Judging from their little teaser trailer below, it seems there’ll be demos of games like Fling To The Finish by Splitside Games, Black Book by Morteshka, Genesis Noir by Feral Cat Den, The Riftbreaker by Exor Studio, and tons more. Steam Game Festivals are short seasonal events where Valve’s gaming platform hosts a bunch of livestreams and dev talks, and offers loads of free demos so people can try out new and upcoming games....

April 24th until May 1st, according to the announcement. “Join us as we break the code, find the missing piece, and align the elements during Steam Puzzle Fest. Featuring discounts and demos on current and upcoming games, this event is for games focused on the spirit of solving puzzles.” As always, the announcement is more for developers than us eager shoppers. If you’re the maker of a puzzle game, you can check the eligibility criteria and submit your game for inclusion....

It’s best played on a pad. The left analogue stick moves your character, the right stick aims your ray, while the bumpers fire either a blue or red pulse. A blue pulse from LB will draw you towards red surfaces and repel you from blue ones, and a red pulse from RB will draw you towards blue and repel you from red. That’s how magnets work: opposites attract, etc. In practice, I found myself getting muddled frequently....

Codenamed The Nate Files, each of these podstras features Nate giving a tangent free reign. This month: the history of glass aquariums. It is both educational and ridiculous. Matthew is pleased at the glass-banging possibilities presented by history.

I’ve mentioned Bird Snapper on RPS a few times over the years, yet never got around to focusing on it. Let’s do that now! There you are in a vast grey desert. Hills line the horizon impossibly far away. A few birds drift through the sky. An unfathomable array of antennae, pylons, and hovering billboards (?) dot the landscape, towering about the spindly desert plants. It might be another planet?...

Stranded: Alien Dawn revolves around base management and gathering resources from your new home planet. Your bunch of survivors all have different skills, such as varying levels of combat experience, so you’ll have to draw on those to make it. Watch out for survivors getting fed up or tired out, although building separate rooms for each and keeping them fed and warm will help. Attacks will come from the planet’s indigenous animals too, so you’ll need to fortify your base with turrets or traps....

Wilmot - Wilmot’s Warehouse Box-pusher and fervent campaigner against automation Wilmot the square is a happy law unto himself. His quiet smile is nigh-permanent proof that you can have a lot of work to do and be happy about it. As you shuffle your way through this inventory-sorting Marie Kondo ‘em up, you will see Wil’s expression changing only in rare moments, like when he has to move a bunch of heavy wine bottles all at once....

The Chronicles of Riddick: Escape From Butcher Bay A first-person stealth spin-off that had absolutely no right to be so good. Playing as Dick Riddick, the see-in-the-dark hero of solid sci-fi schlock Pitch Black, you are thrown in the space slammer and must break out. First it’s all cigs and shivs with your fellow inmates, then it’s dark pits and maximum security. Vin Diesel’s grim drawl is present and correct, as are some truly heinous action movie quips....

Get the WD Black SN850 1TB - £133 (was £154)Get the WD Black SN850 2TB - £300 (was £340) Looking back at the WD SN850 review produced by former hardware junkie and now big-time big boss Katharine, who noted that the new WD drive beat out the previous best PCIe 4.0 drive while costing less. Real-world speeds topped out around 6000MB/s for sequential reads, with sequential writes at an impressive 5200MB/s on the 1TB drive - the 2TB mdoel should be even faster....

In case you’re unfamiliar with Blade and their Shadow service, it was one of the big three cloud gaming services I reviewed at the beginning of last year alongside Google Stadia and Nvidia’s GeForce Now. Unlike its competitors, Shadow offered players an entire PC experience that could be streamed to a myriad of different devices. It was impressive stuff when I tried it out for myself, but it wasn’t without its own problems, including a high monthly subscription cost and continued delays in rolling out its various upgrade plans....

Here’s how it works: from December 1st until December 24th we reveal one 2020 PC game that the RPS team loves. Each game gets a post in which the site’s writers explain why they loved said game, like a small chocolate made out of adjectives. The games are revealed in no particular order except for the one on December 24th, which is the definitive pick for the best PC game of 2020....

Before that we have a big more egg chat to get out of the way, and a decent discussion on some of Henry Cavill’s recent activities. Also I complain about how there are too many Marvel heroes now and they need to kill a load of them off. Plus, in exciting news Nate manages to do his first ever accurate impression, by accident. Stick around for another near miss for Matthew in this week’s Cavern Of Lies....

This is, I suppose, technically a preview. The precise release date hasn’t been pinned down yet, but reviewing The Longing in a conventional way would be almost impossible in any case. Instead, I’m going to update you every month or so on my own progress in a diary. With the multiple endings in mind, our ultimate goal for this series will be… escape! Escape to the surface, that is. There are many obstacles in the way, however, without even counting the entire year-and-change it will take to play the game....

Think of these complaints, for the most part, as a pre-flight checklist done long before the pilot has even sat down; if the game were not in early access, these would be big disappointments rather than exactly the kind of annoying details that early access is meant to iron out. The premise is familiar, but not oversaturated. You run a mercenary company in a fantasy world, and must travel about it finding and fulfilling contracts that keep your fighters fed, equipped, and paid....

As the culmination of a story started with 2012’s Dishonored, Death Of The Outsider couldn’t have been made without an incredible narrative team. Leading the charge were Harvey Smith and Sandra Duval, who conceptualised Death Of The Outsider with the help of Dinga Bakaba. The trio, based in Arkane’s Lyon studio, also recruited 15-year game writing veteran Anna Megill, and Hazel Monforton - who at the time was a PhD student, but wrote such an eye-catching article analysing The Outsider as an example of the ancient Greek Pharmakos figure that Smith hired her for their new Outsider-centric game....

Fair warning though, it’s about as violent as you’d expect. Yes, my standards are low. The trailer mostly consists of introductions to characters from the games, and the dialogue includes several instances of those character’s spouting the game’s catchphrases (“Get over here!”, “Finish him!”, etc.). But shots are well composed, it’s cleanly edited, and the effects look good. I can’t say the same for most videogame movie trailers, or for any of the previous Mortal Kombat movies....

For the benefit of folks who’ve pretended it didn’t exist until this day: The Outer Worlds puts us in the moonboots of a moonman who awakes from a long sleep on their colony ship to find oh no, the spacefuture is awful. We’re not where we expected to be, everything’s gone well corporate, and things generally suck. Off we go, doing quests, recruiting allies, and shooting things in the spaceface....

We declared Yoku’s Island Express one of the best PC games of 2018. Our Graham called the game “a palate cleanser” in his Yoku’s Island Express review. “I played it in short bursts at the end of long days and was refreshed by it each time,” Graham explained. “It’s not rich enough in terms of its ideas and set-pieces to get under your skin and I likely won’t remember much of the details of my time with it a year from now, but I will remember that it provided me with easy, simple pleasure....

It’s not the cold. It’s not even the lack of anything to do. It’s that when your main threat is starvation and hypothermia, and your only real tool is stockpiling, it often feels like your fate is already sealed come October, and waiting around to see if you survived or not carries the same sense of slow inevitability that the average RTS or 4X game does past the opening act....

So without ado: here’s a handful of the games I enjoyed the most this year which (crushingly) didn’t quite make their way into our soft ’n’ snuggly RPS Advent Calendar 2022. *I may have embellished the actual threat for dramatic effect. The Cycle: Frontier At the mid-point of the year, RPS brought out its list of our favourite games of 2022 so far. In it, I said (or rather, gushed) of The Cycle: Frontier that “I’ve never known a game to be so tense and so beautiful at the same time....