Every weekend, indie devs show off current work on Twitter's #screenshotsaturday tag. And every week, I bring you a selection of these snaps and clips. We're running late again because of Monday's holiday, but the games are still just as good. This week, my eye has been caught by big spaceships, some sort of Looney Tunes logic take on Hitman, and a game about the very real lives of the video games media. Come see!
For a certain sort of PC gaming fan, System Shock is where it all began. 30 years of immersive sim development started here, as Looking Glass escaped the restraints of the RPG genre and embraced thoughtful first-person action. SHODAN broke free, and the world was never the same. Without System Shock, there would be no Thief or Gloomwood, no Prey or Dead Space. Bioshock was conceived as its sequel. The creative figureheads behind Deus Ex and Dishonored were wrapped up in its creation, and forever changed by contact with Looking Glass and its unique philosophy.
Countless studios have used Citadel Station as a star to steer by, measuring their own work against System Shock’s commitment to simulation, dense atmosphere, and method-ish refusal to break character. This was not so much a game as an alternate reality. As one of our interviewees tells us: “We were trying to build the holodeck.”
Here’s the story of how it was made, as told by the people who made it.
Noctua's fans are legendary in the PC space, offering exceptional performance and reliability in a love-it-or-hate-it brown and beige colourway. Their premier 120mm fan is the NF-P12, and this model has now been discounted to £12.95 at Amazon UK. That's a lot to pay for a single fan, but these fans normally cost double - think upwards of £22 for a single fan! - so this is actually a heck of a bargain.
Samsung's T7 Portable SSD is one of the best performing options on the market, offering 1050MB/s reads and 1000MB/s writes in a portable USB-attached form factor. It normally costs around £130 for a 2TB size, but today you can pick up this model for £104.96 - a great deal for an external SSD of this calibre!
Today is another out of sync Bank Holiday for me. It's not one in Ireland, so I'm the only one rattling around in here at the moment. And it occurs to me that the vast, vast, vast> majority of you will never have met me in real life. The evidence that I exist in physical space is comparatively minimal! How do you know I'm not an AI? An AI could probably replicate my writing style quite thoroughly, because there are at present many thousands of my - mine, my own - words on the internet, and they and everything else have and are being scraped by AI. This thought process is as a result of a few AI things intersecting with my workspace at once recently. Several of them are quite funny, and also not. If you think AI tools are actually good for writers then I have to assume you don't really think much about either.
Sundays are for using an old receipt as a bookmark. Before you remind yourself of how much you spent on that McDonald's breakfast, let's read this week's best writing about games (and game related things).
When my Sleeper escaped their ramshackle life on the fringes of Erlin's Eye at the end of last year, they left behind a lot of unfinished business. I had to stop short my efforts to help Bliss make a go of her repair bay business, and Tala was left to finish making her brand-new distillery on her own. Yatagan agent Rabiyah probably has my name on an employment blacklist, too, after I upped sticks without telling them, and the spores of mushroom algae I'd been cultivating for Riko over in Greenway were no doubt left to rot and moulder somewhere. Instead, I jacked that all in to smuggle myself, my engineering pal Lem and his tiny daughter Mina onto a ship headed for some far-flung star out in the void. The Sidereal ship wasn't going to wait. It was now or never.
Fortunately hitting an ending in Citizen Sleeper doesn't mean the end of your save. Booting it back up again for this month's RPS Game Club, I wanted to play out a different ending to my Sleeper's story. Turning my back on Lem and Mina still brought its own kind of sadness, admittedly, but I wanted to dig into the game's trio of free DLC episodes first and foremost, as that was another thing I never got time to start last year. I've only played through the first chapter, Flux, so far, but man alive, it was not an auspicious start for the refugee flotilla ship hoping to make a new life for themselves here. In fact, I don't think it could have gone any worse, such was the monumental failure of my collective dice rolls and decision making. But despite absolutely beefing it in Flux, I also came to realise an important lesson. It's okay to fail, and that failure can often make the consequences of your actions feel all the more poignant. Sure, it might not feel nice, and yes, I wish it could have gone better. But sometimes the odds really are stacked against you, and you've just got to roll with it.
After the unspeakable horrors of a five-day working week, what a relief for people in the UK to be back on another three-day weekend. We'll be mostly quiet Monday then return properly on Tuesday. The weather's been absolutely glorious out here so I'm aching to spend quality time outside. But what are you playing this weekend? Here's what we're clicking on!
Most video games are too big. Their lands are too expansive, their histories over-explained, their playtimes too long. Most of everything is too long (songs, books, movies, everything) but it's especially felt in games, where the magical "What's next?" feeling of discovering a world often fades to leave the "What task must I complete now?" drudgery of playing a video game. So I hugely admire Cosmo D's Off-Peak series, which has built the feeling of a huge and fascinating city through only four tiny locations visited across four games with a combined playtime of under eight hours.
It is entirely irrational that I can see a hundred largely identical online shooters and not blink, but see a single game cover similar ground to something unique can make me go, "Oh, it's a Grounded knock-off".
It's also extremely unfair on Smalland Colon Survive The Wilds, a lovely survival game about being a teeny tiny person in the wilderness, where bottlecaps serve as tabletops and beetles are a deadly threat. It is absolutely comparable to Obsidian's garden adventure, but a peer rather than a pretender. I even prefer it in some ways, but they have such a different vibe that there's plenty of room for both.