I've done a lot of talking about The Callisto Protocol this year, starting with the game's gore system and spiky walls at Summer Geoff Fest, before finding out its Die Hard and Shaun Of The Dead inspirations at Gamescom. In-between all the talking? Lots of slides and presentations and absolutely no hands anywhere near controllers. But finally, finally>, I've played a 90-minute PS5 demo of The Callisto Protocol and can confirm that it felt like a last-gen game in a good way: all photorealistic sweat and blood scrawled on walls, coupled with 360-era exploration and fighting. Refreshingly familiar, I'd say.

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Last time, you decided that relocatable buildings are better than slide kicks. I often side with functionality over flash but honestly, this is gutting. Still, this is science, and I respect the process. Next up, I am asking you to choose between two things which, if we're honest with ourselves, are both really about trying to be cool. What's better: parrying projectiles or customisable horn honks?

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After the past three years, I’d have happily never heard the word "plague" again, let alone in the context of one of my favourite co-op games. Yet after an early play around with Deep Rock Galactic Season 3, I’m already sold that this update – which centers around a corrupting, planet-wide infection – could be its best one yet.

After repelling a robot-spamming rival corp across Seasons 1 and 2, your reward in Season 3 – which launches on November 3rd – is to find your mining operating pelted by a meteorite storm. And they’re carrying a nasty payload: Rockpox, a contagion that quickly infects both the caves of Hoxxes IV and the many, many giant bugs living within them. These sickly Glyphids and contaminated caverns will present you and your fellow space dwarves with some new perils, but also new opportunities to turn a management-pleasing profit. And isn’t providing value to shareholders why we’re all here to begin with?

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165Hz gaming monitors are getting so cheap these days, that it doesn't make much sense to pick up anything less for gaming if you're buying new. Case in point is this MSI Artymis MAG242C gaming monitor, which offers a 24-in span, 1080p resolution and curved VA panel for £120 after a £30 discount at Currys.

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AMD's Ryzen 7000 processors are brilliant, often beating Intel 12th-gen offerings and drawing close with 13th-gen, while offering support for PCIe 5.0 SSDs, DDR5 RAM and a brand new AM5 socket. For content creation, they're by far the best CPUs AMD has ever produced - but for gaming, there is another option: the Ryzen 7 5800X3D. This CPU remains stunningly fast in some games that can take advantage of its uniquely huge L3 cache, and best of all works with a wide range of inexpensive AM4 motherboards with cheap DDR4 RAM.

Pound for pound, it's by far the best AMD CPU for gaming on the market - and now it's been reduced to just $329 at Antonline via Ebay. That's a healthy $120 reduction from its US MSRP of $449, and a great price overall given the level of gaming performance it provides.

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Horror games are usually a bit too scary for me to play alone. I actually barely manage to play them at all, though not for lack of trying. Whenever I load them up, I just can’t help but pause every five seconds for a breather. Multiplayer games are far more manageable, though, and often also turn stifled screams into contagious laughter as your friends terrorise each other.

If you’re a scaredy cat like me and would rather scream at the horrors of your unhinged mates than at unpredictable AIs and scripted jump scares, then you’re in the right spot. Here are five games in which your mates can play as the monster. Some are creepy, some are cute, and none of them will force you to run around alone. If you're looking to get monstrous yourself this Halloween, Liam's done a list all about games that make you the monster. No overlap, promise.

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Shareware platformers defined my PC gaming as a kid. Yeah, a cheeky blast on Wolfenstein 3D was okay, but Commander Keen and Duke Nukem were an amazing discovery for a small person who’d been introduced to games through the NES. One of my all-time favourites is Apogee’s Crystal Caves, a gem of a platformer about an interstellar miner who goes space spelunking in search of alien crystals.

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Last week I reviewed New Tales From The Borderlands and I really didn't like it. This was upsetting to me; this may come as a surprise, but I try to avoid playing and reviewing games I think I won't like. I don't want to go out of my way to be mean, and I also don't want to spend hours not enjoying myself. I go into almost every game I play actively wanting to enjoy it (the exception being things like Succubus, which I can only assume are trying an avant garde technique to plumb new, unexplored depths of badness on purpose).

As it turned out, a lot of other reviewers did like it. I'm not going to object to that, because it takes all sorts to make a world, and so on. Rather, it made me wonder if I'd sort of hallucinated how much I liked the first Tales From The Borderlands. How fantastic it was, managing to be both the best Telltale game and the best Borderlands game in one, was a big part of why I was so excited for New Tales. It came out a long time ago, and I hadn't played it for a while. Maybe it wasn't how I remembered. Maybe I'd changed, you know?

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When Adam Isgreen, creative director at World’s Edge, first played the Age Of Empires series, he was still working at Westwood Studios on Command & Conquer. “The first thing I was impressed about more than anything with this series was just like, wow! History! That's really smart," he tells me. "Like, there's no need to explain anything to people. You don't have to be like, oh, there's a laser gun or this is a magic missile. It's like, it's a wheelbarrow. I know what that does!”

To Isgreen, it’s this level of accessibility that’s carried Age Of Empires all the way to today’s 25th anniversary. The instantly legible historical warfare - “pikemen, ranged units and cavalry” - paired with randomised maps that promised, effectively, an infinite amount of replayability; “It just had a lot of features that I think players really loved and kind of defined itself along those features in a way that, yeah, it's just outlasted everything else.”

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Welcome to the 2022 edition of The RPS 100, our annual countdown of our favourite PC games of all time. This is the second time the RPS Treehouse has gathered together to hash out our collective Bestest Bests from across the ages, and lemme tell you, this year's list has seen tons of movement compared to last year's ranking. Not only are there buckets of new entries, but there's been plenty of upward and downward shuffling of old favourites, too. So come on in and find out what's made the cut.

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