Goodness me, the Firewatch trailer looks a bit good. Just shown for the first time at PAX by Campo Santo – a team made of developers from DoubleFine, 2K Marin and Telltale – it seems to be a freely explorable, though narrative-led, mystery adventure. And good gravy, it looks pretty. The first trailer, and first eight screenshots showing the 1980s Wyoming first, are below.

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Team Meat’s peculiar teaser a fortnight ago for a game they’d called A Voyeur For September, has been revealed to in fact be a game called Super Meat Boy Forever (anagram, see?). And despite thoughts it was to be a “live action stealth game”, it is in fact a touch-based “auto-runner”, that will have a Steam release alongside phone/tablet. Confused? I think they were aiming for that.

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Volition have announced a new entry in the Saints Row franchise, the curiously in-joke entitled, expandalone, Gat Out Of Hell.

After the most ugly of starts, Saints Row has gone on to be one of the series most worthy of excitement in recent years. Saints Row: The Third saw the franchise free itself of its genuinely unpleasant origins, and realise itself as a joy-filled, if somewhat problematic, alternative to GTA, rather than a clumsy clone. Last year’s Saints Row IV somehow survived both the collapse of THQ, and the conversion from add-on pack to complete sequel, to become one of the funniest, funnest games ever. So it’s with justified happy expectation that we receive the news that there’s to be a standalone expansion to part VI, Saints Row: Gat Out Of Hell.

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It’s my birthday tomorrow, and I can write about the most incredibly fluffy present I’ve ever received in my life if I want to, damn it. A close friend and ex-colleague mailed me this a few weeks ago and allowed me to open it pre-emptively, to make up for a dreadful week. This is what I found. If it was any fluffier, I’d weaponize that lamb and turn it against curmudgeons everywhere. It would rule households. Worlds.> But, well, it didn’t quite hit the bar. Poor Fritz. As always, however, here is a bucket of discounts to tide you over till the next week. Have a good one!

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Well, it’s been a hellish two weeks, RPS. This week’s S.EXE comes to you from the heart of one of Europe’s most beautiful and sexually liberal cities, Amsterdam, where I am sat with a glass of Pinot Blanc, bread and some sort of Gouda, watching the internet try to hack away at the self-esteem, security, and self-belief of women who make and talk about games. I know it got to me: I sent a message to a colleague to ask his professional opinion. If I, a woman, wrote about a feminist game maker in this climate, would it be an irresponsible act?

I decided, with the gamemaker’s permission of course, to fuck all that worry to one side. It is not Regency England. Women do not need to ask a man’s permission to do fuck all, least of all worry what some anonymous ones on the internet think about anything. That’s what art is about: expressing what you want to. Let’s go on a journey into some real weird shit, RPS. Women are here. We are going to stay if we want to. We are going to talk about what we like. Today what I want to talk about is fucking chairs, fucking women, fucking men, and fucking monsters. If you don’t want to come that’s okay, but this here peculiar territory at 9pm is mine and no one else’s. This will not be safe for work. Let’s Fuck Everything.

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Prison Architect developers Introversion Software joke in their latest update that the dev team is now “more like half a million.” As well as an amusing way to introduce the changes to their mod system, which is now much more robust and capable of adding almost anything to the game, it’s also sort of true. Their massive, ever-growing userbase will now add anything they can imagine, for better or worse, and folks will balance out what they want themselves. Others will improve the systems already there or build collections of mods that interact particularly well. Sit back, Introversion, you’re basically surplus to requirements now.

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Cloud Chamber is a multiplayer narrative adventure, in which players discuss, theorise and contemplate. It’s a cooperative game in which everyone is anonymous and the only goal is to understand. Original live action footage is spliced together with documentary videos from the European Space Agency to create a sci-fi story that is, at least in part, a changeable thing, created by the commentary and input of human observers.

It’s FMV focus makes it seem like a portion of the past but it’s approach to multiplayer gaming feels like a slice of the future. Here’s wot I think.>

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Because video games, one of the things added in the latest Diablo III patch is “The Cesspools.” They’re the sewers of Westmarch, a city overrun by an angel of death and his hoards of minions, making them only slightly better than a toy store in the run up to Christmas. They’re included in patch 2.1.0 as a new area to explore within the endgame Nephalem Rifts, quick one-shot dungeons with totally random layout and encounters. These have also received an upgrade, now with timed “Greater Rift” versions that provide unique rewards and global leaderboards for speed and difficulty. The most significant introduction is Seasons, similar to the character ladders in ealier Diablo games, which allow a competitive version of levelling and loot hoarding.

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Dying Light is a 1-4 player cooperative first-person game set in an urban location that is full of zombies. Under development at Techland and originally conceived as a sequel to Dead Island, it contains all the expected gore and giblets, but also goes in for some of that parkour that the kids use to commute to their office jobs these days. Graham went hands-on at Gamescom and found the controls fussy, which I take to mean that he jumped off a building and landed in a zombie’s gob by mistake. I’m glad to have a sprinkling of doubt because a Mirror’s Edge/Left 4 Dead mash-up is mighty tempting and the brand new video below is brill. Graham keeps expectations in check, like a glum father explaining the queue sizes and fatality rates before a trip to the funfair.

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I’m eternally surprised by what modders manage to do with Grand Theft Auto IV, especially as Rockstar never released official mod tools. Modders needed to build tools before they could build mods, a bit like Minecraft–only you end up with high-fidelity murder rather than a monolithic phallus.

The latest wonder rising from GTA 4 borrows an awful lot from another open-world murder simulator: Watch Dogs. Mass-murderer-with-a-heart-of-gold Aiden Pearce is now hacking Liberty City with his magical telephone, popping barriers out the ground, riding trains, spying through cameras, screwing with traffic lights, and generally hacking the planet. It’s a remarkable feat.

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