We're a two-hander this week, as Nate has a sore throat, but Matthew and I have a jolly old time talking about the games that sound like amazing ideas on paper (whether they end up being great off the paper or not) and even manage to contrast them with games that sound like a bad pitch but end up great. We manage to talk about a lot of games in a sensible way, and even gesture at serious discussion of how prestige indies can dominate their niche to the detriment of other interesting games.

Also we talk about holes quite a lot.

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Combine the peg-pinging action of Peggle with the roguelikelike dungeon crawling of Slay The Spire and you get Peglin, a delightful game which launched into early access on Monday. Off your cute wee peglin goes on an adventure, battling baddies and claiming treasures, but damage is dealt by pling-plonging orbs down Peggle/pachinko boards and you have a bag of different orbs instead of cards. I like it, and it has a demo you can try for yourself.

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Crytek, developers of Hunt: Showdown and the Crysis series, have announced that "the company has adopted a remote work option for employees who prefer it." The decision comes after the studio initially switched to work-from-home during the Covid-19 pandemic and found that development didn't slow down, and follows a similar decision made by Destiny developer Bungie last month.

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Last week, our mission resumed after a wee hiatus and you decided that parody in-game brands are better than photo modes. Or are less bad? Some of you have a lot of pent-up frustration because you lack the dexterity to keep your fingers from fumbling photo buttons. But it is decided, and we must move on. This week, it's a question of love versus a battlefield. What's better: romance, or iconic Counter-Strike map de_dust2?

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Corsair make a particularly fine selection of AiOs, also known as all-in-one liquid coolers. They use off-the-shelf designs for their pumps and radiators, as do many other companies, but distinguish themselves with good-quality fans, optional lighting and low prices for a major brand. That last point is particularly pertinent today, as their H100X 240mm AiO has dropped to nearly £60 on Amazon UK - a significantly lower price than any alternative that I'd rate as highly and some £25 below this AiO's original launch price.

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A new raft of Ryzen 5000 processors has hit virtual and physical shelves, making it a good time to pick up a new AM4 CPU at a discounted price. The appearance of the lower-end Ryzen 5500, 5600 and mid-range 5700X have pushed prices for their more expensive counterparts way down, while the 5800X3D remains hard to find due to its relatively low supply and impressive gaming performance.

If you were thinking of upgrading, you might be interested to know which retailers in the US and UK are selling each of these processors, and for how much. I was interested myself, so I put together a couple of small spreadsheets to find out - and the results suprised me.

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Warstride Challenges is a retro-inspired FPS that's also a rally game at heart. The game rules> and I am smitten with it, mainly because it puts my FPS acumen through its paces: aim, movement, and shrimp-back are all subject to rigorous testing.

But the game also appeals to a primal, competitive side of me. The one that's desperate to beat my rival Patrick, a bot who's literally programmed to be really good, and Edders, a ghostly version of myself who either strokes my ego or shatters it to pieces.

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The Stanley Parable is a game about a man who leaves his desk one day to discover that all of his most difficult to animate colleagues have vanished. First released in 2011 as a Half-Life 2 mod, it is a wild fantasy about what it might be like to not be in front of the computer for a while. There’s also some bonus themes in here about determinism in narrative fiction and the illusion of choice, framed as a satire of contemporary game design, but also as an incisive commentary on the notion of free will in general.

But most of all, I think that The Stanley Parable is a game about not being in front of the computer for a little while, as a treat. There’s an achievement you get for not playing the game for five years, and in The Stanley Parable: Ultra Deluxe – a remastered version for consoles that adds some new content – there’s another achievement for ten. If they could implement an achievement for feeding all of your worldly belongings into a woodchipper and staggering naked into the forest to live with the animals, they probably would.

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If you thought Larian's walled castle booth at this year's PAX East was impressive, wait until you clap eyes on TinyBuild's full-on PAX carnival. It was here where we saw Potion Craft's delightfully detailed little magic tent, for example, as well as the world's largest luminescent, inflatable spider, who was on hand repping their new arachnid-based multiplayer lightsaber game, Spiderheck. To talk more about the stand and the publisher's upcoming slate of games, we spoke to CEO Alex Nichiporchik, all in the company of his good (and grizzly) friend Larry the bear.

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Damn. I really have my work cut out for me with this one. I've given myself the span of a fairly short post to try and convince you, dear reader, to give Rocket Bot Royale a shot. It looks like a browser-based game, and it is. It looks like it's probably not worth anyone's time except schoolkids playing on computers in the IT department during their lunch breaks. But goodness me, is there more going on here than meets the eye.

As I've made abundantly clear ever since I joined RPS, battle royales are my jam. I'll happily bulk out my Steam library with reams of half-baked ideas and clunky combat systems in the hopes of finding the next big time-sink for me and my squadmates to get lost in over the next several months. I fully expected Rocket Bot Royale to be left at the bottom of my most played games on Steam list after a few weeks, but after a few hours of play, I'm starting to think eventually it might arrive at the top. It's Worms, but with tanks. It's free to play. And I absolutely cannot stop playing it.

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