Promise you won't tell the other children, but the RPS staff are actually complex magical spells cast by the Sugar Plum Fairy, as part of an age old pact with the ents of the forest where the RPS treehouse was built hundreds of years ago. Each year the Sugar Plum Fairy has to collect more wishes to power the spells every year (you can help to make the spells more powerful by joining the RPS supporter program). While she's out wish-hunting, here are some Christmas Crackers to distract you.>

Time to enjoy your lovely joke!

Q. What’s Idris Elba’s favourite drink?

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We made it! The winter solstice has passed and the days are growing longer. To celebrate this (plus some other, non-astronomical events), we're taking a week off! I imagine many of you will too. Oh how happy we'll all be, gathering at the window with our loved ones to count aloud the extra seconds of each day! This novelty will wear off in a week or so once we realise longer days don't mean warmer days, so we here at RPS will return on Tuesday the second of January. We have a few more bits and pieces still to come this year, mind. Expect more of our favourite games and—I'm very sorry—Christmas cracker jokes. Before I send you away, please, do tell us all: what are you playing this holiday?

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Bahnsen Knights knows what not to tell you. Its world is largely a mystery, because all that matters is the situation its protagonist Boulder is stuck way, way too deep in. Everything feels like it's about to come to a head somehow, even though you have very little idea what's going on.

Its world could almost be a post-apocalypse one, a feeling that persists even though it's unclear how true it is, how much is ambient cult brainwashing, and how much just the result of Boulder starting to lose himself after being undercover for far too long.

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Hear ye! This month marked the 25th birthday of Thief: The Dark Project. While not as infinitely mutable as other 90’s icons like Doom (which just turned 30, and can be played on a pregnancy test), stealth gaming’s grandpappy has maintained an enduring appeal and influence, especially for those more inclined to sneaking than slaughter. Buckets of digital ink have already been spilt examining this legacy, so I won’t dive into the weeds of a hagiography. What I want to highlight is a major event that marked the 25th anniversary – one that makes today as great a time as any to explore Thief’s still-thriving mod scene.

Notable: After a quarter-century, stealth fans were gifted a new, 10-mission Thief campaign called The Black Parade. Pitched as a prequel to the first game, it features a new protagonist, new story, and new heists, built by some of the most lauded modders on the scene. More notable still: The team lead is Romain Barrilliot, a fan-turned-pro designer at Arkane, where he, alongside other former Thief acolytes, iterates the immersive sim tenets in their patented im-sim laboratory. Mostest notablest? One of Thief’s original designers, Daniel Thron, joined The Black Parade’s team – and simultaneously released a new Thief short film, featuring the original game’s voice actors.

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Welcome to door 22 of the RPS Advent Calendar. To enter, you must prove your identity by answering a simple question. Who are you? A human... or a puppet?

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Like a circus strongman's barbells, 2023's year in VR has been heavily weighted toward either end. The last twelve months were bookended with the launch of two excellent VR headsets (although only one is truly relevant to us PC gamers) and a whole bunch of great VR titles. The summer, however, was the quietest I've known for a long time, to the point where I ended up playing two VR minigolf games in the absence of anything better to do. Fortunately, the last few months have made up for it, providing enough fantastic VR games to feed us well into next year. So it's an unevenly weighted set of barbells, the kind that would give our moustachioed muscleman a slipped disk.

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I've long been a fan of NZXT's AiO liquid coolers - in fact, I'm building a PC with one tomorrow>. You might be joining me on that, as today NZXT's Kraken 240mm AiO is down to £90 at Scan UK after a £40 discount. That's an excellent price for an all-in-one liquid cooler that sports an LCD screen for monitoring your temps or showing off your cat.

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If you're looking for a great graphics card for 1080p gaming, three GPUs come to mind: the RTX 3060, the RX 6600 and the Arc A770. The latter is the most fascinating, in my opinion, as it's seriously faster than its rivals in many games and comes with a better upscaler than AMD's FSR in XeSS.

Today you can pick up this GPU for just £266 thanks to an Amazon UK Lightning Deal on a graphics card that comes from Amazon US - with no extra import or shipping fees. That compares favourably to the £320 that the next-cheapest A770 GPU costs, especially when you consider this is the better 16GB variant with a factory overclock!

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I've recently returned to Warhammer 40,000: Darktide, one year after the grimdark Left 4 Dead 'em up launched and eleven months after I stopped playing. It was always fun to tear through the grubby guts of a Gothic industrial megacity with your chainsword, but it became repetitive and its whole loot-o-crafting mess sucked. A year on, the loot and crafting still suck, but I've really enjoyed the variety added by new levels and weapons and the polish from a year of tweaks and quality-of-life changes. If you played Darktide on Game Pass (or bought it), consider another look.

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Dominions is a series where you can build the Ark Of The Covenant, which blinds everyone on any battlefield it appears on. Games where any soldier can receive a horror mark, which attracts unspeakable phantoms from beyond reality to randomly attack them, and if they survive, they'll probably receive more horror marks. Games where I once deployed my entire military against an evil raven so large and powerful that I lost, leaving behind corpses that it fed on to grow even stronger. Games where a frog could, mathematically, kill god with one blow.

Dominions 6 is due out in January, bringing with it changes so esoteric that I'd be better off talking about Dominions 3 to Dominions 5 instead. So let's do that.

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