heavily narrative or obsessively numerical.

I like Pragmata so far. It’s a slower, more methodical breed of shooter, where the need to manually hack the armour firewalls of every enemy means even the lowliest henchbot forces you to interact with it in a more involved level than merely aiming and blasting. I also like the unpexpectedly lighthearted, not remotely Murder Daddish relationship between leading astronaut Hugh and cheerful android ward Diana. I also also like Diana’s coat.

I do not claim much, satorially – I’m currently wearing a wash-faded Uniqlo tee and some shorts my wife bought me, from somewhere. But I feel it is, almost objectively, a nice coat. It’s practical, strongly silhouetted, and the most primary-colour-ass shade of blue to ever exist in visible light. Capcom, of course, have form here. While the exact game it started with is up for debate, at some point, Capcom decided that cool jackets should appear in all their games. Or, at least, all their Resident Evils.

How, then, does Diana’s stack up? Let us remind ourselves of some of Capcom’s finest stitching work.

Now that STALKER 2 isn’t quite so crash-happy and bug-riddled, I find I’m really not wanting for much from it. I’m deep in my second playthrough at the moment (third, if you count the doomed Beastmaster run) and am still discovering new little corners of the Zone I’ve never explored, and with anomalously snapped arms, am bagging valuable new artifacts that I’ve never seen before.

Not that I won’t welcome the upcoming Cost of Hope expansion making STALKER 2 feel wider still, something it’s promising to do by kicking down the gates surrounding currently locked-off regions (including Chornobyl’s ground zero power plant itself). With the DLC’s story centred around a reignited faction war, however, I’m more interested in what Cost of Hope can do for depth than breadth – specifically, whether it can fill out the base game’s ropey reputation system.

Hello readers. Just a quick one to share that yesterday was my last day as RPS hardware editor, as I am now deputy editor instead. Thus, while I’m not technically to blame for all this, I may become to blame for all this whenever Julian goes on holiday, so we figured it probably bears a note of some kind.

If I was sending an advanced starship on a last-hope effort to find the planet that held the key to saving the Earth, I would send a decoy one out first, for when it's inevitably derailed to trillions of space furlongs away instead.

Dead in Antares feels very familiar, yet not enough to be a problem, or to provide a reference that feels accurate enough. Oddly, it first recalled 60 Parsecs, but rather than a punitive roguelike, this is a somewhat story-led game about gathering resources and managing the needs and stats of your space castaways. With turn-based combat, too. I'm struggling to get across exactly how I feel about it.

"I am going to figure this bastard out. It is going to read the thing over here, then check it against that, and then it will either behave, or light up a sign saying 'MOTHER WHY' and shut down. It is a trivial process, but code begets code. I will be at this all night. I no longer care how unnecessary it is."

(One night passes)

"I have no idea what I'm doing."

So yeah, Desynced probably isn't for me. But it is unorthodox, and god help me, I had questions. It's a factory/automation game whose main twist is the modularity of its buildings and robots. It also has a programming system, which it tells you upfront is optional. It would be unwise to spend several hours obsessively overthinking a function that I'm pretty sure is already hardcoded into my robots' firmware. And still getting it wrong. Do I know anyone who would do that?

If I start trying to explain how I know, it'll probably immediately fall into confirmation bias. For every deceptively great little treat, there are a dozen tiny games I take a punt on just in case they're not as crap as they look. Most of them are, of course.

I'm glad it's the good ones I remember. Not forever, probably not even for long. But every so often, some visibly "this could be rubbish nonsense" game like Wizards & Summons brightens my day, and I get to share it with you lot, and hopefully whoever made it gets to eat this week. It is, I hate the entire world, a deckbuilder. But! It's a sort of hybrid of that, and whatever Chaos was. And perhaps technically an autobattler? When did game words all get so unhelpful.

Resident Evil’s history of handcannons is so storied – and so reliably extended with each new game – that the wiki page charting it takes eleven fully-stretched mousewheel scrolls to skim through. Yet currently, it’s also incomplete, missing what might be the best big iron of them all: Resident Evil Requiem’s namesake revolver Requiem.

It's time for Axis Football 2026, and a correction to the fundamental order of the universe. You see, Axis Games historically released an Americaball sim/arcade hybrid every year. My tradition was to report back every two years.

You may remember that I apologised in 2023, after confusing a name change for a shift to bi-annual releases instead. Well, now they *are* doing that. So I'm retracting that apology, on the grounds that it was clearly not me who was mistaken, but reality itself.

I am a very popular coach.

Some spurn match-3 games as "casual", but those rubes are missing out on a colourful dopamine hit that Crusader Kings 3 can't touch. I'll happily sink hours into Bejewelled, my eyes fixed on the screen filled with glittering gems. Sliding the stones around the grid, looking for moments to line up identical jewels and watch as they pop in explosions of colour. Every time hoping the blast will begin a cascade of other gems falling into place and bursting themselves. It's magical.

Though, recently, that love and my constant need for a fresh fix has taken me to hornier places than I intended.

"Stop colliding with the ground, you oafs" is the kind of management pep talk that explains, in part, why I am not the overseer of a World War 2 airfield.

Ground of Aces is an interesting idea, not just for that premise, but for using it to pull a colony builder design closer to a more traditional management game one. Instead of profitability, your goal is meeting the increasing demands of a (mostly) distant war, and you must plant crops and Gather Resources. But serving that specific purpose feels very distinct from the usual dwarf fauxtress, and the random bullshit of Rimworld feels much less artificial and obnoxious in a wartime context.

There's a bit early on in Xenopurge where you're prompted to check your email, and instead of another menu, doing so has you physically step back from the bank of screens you've been periodically swapping between. Those are, it turns out, suspended high above a workstation that's covered in knobs and lights and - bless us - flicky buttons. Remember buttons? God I miss buttons. The ancients and their unreproducible, superior technology.

This little 3D section contextualises the alien-dodging you've been putting your hapless drones through, sets up the world a bit, starts a plot hook. It's not a problem. But it means that, sandwiched between the arrow-key-and-enter-based, remote mission control bit that's basically the whole game, there's this thing covered in clicky turny chunky bits. I couldn't help but think that I wanted to be playing with that instead.

It is, I thought some way through the first hour, sort of an escape room.

No no, don't leave. I don't think I've ragged on escape rooms before, but I would have, if doing it hadn't meant recommending one. No Signal is only sort of one, but I'm not sure it counts. You start out trapped in one room, see, and must search and logic your way out. Gradually expanding access to a space station results as you repeat this process.

But it doesn't feel like one. Partly because it's the story that pulls you along, not just the innate satisfaction of solving. And partly, I think, because it's not (ugh) abstract.

The phrase "Steam backlog" is one that’s often passed around PC gaming circles in guilty whispers, like a barely mustered-up confession to a Catholic priest. Forgive me father, for I hath bought five different Anno games in the Christmas sale, and do not know when I’m going to play them. I have no such shame, because my personal backlog is even more damning – formed not by a lack of time to play, but an inability to create art. And, apparently, to read.

Christmas is sleeping for another year. The trees' candles are put away. The wrapping paper that covered the floor like hay in a barn has been recycled. The SAM site that monitors the skies above the Treehouse has been switched back on, restoring our protection against airborne interlopers but also ensuring there is no horrible mishap when Father Christmas travels through our airspace. So it is time to get into the post-Christmas analysis that the festivities are truly all about.

We can at last reveal how the team voted in this year's Advent Calendar.