As was leaked, and then hurriedly confirmed by Ubisoft about a week ago, the next Assassin's Creed game to come out will be Mirage, in 2023. It's not going to be quite the massive open world adventure 'em up that the last few entries have been (don't worry; one of those is on the way as well), but a more classic AssCreed experience to mark the series' 15th anniversary. This milestone has made me realise that the Creedsperience has taken up almost half of my current lifespan. Or, to put it another way, I fear that playing Assassin's Creed Mirage may induce a pathetic but very real existential crisis in me.

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The Crucial P5 Plus is one of the most affordable 'second-gen' PCIe 4.0 SSDs, offering sequential read speeds up to a storming 6600MB/s while costing less than alternatives like the Samsung 980 Pro and WD Black SN850. As you may have guessed from the title of this post, it's also on sale at Amazon for a very reasonable price: £59 gets you a 500GB model compared to a UK RRP of £101.

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360mm AiOs seem to be becoming more of a necessity these days, with ever-hotted high-end processors from the likes of AMD and particularly Intel. Thankfully, they're also becoming increasingly inexpensive, with this post in particular spotlighting a deal on the EVGA CLC 360. This cooler normally costs £109, but today you can pick it up for £82 after a 25% discount.

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Summer is ebbing away, and I hate how it goes. I already miss long evenings, with sunset now before 8pm but sunrise still pointlessly at like 6:30? No thanks. I don't miss those 5am sunrises either. So we can surely all agree that the sensible course of action would be to lock sunrise to 7:30am and rotate the whole clock around that. Anyway! What are you playing this weekend? Here's what we're clicking on.

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You start out aiming to restore a princess to a throne, which naturally tempted me on her every turn to lunge onto the nearest spear for a punchline, but I will forgive Tyrant's Blessing for circumstances beyond its control.

Like everything, it's also a roguelike, but it's transparent and fair enough that I can reluctantly forgive that too, not least because I've found myself enjoying this one the more it went on. It's a lighter, cheerier sibling of Into The Breach that's half tactical fighter, half puzzler, and its default difficulty setting is close to perfect if you're looking for something less intense that will still catch you out now and then.

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Despite lamenting the other week that the rest of 2022's gaming calendar was looking a bit weak sauce after endless delay announcements, September is shaping up to be an absolutely monster month for indie releases right now. As Alice Bee noted earlier in the week, there are just too many cool, interesting games coming out for us to review effectively on the site at the moment (although rest assured, we will do our darnedest to cover as many of them as we can).

Part of the challenge is working out what's worth reviewing, and what we think is worth highlighting for you, our readers. The other part, though, is often entirely selfish on our part, just playing and writing about cool games we like. In fact, the decision to review many of the games we covered this week - Railbound, Jack Move and Roadwarden - were all down to having played and liked some form of demo, making events like the Steam Next Fest an increasingly invaluable tool in helping us cut through the noise when we inevitably enter mega months like September.

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Do you ever feel like you're sitting down with a game like a worried parent, saying "I just don't know what to do with you?" Because that's how I feel about Phoenix Point after the last few months of playing it on and off. I’ve definitely enjoyed it more than on its release in 2019, and its DLC adds more to think about and manage during what were once long lull periods. There's a lot to like about its final form. There's also a lot to... I don't quite want to say hate>, but I'm also not quite sure why. It's one of the most evenly mixed bags I've ever rummaged around in.

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We enter the new pod-century on the Electronic Wireless Show podcast a man down, as Matthew won't be here for a few weeks. Not to worry, though, as myself and Nate are ever ready to hold down the fort. This week we're talking about our favourite cinematics in video games, a fitting subject because last weekend I saw the greatest piece of cinema yet conceived by man: Michael Flatley's Blackbird.

I do spend quite a lot of time explaining Blackbird to Nate, but after that we do talk about some cutscenes and cinematics in games (as well as litigating the difference between the two, and Nate tries to remember the first time he saw a cutscene in a game that was in-engine rather than being pre-rendered). And today the Cavern Of Lies is a Cavern Of Justice>, after we received a troubling missive from one [squints] Brond Coatwear?

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I saw a panel of thriller authors a couple of months back and one of them made reference to "the fat chapter", and the others all went "Ohhhh, yes, the fat chapter!". Thriller writers deal in short, snappy chapters, and the fat chapter is the one that ends up getting a load of events or exposition shoved into it, somewhere in the second half, because they wouldn't fit anywhere else. Every year in games there's a fat month, where loads of games come out and loads of them look really good and there is never enough time godammit.

This year that month is September. There are so many games out this month that look so much my jam that I want to spread 'em on my morning toast, but September is also the month that a lot of RPS staff have holiday booked - including me, for two weeks, which means that if these games do get reviewed it probably won't be by me. But know that I have my beady little eyes on 'em.

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Indie team Alblune, which consists of developers Lucie Lessuyer and Alexandre Stroukoff, have a release date for their cute new game The Spirit And The Mouse, a narrative-focussed adventure game with some platforming thrown in. In order to save the cosy town of Sainte-et-Claire, a charming mouse called Lila and a soft spirit called Lumion join forces to restore the town and its people. They'll be teaming up on Steam later this month on September 26th. Check out the trailer below.

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