It’s been about an hour since Evelyn Mansell - one of the lead art directors on the System Shock remake - and I started talking about guns. Specifically the big, daft chunky guns that she worked on, but also about videogame guns in general - what makes them tick. What separates a good one from a bad one. Whether or not Doom 3’s shotgun is one of the good ones (it is).

If there’s one area where all of the remake’s ideas truly come together and shine, it’s in the weapons. There wasn’t much to see in the original - nothing beyond the tip of a barrel. Here, the weapons are very much the star of the show. Heavy, industrial things covered in thumb-print smeared LCD screens and superfluous greeblies. NERF guns that've been painted by a 12-year-old and covered in spaceship parts. These are the toy guns you would have wanted for Christmas, and I wanted to know more about them.

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I'm not someone who usually likes little puzzles or point-and-click games as I'm far too impatient. I'd much rather solve the puzzle by battering it with my fist so the pieces go flying everywhere, or turn my pointer into a fist so I can batter the dialogue out of the dialogue box and watch the wizard's words spill onto the dirt like I've just shaken an open can of spaghettios.

Unpacking, a game where you click on items and shelve them nicely, has somehow tamed my urge to punch the boxes open. Except it's done one thing to personally attack me, and that's by not allowing me to unpack stuff and leave it on the floor. It's a fight I simply can't win.

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Having been absent for the majority of the last few pods, I'm back! At least for a bit, and just in time for Six Ages: Ride Like The Wind (a spiritual successor to King Of Dragon Pass) to to get a depressing-sounding sequel and Myst to get a Humble Bundle featuring its sequels, both official and spiritual. So that got us to thinking: what in the darn heck is a spiritual successor anyway? Are there standard parameters? We have a definitional argument, as is our wont.

Plus: we've been playing a clutch of games that are both fun to talk about and current, James instigates a discussion about whether SSDs should be considered the default over mechanical hard drives, and Nate does a mini-game contest that is literally just about fish and has no relation to games whatsoever.

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Ideally, the story of Remnant II’s launch would start and end with it being an ambitious success of a shooty Soulslike. Sadly not: in a Reddit post addressing complaints of wonky performance, even on higher-end graphics cards, developers Gunfire Games admitted to having "designed the game with upscaling in mind."

Working the likes of Nvidia DLSS, AMD FSR, and Intel XeSS into a game wouldn’t normally be a cause of incredulity. Indeed, as optional performance boosters, they’re pretty much always a welcome sight amid the duller texture filtering and ambient occlusion toggles of the average settings menu. The problem here is that with its dismal performance at native, non-upscaled resolutions, Remnant II essentially forgets about the 'optional' part – and in doing so, undermines what makes DLSS and its rivals such valuable tools in the first place.

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In writing about games like A Little To The Left or current RPS Game Club pick Unpacking, I often have to point out that I am a weird little gremlin who loves puzzles and putting things in the right place in games, but not actually in real life. In real life, I write to you today from a desk covered in a weird detritus of work and life that wouldn't quite see me on an exploitative reality TV show with the word hoarder somewhere in the title, but, you know... maybe give it 15 years.

But I bloody love tidying things in games. Getting everything in the right place. And something that makes it extra enjoyable in Unpacking is the sound design. The house itself is quiet, but everything in the game makes a little noise when you put it away or hang it up or slide it in a shelf, and it's all stuff you recognise from home. It makes the whole experience feel domestic and familiar.

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We begin this episode with a little bit of sad news: the Indiescovery podcast is going on hiatus, due to the fact that Rachel and I are both leaving Rock Paper Shotgun for pastures new. However, there's no need to be too downhearted, as your favourite indie-loving trio has every intention of continuing to collaborate on a few silly bits and bobs here and there.

Listen on RSS feed, Spotify, Apple Podcasts, Google Podcasts, Pocket Casts, Amazon Music, TuneIn, Deezer, YouTube, or — if you prefer — right here:

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Now that Diablo 4's new season has arrived, I thought I'd give the game another shot. So, in an evening spare of stuff to do, I booted the game up and created a druid called ANIMALS. After a few hours of pressing 1,3,2,4, in either the same pattern or different patterns, I've come to realise the game doesn't make me feel anything. I bash some skeletons, I equip a staff, I exit to Windows, I couldn't care less. Maybe, though, it's not such a bad thing?

I know I said I'd like Diablo 4 to channel Vampire Survivors and give me an auto-attack switch, so I could just steer my character through encounters without having to think at all. I still stand by my stubbornness! But having obliterated more packs of rabid wolves and legions of demons, I've come to develop what I think is ARPG muscle memory.

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Gallium Nitride (GaN) chargers are pretty awesome, as they're much smaller than traditional power bricks allowing for some pretty bonkers specs in a tiny space. That's certainly the case for this Tecknet GaN triple charger, which offers two USB-C ports, one USB-A port and up to 65W of charging for Steam Deck, ROG Ally, laptops, tablets and phones.

It normally retails for £33, but today it's available for £25 - an awesome price for this spec.

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Baldur's Gate and Baldur's Gate 2 are two of the finest CRPGs ever devised, with incredible stories, characters and settings, and now you can relive one of the highlights of my childhood for just £2.99. That's a 90% savings on the two Enhanced Editions of the game, which run out of the box on modern PCs and even Steam Deck.

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You know how some games are notebook games? Well, The Banished Vault is a manual game, no two ways about it. Sure, you could theoretically make meticulous notes about all the planetary symbols and construction costs of the various buildings you'll need to harvest and convert resources into fuel, alloys and elixirs as you hurtle through space trying to escape the terrifying Gloom based on its in-game> manual. But when there's a physical paper booklet that replicates all that for you in a much more easily accessible format, with several gorgeous illustrations of its mysterious space monastery to boot, not to mention infinitely better explanations of what everything does than I could ever hope to describe, it's quickly become an essential part of my play experience.

I'm still working on my review for The Banished Vault (hopefully coming later this week), but as it launches on Steam today, I'd strongly recommend spending the extra £5/$5 to get one if you're at all interested in Lunar Division's space survival management 'em up. I don't think I could have survived in the game without it.

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