Assassin's Creed: Valhalla, Odyssey, and Origins all have one thing in common: they've got a Discovery mode, which replaces murdering with learning. You can, quite literally, go on tours curated by historians around each of the game's respective maps. Instead of diving off a Sphinx and plunging your hidden blade into someone's spinal column, you can look up at the Sphinx and read a paragraph on its significance. Maybe view an actual, real life bit of ancient Egypt from an actual real life museum collection in-game. Perhaps embody an Anglo-Saxon lad in Valhalla, instead, and like, cook up some nettle soup having just got a fresh "Friar Tuck" at the local hair choppers (no guarantees on this last bit).

This is all to say that Black Myth: Wukong deserves such a mode, too. There were so many times throughout my review time where I stopped and stared and wondered as to something's meaning. Not only in the architecture, but in the characters, too. So here I am with a proposition: how about instead of thwacking things with my staff, I can use it as a walking stick and point it at things I want to learn about.

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Sorry everyone, I might have to start doing that Token RPS Starfield Liker thing again. The Shattered Space expansion, out on September 30th, probably won’t refurbish the RPG’s reputation as an overall miss – but it does ditch the proc-gen planet bloat for a single handcrafted hellhole, a true Bethesda speciality honed by years of Fallouts and Elder Scrollseses. And, if its - sadly hands-off - Gamescom showcase is any indication, it might just double down on Starfield’s own strengths as well.

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We’ve apparently never written about Atomfall, an oversight I’m now all too happy to correct, having played a promising forty minutes or so at Gamescom 2024. In development at Sniper Elite makers Rebellion, it’s a "survival-action game inspired by real-life events" – specifically the Windscale fire, which in 1957 coated much of northern England in radioactive fallout. Atomfall’s alternative history makes Britain’s worst nuclear disaster even more disastrous, plunging the realm into full-on post-apocalyptica and leaving your good amnesiac self to dodge death with nothing but a cricket bat and whatever you can scrounge out of sheds. I like it! Mostly.

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I’ve only managed to carve out the time for about two hours of staff-bonking simian action in Black Myth: Wukong thus far, but it’s been enough that I’m already quite enamoured with just how consistently novel and creative it’s been. I’m enjoying it enough to wish I’d encountered it in a vacuum.

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I genuinely don't like sucker-punching video games the second they're announced, but playing Glowmade's King Of Meat is three hours of my life I won't get back, and every second I spend writing about it extends that total, dragging me closer to a regretful demise. Here's the stuff I'm more positive about: buried at the core of this spurting interactive snarkfest there is a moderately OK third-person dungeon-crawler for groups of up to four.

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Now, I never played quite as much as our Brendy did of the original Splitgate. But I had a fun time with its mixture of Halo-esque trigger pulling and portalling around! So I was intrigued to give the alpha version of Splitgate 2 a go and see if it had a little more substance to it than its initial reveal, which gave off a, "it's Splitgate but with more money" feel.

Well, I think it's… a bit serious? It certainly has more polish and some extra additions, yet I didn't come away from it thrilled by its more competitive, class-based FPS leanings. I think it just needs a bit more time, perhaps, for a portal to open and some silly rocket launchers and baseball bats and zombies to come tumbling out of it.

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MachineGames have made a decent living as the creators of satirical alternate histories in which you messily murder Nazis using mighty double-handfuls of shotgun. There are Nazis to fight in Indiana Jones And The Great Circle - a globe-trotting, tomb-robbing adventure featuring a Lost Ark-era Harrison Ford - but as you'd expect from a Lucasfilm adaptation, there's rather less of the bloodshed.

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Silent Hill has a messy, up-is-down relationship with time and history, so let's go about this hands-on with the Silent Hill 2 Remake in a messy, up-is-down way. Developed well over two decades ago, the original Silent Hill 2 is the magnum opus of Polish horror stalwarts Bloober Team. Running on then-innovative "Unreal Engine 5" technology created by Jazz Jackrabbit publishers Epic MegaGames, it's a wonderful abyss of a game that remains perfectly playable today, given a certain amount of tolerance for the quirks of the era.

It begins with your character, James Sunderland, descending from the road towards the eponymous Midwestern nowhere-town. Like many games of the period, Silent Hill 2 uses a third-person, over-the-shoulder manual camera, which allows you to glance fearfully up at the monstrous pine trees that fringe the path - each rising from a bulging tide of fog that menaces with the suggestion of approaching figures. There is moisture everywhere, gushing from drain pipes and dribbling down concrete barriers. As you amble into the murk, deathly chords and groaning, unmechanical motifs reverberate from somewhere deep underground.

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Hello reader who is also a reader, and welcome back to Booked For The Week - our regular Sunday chat with a selection of cool industry folks about books! You know books, right? They’re like RPS articles, but slightly better for piling under a flock mat to make little hills for your plastic spacemen. Fitting, then, that this week it’s plastic spaceman enthusiast, writer on Absolver, Nightingale, Gladius, and Total War: Warhammer 3, and Ten Things Video Games Can Teach Us author, Dan Griliopoulos! Cheers Dan! Mind if we have a nose at your bookshelf?

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