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Tuesday, November 14th, 2023
| Time | Event |
| 11:36a | Best early Black Friday gaming mouse deals 2023  Peripherals are a regular feature among big seasonal sales events, so any list of the best early Black Friday gaming mouse deals was always going to be rammed with good kit. It could be even bigger, frankly, but let’s stick to just the rodents worth recommending at full price – including some of the very best gaming mice ever made. |
| 11:45a | Shadows of Doubt modding tools will let you build cities and write your own murder mysteries  Shadows of Doubt is the voxel-based 1980s detective sim in which the glass is always rain-slicked, the coffee as bitter as the human soul, and the whodunnits, procedurally generated. Hard-nosed private eye Rachel (RPS in peace) pronounced herself fascinated but a little stumped by it, back in April, while Graham described it as his "ideal game" in a post about the recent addition of infidelity cases and lost-and-found jobs, adding to my suspicions that Graham is some kind of jigsaw killer and that his news posts are actually ciphered confessions of his terrible crimes. Well, these already viscous plots are about to thicken into a borderline-immobile soup of intrigue, for ColePowered Games are adding modding tools to the game. These will allow you to pen your own detective mysteries, and even alter the surrounding city to fit. |
| 12:46p | Amazon Games cut 180 jobs shortly after Amazon report massive profits  2023's games industry jobapocalypse continues with news that Amazon Games are laying off 180 people. This includes the entirety of the Twitch service Crown Channel, plus its Game Growth division. According to Amazon themselves, it's all with a view to refocussing on Prime Gaming, which serves up games to Amazon Prime subscribers. |
| 3:24p | Best early Black Friday Steam Deck accessories deals  Now that the Steam Deck OLED is almost certainly about to swell the number handheld PC owners – to say nothing of recent price cuts on the original version – we should really consider the best early Black Friday deals on Steam Deck accessories. A quality microSD card is a must-have, after all, while docking stations make it far easier to extract the most flexibility out of your Deck’s desktop mode. |
| 3:27p | Jusant and Shadow Of The Colossus lovers should try Chasing The Unseen's expanded playtest  If you’ve been enjoying Jusant, Don’t Nod’s post-apocalyptic climbing sim, you might also like the alpha playtest for Chasing The Unseen, which has just been updated with a new level. It doesn’t have Jusant’s quietly innovative grip and abseiling mechanics – the climbing is closer to Shadow Of The Colossus, consisting of just one button you hold to cling on till your stamina runs out. Nor does it have the Don’t Nod game's beautifully nested chunks of backstory - no seashells you can press your ear to, alas. But it does have massive flying cephalopods, giant red mushrooms, and floating, fractured landscapes of rock and grass. The gameworld drifts whimsically between categories, neither macroscopic nor microscopic, at times a kind of ocean reef, and at other times, a mysterious, alternate dimension we might summarise as “Cthulhu’s Zen Chillout Room”. The climbing aside, you can glide short distances by inflating what looks like a blowfish, and there are (regular-sized) capybara to chase down and collect. When you die, the game plays a didgeridoo at you in a faintly jocular way. The whole thing pongs of quantum physics. |
| 4:00p | Warhammer Age Of Sigmar: Realms Of Ruin review: a decent RTS heavy on micromanagement 
I feel like I can let a lot of you know whether you'd like Warhammer Age Of Sigmar: Realms Of Ruin with just a few words: it's about micromanagement. Victory is dependent on rapidly issuing movement, attack and ability commands to several small squads of soldiers, and your units will pay a heavy price if your attention leaves them for more than a few moments. If that's not your thing, move along. If it is, Realms Of Ruin is a solid, button-down war 'em up and you should read on. |
| 4:30p | Screenshot Saturday Mondays: Big head, big laser  Every weekend, indie devs show off current work on Twitter's #screenshotsaturday tag. And every Monday, I bring you a selection of these snaps and clips. Or on Tuesday, if my mum visited for a long weekend. Last weekend brought devs showing off a big laser, Predator-style leaping between trees, petting a goose, the giant head of Death herself, and loads more attractive and interesting indie games. Come check 'em out! |
| 4:31p | The first original Invincible videogame, starring Atom Eve, is out today  Robert Kirkman's Invincible is a comic book and lately, animated series about a young superhero finding in his feet in a world where superheroes routinely get decapitated, disembowelled, melted, squished or just plain old beaten to a pulp. Much like The Boys, it's got a not-very-nice version of Superman, Omni-Man, who you might have seen doing not-very-nice things in Mortal Kombat lately. Skybound and Kirkman's first videogame based on the license isn't about Omni-Man, though. Developed by Terrible Posture Games, it's about Atom Eve, a high-school do-gooder who can manipulate the atomic structure of the world, changing one thing into another. |
| 4:45p | How Bit Reactor's Star Wars game hopes to do for strategy what Baldur's Gate 3's done for RPGs  Making a strategy game is "harder than people give it credit for," Bit Reactor's CEO Greg Foertsch tells me. The same could probably be said of any game this year in particular, but having spent over 20 years shepherding the art teams at Firaxis on Civilization, XCOM, Sid Meier's Pirates, Alpha Centauri and most recently Marvel's Midnight Suns, Foertsch has seen firsthand what it takes for strategy games to break new ground over the years, and what an arduous road it's been for the genre to get where it is today. Not only was it "late to party on 3D, they were late to the party on consoles," but it's also "suffered from lower budgets, which means it just hasn't pushed in the way that other genres have," he says. Even now, "it's got some catching up to do," he continues, but there are plenty of reasons to be positive, too. As we speak at the beginning of September, our conversation quickly turns to Baldur's Gate 3, whose enormous success Foertsch cites as a clear and obvious sign that "there's a thirst for something different now," both within RPG circles and, perhaps a little unexpectedly, for strategy heads as well. It's his hope that his own upcoming project, the closely guarded Star Wars strategy game his new studio Bit Reactor are working on in collaboration with Respawn, will follow in these lauded footsteps. "We want to make a game and just have people say, 'Man, that's amazing game, and oh, it happens to be strategy.' That's the goal." |
| 4:50p | Edifier's great value R1700BTs speakers are down to $140 at Amazon US  Edifier's R1700BTs are some of the finest PC speakers I've ever used - and critics and users alike agree - and today you can pick them up for $140 rather than their usual $200. That's thanks to a 30% discount at Amazon US when you clip the coupon on the product page. |
| 5:00p | Persona 5 Tactica review: middling turn-based strategy built for Persona-likers 
The Persona 5 kids are trapped in high school, their semesters stretched into infinity by the inescapable march of spin-offs that have been retroactively stuffed into every available blank spot. Since the credits rolled on Persona 5 (and also before, and sometimes concurrently), the Phantom Thieves have spent their time in a rubbish Dynasty Warriors knock-off, got lost in a dream about a really cheap rhythm-action game and ended up trapped in a cross-generational dungeon crawler. Now they find themselves embroiled in - of all things - an X-COM style turn-based strategy game. Your energy for Persona 5 Tactica is going to come down to how much tolerance you have for the Persona 5 brand’s Baz Luhrmann-style maximalism. If you're emotionally invested in the gang, it'll definitely help. But even if you're a Persona veteran or a total newcomer, you'll find the story a bit loose, the chats a bit tiring, and the combat a bit simplistic. Then again, if you're a Persona fan, it's still more than a good excuse to sink back into another adventure with your pals. |
| 5:02p | This RTX 4070 + Ryzen 7600X prebuilt gaming PC is cheaper than building it yourself  Want a high-end gaming PC for a reasonable price? Stormforce Gaming are offering an RTX 4070 desktop equipped with a Ryzen 5 7600X processor, 32GB of DDR5 and a 2TB NVMe SSD for £1160, which is less money than these components cost to buy to assemble a matching computer yourself. |
| 5:35p | Minecraft update 1.21 players are doing all kinds of crazy things with the new Breeze mob  Just a quick one before I clock off for the day: you would not believe what the kids are up to in Minecraft right now. Well, you probably would, because it's Minecraft, the sandbox building sim that contains all possibility and all human endeavour, with the exception of good PvP mechanics, yes I went there. Anyway, Minecraft update 1.21 is just around the corner, and a few players have gotten early access via Mojang's snapshot releases. I had thought the crown jewel of the update would be the new Trial Chambers, aka trap-filled mazes. It turns out the real star might be the new Breeze mob - in the hands of imaginative players, at least. |
| 10:24p | Rhythmic hiking game from the makers of 80 Days will launch next month  A Highland Song, Inkle's Scottish rhythm mountain climbing game, now has a release date of December 5th. I'm Scottish, I spent my childhood walking up mountains, and I'm a long-time fan of Inkle, so it's kind of them to make this game specifically for me. Hop below for a new trailer, too. |
| 10:42p | Cities: Skylines 2's editor tools are still a couple of months away  A huge part of Cities: Skylines appeal lay in its modding community, which expanded on the citybuilder's robust foundations with new maps, assets and more for years post-release. Cities: Skylines 2 is still waiting on its own official mod support, but Paradox have offered a new update on progress, saying that the editor is "a couple of months" from being in a releasable state, with no concrete timeline as yet. |
| 11:33p | Escape From Tarkov is adding vaulting, revised recoil, and new guns  Tactical extraction shooter Escape From Tarkov is adding vaulting, a recoil rework and new armour, as revealed in a developer livestream. Of the bunch, it's vaulting - the act of clambering over a low wall - which has been greeted most feverishly by Tarkov's community, a fact which is honestly not surprising. |
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