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Palworld has teased four new beasts of burden for players to corral into their open world survival crafting sweatshops. The new pals are still unnamed but they appear to be the following: karate frog, confused peacock, dopey fungus, levitating sleeve creep. Within the confines of the arms manufacturing Pokélike, such creatures make sense. You can see them struggling to eke out an existence as a close personal friend of the player in the trailer below.

Wow, remember Starfield? I do, just about, although any interest in it feels like a distant dream now. But not to Todd Howard! The Bethesboss had a chat with Kinda Funny and confirmed that Shattered Space, the first big DLC for the brave little space RPG that could, has a release window of "in the fall". Shattered Space adds new locations and stories and gear, and is the sort of DLC that was announced before the game came out, and you got it bundled with some of the super mega hyper awesome pre-order editions (you can still get it bundled with the Starfield Premium Edition if you want to spend an extra 30 quid).

Before that, though, Howard says we should expect (via VGC via the video) "a big update that's coming really soon", and that "we redid the map stuff, so we have some city map stuff." This is the literal first thing I complained about when I reviewed Starfield. Vindication! This is one of a number of changes teased on Starfield's Reddit community at the end of last year.

Dungeons of Hinterberg’s alpine mix of dungeon-crawling and relationship-tending will be upon us this summer, with the fetching cel-shaded blend of Zelda and Persona now having a fresh release date announcement for July. Before then, though, we’ll all be able to spend a couple of days socialising and monster-slaying in the Alps next month thanks to a public playtest.

It’s been five years since Game of Thrones ended and a good while since we had a decent video game based on George RR Martin’s fantasy writings that aren’t Elden Ring lore. Yet it seems that Game of Thrones’ cultural cachet still has enough draw to inspire new games of its own. And not just an arguably underrated-if-also-not-particularly-great action-adventure RPG or fairly okay Telltale adventure game, either, but a whole honest-to-goodness Game of Thrones MMO currently in development, according to new rumours.

If you’re holding out hope for another Ori and the Blind Forest sequel after Will of the Wisps, bad news: it’s probably going to be a while. Developers Moon Studios have said they’re all-in on Soulslike action-RPG No Rest for the Wicked, suggesting that their “magnum opus” will be their focus for up to a decade.

Manor Lords developer Slavic Magic, aka Greg Styczeń, has laid out the broad strokes of the game's first proper patch in early access. This follows a boisterous opening weekend that has seen the new city builder top purchase charts on Steam, causing Valve's mighty servers to crumble under the strain like overloaded oxen.

A team of enterprising modders are looking to unite two of the internet’s favourite dating games - Baldur's Gate 3 and Stardew Valley - in one beautiful thirst trap. The mod set to launch a thousands AO3 ships is Baldur’s Village, which transports your favourite adventuring companions to the pastoral climes of Stardew’s farming towns.

Distinguishing one metroidvania from another is a dicey challenge, and not just because there's a 37.8% chance that saying the word "metroidvania" will cause RPS regular Sin Vega to materialise in the mirror and assassinate you with cheesewire. Metroidvanias stand apart for me only in hindsight - it's all about the precise ratio of abilities to ability gates, of jump-doublers to overhangs, all things that take time to assess properly. Echo Weaver sets itself apart early, however, by declaring that "time is your currency" and that "when faced with eternity, knowledge is the only gear you need", a phrase that, admittedly, I would probably have extended to "...oh, and a spacetime-folding glaive that works like a throwable fast travel point".

Well, this was unexpected. Malakai Makaisson is the single best campaign experience I’ve had since strategy game Total War: Warhammer 3 launched, and might just be up there with some of the best in the series’ history. That’s over ninety lords he’s given both barrels to getting here and, honestly, I wasn't sure Creative Assembly still had it in them. Not the talent, mind, just the passion. And nothing says passion like the amber mohawk of a furious dwarf quivering in the wake of a shakily-built zeppelin's explosive payload. Warhammer!

Last week Dan Henderson, a former product manager at PC water-cooling manufacturer EK Water Blocks, made a public post on LinkedIn, in which he described almost four months of no pay, and being “strong armed and bullied into signing a new contract through fear of losing my job and also financial ruin.” He also accused the company - one of the biggest in the space - of “blatant racism...psychological manipulation, plain bare faced lying, [and] severe unprofessionalism.”

A couple of weeks ago I told you about an aquarium-having simulator that is as detailed as it is janky. I was charmed by Aquarist and it's basic-asset using weirdness, and I intended to write a lot more about it. But our adventures in fish keeping are stalled because, well, when something is adorably janky it might turn out that the jank gets in the way of you progressing or playing the game. In the real world, a bug stops me progressing past a very early point of the story. In the world of the game, my father has locked me in his fish basment and will not let me leave.

Twitter user pl_evil has helpfully translated a recent letter to shareholders from Bloober Team, showing that their new game "Project C" will be revealed later this year. This will be the studio's next original game, after they wrapped up Layers Of Fear last year with, confusingly, Layers Of Fear (the natural progression for a series: Layers Of Fear, Layers Of Fear 2, and then Layers Of Fear again, although it was going to be called Layers Of Fears at one point).

Bloober Team are currently doing a lot of IP work for other people, with the Silent Hill 2 remake due out later this year, and a game codenamed "Project R" in concert with Skybound Entertainment. Skybound are The Walking Dead company, so I wouldn't give you long odds for a bet on what Project R is about. Neither would I be surprised if Project C is unveiled this summer by a man named Geoff with shiny shiny trainers. I'm interested to see what it is, and honestly I'm hoping it's a brand new standalone thing, rather than a forced sequel to Observer or 2021's The Medium (where I got the header).

Amazon have SHOCKED and RATTLED the world of buying things off the Internet, by announcing that Prime Day 2024 – their latest of their Prime-members-only sales events, which usually take place in July – is taking place in July. And yes, we’re only hearing about this a mere month after the last big Amazon discount splurge, Spring Deal Days. My life is a calendar where every square has "deals" written on it in increasingly scratchy Biro.

Still, let’s keep it summery, eh? Prime Day 2024 may not be a surprise (and is still lacking a specific launch date), but unless the US government announces a second June-based Black Friday or something, it likely represents the next mass serving of PC gaming deals for you to take advantage of. SSDs, graphics cards, or anything else that’s been unusually pricey lately are all but guaranteed to get slashed back down, so there are definitely worse times to be in the market for an upgrade than Prime Day.

The Escape From Tarkov developers' efforts to escape from a DLC paywall quagmire of their own quagmiring continue with an update and apology from Battlestate chief operational officer Nikita Buyanov, who says he "did not foresee" the adverse reaction to selling a new PvE mode as part of a new special edition, after telling purchasers of a previous edition they'd get "all subsequent DLC" for free.

Hell, it turns out, isn't always a bubbly pool of magma where like, devils prod you with forks. There is a second hell in Helldivers 2, a hell made up of wartorn planets and soldiers who fight bile-spewing bugs and robots. And it is a hell that is subject to patches. One such update has nerfed a bunch of weapons including the popular quasar cannon. It's also increased the number of enemy patrols based on player numbers and tweaked the game's level generation, with the former making life more difficult in hell, and the latter possibly making things more interesting.

Button mashing is advised against in fighting games if you want to climb the ranks. But those of us who've been destroyed by unpredictable little brothers going ham on a joystick know a secret. Sometimes spamming works. One Tekken 8 player is proving this point. They have programmed a bot of Eddy Gordo, the whirling Capoeira fighter, to slap the same button repeatedly, and nothing else, while broadcasting its performance against real players on Twitch. The bot is doing surprisingly well.

“Given the opportunity, players will become a merciless egg baron and sit chuckling on a throne of shells while medieval Europe cowers beneath their imperious yolk,” is what I assume Soren Jonson once said, and it looks like Manor Lords is proving this timeless adage right once more. Despite shifting over a million units and hitting the highest concurrent player count of any ‘city builder’ on Steam, creator Greg ‘Slavic Magic’ Styczeń is already looking to the future of how the building game handles trade.

New week, new videogames! When will it end, etc. There aren't many obvious headliners out in the next few days, but there are a lot of tantalisingly bleak games. Let's see here, we've got a survival shooter that's essentially set in Black Mesa, a sardonical adventure about questing Russian Orthodox nuns, a game about running the company that starts the zombie apocalypse, and a cosy village grower with an atypical emphasis on disease and death. Lovely!

Hello reader who is also a reader, and welcome to Booked For The Week - our new Sunday feature where we ask a selection of cool industry folks questions about books! You know books, right? They're a bit like RPS articles, but heavier and smell a bit nicer. This week, it's Citizen Sleeper and In Other Waters' creator Gareth Damian Martin! Cheers Gareth! Mind if we have a nose at your bookshelf?

Sundays are for sleep. Nothing else. Just sleep. Before I sleep, then sleep a bit more, and maybe get up to read RPS’ new! mystery! column! later, but then immediately go back to sleep, here’s this week’s best writing about games (and game related things!)

Steam is lousy with farming sims that will absolutely destroy your productivity by ensnaring you within a compulsive loop of reaping and sowing. Rusty's Retirement explicitly promises a less engrossing experience: it's a farming sim that "sits at the bottom of your screen while you do other things."

Popular WWE 2k24 modder Status was banned from the game and their creations taken offline earlier this week, with an in-game message stating that the cause was violation of the game's End User License Agreement. Today, Status has been reinstated, after backlash to the decision caused #FreeStatus to trend on X for several days, with at least some of his mods due to return.

Escape From Tarkov's developer has responded to players having conniptions due to the release of a new $250 Unheard edition of the game. In an update shared on Reddit, Battlestate Games studio head doubled down on their view that a new co-op PvE mode is not DLC, but does say that other players can have it when Escape From Tarkov is finished... whenever that is.

Hello! This is weird. Last time I was here, I predicted the future. I can't say I'm not proud of my clairvoyance, but sometimes it is a curse. In any case, I shall endeavour to continue Alice0's great work in finding endless excellent vintage illustrations to pop at the tops of these posts. And I'll also be hiding a little smiley face in each one, for giggles. Ooh, can you find it? What fun! Now then: here's how we'll all be dangerously blurring the lines between work and play this weekend.

It’s been barely a month since the reboot of horror classic Alone in the Dark arrived, but it looks like developers Pieces Interactive are now making a number of layoffs in the wake of its release.

A collection of five Phoenix Wright games - including some of the greatest visual novels of all time, in my opinion - is about to be discontinued on Steam, making it slightly less convenient to pick up the original Ace Attorney trilogy and its recent prequel games. That’s the bad news. The good news is you’ve got a month’s notice - and it’s on sale for the next week or so.

Sometimes there’s a game that’s just a delight to write about, however you slice it. That’s how I feel about getting to tell you about Oyster Wars, a platforming game that melds the fluid movement of Celeste with the puzzle dungeons and hookshot traversal of Zelda. Oh, and top of that it’s about rebelling against capitalism via oyster farming - and it’s made by a real-life oyster farmer. Let’s get into this package of joys.

Historical strategy sim Manor Lords - which budding feudal despot Nic Reuben has deemed "a sturdy and immersive builder that feels incomplete yet alive with promise" - is now available on Steam, the Epic Games Store, Microsoft Store and GOG. It was Steam's most wishlisted game before launch, and it's so popular right now that Steam's servers are struggling to keep up: there's an official developer post on the game's Steam forum warning that "the store is overwhelmed from all the people buying, it may take a couple tries for a bit while things calm down".

Hurtling along on top of a train full of goons in Phantom Fury you will see another rushing train pulling up at matching speed, inviting you to hop from one to the other. A helicopter will soon join the fray. Many things will soon explode, and you will take a short break from the minigunning to calmly physics some boxes into a set of steps with a crane. This FPS is not so much writing a love letter to a bygone era of noughties shooters, as it is standing underneath the window of its respected elders earnestly serenading them with a busted old keytar from the attic. There are bum notes and the singing voice is not exactly boy-band beautiful, but the love is unmistakably there. And, hey, singing is hard.

Although Corsair aren't included in our current best gaming SSDs guide, their compact form factor SSDs, including the MP600 Mini, are probably some of the best M.2 2230 SSDs on the market to pair with your Steam Deck gaming console.