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There are few things more heartwarming than a solo developer seeing breakout success, especially if their game is a wholesome testament to community spirit, entrepreneurship, and innovative street cleaning solutions like Schedule I. Pretty close, though, is a solo developer pulling a 'Miyazaki lying about Elden Ring', and underselling just how big their game actually is in the run-up to release.

Developer Tyler has been updating the bud flinging simulator steadily throughout the demo release and into the current early access, and they've also got a roadmap over at Trello here (featuring: raids, parkour, jukeboxes, and controller support among other things). Some of the most relevant communication is actually in the Steam forums though. Tyler revealed yesterday that he's currently working on getting the game Steam Deck verified. It's also where he first revealed the full list of planned sellables that are now in the roadmap (Marijuana, Meth, Cocaine, Shrooms, MDMA, and delicious + cool Heroin), with plans to take community suggestions once they're all in.

Earlier this month, Snail Games put out a widely and justifiably clowned-on genAI trailer for Ark: Survival Evolved's Aquatica DLC. Much reporting on the incident, including my own, used some variation of "slop" in the headline.

This has likely been true for some time, but it made me notice that 'slop' had evolved from a common adjective into the realm of de facto terminology. If you dislike GenAI, you refer to its output as 'slop'. It's become lexi-canonical.

I think we can do better. "Slop" evokes a tepid cylinder of condensed cream of mushroom soup, glumly wibbling in a chipped bowl. When I think of GenAI, I picture something closer to tropical insects laying eggs beneath soft flesh of victims. There's something parasitical and sinister about flaying the skin of artists who've explicitly spoken out against GenAI and then gleefully parading around in that stolen flesh. Slop sounds like Soft sounds like Plop sounds like Globule. It slides down too easy; gets off too lightly.

Every year, the fruit flies and mosquitoes return to my kitchen, drawn to the illicit aroma of unlidded pasta sauce and the rank embroidery of carbonised toast around my cooker. Every year, I attempt to remove them non-violently by building intricate traps out of vinegar bottles, or performing slow-motion kung fu punches with a jug.

My inability to keep the winged hoodlums at bay has alienated me from my so-called friends, but on the plus side, it has also equipped me to play The Mosquito Gang, an asymmetrical multiplayer affair in which one, regular-sized human player attempts to carry out various domestic tasks while four, tiny mosquito players attempt to suck their blood.

Dungeons & Dragons company Wizards Of The Coast have apologised for "mistakenly" sending a legal takedown to the creator of a free Stardew Valley mod that adds a village inspired by and featuring characters from Baldur's Gate 3. The mod has attracted praise from Larian CEO Swen Vincke, who was naturally a bit piqued when it was taken offline.

75 people have been let go by Eidos-Montreal, the studio announced yesterday. The Deus Ex and Tomb Raider developers laid off the workers because they didn't have the "capacity to entirely reallocate them", according to a statement. It's a further blow to the workforce at the Embracer-owned company, following hefty cuts last year.

Dwarf Fortress co-creator and programmer Tarn Adams has made fleeting, whimsical allusion to the possibility of an Elf Fortress game in a new interview - a fleeting, whimsical allusion I will now pounce on and make an enormous deal of, because my goodness, man, you can't just say "Elf Fortress" and walk off whistling into the sunset.

The topic arose during a discussion of why fantasy dwarves are a "fortuitous" archetype for a maddeningly system-driven game like Dwarf Fortress, in which half the fun is enjoying the tunnel vision of characters who will cheerfully neglect their responsibilities and doom their brethren because, for example, they're obsessed with crafting a mug that menaces with spikes of bituminous coal and alpaca wool. According to Adams, this is relatably "human", though he muddies things intriguingly by dropping a reference to androids, and allows players to weave stories around technical eccentricities and outright bugs, which can be read as instances of "dwarfy" fixation and excess. Elves? They don't work the same way.

IGN Live was already confirmed to return this June, but now RPS's corporate papa has put a date on it. The in-person fan event, with streams for those who can't attend, will return on June 7th-8th in LA, and tickets are on sale now.

I’ve hit the install cap on my storage drive more times than I’ve rage-quit in Apex. At some point, deleting a 90GB game just to download another becomes a sad cycle of SSD suffering. So yeah, when a bunch of top-tier M.2 drives go on sale, I pay attention. Amazon's Spring Sale has been great for PC gaming deals, but it's also the last day of the sale as well, so don't delay on these latest price drops.

Jagex have announced RuneScape: Dragonwilds, a new open world co-operative survival game set in the same fantasy realm as their ancient MMO. It runs on Unreal Engine 5, looks a bit like Valheim and Enshrouded, and will launch into early access this spring. Dragonwilds takes place on the continent of Ashenfall, a wilderness abundant in winged lizards, and your overall goal is to "slay the Dragon Queen".

I'm going to make the obvious prediction here: you will spend much more time in Ashenfall chopping down trees and composing their delicious, grainy innards into barn doors than chopping down any dragons, regal or otherwise. It's a survival game, after all. The ratio of dragons to logging and carpentry in the first screenshots is a nail-biting 1:1 - if it weren't for that subtitle, I might have assumed this to be a game about woodlands management with optional Smaug-bashing QTEs.

Rather than dragon-felling cantrips, the announcement release gives prominent mention to a spell for summoning spectral axes to chop trees down for you, which feels a bit like a car salesman leading with the option to just buy a train ticket instead. Still, let's not be entirely miserable before we've even played the game. Here's the announcement trailer.

InZoi’s early access release isn’t a particularly good fit for the Steam Deck, primarily because it isn’t a particularly good game. Even before you can dig into its sterile person-pushing, though, trying to run InZoi on Valve’s hanhdheld involves involuntarily headbutting the kinds of compatibility problems and weird workarounds that haven’t been common to the Deck since its early days in 2022.

This is frustrating in itself, and doubly so knowing that despite all those years of maturing, the Steam Deck doesn’t really have a heavyweight life sim that slots in seamlessly to the handheld format. The Sims series, InZoi’s clear inspiration and main rival, can be monkey-wrenched into playability, but even the most recent Sims 4 needs a community-made control modification to function – and that’s more about replicating mouse controls on the trackpads than truly optimising for controller-style inputs. InZoi wants to look like the very model of a modern life simulator, but its own lack of portable rapport is, at best, a missed opportunity to plug this gap.

I recently got three hours of hands-on time with Doom: The Dark Ages, which included a ride on dragonback and a fist fight with a massive mech. But one other sequence saw me wrecking demon lads in one of the more expansive, explorey levels this newest FPS is promising. For a lark, I decided to throw all the difficulty sliders up in an effort to hurt myself spiritually and physically. In doing so I discovered there are some interesting options for players who want a brutal challenge. I also recorded it, so you can see how chaotic, silly, and abrupt it can get (and so you can say "I'd do better" than the disgusting journalist).

I used to think any old headset would do. Plug it in, hear the game, done. Then I bought a half-decent one and immediately heard footsteps I’d been ignoring for years. Now I can’t go back. If you’re still gaming with tinny audio and a mic that makes you sound like a drive-thru cashier in a hurricane, Amazon's Spring Sale is your best chance to escape the audio troubles, and it's also the last day of the sale as well, so don't delay on these top discounts.

Ahead of this Friday's big content update for Monster Hunter Wilds, Capcom have put out a new blog from director Yuya Tokuda, detailing more scaly, slimy, and shiny additions. The main theme here is "harder fights", with arch-tempered variants of monsters besides the announced Ray Dau. But there's plenty of other planned smaller tweaks and goodies, including a reduction in VRAM usage coming "very soon".

Friday's update includes long n' purple Mizutsune, plus repeatable fights with Zoh Shia, previously a one-off story monster. There's also a new gathering hub, which I'm especially happy about - I miss what I once referred to as "Astera's gung-ho trumpetbastardry". I want to see people and I want to see lights, and I also want to see virtuosic cat chefs.

Doom is going medieval. Id Software's next brutish shooter, Doom: The Dark Ages, was revealed with a shield-flinging trailer last summer, and we've since learned more about how it'll actually play. Nic already summed up the new features but I gots something that Nic boy don’t: three hours of hands-on time with the Doomlad, including some dragonback dog-fighting, and a fifty-storey fistfight in a gargantuan mech. Let me tell you what it's like.

If you handed me a deck of revolting Tarot cards and told me to heal a bunch of sickly, deranged medieval peasants, I would probably attempt to sew the cards together into bandages. Perhaps I would offer the nicer ones to children instead of lollipops, to distract them while I apply the leeches (lollipops did exist in the Middle Ages, I'm shocked to discover, but mostly in noble circles). Bloodletter has grander ambitions.

In this whispery, crazy-eyed deckbuilder, you'll play Tarot-style cards to purge foul spirits who are seeking to possess and kill your neighbours. "Evil entities have crept into the hearts of the common folk, who teeter upon the brink of madness and death," the developers explain. "Only thy bathhouse stands as a bastion against the creeping corruption." It sounds like a mixture of Pathologic and Black Book and Pentiment. Here be'est the trailer.

An alleged cryptocurrency scam that models itself on Grand Theft Auto 6 will be launching on Steam this week, despite Valve's promises that they do not allow NFT or blockchain games to exist on the platform. Paradise has been advertised as an action game set in a sunny city which will allow players to drive cars, shoot enemies, and earn money. But its in-game currency is based on blockchain technology, and some reports allege it is a scam based in Russia which does not allow its crypto investors to withdraw funds. When asked why the game is allowed on the platform, Valve have repeatedly neglected to comment.

Assassin's Creed Shadows's dev team are "actively looking at" adding options for a more challenging jaunt through the throaty-poke 'em up's incarnation of feudal Japan. "We're looking at these things and monitoring what people say about the game," creative director Jonathon Dumont told GamesRadar+ at this year's GDC.

Shadows currently features four difficulty options for both stealth and combat, ranging from 'story' to 'expert', as well as the 'guaranteed assassination' toggle from recent previous entries, which ensures that when you stab a man in the neck with a large sharp piece of metal, he does not react with a blasé "ow! Nevertheless…".

Coffee Stain remain dissatisfied with Satisfactory, their first-person factory sim, despite Matt Cox giving it the Cox's Orange Pippin Award in our Satisfactory 1.0 review. They're just about to release update 1.1 into public testing. This adds Photo Mode, programmable personnel elevators, and a bunch of twisty furnishings.

One thing it doesn't add is rain, which used to exist in Satisfactory but was removed because it wasn't working properly. Apparently, Coffee Stain need to do an Unreal Engine upgrade before they can restore the missing precipitation. Many players are sad about this. Ah, I think it's kind of poetic that there are people in the Satisfactory community who wish only to be rained upon.

"Alien Ant Farm or we boycott," reads the top comment on Activision's recent reveal of the next wave of tracks for Tony Hawk's Pro Skater 3+4 - a response to the revelation that the upcoming remasters have both been hit and struck by some soundtrack changes, which hasn't gone down completely smoothly with fans. You could almost say they feel making alterations to such classics is criminal. OK, I'll stop. For now.

It turns out these changes come straight from the large Hawk himself. “It was my choice to pick some different songs by the same artists featured in THPS3+4 OST,” he wrote on Instagram, as spotted by Very Gary Computing. “I’m hoping that discovery is half the fun, and a big reason that these soundtracks resonated in the first place. So listen and enjoy the ride. More to come… both old and new.”

Rumours of a Final Fantasy IX remake have been remaking themselves part of the discourse for several years now, sparked by the announcement of an animated series and a Nvidia leak back in 2021, and stoked by manifestations of several other Squeenix games from the leaked Geforce list. Now, Square Enix have added a dedicated 25th anniversary page flogging figures, spectacles, and other charming tat to their website.

The JRPG's 25th cake day isn't until July 7th, but this new page lines up with claims from Oblivion remake leaker NateTheHate that we're getting closer to an announcement, if not a release. Bloomberg's Jason Schreier has also claimed that the Final Final Tactics remaster is still being worked on - a rumour that's been twinned with the FF9 one for about as long as it's been floating about.

OK you gutless punks, you've had this coming for a long time and now, you're gonna get it. Time to pay the piper, you miserable freaks. Oh, excuse me! I should explain. We've been doing some research into boosting site engagement, and it turns out the quickest way to engage people is to abuse and threaten them. We've also been reading up on seduction techniques - frankly, I wanted to try these out first, but the genAI poltergeist in my phone camera keeps misidentifying my nudes as Edvard Munch's The Scream, and Sotheby's now claim I owe them 120 million dollars. Anyway, here's what's new in PC games this week.

Hello reader who is also a reader, and welcome back to Booked For The Week - our regular Sunday chat with a selection of cool industry folks about books! I woke from a terrible nightmare last night. I'd just released a book and every three or so pages, the publisher had inserted a double page spread trying to sell the reader a wireless mouse with Minecraft movie Jack Black's gormless, gouty grin on it, turning my carefully curated atmosphere to shit! Phew. Thank goodness it was just a nightmare! Just an utter, utter nightmare.

Anyway, never mind all that. The sun is out, and books still exist and are mostly advertisement free! Here to talk about them this week is game maker, Dicey Dungeons writer, Now Play This festival founder, and The Husbands author, Holly Gramazio! Cheers Holly! Mind if we have a nose at your bookshelf?

Sundays are for nursing a sore throat into nearly its third week of activity. I wish I wasn't such a tiny widdle baby, but I strongly feel that no person has ever suffered as I now suffer. Let's do some links.

Edge Magazine has launched an industry newsletter, called Knowledge. You can signup here. Edge has long been a stealth B2B product, so an explicitly B2B newsletter makes sense. This is also promising because it's being written by Marie Dealessandri, former deputy editor of GI.biz.

There's a lot we still don't know about GTA 6, but probably the most annoying thing that has gone unanswered is just when it's coming out. Not annoying in the sense of, "oh golly gosh I'm so excited please I need to know", more "come on now, just get it over with!" It's just a whole thing, and I wish it wasn't, but Rockstar and their owner Take-Two also clearly know it's a whole thing, and are riding on that very fact. Take-Two CEO Strauss Zelnick recently spoke with Bloomberg about a whole bunch of bits, and of course the question of when GTA 6 is coming out came up.

We can probably all agree that planting trees is pretty much universally good, right? I can't really imagine a scenario where planting a tree is a bad thing, we need them to live after all. If you're not into planting trees you're probably an oil tycoon, or a squirrel with incredibly bad survival instincts. If you are, though, might I interest you in Treeplanter, a game whose name is exactly what it says on the tin? It was announced just yesterday, and looks quite, quite lovely.

Look, not every dating sim under the sun is insatiably horny, but I don't think you can argue that Date Everything! isn't. Like, the whole game is about how you can date everything, from a chair, to a clock, to a fridge. There's literally 100 different objects you can date, this is somebody's something for sure. And, as revealed in a new trailer earlier this week, as it turns out all you tabletop fiends out there will be able to date a twenty-sided die.

Bah, it's never fun writing one of these, but unfortunately Myst and Riven developer Cyan Worlds have laid off 12 of its staff members this week, supposedly cutting the studio by about half. Cyan shared the news on their social media accounts yesterday, noting that "industry conditions" have "forced" the studio to "weigh the future health of our studio against the month-to-month realities of game development in 2025."

Have you been Everywhere? Not like, literally, everywhere, but Everywhere, that sort of Roblox, sort of Fortnite, everything game from Build A Rocket Boy, a studio founded by ex-Rockstar dev and GTA 3 to 5 producer Leslie Benzies. That whole, uh, interactive experience or whatever you want to call it still seems to be in beta. But the first project spun off from it, MindsEye, a near-future action game that really just looks like slightly sci-fi GTA, now has a release date: June 10th, later this year. Except, I'm a little bit confused by it.

This week RPS has been racked by staff absences due to illness, family affairs, press trips, and a dire force of negation called “holiday”. For a while, on Friday, I thought I might be the only one left. “Is there anyone alive out there?” I howled, guiding my lifeboat among the frozen gobbets of discount gaming keyboard. “Can anyone hear me?” Then, I heard a few, faint voices on the wind. Good news: RPS still has some writers and what’s more, they have plans for the weekend.

It's click season, and Amazon's Spring Sale has some absolute bangers lined up for your next mouse upgrade. Whether you're grinding out ranked in Valorant or just need something smoother than your office-issued brick, now's the time to strike. Prices are slashed, specs are stacked, and your K/D ratio is crying out for better gear.