This is The Mechanic. Taking a dive into Dishonored 2 [official site] with Harvey Smith, it marks the first anniversary of the column. Holy heck! I hope you ve been enjoying it. I want to thank everyone who s read The Mechanic, and all the amazing designers it has given me the opportunity to speak to. Here s to many more next year.

In the city of Karnaca is a district that lies under mounds of encroaching dust. Home to the labourers of the silver mines, Batista has been worked into exhaustion. Its people are spent and the mines so overexploited that dust from them has been billowing out and falling over the streets and squares, the heavy wind whipping it up into storms and engulfing entire buildings.

Dust District is one of Dishonored 2 s largest levels, a dense network of byways, apartments and compounds peopled by downtrodden miners and two warring factions. But you don t need to play any of it. In fact, the entire level is designed around an idea that speaks to Dishonored s deepest design principles. Because the Dust District is all about:

THE MECHANIC: Skipping stuff

(Light-ish spoilers for both the Dust District and subsequent level naturally follow.)> … [visit site to read more]

From the forum threads full of arguments to the constant tweaking and occasional overhauls via patches balance has long been one of the pillars of strategy games. It means fairness, a level playing field, and in competition it means that victory comes purely from player skill. But balance, and the quest to reach it, can easily become the enemy of surprise and of the joy that comes from succeeding against the odds.

Balance s lofty position implies that nobody wants to be the underdog, that conquest is only satisfying if you have the exact same or at least equally effective advantages as your opponents. Sure, when actual money and trophies are involved, this sort of balance is necessary, but when you re playing for fun? When you re playing on your own? Give me the imbalanced every time.

… [visit site to read more]

If DOOM was the year’s second best hell then what was its best first-person shooter? Day 23 of The RPS Advent Calendar, which highlights our favourite games of the year, brings…

Titanfall 2!

… [visit site to read more]

I keep lamenting that there are so few games about jumping, as most platformers are secretly roguelikes or crafting games or RPGs or. Hopiko [official site] meanwhile is about only> jumping, to the extent that it doesn’t include other genre staples like walking. Instead you move simply by using the analogue stick to aim in a direction and then releasing the stick again to set yourself in motion.

… [visit site to read more]

Have You Played? is an endless stream of game retrospectives. One a day, every day of the year, perhaps for all time. (Apart from the next week and a half while we hide in Horace’s warm, warm fur.)>

Normally when selecting games for HYP, I favour those that are at least a few years old, so that the suggestion comes as a greater surprise. But Astroneer [official site] is all I’ve been playing since it was released into early access earlier this month, and it’s lovely enough that it deserves more words written about it.

… [visit site to read more]

It seems absurd to have nostalgia for the 2000s. Surely it was just a heartbeat ago? Yet that is where I find myself. So much has changed in the last decade and a half – politically and personally (child, mortgage, increasing awareness of own mortality) of course, but also in games. These are times of pre-order DLC, culture wars, UHD, annual sequels and developers saying contentious things on Twitter. So much noise, so much division, so much complication, so many games, even. I know I am not alone in finding it exhausting – a friend recently picked up an original Xbox, a CRT TV and a ceiling-high stack of games for pennies, and is absolutely delighted by his return to what feels like a simpler era. It’s not “the games were better then” – if anything, most were worse – but that the entirety of games and gaming seemed so much calmer.

Me? I dream of Dun Morogh, the snowy Dwarf and Gnome starting zone from World of Warcraft. … [visit site to read more]

Ahnayro: The Dream World [official site] is a research-based puzzle game set in a dream-logic world. It was one of the game’s featured in John’s Bleeding Edges series earlier this year, which highlighted games which blurred the edges (geddit?) between game and real world by requiring you to research real people and places and facts in among the fictional elements.

And now we’re giving 5000 copies of the first episode away for free, when normally it costs 7/$9.

… [visit site to read more]

***** The RPS team are preparing for their winter hibernation state and will return on 4th January. In the meantime we didn’t want you to think we’d forgotten about you or the supporter program so we have hand-crafted a selection of the Bestest Best RPS Cracker Jokes. It’s also our way of giving you the “reveal” moment we no longer have in the advent calendar. We’ve made these posts open to all. Whether you celebrate or not we hope they raise a smile. Love, RPS xxx *****>

Q: What is Bambi’s favourite videogame?

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Samurai slaughtered Shermans at last night’s FP game awards. Slitherine’s Sengoku Jidai won Best Wargame of 2016, Shadow Tactics: Blades of the Shogun won Best Strategy Game, and Warbands: Bushido bagged Most Promising Early Access Game. Though it’s short of maps and exclusively multiplayer at the moment (a sizeable solo campaign is imminent) Red Unit’s katana-crammed tactical TBS is already dangerously distracting. This week’s column is an attempt to explain the allure of WB’s bijou battle ballets. Beyond the break is an account of a typical scrap – ten minutes of brisk skirmish converted into two thousand words for your entertainment and edification. … [visit site to read more]

Steam’s Winter Sale used to be The Big One, a crazed festival of online commercialism of the likes you’d not see again for another year. Not so much these days, with the robotshop seeming to have sales every few weeks. And even less so now it’s a two week static bunch of discounts, rather than a daily lucky-dip, people hedging bets on waiting to see if their desired games would take the big 80% plummet for a single day, then becoming furious when they chickened out and bought a day before. It makes life easier, if somewhat less interesting. Still though – it’s an awful lot of discounted games to scour, so we’ve rifled through and found some of the highlights. What a cracking bunch of super-cheap games you’ll find below!

… [visit site to read more]