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Another week of PC game releases is upon us and oh heck, slow down. There are an alarming number of games out this week that I want to play, from large-scale 3D productions to itty-bitty time-killers, each sinisterly appropriate to my Steam stats and wider research interests. Are videogame publishers and The Maw in cahoots to overwhelm me with impulse-buys and sabotage my attempts to Report the News? It’s possible. It’s possible. The Maw can be pretty cunning for an indiscriminate force of cosmic famine. The creature has been known to forge alliances with misguided mortals, seeking to flank and overwhelm harried news writers. How else to explain Phil Spencer’s T-shirts?

Riot Forge’s last stab at publishing smaller spin-offs from indie teams has resulted in Bandle Tale: A League Of Legends Story, which at first glance has all the things I love in self-proclaimed cosy games: gorgeous pixel art, laidback objectives and characters cute enough to trigger primal cheek-squishing instincts. But despite looking like an SNES classic and playing like a mix between Animal Crossing and Stardew Valley, Bandle Tale unfortunately ties itself in knots with overly grindy crafting that had me rubbing my temples in an effort not to combust.

The Intel Core i5 12600K remains a powerful CPU for gaming and content creation even in 2024, and offers better value than successors that use the same socket, like the 13600K and 14600K, due to similar performance at a lower price.

Today you can find the 12600K for £167 at Amazon UK as a US import, versus £221 for the same CPU via Amazon UK itself. That £167 price includes an import fee deposit and shipping too!

I'm a big fan of oversized mouse pads - desk pads, some call them. Today you can pick up just such a mouse pad from Lenovo in a comfortable 900x300x3mm (31.5x11.8x0.12") size for just $10. To get this reduction from the normal price of $18, use code SAVE15ACC at the checkout. This particular model, for your reference, is the well-reviewed Legion Speed Gaming Mouse Pad XL.

Sundays are for creating a solution to deal with fungal gnats. Let's mix and pour as we read the week's best writing about games and game-related things.

Suicide Squad: Kill The Justice League has already had bug fixes and a balancing patch, which is good news for players able to hop into the live service hero-biffer. It's less good news for those players struggling to play at all due to login issues and server issues.

Rocksteady say addressing these is their top priority, although they ask for patience as the problems are "not an easy nut to crack."

Jump King is a simple, brutal, bastard of a platformer in which you attempt to steer a king towards the top of a single tower using his chargeable jump. Misjudge a particular jump by over- or undercharging it, maybe bounce back off a wall, and you may find yourself tumbling all the way back to the beginning again.

It's probably about to get a bunch of even harder levels, however, because nearly five years after release it has just got Steam Workshop support and a new set of modding tools.

Epic have outlined their 2024 plans for the Epic Games Store, which includes a new download manager, a proper offline mode, pre-loading of games, and a focus on game discovery in general.

These plans were outlined in the store's 2023 year-in-review, which paints a mixed picture of Epic's storefront's growth over the past 12 months.

I have an extremely annoying neck and shoulder ache that I can't get rid of, but on the other hand I found the backing to the right earring in my all-day black studs. On a third hand, I found this after I bought a replacement pair. Less ideal. But at least video games have never let me down. That's an egregious lie, though. Games let me down all the time. Which ones are you pinning your hopes to this weekend? Here are ours.

Coming off of 2022’s biggest game in Elden Ring has been a tricky time for Bandai Namco, it seems. The publishers have announced that they have cancelled “at least” five games in the works to help overcome a significant drop in income over the last year, adopting a new approach to development that will focus on quality.

Flashlights and grubby gas masks at the ready: there will be a sequel to Metro Exodus, the developers of the follow-up to Metro 2033 and Last Light have confirmed. Don’t expect it soon, though, as 4A Games say it’ll arrive “when it’s ready”.

Palworld is stepping up its efforts against cheats and hackers in the coming weeks, with the developers of the hugely popular Pokémon-a-like survival game saying they are focusing on stamping out ne’er-do-wells on its official servers.

Alan Wake 2, last year’s best horror game, best game overall or best-game-featuring-an-unexpected-but-extremely-welcome-musical-dance-number depending on who you ask, has shifted over a million copies. Musical dance numbers don’t come cheap, though, so it’s still yet to turn a profit - despite outpacing the momentum of any of Remedy’s previous games, including Control.

I promise I'm not trying to turn RPS into a Soggins the Frog fansite, but... If you have a) been enjoying Cobalt Core as part of RPS Game Club this month, and b) especially like it when Soggins turns up with his ship of malfunctioning missile launchers, then I implore you to make Sunshine Heavy Industries your next port of call in your Steam library. It's what the Cobalt Core devs Rocket Rat Games made first, and you can immediately see a lot of shared DNA between the two games - not least its chunky, charming pixel visuals and some crossover between its cast of characters - including our pal Soggins.

It is, I should stress, a very different game to Cobalt Core - it's a sandboxy spaceship builder with zero combat involved, for starters - but I've been playing it again this week ahead of some other Game Club-themed articles I've got cooking, and I've been having a lovely time with it. Not least because I get to spend more time with Soggins the very smug frog, all while listening to even more excellent chill tunes from Cobalt Core composer Aaron Cherof.

Baldur's Gate 3's latest update has, as per most of their updates, a colossal number of improvements. Notably, there are new animations for folks who hunker down in your camp and a speedier way to dismiss unwanted companions. But most importantly of all, the smooching has been improved tenfold for fans of romance, or voyeurs who relish virtual characters trading saliva.

I'm kind of fascinated by what happened to Hello Neighbor. The original, a stealth horror game against a creepy AI that learned your likely movements, was hugely popular in alpha in 2016. The series was acquired by TinyBuild in 2020, and since then there has been a heroic number of spin-offs. There's one set in an amusement park, a multiplayer game called Secret Neighbor in which one small child is actually a large adult man in disguise, a direct sequel called Hello Neighbor 2, and a VR game called Search And Rescue. I think everyone got a bit of Neighbor fatigue there, lads.

This might include the original creator Nikita Kolesnikov, as (still under the auspices of TinyBuild) he's made a new thing. Currently on Steam for playtesting, the project currently known as RBO isn't falling far from the home invasion tree, as players will either be a home-owning Protector - a McCallister, if you will - or an Intruder, or Wet Bandit.

Because it’s somehow my job to worry about the technical fidelity of electronic toys, I’ve been eyeing the long-overdue arrival of Skull and Bones with some nervousness. After nearly a decade of delays, you’d probably just want to get it out the door, right? Skip straight to the open-world pirate adventuring, none of that 'making it work on a range of graphics cards' nonsense.

But nope. For all its other shortcomings, Skull and Bones performs alright on PC, very often more smoothly than its system requirements suggest. Though I’d still recommend abiding by its SSD storage requirement – following the rules might not be very piratey, but installing on a hard drive will curse you to some pretty tedious load screen waits. Geoffrey Rush would hate it, honestly.

While Edwin sequesters himself in the starting area, let’s head below deck for a closer look at Skull and Bones’ PC particulars. That includes a full rundown of its graphics options – which include ray tracing and DLSS – and a quick guide to the best settings for an ideal prettiness-to-performance ratio.

The first Streets Of Rogue was an RPS favourite when it launched back in 2019 (we literally couldn't stop playing it), and we've known for a while now that its sequel, Streets Of Rogue 2, is due to arrive later this year. Ahead of the game's launch, developer Matt Dabrowski has started releasing a series of dev diary videos detailing his design process and how it's all coming together. The latest is about how he creates the game's proc-gen open worlds and biomes, and it's a fascinating watch if you've ever wondered how its particular blend of randomised chaos works behind the scenes.

Corsair's Shift series of power supplies are one of my go-to recommendations, thanks to their reliable power delivery and convenient side-mounted connectors, and now you can pick up a factory refurbished 850W 80+ Gold unit for just £84 from Scan, versus £145 for the very same PSU new at Amazon or £150 at Scan. That's a huge, nearly 50% saving, and well worth it - even for a factory refurb unit with a 12-month warranty.

The Logitech G915 Lightspeed TKL is a phenomenal gaming keyboard with low-profile mechanical switches, reliable Lightspeed wireless and a compact layout, yet Logitech normally ask well over £100 for it - and double that when it first launched! Today though, the G915 TKL Lightspeed is 55% off, dropping it to the more reasonable price of £99.

Diablo 4 is headed to Game Pass, Microsoft have announced. It'll be the first Activision Blizzard game to arrive on the subscription service since Microsoft acquired them, and it'll arrive on March 28th.

A standalone expansion for Disco Elysium, codenamed X7, has reportedly been cancelled and a quarter of developers at developers ZA/UM are at risk of redundancy. Around 24 employees are said to be affected, according to "sources close to the matter" who spoke to Sports Illustrated's video games site.

Payday 3 developer Starbreeze say their co-op heist 'em up is underperforming both in terms of sales and player numbers. They also say they're committed to turning around that performance, with updates to come in 2024 which will revamp progression, the UI, add a solo mode and an offline mode, and more.

V Rising remains on track to reach 1.0 in the second quarter of this year, in what finance people call Q2 but I like to call Aprilmayjune. The latest developer blog post goes into detail on some of the new features coming for the full release and in particular its changes to PvP, higher tier weapon and armour, and vampire fashion.

Hello Games describe No Man's Sky's latest Omega update as being geared towards newcomers and "lapsed players looking for a way back in". Hey, they're talking about me! I haven't played the wide-eyed space game since before the pandemic, partly because I only own the PS4 version and now that I'm RPS news editor, I'm not allowed to touch consoles any more. Seriously, they burn my skin on contact. Anyway, let's have a gander at the trailer.

It's happening! Why I played Skull & Bones back when it wasn't even a live service game. But now it is, and it's out this weekend. We talk a bit about how long it has been coming out, why it's been in development this long, and why they didn't just release the sucker the two or three previous times they got close to doing so. Honestly, I hope it does okay. We also talk about the games we've been playing this week, and Nate challenges us with a game of Palworld Pal: real or fake? PLUS the giant game dildo and our recommendations this week.

I respect a game with wild ambition. Declaring your game "the spiritual successor to Freelancer" is bold and ambitious, considering how the spaceship sim is still so beloved after 20 years that our readers voted it your 16th favourite space game of all time. This ambition is wild when the tiny development team is led by someone best known for replacing Skyrim's dragons with Thomas The Tank Engine. So while I'm not much of a spaceship sort, I had to check out the demo for Underspace, which aims to combine Freelancer shoot-o-trading space action with a dash of Lovecraftian horror.

Tracking technology isn't perfect. Actually, that's an understatement. Tracking technology has many pitfalls, including how Google Maps can be accidentally used to track people, and the fact that if you systematically turn off cookies, your internet browsing experience becomes increasingly bizarre. I am offered adverts for afro hair care products and huge bags of puppy kibble, because the algorithms no longer have any idea who I am or how many small dogs I have. And yet.

Surely this technology has reached the point where, if I open a game for the first time in several weeks, it should be able to tell I haven't played for a long time, and ask if I would like a small refresher of the controls.

Last night I spent an hour in Ubisoft Singapore's Skull And Bones, the much-reconceived, nigh-mythical open world pirate game that has been in development since 2013. Taking a leaf from the book of feared intergalactic corsair Samus Aran, the prologue starts you off at the height of your bucanneering powers, with a mighty gold-and-scarlet galleon at your disposal that is shortly blown to bits by the English Navy.

People who read my articles have exceptionally good taste, which is why I will assume you are already intimately familiar with Terry Pratchett's Discworld series. For those who are not and somehow got here by mistake, it will save me a lot of time if you go away and read them all. Oh fine, I will explain Hex. And also, if I have time, a real life man with ants in his computer.