I've only dipped my distal index fingerbone in The Necromancer's Tale, a just-released historical fantasy tactics RPG from Psychic Software, but I can at least report back that the character creator is a gentle joy, to the point that I was disappointed to reach the end of it. True to the promise/threat of "400,000 words of hand-written narrative and lore", it's a hearty choose-your-own-adventure prologue that follows the protagonist's infancy and early adulthood. Each choice you make skews the stats on the left. Might sound unremarkable of concept. Here's why it's stuck with me.

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If you're sick of being tag-teamed by Gaping Jaw & Darkdrift Knight, then I bring good news. Elden Ring Nightreign's next wave of enhanced bosses have now successfully RSVPed to the big darkness party. They'll be arriving when the next cycle begins on July 31st.

Sure, that was the most logical point for a fresh rotation, given it's when the established lot of Everdark Nightlord duos were set to disappear. Though, for whatever reason, FromSoft haven't fully committed to a date until now. One can only assume the Equilibrious Beast was busy polishing its horns.

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"I'm not a perfectionist," says the guy who makes niche puzzle games that turn me into a gibbering wreck obsessed with efficiency. And I feel a wave of comical fury. If like me you've been whirring and clicking your way through very good engineering puzzle game Kaizen: A Factory Story, you're probably a fan of previous work from the same developers. The creators of Opus Magnum and Infinifactory may have dissolved their old studio Zachtronics and chemically regenerated as Coincidence Games, but there are still large traces of a Zach present. I caught up with designer Zach Barth to ask about perfectionism, the Factorio-like automation game he gave up on out of boredom, and how the team managed to make a story about factories in 1980s Japan feel human.

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BoJack Horseman was a show about Horsin’ Around.

There was a good thing that had once been and a horse man who was now years removed from it, but still clung on to the idea that the magic was still there. I’ll not stray into spoiler territory, but that clinging generally didn’t go too well for old BoJack. He was a bitter, selfish, washed-up star who so often looked back, rather than looking forwards. It was to his detriment.

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Helldivers 2 developers Arrowhead have made clear that they're still very much all-in on the game right now, with adding more stuff to the good shootery thing they've got going being the main focus. That said, the studio's bigwigs have provided a couple of hints at what the future might hold for them, with the latest being that Helldivers 3 is "hopefully many years away".

Also, they aren't fans of players voting to rename a city on Super Earth 'Gun', which is a thing that's been going on in Helldiverland lately.

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4X strategy games tend to look an elegantly patterned tablecloth covered in toy soldiers. Entrotria looks like a geode full of maggots, or the inside of a prehistoric fridge. Admit it, you did not clock the screenshot above and think "4X". You scanned it and thought "I don't remember sneezing" and by extension, "I need to get my sinuses drained immediately". Here's a trailer.

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If you don't have anything else on this morning, perhaps you'd like to fill the life of a small clay golem up with purpose. I cannot be certain, but at present I believe that the easiest way to do this is with the demo for Tall Trails. It reminds me of playing old N64 3D platformers round my mate Liam's house between watching VHS recordings of Keenan and Kel, which is a nice place to be. It's also got Breath Of The Wild's stamina wheel and freeform clamouring, although you don't need to worry about that too much because you can stuff chilli peppers into your boot and use it like a jetpack.

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Oblivion arguably isn't really Oblivion if you're not bouncing around Cyrodiil in an effort to level up your acrobatics slightly faster. Oblivion Remastered's devs knew that, and so opted to keep the classic "level up by doing the abilities you picked" approach, with some minor tweaks to make it less frustrating.

If, however, you long to ding by being handed boatloads of XP simply from completing quests and killing NPCs by any means, a modder's got you covered. While working on fleshing out a full Fallout 4-esque settlement system for Oblivin' after midnight, MadAbormodding's decided to double down on the rads and bring Fallout 3's levelling system to Cyrodiil.

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Valve have begun removing a variety of sex games from Steam in line with their recent updating of the platform's rules and regulations to allow banks and credit card companies to essentially forbid certain kinds of "adult content". In a statement to RPS, a company representative confirmed that games are being delisted as a result of the rules change, adding that the developers in question are being given Steam app credits as compensation. The alternative, Valve suggest, is that banks and card companies might pull the plug on all transactions, and users in general would lose the ability to buy stuff on Steam.

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FromSoftware's RPGs have done much to explore the cycle of death and resurrection that games have historically taken for granted, but ask comparatively few questions on how the bosses feel about all this. What of the growing psychological weariness that comes from having to swat the same quixotic gnat over and over? What of the despair that grows from realising that, in the eternal battle between godly power and free resurrections 4 life, resurrections will always win out on a long enough timeline. Broken meta. Plz fix. My crumbling empire and poetically exposed eterna-hubris cannot take any more.

What I'm saying is, when people talk about Dark Souls being about "overcoming adversity", they are lying to themselves. Dark Souls is about being a tiny little cheater running face first into a wall until your head is so used to the shape of the bricks that they simply have no effect on your fat, dumb skull. Dark Souls is about using an unfair advantage to torture gods who are much better than you at everything.

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