Keep an eye on the Sony announcements during Paris Games Week, I said. Maybe From Software would pull off a remarkable double-whammy by revealing Bloodborne 2 and saying it’d be coming to PC and that a special edition of the first would be arriving on Steam tomorrow. Maybe Naughty Dog would stroll onto a stage and declare that they’d accidentally made The Last Of Us 2 in such a way that it’d only work on Linux. Anything seemed possible.

Except for an outta nowhere announcement that Spelunky 2 is in development. This is the best possible news because Spelunky is one of the greatest games ever made.

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The fever of alchemical engineering has descended on the RPS team like a dank fog. Opus Magnum is the new Zachtronics puzzler that asks you to make some hair gel out of salt and a hangover cure out of marbles. It’s really good. We ve already shown you some mechanical marvels and talked about it on the podcast but since the game includes a record GIF button, we wanted to show off three of our own proudest creations. Come see the clockwork beauty of our well-oiled machines. (more…)

When Electronic Arts announced last week they were shutting down Visceral Games and giving the studio’s in-development Star Wars game to another team, they muttered about “fundamental shifts in the marketplace” and needing “to pivot the design”. You know, they spouted a bunch of empty business speak which didn’t say much about what had gone wrong with Visceral and the game. That’s publicly-traded companies for you. However! A report on Kotaku talks to a number of former Visceral folks, painting a picture of a deeply troubled game and studio. If you were into the idea of ‘Uncharted but Star Wars’ and are curious about what happened, it’s interesting reading. (more…)

Nostalgic horrorshow Stranger Things returned for a second season on Friday, you might have heard, and Minecraft celebrated its return with a Stranger Things DLC skin pack for the Windows 10 edition. I’m not normally jazzed about licensed skins but I was surprised by: 1) How well-done and recognisable characters are; 2) Quite how many secondary characters were Minecraftised. Also, I want to use this space to declare that Steve is the best character on Stranger Things. Anyway! The pack contains 52 skins for players to wear, including a variety of outfits for the main characters.

Have a look in this here trailer, though you might not want to if you’re avoiding even minor spoilers until you’ve finished watching season 2. (more…)

Several Ancient Egyptian gods had the heads of animals but a bug in Assassin’s Creed Origins turns beasts humanoid in a wonderful and terrifying other way. While we’ve already reported players bumping into bugs and crashes in Origins, none were nearly as exciting as the creatures photographed and tweeted by Tom Phillips of our corporate sibling Eurogamer. A bug can make animals appear standing on their hind legs, twisted in the human ‘T pose’ (a sort of ‘blank slate’ animation) with their necks mangled. Reminiscent of Red Dead Redemption’s human/animal glitches like the donkey lady and flapping bird woman, they replace Unity’s missing faces as my favourite Ass Creed bug. Sure, bugs can be nuisances, but we can also enjoy their absurdity; I myself was delighted by a light show in XCOM 2’s final mission.

In a week in which Assassin’s Creed Origins has managed to break the charts to such a degree that it somehow not only appears three> times, but also stopped Feedly from being able to display the rest of the games in the correct order, we also see a few other new entries. But absolutely no new names. (more…)

Halloween’s timing is a bit weird this year, with the preceding weekend taking the bloodsoaked brunt of the fiendish frenzy, but video games still remember and will still be here for us. Rust is already a game where nude fiends ritually sacrifice each other, making it unsettling at the best of times, but now it’s proper spooky too. The early access survival sandbox’s latest update has decorated the island with graves and spider hives while adding spoOoOoky scarecrows and fire pits filled with burning skulls. (more…)

Alice is on holiday and she’s taken all the games with her. Luckily some developers released new> games after she’d left, so the rest of us still have something to play. Our choices are below, but we want to know from you: what are you playing in this weekend of plenty?

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The enormous open world is attractive and enticing, but it’s Kingdom Come: Deliverance’s skill trees that made me a believer in this historical RPG. Rather than providing mild improvements to sword-handling or stamina, the things you learn are traits that change the way your character interacts with the world and the people in it. It all suggests I’ll be creating a person with knowledge and foibles as I play rather than tweaking a sheet of stats.

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Cities: Skylines has always had an environmental bent – one of the first things you can build is a wind turbine – but with the Green Cities expansion, cleaning up polluted cities has become a major focus. There s a slew of new buildings and policies that make it a little bit easier to keep your citizens from living under an oppressive layer of smog.

How easy, though? I ve started up a new city to find out. My goal: a completely pollution-free utopia where everyone is happy and healthy. This is probably the nicest thing I ve done in Skylines; certainly it s nicer than the time I tried to flood my entire city in poo, or the time I turned off the heating to see how long it would take for everyone to freeze to death.

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