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I've been looking back over my news pieces about artificial intelligence tools, generative image software and/or large language models and reflecting that what I really distrust about "AI" is the fact that AI is "the future". Saying that X thing is the future is de rigueur for technology marketing. It's something you hear repeatedly from videogames companies in particular, with their sequels and console generations and other chronological fixtures that form an endless staircase towards The New.

I promise I'm not trying to turn RPS into a Soggins the Frog fansite, but... If you have a) been enjoying Cobalt Core as part of RPS Game Club this month, and b) especially like it when Soggins turns up with his ship of malfunctioning missile launchers, then I implore you to make Sunshine Heavy Industries your next port of call in your Steam library. It's what the Cobalt Core devs Rocket Rat Games made first, and you can immediately see a lot of shared DNA between the two games - not least its chunky, charming pixel visuals and some crossover between its cast of characters - including our pal Soggins.

It is, I should stress, a very different game to Cobalt Core - it's a sandboxy spaceship builder with zero combat involved, for starters - but I've been playing it again this week ahead of some other Game Club-themed articles I've got cooking, and I've been having a lovely time with it. Not least because I get to spend more time with Soggins the very smug frog, all while listening to even more excellent chill tunes from Cobalt Core composer Aaron Cherof.

Tracking technology isn't perfect. Actually, that's an understatement. Tracking technology has many pitfalls, including how Google Maps can be accidentally used to track people, and the fact that if you systematically turn off cookies, your internet browsing experience becomes increasingly bizarre. I am offered adverts for afro hair care products and huge bags of puppy kibble, because the algorithms no longer have any idea who I am or how many small dogs I have. And yet.

Surely this technology has reached the point where, if I open a game for the first time in several weeks, it should be able to tell I haven't played for a long time, and ask if I would like a small refresher of the controls.

I have never enjoyed those grid-based dungeon-crawling games. I dislike the very notion of dungeon-crawling in general, frankly, but the awkward juddery squareskipping rat-toucher games have always left me absolutely cold.

You will be shocked and aroused to learn that I preface with all this just so I can make an exception of Islands Of The Caliph. Does this mean she's becoming more open minded, or just that she's found a way to gripe and complain even within a recommendation? Who can say, readers.

What I can say is that I don't merely hate it less than its genremates. I think it's a bloody great little RPG, full of charm and detail that never drags it down.

When it comes to co-op shooters and most other multiplayer games, it's often the case that friendly fire is switched off by default or there are endless systems in place to make it a punishable offence. In Helldivers 2 it isn't actively encouraged, nor is it punished. Accidentally vaporising your teammate with an air strike is all a part of the campaign for democracy and freedom, a hilarious byproduct of human error. I gushed about it in my review, and cheery RPS fanzine PC Gamer wrote up a quick piece on the specific ways it eeks out silliness.

But comedy isn't just accidental in Helldivers 2, oh no. I think it encourages playground behaviour of the worst order: smacking your mates into things.

My excitement for Final Fantasy VII Rebirth went into overdrive this week. Not only did we get 20 more minutes of its gorgeous open worlds, mini-games and story nuggets to gawp over this week thanks to Sony's dedicated State Of Play stream for it, but the internet has also been awash with previews, interviews and all sorts of other Final Fantasy-shaped goodies. Honestly, it's like a second Christmas for me over here at the moment, it's great.

But one thing that really stuck out to me this week was a comment made by series producer Yoshinori Kitase in an interview with our friends at Eurogamer. When they asked him why remake Final Fantasy 7 at all, his response hit me much harder than I was expecting. He said that the original FF7 is "probably going to be always that game my dad played, and I don't want it to be that." Aside from making me crumble to dust with irrelevancy, this really got me thinking about older games, the way we play them now, and just what role remakes and remasters have in today's PC gaming landscape. So come and feel incredibly old with me as I try and get my (very jumbled and loosely-related) thoughts in order.

In survival games, I leave the building to everyone else, or I build the absolute bare minimum unless I really enjoy the world I'm in. I think that's a thing inherent in me, as I've never taken great pleasure in snapping together pieces of Lego, and would much rather earn killstreaks than decorate a back garden. For me, building in most games is laborious and predictable and does not sate my impatient brain.

But I like Neal Agarwal's Infinite Craft, a browser game where you slide words on top of each other and see if they generate something new. For instance, "water" and "fire" combine to make "steam", with what's practically infinitesimal possibilities. It is immediate, simple, and unpredictable. More games should facilitate haphazard engineering and silliness.

Every so often, there are games that come out that are made with real models. They're sometimes called "handmade" games, implying pure coders use their prehensile toes, but I really like it every time I see one because I love models. I like little versions of regular things! I just think they're neat. But it really is every so often, presumably because it takes even longer to make a tiny little man out of twigs and spit and scan him into a computer than it does to make him in the computer to start with. Cute miniature puzzle game Lumino City is ten years old, and Trüberbrook is coming up on five. And I first played a tiny snippet of Harold Halibut in 2018. Now, a larger snippet is available for everyone in the Steam Next Fest.

Harold Halibut is a sort of sci-fi, slightly retrofuturist point and click puzzle game about an undersea society on an alien planet. These people's ancestors blasted off to an ocean planet using the technology of a big science corporation and now, though they can't remember why, they're all pootling about under the water looking at fish. In this world of exaggerated sea-science nonsense, Harold stands out as a sort of beige lab handyman.

Readers, I must confess. I was watching Sony's State Of Play stream on Wednesday with a mind divided. I'd arranged with some pals to play an online board game with them that evening, and when news hit that it might actually be a reasonably big deal for us PC folks, I ambitiously thought: I can proooobably do both at the same time??? Reader, I was wrong, at least for the most part. The first 30 minutes of it was arguably fine, but then the 10-minute trailer for Death Stranding 2 arrived and I simply had to throw my hands up in defeat. I honestly did not understand what I was watching, and even several re-watches later, I'm still not 100% sure what Kojima thinks he's playing at.

But hot damn, do I love it anyway.

Oh my god, yes. I was a little hesitant to put this in the shortlist so soon after another stabby swordy duelling game (“Wait, five months? Really?” - Actually Looked It Up While Editing Sin) but goddamn. First Cut Colon Samurai Duel is great. You know those little, simple games that you try out on a whim and find yourself going, "I will absolutely play this all day unless someone stops me"? Yeah.

Not that Yakuza (or Like A Dragon as it's now called) hasn't felt comfortable in its skin over the years, but Like A Dragon: Infinite Wealth feels particularly confident. I think that's down to a lot of little improvements to its RPG systems that I mention in my review, but also two other things: a radio and trolleys.

My inbox is absolutely rammed with early Steam Next Fest demos at the moment. Honestly, did no one remember that February's Next Fest starts in, you know, February, in a week a bit's time this year? I'm all for getting a few things early to make the deluge of demos a bit more manageable to cover, but this year has just been a teensy bit insane. Now there's too many things to look at in advance, but hey, I'm making steady progress, and you've probably seen the fruits of a couple of these this week already. Next on the list is Dystopika, a toy-like sandbox citybuilder that's sort of in the same vein as the lovely Summerhouse I played earlier this week, but also lives at the exact opposite end of the mood and vibes scale. Whereas Summerhouse is about creating diddly little cute streets with sunny Mediterranean vibes, Dystopika is effectively: Build Your Own Blade Runner.

As part of my commitment to hating everything, I have a minor grudge against "idle" games. Because they're not, are they? You have to supervise them constantly, not relax and watch them grow organically while eating a sandwich and only occasionally intervening like a neglectful goddess.

Writer's Rush is sort of, sort of an idle game, I'd argue. It's a low pressure, low stakes, super light sim that takes the barest hint of the clicker and crosses it with sort of-sort of-sort of score attack, and somehow works without quite feeling like either. Because, I think, of its charmingly, intentionally daft representation of what being a novelist is like.

Punch some trees, get some logs, build a crafting bench. I'm bored of Palworld already, because it starts off the same as any other survival game. Of course it does! Here I was hoping for something a bit different - a legally distinct Pinser welcoming me into his home of angry cicada-likes - and I get another serving of derivative. Am I wrong in wanting a survival game that doesn't begin like the rest of them?

Readers with keen memories may remember that I recently self-described as being in my scented candle girlie era. I'm currently burning one called Starry Night, which is a nice fresh scent but it's nowhere near as strong as I would like. I can never find fresh scents that are as long-lingering as the fruity or woody ones. Anyway, I have been discussing my new interest (and interrupting work meetings with pretend candle unboxing videos where I tell them to like and subscribe and check out my collab with WickManiac) with the rest of the Treehouse, which prompted us to talk about the idea of gamer candles. They exist! They're just candles of lies.

I try to be open minded, you know. What usually happens is I give an adventure game a chance though they're all terrible (all of them), and I try. I really do. I made it several hours into Stasis Colon Bone Totem before getting frustra-bored and giving up. That may sound damning, but it's actually very good indeed, because usually that happens within about ten minutes. I can't say it defied my hatred of the genre as much as a The Last Express or The Cat Lady, but it had a good enough run to deserve talking about. Not least as I'm still curious about its setting.

It always breaks my heart a bit when a game I've been looking forward to for a while absolutely biffs it on arrival. Having quite enjoyed Golf Club Wasteland a few years ago (now called Golf Club Nostalgia for, I don't know, reasons), I was quite pumped when developers Demagog Studios announced not one, but two further games set in the same post-apocalyptic universe. The first to come out (albeit only on Netflix at the moment) was the turn-based strategy game Highwater (also a bit of a dud, based on the early Steam demo I played last year), but it's the second game, The Cub (out today on Steam) that has prompted this current moment of teeth-sucking sadness.

I've been playing a bit of it over the last week, and oh man, it's trying so, so hard to be like Limbo and Inside, but just... doing quite a terrible job of it all. I was looking forward to any excuse I could get to have the soothing sounds of Golf Club's dystopian Radio Nostalgia From Mars show back in my ear drums, but alas. I simply cannot hear it over the sound of my own screams of frustration.

After quite a while using the Fnatic Streak65, a 60% keyboard with Cherry brown switches, I have moved on from fruit (technically drupe, according to Google) and into a vegetable era. My Streak's brown switches became a bit loud and quite rattly, which, as someone with hearing declared by an audiologist to be so sensitive that I give myself tinnitus, started to get to me.

So I type this to you now as someone who's graduated to Kailh low profile switches, which is proving as nutritious for my finger pads as I'd imagine its leafy homophone would be. Here's hoping that there's more low profile mechanical keebs out there in a few years, as the options seem very limited at the mo.

We've all got 'em, right? The games we play to make ourselves feel better, to self soothe, the game we play over the Christmas break. My most recent one has been PowerWash Simulator, because it has clear goals in an organised list, it goes ding, it has a nice white noise... But imagine my shock when I re-installed Immortals Fenyx Rising for the somethingth time, and realised that it has been a comfort game for me all along.

This might make me a massive hypocrite. It's a big Ubisoft RPG filled stuff I complain about modern games having, notably a big map of empty space filled with busywork quests and collectibles. But I don't know what to tell you! It requires concentration but not too much, the set dressing all looks great, and it's doing all that AAA stuff with a wink and a smile, so it's sort of fine. It has fourth wall-breaking meta narration! How can I not like it!

Hello folks. It's probably officially too far into January to get away with saying Happy New Year now, but stuff it, I'll wish you a good one anyway, as well as a warm welcome back to Letter From The Editor. This month's letter can be considered very much a part two to the one I wrote in November, in which we had a sneaky peek at the behind the scenes process of putting together our annual RPS Advent Calendar (or in regular video game website speak, our big games of the year feature).

We always have a big old voting barney around November time to decide which games do or don't make the cut in our Advent Calendar (that is: we all submit top ten lists and we count up the votes afterwards), and every year lots of you try and guess which ones will make it over on the RPS Discord. Inevitably, there are only so many slots for what is always a heck of a lot of games put forward, but the key question has always been thus: who voted for what? WELL. For the first time ever, come and find out below as we reveal all.

Readers, I have good news and bad news. Good news. My mum got me an incredible hot chocolate maker for Christmas this year, as well as a jumbo-sized box of grated chocolate sachets to use with it. It is, quite honestly, one of the best presents she's ever given me, and it now means I can have perfect hot chocolate, practically on tap, in as little as three minutes. Hotel Chocolat's Velvetiser, you're an absolute beauty. Honestly, it is so much better than anything I could make, or have made, myself. It's fast, easy, wonderfully smooth and properly delicious hot chocolate. Crucially, the machine itself is also dead simple to clean. Gone are the days I have to worry about washing up a pan of semi-encrusted milk afterwards, or faffing about with how many teaspoons of hot chocolate powder to plonk in because I accidentally coughed and sent half of it flying all over the counter.

Bad news. This recent revelation of such effortless, technological ease has instantly kneecapped any excitement or desire I might have had for Kitfox Games' new tea brewing sim they announced at the tail end of last year, or indeed any other kind of drink-based simulation game (of which there seem to be an increasing number of these days). Whereas before I might have revelled in the step-by-step process of making a perfect hot drink, I have now been fully converted to the ways of instant button pressing and time-saving efficiency. After all, why dwell on the manual minutiae when machinery is king?

Kainga Colon Seeds of Civilization is one of many, many games that I didn't get on with for some reason or other in early access, and has subsequently sat in my pile long past a 1.0 release, neglected and generating a vague guilt. It's come some way since, but its edges are still a little rough, with (usually) minor bugs and limited feedback wrapped up in a design that's influenced, of course, by that vague shimmering ghost of Rogue (and thus is innately bad and you're all just wrong). So yeah, it kinda has problems.

But I like it. Weird, huh?

I reached the Elden Ring exhaustion point a couple of years ago… and I still don't think I've climbed out of my slump. Yes, I gave the game a Bestest Best badge that I stand by, but I also think it's one of FromSoftware's most taxing soulslike creations. It's so colossal that, by the end of my adventure, I'd had enough of the umpteenth boss. I wanted rid.

With talk of Elden Ring's Shadow Of The Erdtree DLC spinning up as 2024 begins, I've assessed my feelings and come to the conclusion that I'm not as excited as I would've been had the game and its DLC somehow existed a few years ago. To be honest with you, part of me hopes it just ends up being a roguelike. That way I might actually get into it.

Earlier this week, I shared a Tweet, or X post or whatever, that was a Twitter Film Guy being like, "It's a burden talking to people about my passion, movies, because I think about them on a fundamentally different level". Like, okay, Scorsese, you can say you didn't really like Murder Mystery 2, the normies won't chase you out of town with pitchforks. You know what actually is a burden? Your passions being watching hours of anti-multi-level marketing (MLM) YouTube videos, which is the content hole I fell down over the Christmas break. Your weird uncles have at least seen a film before, but it's not like I can turn to my mum and ask her if she thinks the weird Monat Christians are worse than the Seint make-up TikTok girlies without explaining almost every word in the sentence.

Anyway. My point is: someone should make an MLM simulation game.

Over the Christmas holidays, I had very good intentions to finally tackle some of the big games from 2023. I still haven't played Resident Evil 4, System Shock, very much of Baldur's Gate 3 or Assassin's Creed Mirage, and I really wanted to play a bit of Avatar: Frontiers Of Pandora. You know, just for a little look after the quite interesting preview I did back in October. Admittedly, I wasn't anywhere near my PC for at least one of the two weeks I had off, as I was away doing the inevitable family roulette of Christmas visiting. I also knew that, even if I had spent the whole time at home, there would be no way I'd finish or get through all of them. I knew I was sort of setting myself up to fail, but as I said. Good intentions. I did have my Steam Deck with me, after all, and even went to the trouble of loading it up with around 50 games, including some of those biggies that I have on Steam.

What did I actually end up playing though? Teeny games. Six of 'em, which were all four to six hours long. And some of them I didn't even enjoy very much! Why? Why do I do this? In some respects I'm pleased I managed to clear a bit more of my backlog, but man alive, I always fall into exactly the same trap. I play the shorties, and always leave the biggies, like I'm allergic to anything over four hours - and I don't like it.

Much as I enjoyed Spellcaster University, I was surprised it was so successful. Its dependency on randomly assigning you buildings differentiated it from the kind of full management game I'd expected, and which I assumed most people would want.

Happily, I was wrong: it did fine. Happilyer still, Mind Over Magic is here (though in early access) to provide a somewhat more traditional design, and it's already compelling enough to turn my quick test into a seven hour delve.

I watched Studio Ghibli's latest film The Boy And The Heron the other day, having gone in basically blind. I knew it would be the case, but I left the cinema and said to my mate, "I don't really know what just happened but what happened was great". It was a lot of things! A visual feast. Surprisingly goofy. Unsettling. But above all, a challenge. We walked back to our cars and tried - my mate was thrilled to have identified who Dave Bautista likely voiced in the dub (we watched sub) - to unpack what we saw.

Since then, we've listened to podcasts, read interviews, and engaged in some back and forth. It's all brought me back to my uni days, where Dark Souls made me get my shovel out for the first time and mine the internet for meaning. Much like Souls, Ghibli's latest only expands as you reflect on it.

In 2024, I am learning to do cryptic crosswords. Last year I complained about Puzzmo's crossword clues being very US-centric and Excors commented that US and UK puzzles seem very different, both in their form and in the fact that UK crosswords are often crytpic. Which is true! Often if you see a "quick crossword" in a UK paper that means "crossword with clues that are general knowledge questions and not an archaic set of riddles - you know, for if you're waiting for the kettle to boil, or are an idiot". So I decided to look into how you actually do cryptics. It's way harder than I thought, but at the same time I did not realise it's just smug puns.

Bahnsen Knights knows what not to tell you. Its world is largely a mystery, because all that matters is the situation its protagonist Boulder is stuck way, way too deep in. Everything feels like it's about to come to a head somehow, even though you have very little idea what's going on.

Its world could almost be a post-apocalypse one, a feeling that persists even though it's unclear how true it is, how much is ambient cult brainwashing, and how much just the result of Boulder starting to lose himself after being undercover for far too long.

My Steam Wrapped listed Baldur's Gate 3 and Vampire Survivors as my top two games of 2023. If Epic Games and my Switch were involved, Fortnite and Persona 5 Royal would've absolutely been included in the lineup, too. Motivation has lain mostly in co-op capers with friends, hangs with virtual pals, or in the battle royale-verse. Otherwise, nothing has truly given me the itch.

But I think 2024 could be a big one for me. Not only are a number of upcoming RPGs right up my alley, they align with new and existing motivations: hangs with pals and Japanese language learning. For the first time, I'm excited to embrace the grind both in-game and outside of it.