There are thousands and thousands and thousands and oh God help thousands of games discounted in the current Steam Winter sale. Honestly, it’s ridiculous.> Where do you start? Where do you end? How many will you ever really play? How many do you have to buy in order to discover the secret Half-Life 3 release date? Well, we can’t help with the more existential aspects of that, but if you’re entirely stuck on what to get, what we can do is tell you which single game each member of the RPS staff would pick from the vast and endless digital discount shelves.

These, as far as we’re concerned, are the games you must must must pick up in the sale if you don’t have ‘em already.

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“ aaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAA !” is the only line of dialogue I can remember from any of the Serious Sam games.

Despite this, developers Croteam are bringing in some big wordguns for Serious Sam 4. Jonas Kyratzes, one of the writers of Croteam’s fine philosophical robopuzzler The Talos Principle, and development/life partner Verena Kyratzes will be writing the screenplay for the backpedalling FPS, the gang announced today. My spies have managed to reconstruct shredded early drafts salvaged from the office bins, and I’m excited to exclusively bring you a line of actual 100% real genuine SS4 dialogue.

… [visit site to read more]

The Talos Principle [official site] arrived very late in 2014, such that it erroneously missed out on the Game Of The Year accolades it unquestionably deserved. It had puzzles to match the exquisite Portal 2, and a story which fascinatingly and engagingly explored the philosophy of consciousness and existence. But hurrah, it can now return to our attention some seven months later with the addition of Road To Gehenna – an extensive expansion pack with a whole new story. Here’s wot I think:>

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A (hopefully) weekly series, in which the RPS hivemind gathers to discuss/bicker about/mock the most pressing (or at least noisiest) issues in PCgamingland right now. Hot Takes are go.>

Alec: OMG THIS IS GOING TO BE THE MOST AMAZING HOT TAKE EVER. By which I mean, today we are discussing hype and videogames and if that helps or hurts them and helps or hurts us. The prompt for this is Hello Games chat with Pip last week, in which they mourned the crushing weight of expectation placed upon them as a result of having made some pretty good trailers for their space exploration game. I guess we re going to struggle to avoid a touch of physician heal thyself here, but anyway. How do we feel about how the world feels about No Man s Sky? … [visit site to read more]

Here’s something I’ve been looking forward to for a few months (except I’d forgotten about *actively* looking forward to it and was more excited-but-put-it-on-the-back-burner-until-reminder-emails-arrived). The Talos Principle‘s [official site] expansion, Road to Gehenna, is out on 23 July.

That’s soon!

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The world’s most accurate ranking of the 25 best puzzle games ever to reach a computer. Plucking the peak of PC puzzling, we break down what makes them so special, and put them in the correct order. Read on for more time travel, rearranged tiles, hidden objects and hexed cells than you could ever want.

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I’m with Graham on Make Frivolous Fun Things Day. I respect developers who come up with goofy jokes for April Fools’ Day then actually follow through on them, though I’d like ‘em even more if they made goofy things whenever they wanted rather than wait until the sanctioned day, a day when I’ll be suspicious of everything odd even when its makers swears blind it is real.

So I was wary when The Talos Principle [official site] Croteam announced they’d added the voice of Serious Sam from the eponymous shooty shooty murderfest series to their quiet puzzle game. But no, they really have, and it’s free for a few days. The game’s on sale too.

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Listen up, fans of robot philosophy puzzlers: The Talos Principle [official site] is getting an expansion called Road To Gehenna.

Or, as Alice’s first draft for this news story put it, “Talos Principle, that game about lasers and jumping, is getting more lasers and jumping.”

The four-episode expansion is set in the same world as The Talos Principle but…

[SPOILERS WARNING FOR THE ORIGINAL GAME – TURN BACK ALL YE WHO HAVE NOT COMPLETED IT]

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I love puzzle games. But it s not beating them that s the exciting part: it s understanding them.

Whether mulling over a cryptic crossword or somersaulting through Portal s portals, there s a moment of epiphany which, for me, pretty much transcends all other moments in gaming. But how do you design a puzzle to best provoke that eureka moment? What gives a puzzle its aesthetic, its pace and texture? Why does one puzzle feel thrilling while another feels like a flat mental grind?

I ve asked three of my favourite puzzle game designers to demystify their dark magicks: Jonathan Blow, best known for the puzzle-platformer Braid and currently hard at work on firstperson perplexathon, The Witness; Alan “Draknek” Hazelden, creator of Sokoban-inspired sequential-logic games, including Sokobond, Mirror Isles and the forthcoming A Good Snowman Is Hard To Build; and Jonathan Whiting, a programmer on Sportsfriends and collaborator with Hazelden on Traal, whose own games are a regular Ludum Dare highlight.

… [visit site to read more]

Finalists for the 2015 Independent Games Festival awards have been announced, and it’s a good-lookin’ list full of many-splendoured things. Croteam’s The Talos Principle, Klei’s Invisible Inc and 11 Bit’s This War Of Mine are the most recurrent PC games (that we’re all able to play already) in the list, but there are quite a few other splendid titles you might have seen on RPS over the last few months in there too. A whole bunch I really need to check out myself, too. I hear particularly good things about Grand Prize finalist Outer Wilds, which is perhaps the most outsiderish contender in there. Anyway: everything in the running is below. What do you make of the line-up this year? … [visit site to read more]