This weekend I am looping the Assault On Precinct 13 theme to build the plodding determination I will need to survive the impending NFT bonanza. I do take some comfort in the fact that NFTs are so unpopular that Riot had scramble to cover after accidentally suggesting a Valorant character liked NFTs. And I especially enjoyed Yanis Varoufakis explaining why the metacryptofungiverse sucks. But more and more companies are talking about NFTs and things will get worse, and I'll need the energy I can only get from Precinct 13 (and the amazing unused Jimmy Chambers song based on it).

But the terrible future can wait, what are you playing this weekend?

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Happy New Year! Somehow we went straight from January 2020 to January 2022. That's weird. Huh. Well, I'm officially giving us a do-over. I think we've earned it.

The games I've collected this week for the first TFI Friday of the year are going to ease us gently out of the time loop that we've been stuck in the last umpteen months. Accordingly, the first one is a time loop puzzle game.

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Through an entirely unplanned sequence of events, I'm currently playing two big action adventure games that couldn't be less alike. One is God Of War, a big, serious dadventure epic about an emotionally distant father trying his darnedest to connect with his (at times very irritating) son. The other is Kena: Bridge Of Spirits, an altogether more wholesome adventure about a young girl cleansing a lush, forested mountainside from a serious case of bad vibes and helping lost ghosts pass on to the other side.

About the only thing they have in common is that they both have what one might call 'cute' NPC companions. Dad Of War is joined by his eager archer "BOY!" Atreus, while Kena has her gaggle of black, fluffy Rot friends (above, right). According to the widely accepted law of big googly-eyes, I should find the Rot absolutely adorable and thus beyond reproach. Atreus does not have big googly-eyes (they are merely wide and naive), but he is certainly a lot cuter than God Of War's other main companion, a talking disembodied head. And yet. Even though Atreus has now reached that stage where he's doing all his adolescent whining and rebellion and "I know you are, but what am I?"> nonsense in the space of about two hours, I would much rather have this sulky pre-teen by my side than the interminable Rot. Let me explain.

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In theory, I miss auto scrolling arcade shooters and would love it if they came back. In reality, they come back all the time and I never really click with them because what I really miss is being a child and feeling like almost every game I saw was magical.

I'm pretty bad at them as well, which doesn't help. Mostly though, I became jaded and curmudgeonly at around nine years old, and will never know such naive wonder again.

Still, Hyper Echelon is fun.

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They say everything is bigger in Texas. It's a statement I have only briefly put to the test during a rushed weeked in San Antonio, a trip I mostly remember for 1) seeing a roadside billboard that advertised Jesus on one side and massive tits on the other, and 2) making a joke about having a puffy taco "so I guess I should see a doctor!" [finger guns] that fell bone-chillingly flat to a dinner table of American business colleagues.

You know where everything actually is bigger? The past>. Join us on this special supporter-funded bonus podcast episode where Nate is our gentle and enthusiastic guide for really massive historical monsters. A giant owl? Bigfoot is really an orangutan? A huge fish that might in fact just be well big, owing to a mistake with its skeleton? Yes, we have all these delights and more. A big thank you to our supporters for making The Nate Files happen.

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Anecdotally, the first records of modern golf date back to its banning in 15th century Scotland. “Nay Golf,” said parliament. “It’s turning the soldiers into fiendish, turf-snorting club-strokers who’d rather say shit like ‘Triple Bogey’ than batter the English, and we’re no having it.” RPGolf Legends is not set in 15th century Scotland, but it does take place in a world where golf has been banned. Only you - through the power of bare-bones ARPG combat and a fun but limited golf mini-game - can save the noble sport from ostensible nonexistence.

I say ostensible because, in reality, golf is everywhere. Our heroine Aerin’s hometown is called Mulligandale. It has two shops, one of them dedicated entirely to golf. Folk shimmy about in golfwear, talking about golf. Many give out golf-related quests, the rewards for which are usually some form of golfing paraphernalia, often golf balls. The actual golf courses themselves have been sealed off by an ill-defined big villainous, but if you put a translucent barrier around the thing you’re trying to crush and still let the people you’re attempting to terrorise build their entire society as a monument to it, you’re basically asking for a plucky hero to restore the national passtime to glory. Highly questionable bit of villainy, this.

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Welcome to The RPS Time Capsule, a new monthly feature we're putting together where every member of the RPS editorial team picks their favourite, bestest best game from a specific year and tells us why that game above all else deserves to be preserved in our freshly minted time pod. It might be that it's the best example of its genre, or it contains a valuable lesson for future generations. This month, we're travelling back to rescue eight games from 2010, and cor, what a good year that was. Too bad almost all of them will end up in the lava bin by the time we're done.

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Steam's Lunar New Year Sale started last night, a huge sidewide discount-o-rama with tens of thousands of games and things going cheap. If you forgot to buy something in Steam's last huge sidewide discount-o-rama a whole three weeks ago, or have received a new paycheque since then, hey! It's a big sale! Again! Splendid!

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Hyper Scape was launched suddenly in July 2020. Initially accessible only via Twitch drops, early streams gathered half a million viewers before it opened up to everyone ten days later.

Unfortunately its drop in popularity was just as sudden, and almost as immediate. Eighteen months later, Ubisoft have announced they're ending development and shutting the game down on April 28th.

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Back in the mists of time of 2013, a bunch of Japanese developers got together to make a series of short 3DS games called the Guild series. Headed up by Ni No Kuni makers Level-5, it had some pretty big-name contributors: Keiji Inafune, Goichi Suda, Yoot Saito and Yasumi Matsuno among others. But there was one game that stood out to me as something really quite special. It was the considerably less well-known Millennium Kitchen's Attack Of The Friday Monsters, a sweet slice of life adventure that saw you play as ten-year-old Sohta walking the streets of his small Tokyo suburb on a hazy summer afternoon in 1971. It was a tender celebration of childhood nostalgia and imagination, with just an inkling of some menacing undertones, both from the people Sohta meets in his neighbourhood and the titular Friday kaiju monsters that may or may not exist in the real world.

I mention all this because The Kids We Were is probably the only game I've played since then that's even come close to capturing some of that Attack Of The Friday Monsters magic. You won't find any kaiju here, but this is a similarly nostalgic portrait of pastoral Tokyo, as viewed through the eyes of young Minato on his summer holidays, first in the present day and then in the 1980s when he ends up travelling back in time Back To The Future-style to when his parents first met as kids. With three days to right past wrongs, this is one of those gentle, coming of age tales that leaves you feeling warm and fuzzy in all the right places, even when there's no real 'game' to speak of.

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