Ni no Kuni 2: Revenant Kingdom and its DLC are now available on Game Pass

As of today, Ni no Kuni 2: Revenant Kingdom and all its DLC are available via Xbox Game Pass. Level-5's JRPG is set long after the events of the first game, has a new cast of characters, changes up combat a lot, and adds a sizeable kingdom management element to the game. I know people who like it and people who hate it, which in itself makes it interesting.

There are also a bunch of games leaving Game Pass at the end of the month, including Chinatown Detective Agency.

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EVE Online's developers are making a blockchain game in the EVE universe

EVE Online developers CCP Games are working on a new game set within the EVE universe. That's the good news. The bad news is that it will use blockchain technology, after CCP received $40 million (around £32.7 million) from venture capital firm Andreessen Horowitz.

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Battlefield: Bad Company 2 (and 1 and BF1943) will be removed from sale next month

EA are removing Battlefield 1943 and Bad Company 1 & 2 from sale on April 28th, and closing down online services for all three on December 8th, 2023. If you already own copies of the games you'll still be able to play their offline features, such as Bad Company 2's beloved singleplayer campaign.

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XCOM director Jake Solomon wants to open a new studio and make "more of a life simulator"

Jake Solomon was a longtime designer and director at studio Firaxis, and he was pretty publicly the figurehead for big strategy games like XCOM 2 and Marvel’s Midnight Suns. So last month, it was pretty big news to hear he was leaving Firaxis behind to chase a “new dream.” At the time, it was unclear what that dream was, but thanks to a podcast interview with My Perfect Console (spotted and transcribed by VGC) we now have an idea of what Solomon will do next. It involves opening a new studio and working on strategy games, unlike the ones he made at Firaxis.

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Tired of remakes? Check out this chunky PSX-style Dead Space Demake

Remakes are all the rage these days. It feels like every classic from Resident Evil 4 to Final Fantasy 7 is getting a shiny facelift, reimagining the polygonal blocks from yesteryear and turning them into scarily realistic blockbusters. But, every so often I get an itch. An itch to go back in time to my low-detail-graphics childhood, sitting on the floor, looking up at a squared CRT. And that’s what a good demake is for; specifically, the Dead Space Demake.

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The Witcher's multiplayer spin-off might be rebooting development

Last year publisher CD Projekt Red announced Project Sirius, a spin-off to The Witcher from Molasses Flood - the studio behind Flame In The Flood and Drakes Hollow. But it seems we might need to wait a while more to see the untitled project, as it looks like it's getting rebooted to start development from scratch.

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Tchia review: a gorgeous open-world adventure bursting with heart

After playing a short snippet of Tchia back in January for a preview, I had complete faith that developers Awaceb would deliver on their promises for their open-world adventure. Tchia’s island is a marvel to behold. Not only is it gorgeous, but it’s bursting with things to do: sailing, climbing, totem carving, gliding, pearl diving, sharpshooting, tree hopping, treasure hunting - the list goes on and on.

Not only that, but there’s a 10-hour story to follow, quests to complete, and baddies to tussle with. It's a lot, but Awaceb seem to take it all in their stride. Never once does Tchia feel like it’s bursting at the seams; its balance of activities, exploration and story make it feel perfectly whole. The game's incredible scope doesn't feel like the debut of a nine-person team, but astonishingly, it is. We've had a good run of Bestest Bests on RPS this month, and I'm more than happy to extend it because Tchia is an absolute triumph.

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After a decade in limbo, indie darling Cart Life returns to Steam

Hurray for game preservation: Cart Life is coming back to Steam later this year. You might remember the retail sim as the monochromatic indie from 2010 about three street vendors who struggle to make ends meet. It was a kind of precursor to Papers, Please, and despite critical acclaim and big wins at IGF, Cart Life’s creator Richard Hofmeier removed the game from Steam almost a decade ago - instead opting to release the source code for free.

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Pick up 32GB of Corsair DDR5-6000 CL36 RAM for £120 after a 53% discount

High speed, low latency DDR5 RAM continues to drop in price, and now it's possible to pick up a high-speed 32GB kit of DDR5-6000 CL36 for just £120, as Corsair's Vengeance dual-channel kit is down to £119.99 at Amazon UK. This is less than half the price that this DDR5 kit launched at in October last year, especially given that the RAM still cost £173 in February!

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One of the fastest SSDs, Solidigm's P44 Pro 1TB, is down to $69.99 at Amazon

When it comes to SSDs, the brands we probably think about most often are WD, Samsung, Crucial and Kioxia, each of which creates their own flash memory. However, we're missing the fifth place NAND flash memory manufacturer, another brand that creates their own flash memory and controllers: SK Hynix, or as their consumer brand is labelled, Solidigm (meant to rhyme with paradigm for some reason).

I recently upgraded a laptop I'm testing with their P44 Pro 1TB drive, and I've been thrilled with its performance - and now, this drive has hit a scorchingly hot price on Amazon US. You can now pick up this drive for just $69.99 after a 44% discount from its US MSRP of $124.99, an incredible price for a high-end PCIe 4.0 drive.

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400 Twitch employees have been laid off amid more huge Amazon cuts

After laying off more than 18,000 people in January, Amazon is shrinking its workforce again, this time by cutting 9,000 jobs in their cloud service, human resources, and advertising divisions. A further 400 Twitch employees will be affected, according to a brief memo from Twitch’s new CEO Dan Clancy.

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Destiny 2 and live service has surprising parallels with piss-coloured walls

Exciting times! Liam and I have wrapped Inventory Space episode two, in which we documented several weeks of us returning to Bungie’s live service behemoth Destiny 2. We found it to be an FPS delight, but one that’s wrapped in a taxing MMO.

One thing I can’t stop thinking about are the game’s piss-coloured walls. They appear right at the beginning of the game’s latest expansion Lightfall and I genuinely believe they summarise Destiny perfectly.

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Get an RTX 4070 gaming laptop from Lenovo for £1615 with this code

Want a super-fast gaming laptop? With the very latest components, including a 13th-gen Core i7 processor and GTX 4070 graphics card? Of course you do - and now one is significantly more affordable, thanks to a 15% off discount code at Lenovo's web store that knocks £285 off one of their best gaming laptops. With code LEGION15, you can pick up a £1900 laptop for £1615, an incredible deal for this bleeding-edge spec!

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Inventory Space: Destiny 2 is an unparalleled FPS wrapped in a taxing MMO

Having spent several weeks with space orbs and triangles, Liam and I have returned from our intergalactic escapades with a spot of news: Inventory Space episode two is a go! It's a video series in which we spend our precious free time with live service games to see how much they demand from our schedules, and whether we're truly able to experience the best of them without crumbling to dust.

So, please join us, as we tackle Bungie's FPS behemoth Destiny 2. Was it worth our time? And crucially, is it worth yours?

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Pick up a titanic 4TB Crucial P3 Plus PCIe 4.0 SSD for $225

Want a big-ol' SSD for your games, media and what-not? The Crucial P3 Plus is currently reduced at Best Buy, where the massive 4TB size is down to $225. That's nearly $40 off its previous price and a great value for a drive of this spec.

For the record, the P3 Plus is a PCIe 4.0 SSD, with up to 5000MB/s reads and 4200MB/s writes. It uses QLC flash in a DRAM-less design, but with HMB technology - so it uses your computer's RAM as its cache. That allows it to provide surprisingly excellent performance, although we'd still recommend a higher-end TLC drive with a DRAM cache for the most intensive workloads, like 4K video production. For gaming and regular use though, this is a great choice!

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Cal looks for a safe haven in Star Wars Jedi: Survivor's newest story trailer

We recently got a 9-minute look at Star Wars Jedi: Survivor's lightsaber swinging combat and it confirmed that yes, Cal still really likes stabbing animals in a fashion that’s unbecoming of a Jedi. It also looked beautiful. But what’s actually happening this time around? Well, EA have released a new story trailer for the sequel, catching us up with an older version of the Mantis crew.

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Disco Elysium lawsuit woes continue as fired devs double down on claims of fraud at Studio ZA/UM

The already troubled goings-on at ZA/UM - the studio that developed Disco Elysium - have gotten messier than Harry’s own apartment. Last week ZA/UM announced that one of its legal disputes had been resolved and that they expected the rest of their legal troubles to "fall apart." But fired game director Robert Kurvitz and art director Aleksander Rostov took the oppurtunity to double down on their lawsuit and dispute the studio's claims, calling them "wrong and misleading in several respects."

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The Sims rival Life By You reveals its open world, dialogue trees, and third person mode

Earlier this month, Paradox revealed Life By You, a competitor to The Sims led by former EA exec Rod Humble. We only received a snappy 50-second tease of some environments and our non-Sims avatars, but Paradox have now shown more of their life-sim via a live stream, calling it “the most moddable and open life simulator.” We now know that Life By You will have an open world, a dialogue system, a third person-mode, and it’ll release into early access on September 12th.

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24 Killers is too likeable to cheapen with genre labels

I rarely enjoy adventure games, and in fact resent them for pinning that term for a genre that almost never feels adventurous. And yet I don't quite want to say that 24 Killers is an exception, because confining it to any genre feels reductive, let alone one that will probably put you off if you're anything like me.

It's a tiny bit like a Stardew Valley or Gleaner Heights, or any of those "do chores until you run out of energy" games, but mostly it's a "hanging out and being slightly weird" game.

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RPS will be at PAX East 2023

The RPS team are once again grabbing our passports and hopping over the pond to attend this year's PAX East. Liam and I are heading out to Boston this week to play a bunch of awesome indie games, have a gab with developers, attend some cool panels, and generally have a good ol’ snoop around the show floor. And the best thing is that we'll be sharing all our PAX escapades with our RPS supporters.

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