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A watched pot never boils, so they say - ‘they’ presumably all being dead now after having their minds physically melted after hearing the first kettle click in readiness while stubbornly staring in the opposite direction. Yes, yes, it’s a metaphor, but we don’t have time for all that. Your kingdom is under attack by goblins, and the only way to get your useless underlings to chop the wood, till the fields, and train the guards needed to defend it is to provide constant surveillance. The King Is Watching is a minimalist resource-chain-em-up and wave defense goblin-knocker with a brilliant twist. I'm now a little bit obsessed with it, I think, and what is RPS if not a vehicle for chronicling my many fleeting obsessions?

We already know that you’ll be able to romance all your companions in the upcoming RPG Dragon Age: The Veilguard. Sounds a bit synthetic on the surface, right? Even fantastic games like Baldur's Gate 3 suffered from this overly obliging approach to relationships. A game letting you tell your own tales is dandy and all, but those stories don’t mean much if the cast feel like input/output affection bots, ready to drop trou like a clumsy Levis temp once you’ve adequately filled their invisible bonkometer.

They get knocked down, but they get up again, and you’re apparently never going to keep Eve Online studio CCP Games from trying to make an FPS set in the universe of their Excel(lent?) MMO happen. EVE Vanguard - the studio's admirable fourth crack at it - was announced last September. Since then, it's been in gated pre-alpha, offering weekend playtests to EVE Online Omega subscribers. According to a new and rather vague roadmap, should get a substantial update this November. Here’s said infographic - more pork scratching-stained napkin scrawl than sat-nav.

Prolific fantasy author and number one Ranni stan (“I'll pick the ending where my character gets a waifu”) Brandon Sanderson has been thinking a lot about how to apply Elden Ring and the Souls games' signature storytelling approach to novels. During a recent playthrough on his YouTube channel, he was asked if he thinks there’s a way to replicate Souls-like descriptions in books. “I’ve wondered that. I really have,” Sanderson replies.

Creative Assembly and Sega have slapped a release date on Total War: Pharaoh’s free Dynasties expansion, which outfits the historical strategy colossus with new Aegean and Mesopotamian regions and maps, new factions such as Troy and Babylon, and a glittering, bellowing host of new or reworked units, new mechanics, and new quality-of-life updates. That release date is 25th July 2024. Come stamp your feet and brandish your shields vigorously at the overview trailer below.

Read enough of our hardware articles and you’ll eventually come across someone, probably me or Katharine (RPS in peace), banging on about the Logitech G915 Lightspeed Wireless. After half a decade on shelves, it’s still the best low-profile mechanical gaming keyboard going, and quite possibly the best wireless keyboard to boot – while the tenkeyless version, the G915 TKL Lightspeed, is just as lovely to use.

Between their nimble performance, crisp mech switches, and impeccable build quality, the only way in which the G915 duo underwhelms is their high pricing – very much the kind you’d want to wait for a Prime Day or Black Friday to dull the pain of. Now, though, there’s an alternative: the new Logitech G515 Lightspeed TKL. I’ve been using it. It’s good!

That was…slightly cheeky of me. The Tomoe you play in parry-ful action adventure Bloodless is not the same Tomoe that was conspicuously absent from undeniable influence Sekiro. They might be based on the same historical figure, but that’s simply Sek-ulation. However! You can make your mind up yourself for zero money, since Bloodless has a free demo on Steam. Trazzer below.

According to the wikihow page “how to fall safely”, the best way to minimise injury while falling is to stay loose, keep your arms and legs bent, and roll on impact. According to ragdoll-prone shooter Helldivers 2, however, it’s better to stand to attention in mid-air and perform a crisp salute. It’s long been known that the game’s emotes confer unexpected defensive advantages, with emergency hugs sometimes shielding you against artillery fire, but now, one redditor has proven via careful scientific experimentation that they also protect you against the force of gravity.

From Zenless Zone Zero to The First Descendant, we seem to be experiencing a free-to-play explosion. Despair, ye time-constrained adults, for your carefully engineered shortage of pocket money offers no bulwark against the onslaught of games that want a slice of your evening or weekend. Today's big release, Once Human, at least features a giant schoolbus on monster legs, together with a less exciting but customisable van that just has wheels. In this open world survival shooter, you are a "Meta-Human" making your way around a landscape corrupted by Stardust, which has warped the scenery and will slowly drive you nuts.

Ever since the hat was invented by Valve Corporation in 2009, mankind has grappled with questions of fairness, worthiness, and pride – at least as they pertain to microtransations in free-to-play games. Shooty battle royale Apex Legends is the latest to posit an answer, that being "the Battle Pass should cost more money".

The studio-killing fallout of Embracer's acquisition frenzy continues to fall like ash on the industry. The publishing giant has reportedly closed Piranha Bytes, the studio known for cult RPGs like Gothic, Risen, and Elex, according to a worker who spoke to Polish games site CD-Action. The studio's existence had been under threat since early this year, after being targeted in Embracer's purgatorial studio massacre. At that time the German studio were hopeful to avoid being closed down, insisting "don't write us off yet!" Unfortunately, it looks like those who worked at the studio have since been laid off.

I gaze with alarm and approval upon the recent phenomenon of "dark strategy" or "horror strategy" games, a devilish parade of top-down drag-clickers, from The Fabulous Fear Machine to The Tribe Must Survive, that strive to find the fear in a genre that typically places you at a managerial remove. The best-known is probably Frostpunk, with its perpetual raging against the dying of the light, its ceaseless scrape for coal and wood as the temperature falls. Anoxia Station, announced this month, is similarly driven by the gathering of fossil fuels, and similarly shaped by questions of worker death and morale, but it takes you deep underground - into a sumptuous, brutal world of quartz crystals, salt caves, magma lakes, moonmilk rivers, swirling gases and, judging from the below trailer, enormous maggots and centipedes. Larva lakes, amirite.

The Ukrainian city of Mariupol came under heavy bombardment during the opening months of Russia's invasion in 2022, a programme of artillery and air strikes that damaged or destroyed the majority of residential buildings and has killed or dispossessed thousands of people. It has now been occupied by Russia for almost two years, during which, as reported by the Associated Press, Russia has demolished, rebuilt and renamed much of the city, overwriting its Ukrainian heritage.

The Disco Elysium-inspired RPG Hollow Home is a memory of Mariupol from just before the war - not a 1:1 recreation, but a collection of details, colours, personalities and some familiar buildings, painstakingly amassed and offered up in the face of erasure. Speaking to me during a very brief demo at Digital Dragons in Poland this year, artist Anastasia Hlyniana called my attention to the plants jutting from old car tyres around the game's isometric map, which she says are a common sight in Mariupol.

The best microSD cards for the Steam Deck are typically thought of as accessories, like a docking station or an aftermarket case. But the term "accessories" suggests that they’re mere add-ons, when in reality, making such an easy yet transformative upgrade to your Deck’s game-holding abilities feels damned near essential. Especially if you’ve got one of the smaller, original LCD models. The whole idea behind the Steam Deck is that you can take more or less your entire Steam library out and about with you, so why not give yourself the room to fit in as many games as possible?

I don't plan on having kids, but in the event that I change my mind, commissioning a forest Witch to grow one from a mushroom seems a lot easier than the usual human procreative process, though possibly just as abundant in screaming. I've been playing the demo for "cute-creepy" RPG and life sim Mushroom Musume, in which you - an unnamed "Recluse" - cultivate and play as a series of mushroom daughters. My current mushroom daughter is called Alia. She's a Common Turquoise Truffle. She's got a small pig acquaintance, who so far hasn't tried to devour her, and a cute fuzzy hat, which she stole from outside a church - precise impact on character development still TBC.

Another year, another huge amount raised for charity by obscenely skilled gamers. Popular speedrunning event Summer Games Done Quick took place last week and raised more than $2.5 million for Doctors Without Borders, fielding runners who took on a mix of modern and retro games with various quirky goals or challenging requirements. Like an attempt at getting through Sekiro: Shadows Die Twice without being hit (oh god) and a hasty anti-gravitational swim through the solar system of Outer Wilds but without using the game's spaceship (what). Let us be glad these folks use their powers for good.

Time hopping in Berlin usually means queuing several hours for a club, only to magically find yourself either right back at the end of the line, or else waking up on the U-Bahn three days later with tinnitus and currywurst spilled down your Acronym jacket. Not so in cyberpunk tactics game All Walls Must Fall. Here time travel means dodging bullets, reversing flubbed hacking, and replaying that conversation you had with the bouncer that got you booted to the curb. “A bloody good time-troubling tactical shooter,” decreed Adam Smith (RPS in Peace) in his review. Well, now it’s a bloody free time-troubling tactical shooter. Take that, Monday!

The publishers of recent city builder sensation Manor Lords and elder survival sim juggernaut The Long Dark are having a mostly gentlepersonly skirmish about how many significant updates a game should have in early access, and the potential consequences in terms of both developer overwork and players losing interest.

Have I ever bellowed breathlessly about how much I appreciate modders? If I’ve done it a thousand times, it still isn’t enough. Today’s saintly file tinkerers are MerseyRockoff and glassfish77, who’ve restored a series of boat racing quests in open world RPG The Witcher 3: Wild Hunt and made them available in a mod for your sailing pleasure. Cheers, PC Gamer!

Happy this week, everybody? Following last week's slight (and perhaps slightly editorialised) dry spell, there is a non-zero quantity of promising new PC games in the offing, and they cover a nice spread of genres.

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! “What’s with the politics? Stick to games!” is a common refrain you might hear from the sort of winning individual who thinks books are a communist plot to lower their sperm count. Luckily, those people are elsewhere, so I hope you’ll allow me a brief moment of relief that the Tories are no longer in power. This is a great thing, providing you have absolutely no follow-up questions! This week, it’s QWOP, Getting Over It, and Ape Out's Bennet Foddy! Cheers Bennet! Mind if we have a nose at your bookshelf?

Sunday’s are for being mildly optimistic about the future for a few short hours. Before something bad happens, let’s read this week’s best writing about games (and game related things!)

Metal Gear Rising: Revengeance allows you to slow time and slice objects into pieces, their 3D models bisecting precisely along the lines of your swipes. For this reason alone, I think you should own it. Now you can own it DRM-free on GOG.

You can't purchase Outrun 2006: Coast 2 Coast digitally on PC anymore, because the Ferrari license expired and it was removed from sale back in 2010. We live in a cruel universe. The excellent, stylish racing game is still playable if you do own a copy, however, and it just received a fan update that'll make it run better on modern machines.

Construct 'n' destruct sim Besiege recently got a splashy expansion in The Splintered Sea, which Nic enjoyed a lot in his review while calling it compact, small and brisk. Apparently Nic wasn't alone in this opinion: its developers now say they're working on a free update that will expand the expansion and make its campaign 50% longer.

I played badminton yesterday. I am now incredibly sore all over. It made me realise that, perhaps more than anything else you could say about them, weekends are for being sore. Sleeping in, waking up covered in aches, making a noise like someone three times your age when you get out of bed, and then pretending you're a third of your current age by doing nothing except play games for the next 48 hours. Here's how we'll be spending them!

Escape from Tarkov is taking extra steps to crack down on cheaters by offering players a cash bounty - in the extraction shooter’s in-game currency, anyway - for reporting ne’er-do-wells.

Factorio’s whopping Space Age expansion has been in the works for a good few years now, and we finally know when we’ll get our hands on it. Space Age will arrive this October alongside a major 2.0 update for the moreish factory-automating hit, with the expansion costing as much as the base game. It sounds like there’ll be plenty to show for that price, mind.

It looks like we won’t get a remake of Dead Space 2 in the style of last year’s excellent do-over of the original limb-shooting horror game, but it turns out that Dead Space isn’t completely, uh, dead just yet. Though to what degree you could consider it alive and well - reanimated in a twisted form of its previous glory, perhaps - is another question entirely.

Dawntrail, the latest expansion for Final Fantasy XIV, has officially been out just three days, arriving earlier this week after a brief early access release. Despite its story and extra 10 levels spanning dozens of hours of playtime, that’s apparently been ample time for players to complain loudly enough about one of the expansion’s brand new jobs - so much so that Square Enix have already announced a set of incoming changes planned across the game’s next run of patches.