Supporters

I've probably mentioned before that RPGs are difficult to scout. They share a deposit problem with strategy games, plus the burdens of story and a tendency towards slow, frustrating starts.

Banquet for Fools goes the prologue route. Fortunately, my few gripes with that solo mini-adventure were mostly quelled by the main event. In fact, in hindsight most of those complaints boiled down to "this is awkward without backup", teaching me how to use my party before I knew they existed. More fortunately still, Banquet for Fools is original and intriguing, channeling the ancient ways of RPGs without losing itself to them. I was delighted to learn who made it, because this feels like the game that will finally let their imagination and talent shine.

Eheughhhh. Ack. Eheughhhh.

I’m dying. The dreaded Song cough has gotten to me. At just 36 years old, I, the ambitious, diplomatic, and scholarly Qin Guan, am about to snuff it. It’s not fair. From my deathbed, I rasp out indignant poetic verse about game mechanics and balance. It packs an unnerving meta punch, much to the discomfort of my dear second wife, Wu Junxin, who wonders what this Crusader Kings 3 of which I speak could be.

A while back, I tipper-trucked a few thousand words of Gamescom demo impressions onto the RPS lawn, with the assurance that I’d now duly covered every game I’d played there. However, there was one more, ACAB rhythm actioner Unbeatable, and I left it out on the grounds that I didn’t so much play the preview build as much as I got into a fight with it. And lost.

And with that, this year's edition of the RPS 100 is complete. At least, ours is. We'll be opening up the vote for the 2025 RPS 100: Readers' Edition on Monday. I'll then collate the results and give it the full article treatment to go out over the Christmas break.

I've loved reading through the lists shared in the comments, and I hope many of them survive the gamut of the public vote. (Invisible, Inc in particular. I'm kicking myself for not including it in my submissions.)

For the supporter post this week I thought it would be good to go into a little more depth on how the list was assembled, some of the things I've learned about the team and what people expect from a list, and, potentially of most interest of all: what did each team member submit in their original 25. Including those that didn't make the top 100...

RPS is an acquired taste. We know it, you know it, and some loud portions of the internet complain about it. But what that means is that every day there are people who visit this site, see the games we cover, and read how we cover them and decide it's not for them. Maybe they don't like our tone, our taste, or our humour. Whatever it is, they see it, they leave, and they may never come back.

And that's fine.

Because for others, and as supporters of this site you are among them, there is something here that can't be found anywhere else. It's what brought me back to the site every day as a reader, and now as its editor it's what I hope to foster.

Can PC hardware have soul?

Not a soul, in the immortal spirit sense, though if anyone wants to comprehensively prove the existence of the divine in the comments then feel free. But I’ve long believed that inainimate objects can possess the same kind of loveable, if intangible and barely describable, quality that we look for in more purely creative works of art. Stuff where you take one look and know: yes, that’s special. The Fender Stratocaster. Rubik’s Cubes. The Space Shuttle Discovery. Soulful as fuck, all of 'em.

Unfortunately, whatever this quality is, it’s one that seems to elude PC hardware: a field of design that’s never been better, practicality wise, yet consists almost entirely of cold, black, do-yer-job plastic. Functional to a fault. It’s a shared shortcoming I’ve been thinking about since the flight home from seeing Valve’s new Steam gear, and from first impressions, they’re mostly the same story. The Steam Controller feels like a good controller, technically and practically, but I don’t think it has the charming hum of true soul. The Steam Frame definitely doesn’t. The Steam Machine? That, I'm still figuring out.

As you may have seen, I've not been having the best time with Wall World 2. While the sequel retains the half Missile Command, half Manic Miner roguelike goodness that made the first game so compelling, a shift in its structure has surfaced the dull minutes that dominate the start of each run. It's an unexpected change, and one which has really dampened my love for this robotic-spider good-time.

In the distance, I catch a brief glimpse of two streams of light. Then, the road’s empty, aside from the splayed glow of my own headlamps. The Mulsanne straight is beautiful at night, but as I fly along it atop a wave of V10 screams, I’m distracted. My steering wheel is pointing slightly to the left. I’ve knocked the tow out by clumsily meandering too close to a barrier. Miraculously, it seems to be the only damage my Courage C60 has sustained, but it makes catching the distant cars that taunt me so unlikely.

The year is 2005, and I’m on track for the sort of deeply lonely fifth place finish the Le Mans 24 hour race is wont to deliver. I’ve only been behind the wheel for an hour, but Automobilista 2’s latest expansion is great at taking the sim’s long-brilliant racing foundations and using them to meld your mind with that of a mid-2000s endurance driver.

It is a delicious irony that at the end of Hardspace: Shipbreaker, a game about carving junked spacecraft into their constituent parts, lies a moment of fusion: a final mission that perfectly joins together your actions to its overarching narrative.

I don’t normally have trouble saying goodbye to things. I replace wall art when I’m bored of it. I threw away my signed last-day-of-school shirt because it smelt of dust. I don’t even remember where my first bass guitar is. So why have I spent over two weeks noncommittally ambling around Hollow Knight: Silksong, looking for anything to do besides seeing it to a final conclusion – even if that means not playing it at all?

A newborn fist smashes through the glass.

The unholy creature to which it belongs slithers from the tube and sprints past the slumped shapes of slumbering scientists. It runs through the lab at breakneck pace, an engine pumping as quickly as it can, but in total silence. Some cockney-accented shadows turn out the lights and it lurches on through the dark, knuckles dripping with irradiated shrew innards. A posh lady tries to talk to it, but even when forced to pause, it will not listen.

As it lumbers through the turnstiles of London bridge station, a single thought crosses its mind. Please. Not Again. Not this time. It clambers up the escalator of dread and passes through the invisible membrane into London.

One day I will learn some genre terminology, instead of clumsily describing puzzle games for several sentences. But not today! Today I am being not a professional critic but a loveable scamp. That's what they pay me for, probably.

Today it's time for ReWire, a mildly aggravating game lying somewhere between Pipe Mania and a tile-moving puzzle. It has a story, and you might expect me to bang on here about how it uplifts something modest, the power of narrative, and emotional investment. Perhaps I would, if I hadn't immediately started skipping the entire thing because it's so damn slow and I am going to die, we are all decaying mass, I feel myself age and wither and the dust gather in my mortal pores at every moment and oh my god, games, will you please, please let us skip to the next line of text at will.

It's a fun game, though.

I am terrible at Passant Colon A Chess Roguelike.

As a tiny baby I was good at chess, but may have plateaued there. Or maybe it's the game's fault? Yeah it's the game's fault. Bad game. 0/10 thumbsdown unsubscribe.

3D vehicular combat games ought to be a whole subgenre, but they're surprisingly sparse for something whose appeal seems so obvious. Presumably they're a nightmare to make, given how many different directions the concept can pull in.

Fumes is not a racing game, or a simulator, or a brutal Mad Max hell world. Its main pull is towards the mid-late 90s action of Destruction Derby or Driver, although even those were harder and heavier. But it's doing its own thing, not nostalgia mining, and though it's not quite my thing, I'm struggling to name a driving-and-blasting game I got into faster and swore at less.

Three in a row for Schmidt Workshops! We should start giving out awards. Cyclopean Colon The Great Abyss is a modest little monster bashing RPG, comparing loosely to the early Ultimas, although much neater. You skip squarily around a top-down fantasy world, walking into people to get their attention, and into dungeons to become a real 3D boy skipping cubily around.

It's more robust, if less novel, than last year's cryptid-tracking puzzle-sim Aberration Analyst, and less colourful than Islands of the Caliph. But you'll pick it up within minutes, and probably not put it down for a few hours of optionally green fun.

There's a type of depiction of self-loathing that mostly gets on my tits. Yes, yes, you did all the slurs at yourself, well done. You turned every sentence or thought into a means to repeat a dig at yourself, we get it.

It's not something I'm proud of. Thankfully, this has only happened through fiction, not in person*. It's one reason I don't have space to articulate my feelings about Lovely Lady RPG. They are mixed, partly because it's such a personal game, and it feels especially cruel to be hard on works like that. But loving each other doesn't mean perfectly mirroring them, or having only good things to say. It means accepting. I suppose that's sometimes true of criticism, too.

A few times early on in Quantum Witch I was put on the spot, and forced to make a choice that seemed quite definitive. I felt put out, wanting to go and check something else first, or at least to save the game, which wasn't an option (yet). Both of these are a problem when covering a game, especially in a limited, impressions-y way. I don't know what possibilities I'm blocking off by making this choice, or which will be left to me later!

This is, however, the whole point of the design. You're given save slots after your first ending, and encouraged to go through again and try something else. Which you will, because wow, changing that one little choice took me some places.

Autobattlers might be replacing laborious tactical fights in recent and upcoming strategy games, but they can still carry a lot of fun on their own merits too, without any of that context.

Operation Colon Polygon Storm is a simple concept. You're on the left, they're on the right, so clearly you have to let them kill anyone they want while you exhaustively research a factual rebuttal of that one thing they said last week. Or you can summon some wardudes to shoot them first, whatever.

There's surely a name for this type of puzzle game. I could look it up, but then what would I do with the intro the next time I cover one, huh? Did you even think about that? It's a "fill all the squares" thing, so intuitive that it barely needs explaining. Move around the level square by square until you've done them all, and that’s that.

You are a good little gay bunny girl with a thing for slime. Sorry, wrong window. Blobun is about a gay bunny girl who's made of slime now, but that's really a "sure, why not" bit you can forget about. The puzzles are the point, and considering how fussy and easily bored I usually am by puzzles, it's a damn fine point.

For no reason, I put Archons of Doom aside years ago, likely distracted by a bird, or cleaning the flat, or the crushing despair of living in an empire's corpse. It's sat on my PC ever since. One of the many "I'll play that one at some point" games to survive purge after purge, despite its relatively hefty install size. Sometimes, after doing this for long enough, you just get a feeling. This has something. This might be Good.

I've played it properly now and yeah, Archons of Doom is good. Humble, and imperfect, and budget through and through. But it's getting its spot here, at last.

Funnily enough, I went back to Arx Fatalis for a few hours in early 2023. It's still one of those tragic near dead ends, doomed by a lacklustre sales and the later success of Dishonored guaranteeing Arkane would never get a chance to bring it back.

So here's Monomyth. It's unfair to call it Arx Fatalis again, but the influence is undeniable. Here's your Easily Escapable Dungeon cell, complete with friendly neighbour helpfully suggesting you press the conspicuous brick, you dolt. Here are gloomy but not unpleasant caverns with ferns and mushrooms and boring rats. Here's the worry that archery and stealth are poor choices in a series of tunnels. Here's cooking fish by placing them next to an open fire and waiting and yes, yes, yes, here we go!

Shaking off the urge to say "oh no a mansion full of rich people all killed each other oh no", I'm surprised by how interested I was in the motivations and movements of everyone in Utter A Name.

Spectral silhouettes stand ominously around a fancy house dotted with bodies and glowing things. This is the kind of nonsense I'd expect from fancy house people, but your candle-toting woman expects you to steer her around to figure out what happened instead of looting the place. Weirdo.

There were some servants as well though so ugh, fine. Fiiine. Sometimes class solidarity means ghost nonsense I guess.

One of the UK's more disagreeable "weeds" is the bramble. It's a spiky, resentful snakeweasel of a plant that gets in everywhere and refuses to be gotten out. It pokes ravenously through fence gaps and broken glass panes, sneaking through long grass and using its thorns to haul itself over barriers and become inextricable from any structure in its path. It forms wiry entanglements that will strip the flesh from anything larger than a rabbit.

About ten hours in, my recent Baldur's Gate 3 honour run (effectively ironman, you lose on party wipe) almost ended in fire. There's a stash of smokepowder barrels in the Goblin camp, quite easy to steal from the Zhentarim guards outside the room. This time, however, the Zhent were already hostile since I'd got a bit loud killing the Goblin priestess.

What I didn't know, because I'd never seen it before, is that the Zhentarim leader is programmed to always kick off the fight by launching a flame spell at the barrels. Also, there's a lot of barrels and they're packed together quite tightly. Also, they're very explosive. Luckily, I'd picked up some initiative perks and had managed to move most of my party away from the blast. I think Gale got got, but Gale is always going and getting himself got, so I brushed it off and continued the run.

Darktide reminds me, more than its imposing and lavishly fuckawful environments invoke the 40K universe itself, of a birthday party at an independent laser tag thing I went to when I was maybe 11. Two floors of rooms and hallways, crenulated nooks and crannulated crannies, done up like industrial backalleys in a sickly cyberpunkish glow. We got geared up and entered through different doors. The doors closed, and I was suddenly alone in a labyrithine shitebunker. Above me was graffiti that asked, in the most menacing shade of cyberpink, "which way now?".

So anyway I started crying. Or doing that thing you do when you're small where your cheeks get all hot and you're crying inside anyway. Deeply disorientated; all the crushing weight of sudden mumlessness in the biggest of big Tescos. Not worried about the other kids with guns as much as the environment itself, which felt - just like Darktide so brilliantly pulls off - malevolent and industrial and impatient and vast.

You are standing in your kitchen, ready to cry. You start with 3hp, 3 gold pieces, a torch, a half-eaten Curly Wurly bar, and a heavy iron shield. Made with Electric Zine Maker. The pages not the shield I don't think it can do that.

Couple of spoilers, innit

Something Larian's Baldur's Gate 3 shares with Bioware's predecessors is a sort of invisible hierarchy of quests and enemy encounters, which is great in the sense that it avoids level scaling and offers satisfying "I'll come back later with a bigger sword" moments, but does present a bit of an issue for roleplaying.

I've been feeling spiritually, physically, and cognitively exhausted recently - jelly of limb, soul, and mind - and 9 Kings is picking up the slack something tremendous. The idea is that each king has a themed card deck, used to build structures and units to defend your base against the other 8. Each king's deck contains its own synergies (a bad corporate word we've somehow adopted in lieu of the superior 'interfuckery' or 'mingle-jinks', but I'll use for simplicity's sake), and the cards you gain from fighting other kings create even more. You'll even get chances to make peace or wage war on new kings to chase certain playstyles.

Minecraft-ish games are a tricky prospect for a summary piece. Hours into Core Keeper, I still have little idea how to activate the Core, or the three shrines with ominous names surrounding it. Am I missing something? Am I searching in the wrong direction? Am I not supposed to even think about that until another ten hours in? Or did I keep forgetting they exist, because it's so easy to get distracted wandering and mining and poking stuff? It's probably that. It's that.

Core Keeper excels at leaving you to do your own thing without becoming lost or overwhelmed, or fixated on one thing until a month goes by and grinder's remorse begins to haunt your soul. It hasn't grabbed me, but gently taken my hand, where its peers quickly become rote or annoying.

A poem is a news article is a video game is coordinate and procedure for extending a space. The space begins when the first line ends, folding a sentence back on itself to produce serried rows of straight and faceless flowers. This is the two-dimensional workfloor of the poem. Between the stems, the eye is a little animal or adventurer following the sentence as you would cobblestones through a clever wood made up of many, half-seen triggers and hinges that move or breathe according to the motion of your passage.