A while back, I was wondering where all the Steam Deck accessories were. Valve themselves have the case covered, including a decent hard case with even the cheapest 64GB models, and it’s not difficult to pick up one of the best microSD cards for the Steam Deck. Otherwise, and especially with delays to Valve’s official dock, there’s not much out there from the usual PC hardware suppliers.

I therefore turned to the makers and sellers of Etsy, where a kind of indie Steam Deck accessory market has emerged. Soon, I’d bought (with my own money, you’re welcome ReedPop) a selection of unique, handcrafted, sometimes questionable gadgets and appendages, and promptly packed them onto a train for independent appraisal by a newly minted Steam Deck owner. Specifically, RPS vid bud Liam.

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Every weekend, indie devs show off current work on Twitter's #screenshotsaturday tag. And every Monday, I bring you a selection of these snaps and clips. This week, my eye has been caught by art made of hands, skeleton wrestling, and a squirrel horrifyingly climbing people to rob them.

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Welcome to the first weekend of autumn, gang! Scarves on necks, cocoa on stoves, leaves on ground. Chat about the weather might seem trite but what other conversation topic covers matters directly impacting your life today without risking causing a disagreement, years of simmering resentment, or a brawl? "What are you having for dinner?" is another good one, I think. Perhaps you'll find this advice helpful if you're attending EGX this weekend. Oh, I know another one: what are you playing this weekend? Here's what we're clicking on!

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Everyone's talking about Trombone Champ. Not since Untitled Goose Game have I heard this much excited chat about a game from pals who don't usually talk about games. This is because: 1) it's a fun silly idea; 2) it's very funny to miss a trombone note and squeal out a farty toot in the middle of Also Sprach Zarathustra. As I play Trombone Champ myself, I come to really appreciate that. It's a rare rhythm game where playing badly doesn't frustrate or berate me, because the worst-case scenario is making fart noises, and fart noises are funny.

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The RPS treehouse is quiet today, with most the gang gone to that London for EGX 2022. We're running a Steam Deck Zone filled with minicomps and have a showcase of games with weird controller experiences, and I imagine they'll also be playing games, chatting, attending talks, loitering, expanding their LinkedIn networks, and other such expo activities. Kindly, they're going to check in across the day, texting us all with updates on what they're seeing, doing, and (I imagine) eating. And Ollie might join in from home with cat photos.

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The RPS-beloved turn-based strategy game Solium Infernum is back from the dead. Announced earlier today on stage at EGX London 2022, Armello creators League Of Geeks will be resurrecting and reimagining the game in 2023. Originally released in 2009 by solo dev Vic Davis and his studio Cryptic Comet, Solium Infernum cast you as an Archfiend hoping to stake a claim for Satan's empty throne. With a strong emphasis on political intrigue and Machiavellian backstabbing over taking things by force, this strategy game from hell was a firm RPS favourite back in the day, spawning an eight-part diary series of the team's play-by-email multiplayer adventures. Alas, it never quite found the audience it deserved back in the early 2010s, eventually causing Davis to shut up shop completely in 2015 and pursue a career in tabletop.

League Of Geeks are here to change that, though, and after speaking with studio director and co-founder Trent Kusters (both at EGX earlier today and during a hands-off presentation of their pre-alpha demo late last week), it's clear the team have taken great care in bringing Solium Infernum up to date for modern audiences. It leans into all the same kinds of mind games as Cryptic Comet's original, and its simultaneous turn structure is still very much intact – just with lusher 3D visuals, and all-new, revamped menu screens. And it looks devilishly good.

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Nvidia stuck to the high-end goods for their GeForce RTX 40 series announcement, revealing their next graphics card generation with only the premier RTX 4090 and two flavours of RTX 4080. All three are coming soon with varying degrees of price bumps over the RTX 3090 and RTX 3080, though Nvidia reckon the performance and feature improvements of the 40 series’ Ada Lovelace architecture will make them worthy investments. Especially with the aid of DLSS 3, a new and significantly upgraded version of Nvidia’s DLSS upscaler that will only work with RTX 40 series GPUs at launch.

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Last time, you decided that impossible geometry is better than games playing the music CD left in your drive. As someone definitely not attempting to rig the vote, I respect people on both sides yet am pleased by this outcome. This week, ah sure, why not have another crack at pitting two similar-ish things against each other. It feels against the spirit of the competition but I'm curious. Let's try two sounds. What's better: ding! or the Howie scream?

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Of all the games I sampled at this year's Gamescom, Scorn surprised me the most. For whatever reason, I was expecting this survival horror adventure to ditch spookiness for kookiness, perhaps rattling my bones with hyper-violence and monsoons of crimson.

Nope - the game wasn't what I expected at all. At least, not the 45-minute portion I got to play. Rather, my demo was more of a hardcore puzzler with some exploration elements and the teeniest smattering of action. Don't get me wrong, it was still unsettling and grotesque! Just in more of a brain-training way, if the brain-training was for MIT graduates, or like, the human calculators on University Challenge.

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Asus' Zephyrus G14 is my favourite all-AMD gaming laptop, and today the latest generation model is going cheap at Best Buy. This specification packs in a Ryzen 9 6900HS processor, Radeon RX 6700S GPU, 1TB NVMe SSD, 16GB of DDR5 and a 14-in 1440p 120Hz screen - and it's been discounted from $1650 to $1350, saving you $300. That's an awesome price for this level of performance, all in a compact 14-in chassis that's easy to tote around or work with on the go.

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