I recently took on a garden allotment tenancy for what I now consider the tellingly low rent of £60 a year. Arming myself with some shiny new shears, I visited my little slice of heaven and found it to be a resentful thicket of Guinness cans, sacks of worrying discarded clothing, nettles sturdier than barbed wire, and insects of a kind I have never seen before and never care to again.

At one point I got my foot stuck in a long-abandoned bucket and, while running around in a panic, put my other foot through a red ant nest. It was a lot like playing the demo for Cleanfall, except that I can't build an airship out of flying jellyfish and flamethrowers and blast this stupid allotment into submission. Mind you, Cleanfall is evidence that an airship made of flying jellyfish and flame throwers will only get you so far.

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Over the past week or so, Steam Deck circles have been filled to their plastic curves with chatter over Decky Lossless Scaling: a plugin for the handheld’s Decky Loader toolbox that makes the game-agnostic frame generation of Lossless Scaling work, more or less, in the Deck’s main Gaming Mode. Quite the feat, considering Lossless Scaling itself is officially unsupported on SteamOS.

In truth, this is a veritable Russian doll of unofficial spinoff projects. The plugin, by developer xXJSONDeruloXx, is based on the separate lsfg-vk by PancakeTAS, which is in turn a Linux compatibility layer for the original, Windows-based Lossless Scaling (and, while I’m crediting folk, a nod also goes to YouTubeist Deck Wizard for pointing this all out first). The long and short of it is that once everything is set up, you can make your Steam Deck do its best DLSS 4 impression by attempting to double, triple, or possibly quadruple the framerate output in your choice of games – though having tried it in a few myself, I’m not convinced you’ll always want to.

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Cyberpunk 2077 update 2.3 dropped last week, delivering a bunch of new ways to spice up your dystopian drives and more additions to possibly the most in-depth photo mode a game's ever had. CD Projekt also added in the ability for you to dismiss the freeroam ridealong Johnny Silverhand they added in previously.

As someone who finds cyberKeanu a bit more grating at times than is socially acceptable, I was pleased. However, over the weekend a modder's released something that might tempt me into bringing him back, if only so V can respond to being told off for crashing by sarkily calling ol'Reevsey mum.

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There are lots of games in the same way there are lots of crisps. Many of those games are good, in the same way that many crisps are shaped a bit like Jesus. But even a crisp shaped like Jesus ceases to delight after you've seen a few. Great, you think. Another bloody Jesus Dorito. Hurl it on the pile. You crave something transcendent. Like a Möbius strip Wotsit. Or a Salt 'n Vinegar Disco inscribed with the Corpus Hermeticum. Something that changes the way you look at crisps forever.

Anyway, Hell Clock is not that, but it does has a wicked sick knife spin attack, so carefree in its centrifugal flesh mangling that I resented every screenshot I had to take for making me move my finger off the funny spin button.

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Bang bang. A Doom modder who's been busy recreating the city of Necropolis from the original Fallout as the setting for some irradiated boomer shooting has released a fresh trailer to the public for the first time in years.

Alexander 'Red888guns' Berezin looks to have been quietly beavering away at GZDoom WAD Fallout: Bakersfield since releasing its last teaser in 2022, having posted fairly regular update blogs for supporters on his Boosty profile. For the rest of us, this fresh trailer's the best look we've gotten yet at what Berezin - who's worked on classic Fallout mods like Olympus 2207 and Fallout: Sonora - has been up to when not doing stuff for publishers New Blood Interactive.

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I’ve had Le Mans Ultimate on my radar of things that let you drive around in realistic circles for the past couple of years, but I’d never dived into its early access. Part of that was being utterly spoilt for choice in terms of existing options when it came to getting my GT racing on, with the likes of Automobilista 2, Assetto Corsa Competizione, and even slightly older sims like Raceroom competing for pole position in the racing bit of my Steam library. Add in the behind-the-scenes turmoil that’s frequently surrounded publisher Motorsport Games over the past half-decade, and you get ample reason to take a wait-and-see approach with their latest offering.

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Sometimes our patron news deity the Maw opens beneath my feet like a toothy sinkhole, and sometimes it leaps up and slobbers all over my face like an exhilarated labradoodle after a weekend at the kennels.

Down boy! Down, you ridiculous creature! Stop putting your tentacles in my ear. Who wanna biscuit? Do you wanna biscuit? Well, you can't have a biscuit - the only things I have to offer are new PC games. Here's what's coming down the chute this week.

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A few of the UK's fanciest former indie developers are going indie again... with help from venture capital. Still Wakes The Deep and Dear Esther creators The Chinese Room have slipped the surly bonds of Sumo Digital in the course of a management buyout, with "facilitation" from Hiro Capital. Now "fully independent", they're focussing on the creation of original games, with two unannounced projects in the offing once they've finished developing Vampire: The Masquerade - Bloodlines 2.

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Turtle Rock's Evolve was, for me, an almost-brilliant asymmetrical shooter straining to extract itself from the jaws of a live service kaiju maddened by a sludgy diet of unlocks and micro-transactions. It was a huge round of hide-and-seek featuring one, upgradeable alien monster and four hunters equipped with jet packs, trackers, forcefield nets and assorted demolition gear. I had a grand old time at launch as the Wraith, a godawful sneaklizard with warping capabilities, like a xenomorph moonlighting as Corvo Attano. But such thrills were sabotaged by the grindiness of the early game and by an infuriating deluge of paid DLC. Publishers 2K Games delisted it in 2018, after attempting to reboot Evolve as a free-to-play game. The beast clings onto a little life care of a community Discord for existing owners.

Even given the reaction to Evolve's nickel-and-diming, it seems unlikely a sequel would have stripped out the live service progression elements and reverted to something like the menu-light horror movie sandbox approach of the developer's previous Left 4 Dead. After all, Turtle Rock went onto make Back 4 Blood, a zombie blaster marinated in grindogubbins. Still, I'd have liked to see them try it. And look, they almost did.

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Sundays are for counting the days. If you haven't heard: I'm leaving RPS on July 31st, bringing my 12 years with the site to an end (and 8 years spent with Gamer Network websites more broadly). This isn't like in 2021 either, when I nominally departed but continued to support the site from the management side and by writing evening news posts. This time is me gone for realsies. I have plenty of thoughts, more than I can reasonably fit in one post or a hundred. So: links? Links.

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