The co-operative clambering of Chained Together is easy to understand. It's like Fall Guys in the fiery pits of hell, with a tower of fiendish platforming challenges. It brings to mind the mind-shattering failures of Getting Over It and a previous short-lived clamber sim called Only Up. Also, you are chained to your teammates. Every time you fall in this fiery multiplayer de-motivator, you are taking your pals with you, usually right back to the start. At RPS, we are not fazed, this should be straightforward. Nic, Edwin, and Brendan are all disciplined people. Yes, they are bound together in unbreakable irons. Yes, Nic does sometimes leap into the abyss without warning. Yes, they remain divided on precisely what obscene act the giant demon in the game's background is performing with his idle hands. But none of this means they can't work together to escape the inferno. Right?

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Happy Monday all! Yes, I wrote that with total sincerity. We all deserve a happy Monday - perhaps video games can help with that. As you'd expect, Elden Ring's recently released Shadow Of The Erdtree DLC remains this week's Big Kahuna, with no obvious mega releases in the offing to break its chokehold on the discourse, but I have dipped my latex-gloved hand into the gestation pools and fished out a few promising oddities.

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Hello reader who is also a reader, and welcome back to Booked For The Week - our regular Sunday chat with a selection of cool industry folks about books! I do not have a completely true fact to share about books with you this week, because I just read a book telling me that sharing facts about books is actually destroying the online book facts industry. Check back next week, by which time I may have finished another book debunking these claims. This week, it’s the developer behind Sluggish Morss, Dujanah, and the upcoming Judero, Jack King-Spooner! Cheers Jack! Mind if we have a nose at your bookshelf?

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Sundays are for leveling vigor. Don’t be a hero now. Get that baseline 60. You’ll need it. Before you hit the motivational high of turning a two-shot into a three-shot, let’s read this week’s best writing about games (and game related things!)

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Ollie is beset by maladies unknown today, so this is my domain now. I was tempted to recreate a hellish mockery of his fun hidden face game by trapping a crumbling mirror image of his visage, Dorian Gray style, somewhere in the above image. Alas, my version of Photoshop appears to be lacking that function. I suppose I will have to turn to other avenues of entertainment, such as a video game, should any exist.

So I just checked there's actually loads of them. What a turn out! Here's what we're all clicking on this weekend.

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Update: Whelp, spoke too soon. Apparently some Steam Deck players are seeing an "Innapropriate activity detected" message upon launching Elden Ring, blocking them from playing online. I haven't had this myself, and some have reported the issue fixing itself after they installed the Shadow of the Erdtree DLC, but hopefully there's a proper patch in the works.

Elden Ring on the Steam Deck has long enjoyed a smoothness that desktop play has lacked. Not so much in simple framerate terms – the handheld spends far more time around the 30fps mark than it does bumping into Elden Ring’s 60fps cap – but thanks to a Proton compatibility update back in 2022, it’s drastically less prone to the flow-breaking stutter that still plagues the RPG in 2024. That now goes for Shadow Of The Erdtree as well, judging from my portable time in the new expansion.

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A phoenix is a mythological firebird that is periodically reborn from its own ashes, a symbol of cyclical renewal. It's also, according to several former employees of Chorus developers Fishlabs in Hamburg, an internal title for the massive cost-cutting project begun by Swedish conglomerate Embracer Group in June 2023.

The current incarnation of a bewildering series of mergers, renamings and acquisitions that date back to the founding of Nordic Games in 2004, Embracer have spent much of the past decade buying up video game studios and licenses, from Deus Ex developers Eidos Montreal to the adaptation rights for The Lords Of The Rings. According to a February 2023 earnings report, by the end of December 2022 the conglomerate had 134 internal studios on the books (including table-top developers) and owned or controlled over 850 IPs, with 224 games in development. Our Graham warned of the perils of such consolidation in 2019, and his misgivings have been borne out. Following the reported collapse of a billion dollar Savvy Games investment deal, Embracer set out to recover their debts by cancelling projects, laying off staff and closing whole studios. Fishlabs - acquired by Embracer in 2018 alongside their parent company Koch Media, nowadays Plaion - were among those burned by "Project Phoenix", first losing a dozen people in September 2023, and then around half their remaining workforce in November. In the process of these reductions, Embracer also binned off two video game projects – a sumptuous sci-fi metroidvania that was in full development, and a "visual prototype" for a brand new Red Faction game.

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I realised recently that a juicy subject for another Should You Bother With has been staring me in the face – or rather, I’ve been staring at it. Ultrawide gaming monitors have clearly avoided non-starter status, given they’ve been around for years, seemingly being exchanged for currency – and yet they’re nowhere near what you might consider the 'default' option when making a display upgrade. Regular widescreen monitors, with regular 16:9 aspect ratios, remain the go-to. So why switch?

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Chaos and comedy. Death and rebirth. Luck and, uh, running out of luck. A good roguelike doesn't treat the player like other games do. Roguelikes won't guide you helpfully along a path, or let you cinematically snatch victory from the jaws of defeat. They're more likely to dangle you deep between the jaws of defeat and fumble the rope until you go sliding down defeat's hungry gullet. This is their beauty, and it's a part of why we keep coming back for another go. Next time everything will go right. Next time you'll find the right pair of poison-proof loafers, the perfect co-pilot for your spaceship, a stash of stronger, better ropes. Next time.

Here's our list of the 19 best roguelikes on PC you can play in 2024.

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