I’m honestly taken aback by how good game giveaways have been in recent years. In the past few months alone we’ve seen some genuinely great stuff given away for nothing but the time it takes to click a button. Even if most of the giveaways are promotional in nature, there’s enough available for nothing to keep even the most fervent player going for months. For the next 44 hours (give or take a few minutes), you can score the Ultimate Edition of Stardock’s well-received sci-fi 4X strategy game Galactic Civilizations 2 here on the Humble store, free to keep forever.

Galactic Civilizations II may not be the greatest strategy game ever made, but according to our once-resident master of war Adam Smith, it’s in the top 25, and that’s not to be sniffed at.

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Join Ella McConnell for Waifu Material, a monthly column in which she navigates the murky, cherry-blossom-strewn waters of visual novels, dating sims, and everything in between (reader masochism not required but strongly recommended).>

For better or worse (NAMING NO NAMES), vampire romance is a prolific subgenre in pretty much every contemporary medium and visual novels are no exception. As such, when Red Embrace popped up in my Steam recommendations I decided to embrace the inevitable.

Developed by Argent Games, an up-and-coming Western visual novel team whose previous title Chess of Blades made it into Rock Paper Shotgun s Unknown Pleasures roundup in January, Red Embrace is also part of the boys love or yaoi subgenre. Historically, yaoi fans (as well as fans of its female-focused counterpart yuri) have often found themselves under fire in popular culture, but will Red Embrace make a fujoshi out of me?

Let s find out. (more…)

Valve’s Steam Link app – a beta version, at least – has rolled out onto Android, with an iOS version soon to follow. Now folks with any kind of modern tablet, phone or other free-roaming screen will be able to play their PC games library anywhere in the house through the power of low-latency video streaming, assuming your home Wi-fi is up to par.

You’ll need a relatively recent phone or tablet to get the most out of this, and ideally a Steam Controller or two (which recently was updated to play nicer with iOS), but at the price of free, it’s hard to complain.

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The thrills, chills, and plaster fills of DIY have come to PC today in House Flipper. The daddification of video games not quite being at the point where we get games about dads replacing fuses or painting the nursery, House Flipper puts a small business spin on DIY by having us renovate and fix-up houses for clients or so we can sell ’em on for big bucks. Knock through walls! Plaster! Paint! Rewire! Refit! Renovate! Tidy! Make your fortune! As a Viscera Cleanup Detail esports professional, I am delighted by the idea – though I can’t help but wish this first-person handymaner were multiplayer and a bit more dynamic. (more…)

Steampunk may be a little overplayed these days, but Far: Lone Sails stands out from the top hat and techno-monocle crowd. Its stark, shifting palette of whites, reds and dark blues, a bleak and empty world that feels enormous around your tiny character, and the centrepiece of the action: your creaking steam-powered land-ship.

In this quiet post-apocalyptic adventure, your tiny little plains-wanderer is tasked with maintaining and singlehandedly crewing this enormous vessel across the great plains of a long-dry seabed in search of civilisation out in the wastes. It also launches today.

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Battle royale is indeed coming to CoD in Call Of Duty: Black Ops 4, as had been rumoured, throwing together characters, weapons, and locations from across all the Blops – including the Zombies modes – in one big last-man-standing rumble. Activision today held their big reveal-o-rama event for this year’s face-shooter, see, blabbing all sorts of details. They also confirmed the rumour that Cod Blops 4 won’t have a traditional CoD story campaign. While it does have a few missions sprinkled around, the focus is on multiplayer, and I’m quite curious about how this will turn out. One unsurprising change: this time it’ll run on Blizzard’s Battle.net, not Steam. (more…)

Right at the beginning, The Thin Silence warns you of its themes of depression, suicide and negative mental health and asks you to stay aware of your own mental state while playing. This warning represents the essential sentiment of the game straight away: violence and death should never be taken lightly. (more…)

You look a little tired, friend. Let me just adjust this slider for you. There, wide awake. Now you ve got some energy, how about listening to the RPS podcast, the Electronic Wireless Show? This week we re talking about character creation. Which games spoil us with choice? And why do we always end up creating the same sneaky elf? (more…)

I don’t think it’s unfair to say that when Super Nintendo classic JRPG Chrono Trigger first hit PC back in February, the quality of the port could be summed up as ‘hot garbage’, with blurry sprites, a clumsy interface and even using Windows default system text in places. The iconic opening screen of the game – a clock pendulum swinging – was even undermined by being completely out of sync with the audio.

Fortunately, Square Enix have made genuine efforts to improve things, with the previous patch cleaning up the blurry, overly-filtered sprites and yesterday’s update making significant improvements to the combat UI, with more improvements due in June.

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This is Playstyle Royale, where I head into… wait. This isn’t the (long neglected) series you all know and love where I play PlayerUnknown’s Battlegrounds while adhering to arbitrary rules. This is that, but in Fortnite.

Fittingly, the rules this week say I can’t use a weapon until I’ve made it into the final two. My only defence? Building.

As usual, I’ve given myself five attempts. I probably should have written ‘unless’ rather than ‘until’, but I’m an optimist at heart. The intro stands: let’s do this!

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