Rock Paper Shotgun

A month or two back I penned a 1500 word whine about feeling too powerful in Blood of Dawnwalker. "Gimme a vampire sim in which I'm a pathetic vein-nibbling goblin," I wrote, using many more adjectives than that. Well, never let it be said that I'm biased against vampires, for I am equally keen to play an RPG in which I am the least capable vampire hunter in the universe. A vampire hunter who screams when he wakes up with his hair over his face. A vampire hunter who has to spray the vampires wit

The most important thing to know about Bay 12: Mech Repair is that these are mechs of the MechWarrior or possibly Patlabor school – that is, basically WW2 tanks on hydraulic legs, with cockpits full of switches and wireframe displays. Their bodies are assemblages of pistons and reactors. They are not biomechs like the ones in Evangelion. An Evangelion Repair game would be… different. Less industrial, more Oedipal. You would dread removing the smallest piece of housing. Read more

Anthropic have told their genAI tool Claude to start ducking requests from users to recreate or clone existing games, following a flood of folks using the tech to generate six-fingered remakes. Instead of risking infringing on the intellectual property of series or titles that companies which aren't Anthropic own, Claude will instead restrict itself to only generating "original" games slopped together based on whatever data it's drawing on. Read more

Recently, I managed to dupe that preposterous hack Julian into signing a form committing him to alternate weeks of Maw-feeding duty. How he whined last Monday, as we strapped him into his neoprene bodysuit. How he begged for mercy, as we handed him his 12-foot Gallium toasting fork and elbowed him out the airlock. Read more

After adding a whole new town to Fallout 4 last month, a group of modders have released another in their long string of extra quests for the RPG. This latest mission revolves around a dungeon delve in the Glowing Sea, where a mysterious bunker's just been unearthed. Read more

The team behind Oblivion remake mod Skyblivion are being threatened with legal action by a former volunteer on the project, according a video posted by current lead Kyle 'Rebelzize' Rebel. The situation looks like it'll need resolving before the mod, which was originally set to release last year, can finally make its way out of the Imperial City sewers. Read more

Legendary outpost builder Dwarf Fortress is getting a meat biome. A terrible netherworld of bone and artery. A sunken redoubt of gristle and gizzard. An appalling labyrinth of squirt and squelch. Honestly, the biggest shock here is that Dwarf Fortress doesn't appear to have a meat biome already. It certainly has plenty of florid descriptions of fatal injuries. Read more

What makes Carrion interesting obviously lies in playing as the monster in a horror game rather than being the one chased down by it. The game's nasty tentacle monster still gives me the heebie jeebies, so I really would hate to be hunted by one. This is where I point you towards Gag Order, a shooter where you are in fact hunted by a disgusting cephalopod creature all while tracking down a distress signal. Read more

December is certainly going to be the month of Dune. The biggest Dune of Dunecember will obviously go to Dune: Part 3, which is Duen out December 18th. A little bit before that, however, is a well-timed free expansion coming to Dune: Awakening. It's called Blood and Ice, which sounds gross, but hey, I guess free blood and ice isn't entirely a bad thing? Read more

If you're something of a Portal or Half-Life head, you'll probably already be familiar with F-Stop, an unreleased Portal prequel that remained quite mysterious for many years. Back in 2020, a much deeper look was revealed in a semi-official capacity, revealing a pretty neat concept (that isn't so dissimilar to that of Superliminal). Now, all these years later, assets and source code for the game has leaked, and what exists of F-Stop is fully playable. Read more

Let's start with the bad news: Final Fantasy 14: Evercold has been delayed. The good news, that doesn't matter all that much, as it's only a delay of roughly a month, and a release date has been set in stone too: February 23rd, 2027. It's cutting it a bit close to the seasons shifting towards spring, making the game seasonally inappropriate, but hey ho, February is still winter! Read more

In this genAI world, every single leak that makes its way out into the world should be seen as more of a "leak" until proven otherwise. With that said, it does kind of seem like a remake of the first Persona game is on the way, with some footage supposedly leaking and showing it in action. Read more

Sundays are for looking upon my DIY works and despairing. Strewn sawdust, spilled paint, and hunks of broken MDF litter my living room kingdom. When will it be over? When will I be free? When will I be able to reassemble my sofa, sit down with a cup of tea in hand, and admire my books, unpacked and arranged on perfectly fitted alcove bookshelves? "Today?" I whisper hopefully in response to a paragraph of rhetorical questions. "Probably not," snaps back Reality. Especially if I don't get out of b

Like a tag team of oiled snakes that have entered a wrestling contest, theme is a difficult quality to pin down. A game can be well designed, but if it lacks a coherence between those mechanics and its appearance, narrative, and its framing, there is a dissonance that can be hard to ignore. I realise I've just stepped into an old argument by using the word 'dissonance', but Hocking was right, games that don't cohere can be jarring. A developer may desire that sensation of discomfort, but often i

My scares should have been reserved for today, what with it being All Hallows' Eve and all, but my fright came on Thursday. Read more

Warframe creators Digital Extremes have announced that their free-to-play fantasy RPG Soulframe will be available for everyone to download on 6th November, after two years in closed alpha. Finally, you serfs without "prelude" keys will be able to fire up Soulframe.com and make sense of my ranting about the sleeping animals on the lobby screen. The new "open prelude" will land shortly before the game's 17th major update, Verse of the Veilands, which lets you grow your Omen wolfpup allies into r

It would appear that Phantom Blade Zero (Phantom Blade 0? Zero? Let’s go with Zero) demanding more gigs than a mismanaged stadium is doing little to stop people playing the thing. It therefore stands to reason at least some folks will want to run S-Game Studio’s lightly Soulsy sword-em-up on the Steam Machine, so let us now examine how said GabeCube stands up to its effects-heavy martial artistry. With some settings proposals, natch. Read more

The postmortem on BioWare, following their shuttering by EA this month, points to the publisher's preference to back Star Wars Battlefront 3 over Mass Effect 5 as the main factor in the demise of the beloved RPG developer. That's according to Bloomberg, who also report that a couple of other factors likely also had some influence. Read more

Excellent apocalypse RPG World of Horror has just received a sizeable free update, As Below So Above, adding no less than two Old Godly invasions for you to identify and thwart. One of these additional cosmic disasters involves four cults summoning their fave abominations at the same time. I picture them forming a shaky barbershop quartet on the skyline, while stamping the streets to mush. Damn it, Ath-Yolazsth – you're leading again! Also in As Below So Above: more "enemies, mysteries, charact

Thanks once again to everyone keeping our lights on, and our pantries full of Mini Cheddars, by being an RPS Supporter. The latest batch of subscription stats came in the other day and it’s been heartwarming, and more than a little humbling, to see new Supporters keep showing up. Rest assured that your backing does not go unappreciated, nor uninvested around the site. To whit, we’ve been commissioning a particularly strong assortment of freelance-scribed pieces (for all readers), some of which –