Resident deals-dealer Katharine is on holiday this week so we’ve not got a regular deals post. However! I will highlight something I know she’d want noted: the Zero Escape series, those strange and wonderful games of life-and-death puzzle rooms and doomsday experiments and robots, have honking great discounts this weekend. You’d be hard-pushed to get more foolishness for 6. The sale by publishers Spike Chunsoft also includes Danganronpa, Fire Pro Wrestling, Steins;Gate, and more.

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It’s the first day of Golden Week in Japan, and while that may not mean much to those in English-speaking territories, it’s one of the nation’s biggest holidays. As Valve never miss an excuse for a sale, that means that there’s some great deals on games from Japanese developers and publishers. If visual novels, fighting games or JRPGs are your thing, there’s some good stuff at slashed prices today. Here’s the official sale highlights page, you can see all the current week-long deals here, and a handful of personal picks below.

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Why, yes, that is a polar bear about to saw an anime girl in half, because that’s what happens when Zero Escape director Kotaro Uchikoshi is no longer restrained to the waking world. AI: The Somnium Files is his next game, developed by Spike Chunsoft, and now has a July 26th release date on PC. It’s a sci-fi mystery that seems vaguely inspired by oddball Jennifer Lopez psycho-thriller The Cell, putting players in the shoes of a cyber-psychic detective investigating people’s dreams as well as crime scenes. Below, a bizarre new trailer that I wouldn’t try to make sense of yet.

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As a series about time travel and hopping between lots of alternate realities, Zero Escape sure knows how to mess with players’ heads. Its developers, Spike Chunsoft, know a thing or two about that in real life, too. Instead of releasing part one and part two of this superb visual novel series before> the third and final installment came to PC in 2016, they went and did it all backwards, releasing Zero Time Dilemma first. Only then did the previous games come out as a double-bill in Zero Escape: The Nonary Games, nine months later.

That’s narrative tomfoolery of the highest order, if you ask me, and it probably means there are several people out there who played them all out-of-order. Which is a shame, as Zero Time Dilemma is all about big story payouts for those who have been following the series from the beginning. And golly is it good.

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When you hear the words battle royale , most people in 2018 immediately think of the trigger-happy Plunkbat or the cheery Fortnite. But a decade ago, those same words only evoked bleak battles between crying teens, fought on the black-and-white pages of a manga — a Japanese comic.

Art doesn t exist in a vacuum. Creators absorb ideas and translate them to different mediums, in a web of cross-influences and contaminations. That s why to understand the rise of battle royale games, we must start from the cult manga Battle Royale.

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It is a truth universally acknowledged that a visual novel in possession of a good plot must be in want of at least half a dozen grizzly murders, a dollop of deep philosophy lectures, time travel and lots and lots of escape-the-room puzzles. After all, simply clicking your way through a story one text box at a time is BORING and TEDIOUS and not at all fun, especially when there’s nobody getting mysteriously offed behind the scenes whenever you stop looking at them for one goddamn second. Did I mention the thing about the murders?

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Welcome back, gentle human bean, to another year of PC gaming thrills, spills and ambient anxiety about the correct deployment of the term ‘roguelite’ here on Rock, Paper, Shotgun. As our beleaguered forms struggle to cope with the sudden shift away from Chocolate Oranges for breakfast, now is the time for our time-lost minds to reflect upon how we occupied ourselves over the past ten days.

To wit: what videogames did we play, when time, relatives, bloating and demanding pets allowed?

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As December approaches like a runaway sled and we prepare to say our goodbyes to 2016, it’s natural to reflect on the year as a whole. Those reflections could easily take the form of laments but we’re keeping our focus firmly on the world of PC games, where we’ve identified ten trends that may not have defined 2016, but have certainly helped to shape it. We delve into Sorcery and synthwave, DOOM and Danganronpa, and much more besides.

… [visit site to read more]

Zero Escape: Zero Time Dilemma is “a fitting end to the trilogy’s story arc and animation aside it’s an excellent way to spend a few evenings,” is Wot Kate Gray Thought of the gruesome escape room visual novel. Which made it jolly weird that this is actually the first game of the trilogy to receive a PC release, and this is very much a game best enjoyed at the end of a series. You big sillies, Spike Chunsoft.

Well, after a wee hint, the developers have announced that yes, the original Nine Hours, Nine Persons, Nine Doors is coming to PC together with sequel Virtue’s Last Reward. … [visit site to read more]

Flip a coin. If it s heads, carry on. If it s tails, embark upon a 20-hour adventure in which you might be cut in half with a chainsaw, dissolved in acid, or turned into nuclear goop in a big uranium-fuelled explosion.

This is the first and most central decision of visual novel/room escape game Zero Escape: Zero Time Dilemma. Nine people are trapped in a facility, and six people must die in order to reveal the six passwords for the exit. What s more, every 90 minutes, everyone is put to sleep and their memories are wiped, which – as you might imagine – makes everything terribly confusing to piece together, for both them and you.

… [visit site to read more]