Last week our resident novelty-guzzling elder god the Maw ate me, as Julian sorrowfully reported. Well, I’m back in the waking world, and not as smelly as I could be, all things considered. I’ve been eaten by the Maw a few times now, but this is the first time I’ve managed to escape via one of its mouths, rather than by way of… other orifices.
“ARE YOU NOT ENTERTAINED,” I bellow, straightening heroically with my shoulders braced against the cyclopean gums, as chunks of rancid Call Of Duty DLC sluice between my ankles. “MY OTHER CAR’S A MOTHRA”, I roar, as the other RPS staff hastily gather with a jump net. “HERE ARE SOME NEW PC GAMES,” I add, throwing myself into the waiting arms of my brethren.
Monday 16th March
- Bonnie Bear Saves Frogtime combines the whimsy of frogs with the steeliness of grid-based battles.
- Deadline Delivery combines the errancy of apes with the urgency of exploding mail trucks.
- Starship Troopers: Ultimate Bug War combines the shootiness of guns with the splatteriness of bugs. In a Kafka-esque scandal, the game lets you play as the bugs, for to fight the bug, we must understand the bug. We can ill afford another Klendathu.
Tuesday 17th March
- The Ratline is the latest moustache-twiddling document arranger from Owlskip. It sees you tracking down Nazi fugitives in the 1970s, putting together the evidence and chewing people out over the phone.
- Everwind is an early access first-person survival RPG, set in an open world of procedurally generated flying islands and customisable airships.
- Goodness! Some fresh DLC for venerable Zachlike engineering sim Opus Magnum, featuring writing, cutscenes and music from original writer and composer Matthew S. Burns.
Wednesday 18th March
- Crawling Angels reminds me of the old ‘kill your boss’ games I used to play on Newgrounds. You’re a child attending a hideous carnival, centring on a smug-looking puppet, the Forever Chicken. The Chicken has various… desires. Your job is to satisfy them, or your Uncle Tontine won’t let you go home.
- The Cube, Save Us (pictured) is not a Curiosity follow-up but a melee-oriented early access extraction game about breaking into a huge sky cube in order to steal phat loot and save civilisation, maybe.
- In Their Shoes is an ensemble slice-of-life game with an overarching timeline puzzle. It “reimagines classic visual novel mechanics by allowing you to enter into the tangled and intricate thoughts of each protagonist”.
Thursday 19th March
- Well, well, well, if it isn’t the PC version of Death Stranding 2: On The Beach, finally. Nice of you to join us, Kojima. Nice of Daddy PlayStation to permit you to release a game on our platform. It’s not like there are hundreds of millions more PCs than PlayStations, or anything.
- Crimson Desert is the Witchery kitchen sink of action-RPG mechanics from the people behind Black Desert Online. I’ve played about 45 minutes of it, and I think it’s going to charm the socks off a few people and drive many other people stark raving bonkers.
- I like the… thwackiness of 2D dark fantasy action-platformer Briar Flame.
Friday 20th March
- We started the week with frogs, and with frogs we shall end: Rubato is a tongue-lashing 2D platformer with a lot of other experimental stuff in it that will gladden the sickly souls of older millennials.
Things afoot in the Treehouse this week: several of us are playing Crimson Desert, some of us are driving anime cars, a few of us are working on pieces about much older games. There are also New Embargoed Things to see, interviews to solicit, and a lot of fried rice to consume, because I made too much this weekend. How quickly does fried rice go off? If I flush it down the lavatory, will anything bad happen? What if I conceal it down my trousers and sneakily dispose of it while playing baseball, like in The Great Escape? I’d have to find a local baseball team first.
