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Kill Knight, the silly-named twin stick action game you may have caught at similarly silly-named event The Triple-I Initiative in April, is joining this year's Steam next fest with a demo ahead of its expected release date later this year. I’ve played it, and I feel must apologise, Mr. Knight. I still think it's a silly name, but with frantic flowing action this immediately gratifying, you can call yourself whatever your killy little heart so desires. For this knight is not like other knights: this is a knight who kills. Wait, they all do that? Oh. Well, this one has four guns. Suck it, literally every other knight.

Destructive third-person action game Just Cause is getting made into a movie, produced by the men behind The Fall Guy and Nobody, according to the Hollywood Reporter. This isn't the first time the over-the-top explode 'em up has been in line to get the big screen treatment. Another version spent years in development hell until the rights lapsed. But it's been picked up again by Universal, who are no strangers to turning video games into box office burger bucks (they did The Super Mario Bros. Movie). So, it might result in an actual movie this time.

The demo for puzzle game Schim, in which you play as a boy and his frog that only exists in the shadows, is out now on Steam. I’ve given it a whirl, and its pretty froggin’ delightful. The game has you progress through different scenes set in a chill, colorful townscape. You can switch at any time between boy and frog. The boy can go anywhere, but is frequently blocked by environmental puzzles. The frog has the means to solve such puzzles, by hopping between shadows naturally cast by the environment. They act like little inky puddles, and simply jumping from one to the other is a rare joy.

Understanding any given sentence in Wuthering Waves is like trying to discern sensible meaning from the back of a rain-bleached Doritos packet you found while cleaning your gutters. Last week, players of the character action gacha asked for more freedom to skip story scenes and dialogue. Having sunk a bunch of hours into the game, I can see why. The combat may be swish and the traversal across its rolling landscape flowing and carefree, but the lore-obsessed babble of its characters is mind-numbing. Wuthering Waves has been this month's lightning rod for hype. But it's worth dissecting what it's actually like to play.

Readers, I appear to have locked myself in self-referential language matrix trying to describe the feeling of playing top-down action shooter Kickback. You can only move through the recoil from shooting, you see, which means facing the opposite way to where you want to go. It’s both very counterintuitive and very fun. To call something both counterintuitive and fun seems, well, counterintuitive. But also: fun. Which, as a concept is very fun to think about. But, also, quite counterintuitive. Writing such a incredibly redundant paragraph is quite fun, even though I’m just repeating myself. Counterintuitive, right? I’m going to try to escape this paragraph now. If I manage it, I’ll see you in the one below.

With an effectively infinite universe to fill in No Man’s Sky, developers Hello Games have certainly risen to the challenge of trying to fill it with as much stuff as they possibly can over the last near-decade, still managing to add major new features and modes eight years on from the sci-fi exploration game’s release. Next update Adrift is taking things right the way back, though, by emptying the expansive cosmos of almost everything except you, your ship and planets to visit.

Tavern Keeper has been kicking around for a good number of years now, as Game Dev Tycoon developers Greenheart Games polished up their charming mixture of Dungeons & Dragons fantasy bartending with Theme Hospital-style sim management. Almost a decade from Game Dev Tycoon’s release, Tavern Keeper is now finally approaching its early access release later this year.

A PC adapter for Sony’s PlayStation VR2 has recently popped up in South Korea, giving a new update - albeit an unofficial one - on the incoming PC support for the PS5 VR headset teased earlier this year.

It’s been a little while since we last heard about the untitled open-world driving game from Maverick Games, the studio opened a couple of years back by ex-Playground Games veterans including former Forza Horizon 5 creative director Mike Brown. We still don’t know what the team’s new game is called or when it might hit the road, but we have been given a few more snippets of what to expect and news on who’ll be helping pump up its tires and fill it with fuel as publisher.

We have been cursed with a terrible devouring monster. Each harvest, one villager must don the ceremonial, mildly magical mask, and enter the fields alone, to gather the precious life-giving ambrosia before the beast can befoul it. For five nights you must do battle, or evade its ravenous clutches.

Those of you who have known your own Devourer are surely thinking: Only five nights per year? Luxury. Harvest Hunt is good, though.

Many moons ago, premiere wordsman Nate Crowley reviewed shark ‘em up Maneater, decrying its incurious perpetuation of anti-shark propaganda, and calling it “an ecstatically violent simulation of being a fool's idea of a shark.” My own frothing penchant for the plan-schemes of Warhammer’s Skaven ratboys has been documented in these pages to the point of rabidity, but I do feel broadly similarly about media that sullies rats - clean, smart and good folk that they are. Lively tactics Trash Of The Titans does not aim to emancipate its villainous vermin. But, like Warhammer, it gets a pass for its evident affection towards its antagonistic dumpster diving scuttlers. Also, it's just plain fun.

A producer on Kerbal Space Program 2 has confirmed that those working on the space flight sim are being laid off en masse. We already knew that the developers at Intercept Games would be losing their jobs thanks to a closure announcement from Washington State. Until remarks from Strauss Zelnick, the CEO of Take-Two Interactive, muddied the waters. Zelnick refused to acknowledge that the studio was being closed when asked by a reporter, even going so far as to claim the opposite. "We didn't shutter those studios," he told IGN. But it seems clear from one producer's testimony that Zelnick's remarks are inaccurate.

A new earnings report from The Witcher 3: Wild Hunt makers CD Projekt Red has revealed that the follow-up to the sorceress-courting, Nekker-thwacking, horse-reassuring RPG is currently being worked on by around 400 people, and plans to move into the production phase by the “second half of the year.” Elsewhere, the report shows that the studio’s previous RPG, Cyberpunk 2077 officially ended all development at the end of April, at which time the remaining 17 staff still tweaking that game’s ray-traced chewing gum foil moved on to the Witcher 4 , or ‘Polaris’, as they keep insisting it's called.

Well, it’s been a long hard road, but since I vowed to only consume alcohol matured while having game soundtracks forcibly blasted into its molecules, giving up drinking has been a lot easier. Now, to take the final gulp of my Snake Eater-theme-reared IPA, and open up my web browser….

I have played many a creepy throwback game that takes inspiration from the ever inadequately named "Golden" (Grimy and Diseased? Cadaverous, perhaps) Age of survival horror on PS1, but it's rare you play one that invokes the N64, and even less often that you stumble on something horror-adjacent that riffs on Star Fox 64. Ah, Star Fox! The natural companion piece for, say, Eternal Darkness or The Suffering. In fairness, I did always find those Pez dispenser dialogue animations pretty eerie.

To kick off with some extremely half-arsed mytho-geometry, the original Frostpunk was a testament to both the design utility and the inexhaustible political symbolism of circles. When people wish to found a community of equals they commonly form a circle, with each participant visible and audible to the rest. A circle is also the best shape for defending against an engulfing ambient threat such as a global ice age, because it has no weak points, and it makes a great centrepiece for a videogame interface, a symmetrical motif that can be tuned and adorned to either suck your attention into the screen or distribute it evenly in all directions.

Created by Polish developers 11 bit, Frostpunk takes place in the middle of a circle, an Arctic crater with a huge coal generator at its heart. Your city rises in rings around that generator, each additional layer of dwellings corresponding intuitively to decreasing temperature, and the result is one of the most focused and thematically consistent specimens of its genre - a building game that feels as intimate and urgent as tending a campfire. Frostpunk 2's new campaign mode breaks the circle open. It starts where you (hopefully) ended, with the crater now fully colonised and evolved into a glaring, blue-orange geode of high-density housing and clustered chimneys. But the view has been pulled back, and construction now unfolds along the plains and canyons beyond the crater, which consist not of circles but of hexagons - another UI designer's favourite - on which you'll plot out upgradeable districts rather than assembling individual buildings.

The first scene in RPS Game Club pick Deathbulge: Battle Of The Bands - a genuinely funny and innovative riff on turn-based RPGs - sees candyfloss n’ superglue-haired guitarist Faye frantically search for her missing guitar as the crowd for the titular battle grow impatient. You’ll quickly realise this a school-with-no-trousers-esque dream sequence, but the matted mess of thick black cables that carpet this dingy side-stage is painfully accurate. Pissing around with gear is roughly 70% of the band experience, in my limited experience of being in bands. This probably changes when you’ve got roadies or dedicated tech people, but we did not, because we were skint. And also terrible. Several hours of Deathbulge has brought me more joy than several years of being in actual bands. I had some isolated good times in some of those bands, but I’m having a very good time with Deathbulge.

A whopping 1000 corpses have been found in our ongoing investigation into Anthology of the Killer, Rock Paper Shotgun can reveal. The bodies were discovered in the aforementioned murder mystery "video game", which is out now on itch.io. Following our previous reports we can confirm that exposure to the game's crime-infested city can cause severe disorientation, confusion, uncontrolled fits of laughter, and moderate enlightenment. The streets here are so dense with crime that entire apartment blocks must shutter at night. When Rock Paper Shotgun reported the 1000 corpses to detectives, we were told this was "normal" and "appropriate".

Call of Duty: Black Ops 6 will be the first Call Of Duty to launch on Microsoft Game Pass, according to a notification that went out this morning via the Xbox Game Pass app for iPhone and Android. "Just announced: Call of Duty: Black Ops 6 is coming to Game Pass on day one later this year!" it reads. Sounds like a solid confirmation from me, though Microsoft and Activision have yet to start bellowing the news from any of Call of Duty’s official pulpits.

In the vast Wuthering Waves-shaped shadow that has descended across gaming comes an announcement from HoYoverse, publishers of quite large gacha gubbins 'em up, Genshin Impact. The studio's follow-up Zenless Zone Zero is now set to release on July 4th. For anyone who hasn't yet heard of the bright cyberpunk character action game, I guess now's your chance to look at the slick anime visuals in the new trailer below and go "hmmm", with either a songful note of eye-widening interest or the suspicious rumble of a free-to-play skeptic. Your choice.

Resident Evils Code Veronica and 0 will be the next entries in the survival horror series to get the remake treatment, according to rumours. “A remake of Resident Evil Zero & Code Veronica in development right now,” claimed user Dusk Golem on Le Epic Musk Zone. The claim was casually corroborated by trustworthy sort Andy Robinson of VGC. Note the wording here, which suggests a bundle package of sorts, similar to the rumoured original plan for the remakes of Resident Evil 2 and Resident Evil 3.

At intervals in our relentless battles with the Maw, we lose people. Sometimes, it's because those people have succeeded in levelling up out of games journalism, or found their way into another echelon of the craft. Other times, the losses are more abrupt and arbitrary. In each case, one short term response is intensification. Those of us who remain must be rockier, paperier and more shotgun than ever before. With that in mind, here are this (four-day) week's new PC games of note.

It’s been three years to the day since we learned that Square Enix planned to remake Dragon Quest 3, unveiling a revamping of the seminal 1988 JRPG in Octopath Traveler’s HD-2D engine. Three years have passed since then, but we’ve finally had an update on the remake - and it’s raised a few questions, to say the least.

The next Doom game - the first new instalment in over four years, after Doom Eternal - is reportedly taking a leaf out of Evil Dead: Army of Darkness’ necronomicon by transporting the Doom Slayer back to a medieval world to presumably battle hellspawn. According to a new report, it’s subtitled The Dark Ages and we’ll get an official reveal next week.

The director of Baldur's Gate 3 and CEO of developers Larian has revealed that the studio experienced crunch in order to get the sprawling Dungeons & Dragons CRPG finished. While Swen Vincke admitted that “it would be a lie to say that we didn't [crunch]”, he insisted that it was less than on past Larian games such as Divinity, staff were paid for the overtime and it seemingly didn’t go as far as working late nights or weekends (for the most part, anyway).

The sheer number and scale of video games released nowadays means that the infamous Steam backlog is better-fed than ever, gorging on half-played hundred-hour RPGs, never-touched indies amassed during summer sales and “I’ll get to it one day” PC pipe dreams. If you were hoping to task your descendants with continuing your quest to get all 1,700-plus achievements in Tales of Maj'Eyal or maintain your ranked leaderboard position in Dota 2, bad news: it turns out that you can’t pass on your Steam library after you die.

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! Of course, regular readers will know that 'book' was actually the name of the doctor, but that's beside the point. This week, it's Syphilisation and The Quiet Sleep developer and RPS contributor, Nikhil Murthy! Cheers Nikhil! Mind if we have a nose at your bookshelf?

Sundays are a day that arrives at the end of the week. Sometimes those weeks bring joy, and sometimes they bring uncertainity. That's fine. There's another one tommorow. Before that new week begins, let’s read this week’s best writing about games (and game related things!)

It's been a week. Possibly, a three-day weekend of rest and games will do us all some good. And maybe by the end of it, it'll be a new week. Here's what we'll be clicking on this bank holiday weekend.

Wuthering Waves is the latest open-world RPG gacha game to follow in the wake of the likes of Genshin Impact and Honkai: Star Rail, but Kuro Games’ free-to-play offering has had to deal with a bit of a wobbly launch over the last couple of days, leading the studio to scramble to address login problems, detail additional upcoming improvements and offer players some in-game games as means of apology.