I m jumping the gun just a little but a few of you have sent emails on precisely this subject and there s a significant quantity of fairly solid info out there, so let s talk about the shape of all things CPU and gaming. AMD s Ryzen chips have very obviously been the big news thus far this year. But completing the picture for the next six months or so is what will shortly amount to the most significant update to Intel’s CPU line up from a gamer s perspective in about five years. For once, it s going to be unambiguously good news… (more…)

Ice Pick Lodge’s remake of Pathologic, their wonderfully unpleasant 2005 horror, has picked up a publisher and a confusing new name. The crowdfunded full remake is now named Pathologic 2 [official site], though it definitely is not a sequel. New publishers Tinybuild say that the name is, somehow, “to avoid confusion”. Right-o. Accompanying today’s weird news is a gameplay vidblast showing sickness, autopsy, and purification in the diseased and dying town. Observe: (more…)

Life is Strange: Before the Storm [official site] is the episodic narrative adventure Life is Strange prequel which shines a light on grieving rebel Chloe s sudden and intense friendship with school queen bee, Rachel Amber. Rather than this being a Dontnod game the story has been entrusted to third party devs at Deck Nine, although Deck Nine have kept the look and feel of the original episodic teen tale intact, rooting a lot of the action in familiar locations and involving familiar faces. It struggles with characterisation and motivation at times, BUT it also made me laugh out loud and furnished me with an unexpected weepy moment. Here s Wot I Think: (more…)

Welcome back to Unknown Pleasures, our weekly deep dive into the deep, dark waters of Steam new releases. These are the games that we most liked from the past seven days (with the exclusion of those we’ve already wittered about in detail).

This week, we have Inner Space: The FPS, globular cats, rollerskate simulation, platforming goldfish and a spiritual Myth sequel. (more…)

Against all odds, Sega have released a decent Sonic game. Can they do the impossible and follow Sonic Mania up with another? We’ll find out in two months, as Sega today announced Sonic Forces [official site] will launch on November 7th. While Mania is an olde schoole stylee 2De Sonice revisiting paste gamese, Forces is one of them there newfangled modern Sonics with 3D levels and the occasional side-scrolling section. It also has players create their own characters, which means your fanfic dreams of adventuring with Sonic can come true. (more…)

Hark, it’s the sweet vocal vibrations of the humble RPS podcast, the Electronic Wireless Show. The lads (lads lads) are back from the bright lights of Gamescom and ready to chat hard about the games they saw. But Pip is only giving us a maximum of three words about each one. Madness. Never mind, we can talk more verbosely about the alien-shooting of the Destiny 2 beta, or the otherworldly kickboxing of Absolver, or the other-alien-shooting of XCOM 2: War of the Chosen. It’s been quite a good week. (more…)

The baddies of Ubisoft s post-disaster Clancy-em-up The Division [official site] are sick of your attitude. The upcoming Resistance update 1.8 is free and sees the dastardly bullet sponges of New York hanging out together and putting their differences aside to form an alliance of flamethrowing cleaners, escaped prisoners, rioters and mercenaries, all of whom want you dead in a ditch. What a good plan. You might even say it s intrepid>. At least, I would, because I also need to mention the new area coming to the game, the West Side piers, housing tourist attraction and quite-large aircraft carrier the USS Intrepid. (more…)

And now we just use the Face Ripper on this elven corpse so we can polymorph into an elven form and learn more about what happened by eating the limbs we found earlier.

At Gamescom, Swen Vincke, CEO of Larian, was showing the playable undead race in Divinity: Original Sin 2 [official site] for the first time. Faces were ripped, children were startled, feasting on cadavers quickly became routine. I love Divinity but in among all the elves and dwarves, I sometimes forget just how weird> it is. When you’re playing a skeleton, it’s going to be weirder than ever.

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Have You Played? is an endless stream of game retrospectives. One a day, every day, perhaps for all time.>

Space Quest IV is really, really funny. No, I’m not wrong about this! (more…)

With Total War: Warhammer 2 [official site] now only four weeks away, launching on September 28th, developers The Creative Assembly have settled and announced the fantasy wargame’s PC system requirements. They are, unsurprisingly, about the same as the first Twarham’s requirements but very slightly raised so folks with sluggish PCs will want to check ’em out. And for folks with silicon-snorting framecrushers, beefy boxes bulging with ribs and oozing sauce, or chip-crunching cybermaws crammed with Datadeglovers , they’ve detailed the sort of rig you’ll need to slam 60fps. (more…)