Last week I spoke to Larian's founder and director Swen Vincke about the latest big update to Baldur's Gate 3, and the road to 1.0 release. But also it was December the 16th, so I saw fit to waste his time asking a bunch of fun seasonal questions that blended the love and goodwill of Baldur's Gate 3, with the companion-wrangling and clutch strategy of Christmas. D'you see what I did there?

My questions are in bold, and Vincke's answers are undeneath - and they are both amusing and instructive. I for one hope that Wyll's romcom visit home becomes a future winter DLC.

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Behind today's RPS Advent Calendar door is a game that was only just beaten into second place. Luckily, after said beating it can just pop back to life at the last Site Of Grace it visited and then dive back into the fray again.

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Can you hear that gentle rapping, tapping at your chamber door? 'Tis some visitor tapping at your chamber door - only this, and nothing more!

No it isn't. It's the Nate Files bonus podcast, funded by our supporters supporters, and we have an egg for you. Quoth the egg "Yolk!"

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December always feels like a good month for VR gaming. Perhaps it's because Christmas and VR headsets go together like mangers and Messiahs, or perhaps its because virtual reality is the only place I'm likely to see sunlight before March. In any case, if you're giving or receiving a pair of magic goggles this festive season, I'll be recommending a couple of stocking fillers to go with it at the end of this article.

First though, it's time for a more general bit of stocktaking. 2022 was a big ol' shrug of a year for VR gaming. Which is not to say it was bad, plenty of fun and interesting games launched in the last twelve months, one of which I'd probably put in my personal top ten. But from both a hardware and software perspective, nothing released this year is likely to shift the needle.

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Nope, you don't need to get your eyes tested. Alt254 is a minimalist action adventure game that plays out on a small (albeit greatly enlarged) map that measures just 21x26 pixels. In this tiny space, you, a black dot, must venture forth, solving puzzles, deciphering the strange, colourful world around you and piecing together your broken memory along the way. It's a very enigmatic little game, but one that's instantly charming in its old-school vibes and artfully constructed world. Its soundtrack is a bit of a corker, too.

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Nvidia's marketing team this week announced an Nvidia-branded shower gel and deodorant as a PR stunt for social media giveaways. As far as I can tell, their Sphynx Ampere toiletries do not smell like new graphics cards, so who cares? However! This does make me wonder: which PC gaming smells would you like as a shower gel, perfume, deodorant, aftershave, air freshener, or such? What are the good smells of PC gaming? Which would you eagerly accept as a boxed toiletry set from your aunt this Christmas? I'll go first.

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As we enter the end of year and awards season, it would be remiss not to revisit FMV match-cutting three-movies-in-one detective game Immortality, one of the most innovative and thought-provoking games I played this year. But given the game's subject centres on the depiction of women on film, and their exploitation in the film industry by male creators, it felt appropriate to examine it from the extremely talented femme members of the team. That means not just the star Marissa Marcel herself, played by the award-winning Manon Gage, but other women and non-binary creatives who played different roles in bringing this game to life.

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For day 22 of our RPS Advent Calendar, we're going to make a break for it. Let's escape our enforced drudgery and make a new life for ourselves, out on the outer reaches of space in a lawless space station where we can be anything we want!

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If I were a PC graphics bigwig, choosing which aged game to spruce up with ray tracing as an elaborate mod tools advert, I wouldn’t have gone for one with as timeless an aesthetic as Portal's. Maybe that’s why I’m not one – Portal with RTX is a gorgeous return to Aperture Science, a borderline must-play for anyone with a premium GeForce RTX GPU, and a mightily impressive demonstration of the Nvidia RTX Remix tools that built it.

Admittedly, that’s in spite of some shortcomings, including utterly broken performance on even the strongest Radeon RX graphics cards. Equip yourself with RTX hardware, however, and this free mod is a real Christmas treat.

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I’m a big fan of life-sim mini-games. Cooking, crafting, mining, gardening, and all those other videogame-y tasks make something that's a bit mundane into a fun little treat. It looks like developers Niceplay Games agree, as they’ve taken the joy of tactile crafting and created an entire potion-brewing sim around it - and not only is their crafting system both creative and clever, it's oh so satisfying.

We've written about it before, but Potion Craft is out now. You play as an alchemist who has set up shop in an old wizard’s hut, ready to sell your many bubbling brews and concoctions to the locals. People will come by the shop during the day banging on about their problems, so you need to listen to each customer's issue, create an appropriate potion to help, and receive a lovely handful of gold in return. It’s essentially a shop management sim, since you make money, buy ingredients, and haggle to get a good deal. But the best part of Potion Craft is all in the title; it's getting to grips with the art of potion brewing.

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