The castaways are a ragtag crew of teens: Lily is smart, Jaimie is athletic, and Oliver is charming. Sure, there’s Audrey, but she’s such a rebel and her crush on Joshua is making it tough for her to get anything done. And on the night of Day 8, Lily seems to have remembered seeing a documentary about a ritual to scare evil spirits and convinced everyone else on the island that it would be a great idea to burn all the leftover wood in the shape of an idol. Great. Now how are we going to get home?

This is Teen Island Simulator, a zero-player adaptation of the GMless pen-and-paper game, Teen Island, by Chris McDowell.

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We’ve told you what we think are the best PC games of 2020 (well, as many as we could fit), but what about cold, hard business? For folks who want metrics and money, Valve have revealed the best-selling games on Steam of 2020. They’re a bit vague about it, mind.

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Hullo! While we’re away until the 4th of January, here’s a wee post for you, reader dear, to gab about what you’re playing this holiday. What are you catching up on? What have you still not put down? What did you get in the sales? Which games did our advent calendar nudge you into trying? And if you fancy more chat with folks over the break, perhaps you might visit the RPS forum or RPS Discord server?

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Q: What were six and seven charged with, when they ate nine?

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For the first few months during lockdown, I spent some of my time at home working on a model greenhouse. I used white glue to attach small pieces of wood to other small pieces of wood, making door handles and boxes of pot plants and watering cans. There was an undeniable feeling of safety in the sway of a life in miniature. That is, up until I got overwhelmed by the prospect of finishing a project and let the pieces while away unglued on my bookshelf.

Perhaps I’ll get back to it at some point. In the meantime, the charming little diorama homes in The Almost Gone are here to give me my tiny-house fix.

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Q: Which game has racked up nearly two thousand hours of play on the steam account for the Gorilla house at London Zoo?

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Alright, that’s it. RPS is concluded for 2020. We wish you a merry Christmas, a happy Hogmanay, a Festivus for the rest of yous, and a general good’un for whatever else you might be doing after the RPS treehouse falls empty. We’ve left Horace a big bowl of Twiglets, Nate’s put a mince & onion pie out for Jason Statham, a series of traps involving Warhammer 40K figurines and coconut crabs should deter burglars, and a few posts are scheduled for the break. Hold tight. We’ll see you back on Monday, the 4th of January, 2021.

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Christmas music as a genre is rife with earworms (I’ve got chuffing Slade stuck in my own head right now) but the makers of Baldur’s Gate 3 have gone one step further with Christmas brainworms. Larian Studios today dropped the surprise Christmas present of Tadpole For You, Tadpole For Me – a festive song about being infested by Mind Flayer parasites. And yes, the devs sing it themselves. After all, iiiiiiiiiiiiitt’s Christmaaaaas. Ah god damn it.

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The RPS podcast network (comprising this podcast and The PC Gaming Weekspot) didn’t want to leave you bereft over the break, so we’ve got a little Christmas Eve treatette for you, stuffed right down in your filthy stocking. Yes, it’s a mini podcast – by which I mean about 40 minutes, which is actually quite maxi – where we just have a little chat about what games we’ll be playing over Christmas, and some of our Christmas traditions.

There is a very heated bit about cooking sprouts that, if I’m honest, takes up most of the run time, because it devolves into us interrogating Matthew about why he thinks fruit isn’t allowed to be added to the preparation of non-fruit foods.

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Most survival games have an element of horror, giving us an inhuman hunger that’ll kill us if we don’t eat a three-course meal every five minutes. I like jokes. The Forest goes hard on horror, having cannibals and mutants stalk us, and the story-driven survival game’s sequel is looking just as wonderfully horrible. The developers, Endnight Games have announced they plan to release Sons Of The Forest in 2021, and shared a new trailer showing what’s waiting for us in the trees. I do not like it, which I like.

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