Usually with something like this I’d say “Remember Pharaoh? It’s like that,” except it turns out I misremembered Pharaoh. Since playing the demo of A New Era, and going through some early campaign levels, it has come back to me that I basically only played the first few bits of original Pharaoh over and over again, because Pharaoh is actually quite hard. It’s a collision of your usual city-builder interlocking systems, and vibes-based town planning....

For what it’s worth, Kinetic Games have the August update labled as a “minor update” on their development log but I beg to differ. Phasmophobia’s developers have been sharing sneak peeks at the update since earlier this month and things are looking especially frightening. The former solo developer project picked up a second programmer and a 3D artist earlier this year. With dedicated art support, all the tools you’re used to carrying around are getting a face lift....

To get this price, select the Ubuntu Linux 20.04 LTS operating system and use VOUCHERCODES8 at checkout. Linux is a completely free operating system, unlike Windows, so you can knock £50 off the purchase price just by ticking this box - and of course, you’re free to install Windows 10 or 11 afterwards. Keys for Windows 7/8/10 work on Windows 11 too, so you probably already have a key lying around - or you can pick up a new one for less than £50 online....

Get the EVGA CLC 360mm RGB AiO for £82 (was £109) The EVGA CLC 360mm includes some subtle RGB lighting on the Asetek-based pump, but the focus here is really on performance. Having three 120mm fans provides a lot of cooling power, and the larger radiator increases the amount of heat that can be soaked before you start to notice higher CPU temperatures. That means the CLC 360mm is ideal for those higher-power CPUs, like Intel’s recent Core i9 examples, but it does come with some downsides as well....

Myers is a hedge fund director, and an utter sod, obviously. He’d sell a truckload of tiger willies if it made him a tenner, and laugh about it afterwards. He’d make a crocodile eat a big hot anvil made of poison, while people threw pennies into a hat. He doesn’t care about animals. Far worse, he has no interest in them. But despite this, as I’ve been pottering along with the campaign during quiet evenings in recent weeks, I’ve come to find him a strangely welcome, refreshing presence....

It’s a surprisingly versatile bit of kit, the Playdate, and one I feel will enchant and enthral anyone who has a deep and inherent love of all things games. Sure, there’s every possibility it may end up as another Ouya-style disaster show, but if you’ve ever longed for something like Lexaloffle’s Pico-8 platform to be more than just a ‘fantasy console’, then the Playdate is exactly what you’ve been waiting for....

Look at it. That’s the long lens shot of it everyone is rinsing, in the header there. You can just imagine painting that circular bit on the left in white acrylic paint, and your mum putting it on the shelf with all the spaghetti so it would dry, except you couldn’t be that patient so you started painting it silver too soon and that bit ended up being streaky compared to the rest....

Post Void, I had thought, was about being fast. I was probably too old to ever be good at it. That never mattered even when I thought it was true, but it isn’t. Post Void is about letting the game take you. Its hypnotic rhythms, its lurid colours, its cacophony of violence and strangled, somehow endlessly escalating guitars. There is a space in your mind between reflex and conscious decision, between panic and triumph....

Resident Evil Village’s demo will give players an hour to poke around village and castle sections of the game (are there others? I have no idea). Capcom have previously released village and castle demos separately for PlayStationeers, available for a single day and 30 minutes of play, but this is the PC (and Xbox) debut. The demo is due to be playable between midnight UTC on Sunday the 2nd of May (that’s 1am for us in the UK, and 5pm on Saturday for Pacificians) and midnight UTC on Monday the 10th (etc)....

Island Bound was lightly teased last October, back when Paradox announced a PC release of Psych Ward, Prison Architect’s dive into the extremely fraught waters of mental health in prison. This time ‘round, they’re doing Alcatraz. To state the obvious, Island Bound lets you set up a fortified prison complex out at sea, no roads required. Instead, you’ll be setting up helipads and docks to ferry in supplies or new inmates - which in turn means more ways for illicit goods to be snuck behind bars....

At the time development started, NOVECT were less a development studio, and more of a group of univeristy friends with minimal coding experience but a love for telling stories; a hobby project run by friends on the side of university and normal jobs inside and out of the games industry, only becoming a fully-fledged studio later down the line. Fast forward to today, NOVECT are a firmly-established indie developer with games and multimedia adaptations of their work under their belt, and new project still mysteriously known as “Project Code Name ‘M’” now in the works....

Darktide is a fun Left 4 Dead-ish cooperative FPS (as our Warhammer 40,000: Darktide review will tell you) with two flaws: 1) not enough levels; 2) a wholly uninteresting grind to get better random rolls of weapons and make numbers bigger. Progress on #1 appears slow, though largely because Fatshark haven’t talked much about it so we don’t know what’s going on. Progress on #2 is frustrating because their plan is to rework it, not remove it....

The XL version of the Razer Iskur gaming chair is down to £287, nearly half the price it is on Razer’s official website and an all-time historic low price. Curiously, it’s also nearly £230 cheaper than the regular size version! Katharine reviewed that Iskur previously and rated it highly, so if this size fits you then this is a nice chance to pick it up at a very fair price....

In this guide, we’ll explain how to gain and lose honor in Red Dead Redemption 2, along with a full breakdown of every honor rank and their respective rewards. How to gain or lose honor This is pretty simple and works as you’d expect. You’ll earn honor for actions that are perceived to be, well, nice. Rescue strangers from danger, stop a coach from being robbed or turn a criminal into the law and you’ll earn honor points....

A year after forming to look into everything from casinos to loot boxes, the Select Committee on The Social And Economic Impact Of The Gambling Industry published their report today. You can read that in full in his here PDF. Over the past year, recommendations to regulate loot boxes in the UK have come from a Parliament committee, NHS England’s director for mental health, and the Children’s Commissioner. This new report refers to some of those statements....

You can see the moment in question at the 1:17:05 mark below: Little else was revealed about the game in the show - a full reveal will no doubt likely come during Geoff Keighley’s Summer Game Fest bonanza next month - but we do have a few theories on what it might mean for the series below. Spoilers ahead, you have been warned. As you may recall, Star Wars Jedi: Fallen Order starred the galaxy’s most basic Jedi, Cal Kestis, along with his cute futuristic Fjallraven Kånken of a robot, BD-1....

If you’d not followed along with Prodeus, Bounding Box describe it as “a first-person shooter of old, re-imagined using modern rendering techniques.” It sure is exactly what it says there on the tin, including a campaign mode full of baddies to shoot. Catch all that on show here in the new trailer. At the 1:50 mark you can catch a look at that co-op, and your protagonist’s space-y face. Two miniguns are better than one, after all....

The legal complaint was brought by former executive assistant Sharon O’Donnell, who was fired from Riot Games in July 2020. As reported by Vice, the suit alleges that Laurent asked O’Donnell to “‘cum’ over to his house while his wife was away”, asked her to travel with him outside of work, and told her to be more feminine and to watch her tone. O’Donnell’s suit says that she complained about Laurent’s behaviour to Riot Games’ HR department, and alleges that her termination related to those complaints....

“Roguelike” always feels like an inadequate phrase when describing Risk Of Rain, and “platformer” doesn’t really communicate the flavour of the experience either. You’re better to think of it, in 2022, as Vampire Survivors as viewed from a side-on perspective. You’re going to pick a character, make that character enormously powerful with active and passive skills over the course of a run, and battle against ever-growing swarms of enemies. In Returns, each character will have three alternate abilities, although the video above only shows one for each....

As the unofficial resident expert on giant robots here at RPS, I’ll just say: cor, those are some phenomenal giant robots. Brillo stuff, Star Renegades. Each run of Star Renegades puts you at the start of a swelling rebellion against the invasion of an existentially-terrifying state known as the Imperium. If you’re lucky, you’ll find a way to smash an oppressive, interdimensional empire out of your reality for good. Fail, and you’ll just hop to a new dimension to try again....