Rock Paper Shotgun

In my time as a videogame partaker, I have crawled through approximately three billion airvents. I may well have crawled through more vents than you've had hot dinners. As such, any videogame that can get me excited about loosening a barred hatch and hauling my heavy ass into a square tunnel is doing something right. The Wild Gentlemen's new sci-fi immersive…

Control Resonant's New Game++ update also squashes some of my least favourite bugs, including the one where magic doors change my trousers

Trippy hack 'n' slash sequel (and, for the benefit of anyone planning for this year’s Advent Calendar guessing game in the RPS Discord, my current second-favouritest game of 2026) Control Resonant has a big old update out today. As declassified by Remedy, it not only adds the pledged New Game++ mode for plus-deficient game replayers, but makes absolutely blo…

I'm not sure the "AI" in my chair's lumbar support actually counts as AI, but it has been smart enough to help my posture

Note from James, 02/10: We've heard your complaints that some of the wording in this piece - a lot of which, if I'm honest, was added/changed by me in the edit - overstates the chair's potential health benefits. The HBADA’s X7 chair may reduce back pain during long periods of sitting at your desk but it will not literally fix your spine. While it is and will…

Capcom aren't just running out of Resident Evil games to remake - they're banking on it, with a mysterious "crossover" planned when the timelines collide

Capcom have done a brisk trade in Resident Evil remakes this past decade. They've gone back to formula with Resident Evil 2, Resident Evil 3, and Resident Evil 4, not just bumping up the resolution and revarnishing the cutscenes, but writing new variations on the old survival horror fables. There's a Resident Evil: Code Veronica regurgitation due in 2027, an…

The Witcher 3: Songs of the Past's setting "felt like a really natural way to go", CD Projekt Red story director says, while parrying my attempts to breach the DLC's guard

Ever since The Witcher 3's decade-on expansion Songs of the Past was revealed not to be a windup nor a case of empthy rumourmongering, I've been eating up as many details about its story as CD Projekt Red have offered. The truth is that, outside of showing off the setting and a few of the characters Gerry'll chat to, they've kept their lips pretty tight. On…

"We want people to try and outsmart the game": No Law aims for Arkane-style reactivity within a dangerous walled city

Port Desire, the hemmed-in city setting of immersive sim No Law, is hard to place. At points, it reminds me of walking around Lisbon. It shares that Portuguese city's verticality, where hill-straddling streets shouldered by colourful houses and corner shops can feel like tiers on a wedding cake. The strong sunlight and bursts of foliage reinforce the mediter…

"Xbox is not for sale" despite all of the layoffs and neat repackaging of studios within Microsoft's corporate structure, CEO Asha Sharma says

Despite recently having overseen the laying off of 268 staff in the second of multiple rounds of cuts planned for this financial year, Xbox CEO Asha Sharma has denied that their are plans to sell Microsoft's gaming division. The bloodletting at Xbox in recent months has not only seen workers let go, but the place of studios within the company's structure bei…

The Division developers Massive are now "the global brand" in charge of Splinter Cell and Ghost Recon, alongside a new Ubisoft dieselpunk MOBA

Tom Clancy's The Division and Star Wars Outlaws studio Massive Entertainment just got, er, massiver. Parent company Ubisoft have announced that they're now "the global label" for several other series, including Ghost Recon and Splinter Cell alongside at least one original game, World War fantasy MOBA March of Giants. Read more

First-person RPG Queen's Domain pitches you against an island of gorgeous freaks with naught but a flying sword and infinite throwing daggers

Fantasy RPG Queen's Domain is frequently likened by certain other websites to From Software's King's Field games and The Elder Scrolls 3: Morrowind, so I'm going to put my nose in the air and forcibly compare it to something else. Looks like, errrrrr, a first-person Ico with Mayan architectural influences, maybe a touch of Final Fantasy's Ivalice period here…

"NO GAME NO LIFE": Grasshopper Manufacture have leapt from the jaws of NetEase and gone indie again

No More Heroes and Killer7 developers Grasshopper Manufacture have split from erstwhile parent company NetEase, founder Goichi "Suda51" Suda has announced. NetEase bought them back in 2021, as part of the acquisition of Gungho Online Entertainment. Now, they're going indie. According to Suda, the change reflects "a strong desire to deliver titles in an even…

The importance of being earnest: How Marvel Tōkon's Deadpool trades ridicule for fighting game reverence

Deadpool’s a weird character. Like fellow mutant Wolverine, Wade Wilson is a trained killer whose primary superpower is a healing factor that lets him recover and reform from any wound, even if bisected or decapitated. Unlike Wolverine, Wade knows he’s in a fictional medium, be it a comic book, movie, or game, and physically can’t stop quipping about that fa…

Crimson Desert's first expansion, Charting the Unknown, delayed so Pearl Abyss get more time to polish and stabilise the red pudding

A little bit of extra waiting is in order for Crimson Desert's first proper expansion, Charting the Unknown. Originally set to arrive midway through October, it's now been moved back by a couple of weeks to allow for some extra fine-tuning of the thousand or so funky open world activities devs Pearl Abyss have jammed into it. Read more

Come play the flute and reshape the very earth in Songs of Glimmerwick, a magic school RPG from the creators of Eastshade

It has perhaps never been easier to join a witch or wizard school without being a Guy Who Rhymes With Bally Trotter. Academies of the occult abound in videogames. True, there has yet to be an amazing Little Witch Academia adaptation, and I'm still waiting for that Arbitrary Metric take on Naomi Novik's A Deadly Education, to say nothing of Failbetter's take…

Crusader Kings 3's By God Alone expansion offers plenty of holy hijinks, even if your polyamorous Pope doesn't get divorced three times in one day

My very soul has been cleft into pieces on this day. January 3rd, 902 AD. First, my Christian faith fractured in twain. I stand in Rome, head of the Roman Rite and now the leader of the Catholic world. My neighbours to the east have chosen to walk a different path, transforming their Greek Rite into a new Orthodoxy followed by the Byzantine Empire. It’s a br…

"Ultimately, we asked 'why are we doing this?'": the creators of Arc Raiders wildly underestimated how hard it is to make a live service game

Arc Raiders developers Embark heavily underestimated the challenges of creating a full-blown live service game, executive producer Aleksander Grøndal has conceded in a new interview. The extraction shooter launched with an ambition for monthly post-release updates that ultimately proved untenable, resulting in an exhausted and unhappy team who were "constant…

All the RPS Supporter rewards for September 2026: Model ships, maze cities, and the tyranny of content

In case you missed it, September happened. Technically it’s still happening, and we have one more exclusive post for RPS Premium Supporters coming this week, but this time I fancy doing the monthly rewards roundup within the month being rounded up. Lest armoured date pedants infiltrate my flat with breaching charges, and start hitting my shins with their per…

"I always see it kind of like a triangle": The surprising challenge of making the perfectly-sized cave in Satisfactory expansion Core Values

When I first learned about Core Values, the upcoming expansion to factory automation game Satisfactory, I didn't grasp the scale of the challenge developer Coffee Stain had set themselves. 'So, the game is set underground now?' I thought. 'I'll just stick up some more lights and make the same factory I always have.' Yet, as I covered yesterday, that won't be…

"Getting sidetracked doesn’t feel too unnatural": Baldur's Gate 3 Act Two Expansion modder on how they seamlessly fit a "detour" to fight an army into the RPG's plot

Midway through September, modder SquallyDaBeanz released a solo-developed custom campaign for Baldur's Gate 3 in beta, adding an extra chapter to the RPG's main story. Neatly nestled between the RPG's second and third acts, the mod sends you and your party on a trip through The Chionthar Wilds while the Absolute's Army marches on towards the city the series…

GTA 6 will simulate hurricanes, rainbows and persistent, dynamic clouds, among other efforts to make you stop doing crime and become a weather nerd

Grand Theft Auto 6 features a re-engineered, "more localized and persistent" weather system that ranges in intensity from physically credible rainbows to full-bore hurricanes, according to Rockstar vice president of art for lighting and rendering Owen Shepherd. As ever with GTA, the question is to what extent this will materially affect your doings in the ne…

With Deadlock's latest updating promising six new heroes, over 10,000 new voice lines and too much more to mention, it's clear Valve are still pretty committed to it

It feels weird that Deadlock is technically a game that isn't out yet, doesn't it? You can't even just play it as someone that's never done so, you have to have someone that's already got access to send you an invite. Valve didn't even really acknowledge its existence publicly, and they still sort of treat it as this little secret that everyone's in on. Two…

Sometimes the thing you need is a wonderfully ethereal physics platformer jam game where you are a little round guy with very stretchy arms called Big Stretch

I have a working theory that above all other aspects, the Vibe (with a capital V) of a game is the most important thing to enrapture a hypothetical audience. A strong Vibe is not a guarantee of such a thing, this algorithmic world we live in denies us such luxuries, it's just the most important starting point. The Vibe does not look like any one thing, the o…

Valve is changing Steam's homepage discounts and events section to go the way of the algorithm to get you to look at, and buy, obviously, more games

Go ahead and boot up Steam for me. Underneath the ad banner for whoever paid to be there for that day and the featured and recommended sections, you'll find a section titled discounts and events. As it currently stands, this section is hand curated by Valve to highlight some site-wide relevant sales. But Valve have been changing Steam up a lot in recent year…

"You will not be using belts": Satisfactory's first expansion isn't the same game set underground - there's a whole new set of resource-moving toys to master