Have You Played? is an endless stream of game retrospectives. One a day, every day of the year, perhaps for all time.>

Line Rider is a thing of beauty. A simple draw-your-own-sledding-slope game that became a phenomenon among the right kind of internet denizen. As simple to learn as doodling in MS Paint and yet difficult to manipulate with true mastery. What do you do, it asked the time-wealthy citizens of the information superhighway, when your canvas is beholden to a tiny, adorable boy with a sled? Well, answered the internet, you create a god damn masterpiece. (more…)

With tonight being Devil’s Night – an event that The Crow taught us all occurs the night before Halloween itself and usually involves revenge murders – it’s a pretty good time to stock up on some horror games in order to make the most of the season of spooks.

Over at Humble right now, you can get a bunch of particularly good games with a horror bent, with up to 90% off the range on offer. This sale range is set to finish in a matter of days, so you’ve got a little bit of time to make a decision but if you’d prefer to spend Halloween night scaring yourself stupid, you may want to grab something sooner rather than later.

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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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