Hope your Christmas shopping is already done, because Steam’s Winter Sale is liable to drain what remains of your holiday funds. No awful minigames like in summer – this sale’s twist is a virtual advent calendar here, where you can click a door each day for a handful of Steam wallpapers, chat emoticons and holiday-themed fluff. Beyond that, users can cast their vote on the The Steam Awards nominees and get a fistful of trading cards for your effort. The sale ends on January 3rd, and I’ve got some personal stocking stuffers picked out below.

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Have You Played? is an endless stream of game retrospectives. One a day, every day, perhaps for all time.>

What was the logical next step for the developers of dual machine gun toting, beheaded bomber slaying Serious Sam? A thoughtful, philosophical puzzler in the vein of Portal, of course.

In The Talos Principle [official site] you play as a robot, guided through the game by a disembodied voice calling itself Elohim. Imagine the Stanley Parable narrator but with more pompous severity and you ll have a good idea what you re in for. (more…)

The Talos Principle 2 is coming. At some point. In some form. That’s all I can tell you. Croteam’s Alen Ladavac confirmed it during a talk at the Nordic Game conference this morning, and that’s all. It is coming. Which is grand!

The Talos Principle [official site] arrived in December 2014 so, although the philsophical first-person puzzler is pretty great, it got a little lost in the usual December busyness. But the Serious Sam gang followed it up with a fine expansion in 2015 and evidently all is right in the world, because a sequel is coming too.

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The games that fly under publisher Devolver Digital‘s banner are often funny, sometimes silly, and always quirky. Frantic shooter Not A Hero revels in its messy, hedonistic chaos; Dropsy tells the tale of sad, social misfitting clown; and The Talos Principle is a wonderful game about philosophy and mind-boggling puzzles, to name but a few. The Humble Devolver Bundle has them all and more and is live right now.

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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.

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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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