I've come to regret trying to theme these posts, reader, but this week I have been listening to the audio book of Rotherweird as my bedtime listen. I keep falling asleep at "man is interviewed for weird teaching job" and waking up at 3am to "the weasel-man spoke to the hideous spider-woman in the magical mixing garden". So I wanted to find some horrible hybrid monsters for you this week. Alas, it seems that is a niche concern (either that or games about hybrid monsters are not tagged correctly on Itch, where I thought I'd find them).

Instead I found some games about dead monsters, more or less. I found some of them suprisingly cathartic, and at least one of them surprisingly difficult.

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There are many things other adults do that I have never gotten the hang of. I don’t go to pubs. I don’t bother with coffee or tea (tea is particularly terrible, what is wrong with you all?). And I don’t drink wine. I have tried. I’ve swooshed and slurped and spat. It always ends with me putting the glass down and backing warily out the room on the way to the nearest sink.

With that disclosed, I do like the look of Hundred Days, a genteel vineyard management game that just launched on Steam. There’s a lot of detailed work that goes into making wrong Ribena.

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If you like to play Microsoft Flight Simulator as a tourist, I’d suggest hooking your game up to Bushtalk Radio. It’s a community generated landmark database that tracks where you are in-game. Get close to a registered landmark and the site will automatically start telling you all about it, just like my mum does when we're in the car ('Ooh, a red Volvo.'). Think of it as an audio tour for the entire world, one that covers everything from magnificent waterfalls to the world’s largest beaver dam.

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I couldn’t believe it when I searched the RPS tag system and didn’t find any mention of Earth Defense Force: World Brothers. I thought the site was doing that thing where it searches EDF-free universes again, but the IT department assures me that the multiverse toggle is off. It seems we just didn’t know that there was a cute spin-off of gaming’s greatest bug hunt, and that it was out very soon. This month, actually.

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Wireless gaming mice are a great way to cut the clutter on your gaming desk, so to help you get the best wireless gaming mouse for your money, we've put together this list of our top recommendations. Wireless gaming mice can often be quite a bit more expensive than wired gaming mice, but we cover all budgets here, with our cheapest pick going for just £50 / $50. We've also got some top picks for those after the best ultralight wireless gaming mouse, as well as those after something a bit chunkier. Whatever you're looking for, we've got a wireless gaming mouse pick for you.

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If you've been waiting patiently for Subnautica: Below Zero to leave its early access adventure, then I have some good news for you: the icy explore-a-thon launched in full today. Set two years after the events of the first Subnautica, Below Zero plunges you into a frostbitten new region with new creatures to discover - such as terrifying penguins with beaks atop their heads.

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I hope you're ready for some more cyberpunk vibes over the next couple of years, because publisher 505 Games have announced Ghostrunner 2 is on the way. The sequel to the dystopian ninja-slicing, wall-running action game Ghostrunner is being made right now by developers One More Level. The first game had players dashing and slashing through a skyscraper, like Mirror's Edge but with swords.

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I understood polygons. You knit a bunch of triangles together, they make shapes, right. Now everytime I open Twitter there's someone posting an intricately detailed 3D model and writing "actually, this is just a sphere" above it, or posting a fully animated 3D character and saying, "this is really just a shader."

But today's graphics marvel is the voxel. I previously thought of them as betamax to polygon's VHS, but voxels have had a resurgence of late via various indie games. And I've never seen anything voxelly as intricately detailed as an in-development engine by a programmer called John Lin. Watch a video of it below.

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Last week we posted about a rather excellent gaming PC deal, which bundled up an Nvidia GeForce RTX 3060 graphics card and AMD Ryzen 5 5600X processor into a computer box with surprisingly solid components throughout, all for less than one thousand of your Earth pounds. Today, that deal makes a return of sorts, as UK system builders AWD-IT have a very similar prebuilt gaming PC, once again for a little less than £1000.

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Lost Ruins is a 2D sidescrolling action platformer in which you can mix-and-match abilities while fighting monsters, but I'd hesitate to put it in a box alongside Dead Cells. The rhythm of its combat, the weight of its movement, and its anime grimness places it alongside other games like Momodora: Reverie Under The Moonlight and maybe the more recent Skul: The Hero Slayer.

It's out now and there's a trailer below.

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