How refreshing it is to have a Scandinavian-inspired story that isn’t about detectives in woolly jumpers unearthing all manner of grisly nasties from the crisp white snow. Röki‘s young heroine Tove does do her fair share of digging in Polygon Treehouse’s gorgeous point and click adventure, but instead of dead bodies she’s collecting celestial stone discs, strange sophorus flowers, and jars of sticky black goo so a giant cat can stop their legendarily dark fur from going grey and ruining his carefully cultivated myth status.

It wouldn’t do to disappoint the locals after so much time spent hibernating underground, of course. Giving a cat the equivalent of a post-lockdown haircut is more than a fair trade for not being eaten, I reckon – especially when it means you can snatch the giant, succulent ham roasting on the fire while your feline friend gazes at their newly dyed locks in the mirror. If only all hairdressers were so generous.

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The Mafia: Definitive Edition remake is coming in September, but you can take a look at some of the remade missions ahead of time in a new video. Lost Heaven looks much shinier, of course, and its characters have gotten a glowup, but there have been some updates to how it plays as well, which Hangar 13 explain.

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This year’s A Maze festival started today, showing off some of the weirdest and indie-est of games, as well as lots of talks about the same. A Maze is usually in Berlin but, like so many others, the festival has adapted to the current pandemic situation by going online. You can even attend virtually this year with the ‘Total Digital’ experience, a sort of combination of chat room, museum, and temporary platform for the games, where you wander around a 3D show floor and poke at things with your digital, uh, flamingo hands.

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Just when you thought their Warhammer and Summer Adventure Games bundles had got you covered, those mad folk at Humble have gone and rustled up another crate full of games for your bingeing pleasure. This time, it’s centred around the greatest hits of adventure game specialist Daedalic Entertainment, with 11 games bundled up for £12 / $15. Highlights include Ken Follett’s The Pillars Of The Earth, Aer: Memories Of Old and State Of Mind, so read on below to see how it works.

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After four-and-a-half years, Microsoft’s livestreaming platform Mixer will shut down later today. Officially, Mixer streamers (Mixerers?) are invited to swap over to Facebook Gaming’s livestreaming service, with treasured Mixer Partners getting partner status over there too. From what I’ve seen on my stroll through Mixer on this final day, a whole lot of folks are planning to switch to Twitch. The shutdown comes less than a year after Microsoft went wild recruiting top Twitch streamers including Tyler “Ninja” Blevins with exclusivity contracts rumoured to be worth millions.

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Apparently, Viper one of the least-picked characters in Riot Games’ hot new FPS,Valorant, because, apparently>, her kit wasn’t very strong. She’s near the bottom of a lot of tier lists, yet here I am thinking she was pretty good. She has a big wall thing and a good smoke that both decay enemy health, as well as smelly little floor grenades that damage enemies. But that just wasn’t enough to make her more viable than other agents, I suppose. Not any more, though, because Riot have given her some beefy buffs in the most recent patch to up that decay damage, and bring down the cost of her toxic fuel.

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If a train of monsters riding through hell is too sensible for you, rejoice: you can now stick googly eyes on everyone Monster Train. Presumably inspired by the best Slay The Spire mod, the new option puts rolling googly eyes on all your monsters and enemies in battle (alas, not everyone on all screens, not like the Spire mod). Small. Pointless. Delightful. Pop into the settings menu, flick the switch, and get a-googling.

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A new region means new dojo leaders. Their teams are rather formidable and you’ll need to prepare in advance if you want to overcome them. But their dojo puzzles are also somewhat obtuse, with the fourth dojo having the absolute worst puzzle I’ve seen in a long time. If you’re stuck on that sliding puzzle, this guide has the solution.

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Has anyone, in the history of gaming, actually made the bad choice? I can see the renegade dialogue option staring at at me, but are we 100% sure it’s wired up to something in the game? I have my doubts. And it’s those doubts that have led to this, a new streaming series where your loyal RPS vid buds attempt to pursue the worst endings imaginable.

We plan to tackle games in their entirety over a number of weeks, starting with the moral murk of 2019’s The Outer Worlds. It’s short and has great potential for evil (like some RPS staffers I know) and should be a good time for all involved. Well, all those watching.

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As you may have seen already, the hillside lake shown on Minecraft‘s old title screen, which rotated slowly and blurrily between 2011 and 2018, has been located at last. The discovery of the world’s seed is a whole story in itself, about how a group of people managed to deduce a single location from among the 18,446,744,073,709,551,616 worlds possible in Minecraft. That’s about as many atoms as there are in a bee, for reference, making for a pretty daunting puzzle. But since the techniques used to solve it were so unspeakably clever that I could only understand them as literal sorcery, I am probably not the person to ham-fistedly relay that tale.

Instead, I thought I would make a pilgrimage to this fabled location by loading the 2011 beta build where it existed, generating a world with the sorcerers’ seed, and building a house by the side of that very lake. We’ve all seen the place hundreds of times, but I wanted to know what it was like to live there. The answer, as it would turn out, is “surprisingly difficult”.

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