Just Cause 4 stuck its landing about as elegantly as a Victorian flying machine made from long-johns, strawberry shoelaces and seagull wings – here’s John howling about its numerous misfires in our Just Cause 4 review – but developers Avalanche aren’t giving up on it yet. Steam reviews currently average out to the dreaded Mostly Negative, with the vast majority of thumbs-downery prompted by the presence of more bugs than the family movie box office in 1998.*

Undeterred (well, probably quite a lot deterred, let’s be honest), Avalanche recently pushed out the first big JC4 patch, which attempts to wrestle the most overt boo-boos to the ground – including fixing texture pop-in, making keys remappable and menus less miserable, and overall ‘stability fixes’. They also promise that this is “just the start of the work we are carrying out,” with more patches planned next year. They’re also “very sorry to hear” that so many people have had a rubbo time with JC4, if that helps any.

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Much as every Christmas cracker must contain a paper hat and every Christmas stocking must give a satsuma, every Christmas’s gaming must include Skeal. No one knows when this tradition started but it’s tradition, and so we must play Skeal. I’m sure many of you already celebrate the season by playing Skeal with your family round the hearth, laughing and singing together, but for the uninitiated I’ll explain: Skeal is a free slalom skiing game which teaches us the true meaning of Christmas – power, pleasure, and pain.

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There’s a reason you don’t hear much about witches, which is that they’re not real. There’s a separate reason why you haven’t heard much about Witchfire‘s witches since The Astronauts announced their first-person occultist bosher last year – the devs are only eight in number, and they have all been very busy.

In a recent blogpost, The Vanishing Of Ethan Carter devs announced they’re about to get a bit more chatty. Weekly dev updates are due to start this Wednesday, while the announcement itself gives an overview of progress so far. It’s looking very pretty, quite swish, and rather creepy.

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I don t know if I m cut out for this. It pains me to write that. I m RPS s shooty boy, the kid with the crosshairs. I chomp M4A1 rounds for breakfast. But an average round of Insurgency: Sandstorm tends to chew me up instead, then squat over me while informing me about my poor life choices.

I think I m having a good time?

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Good morning! A lot of people had their end-of-year work parties this weekend, including us. But now it’s Monday again. It’s too early for… anything. You’ve got loads of wrapping to do and because you’re not in your 20s any more, the hangovers last for three days. So here is something soothing to stare at, meditatively. Pick out little details. Stay in bed a bit too long because the floor is very cold.

In my review I said that Gris might be the most stunning game I have ever seen. It’s an assessment I stand by, despite not being a huge fan of the story framework that stunningness (stunability?) is deployed around. Gris is probably a must play for anyone interested in illustration or animation.

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Guitar Hero was the best time I ever had with games. Music, friends, house parties, feeling cool in spite of/because of holding actual toys>. Guitar Hero on PC? Obviously a terrible idea. (But it was great news for me).

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Epic Games have melted down Infinity Blade twice in one week. First they scrapped Infinity Blade, their mobile action-RPG series, and now they’ve removed the Infinity Blade they added to Fortnite Battle Royale in homage to it. As I explained after Epic added it, Fortnite’s Infinity Blade was overpowered to the point of ruining the game at all levels from pubs to Epic’s $1 million Winter Royale tournament. They had planned balance tweaks to tone down the murdersword but nah, they’ve conceded that they straight “messed up” and should think harder before adding any more of these ‘Mythic’ items.

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What lies behind door 16 is a mystery. Open it and begin your search for answers.

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The creator of Stardew Valley has temporarily set aside working on his next game in favour of making adding more free content to the much-beloved farm-o-craft-a-fight-y life sim RPG. Eric “ConcernedApe” Barone has been mighty secretive about his next game, not saying what it even is let alone when we might get to play it, so it remains in the nebulous future. Before he gets back to work in this mystery game, he plans to form a development team to keep Stardew updates rolling while he’s occupied.

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Sundays are for SHOPPING OH GOD THERE’S STILL SO MUCH SHOPPING. You can also read the best writing about videogames from the past week.

“What the Popularity of Fortnite Has in Common With the 20th Century Pinball Craze” is a Smithsonian headline that made me both curious and vaguely tired. I’m glad the former feeling won out, because Clive Thompson’s historiography of pinball is fascinating.

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