The folks who’ve brought you all those cute animal parent games: Shelter, Shelter 2, Paws, Meadow and the lot, revealed last year that they have something new in the works (aside from the planned Shelter 3). Might and Delight’s “tiny MORPG” is called Book Of Travels and is planned as a “unique social roleplaying experience” somewhat in the vein of the studio’s multiplayer experiments in Meadow. After being successfully crowdfunded, they are looking forward to beta testing starting this summer and an early access release for the autumn.

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A new Crusader Kings 3 video developer diary explains how Lifestyles are going to work in this third instalment of the series. It’s a new and improved system that’s pretty different from Crusader Kings 2 – featuring proper skill trees so you can better shape your character to be the way you want them to be.

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Disintegration, the upcoming game from V1 Interactive about flying around and shooting people on a tricked out hoverbike called a “gravcycle”, goes into open beta today. Lead by Marcus Lehto of Halo fame, the developers are inviting as many players as they can to come and test their game. With two modes and seven gravcycle crews on offer, it’s a chance to get your hands on it for a short time before it releases later in the year.

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Last week, the haunting and hilarious Disco Elysium added an extra difficulty setting called Hardcore True Detective Mode . On the surface, it seems like a fairly standard set of tweaked parameters. More demanding dice roles to shaft dear old Harry Du Bois at every opportunity.

If you take time to read the update notes though, it becomes clear that these new changes are storytelling devices as much as adjusted sliders. Since there are no monsters to make tougher, it s your wallet and psyche that take the hits. It s had me thinking about how ZA/UM s surrealist cop odyssey, and other games, express poverty through their systems. Games that invert the traditional power curve of farmhand to godhood, or make us try twice as hard to get half as far. Far from being a detached add-on, the update is a deft application of mechanics-as-metaphor that wouldn t work if desperation, isolation, poverty, and addiction weren t already stitched deep into the fabric of Disco Elysium s fiction.

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Rounds in Legends of Runeterra are perhaps the most complicated thing to get your head around. It relies on understanding the logic behind how spells resolve, when you can play certain cards, and actions that can take place during combat phases. A lot of how Runeterra works is dependent on understanding a concept Magic players would be familiar with. Let us guide you through how turns work in Runeterra.

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Since it first launched years ago as the Skype-killer app for Twitch streamers and gaming communities, VOIP and group chat app Discord has hulked up. New features are constantly in the works like sorting servers you’ve joined into folders, an overlay for seeing your voice chat while in-game, and plenty of other big ticket features. Like any widely-used app that reigns over a relative lack of competition (lookin’ at you, Steam) some features just don’t survive contact with users and need to be culled (lookin’ at you>, Steam). Discord threw two such underutilised bits in the bin this week.

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Listen, we all know that Final Fantasy VIII is the best Final Fantasy, but even I, Squall Fangirl #1, have to admit that the recent Final Fantasy VIII Remastered port wasn’t everything I hoped it would be. What I’ve been itching for all these years is a proper Final Fantasy VIII Remake in the style of the upcoming Final Fantasy VII Remake – although by the time Square Enix finally finish making the latter, I’ll probably be old and grey and too decrepit to play video games anymore.

Still, while a FFVIII Remake is the thing I live in hope for, by golly does the new four-minute trailer for its wildly popular predecessor look exciting. There’s Red XIII! Cross-dressing Cloud! Hojo! Some questionable dialogue! Lots of horrible Shinra execs! Summons! More of that gorgeous battle music! And someone called Aerith? Time to get HYPED.

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As with many collectible card games, Legends of Runeterra is one that is going to see updates, lots of updates. So in order to keep up with all the changes that will be made to the game, I will be looking over the changes that are being made when every Runeterra patch note post is released and seeing where the biggest changes are going to be.

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I did not expect that I would ever Google something like “will Big Ben bong?” in service to an article for RPS, and yet here we are – and it turns out it will not. The big B day has arrived, not with a bong but a whimper. It’s a sore subject for a lot of us (stuff disappearing off of Netflix; my partner is European and won’t have to queue as long at airports), a genuinely frightening one for others (unknown economic impact; forced repatriation).

As in most times of stress, I turn to video games for both a distraction from and mirror to life. I don’t even mean obviously Brexit-y things like Not Tonight or Spinnortality. There are many games notionally unrelated to today that nonetheless feel apposite to play. Here are a few that I thought of.

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When you send your Renoir nude off to the restorer for a spruce-up there’s no danger it will return with the nipples painted out because the restorer thought they might cause offence or arousal. Things work a little differently with computer games it seems. Much-loved isometric sneak-em-up Commandos 2 has come back from refurbishment missing a few aesthetic details. German flags have shed their swastikas, Hinomarus have disappeared from the wings and fuselages of Japanese aircraft, and footage of vile misery-monger Adolf Hitler has been cut from the intro cinematic. The edits plus a host of bugs and shortcomings explain the game’s less than rapturous reception and the waspish words about to waft from my word piano. (more…)