What lies beyond Limgrave? I honestly don’t know. I’ve muddled my way through Elden Ring’s starting peninsula three times now, but have yet to step foot beyond the crumbling gatehouse of Stormveil Castle. The second Godrick The Grafted is reduced to a sickly pile of wobbly limbs, I turn the game off and walk away.

It’s not that I don’t like Elden Ring. I’m not struggling to connect with its open world take on the Souls genre. I’m not put off by the difficult encounters that await me, or the obtuse challenges I’ll be forced to overcome. The answer is weirdly simple. Limgrave provides me with everything I could ever want from a Souls game to the point that when Godrick croaks his final rancid breath and his (presumably) four tongues comically lop out of his stupid mouth, I’m left with the deep satisfaction that comes with the end of a journey, rather than the beginning of one.

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Sundays are for seeing what this new Nolan flick is like. Before you reach for the popcorn, let's read this week's best writing about games (and game related things).

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Well hello again, you. That was supposed to be nice but I sound like him off of You. It's unreasonably muggy where I am, which is a type of weather I'm not built for. I'm not built for rain or snow or sunshine either, to be fair - and if you're like me you could maybe have a crack at Wood And Weather's free demo on Steam this weekend, a game where you can change the weather to whatever you want. It's very sweet. I like games where it's like you're smashing lovely toys together. I've already played that, though, I'm telling you that maybe you'll like it. Oh, you want to know what we're playing this weekend?

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The WD Black SN850x is our top SSD pick for PC gaming, offering some of the fastest load times we've ever recorded - so I thought I'd let you know that the 1TB size of the drive has dropped to £47.99 on Ebay when you use code APPLY20 at the checkout. That's a tiny fraction of the drive's original RRP and the lowest price we've ever recorded for this size. All told, it's a hugely impressive deal.

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Sony's DualSense controller is one of the premiere options on PC, offering enhanced trigger rumble ('adaptive triggers') in a handful of games on top of excellent ergonomics and high-quality buttons that are much appreciated in a huge number of racing, action and other titles. These controllers normally cost around £50 to £60, but today they're down to £40 – as part of a Sony summer sale that sees the Sony console drop from £479 to £399.

There are a wide range of colours available, far beyond the white models that launched with the console in 2020. I'm a fan of the black and camouflage options, but there's also red, pink and blue. Here are links to Amazon and Currys, with the latter offering all colours apart from purple at £40 at the time of writing and Amazon only for black, white and blue.

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I have a complicated relationship with retro-style games in general, and no particular fondness for the Everything Was Nintendo school. Or platformers, or double jumping, or dashing, or neon, or being alive in general. Dislike is the wrong word, but "weary neutrality" about covers my feelings when another retro platformer comes down the game tubes.

Gravity Circuit, however, is good enough that I can't not mention it here. It's loud and bright without being obnoxious or overwhelming, fast and precise without being overly demanding, and generally just a damn good effort at creating a modern action platformer whose main influence is obvious, but isn't just going through the motions for the sake of nostalgia. I'm saying it's good, yeah? Maybe not quite for me, but good anyway.

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I bloody love Ratchet & Clank: Rift Apart. It’s a meaty and satisfying action-platformer with possibly the best-executed comedy and character work of the entire series; a series that’s essentially grown up alongside me, in tone as much as technical sophistication. I wish I had the time to review it properly but, with a weekend and a Baldur's Gate 3-shaped boulder bearing down, I’m staying in my hardware lane to focus on the performance of and best settings to use in Rift Apart’s new PC version.

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Hello! It's RPS Game Club chat time! As you know, this month's pick is Unpacking, and here at RPS, we've been writing a bunch of lovely words about Witch Beam's block puzzle tidy-em-up. I've really enjoyed returning to this indie gem and have noted the irony of my Unpacking house being spick and span but my own house being, well, a dumping ground. But we wanna hear what you have to say, so put that kettle on, grab some bourbons, and tell us what you think. The chat below will start today at 4pm BST / 8am PDT. See you then!

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Every year when I ask the team to vote for their favourite games of all time ahead of us putting together our annual RPS 100 list, I'm regularly astonished by the sheer breadth of games that fly into my inbox. Everyone on the team has such varied, individual tastes, and it heartens me to see so many different genres and types of games represented every year. This year's list (available to read now in Part One and Part Two is another great testament to that.

But as we (sometimes) jokingly say any time we compile a big list like this, the games that didn't> make the cut are always at #101. Well, this year I thought supporters might like to see those games at #101 this year, and crikey, there are a lot>. There are so many here, in fact, that we would have had to have stretched to an RPS 200 to include them all. So here are our honourable mentions this year (listed, for ease), and I'd love to see you try and guess which games belonged to which member of the team.

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Japan’s biggest yearly indie games event returned to a blisteringly hot Kyoto last weekend, just in time for the world-famous Gion Matsuri taking place in the city that same weekend. Bitsummit Let’s Go was the name given to the 11th incarnation of the event, expanding to three days for the very first time - also featuring over 100 games, the largest showcase yet. With so many games on show it’s hard to narrow them all down. Keeping with the event’s spirit of showcasing independent talent and undiscovered gems, I’ve chosen to pick out some of the smaller games peppering the show floor and highlight just a few favourites.

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