For most of his game-making career, Australian developer dweedes has projected an image of cheeky, punkish rebellion. His website WET GAMIN has accumulated a trove of experimental games over the last decade: short works by various freeware developers that exemplify a scribbly, DIY spirit. Now, making and selling games on Steam under his studio Nonsense Machine, dweedes finds himself in the position of stepping up his commercial and craft ambitions while trying to stay true to his anti-corporate roots.

"I'll put out games for free because it kind of lightens the load off my head," he tells me as we chat over Discord. "I don’t have to market it, I don’t have to invest time in it. I just want to get the idea out, and then people can play it. There’s no quality target, so it’s fun for trying new ideas and throwing whatever you want out and not thinking too hard about it."

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Oh, throw me in an ancient tomb and lob some snakes down there for good measure, Indiana Jones and the Great Circle got some DLC this week. I can't imagine why that might have flown under the radar a bit. Anyway, the Order of Giants has brought with it a patch that makes a few noteworthy additions to the base game.

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I fear and covet no videogame genre on this Earth like the bullet hell shoot 'em up. I find these scions of the arcades irresistibly beautiful. They look like how I imagine human nervous systems appear to thunder spirits. By the same token, I’m not sure they're actually designed to be processed by the human nervous system. They're the sort of game the androids will play, once they’ve hunted down and incinerated the last of our kind.

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Not long before joining Rock Paper Shotgun, I wrote a feature for Edge magazine about the origins of the very silly term "AAA game". The overall conclusion I came to is that "AAA game" is possibly a boardroom-level borrowing from the credit rating industry and Hollywood, and that it has little meaning beyond "most expensive/biggest".

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The first bit of DLC for mud-splattered infrastructure setup sim RoadCraft has rumbled out of the garage, bringing with it a couple of new maps, several extra vehicles, and some extra-tough options for those craving a hard time.

One of those fresh rides is a bridge layer, and you best believe it'll end up wedged somewhere improbable with its wheels spinning helplessly once I get my hands on it. How can you mess up motoring towards a gap, and pressing the 'commence bridgening' button? It'll be possible.

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My first memory is of ants. Just ants. It's one of those very early ones that are nothing but a momentary snapshot now, long since worn with use and subconsciously filled in with probably inaccurate details and context. They were moving around on a white doorframe, and I don't remember the surroundings, or what I was doing, what I did with this observation, or whether anyone even told me what ants are or whether I already knew. But I remember a fascination that never left me. I will, as ever, die for them. To be fair, I'd die for basically anyone who is a cool animal and/or passably feigns friendship, but whatever. The point is: ants.

You'd think I would have played Empires Of The Undergrowth sooner.

I meant to! For years! Being Ants is one of those dream game concepts, and an incredibly difficult one to translate to a workable, satisfying design that isn't hyper simplified or a glorified reskin. And Slug Disco have kind of gone ahead and done it.

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Not gonna lie, readers, Hollow Knight: Silksong is kicking my teeth in, with gracious yet far more powerful legswings than Hollow Knight’s early stages ever managed. There’s a jumping-puzzly bit two hours in that took me about the same amount of time to clear, and the bosses seem generally sweatier too. I’m fairly sure one of them used an impossibly rapid flurry of sword slashes to spell out "Do one, James Archer of Rock Paper Shotgun dot com" in my flesh.

In other words, the review’s coming on Monday at the earliest. But I do think I’ve endured enough to determine that Silksong is a very, very good match for the Steam Deck, making small but welcome compatibility improvements over the original (in addition to its new, desktop-minded ultrawide support).

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