February's Steam Next Fest demo bonanza officially concluded on Monday, and Valve have now revealed the 50 most played games you all tucked into across the week-long event. Ordered by the number of unique players that spent time with them during Next Fest proper (meaning all those early demo plays from earlier in the month haven't been counted), the most popular game of the lot was one that was only formally announced right at the end of January. So congratulations Dungeonborne - your blend of PvPvE dungeon crawling and fantasy skelly monsters clearly struck a chord with this year's Next Festers.
By now you'll probably have read quite a bit about our preview adventures in Inflexion Games' upcoming fantasy survival adventure Nightingale - including our slightly raucous attempts to interview CEO Aaryn Flynn while instant KO-ing tree monsters and abusing our supplies of ice bullets. But outside this guided co-op session, several members of the RPS Treehouse were playing it on their lonesome last week, too, getting to grips with Nightingale's particular flavour of sticks-and-stones crafting, cooking up meat and berry wraps to keep ourselves fed, and generally being cajoled and maybe even lightly seduced by our fae Shakespearean guide, Puck.
With so many folks playing it - some diehard survival heads and others who are mostly just glad to be having a break from Palworld for a spell - it quickly became apparent that lots of us had quite different takes on how Nightingale worked as a craft 'em up. I swear, I don't think our RPS Slack chat has ever seen such passionate discussions about UI layouts and hotkey assignments, so we thought it might be fun (and useful) to try and distil some of those thoughts for you. Will Nightingale succeed in capturing survival newcomers with its peculiar blend of gaslamp tea leaves, or will it chaff like a Victorian corset for the survival hardcore? Join us as we discuss some of its finer points below.
Deep Rock Galactic: Survivor is a delicious piece of mad science: what if you spliced the ale-sodden DNA of Deep Rock Galactic’s dwarven miners with tissue samples from a Vampire Survivors-like autoshooter?
It shouldn’t work, surely. It would> be easy to look at this spin-off and question why it takes the co-op out of one of the best co-op games on PC, or to shovel it aside as a cynical attempt at latching onto the popularity of autoshooters/Survivors-likes/bullet heavens (delete as preferred). But you’d be a smooth-handed leaf lover, my friend, as not only does DRG’s mix of horde shooting and rock smashing translate remarkably well to the format, even this early access version is heaps of subterranean fun.
Helldivers 2 might be a co-op shooter mixed with comedy genius, but its launch has been blighted by bugs and crashes. Over the past week the devs have deployed server hotfixes and matchmaking tweaks, although one server and rewards patch had to be rolled back to fix "significant" performance issues. Still, they're doing their utmost as the game becomes PlayStation's biggest PC release to date. And the latest patch brings with it a slew of crash fixes, reductions to disconnects, further tweaks to matchmaking, and preps things for future server improvements.
In the event that I walk in front of a particle accelerator, get converted into digital data and am promptly isekai-ed into a gameworld, I hope that gameworld is the opening port town from the original Grandia, released on PS1 way back in 1997 (and ported to PC in 2019). There's something about that game's isometricky vantage point and precise combination of 2D pixel characters and 3D environments. The last sentence describes many virtual worlds of the late 90s, but none have stuck in my mind like Port Parm: that hodgepodge of green and rusty roofs, the canals cutting through the cobblestones, the smoky chimneys and people filling the alleyways. Bliss. I can still hear the seagulls blowing around the screen.
Oh sorry, I rhetorically lost myself for a minute there! I'm supposed to be telling you about Terra Memoria, a new RPG featuring time travel, magic crystals and animal wizards. Here's a trailer.
Free Stars: The Ur-Quan Masters will make its way to Steam on February 19th. It's a version of 1992 strategy classic Star Control 2 that takes advantage of updates from its long-running open source project, and it'll be completely free.
Microsoft Flight Simulator's free Dune expansion is available now. It features the Royal Atreides Ornithopter from Denis Villeneuve's movies - with this entire DLC being a marketing tie-in with Dune: Part Two, which releases next month. It includes tutorials, time trials, and a "daring rescue mission".
Sons Of The Forest's 1.0 release date draws nearer. Players who prefer their cannibal islands as polished as possible can begin their visit on February 22nd, and there's now a release date trailer that shows exactly what kind of human monstrosities you can expect.
Magical first-person shooter Immortals Of Aveum launched last August and by the following month half its development team had been laid off due to poor sales.
In a new report by IGN on widespread industry layoffs, developers who worked on Aveum say it cost around $125 million to make and "no one bought it."
It seems like just yesterday that we were reporting that the Asus ROG Ally had dropped to £539 in the UK, and now we have a similarly good deal for the US market: the same Z1 Extreme 512GB model for just $599 following a $100 discount at Best Buy.