Some studios are content to take their time, and refine their craft to a perfect, incisive edge. Inkle, previously of the excellent 80 Days have been working away at Heaven’s Vault for almost a full year since RPS’s Adam Smith took a peek at it last GDC and fell madly in love with its quiet, thoughtful, nature.

While Inkle aren’t quite ready to pin down any of the gritty details like a release date or system specs, they are ready to show the world a little bit of the game in motion. Take a moment to ponder its nature, before rushing off to the next game.

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Guild Wars 2 fans, it’s time to mark up your calendar again. As has become the standard format for the successful MMORPG, a second episode of Living World content – this one titled A Bug In The System – is on its way, bringing new sights to see, new monsters to bop and new loot to hoard.

It’s been three months since the release of Daybreak, the first episodic update bridging Guild Wars 2’s Path of Fire expansion to whatever new release awaits next, and while we’re still a bit short on hard details (other than the launch date, March 6th), from the looks at the trailer within they’re doing something a little different this time.

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Premature Evaluation is the weekly column in which we explore the wilds of early access. This week, Fraser s hawking his wares to the ravenous consumers of Rise of Industry, a tycoon game about growing berries and other less important things.>

You ve got to give the people what they want. Booze, sex, tasty little berries harvested from a local plantation and driven straight to the farmers market – these people have needs, and for the last week I ve been spending my evenings with Rise of Industry trying to fulfill them. Well, the need for berries anyway. People go nuts for them – but they don t care for nuts – and I am the Berry King.

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Hello. Today, I will return to the public biffing of Street Fighter after a long absence, with a single rule: I can only play as Blanka.

To explain: I haven t played a game in this series since Street Fighter II, in which this Brazilian bootleg Hulk was a classic character. But he was only added to Street Fighter V: Arcade Edition last week, where he is described by the game s roster as unemployed . Join me in pretending that the release of this wildman is the reason I have decided to fight online in SFV, and not because I thought of the headline Blanka Slate first and then had to come up with a whole feature to justify using it.

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It’s been yonks since Rab Florence shared his thoughts on the original board game version of The Horus Heresy: Betrayal At Calth, although judging by his enthusiastic after-action report it can be a quite thrilling experience. As Games Workshop is wont to do these days, they’ve licensed out the rights to the PC adaptation to a lesser-known studio. Enter small VR outfit Steel Wool Studios.

Rather than attempt to replicate the tabletop experience directly, Betrayal At Calth hopes to make the experience a little more memorable by putting the player’s viewpoint on the ground with the troops in traditional FPS format, or in VR, if the tech-priests have blessed you with vision beyond the Ocular Rift, and the silly future-goggles to go with it.

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Sega may have their roots in console manufacture, but they’ve come a long way as a PC games publisher, with fewer and fewer titles being left console-exclusive. The latest to make the hop over is Puyo Puyo Tetris, Sega’s well-regarded fusion puzzle game. The PC release, available now on Steam and Humble, is budget-priced compared to its retail console debut last year.

Sega sent us a pre-release copy, so I’ve been putting it through its paces, and am happy to say that outside of a couple of technical wrinkles, this is a great port of a very generous package of block-puzzling variants.

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The turn-based tactical MechWarrior-o-rama BattleTech will launch in April, publishers Paradox announced today. When in April? That’d be telling. But at some point. Our Adam called it “the mech game I’ve always wanted” when he played a preview version almost a year ago, so it’s nice we’ll soon get to see what the robofuss is about. We’ll have to mech up for lost time. Mech. MECH. MAKE. On the subject of explaining things, a new video series has started with some Harebrained Schemes fellas (including BattleTech co-creator Jordan Weisman) explaining a bit about how the game works: (more…)

Twenty-three years, eh? Some of you reading this are probably younger than that. Well, you whippersnappers had better sit up and pay attention, because a genuine, no-qualifiers-necessary JRPG classic just popped up on Steam, over two decades past its original Super Nintendo debut.

While others such as Square’s own I Am Setsuna have attempted to recapture its spark, there really is nothing quite like the original time-travelling classic Chrono Trigger. For the first time, us PC folk can experience it without having to go emulate old consoles, though perhaps not without some issues.

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Jason Rohrer, he behind RPS favourites The Castle Doctrine, Cordial Minuet, and Sleep Is Death, has his new game out today – One Hour One Life. And this time he’s taking on, well, all of humanity? (more…)

Look not to what high-speed, turn-based, sci-fi strategy wonder Into The Breach shares with its timeless predecessor FTL: Faster Than Light, but instead to how aggressively different it is. Though they share a soul of permadeath and moment-to-moment dilemmas, entire limbs have been lopped off and casually thrown aside, teeth and hair uprooted and plugged back in at strange new angles, eyeballs moved to places that were never designed to have eyeballs. Not in merely superficial ways either. It has moved from space-bound chaos to ground-based decisions, from spaceship crew management to mech vs horror-bug warfare, even from real-time to turn-based combat.

Yet the really startling change is that, unlike FTL, Into The Breach is rarely a game of chance, of random, cruel loss or sudden fortune, but instead is almost pathologically fair, even if it often doesn’t feel like it. There is no calamity here that cannot be traced back to your own actions. In other words, you’ve only got yourself to blame for the total wipeout of humanity. But this particular end of the world is a glorious one, and one I will happily keep experiencing for years to come. (more…)