I'm going to jerk back the curtain a little bit here, and I hope the devs will forgive me - it'll turn out okay, I promise! You see, since the pandemic happened everyone has discovered you can do hands-on game previews using remote streaming, provided all parties have a decent enough internet connection. It usually works very well, with the added benefit that I don't have to get on a plane anywhere. I had one of these for Vampire: The Masquerade - Swansong last week, an upcoming thrillery-puzzley-investigation-RPG set in The World Of Darkness universe (aka all them vampy games), by Big Bad Wolf, who did The Council. For various reasons, however, my preview went terribly. But if it had gone well, I probably wouldn't be as excited for Swansong as I now am.

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FromSoftware's games are filled with formidable foes, from notorious bosses like the Four Kings and Genichiro Ashina, to infamous regular enemies like Dark Souls' basilisks, or those sodding kite ninjas from Sekiro. Yet despite the presence of all these terrifying enemies, nothing sets me on edge in a FromSoft game like encountering a dog. The hideous hounds of Dark Souls and Bloodborne were bad enough, but Elden Ring takes canine combat to a whole other level.

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Sundays are for watching The Undertaker throw Mankind off the top of the Hell In A Cell. Before you wince, let's read this week's best writing about games (and game related things).

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Honestly, given Rocket League's prodigious success, it's a surprise more games haven't attempted to follow in its car tracks. Announced this week, Turbo Golf Racing looks to change that. It's a multiplayer game about driving a car into a ball, but as the name suggests it's drawing inspiration from those ruined good walks rather than from football.

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I'll be honest, reader, In about 12 hours from writing this I'll be getting up to catch a flight - indeed, as you read it, I'll be in the air - and there is still so much to do that I kind of resent you making me type this right now. Last night I had to borrow a hoover from a neighbour I've never spoken to before, because we need to clean our flat before we leave this hell-country forever, but realised too late that we have now sent our own hoover via international shipping>. What fresh hell. I will not have time for any games this weekend, nor, conceivably, the emotion of joy ever again. How dare you even make me consider what games I might have been playing instead?

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Do you ever find yourself explaining how best to approach a game, but still failing to take that approach yourself, and getting frustrated with it?

After spending far, far too long trying to obsessively control every detail of Distant Worlds 2, I've accepted that I need to take my own advice and work with its macromanagement systems instead. They are, after all, the reason its ludicrous scale is workable at all beyond the opening hours, and a major reason its predecessor was so interesting and forward-thinking to begin with. But they are also a source of great friction and confusion, especially if you don't take the time to learn how they actually work.

Distant Worlds 2 is, ultimately, a game that you need to meet in the middle. Consequently, it's one that I can only partially recommend. But I really do recommend it for that part.

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Ever since the very first trailer for Tunic appeared all the way back in 2017, my Zelda senses have been a-tingling. I'm always up for a good Zelda-like, and everything I saw of Tunic back then seemed to confirm that this was 100% a game I would like and enjoy.

You can probably imagine my excitement, then, when Microsoft announced there would finally be a playable demo to people download during last year's E3. However, as I briefly mentioned in my post about Tunic's brilliant in-game instruction manual yesterday, I actually came away from that demo a bit disheartened. With just a single (and quite unforgiving) dungeon to explore, I was left thinking it hewed a bit too close to the Soulsian school of combat difficulty than I'd like. Upon playing the final game, however... Delight! Magic! Joy! I actually can't get enough of it. To think I almost dismissed what's now one of my early game of the year contenders on the basis of that one 20 minute demo now seems incredibly hasty on my part, but with so many games now being shoved down our throats on a daily basis, those first impressions can be devastatingly powerful.

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Super light strategy games aren't exactly uncommon, but it's still a treat to come across one that gets the levels of effort and complexity right. Buggos is about driving your endless swarm of alien insects to spread across a newfound planet and wipe out the gross humans standing in the way.

There's very little stress and no need for detailed schemes, reflexes, or micromanaged tactics. As long as there is food, more buggos will come, and as long as there are buggos, they will loosely move in the direction you command, dying in droves but succeeding in aggregate. It's a good time that asks for little but a point to attack and a desire to consume everything in your path. I'm actually surprised at how much I want to keep playing it.

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I felt my inner-child squeal out when Lego Bricktales was announced during last night’s Future Games Show. They took my favourite part of Lego, building stuff, and turned the whole thing into a physics-based puzzle game, where you build creations to solve problems.

The premise is your grandfather, who just happens to own an amusement park, needs your help getting all the health and safety requirements above board. Because of some complicated Lego lore reasons, the only way to save the park is by helping people all around the world. How do you do that? By building increasingly complex contraptions of course. You can check out the trailer below:

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Last night, RPS' Bestest Best game of 2021 Inscryption won the Seumus McNally Grand Prize at the Independent Games Festival Awards, confirming that once again, we are correct about everything. If that wasn't enough, though, an hour later, Inscryption then won the Game Of The Year award at the Game Developers Choice Awards. It's the first time a game has ever won both awards in the same year, which is a stonking achievement. Clearly, our Advent Calendar made some pretty big waves this year. Just saying.

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