I did not expect that I would ever Google something like “will Big Ben bong?” in service to an article for RPS, and yet here we are – and it turns out it will not. The big B day has arrived, not with a bong but a whimper. It’s a sore subject for a lot of us (stuff disappearing off of Netflix; my partner is European and won’t have to queue as long at airports), a genuinely frightening one for others (unknown economic impact; forced repatriation).

As in most times of stress, I turn to video games for both a distraction from and mirror to life. I don’t even mean obviously Brexit-y things like Not Tonight or Spinnortality. There are many games notionally unrelated to today that nonetheless feel apposite to play. Here are a few that I thought of.

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It’s been an eventful decade for PC games, and it would be hard for you to summarise everything that’s happened in the medium across the past ten years. Hard for you>, but a day’s work for us. Below you’ll find our picks for the 50 best games released on PC across the past decade.

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Tis the season / use a brolly / tra la la la / la la la la.

Hello, it’s me, the list goblin, here in this festive first week of December to deliver a big black bin bag of presents to you. And by presents, I mean a single irrevocable inventory of the most disastrous and terrible winters in the videogames of recent history. Yes, there will be cannibalism. Yes, thousands will die of exposure. But from this great compendium of coldness will come knowledge, strength, and, okay, at least one adorable puppy. Here are the 9 harshest winters in videogames. Wrap up.

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Those of you chained to the churning wheel of the internet might have seen this facial recognition algorithm thingo doing the rounds. It’s called ImageNet Roulette, and it’s basically a website where you feed in a photo of your human face and see what the cybergods of our terrible future make of you. But it’s probably not safe to show the neurohive your real face. So we showed it 13 pictures of videogame characters instead, to see if the machine lords of the net realm can tell who they are and what they are all about. The short answer: not really, but sometimes. The neural net, it turns out, is a dangerous idiot.

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Ah, the non-player character. Stoic endurer of all our sadistic whims. It s time the monsters on the RPS podcast, the Electronic Wireless Show, made tribute to these humble little robots, whether they re annoying companions, side characters, or disembodied human heads. Let s talk about some of our favourites. (more…)

The closest I’ve come to an altercation with a border guard was on a family holiday. We’d arrived at Philadelphia airport, and the American at the desk was deeply suspicious about my parents lack of a shared surname. He demanded to know why they weren’t married, prompting my dad to explain that while he was in favour of it for tax reasons, neither of them really believed in the importance of marriage as a cultural or religious institution. We made it through, just.

Who knows how that conversation would have played out in Arstotzka, the fictitious setting of Papers, Please and its newly released official short film. Developer Lucas Pope was involved with the writing, which helps explain how it manages to capture the spirit of the game so effectively. If you didn’t get your fill of tortuous decisions packed with moral angst and grim ramifications from Papers, Please itself, then this should do the trick.

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All right, picture this. There’s five podcasts tied to a train track, and you’re on a train speeding toward them. On another track, there’s just one podcast, the Electronic Wireless Show. Do you swap tracks and kill one podcast to save the other five? Or do you forge ahead? Take your time, it’s a difficult moral choice – exactly our topic this week. Think hard about it. No, listen, you should think about it very carefully. No, listen–

I know, but–

You can’t just p–

Ha ha, okay, stop the train. Joke’s over.

Stop the train.

STOP THE TRAIN FOR THE LOVE OF GOD STOP THE TR– (more…)

There are more wonderful games being released on PC each month than ever before. In such a time of plenty, it’s important that you spend your time as wisely as possible. Thankfully, we’re here to help. What follows are our picks for the best PC games ever made. (more…)

Glory to Arstotzka! A fan-made Papers, Please short film is in the works and, judging by the early videos and stills, has nailed the oppressive atmosphere of the border sim game. The trailer doesn’t give much away but still has me hooked, and I love seeing the game’s pixel art objects come to life.

The folks behind it are Nikita and Liliya Ordynskiy, graduates of the Moscow Institute of Television and Radio Broadcasting.

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From South Korea – that nearest of neighbours to the world’s most notoriously oppressive regime – comes Replica [official site], a short game about paranoia, censorship, cruelty and the smartphone generation. It would not be inaccurately described as a riff on Papers, Please based around modern technology, given that it concerns labelling someone a traitor to the state by uncovering ‘evidence’ from their smartphone.

… [visit site to read more]