Baldur's Gate 3, out of early access last week, is an officially licensed D&D RPG of many hours of turn-based combat, as you bring together a rag-tag group of misfit heroes to save the world from a mysterious cult. And also every single one of those misfit heroes wants to get at you. In many cases with zero prompting from you whatsoever. It doesn't end with your team companions either; by my loose estimations, any character who is in upwards of three cutscenes comes with a 70% chance of propositioning you. There's one romance option that I experienced effectively as a jump scare, entering a cutscene to see a character suddenly and casually-not-casually shirtless. It never ends. In hindsight, picking from a selection of genitals in character creation was probably a clue.

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The Logitech G502 X is an interesting remake of the RPS reader favourite G502 gaming mouse, and today it's discounted to $50 in the US when you use a $10 coupon code at Amazon.

It features a more streamlined design that James called "achingly close to perfection", with hybrid optical-mechanical switches and a slightly lower weight (89g) - plus the same high complement of programmable buttons and the hyper-advanced scroll wheel that made the G502 such a hit in the first place.

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Sony's PS5 DualSense gamepad is one of the best controllers for PC, but with a $70 MSRP it's also one of the most expensive mainstream options. Thankfully, DualSense price cuts that appeared first in the UK have now spread to the US, bringing the Sony pad to a reasonable $49.

Given how well this controller is supported for PC gaming, thanks to the efforts of Valve and modders behind projects like DualSenseX, this makes it an awesome pickup - whether you're looking to play Baldur's Gate 3 in couch co-op or F1 23 with full adaptive trigger support.

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I'm going to be up front with you, readers: this week's What Are We All Playing is going to make for some monotonous reading. I haven't read any of the submissions this week, but I predict this to be the case because a) a lot of people have snuck in some holiday this week and b) everyone who is here is likely to be playing the same thing. You can guess what it is before the jump...

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Look, I could justify this month's Reality Bytes in any number of ways. I could say the VR launch cupboard is a little bare at the moment, with Steam's New Releases list offering up a lot of dour military shooters, dubious Early Access projects, and fantasy dismemberment porn. I could say that The Room VR: A Dark Matter has just received a PSVR2 release, so now seems an opportune moment to revisit this acclaimed spin-off puzzler. I could say that The Room VR is the only entry in the series RPS hasn't covered yet. But to be perfectly honest, I just fancied playing The Room VR. So there.

Oh all right, there was a slightly more specific reason why I wanted to revisit a game that came out just three days after Half-Life: Alyx. Upon its launch, there wasn't much else like The Room on VR devices, a dedicated puzzler with high production values that didn't feel the need to throw in a gun to shoot or a melon to chop. Now, there are bunch of fantastic VR brain-ticklers swimming in the pond, such as the time-travelling epic Wanderer, the perspective-bending A Fisherman's Tale series, and the ingenious automation extravaganza The Last Clockwinder.

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It's been a while since I picked a game that irritated me quite so much. I quit playing Frank And Drake twice before even meeting its second protagonist, but something about it kept pulling me back.

It's partly the style. Some gorgeous rotoscoping gives its few characters a sense of constant motion that's unreal and very lifelike at once, and it's sometimes pushed further by having them decelerate to a blurred freeze frame when you stop walking. The backgrounds are static but interactable things shimmer a bit, like in old cartoons where you could always tell what was background and what was going to do something. More than that, though, it had me intrigued>.

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I'm not afraid to admit this, but it's become increasingly obvious over the last few days of playing Baldur's Gate 3 that my ability to create interesting custom characters is severely lacking compared to other members of the RPS Treehouse. Case in point, our Ed breezily announced yesterday in our team Slack that he was playing as a Dark Urge bard called, wait for it, Edders Sheeran like it was no big deal whatsoever. I'm not gonna lie, a tiny part of me died inside upon hearing this, simply because of its sheer (not a pun), unadultered brilliance. I mean, come on, it's so good it should actually be illegal.

But it also confirmed to me a deep dark truth about myself that I think I knew deep down, but had kinda been pushing under my equally drab mental carpet for years and years. I'm quite boring at the end of the day, and am the type of person who, no matter the game, always creates basically the same identical person every single time.

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I'm not usually one for character creators. I don't like squinting at brow density or sliding the juiciness of my lips down a scale, twisting and turning my character as if it really and truly matters when I drown them in chainmail anyway. But getting my fella right for Baldur's Gate 3 was of utmost importance, as they'd be my 100+ hour vessel for awful, awful decisions. And I've started off strong, having created an awful little guy.

Let me introduce you to Edders Sheeran, the bard. On the surface he seems like a cheerful sprite, ready to pat his little drum and have everyone do a nice little dance. Truthfully, he is a psychopath who suppresses the urge to kill, thanks to a malevolent background choice that most would leave for a second playthrough, so as he plays Shape Of You, he also imagines the Shape Of You Dead.

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After doing some back of the fag packet style calculations, I have determined that I save Baldur's Gate 3 - the ole' F5 quicksave, baby - a bit over every five minutes. This is not something the game discourages. In fact, I would say that Larian's Dungeons-&-Dragons-but-digital game actively encourages it. Both Edders and Graham found out that you can die almost immediately upon finishing the tutorial and encountering a dying bit of ocotopus sashimi in a crashed ship; fail a roll involved in talking to this unfortunate mind flayer and that's it. Kaput, in about an hour. As Graham observed, the lesson that this teaches you is not "mind flayers are dangerous", because you have already learned this lesson on account of the opening cutscene being all about that. The lesson is "the DM is a prick, so savescum often".

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Welcome to the second ever RPS 100: Reader's Edition. Over the last week, you'll have seen our own RPS 100 list counting down our favourite games of all time (and if you haven't, do go and have a look at Part One and Part Two when you've got a spare moment), as well as some additional features about the games that made it into our collective top ten. But now it's time for your list, as voted for by you, the RPS readership. There have been some interesting movers and shakers this year, and some rather intriguing new entries, so read on below to find out what your> 100 favourite PC games of all time are for 2023.

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