Fine free-to-play action-RPG Path Of Exile today launches its squillionth free expansion, Heist. As the name suggests, we’ll be breaking into secure places to rob them blind. And in true heist tradition, we’ll recruit a crew of rogues with unique skills to bypass security. I’m in.

This update was supposed to also to introduce a Mac version of Path Of Exile, though that has been slightly delayed by last-minute technical problems.

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The plan was a simple one. After a fortnight masquerading as Michael Portillo, return to this column’s touchstone, virtual war, without passing Go or collecting £200. It wasn’t my intention to swap driving for driving… bogies for bogeys. I never meant to lose my heart to a ramblewhack sim. (more…)

To completely defox today’s word chain you’ll need to provide Roman, my Chief Foxer Setter, with the sequence of 24 words suggested by the clues below. (more…)

I’ve never been so called out by a game name. Look, I took a break from driving for like six months because of the pandemic. You try going that long without having to parallel park, yeah? They say the skill comes back quick but it most certainly does not. Thankfully, Happy Volcano’s You Suck At Parking does not actually make you drive a real vehicle. Rather, you’re plonked in a funky little video game car (or van, or lorry, or occasionally steamroller) with a simple end goal: park good.

It’s kinda like a weird racing game. Your objective is to stop, yes, but you must do so very quickly, and often without exploding.

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The [cms-block] went on sale yesterday for seemingly all two minutes before it vanished into a puff of broken websites, out of stock stickers and ludicrous Ebay scalpers. Many retailers are still struggling to cope with demand, too – indeed, Newegg have said that they experienced more traffic than the morning of chuffin’ Black Friday yesterday, and that their entire RTX 3080 inventory sold out in five minutes.

But if you’re absolutely desperate to get your hands on Nvidia’s new flagship RTX and don’t care what AMD have in store for their [cms-block] GPUs next month, then help is at hand. As your resident deals herald, I’ve been scouring the web to find exactly where you can buy an RTX 3080 right now, and how long you’re likely going to have to wait before you get one.

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The Can You Pet The Dog Twitter account is quite possibly one of the greatest forces for good in the history of games, especially now it’s spawned its own Humble Bundle. The Humble You Can Pet The Dog Bundle runs from now until Thursday October 1st, and contains eight games of dog petting goodness, plus two soundtracks, all for £9 / $12. You also get to experience the warm, fuzzy feeling of supporting three separate animal charities, too. Here’s how it works.

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Deckbuilding and dungeon crawlers: two great tastes that go well together. Cards, it turns out, are a great tool for abstracting the collection of vaguely synergistic loot from monster corpses, and then seeing how far the resultant combinations will get you through fast-paced, sudden-death runs through a gauntlet of further monsters. Slay The Spire is arguably the defining masterpiece of the card crawler subgenre, and both I and former staff writer Matt Cox (RPS in peace) were impressed by the multi-storey devil fights of this year’s Monster Train.

But there’s still plenty of room for invention in the format, and the upcoming Ring Of Pain (out on October 15th, and showcased in the ongoing PAX X EGX extravaganza) demonstrates what it was missing all along: massively disconcerting owl people.

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I consider myself quite the all-rounder when it comes to playing games. I’ve sampled a little bit of what sometimes feels like every game ever made during my five-squared years on this earth. And yet somehow, inconceivably, before last year’s Call Of Duty: Modern Warfare I’d never played a CoD game before. I’ve no idea how it happened (or didn’t happen), but it did (or didn’t).

Then, as if to make up for all that lost time, the CoD Gods dropped Call Of Duty: Warzone on me a scant few months later. And in a twist of irony, I’ve played very few games since.

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Welcome To Elk

recognises we’re probably all overdue a trip. Oh, a change of scenery would be nice, but it’s the people who make the place – the strange, sombre and often surreal stories from folks we’d never otherwise get to meet. While there’s still a global pandemic going on in the real world, developers Triple Topping are taking us on a trip to their storybook island starting today.

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Hogwarts Legacy

might be set 200 years before lightning-face shows up, but it couldn’t pre-empt the series creator’s transphobic outbursts. Following its debut at last night’s Playstation show, publishers Warner Bros. have attempted to reassure troubled fans that author JK Rowling is not “directly involved” in the game’s production – though they’re being cagey on just how, exactly, she stands to benefit from the game’s success.

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