Duskers developers Misfit Attic have revealed Below The Crown, a chess-flavoured fantasy roguelike with an Inscryption-style meta-layer and some sexy 80s CRT visuals. You are a wizard, tasked with Gathering A Party and braving an offbrand Tron dungeon to retrieve some gold. Your upgradeable party members are based on chess units, and each floor of the dungeon is a grid-based combat puzzle inspired by classic chess manouevres like Forks and Pins. Here's a trailer.

Read more

If the mountain-sized cop in Militsioner were just a massive looking glass in the sky, registering your every motion or infraction with sterile exactness, that would be fine. The trouble is, he is also a needy piece of shit. If you don't glance up and address him every few minutes, he'll complain thunderously about being unappreciated, and when the Cop feels bad about himself, it leads to floods. Tunnels and other low-lying areas become inaccessible. The Cop's wayward emotions rain down upon the game's clenched handful of city, which I think may be smaller overall than the Cop himself.

Read more

Are you sitting down, Oblivion Remastered? It's alright. I've just got...some news I need to tell you. There's no easy way to say this. A modder's decided to put a bunch of Fortnitey emotes and dances inside you.

We can see the likes of dabs, the NaeNae, and even a stanky legg on the scans. They're cranking it, spanking that, and Snoop Dogging all over your internal organs too. There's nothing we could have done. That surgery which ported you from 2006 to 2025 increased the risk of this drastically, but how else were 12 year olds supposed to learn about the need to CLOSE SHUT THE JAWS OF OBLIVION?

Read more

I’m struggling to find interesting things to say about Metal Gear Solid Delta: Snake Eater. Or, at least, new things – in the ongoing debate over whether remakes should meaningfully tinker with the original or stay as faithful as possible, Delta is firmly in the latter camp. It’s MGS3, basically! It looks better and it runs worse! It’s been twenty-one years and I still mentally supplant most of the actual dialogue with Hiiimdaisy comic jokes! That one’s my fault, granted.

I am, however, liking Snake Vs Monkey, a recreation of the original’s Ape Escape crossover mode where you dash around tranquilising and capturing cartoon chimps against the clock. Partly because I never played it on PS2 – I cruelly denied Hideo Kojima his dues by only ever renting MGS3 from Blockbuster, and evidently didn’t feel sideshows were worth cutting into the two days before I had to give it back. But also because it’s a strangely compelling time attack minigame, one that took mere minutes to have me optimising ape-tranqing strategies to shave the seconds off.

Read more

Are you from the UK and partial to risque adult Steam games, such as Amarillo's Butt Slapper - the Dark Souls of Butt Slapping - or the timelessly iconic MILFs of Sunville? Bad! Naughty! GO DIRECTLY TO BED. Unless you have a valid credit card. Steam have begun rolling out a requirement for all UK-based users to verify their ages, if they wish to access store pages for games rated mature. According to reports, debit cards are acceptable too.

Read more

Battlefield 6's open beta may be over, Battlefield 2042 might also have been transformed into Battlefield 6, but there must be more battles in the fields of six, so sign-ups for another round of Labs testing are now open. Two fresh maps with plenty of room for vehicle-based fisticuffs will be on offer, as well as a chance to check out the server browser that may well be chock full of 24/7 scraps once the final game launches.

EA have wheeled out all of this info in two separate blog posts, which follow neatly on from them running down all of their learnings from the open beta.

Read more

The headcounts of both The Witcher 4 and Cyberpunk 2's dev teams continue to steadily climb, as the two RPGs inch closer to our fingertips. Meanwhile, CD Projekt have confirmed that their research division are still busy deciding what the mysterious original game codenamed Project Hadar will look like.

All of these details, plus some Nintendo Switch stuff we've avoided hearing by sticking our mouse and keyboard-focused fingers in our ears, were revealed in the Polish publishers' financial report covering the first half of 2025.

Read more

Sometimes, readers, it's tempting to do the popularity thing, and ask what you're> playing, or thinking of buying. There are countless popular games I never mention, surely I should be doing those? What if I am terrible actually and should write about the things that are making a big splash instead?

But that way lies Views Brain. You can already get that everywhere. Moreover, I suffer a curse where if you chose a game I hated or found dull, it would ruin my life. Especially> given the time investment that even lightweight strategy games so readily demand (I don't get paid for the 6-hours-in "Oh, this is really limited/bugged/regurgitated" games, you know).

My compromise was a shortlist you could pick from, and I'd do a piece on the winner. Naturally I'd have to play them a bit first to be sure, and you already know what happened, don't you. We're doing a roundup, and it won't be the last. There are no rules in the Rally Point.

Read more

A group of more than 450 Diablo developers have voted to form a union at Blizzard, under the banner of the Communications Workers of America (CWA).

According to a CWA press release, the new union is made up of game developers, artists, designers, engineers, and support staff across the Diablo series, and has already been formally recognised by Blizzard parent company Microsoft. These workers join the over 500 World of Warcraft and almost 200 Overwatch devs who each formed their own unions earlier this year.

Read more

Red Hook have just released the third and final part of Darkest Dungeon 2’s Kingdoms mode - a boardgame-style add-on experience that sees you moving a stagecoach around a map’s worth of benighted inns, fending off pigmen, witches and - as of this update - giant mosquitos.

To celebrate, they’ve also made the base roguelike RPG free on Steam until September 1st. Admittedly, being offered Darkest Dungeon 2 for free is a bit like somebody warmly offering to give you the plague. But this is the fun kind of plague, a plague rich in dicey turn-based battles, grindy but engrossing character development, and suppurating vistas of cthulhoid swampfields.

Read more