Over the past week or so, you may have caught wind of Denuvo - the makers of anti-cheat and anti-piracy software - embarking on a PR campaign of sorts, intended to combat negative public perception of their software. In case you're unfamiliar, Denuvo's wares have become infamous for allegedly sabotaging the performance of all sorts of video games, from Resident Evil: Village to Tekken 7, though accounts of the severity vary, and there is an on-going shortage of independently supplied raw data. >

Denuvo's attempts to clear the air include opening a Discord, which they say “ is a key step in fostering closer relationships with game developers, publishers, and players, offering a dynamic, real-time platform for meaningful interaction”. On Monday, Denuvo’s media team reached out to me to offer an interview with Denuvo’s product manager, Andreas Ullmann. Here’s that interview, edited for brevity. >

RPS: In a recent public statement you said “we will stop letting every claim about our product go unanswered". What claims are you referring to?

Andreas Ullmann: It's basically really about the stuff that's posted by the community. So you just need to check out Steam forums, for example. Very toxic, very hostile environment. If a game announces to use any of our products, if you check out the Steam forums, all the claims are popping in. SSDs are destroyed by our solution. The usual performance topics, and we simply don't want to leave the floor to these people who are posting all things about us anymore. We want to also be there for a person who has not heard about us before. We also want to share our view, our opinion on these topics, and also act as a trusted source of information.

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Not many people hit the refund button on Sonar Shock, the indie immersive sim that’s rated Very Positive on Steam. But those that do tend to complain they couldn’t get the hang of the controls. You can understand why. Try to strafe left to dodge an attack from a blubber monster, and you’ll instead rotate on the spot. Attempt to turn the camera with a flick of the mouse, and you’ll discover that your view remains fixed in place - the cursor moving across the screen as if searching for an icon on your desktop.

"The controls are actually one of the biggest points that make people bounce off the game," developer Raphael Bossniak admits.

And yet they’re also a unique selling point. Where last year’s extraordinary System Shock remake embraced the interface and keyboard conventions of modern gaming, Sonar Shock leans into the experimentation of pre-Quake control schemes - long before WASD and mouselook became standardised for the sake of ease and sanity.

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No cool industry person this week, I’m afraid, but I do have a consolation prize for you. A comment from valued RPS community member #1694 a few weeks back reminded me that I once spent a long time tracking down good SF/Fantasy/Horror short story magazines. Partly for pitching purposes, and partly because I was just really excited such things still existed.

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Sundays are for reconnecting with old friends, reminiscing about good times, and eventually going to bed feeling an unbelievable sense of calm, contentment, and a newly invigorated sense of self. Lol nah I’m going to play Mechabellum and eat gnocchi from a packet. Asda’s vegan pumpkin pesto is very good though. Here’s some writing I personally found interesting about games (and game related things!)

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This weekend marks the last chance to stuff your hands into the giant plastic tub of loose Lego that is Steam Next Fest, until the next one in like February or something. We’ve been smushing all our demo recommendations up against those of Eurogamer and VG247 in the Wishlisted hub, so there’s no shortage of us-approved tasters to catch up with.

As for what we’re playing this weekend, well...

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Deadlock gives me the shakes. Valve's not-so-secret third-person MOBA shooter is a fiercely competitive game of push and pull through monster-peppered city streets. You'll get into hectic scrapes with a giant blob man and come out of it sweating and swearing, and possibly alive. It is tactical, deep, instinctive, and an interesting work-in-progress. It elicits adrenaline almost as much as it forces murder economics down your piehole. This is the kind of game that puts you into a blistering, exciting (and confusing) battle for survival, then displays a graph when you lose. I need to get as far away from it as possible.

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Ah, what a pickle I’ve gotten myself into. I need to climb down from this table if I’m ever going to meet up with my teammates and finish the game, but the stupid zombies cannot get me if I stay up here. It’s an absolute gherkin, I tell you. A real cornichonundrum.

The steel pipe in my right hand is doing a decent job of whittling them down, and the torch in my left lets me see the expressions of impotent rage on their flaky faces. Still, the pipe won’t last forever - this is videogame steel, the crumbliest steel there is. Thank god No More Room In Hell 2 doesn’t bother with the hunger or rest parts of the survival equation. I can, in theory, stay on this table forever.

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Looking for a new gaming monitor? I don’t mean to tempt you, but this is one hell of a deal. Beating its most recent Black Friday pricing ($1179) by over $200, the Samsung 49" Odyssey G93SC Series OLED Curved Gaming Monitor is now down to $949 at Amazon. That’s $650 off its original list price, and one of the best deals of the year so far.

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Both part of Italy’s "not very big" developer community, Morbidware’s Diego Sacchetti and Misbug have known each other for a long time, but hadn’t had the chance to collaborate together until 2019’s The Textorcist: The Story of Ray Bibbia - a bullet hell where you dodge projectiles and type in exorcisms to banish demons. They worked well together, so started looking for their next project - something full-time that could take the place of the increasing instability of freelancing.

It was a shared passion away from videogames that ended up moulding the shape that project would take. "We love tabletop RPGs," says designer and programmer Sacchetti. "So when we stumbled into Mörk Borg, and then we started to play, we looked at each other in the eyes and said, 'Why don't we make a game out of it?'"

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What is the cutest type of eyeball? This question has plagued the games industry since Nintendo first allowed millions of unsupervised children to play god with Mii avatars and their customisable peepers. In low-stakes fishing game Webfishing, you can give your fuzzy avatar one of 33 styles of eye (I counted). This is the mark of a solid Animal Crossing-like. There's a lot of other character creation bits and bobs, of course, but you'll have to catch a bunch of bass and sell the haul to unlock every boopable nose and bleppy smile.

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