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Here we stand in the dark neo-year of 2020. The spam bots have risen to prominence, the governments of the world are bickering over follower counts, and history class has been renamed “meme studies”. Somewhere, in a dusty room in the RPS treehouse, a rogue human is compiling a list article for a crumbling PC games website. It is a warning to all those who read it. A prophecy of the terrible things to come. Wars, invasions, disease, heat death. Videogames, it turns out, have predicted all this and more. Here we replicate this cautionary pre-chronicle, your guide to the harrowing times ahead. Here are the 11 worst years in our future history, according to games.

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Look! A ranking of the 50 best RPGs on PC. I know, you never asked for this, but here it is. It is 100 percent correct, we double-checked. The RPG is a broad and deep sea and fishing out the best games from its characterful waters is no easy task. But we are capable fishers on the good ship RPS, and know when to humanely throw back a tiddler or fight to heave up a monster. Enough of this salty metaphor. Here are the 50 best RPGs you can play on PC today.

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I reckon that when I was growing up I spent longer reading the manuals for games than I did playing them. The thicker the better (as the someone said to the etc.), and if it were up to me every game would come with a chunky instruction booklet. The standard these days is the in-game tutorial, and many of them feel like afterthoughts. Either they re too bare bones to properly teach you how to play, leaving you to scroll through Wikis, or they re so boring that you rush through them and then forget everything you re told.

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When Graham asked if you’d played Just Cause 2, he (correctly) spent most of his time praising the extent of its wanton destruction. Then he claimed that the multiplayer mod “lets you wreak the same havoc and much more in huge multiplayer servers.” I don’t think he realises how right he was.

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It has happened. The day spoken of in legend. After two years, I am finally to be set free of the Curse Of Steam Charts. All its taken is entirely leaving my job in four days time to end this purgatory. The only decision left is to whom I shall pass this vexation. That, and how to avoid mentioning the actual games for one more week. And this time I’ve come up with a self-indulgent doozy.

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The first time I pushed someone downstairs in Hitman: Blood Money, I felt faintly guilty. Not because I’d just killed a person, but because The Agency, my bar-coded assassin’s employers, had gone to the trouble of providing me with a wealth of lethal equipment. Yet here I was, sending people to their deaths without touching a single item. Was I putting someone out of a job?

Five minutes later, my concerns had vanished, replaced by a sense of malevolent joy as I explored the lethal potential of Agent 47’s “shove” ability, a feature that’s strangely absent from subsequent Hitman games.

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In the best possible way, the Hitman series is ridiculous. Its protagonist, Agent 47, is the single most conspicuous person in any crowd. He s big and bald and white with a bar code prominently tattooed to the back of his head, and not once does this fact deter him from his preferred method of infiltration: wearing a disguise.

These aren t disguises in the elaborate, Mission: Impossible, we ll give you an entire fake head sense. No, 47 simply throws on the clothes of whatever guard or unfortunate bystander he s subdued. And this actually works. In the franchise s fiction, he s considered one of the most dangerous people in the entire world, the best of the best. This imposing figure who scarcely bothers to alter his body language, let alone his voice, is a master of disguise. Like its 2016 predecessor, Hitman 2 is quite aware that this concept is absolute nonsense.

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For all the bruisings, beatings and impalings that Lara Croft endures in the recent rebooted trilogy, the real victim was Tomb Raider s sense of scale. Everything became crushed down to deliver fidelity. There were temples, sure, but you viewed them from cramped tunnels as you scurried past guards, and towering structures were only seen from the extreme close-up of a climbing wall or the long-distance photo op as you were shepherded along ziplines. Yamatai, Siberia and Peru are vast landscapes you view from a thin corridor of interaction. And even then control is wrestled away with endless QTEs. Returning to Tomb Raider: Underworld s gargantuan locations is like stepping off an EasyJet flight and feeling the blood rush back to your ankles.

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With Shadow Of The Tomb Raider, Lara has now completed another trilogy, probably by falling through its roof and shooting it in the face. This would be the second set of three games from Crystal Dynamics (with help from other parts of Eidos), following on from the six titles created by Core (if you don’t count the Game Boy ones). She’s twelve main games old, twenty-ish if you count the mobile and off-brand ones, and 22 years old if you count in linear time. I’m here to argue it’s time for Lara to go.

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As the latest Lara trilogy reaches its end, it seems a good moment to cast one’s mind back to the beginning of the previous one. Because crikey it was good>.

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