Last time, you decided by a narrow margin that becoming overpowered is better than a chunky manual. With no chunky manual to teach you a game's systems, I guess you'll be busy experimenting with that for a while. This week, I've had a queer fancy to (for once) make you pick between things which have absolutely no connection. What's better: seasonal events, or dynamic snow? I know, it's a bit of a silly choice, but hey, it's the last week of work before Christmas, let's goof off.

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I've been playing Blacktail, ostensibly for review, but with all the seasonal nonsense going on I haven't played enough to give you a big wot I think. It's worth writing about though, so here I am, doing that. It's a weirdo little first-person action-adventure game where you play as the 16-year-old Yaga, who has been run into the forest because the local villagers think she's in league with the witch Baba. If you know any European folklore you may have reason to suspect they're right.

Yaga's childhood friends have all vanished, along with her sister, and the game sends you off to breadcrumb trails around a bright, unreal forest, to find the memories of what happened to the unfortunate kiddies. Along the way you grow in power and skill, using different types of arrows with your bow, as well as lures and spells. I like Blacktail because it's a little bit janky in ways that don't break the game, and is absolutely committed to its own particular flavour of odd. It's the kind of game you used to see a lot in the early-mid 00s, and just don't get much anymore.

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If you want to open today's door on the RPS Advent Calendar you're going to have to jump and pull on the handle, or scratch on the door until someone comes to open it for me. Unfortunately, today you don't have opposable thumbs - but you're way better at climbing, which is going to come in useful.

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Underwater citybuilder Aquatico will submerge players on January 12th, 2023. This new release date comes a little more than a month after its release was set for January 19th, but I won't look a gift seahorse in the mouth. There's also a new trailer below which breaks down how you'll build your very own Rapture equivalent.

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Larian's now-traditional Panel From Hell method of update delivery dumped some important Baldur's Gate 3 news last week. The weighty Dungeons & Dragons fantasy RPG has been in early access for a couple of years, but it's now scheduled for a 1.0 release in August next year. As well as that, BG3 got its ninth update, the last significant one before release, which raises the level cap to 5 and adds Paladin as a playable class. I caught up with Larian's founder and director Swen Vincke (this time sans full suit of armour) and he told me that, despite Update 9 being a big one, there's still a lot to come.

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If I were only allowed to give a single, solitary reason for trying Control, I’d probably settle on this: it has the most satisfying “throw desk at face” interaction I’ve experienced in a game. Yes, even more so than Half-Life 2. Maybe it’s the slower flying speed of the desk, giving you more time to anticipate the blow. Maybe it’s the recoil of the face. Or maybe it’s just how the desk, or whichever piece of office fixture you’re telekinetically hurling, impacts in a hilarious explosion of shards and scraps.

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Exercise caution when opening door number 20 on the RPS Advent Calendar, because it's an uncaring world of manual labour in space out there. If you open the door wrong you could cause a huge explosion that kills you - but to mitigate that risk you can spend money buying an Official Safe Door Opener. Don't worry, you can just work more to pay it off.

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Hello, yes, I know this is our fourth post on the subject but it’s mostly good news – The Witcher 3: Wild Hunt’s next-gen update is now considerably less of a technical muddle. After applying yesterday’s PC hotfix, performance with the new ray tracing settings is majorly improved, and if you don’t (or can’t) use those, The Witcher 3 no longer runs slower than it did before the next-gen update hobbled it.

That’s judging by some tests I’ve run using the Nvidia GeForce RTX 3070, on which overall stability seems to have improved as well. I’m still having trouble with AMD graphics cards, however, with FSR upscaling being a particularly reliable source of crashes.

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"Do not be afraid to die." That's the advice of Haemimont Games' CEO Bisser Dyankov when it comes to playing their new open world survival sim Stranded: Alien Dawn. Having launched into early access in mid-October, the latest game from the Surviving Mars devs has just recently doubled in size to include a brand-new desert biome in its Dunes And Moons update, adding harsh temperature extremes to deal with, new alien lifeforms to observe, and, you know, just the odd Chaos Moon to endure while you're at it.

The world of Desertum is certainly a marked change from Stranded's initial mountainous forest planet, Sobrius, but after a few weeks of trying (and inevitably failing) to stay alive in them, I do feel like I've settled on a couple of vital dos and don'ts now. For example, Do: invest in defences early on. Don't: eat that weird alien zebra camel until you know whether it's going to give you gut rot. The list goes on, and has only grown larger with the addition of Desertum, which was deliberately designed to "challenge players to plan better and not rely on their previous knowledge," Dyankov tells me. "Our aim here has been to find a balance between the familiar and unfamiliar within the Desertum Biome, to ensure it's a challenging place to build your base, but is also enjoyable." I'll try to remember that the next time horned dinosaurs are gnawing my survivors' legs off.

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How was your year for PC hardware, reader? Pick up anything nice, or got any old favourite gear still going strong? I’m still very happy with the 4K gaming monitor I got for a pittance, and have spent the past twelve months becoming increasingly convinced that tenkeyless keyboards are, in fact, the best keyboards.

That’s just me, though. On an everyone’s-invited macro level, 2022 ended up being the most transformative year for PC gaming kit in recent memory. We’ve had it all: long overdue launches, bitter disappointments, and genuinely impactful performance innovations. Also, Valve made a handheld PC. That was cool.

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