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I lost my way with Lunacid last year, early on after stumbling through a small warren of spongey enemies. Trying it again this week rewarded my patience and taught me that I'd had the tool I needed all along, but dismissed them because it didn't work immediately. Playing beyond that has elevated it from "not my thing but I should cover it because it's someone else's" to "wait, this might be my thing? Damn it".

Earlier this week, Square Enix decided to ruin over a decade's worth of CD collecting by sticking all of their incredible Final Fantasy Piano Collection soundtracks online, for free, on pretty much every streaming service imaginable. The sheer cheek of it! Honestly, I'm still mildly shocked by it all. Just the thought of all that brilliant music, available to everyone, for zero pence and import fees. What an outstanding gift to the world. (Well, the real gift would be re-printing the fabled Final Fantasy X-2 Piano Collections CD and/or sticking that online as well, if you ask me, but hey, I'll allow them this one little omission).

After all, there's an absolute treasure trove of music you lucky lot get to dig into now, so if you're wondering where to start or just fancy yet another guided tour through some of Final Fantasy's best music tracks, allow me to forcibly volunteer myself to regale you with some of my personal favourite highlights.

I like to-do list games. Take Wytchwood, where your to-do list is stuff like 'craft trap to catch lizard to use lizard eyes to craft weapon to defeat ghost to...' and so on. My Little Universe, which is clearly best played in co-op, and would be good to play with kids if you have sourced any of those from somewhere, is like a to-do list game that reduces crafting to the barest minimum. You are basically collecting raw resources and pouring them into a bottomless maw. Despite that description, it's quite charming.

I loved the premise of Deadnaut. It's the tactility of chunky spaceship interfaces combined with the frustration of the corporation cheaping out on everything and not caring that it'll get everyone killed. It's the desperate crews exploring derelicts out on the fringes of the known, where terrible, unspeakable things have been unleashed. Alien by way of Duskers.

I didn't love playing it, though. It was too frantic, too awkward, too short. Deadnaut Colon Signal Lost changes all those things and more. It's more like a re-interpretation of its own ideas than a direct sequel. Consequently, it's sanded off a little of its unique nature, but overall is a much better game.

Even though it's a bloody roguelike. Godddd.

At the beginning of September, the soundtrack for Tunic disappeared from streaming services. The composers, Lifeformed and Janice Kwan, said they'd received several false DMCA takedown notices for their work, which had resulted in the removal of both Tunic's soundtrack from numerous platforms, as well as three more of their albums. For a while, things looked very uncertain about the likelihood of their soundtracks returning. Left without much recourse against their distributor, the composers eventually filed a counterclaim to try and better protect their work and get them back online. Thankfully, they were successful, and all four soundtracks are back where they belong.

It's been a messy saga about that's highlighted several issues about how DMCA claims can be manipulated like this, and they're not the only ones it's happened to recently, either. Fortunately for the Tunic duo at least, the situation's since been resolved and their soundtracks are now back where they belong - and to celebrate, they've released a whole new set of Tunic tracks that they describe as "initial piano concepts" for some of its major themes. And hey. You know me. I love a good piano collection of a video game soundtrack, so it is probably no surprise whatsoever that I've more or less had this on repeat for the last month. It's so, so, so good.

Good lord. That run was 90 minutes? It felt like twenty, and also like six days. Highway Rampage is a small game, but after the way it's gripped me right from its beautifully cool intro, I can't not bring it to your attention.

This is an arcade blasting game through and through, where conscious strategy and placed shots soon shrink into rearview atoms as the pull of the machine gunner takes you and you realise you've been screaming for the last eight seconds. You drive a selection of vehicles across an increasingly ludicrous desert while everything in the universe tries to stop you. But you have guns. Or flamethrowers. That are bristling with ramming spikes. Or possibly all of the above.

Hello folks. It's been a while since we've done one of these (apologies for that), but off the back of our free month RPS Premium trial in September, I wanted to put out another call for reader questions from our fine crop of supporters - as an extra thank you and benefit for your continued support of the site. This is your opportunity to ask us, the RPS editorial team, questions about games, the site, the way we do things, and other things we like. These questions will then be answered in our semi-regular (ish, sort of, as best we can) Ask RPS column, which is a public post available to everyone. So come and tell us what's been on your mind in the comments below.

Correction: In 2022 the Axis series switched from titling its games for their current year to titling them for next year. Since I skipped last year's installment, and searches for "Axis Football 2022" brought up nothing, I got horribly confused and wrongly stated that the series skipped 2022 entirely. I apologise for this embarrassing error, and for not realising it until the exact moment everyone at RPS went home for the weekend. Although that latter part is at least quite funny.

Axis Football 2024 is part of the little Americaball series that could. Since 2019 I've settled into a habit of skipping every second entry, only to learn that this time, its developers did too.

The result is still iterative improvement, but a more noticeable one in lots of small ways. Its animations in particular combine more naturally, with players visibly struggling to tackle, catch, or shake off an opponent. It feels like a punchier sport, making the significance of blocking and positioning clearer, and bringing out the drama that its coaching mode in particular really thrives on.

During the Nintendo Direct the other week, a single game stood head and shoulders above the rest for me. It wasn't Super Mario Wonder (though that does look pretty all right for a 2D Mario game), and it wasn't F-Zero 99 (which I sort of instantly dismissed as a cheap cash-in on that most excellent of neglected Nintendo racing games but have since been told is also quite good). Rather, it was the news that the insta-sit-up-and-pay-attention pairing of Atlus and Vanillaware were making a new fantasy tactics RPG called - wait for it - Unicorn Overlord, and woah nelly, it looks absolutely incredible. Vanillaware games have always been a feast for the eyes - see Muramasa: The Demon Blade on Wii and more recently 13 Sentinels: Aegis Rim on PS4 and Switch - and the thought of marrying those lovely visuals with what appears to be a pixel art mash-up of Final Fantasy Tactics and Fire Emblem? Yes please and thank you.

I was all ready to gush about it in a news post and whack it straight into our release date calendar when I first saw it. But then my heart sank. The press release for it came through, and despite it launching on literally every other console including the Nintendo Switch, PC was not among them. My heart. It was broken.

I like small things - models, and what not - but I'm not patient enough to build them from scratch myself. Lego sets represent an ideal, if monstrously expensive, solution. I can build the thing without having to make all the constituent parts of it. I've recently gotten well into the modular city sets, to the extent that I look up discontinued sets on eBay and other such secondhand vendors. I don't actually get sets very often, but last week I built a police station, which can slot next to the bookshop I got for my last birthday. And while the bookshop has cute details - like a book called Moby Brick with a white block leaping from the sea on the cover, and an attic flat with a pet iguana in a glass tank - the copshop has some secret secrets that are the Lego equivalent of leaving a skeleton in a toilet stall. But better.

My goodness, what a close thing. Fading Afternoon is a game of excellent vibes as you stroll around the city living your faintly sad life. It's also an incredibly cool 2D beat 'em up that is, at its best, comfortably the best I can think of. But the boundaries between the two are too frustrating to make it the legend it ought to be.

It's a sequel to The Friends Of Ringo Ishikawa, a game I didn't really vibe with. FA is much improved, a sort of pared down Yakuza game about beating rival gangsters up in between story bits about an ageing Maruyama trying to get the band back together after leaving prison and apparently not caring that he's dying. I do recommend it, but be prepared for some friction.

I've really been trying with Starfield! I want to experience the space adventure that's been lauded by some critics as a 10/10 masterpiece, and by Bethesda as the most important RPG ever made. But I'm struggling, folks. I'm really struggling.

You see, I'd hoped Starfield's side quests would be a bit more fun than collecting magic space rocks. But basically every side hustle I've tackled have all been the equivalents of early MMO fodder and I'm so tired of them.

This week we wrote some articles about the hilariously comprehensive Microsoft leaks, and Alice0 wrote one in particular about Bethesda's plans to not remaster Morrowind. It is, she points out, understandable why the sanitised Bethesda of today would leave well enough alone: "2002's Elder Scrolls game is an overambitious, odd, scrappy, and spiky beast. It is a game happy to leave you lost, confused, misunderstanding, weirded-out, frustrated, and stuck."

Yet, Morrowind is loved! And in the comments of that article Nic Rueben mentioned the demo for Ardenfall, an RPG with no release date but a Steam demo. So off I toddled to have a look, and though I haven't played much of it yet, I'm confident in saying that if you liked Morrowind you should check the demo out.

I dunno if you've heard of this game Starfield, but there's a lot of talk about it at the moment. It is a roleplaying experience where the role you play is not "Viking-ish warrior who can shout with the power of a million metal frontmen" or "wasteland wanderer downing cans of irradiated coke" but "person in space following a broadly unexciting A-plot". Much of the most interesting stuff in Starfield is on the periphery of the main story, as is the case with most Bethesda RPGs, but I find Starfield to be much less whimsical (something I won't relitigate here). As an RPG, Starfield is taking itself seriously, and sometimes this collides with the design game systems and menus.

An example of this is that you are supposed to experience the vastness of space, but cannot do so without going through a lot of loading screens. Another is that you have two sets of clothes: a spacesuit for places that are hostile and have no breathable atmosphere, and street clothes for planets that do. And NPCs keep making fun of me for wearing my spacesuit when I don't need to, and I hate them for it.

Space Mechanic Simulator almost had me. The promise of jetpacking over to satellites and stations then tinkering in their innards is a solid one, and adjacent to my impossible space salvage game dream. Elements of it work. Others are within acceptable levels of wonkiness for me personally. But it needs a bit of an overhaul to fix some silly design choices it's hobbled itself with.

Friends, I am excited. A new trailer for Final Fantasy VII Rebirth dropped last night during the Playstation State Of Play stream, and holy cow, despite feeling a bit ill and exhausted and generally not firing on all cylinders at the moment, I think I might be more pumped for this than literally any other video game on the horizon right now. Even that long-awaited PC release of Final Fantasy 16 can't quite compare to this, if you ask me, and I might even be more enthused by it than the prospect of a Switch 2. And I don't even really like Final Fantasy VII! That's how much Nomura's mad, timey-wimey game child has sunk its teeth into me. I'm mostly here just to see what mad nonsense comes Cloud's way next - and from the looks of things, it's a lot.

Longtime readers will know that I really appreciate a good kick in a vide-oh my god I've been working here that long. Anyway, I like a kick, and I like a game that manages to actually be funny, and I have been playing Deathbulge: Battle Of The Bands. You do the math(s).

I actually wrote about Deathbulge in a round up of best demos in a Steam Next Fest back in 2020, at which time I enjoyed the RPG antics of a band entering a cursed Battle Of The Bands competition and finding out that it's a fight to the death. The full thing came out a month ago without my noticing, and got past the endpoint of the demo. It's fun! I'm enjoying the combat, which is both real-time and turn-based, and has some surprisingly deep tactics attached to it. But more importantly, the full Deathbulge game starts in a town where you enter houses by kicking doors in.

Hitting pause in a video game is like dropping a wall across it. On one side of the wall lies what is called the diegetic space of the game, aka the fictitious world, which is generally the aspect that receives the most interest, the aspect that tends to attract the weasel word "immersive". On the other side of the wall lie menus, settings and other features that form a non-diegetic layer of bald operator functions - technical conveniences and lists of things to tweak or customise, from graphics modes to character inventory, that are cut adrift in a vacuum outside of time.

In theory, the pause screen and its contents are not truly part of the game. There is no temporality, no sense of place, no threat, no possibility of play, no character or narrative, no save the princess, no press X to Jason or pay respects, no gather your party before travelling forth. As the scholar Madison Schmalzer points out in the paper I'm wonkily paraphrasing here, "the language of the menu itself emphasizes the menu's position as outside of gameplay by labeling the option to continue as 'resume game.' The game world is always privileged as the site that gameplay happens."

I first clocked the mysterious-looking OU when Japanese indie collective Asobu did their pre-Bitsummit showcase stream in 2021. It wasn't entirely clear what OU was going to be at that point, other than a sort-of-puzzle game about an amnesiac boy who'd found himself in a fantastical world of picturebook pages, and even when Alicia Haddick played it for herself at Bitsummit proper the following year, OU still had a strong, impenetrable sense of ambiguity about it.

But its striking art and rustic guitar soundtrack have stuck in my mind ever since, and finally, OU is now out in the wild. I've only played about two hours of it so far, but it's clear there's still a lot more to discover within its dreamy little vignettes. It's one of those games that's designed to be played multiple times to get the full extent of the story, and I've just hit the first of those Nier Automata-esque restarts. Honestly, I'm not quite sure what to think of it yet, but one thing is certain: I can't get it out of my head.

Although most of my favourite films are tragedies, games with a grim and heavy premise don't often appeal to me as much as you'd think. I wasn't quite expecting to enjoy The Man Came Around, then, as it's about a group of desperate people trying to cross the border to escape their authoritarian government. In Winter, no less.

It's actually rather light in practice, although not in a flippant or trivialising way. The message is clearly that these things are serious and our sympathies should be, well, basic concern for the wellbeing of other people. But it's not as miserable to play as games with such serious themes often are. The premise is serious, but the act of playing it is not. I'd call it "diverting" rather than "entertaining", but the bottom line is there's a good afternoon or two in there for you.

Maybe it was replaying Aperture Desk Job for the RPS Game Club, or maybe it was the sheer scale of Baldur's Gate 3 activating the ol’ fight-or-flight. Either way, I’ve recently developed an intense appreciation for teeny, tiny microgames, to the point where I’ve essentially been begging in the RPS Slack channel for recommendations. Just one more Steam link and I’ll be fine, promise.

And I don’t mean short games in the seven- or eight-hour sense. Not even film-length games like Portal or Jazzpunk. No, I seek to gorge on the slightest sub-hour canapés, games in which you can see and do everything in one or hour or less. "Irresponsibly large"? Another time, Mister Starfield, I crave something irrevocably small.

Hello folks. How was Baldur's Gate 3 August for you? Ready for Starfield September? I hope you are, because lemme tell you, it's coming all right. In truth, I was surprised (and somewhat saddened) by some of the comments we received around our Baldur's Gate 3 coverage. If you missed them, they were mostly in the vein of saying our increased volume of BG3-related posts felt like "spam", harking back to when we (and the internet at large) all went similarly bananas over Elden Ring last year. I know it can sometimes seem like writing about these games - particularly on RPS - feels like we're somehow neglecting everything else going on in PC gaming. But the truth is a little more complicated than that, so I wanted to take some time to talk a bit about this in this month's Letter From The Editor, because there are a number of reasons why this happens - and will probably continue to happen more generally as websites fight for survival.

People have talked about Baldur's Gate 3 going a bit wonk in the final chapter when you reach the titular big city. It was actually my favourite act of the whole game - not that I doubt other people saw things going on the wonk a lot, but I did, thankfully, escape more or less unscathed (apart from one instance where, for some reason, Gale the smug sex wizard had a conversation with me, and then immediately repeated the exact same conversation). For me, the final act of BG3 is the act when all my nonsensing in the rest of the game paid off. The part where it turned out it did matter that I spent a painstaking hour separating and killing a bunch of guards in a mine, so I could save the gnomes trapped in a cave-in. It was also where a genie turned me into cheese.

Spoilers, obvs, if you're that way inclined.

This week's news that the amazing Shadow Gambit: The Cursed Crew will be Mimimi Games' last hurrah has left me absolutely devastated. As the kids might say, I am shook. Besides being a bestest best in class tactics game with great characters, a witty script and deviously designed stealth puzzles to blast and backstab through, Shadow Gambit did that very rare thing that's seemingly eluded both other types of strategy game I've played recently (*cough*The Lamplighters League*cough*), and even Mimimi's own work in the past - and that's teaching you how to actually have fun with its large cast of murder pirates through its brilliantly-conceived bespoke tutorial missions.

Sometimes I open with "I hate x" because it's funny (and I'm right), but sometimes it's because I'm not sure if that's the source of my mixed feelings about a game. Verne Colon The Shape Of Fantasy is, at least in part, an adventure game, and weaker for it. Taken as 'pure' interactive fiction, it'd be shorter and simpler, but might allow its premise, atmosphere, and intriguing world to shine the way they ought to.

The premise actually takes some explaining. Jules Verne himself takes the place of Aronnax, the protagonist of Twenty Thousand Leagues Under The Seas, and instead of mere hermitry, his new submarine home/prison is devoted to a guerrilla war against The Nation, a Prussian-ish empire you might be able to stop using a techno-magical gubbins that allows you to edit reality. Intriguing, right?

We're in the midst of an unspeakably good couple of months for game releases, even if you ignore the boring corporate ones that we'll never hear the end of. The downside of such a bounty is there are even more gems getting overlooked than usual, because nobody has the time even when we're aware of them. Like, for example, Bomb Rush Cyberfunk.

It absolutely is the Jet Set Radio tribute it looks like, and it's a delight even if, like me, you never really liked the originals. Inspired by, rather than tracing over the rail grinding, spraypainting, all-dancing classic. It plays a little smoother, it clocks in shorter, and runs a little faster, but it's undeniably dancing to the same beat.

"Everything is floating islands and airships and we're not going to explain how or why" is a setting I nearly always respect, but fighting a campaign against pirates leaves me feeling distinctly uncool. This is the dilemma Black Skylands leaves me with.

You're a very young officer of... something, battlefield promoted to captaincy of the Fathership, essentially a giant floating base from which you set out on your airship in an open world kinda way to trade broadsides with baddies and land at occupied islands to do the twin stick shooter thing on foot. I… don’t like it as much as I want to.

I haven't played Dungeons & Dragons before, and I don't know much about it besides the obvious. I know there's a dungeon master, or DM, who directs proceedings behind a cardboard shield. I know you lob some dice to determine the outcomes of an adventure that's contained in the heads of everyone at the roundtable. And that's about it.

Baldur's Gate 3 is based on D&D's 5th edition and it's meant to honour its rules to the absolute tee. I'm sure it does! To be honest, though, I haven't exactly learned much about D&D by playing it. I don't even think of myself as playing D&D, instead I'm just playing an RPG whose complexity adds a nice mystery to proceedings.

Sclash is gorgeous. That's not the reason I'm writing about it, but it definitely helps. Style can't fix a bad game, but it can elevate a decent one about, say, a little hand-drawn 2D samurai running across the world stabbing dudes for peace. Little Jinmu does a lot of running to the right, a lot of slashing, and probably very little parrying and punching once you figure out the power attack.

There is, bluntly, not a lot to it, especially while its online mode is still listed as "coming soon". But even with remote multiplayer, I see this as more of a diversion for friends to enjoy than a serious competitive fighter and intentionally so.

I enjoyed it though. Actually, I think I enjoyed it more for that, though it does perhaps limit its audience.

This week I wrote a little post alerting you, my best friends, to the existence of Murdle. This weekend I went to town and bought a copy of the Murdle book - or, I should say, Volume 1, because you can already pre-order Volume 2. It's a chunky enough tome made up of 100 of the puzzles that form Murdle's daily little treat, split into sections of escalating difficulty. And, against my expectations, and despite basically being a vehicle for logic grid puzzles, Murdle has an actual plot. Which is more than many video games manage.