It’s good! In particular, it’s good if you like games magazines and want to hear from people who love them and made them. In episode 8, they covered (that’s a pun) their experiences putting together magazine covers for the likes of PC Gamer, NGamer, ONM, OXM, and GamesTM. Matthew and Sam (who is also lovely) discuss how they chose what game to put on a cover, the strange negotiations that went on with PRs over the (sometimes) terrible art they’d been given, and the struggles inherent in trying to sell a magazine with just a handful of words on the front....

The concept of co-open is simple: you play as a kid on their first solo grocery trip. Your grandmother drops you off, gives you a phone number, and then the supermarket is your oyster. Oh, and everyone is an anthropomorphic bird, and a majority of the characters are LGBTQIA+ in some shape or form. The environments pop, with bright bold colours, and each micro-location feels incredibly defined. All of the character models are 2D, stylised in a way that makes them look like acrylic stands....

Get a SanDisk Ultra 512GB Micro SD for £37 (was £72) This memory card is not the fastest around, with A1 and UHS-1 ratings and a sequential read speed of up to 150MB/s, but we found that there wasn’t a particularly noticeable difference between the slowest and fastest Micro SD cards in our Steam Deck memory card testing. (We saw similar results for Switch too, over at Digital Foundry.) In fact, we named the SanDisk Ultra the best cheap Micro SD card for Steam Deck, and this discount just reinforces that recommendation....

I don’t have the experience to tell how much it actually looks like Berlin, nor how much it catches the vibes of areas, but it does look like a place I want to drive around. Parp parp! The Bus is available now on Steam Early Access for $22/€26/$25. The plan is to add extra features and content over the next 8-16 months before launching in full. Expected additions include multiplayer, mod tools, an economy mode, and more busses....

One of the other best bits of Dead Space was making monsters walk into machines and devices that gibbed them, so I’m glad to see that represented too. Give me a haunted house in space where every lifeform constantly explodes into its constituent organs and I’m happy. The Callisto Protocol is a third-person sci-fi shooter set on the Jovian moon of Callisto, where some Thick McRunfast fella is trying to escape from a prison after space spookiness causes everyone to mutate into monsters....

Action in The Cycle: Frontier happens on the hitherto abandoned planet of Fortuna III, where you’ll have to run about, shoot aliens and other players, and prospect for loot. You’ll have to extract at the end of it all though, otherwise you’ll lose anything you plunder. Yager aren’t enormously clear on what the difference is between the pre-season and season one – it seems like the only change is the launch of the season pass on the 22nd – but they emphasise that any progress made in the pre-season will carry over to season one....

A Fumble In The Dark returns to the mildly spooky American city of Twin Lakes to investigate bothersome supernatural goings-on, though it will also venture over to Castle Dooley in Ireland. I suppose I should’ve known Dooley would have ancestors—most people do—yet the prospect startles me. He’s a strange one, that Dooley. The first game was a good’un, Adam (RPS in peace) ruled in our Darkside Detective review. “Like the puzzles, the humour in the game is gentle, poking fun at the entire concept of a paranormal police department and the tropes of point and click adventures, but so many of the jokes land that playing is like having dinner with a well-oiled double act....

We have plenty of digressions this week as well, including a big thing about the whole beans on Weetabix thing, and giving Matthew a roasting because he says he doesn’t like food that “glistens”. Absolute nonsense. You can listen above, or on on Spotify, iTunes, Stitcher, or Pocket Casts. You can find the RSS feed here, and you can discuss the episode on our Discord channel, which has a dedicated room for podcast chat....

As you can imagine, this goes off-piste almost from the get go. We start with cloning and escalate from there. Nate pitches a mobile game about Gimli that doesn’t exist. Matthew suggests that platforms for games should be decided by a Wheel Of Fortune spin. But we do get around to making some sensible points about creativity, and the role of E3 in general, although we apologise for doing so....

But there’s one thing that always gets me. No matter how careful I am, icy surfaces totally pass me by. It’s as if they’re invisible, the way I think I’ve clocked every variable, before my dwarf rogue moves two paces and tumbles onto his arse. I don’t mind, though, as it’s comedy gold; an act so funny I’m convinced there’s actually nothing funnier. Divinity Original Sin 2 is a rare game for me to play....

The council is divided.

Get the LG 27GL850 for £300 (was £439) The LG 27GL850 made headlines here at RPS when it was discounted to £330 last month, and I honestly didn’t expect to see go £30 lower any time soon. Beyond its core specs, which sit right in the current sweet spot for price versus performance, the reason it’s so good is that Fast IPS screen. This recent innovation combines the strengths of TN (great motion handling and low response times) with IPS (wide viewing angles and great colour reproduction)....

His outfit is wreathed in teeth, stretching his neckline out far beyond what you’d consider acceptable in any other profession. To be honest, even one tooth would seem iffy to me. I’m not sure how he functions in that outfit. I’d be constantly knocking out molars on doorways and catching that magnificent backpiece on my chair. Noodles would be off the lunch menu. But he doesn’t care. He’s already outdone everyone else....

Squadrons blinked out of hyperspace and onto PC back in October 2020, a spiritual successor to classic space dogfighting sims from LucasArts such as X-Wing Vs. Tie Fighter. Set after Return Of The Jedi, the game puts you into the orange jumpsuit of the New Republic’s Vanguard Squadron and dodgy black helmet of the Imperial Titan Squadron in alternating campaign missions. Squadrons also has multiplayer team deathmatch and fleet battle modes, the latter challenging two squads of five to blow up each other’s capital ship....

The RPS 100: Reader Edition A massive thank you to everyone who participated in this year’s RPS 100: Reader Edition. We had hundreds of responses and it’s been such a pleasure going through all your favourites, reading what you love about them most, and cramming it all into this giant, highly comprehensive reader ranking. You’ll find plenty of old favourites here as well as some modern classics, and I’m dead keen to see what you make of it all....

Make way for the comedy action stylings of Marvel’s Guardians Of The Galaxy! Hayden: I think it’s fair to say I’m the biggest Marvel fan here at RPS. I indulge in reading comics in bed over the weekend and I go to see every movie about five times (thanks, Odeon Limitless!). The Guardians have always been the best for me, though. Their endless wisecracks make me genuinely laugh in a way most things just don’t manage....

It’s the little Zelda-like fox who could, Tunic! Katharine: After playing and not liking Tunic’s demo very much, I went into this very clear Zelda homage with a bit of trepidation. I was sad I didn’t get on with that earlier demo, what with Zelda being my favourite thing on the entire planet (sorry, PC), and I was worried that its Soulsian-like combat would prove too gruelling and off-putting. Said combat is still utterly rock hard at times (lookin’ at you, Siege Engine), but the more I played of Tunic proper, the more I realised that its demo was only a tiny snapshot of a much larger, more engrossing whole....

Nate: So apart from anything else, is it just me or is the music in this game way better than it needed to be? Matt: This was the first thing I was going to mention! Especially the way it changes between your settlements. I enjoyed panning away from the jolly, industrious sound of my thriving first village, over to the barren wasteland of my second. Nate: I bloody love the jaunty shanty that plays when you move the camera past a ship....

I got a fair way into Returnal when I played the PS5 version for the first time late last year, but its intense baddies and shoot ’em up-style laser attack patterns proved to be just a bit too much for me in the end. They don’t mess about those aliens, that’s for sure. Still, I had a cracking time zooming through its stunning worlds and blastin’ away alien beasties until it got too difficult, especially when I didn’t think Returnal would be my cup of tea....

After it was announced, The Wonderful 101: Remastered had an absolutely killer Kickstarter campaign, becoming fully funded in a matter of hours. The Kickstarter stretch goal to get the game on Steam was $250k, and at the time of writing it’s raised $1,770,552. With all the love it’s received over the last month, it’s strange to think the game struggled commercially when it was originally released for the Wii U....