When Paradox announced their post-apocalyptic North American grand strategy game Afterworld, I made the obvious comparison to Fallout. For this I should be chained to the fender of a war rig and pelted with scoops of radioactive dogfood, while being slowly driven through a pack of three-headed coyotes. In a new dev diary, Afterworld's content designer and "elder lore keeper" Luke Bean has gone into some detail about the game's setting, explaining that Afterworld owes more to study of the Bronze Age collapse than any Vault Tech malarkey. The continent's diverging tribes are also apparently far more estranged from and mystified by the "ancients" than their peers in Bethesda's RPGs. "The people of this world aren't Americans exactly," Bean began. "They are people who remember the Americans. America was an ancient empire to them, sort of the way the Roman Empire was for us, and they live in the shadow of that history. The people know that there was this time full of powerful and mysterious science. They think of the ancients - us - as people who could do anything they wanted with science. And so the central mystery of the past to them is if the ancients could do anything they wanted, why'd they all die? They must have wanted to die." Read more

Cyberpunk 2077 quest mods are still a relative rarity and the latest's aimed at folks who don't think getting to play that one gig with Samurai during the main story's enough jammin' in front of a crowd. It'll let you and brain-dwelling Keanu Reeves tour various venues throughout Night City and offers the option of adding in custom songs from your own playlist if you don't mind looking down to see that your fingers definitely aren't in the right place. Read more

"The race is not always to the swift nor the battle to the strong," wrote the late author Damon Runyon, "but that's the way to bet." As someone neither swift nor strong, this does not bode well for my chances in Wardogs season 2, which sees the early access sandbox shooter adding – among many other things – a gambling system. Read more

I'm sure you already had it marked in your calendars, but it is that time of year again when the Galaxies Showcase takes one more spin around the internet. This year's stream will see new announcements Arc Raiders's developer Embark Studios, Zero Parades: For Dead Spies' ZA/UM, and Elite Dangerous' Frontier Developments, along with a whole host of others. The showcase itself is taking place on October 15th, and you can watch it on IGN's Youtube channel, over on Facebook, Twitch, and Musk's pits. And I do believe it will also be popping up at the top of our homepage during the stream, too. Think of it as us hanging a projector screen on the side of the Treehouse. Read more

The dashing Da Vincis of Amanita Design have announced Machinarium 2, a sequel to the 2009 puzzle adventure young master John Walker called "a sort of beauty that games are almost never graced with". I haven't played the original Machinarium, but I have played Amanita's splendid living object platformer Creaks, and in general, I would quite like to go to bed with the entirety of their art team. So here's me sternly ordering myself to _finally_ play Machinarium while we wait for the follow-up, which doesn't have a release date yet. But does have a trailer. Read more

This Is Not For You is, in fact, for some very specific kinds of people. It is for people who love drawing maps, and it is for people who love having their blood sucked by a non-Euclidean lighthouse. Somebody plot that on a Venn diagram for me. Created by Mexico-based studio Interactive Dreams, it's a dimension-defying maze game in which you play Ulysses, a shipwrecked sailor who strays into a strange lighthouse that's bigger on the inside and also, utterly incoherent. Walking north could take you south. Walking out of a bedroom could take you to the bottom of the ocean. Why yes, it _is_ inspired by Mark Z. Danielewski's House of Leaves. Here's a trailer. Read more

Forza Horizon 6 has, as is standard for the live-service racing series, settled into a steady rhythm of revolving weekly to-do lists and a gradual drip feed of fresh cars since it came out in May. Unless you're hopping on for regular bouts of driving with mates or just dig the grind, odds are most folks will have dipped in and out over the months, possibly only returning when a new season adds the likes of a drift attack mode to the open world. Horizon 6's first major DLC's likely to change that at least for a little while, and Playground Games have now revealed it'll be arriving in January. Read more

Writing about new 2D timeloop metroidvania Echo Weaver is tricky because most - possibly _all_ - of what you need to complete it is available to you the very second you first wake up, deep in the charnelpools of an ethereal and shattered lunar civilisation. The plot in brief: you are a perpetually rewinding robot boy on a mission to work out what the hell happened. You'll explore overgrown biomes, investigate busted machines, run errands for a handful of scrappy, splashy-hued aliens, and conjure holographic flashbacks that cover the circumstances of your own creation. Developers Moonlight Kids stress that the only thing you really gain in the course of all this is knowledge. There are a few upgrades to gather, but no core skills to unlock. Instead, it's all there for you to learn, whether by reaching a tutorial area or just by hitting buttons at random and messing with terrain fixtures. As such, my telling you about abilities really does risk ruining it, much like explaining the behaviour of celestial bodies in Echo Weaver's great influence, Outer Wilds. So if you're strongly inclined to buy the game – my verdict after four hours: a vivid and thoughtful, freeform Metroidy puzzler with refreshingly minimal combat and a few rough edges - maybe get your feet wet before reading on. Read more

I love an everything seasoning video game. You know, the kind of game where it's five different genres at once, somehow, all of which builds into one cohesive vision? It's not an easy thing to pull off, but Daniel Mullins seems to be quite good at it, as evidenced by Inscryption, and as suggested by the upcoming Pony Island 2: Panda Circus. Which, by the way, now has a playtest you can sign up for. Read more

Welp, Cyberpunk 2077 is getting a live-action adaptation! With the plethora of Hollywood adaptations of video games these days, this is one of those bits of news that has me thinking, "wait, that wasn't already a thing?" Apparently not! Read more

I am not a huge fan of collaboration DLCs, mostly because my curmudgeonly self can only see them as attempts at multiple companies trying to profit off of one another's things. But I do have to admit that yes, the just announced collab between Dave the Diver and Subnautica 2 does make total sense. Certainly more sense than the Godzilla one from a couple of years back. Read more

A dev's work is never done, and certainly not with a big ole revamp like The Witcher 3 Remastered. CD Projekt Red put out a new patch today bringing in a range of fixes for the RPG, perhaps most notably sorting out some of the game's lighting issues, amongst other, PC-specific related problems to do with your GPU. Read more

I do love a boardgame where you reveal the tiles as you play. Sure, I _also_ enjoy turning over all the pieces at the beginning of a game of Settlers of Catan and taking in all the tiles and trying to work out a strategy based on which resources are clustered near which port, but that's not the same as a game like Betrayal at House on the Hill, where you all start together in one single room and unveil the architecture of the house tile by tile as you explore. You have that same strategic eye, looking at the function and threat each room holds, but because the house is still being built, your plan can't become fixed. You have to reassess the layout of the building with each new piece and, of course, when you hit the moment in the game where one player betrays you the real danger arrives, all that planning now has to be twisted to oppose the new threat. Volatiles is an action game that plays with that same sense of strategy and mystery. It starts with you waking in a strange facility with little sense of what brought you there. The scientists around you say they're helping you, but they're the same people who keep dunking you into a sensory deprivation tank and forcing you to fight the monsters in your mind. It's just possible they don't have your best interests at heart. Read more

Viewed from the front, my truck, with its winch and thick off-road tires, could be straight from SnowRunner central casting. Sure, it would an off-off-Broadway production of SnowRunner, with the polycount and texture resolution of a PS1-era take on the driving simulator, but I'm looking at a vehicle that is ready to struggle through thick mud and deep water; a petrol-guzzling workhorse. Then I walk around the side and glimpse the load it's hauling: a giant severed hand, freshly cut from the corpse of a buried god. Prospice: Anomalous Logistics has all the markings of SnowRunner, MudRunner and Spintires games, the driving simulators with a focus on overcoming difficult off-road terrain, but it's seen through the lens of eldritch horror and the new weird. Read more

The sort of beautiful thing about triple-A games is that sometimes they have the resources to make an entirely new game within them. That was how Gwent was born, an in-world card game you can force Geralt into play that was eventually spun off into its own, fully-fledged thing. I imagine we'll be seeing a revamped version of it whenever The Witcher 4 arrives, but considering that's 2028 at the earliest, may I suggest making your bed with Lazare's Sacrifice, a narrative deckbuilder set during the French Revolution that's being made in collaboration with Gwent's lead designer Damien Monnier. Read more

The GTA 6 leaker or leakers that previously shared enough alleged gameplay to prompt Rockstar Games and Take-Two to begin the legal process of hunting them down appear to have returned, with a new 25 minute clip of them up to various hijinks in the game. A fair chunk of those hijinks have been gotten up to while protagonist Jason's in the buff, his bare bum and wiggling weenie out for all of Leonida to gawk at. Read more

Not being much of a kinkster, I'm the wrong writer to assess how Clive Barker's Hellraiser: Revival portrays BDSM. I can't say with any authority, for example, whether developers Saber Interactive have succeeded in distinguishing consensually practised fetish from otherworldly torture. But I will say that the faithful-seeming sex club you visit early on does a fine job of underlining the ridiculousness of Hellraiser, and of so many violent horror videogames with 'sexual themes'. Read more

Xbox, currently in the midst of multi-round mass layoffs as part of a plan to let a final total of 3200 people go, have announced a new arm of their business which is firmly aimed at milking more cash out of its blockbuster game series via licensing deals. That likely means more stuff along the lines of the recent money-making Minecraft movie and Fallout TV show, though apparently not money-making enough to convince them their game-making business didn't need slashing to the bone. Meanwhile, Minecraft developers Mojang have a new boss who previously spent a decade working on Facebook at Meta. Read more

I've admittedly not delved into any multiplayer action in Star Wars: Galactic Racer since the gates to its racetracks were opened to the masses early this week. Look, I needed a quick breather after ramjetting my way through 40 or so hours of it for review. It looks like I might have to try and convince my colleagues to hop on for an RPS Boonta Eve classic soon though, as devs Fuse Games have already announced plans to up multiplayer party sizes so you can invite six mates along instead of three. Read more

Handheld PC games could be set for a bit of visual spit 'n' shine, as AMD have confirmed plans to bring FSR 4 – their newest, prettiest upscaling tech – to the kind of dinky Radeon APUs used by portables. AMD Computing & Graphics exec Jack Huynh, speaking to Korean media including The Elec, detailed a two-pronged approach: they’ll make new APUs built with native FSR 4 support, as well as a special version of the upscaler that can run on older integrated graphics chips, both by the end of 2026. Read more

Star Wars Zero Company developers Bit Reactor have begun to put some of the developers they furloughed prior to the game's release back on payroll. Thus far, the number of staff on payroll at the studio has reportedly returned to "more than half" of what it was prior to the furloughs, with Bit Reactor boss Greg Foertsch asserting that they hope to "eventually bring as many people back as possible". Read more

There was a time when open worlds made of flying islands really seemed like the New Hotness. I guess The Legend of Zelda: Tears of the Kingdom is the obvious trendsetter, but my mind always returns to Bossa's ill-fated aerial MMO Worlds Adrift. I have fond memories of a preview session in which a developer and I tried to rebuild a wildly rolling airship in a hurricane. We failed, but a good time was had plummeting and dying. More recently, we've had Lost Skies (another Bossa joint, born of Worlds Adrift's crashlanded remains), Bohemia's Hytales-ish Everwind, and the curiously fungal Aloft, none of which appear to have slipped the surly bonds of Earth and touched the face of the Steam Top 20 Most Played. Still, the zeppelin fanciers among game developers keep trying to make fetch happen. Here's a trailer for Atmosfar, which now has an early access release date - 29th October. Read more

Both James and I dug anime-styled arcade racer Screamer when we gave a verdict on it earlier this year, but one aspect that raised both of our eyebrows was the game's unorthodox twin stick drift controls. Usually, steering and sliding in racing games are managed by the one singular controller stick, keeping things simple and intuitive, but Milestone opted to make you kick out the tail with a second stick instead. It feels fine once you get used to it, but is the kind of thing that could bounce folks off who're not down to rewrite years of muscle memory. The good news for such folks is that Screamer's latest patch adds in the option of single stick sliding in the hopes of making the adjustment a little easier. Read more

Gaming chat app Discord has suffered another user data breach, with a suspected 1 million email addresses stolen alongside (potentially many more) user IDs and IP addresses. While Discord was not targeted directly, third party security service Double Counter have reported a "deliberate, multi-stage attack" wherein hackers spent nearly six hours poking around their infrastructure before the vulnerability was closed. Read more

I want, and not even especially deep down, to like Silver Pines more than I do. Wych Elm’s debut game – a Twin Peaks-inspired, neo-noir detective mystery that quickly repaints itself in survival horror red – is endearingly unusual, an angular mishmash of different genre staples that, nonetheless, stays coherently glued together by its expressively moody visual style and an intriguing missing-person tale. It’s just... well, put it this way. I’m only about three hours in, and if I have to backtrack my slouching private dick through one more thicket of locked doors and collection puzzles, the next crime he’ll be investigating will be the aggravated assault of a desktop monitor. Read more

This week, Steam published another one of their monthly hardware surveys, offering a granular market assessment based on optional and anonymous contributions. I don't read a lot of these. Perhaps if I did, I'd be less shocked to discover that 32GB is now the most popular RAM setup, with 42.22% of respondents choosing it, as against 37.82% for 16GB configurations, and 6.47% for 8GB. Read more

During the hands-off presentation of Rainbow Six Tactics at Gamescom, destruction obviously featured. Walls were breached, cover was blown up, and masonry was peppered with rounds. It looked excellent, but it was also familiar from other turn-based tactical games. Considering the focus of scenery destruction in Rainbow Six Siege, I wasn't sure how the team were actually advancing the tech beyond what we've seen in games like XCOM 2. There was one moment in the hands-off demo in particular that had me worried it was basically a graphical nicety. Sniper Glaz fired a high-powered round through two interior walls, headshotting a terrorist on the other side. The round left visible holes in the walls, but beyond being a neat bit of set redressing, it wasn't anything that we couldn't have seen in other turn-based tactical games. When I spoke to the developers, I wanted to know if there was anything else happening that I wasn't perceiving, something about the destruction that made it distinctly Siege-inspired. Read more

In-development footage of the Perfect Dark reboot from The Initiative, which Microsoft cancelled as part of their mass layoffs in July last year, has reportedly been uncovered. It shows off a couple of minutes worth of what looks to be texting of shooting and explosion mechanics, plus a chase on foot through a facility that's falling apart. Read more

The English language can be a way of communicating, and it can be a way of subjugating. Patience is a Virtue protagonist Louis knows this intimately. In this "cozy-meets-creepy" conversation puzzle game from teaisfortoby!, some interactions require you to answer only using the words spoken by the other party. The first such chat in the demo is with Louis's boss at the local grocery store. She wants him to lock up early. All Louis has to do is assent. But to assent, he must reassemble her phrasing into a coherent, five-word response, grappling not just with elementary grammar but phantom questions of tone. Being the first of these puzzles, it's an easier one, but the constraint is rather suffocating nonetheless. Louis is chronically ill and neurodivergent, and his difficulty talking back reflects his lack of privilege. These words don't belong to him. They are alien objects he must painstakingly bolt together on demand. Read more

Xbox chief strategy officer Matthew Ball has refuted a report that the console makers have secured an exclusive cloud streaming deal for GTA 6 at launch, which is noteworthy because the tech could provide a means to play the crime sim on PC prior to a native port arriving. Read more

Last month, State of Decay developers Undead Labs bought their own independence from Microsoft, after a deal with unnamed buyers fell through. The staff created a new holding company, Full Measure, to facilitate the buyout. Layoffs followed. Now, studio boss Philip Holt has offered an inside look on the transition, together with thoughts on the wider landscape of videogame industry investment. Short version: he thinks there's still money washing around, but the fatter cats are very much looking for "obvious slam dunks". Read more

Look, I'm pretty reasonable at Tetris. I'm not one of those grand masters or anything, but I can both have fun and get a score that would at least make my hypothetical nephew impressed (assuming he also wouldn't be in the Roblox mines). Sometimes, though, a take on the beautiful block game rocks up that makes me question any such skills I may have. Today, that is ROTERA, a block stacking game in which you must manage tetronimos falling from four directions at once. Read more

I've never really been able to do that whole counting sheep thing to get to sleep. Just doesn't work for me. Instead, my brain prefers to latch onto something embarrassing I said when I was 14 and then imagine what the people who heard that must think of me, conveniently forgetting that 15 years have passed since then and only I would ever remember such an inane moment of a life. Segue! Here's a going about counting sheep called, you'll never guess it, Sheeps, and it's a roguelite so it's actually more interesting than that, I promise. Read more

Where there's a will (and some talented, incredibly passionate modders), there is always a way in the world of video games. Today said will has manifested in the form of Borderlands Online, an MMO spin-off that was planned to be released exclusively in China as a free-to-play game. A build of that game was found a year ago, and now, it is playable. Neat! Read more

If the promises that Owlcat are making of Warhammer 40,000: Dark Heresy aren't just PR fluff, it sounds like we might be in for a good bit of fun. In Dark Heresy, you are an acolyte of the Inquisition, meaning you have to look out for that titular heresy, which actually means that you're a space cop. Boo to that in the real world, obviously, but it's a narrative device that can make for some interesting storytelling, and according to the game's narrative designer, that storytelling manifests in being able to wrap up investigations with hardly any evidence. Read more

I'm really tired of writing about genAI today. It's my first news shift with RPS, and within a few hours, I've written three stories that are solely about genAI use by modders, indie outfits and now, somehow, Jagex. Still, the horrors persist, and so I must continue reporting on them. As part of RuneFest 2026, Jagex unveiled a new trailer for RuneScape 3's Hoard of Dragons expansion, featuring the Dragon Slayer II quest, arriving in 2027. That video I linked to is a reupload by another channel, as Jagex very quickly took down their own upload of the video due to the trailer's use of genAI imagery being pointed out (thanks, Kotaku!) Read more

According to various LinkedIn posts, Eternal Strands developers Yellow Brick Games have begun laying off staff to an as yet undisclosed degree (thanks to Chris Kerr on Bluesky for the initial tip). Read more

Warhammer Survivors, Auroch Digital's take on injecting the bullet heaven popularised by Vampire Survivors with characters you can buy little figures of, finally has a release date. It's out next month, and has a new demo to fill the gap between now and then. Read more

At this point, you can't even open the Steam front page without stumbling over remake after remake (sometimes remasters, just to spice things up). To say remakes are in vogue would be an understatement: they're an almost guaranteed moneymaker that can prey on nostalgia and a lust for a 'better time' to deliver games that can offer some ephemeral reproduction of the feeling of childhood, thus protecting from the Scaries of living in the current time. And, unless you're Square Enix having the Final Fantasy VII Remake series juggle both a new story and the original as a metanarrative, remakes usually grant that sweetest of temptations: the same thing you like, forever. However, one person who seemingly takes issue with this is Takashi Iizuka, general producer of the Sonic series. In an interview with Automaton - which also touches on Sonic’s growing multimedia empire and Sega’s experience with Sonic Racing: Crossworlds as their first live service game - Iizuka suggests the blue hedgehog won’t be getting any remakes or remasters anytime soon, citing the concepts' lack of originality and still-high development costs. Read more

In Dreadline Express, you play a character who awakes in the cabin of a carriage on the last human train. It hurtles down the track, bathed in the red light of an alien sky. At the windows of the carriage, eldritch tentacles press themselves against the glass. A voice crackles at the speaker, it announces that you've been selected by lottery. You're to be sacrificed for the greater good. The message signs off "All hail the Supreme Engineer". It's an ominous beginning, but the best is still to come: Dreadline Express has a mechanic that quickly made it my favourite thing I played at Gamescom. Read more

Over the course of my illustrious tenure as RPS news mangler, I have seen many Simslikes. Tragically cancelled Simslikes from publishers better known for feats of tactical incest! Corrosively telegenic Simslikes suggestive of a paved-over burial ground! Cottagecore "don't call me a Simslike" Simslikes! And now, finally, Simslikes that appear to have been conceived in the Red Room from Twin Peaks. The game I'm referring to is Noematica: Digital Dollhouse from Asphodel Cybernetics, which exhorts you to "behold the humble Noem! Beguiling and silly-pilled, fully customizable, monstrous or adorable: with an n-dimensional vector space of fantasies and memories." Here's a trailer - get beholding. Read more

The software developer behind an unofficial PC version of N64 platformer Banjo-Kazooie has posted an impassioned screed about the usage of generative AI tools for rush-job PC ports of classic games. The dev in question is DarioSamo, a member of the modder group who released Banjo: Recompiled earlier this year. He argues that the idea that generative AI allows for faster porting is either outright "false" or simply misguided, explaining that decompiling a game – that is turning the original machine code into human-readable code – in order to release on modern platforms is supposed to be an exercise in actually understanding and preserving how that game was made. Read more

Following Microsoft's recent reveal that Hellblade makers Ninja Theory would be facing closure, with two deals to buy them after their split from Xbox have fallen through, the studio look to be in the process of informing staff they're at risk of being let go. Read more

Details about and dev chatter concerning GTA 6 continue to drip out as part of the marketing push towards its console launch in November. This time, some of the aspects of it I'm most intrigued to see how Rockstar have handled whenever they deign to bring it to PC have been discussed - how they've approached satirising the societal climate of America in 2026 through allusions to politics and the American dream. Read more

In the grim darkness of the far future, there is something far worse than war. There is: a level that is basically a huge, spinning lock full of tentacles, with your Space Marine or Sister of Battle protagonist naturally serving as the key. Auroch Digital's new FPS Warhammer 40,000: Boltgun 2 launches next week, and I've been chatting to the game's principal designer Matt Bone about some of the more "creative" environments in store. It's a sturdy rule of thumb that all the best ideas in gamedev are the ones that make your colleagues want to fill your trousers with sea urchins. Bone certainly appears to have achieved this with the map comfortingly known as Vicious Circles. Read more

Happy this week, all! I regret to inform you that the videogame developers have been at it again. Sometimes, I find that the promising new releases distribute themselves evenly throughout the week, like butter perfectly spread over just the right amount of toast. And sometimes, as with this week's haul, they congregate weirdly on Thursday and Friday. It's as though they were trying to get away from me, like rats ambushed in the pantry, pawing frantically against the weekend's closed and bolted door. Haha! Hahahaaha! There is no escape, cheese-filching squeakmonsters! Down you go! Down you go into the Maw! If you think characterising new videogames as a rodent infestation is unkind, I quite agree. Rats are sociable, adaptable, and admirable creatures who deserve better than to be compared to stupid videogames. In any case, I am only being macabre because this is the month of Halloween – hence the conspicuous abundance of horror in the list below. Read more

A fourth entry in the RuneScape series of MMOs has been announced by developers Jagex at this year's RuneFest. It's going by the obvious placeholder name of RuneScape 4 for now, is being developed using the Unreal Engine, and is still a decent way off. Read more

If you've watched the trailers for No Law or the tech demo that developer Neon Giant showed off at Unreal Fest earlier this year, it would be easy to believe the game has a similar scope to CD Projekt Red's Cyberpunk 2077. After all, both games are open-world RPGs set in cyberpunk cities. Set in a beautifully realised mediterranean city that is somehow equal parts Lisbon and Kowloon Walled City – and with corner shops that are as stuffed with riches as the one down the road from my flat. But, the developers will happily tell you where they've scrimped and saved. Read more

Sundays are for having the first lie-in in a month. No trips to visit family, no waking in unfamiliar beds, and, best of all, no having to wait until the hosts are up before you can get started on breakfast. I will be snoozing deeply in my own particular mattress before having a plate of toast and scrambled eggs at a time that I deem appropriate. Once that's all polished away, I will return to bed with a fresh cup of coffee and peruse the week's best writing at my own leisure. What's that? You want me to share? Fine. You can have a read of them when I'm done. Read more

Sometimes I Wonder About The Other Me is a 2D platformer created by "small game" developer Luis "Ludipe" Díaz Peralta, whose other works include A Place For The Unwilling. It's broken into a handful of single screen maps. On each screen, there's a Mario-brand exclamation mark block that burps a text fragment, forming an overarching monologue that begins with the title phrase. As you move between screens, you come to a signpost pointing left and right. Heading in either direction leads to a splitscreen area, with the player controlling duplicate characters. As you guide your charges rightward, one half of the screen flakes away to darkness. The remaining character returns to the starting screen, there to wonder anew about the Other Me. Read more