Maybe it was replaying Aperture Desk Job for the RPS Game Club, or maybe it was the sheer scale of Baldur's Gate 3 activating the ol’ fight-or-flight. Either way, I’ve recently developed an intense appreciation for teeny, tiny microgames, to the point where I’ve essentially been begging in the RPS Slack channel for recommendations. Just one more Steam link and I’ll be fine, promise.

And I don’t mean short games in the seven- or eight-hour sense. Not even film-length games like Portal or Jazzpunk. No, I seek to gorge on the slightest sub-hour canapés, games in which you can see and do everything in one or hour or less. "Irresponsibly large"? Another time, Mister Starfield, I crave something irrevocably small.

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Space will neither save nor free us. Like Starfield, it will not be glamorous or exciting. As billionaire jebends plot to establish their own corporate fiefdoms amongst the stars, our descendents' potential spacelives are looking as miserable as collecting 5 spacewolf livers. But I find some hope in spaceship salvage sim Hardspace: Shipbreaker, both in the overt plot about unionisation and in the small satisfaction of doing a job well. Head down, shut up, and focus on dismantling this spaceship carefully and efficiently. It's an attitude that won't save the world but can get you through one more day, and sometimes that's enough.

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When I finished Part 1 of my perverse effort to play Starfield entirely as a space sim, I was both terrified and tantalised. A quick reminder of the rules: I can only acquire new ships by commandeering them, with no planetary landings permitted, which also means that I can't just shuffle between ships at whim after adding them to my hangar. It's possible the game contains an orbital shipyard of some kind - if you've found one, don't spoil! - but at the time of writing, any vessel I abandon is essentially gone for good.

My first trophy as greenhorn orbital bandit Mary Read was a UC Transpo, which isn't so much a spaceship as a shoebox with toilet roll tubes and detergent bottles glued to the outside, its ordnance limited to a single laser. I began my second leg confidently expecting to spend many hours in this Fisher Price starmobile, vainly searching for a wounded battlecruiser or an abandoned solar yacht or some other, more capable vessel accessible to a space pirate of extremely modest means. This is going to be Jalopy: Galactic Edition, I said to myself. Imagine my shock (and slight disappointment) when I jumped to the very next planet and proceeded to comprehensively ding over a Crimson Fleet Spectre.

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Greetings, starchildren. This week on the Electronic Wireless Show podcast we talk about Starfield, the game on everyone's lips! We got code late due to an unknown random happenstance, but we've now put a bunch of time into playing it so can have a blimmin' great chat about Bethesda's space RPG. I sound like I hate it, but don't. James actually likes it. Nate has not played it but he asks us about it.

As you might imagine, the field of stars also makes up the bulk of our What We've Been Playing this week, although Nate is considering whether to start that or Baldur's Gate 3 - we give conflicting answers... Plus, some interesting recommendations, and Garfield.

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Hello folks. How was Baldur's Gate 3 August for you? Ready for Starfield September? I hope you are, because lemme tell you, it's coming all right. In truth, I was surprised (and somewhat saddened) by some of the comments we received around our Baldur's Gate 3 coverage. If you missed them, they were mostly in the vein of saying our increased volume of BG3-related posts felt like "spam", harking back to when we (and the internet at large) all went similarly bananas over Elden Ring last year. I know it can sometimes seem like writing about these games - particularly on RPS - feels like we're somehow neglecting everything else going on in PC gaming. But the truth is a little more complicated than that, so I wanted to take some time to talk a bit about this in this month's Letter From The Editor, because there are a number of reasons why this happens - and will probably continue to happen more generally as websites fight for survival.

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Oft' am I struck by the fact that video game homes belonging to characters in the depths of despair are nicer that all of the homes I've lived in myself. Granted, I'm a thirty-something in a country with a years-long housing crisis, so even the Baker House in Resident Evil 7 is of "I think I could just about afford that one day" status. But it comes to something when a 70s depresso-capsule at the bottom of the sea has more square footage and storage space than I do.

Under The Waves (which got patched today, and not before time because I've had one fatal error crash per play session since it came out last week so far) is about a deep sea diver called Stan, who is living and working at the bottom of a big wet metaphor for grief. You will know this because a) its Steam page says this up front, and b) it's not super subtle (this game is published by Quantic Dream). But, as newsman Edwin pointed out to me today, when was the last time the sea wasn't> a metaphor for grief? It's never a metaphor for enjoying a nice raspberry ripple ice cream. And despite Stan making reference to "what [he's] been through" half an hour in, I think it does a great job with its chthonic sadness. You float about in your tiny little sub in a great misty darkness, listen to the extremely melancholy music, and you start thinking about sad stuff in your own life. But you get into Stan's capsule living area and you think "this guy has a carpet and a book nook, what the hell?"

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Last time, you decided that interrupt attacks are better than a lore codex. Sanity prevailed, and I thank you. Though I realise I am now writing a lore codex entry about a great victory in the year 2023, so sorry about that. This week, I ask you to choose between upgraded movement or upgraded cardboard. What's better: Fast travel, or upgrading cards?

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Space. The medium frontier. These are the voyages of me, reviewing Bethesda's big space RPG Starfield. It's the company's first new IP in almost 30 years (a claim that contains in it an inherent threat for Starfield 2), and though Bethesda has copied some of their own homework for some themes and factions, Starfield is indeed a spacefaring adventure of epic scale and sometimes surprising beauty. It's this scale that makes Starfield feel unfortunately small and empty, a place that still has those fun little Bethesda side quests that escalate into something huge and absurd, but that can also swallow them whole in its cold, star-scattered grandeur.

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In the grim darkness of the far future, the galaxy is your oyster. Or at least it will be, once you've played 100 hours of Warhammer 40,000: Rogue Trader, an RPG from Pathfinder developer Owlcat in which you can buy planets, configure your genocidal Dark Eldar friend to strike ten times a turn, and gaze on ruefully as a demon explodes out of your Psyker's head.

An immediate and shameful disclaimer: I can't match Nic Reuben's deep knowledge of the 40K tabletop universe, which saw him ruminating upon the mysteries of the Koronus Expanse back in 2022, while holding Owlcat's feet to the fire over the absence of space dwarves. The nearest I got to playing 40K as a lad was its Battlefleet Gothic spin-off (which none of my friends were interested in, so when I say "playing", I mean that I sat in a room staring glumly at some unpainted Lunar-class Cruisers while other kids went out and climbed trees). The framing I'm working with instead, based on an hour of hands-off Rogue Trader gameplay, is that it's sort of Warhammer Mass Effect, but with XCOM-style turn- and grid-based combat, and while there are opportunities to be a compassionate hero, you fundamentally only have the option of playing Renegade. Let's dig in!

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One SteamOS patch and a reinstall later, and I’ve overcome my initial launching woes to properly play Starfield on the Steam Deck. Though perhaps it was better off breaking in the atmosphere, and while I’m enjoying Starfield’s spacey adventures in a general sense, its punishing technical requirements are making the Deck’s usually-plucky hardware look like a pile of Old Earth scrap.

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