It's been a hot minute since we last wrote about UFO 50, the 50-games-in-1 8-bit retro collection from the makers of Spelunky, Downwell and friends. It's been MIA for several years now (and no wonder, given these are 50 full-sized games being made by several different, and likely very busy, developers), but at long last, Spelunky creator Derek Yu has posted an update on Steam saying the project is finally nearing completion. "We should have a complete game in a few months but are planning for a release in the second half of the year to give us time to do more testing and then marketing," he said.

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DarkStone Digital, solo developer of The Mortary Assistant, is making a new horror game based on Paramount's Paranormal Activity films. Titled Paranormal Activity: Found Footage, it's being published by DreadXP and features some kind of reactive haunt system, with scares dialling up and down based on your actions. DreadXP have shared a teaser consisting of some crackly logos against a backdrop of radio chatter. Given that this is a Paranormal Activity adaptation, it's possible the trailer harbours spooky secrets. You may wish to experiment with turning the brightness up and down, playing the video backwards, or watching it again at the next full moon, perhaps while standing in a cemetery loudly declaring that ghosts aren't real.

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SteelSeries make some of my favourite gaming headsets - and RPS' favourite wireless gaming headset, which today is discounted to under £100 versus its normal price of £175. That's a good price for the Arctis 7+, a comfortable and great-sounding headset that works not only on PC but also on Switch, PS4, PS5, Xbox One and Xbox Series X/S - that's all the consoles!

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Here's something a little different: a seven-port powered USB hub from Sabrent that makes it easy to connect a huge amount of peripherals and drives to your PC without having to fumble blindly with the back of your PC - or turn one of your laptop's USB ports into many many more. It normally goes for £30 to £40, but today you can pick it up for just £19 at Amazon UK.

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I've done some elementary study of the planet Jupiter for various creative research projects/dead-ends. It's probably a symptom of my failings as an astronomer, but I have to say that at no point have I noticed any gigantic, depressed clowns. In new platformer Clown Meat, one such gigantic, depressed clown has swum through Jupiter's atmosphere, drifted to Earth and kicked off some kind of meatpunk apocalypse, saturating the surrounding countryside with circus-themed abominations.

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I've had to look up.... goddamn it, hang on. I've had to look up Wrath Colon Aeon Of Ruin every day to remember its utter nothing of a name. Such a weak title deserves a much worse game, but this captures the feeling of its late 90s FPS influences as they actually were, and ends up just familiar enough to work, and just original enough to refresh the formula. At times, it's a little too> accurate, but even with its annoyances dialled up by the pressure of playing it too hard for the sake of review, I'm impressed with the balancing act it's struck.

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Since I’m apparently on survival game duty for the rest of my days, and we’ve just had a firm reminder of how wobbly an early access launch can be, it seems like a good time to check in on that there Sons Of The Forest 1.0 release and see whether it’s felt the effects of its own early access polishing process.

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Eric "ConcernedApe" Barone has marked the 8th birthday of his farming sim phenomenon baby (also called Stardew Valley) by announcing the impending release of update 1.6. The PC version - the one we care about - is arriving on the 19th of March, and consoles and mobile as soon as possible after that. The actual content of update 1.6 is largely a mystery, but Barone has teased a few things here and there, including that it's "mostly changers for modders" that'll make it "easier and more powerful to mod".

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I seem to be on a highly irritating "refuse to play games as they were intended to be played" spree lately. A couple of weeks ago, it was "I refuse to leave the prologue area in Skull And Bones", a decision that has sadly been born out by Ed's review. Then it was "I refuse to play Helldivers 2 as a co-op shooter", which again, is a stance I am sticking with, even as I am overrun and sat on by Terminid Chargers. And now it's "I refuse to play Cobalt Core as a roguelike deck-builder, because it secretly isn't one". Come now, squint at the header image so that the text and numbers fade away, and all you can see are coloured shapes. Pay attention to certain underlying rhythms while playing. Need I say any more?

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Another day, another videogame company jettisoning a large number of people "who have contributed to our success" so as to position themselves for growth in the face of "challenging times". Today it's Sony's turn with the axe: the PlayStation publisher have announced plans to reduce their global workforce by about 8% or 900 people, so as "to future ready ourselves to set the business up for what lies ahead", in the words of outgoing president and CEO Jim Ryan.

Several well-known PlayStation studios are affected, including The Last Of Us developer Naughty Dog, Ratchet & Clank developer Insomniac Games, Horizon developer Guerilla Games and PlayStation VR specialists Firesprite. It's also proposed that PlayStation close Sony London in their entirety, though the exact scale of the reductions remains to be seen.

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