Supporters

Typically, I'd take the title as a fair warning that this is roguelikey and thus Not My Bag. But it's been a while since I've played a good arcadey blaster, and I'm on a bit of a space kick lately and... ooh, go on then.

Rogue Eclipse fortunately leans more arcade than arbitrary, and shortcuts, alternative weapons, and ship tweaks come fairly quickly. You begin more than capable, and the action itself is the point, rather than masochistically testing yourself for the sake of it. It's pretty great action too, which outweighs some frustrations that even roguelike fans might concede could be polished down a little.

For the months leading up to September, there was a certain amount of steadying ourselves. Hovering over the month of November like a giant steel toe-capped boot, GTA 6's looming release date drove many developers to shift their game's launch to this month or simply pushed them back into 2027.

Now three weeks into the full flow of game releases – which has seen Mark up to his neck in Blood of Dawnwalker, James swinging a great big hammer in Control Resonant, while somehow also reviewing Valve's new VR headset, and Edwin diving into the horrors of both Roman Sands RE:Build and Silent Hill: Downfall, as well as two Jay Castello reviews, Moonlighter 2 and Nighthawks – we are almost through and out the other side.

You've hopefully already seen the desks of Julian, James, and Callum, and since Callum oh-so-graciously tossed the gauntlet down at my feet last time, it is now my turn to reveal the thing that I sit at each day.

Welcome to a deep dive into the setup that supports my aching frame as I tap keys in order to write the guides that most supporters do not peruse, for you are an educated lot who seem to use mystical magicks known as "RSS Readers" that provide you with only the best writing of RPS. Not, for instance, my examinations of how to make a giant toad happy in Mortal Shell 2.

But I digress! The last time I talked about my desk in these parts, it was to lament how a boss fight made me so pissed off that I bashed a chunk out of it. I promise there is more to me than dysregulated gamer rage, so let us embark now on a tour of my world; follow along with the numbers and arrows, class!

I emerge from my Batcave with a roar and ominously roll towards the streets of Gotham. Cloaked in jet black, I'm impossible to make out in the shadows, with only brief stretches of lit tarmac revealing my terror-inducing true form. I'm a rich playboy underneath, but to my foes, I'm a Dark Knight. My chariot sounds like thunder and goes like lightning. Tonight's bound to be a bad one for any opponent who crosses my path.

CORRECTIONS AND CLARIFICATIONS: I recently wrote that Vholume, that indie parkour game about sprinting through brutalist, unfinished-custom-Half-Life 2 Deathmatch-map-lookin’ megastructures, was "alright." This was incorrect. It is fact a "good game," with quote marks because I said it just now. RPS regrets the error.

Last night I was continuing my Sisyphean task of completing Star Wars: Zero Company so I can get down to writing the review. Judging by mission lists online, I am about two thirds of the way through the story. I don't know if that means I'm two thirds of the way through the playtime, however, as the missions seem to be getting longer and longer. Perhaps Sisyphus is the wrong comparison, and this is a case of Star Wars: Zeno's Paradox.

Early on in my time with Sprawl Zero, I entered an otherwise forgettable room containing the absolute best puddle. Just, the Dark Souls of puddles: delicately embossed with oil around its rim, frighteningly clear in the centre. The kind of puddle you don't get in videogames nowadays, with their funky raytracing. An icy reverse render of the breezeblock walls and girdered ceiling, with no hint of the metal beneath, no transparency at all. Not a puddle, but a portal. The kind of surface from which you'd expect a gauzy hand to emerge, offering a magic sword. Or more plausibly in context, a fully loaded gauss rifle with a pop-out holographic display.

Awk awk awk awk, awk awk awk awk, awk awk awk awk awk awk awk awk awk awk awk awk awk. Awk awk awk awk: awk awk awk awk awk, awk awk awk awk awk awk awk awk. Awk? Awk awk awk awk awk awk awk awk awk awk awk awk awk awk awk awk awk awk awk awk awk awk awk awk awk awk awk awk awk.

Awk awk awk awk, awk awk. (Awk, awk awk.) Awk awk awk awk awk, awk awk awk awk.

"I don’t think I’ve ever made a game you guys have entirely liked," solo Bulwark and The Falconeer dev Tomas Sala recently told me at a Gamescom side-event. I kind of wish he hadn’t, partly because it activated the part of my brain that fears being punched for something Sin wrote, and partly because me returning from Cologne, immediately installing the ShipShaper: Falconeer Chronicles demo, and enjoying it now looks like an untoward lapse into industry appeasement.

Nevertheless, I do, I’m afraid, like it – entirely. As a dedicated boat-building game, it’s smaller in scope than its strategy and aerial combat cousins, yet is quick to tickle your own creative bones by welding precise, Blender-style model tweaking to accessible, loosely Townscaper-esque snappiness. It also happens to be launching in early access today, with an aforementioned Steam demo that’s been updated significantly since Mark tried it earlier this year.

I’ve become convinced that every Gamescom attendee who posts a variant of "Great time, so exhausted!!!" as they leave the Koelnmesse is, in fact, putting on a front. Gamescom is not merely exhausting. Gamescom is a place in which thousands of people, who’ve dedicated their lives to an almost entirely sedentary pursuit, are forced to strap themselves with overstuffed rucksacks before walking distances equivalent to circumnavigating the god-damned Moon just to get from one side of Halle 3.2 to the other side of Halle 4.1. Gamescom is a public health menace, capable of reshaping the spines of its encumbered visitors and even, for those who occupy the business section, forcing them back into an earlier, hunter-gatherer stage of human evolution.

If you’re in the B2B area, see, it’s because you’re there to work, which inevitably means you have no time for anything else. Breakfast? Lunch? These concepts are powerless against the onslaught of preview appointments and developer interviews. Yet if one is to survive, let alone endure Gamescom’s physical trials, fuel is essential. That’s why an increasingly common sight at the world’s biggest games fair is the scavenging journalist, picking at the business section’s (ideally unguarded) selection of snack bowls and plates. The scavenging journalists of RPS are, of course, no exception.

As you might have seen me mention last week, I recently set about modding up Skyrim for my first proper delve back into it in a good few years. It's something of a ritual at this point, much like my biennial New Vegas playthrough or quarterly dips back into Cyberpunk 2077 simply because I like hanging out in a dystopian future that, unlike the one we're living through in the real world, can't hurt me.

We are a week out from Gamescom and there is an air of busyness all about the Treehouse. The trade show in Cologne will be a lot of work itself, but we roll straight from that into the most packed September I can remember, and that's followed by… well, I'll get to that in a minute.

Most people reading will have no, or a completely wrong idea of what it means to have huge Amiga energy. This is a catastrophic failure of game culture, obediently fixated as it is on the handful of corporations that had all the advertising money in the USA. But anyway.

Neofeud 2 radiates it. It's in the sound, of course. It's in the primitive, kind of bad animations (not because they're bad - variety was the watchword of Amiga culture - but because of why they're bad, and why they're not). The heart-on-sleeve extremes of its setting and dialogue, the direct and naked references and blatant influences. It is very punk, politically and artistically. It's rough and a little clumsy because that stuff isn’t why you make something.

In the wake of James and Julian showing off their delightful collections of prize hog pictures and ugly contoured mouse mats, I too have volunteered as tribute to announce to the world that I don't work in a fancy office. No, instead I sit in a seedy den in the corner of my bedroom, and I'm not protected by the watchful gaze of Caesar, the wise, benevolent pig, or an oceanic Cornish coaster. My friend Ugly Squidward keeps me company, whispering secrets into my ear.

After writing about Mortal Shell 2's approach to difficulty earlier, it got me thinking about why I bounced off Soulslike games. They're one of the biggest genres in gaming, adored and lionised by so many. I've tried many over the years, but never completed any of them.

But, it didn't have to be this way. And I'm going to lay the blame on the doorstep of my old boss, Keza MacDonald.

If you managed to make it to the end of Julian’s desk tour without being hypnotised by the terrible beauty of that plump, vast, prize-winning Sussex hog, you’ll recall that he (Julian, not the hog) challenged the rest of us to share our own workspaces. First cheekily, then mockingly. "Nice desk pictures, Captain No Desk Pictures," he’d sneer, before roaring out of the Ziff Davis office on his motorbike. Or it may have been a bicycle, I wasn’t sure. My eyes were too full of tears.

Well, fine. FINE. Here’s where I park myself, plus all the bits and bobs that keep me company, and yes - you can click the photo to make it bigger.

"That's an old meme!", condemned a long-ago group chat when I cheerfully linked to Cato colon Buttered Cat . Yeah, well, so are kissing girls and being weird, and I never let that stop me from enjoying those!!! Although admittedly, it’s not unheard of for them to conflict.

It's based on a gag, see. Cats land on their feet, and toast always lands buttered side down. Therefore, strap them together and you get a perpetually rotating hoverbeast. This forms one of those puzzle games about navigating two distinct characters through a series of 2D platformy rooms. I suppose it's technically three, since when combined they can essentially fly via multi-jumping. It makes for an easygoing little game that I haven't entirely fallen for, but wouldn't struggle to recommend.

My relationship with the Assassin’s Creed series has, for a long time, mirrored the relationship a quirky distant relation of the titular order might have with the young prodigy their chapter’s mentor is training up. Especially prior to getting into games journo, I’d make the effort to check in every two years or so and see what the whippersnapper looked like.

It’s finally here. Today, at long last, I take righteous vengeance on Hollow Knight: Silksong developers/publishers/inflictors Team Cherry. Every punt of double-mask contact damage, every Dark Souls 2-ass checkpoint placement, every single strand of life-giving silk that Bilewater’s muckmaggots have gnawed clean from my bone cavities, all will be repaid tenfold when I spoil their Sea of Sorrow DLC reveal by revealing – exclusively, for RPS Supporters – what I’ve seen of it. In my dreams.

With a remaster on the way from Nightdive, I've been revisiting 1998's Thief: The Dark Project and trying to work out what I find so magical about its stealth. In brief, I think of Thief's stealth as a form of dissociation - a kind of surging and ebbing, out-of-body experience. Dissociation is a clinical condition, of course - I don't want to trivialise the suffering of people who lose all sense of time and identity as a symptom of trauma. But dissociation is more than anguish and disarray. There is also the milder experience of dissociation as daydream and reverie, a gentle loosening of the screws. You glance down and find that your arms and legs are far removed, like roads or rivers along a sunny valley floor. You try to reestablish the connection to those vagabond, limblike geographies, and realise you have nothing to connect them to.

House of Legacy is baffling. It has almost no sound. Its many characters are entirely unmemorable. It's unclear and awkward, and its whole starting phase is repetitive grinding that makes your first milestone 'Made enough money to delegate this away.' It's a single-save game, so you can't really screw around to see what's possible.

But it's so pleasant to keep playing. There's always something to reach for, and always a gentle brush of soft leaves against your hand as you do. It lacks drama, but hints at it just enough for you to fill in the gaps yourself. The product of all that, somehow, is this:

You have to stop me. I have so much to do just to survive this summer. I can't lose another day to this bloody game.

Now where's my editor's pen, I know I left it here last time I wrote one of these. Ah, here it is, under all the dust and cobwebs…

A frustrating result of early access becoming entrenched as a concept: players condemning such a game for being unfinished, or awkward, or very wobbly. Some completely unrelated game by entirely different people was fine straight away, was it? Well we should definitely punish these people for not having those resources. That'll definitely encourage others.

Spacefleet Colon Heat Death is perhaps not the best candidate to start that argument over, mind. Its awkward and opaque parts make it more potential than game at this stage, and it's cursed to appear in the shadow of Nebulous, despite their very different designs and aims. It's not good, and it's not a janky but loveable underdog. But I want it to get there.

James and I began heading into the Ziff Davis offices this week. It's a strange place of coffee machines, personal lockers, tasteful scandi decor (except for the gurning Vault Boy statue giving a big thumbs up in the cafeteria), and, most importantly in a heat wave, air conditioning.

While pleasant overall, Ziff operates something I find anathema to my very soul: a clean desk policy.

We’ve reached the point in the year when we on RPS remember oh, yeah, we should probably start thinking about the RPS 100. Which means it’s time for me to start thinking about both Team Fortress 2 – the best game ever made, including over that one you like – and, by extension, the grey little corner of TF2 in which I spent about two years squatting in.

"Are we eating their babies?" asked my brain a few seconds before I would have fallen into the most blissful sleep ever achieved. Well yeah, probably. I'd explain that I'm being forced to, if I somehow could. Maybe work out a plan to smuggle them into the government/finance centre of the evil Australian feudostate, or tell them something we could... well anyway, the point is, life isn't like that most of the time. The system is not an episode of Star Trek, it's the thing that'll kill your family if you don't harvest enough crabs.

Which all sounds far more bleak than Crabmeat feels in practice. It is somewhere between an Actually Useful Job simulator and low-concentration suspense horror. It won't take more than an afternoon, and it won't wreck your nerves or demand a lot of skill or intensity. It's almost fun, in that "getting things done" way that physical work can be. The danger is manageable.

So far.

Talk of the new Steam Machine’s living room PC bona fides usually come down to its size or its noise, both of which could be described as "very little." In third place, I’d argue, must come its tidiness. Whereas my big-lad Windows PC has enough wires spilling out to strangle the Colossus of Rhodes, I rarely need to add to the power and display cables hidden behind Valve’s SteamOS cube; in particular, its integrated Steam Controller antenna means I get gamepad and (near enough) mouse input without so much as a USB receiver.

In a lounge environment, this is appreciated cable-cutting. But I’ve also discovered that it denies, or at the very least discourages, one of the Steam Controller’s most gratifying interactions: magnetically snapping on its cabled charging puck.

I don't particularly care that the rotors can upgrade to have a special power that hacks apart everyone standing nearby. I just want to stand under them for a while.

I thought I'd be comparing Megacopter Colon Blades of the Goddess to something like the Strike series, but it's much more of an arcade blaster deal. There are a few details I grumbled and whinged to myself about, and yet I was quickly way more caught up in it than I'd expected.

It was Ansel Adams, the pioneering landscape photographer, who once declared: "You don’t take a photograph, you make it." Evidence suggests he was talking about pictures of mountains and cool-looking sticks, rather than computer components and handheld game devices, but we in the PC media biz could still stand to learn from Adams’ timeless wisdom.

All of which is to say: my hardware photos are full of bullshit.

Helicopters are insane machines and should not exist. Yes, I'm sure they have unique and valuable uses, even outside the murder industries. I don't care. They are ludicrous devices and we should not tamper with their like again.

Hardware sims are a bit of a blind spot for me, as a player. I see the appeal of some, but machines generally get less interesting to play with the more automated they become. So I might not normally have paid much attention to Hijong Park’s Defender Patrol.

But Hijong Park is the maestro behind the best reinventions of ancient arcade games around. And rather than jump to modernity, they've applied their usual treatment to early 90s aerial combat sims. I had to know.