Hello folks. It's time for the next gathering of the RPS Game Club! This month, we've been playing Bethesda's mega space RPG Starfield, and we'll be chatting about all your favourite/worst/merely mediocre moments, quests and stories from it later on today, Friday November 3rd, starting at 4pm GMT / 9am PT / 12pm ET. We're looking forward to it! So see you later on at 4pm sharp.
Pull switches, press buttons, unscrew panels, mix chemicals, switch broken parts, and pray that following procedure is enough to save you from impossible horrors. That's the fun of Unsorted Horror, a cracking free collection of short first-person horror games with dramatic, doomful scenarios and big, weird machines. No, absolutely you do not get a gun. If you enjoy figuring out how doodads work while feeling like the world has possibly already ended and everyone just kept on going, do play!
I have a confession to make, readers. I'm mildly obsessed with Starfield's cuboid food brand Chunks. In all honesty, I'm kinda obsessed with Starfield's food in a more general sense, and I have almost as many screenshots of its tube-like meal boxes, stale toast slices, vacuum-packed sachets of rice balls, steak slabs and spiced worms - and, of course, Chunks - as I do its planets and NPCs. I'm weirdly fascinated by what Bethesda think our future meals will look like when we eventually start travelling across the stars, and not just because I like ragging on their somewhat plastic-looking textures and marvelling at how everything from orange juice to beer and wine comes in kid's size cartons with a little straw on the side.
Chunks are my favourite food of the lot, though. These cubes of faintly glistening organic matter are bite-sized monstrosities that are quite possibly some of the most unholy things I've ever seen. How this became the dominating foodstuff across the known galaxy is a mystery worthy of its own sidequest, because let's be honest, I'm all for eating wonky fruit and vegetables, but would you truly go to shop, sit down at a table and order an apple that's been squeezed into a perfect cube? Or a cube with yellow skin that professes to call itself grilled chicken? I would probably try them once for curiosity's sake (it's the food of the future, of course I want to know what that tastes like!), but it's also exactly the kind of thing I'd swear off immediately because nope, nuh uh, I just can't even contemplate it anymore. And then it dawned on me: this is exactly how I feel about Starfield as a whole.
I've many a Halloweeny game to recommend to you (Saturnalia, Hob's Barrow, Wytchwood, World Of Horror and even, I suppose, Alan Wake 2, although I'm sort of enjoying it in the wrong way to think of it as a Halloween apropos game) but I'm short on recommendations for myself. I rarely replay games, let alone horror games, which are often one-and-done sorts of things - though I do, of course, enter the Pumpkin Carving Festival every year.
I want something that has a general air of spookiness without being a jumpscare frightfest. If I hadn't played The Tartarus Key already I'd be playing that, is what I'm saying. But the other day I played the demo for An English Haunting and it's exactly what I want. It's just not going to be out for a while. Rats!
While Rishi Sunak bundles nerds into Bletchley Park, we at the Electronic Wireless Show podcast are investigating the real danger of AI: somewhat rubbish text-to-speech voicelines making The Finals less fun. We discuss the arrival of AI voices in big-name games, the disappointingly businessy thinking behind it, and whether we can think up some uses for AI-generated material that we can actually get behind. All sparked by voice actor Gianni Matragrano’s video compilation of the lines in question, which you should probably watch before listening to this episode, or there’ll be a bit where Nate appears to bellow "THE KING FISH" for no reason. Well, maybe not no> reason. It’s still Nate.
Plus! We talk about what we’ve been playing this week, which coincidentally for me was The Finals, while Nate’s been digging deeper into the Deep Rock Galactic: Survivor demo. I also recount the teeth-based controversy surrounding Cities: Skyline 2, in turn begging the question: what are they going to do with all those teeth?
I played a demo of Scene Investigators over the most recent Steam Next Fest, and was interested enough that I wanted to have a go with the full release. It's billed as a detective game for true crime fans, but it reminds me of those puzzle books you used to get, where you are shown an illustration of a crime scene and, if you stare at it long enough, can figure out the assigned solution. Scene Investigators is like that but the scene is a big 3D one you can walk around. A crime has happened and you need to figure out what, mostly by peering at the dates in a diary to cross reference them with the time and day a phone message was left. This is why I wouldn't recommend it to everyone. It's quite hard. But! Some people will really like it.
What kind of game does the label “survival horror” denote? Since its inconspicuous first appearance in the original Resident Evil’s loading screen (functioning first and foremost, lest we forget, as a handy marketing catchphrase), the term has been so enthusiastically embraced and haphazardly applied as to be rendered almost meaningless in 2023. Horror gaming has witnessed multiple seismic shifts since 1996, most notably the turn to action-oriented design with the likes of The Suffering and Resident Evil 4 in the mid-2000s, as well as the rise of spooky almost-walking-simulators like SOMA in the mid-2010s.
Yet the term survival horror has expanded to such a degree that it now seems to stand in, albeit rather awkwardly, for the entirety of video game horror. Even with the caveat that borders for these kinds of labels are notoriously hard to define, survival horror remains an unusually amorphous realm, one that (as a quick search of the relevant tag on Steam will reveal) lays claim as much to first-person bloodbaths like Zombie Army Trilogy as it does moody, combat-free adventures like Visage. Still, old distinctions linger, and a clutch of recent indie survival horrors qualify their work with the word “classic”. I interviewed some of the developers to find out why - and, more importantly, what classic survival horror means.
Last time, you decided that blink teleports are better than summoning spectral animals. I'm wholly unsurprised but I am glad that the fleeting beasties still earned a respectable share of science votes. This Halloween week, with eggs drying on your house and Snickers-sweet vomit running in the gutters, let's consider death. What's better: ghosts walking through walls, or soulslike bloodstains?
Logitech's G305 wireless gaming mouse is an incredible budget option, combining the firm's bulletproof Lightspeed 2.4GHz wireless with a small, comfortable shape and six programmable buttons. This model's full price is £60, but today you can pick up the G305 for just £30 at Currys as part of their early Black Friday deals.
Large gaming monitors can reach some crazy-high prices - so what's to stop you from getting a smaller 4K TV instead? You get a much bigger screen for the money plus TV functionality, and if you choose carefully you won't give up PC niceties like 4K 120Hz support or FreeSync and G-Sync compatibility.
This leads us neatly on to the 42-inch LG C3 OLED, which has dropped to £949 at Currys in the UK for Black Friday (it's normally £1399). This tasty £450 discount brings the monitor down to a price that it actually offers better value than many large-format gaming monitors, while offering far superior HDR, incredible motion clarity and of course full compatibility with PS5 and Series X consoles.