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 mech battles, Japanese horror, colourful farming, a hand-drawn horror game in the Doom engine, and plenty more. Come look!
Sundays are for ordering a Steam Deck and getting quite excited about its arrival. Before you track its delivery, let's read this week's best writing about games (and game related things).
First, snowdrops. Then crocuses. Now, daffodils. You know, I had always appreciated council budgets including spring bulbs to make places pretty, but it's only this dismal winter that I truly realise the mental health bonuses of this. Spring is coming, they tell everyone by poking up in parks and on roundabouts, hold on just a little longer. But what are you playing this weekend? Here's what we're clicking on!
Most RPGs set you off on some kind of grand quest, a hero's journey filled with danger and peril as you track down some legendary sword to defeat a world-ending evil. Boots Quest DX, however, has much humbler aspirations. You are a mere boot enthusiast on an adventure to find the very bestest best boots known to man (or blobs, I genuinely can't tell what provenance these rotund creatures hail from), and nothing else will deter you from achieving your lifelong goal. Find a honking great sword on the beach? Trash. A pirate's cutlass? Get in the sea, literally. If it's not a pair of boots, you're not interested - and it all makes for a brisk, anti-RPG adventure that's incredibly refreshing.
Jank. I am saying "jank" several times upfront, not because Spacebourne 2 is particularly> janky, but because it is a bit, and I want to temper your expectations so you're not unfair on its flaws if you try it after I bang on for the rest of this article about how impressive it is.
There's a dream space game we all imagined, where you pilot a ship freely around the galaxy, landing on planets and space stations and running around them doing stuff, finding things, maybe having a fight, then get back into your ship to launch into space, where you can stop at any time and do a little space walk. Maybe walk around on an asteroid, just because.
Spacebourne 2 isn't the dream. But for a game made, as far as I can tell, by one person, it is an astonishing effort to capture that spirit.
“At some point," says Joel Jordan, "Animal Crossing poses the question to you with alarming force: how do you want to spend your time?”
Allow me to open with the scoundrel’s refuge that is a seemingly weighty dichotomy: I reckon there’s two really special types of indie games. Those that work wonderfully despite their smaller scope, and those that work wonderfully because of it. It’s that second kind - the particular and peculiar voyages into the miniature and mundane - that really spin wonders. Games like Unpacking, PowerWash Simulator, and Dinkum. Games humble enough in scope, and curious enough in outlook, to be uniquely capable of framing everyday experiences so that their inner oddness and strange magic - unfairly dulled by familiarity - shines.
So, when Jordon - solo dev on the upcoming Time Bandit - brings up the question: how do you want to spend your time? I’m left pondering it for far longer than I think I otherwise would, thinking about it in context. The obvious answer here is: playing an videogame, please. But Time Bandit’s free demo doesn’t take long to make me almost uncomfortably aware that there’s more than one way to play something. I don’t even need to be anywhere near the PC. I might actually be playing it more when I’m not [X-Files music, but also I’m going somewhere with this].
Earlier this month, we asked you to vote for your favourite strategy games of all time to celebrate the launch (and glorious return) of several strategy classics this month, including Relic's WW2 RTS Company Of Heroes 3, Blue Byte's The Settlers: New Allies and Cyanide's fantasy Warhamball Blood Bowl 3. And cor, I've never seen such love for individual expansions and total conversion mods among mainline RTS games and 4Xs. As with all strategy games, however, there can only be one victor - and you can find out what that single strategy game to rule them all is right here. Here are your 50 favourite strategy games of all time, as voted for by you, the RPS readership.
You know it’s a great turn in The Pale Beyond when only five of your crew are freezing, two have frostbite, and one has scurvy. After all the struggles and dangers I’ve been through trying to keep my ship’s crew alive in the bone-biting cold of the arctic tundra, that’s definitely a success in my book.
It’s easy to describe Bellular Studio’s survival sim as just ‘Frostpunk on a ship’, but in some ways that’s pretty accurate: you’re the leader of a group trying to survive in a harsh frozen wasteland. But it’s also a comparison that falls short in plenty of other ways. Sure, the engine of this survival sim might run the same as Frostpunk’s, but it’s buried deep in a handcrafted hull. With an overarching story that deals with the drama and despair of survival, together with a cast of underdog characters whose personalities and flaws fuel your determination to keep them alive, The Pale Beyond is much more human than its steampunk counterpart.
This week on The Electronic Wireless Show podcast our interest was piqued by new trailers for a Jesus simulator and a politics in hell strategy game. We ask ourselves: why are there so many hell-themed games and so few heavenly ones? Is it blasphemy? What would our pitch for a game set in heaven be? (Spoilers for that last one: there's a lot of admin involved). We also chat about what we've been playing this week, and Nate orchestrates a mini-game pitchathon that goes at least somewhat off the rails.
When it comes to ultrawide gaming monitors, curved VA panels are very much the standard - but despite their benefits in terms of immersiveness, not everyone prefers them. Therefore, I thought I'd highlight this deal on Gigabte's M34WQ, a flat 34-in monitor that hits the popular 3440x144 144Hz spec and is today $20 off with a coupon code at Newegg to hit its lowest ever price.