From the buzzing tube lights of TGS 2026 emerges Tokyo Walled City, a (deep breath) "stealth action retro-cyberpunk immersive sim with survival horror and RPG elements" in development at indie outfit Grim Ronin. Hey, I like most of those things, and I like rainy, neon Japanese streets, so let’s have a crack at covering an independent imsim without mentioning Gloomwood. Ah, dammit.
Control Resonant, much like the inside-out, interdimensional cryptids it has you bashing with a shapeshifting stick, probably shouldn’t exist. At least not in the risk-averse, pennypinching reality that sometimes seems to have enveloped the art of gamesmaking, and that may have installed some scepticism into my own head. The sequel to a liked yet slow-selling shooter, which replaces both the original’s player character and its instantly recognisable, bureauca-brutalist setting, while violently pirouetting into open-world RPG melee brawling. Five words that Remedy, in all their thirty years of existence, have never previously let pass their lips.
Heart Machine, the US-based makers of Hyper Light Drifter, its multiplayer spinoff Hyper Light Breaker, and last year’s Possessor(s), have laid off "nearly everyone" on staff after an unnamed publisher pulled funding for their next, unannounced game.
The Steam Frame, unfortunately RAM shortage-ravaged as it is, is unique among virtual reality headsets for its ability to run Steam games – VR or 'flat' alike – entirely on its own, internal compute hardware. It is, in effect, a SteamOS PC for your face. Yet as I waxed about in our review, this feature’s impact could extend far beyond the Frame itself, as it’s based on new compatibility tech that Valve now hope to bring to a broader range of PCs and laptops. Potentially, according to staff speaking with RPS, making bonafide gaming systems out of previously unfriendly computers.
Valve have sometimes – if perhaps not often enough to call it a grand old tradition – massaged interest in their hardware by pairing the kit with a new game. For the Steam Deck it was Aperture Desk Job, and for 2019’s jammy sod of a VR headset, the Valve Index, it was Half-Life: Alyx, a full-length City 17 adventure that reviewer Graham (RPS in peace) called “a masterclass of first-person shooter design.”
Still, people rarely want to take the same class twice, hence why padding-compacted eyebrows have been raised by Alyx again being a tentpole of the new Steam Frame headset – this time, to showcase the game running in PC-less, standalone VR. Why not make something new, even a smaller tech demo like ADJ or the Index’s own The Lab collection of Portal-themed minigames?
According to Valve staff, several of whom I spoke to prior to the Frame’s Monday night launch, there were several reasons why a return to Alyx was considered more valuable – even though a brand new VR game was, at least briefly, on the table.
Surprising no-one, Valve’s Steam Frame VR headset is launching with higher-than-expected prices, following the Steam Machine in having its budget-friendly intentions foiled by the memory shortage misery of RAMnarök.
The lack of affordable PC parts - which as a fully standalone-capable VR kit, the Steam Frame is as vulnerable to as any laptop or desktop - continues to have wide-ranging, usually shitty impacts on hardware manufacturing and even game development. Besides simply raising prices, some kit makers are reverting to lower-RAM models to keep costs down, or going DRAMless altogether. Valve, however, have told RPS that there was never a question of cutting the Frame’s specs, even as the worldwide component crisis took hold.
It’s a strange time to be selling a new VR headset, and maybe an even stranger time to be buying one. The supply of original virtual reality games has slowed to a dribble, and just as with Valve’s last hardware launch, the Steam Frame arrives covered in bumps and scrapes from a fight with the worst components shortage in memory. A fight which, judging by how it’ll cost ya £889 / $1,059 at minimum, it lost.
However, something else the Frame has in common with the revamped Steam Machine is that as a piece of hardware per se, it’s really quite likeable. Charismatic, even. It’s a happy marriage of core VR capability and genuinely new engineering ideas: some simple practicality boons, some with the potential to change PC games as we know them. And not just the ones you’d play with sweaty goggles on your face.
I’m a big fan of these September weekends where I wake up and my bedroom has neither the humidity nor the ambient temperature of an Eden Project rainforest-o-dome. Autumn was previously my third favourite season at best, but I think we need to have a serious conversation about top two.
The additional thermal headroom to comfortably run a toasty graphics card also makes this one of the better times to play games. Including these, and also, the ones you’re going to tell us about in the comments.
Because no-one entirely likes their job, I should be upfront about my issues with newly launched Early Access darling Wardogs, the mass-scale multiplayer shooter in which I’ve just found employment. Its "Play like you used to" tagline and Halo 3-aping trailer smell a bit of reactionary, stuck-in-the-past thinking. It’s a mass-scale multiplayer shooter, so individual heroics rarely influence match outcomes. And, like pretty much everyone else who sucked down both those problems and tried playing on launch night regardless, I spent far too long attempting to communicate with server architecture that clearly had the resilience of overmilked cornflakes.
There’s a new Steam client beta update out, and for SteamOS devices like the Steam Deck or Steam Machine – or just the Windows client's Big Picture Mode – it’s meaty one, features-wise.
Touhou Project is Schrödinger’s shoot-em-up series: simultaneously a decades-running, 20-game strong (not counting spinoffs) multimedia juggernaut spawning one of the most active fan communities of the post-Trekkie age, and also some weeb curiosity that no-one I’ve ever spoken to has ever heard of. Either way, it’s been around for yonks, and has just seen the launch of its first official remake, of foundational 2002 entry Touhou Koumakyou: The Embodiment of Scarlet Devil.
Bit of an anticlimax, really. After months of (justified) revulsion and anti-anticipation over Nvidia DLSS 5’s AI rendering, it’s now available in a live game - license laden b-baller NBA 2K27 - and it looks... maybe not that bad?
This not-that-badness does come at an enormous cost to performance, and I’m still sceptical of how DLSS 5 will handle something more stylised than 2K27’s devotedly realistic depictions of varnished court floors and face-scanned athletes. But given how artistically botching and/or ridden with rendering errors the earlier previews have been, this specific implementation, in this specific game, is at least inoffensive in the looks department.
Full disclosure: I did not get to play Exodus with the grumpy mecha octopus sniper. "Where’s the octopus sniper?", I whispered, confusion melting into sadness as the two other members of my space station infiltration team stepped forward under the support of their dull, seen-it-all-before vertebrae. No, it’s fine. It’s fine.
I’d like to say that the demo’s shooting and roleplaying moments made up for the lack of squidmates. In some places, particularly when venturing back out into the vacuum, it actually did. But if Exodus really is going to occupy the Guns & Conversation space that Mass Effect is currently leaving vacant, I’d hope it’s holding much more in reserve, as the corridor battles and bland heroes I saw probably aren’t going to cut it.
The opening minutes of Onimusha: Way of the Sword are glorious, in the sense that they’re utterly shambolic. Wandering ronin Musashi wakes up under a bridge, belts a wrong-footingly British "WOT?!" at some starving urchins eyeing up his rice ball, then proceeds to be chased around a muddy village by what feels like two thousand martial arts students, only occasionally stopping to boot a wooden plank into their faces or scoop up an imperilled dog. It’s goofy and brash and genuinely funny, in a way that immediately looks to elevate it among the field of po-faced fantasy slashers as effectively as any well-honed parry mechanic.
Why in the following hours, then, does Way of the Sword make only occasional attempts to match this intro’s energy?
Gawd, everyone’s doing an XCOM these days. Star Wars is doing an XCOM. Rainbow Six is doing an XCOM. Warhammer 40K has done, like, four XCOMs. Those squeaky wiggletubes of Worms are at it too, with Worms: Galactic Tactics, a turn-based grid battler coming sometime in 2027.
It’s a busy genre, then, though there might well be room for this one too. I played a few rounds with developers Absolutely Games at Gamescom last month and it shows real, shrewd promise, despite slaying some of the wider series’ sacred bombsheep.
Well, I say behind-closed-doors. It turns out that if I wanted to watch a prerecorded saunter through a chunk of The Witcher III: Wild Hunt’s Songs of the Past expansion, I could have just tuned into the Gamescom livestream, rather than travelling to Germany before parking myself in an almost pitch-black miniature theatre for 45 minutes. Now my by-touch handwritten notes are completely illegible, and I don’t even get to feel smug about attending a super secret preview.
Still, the preview – which like Songs of the Past itself, was a joint operation between CD Projekt Red and co-devs Fool’s Theory – didn’t show off the expansion alone. It also focused repeatedly on the combat, movement, UI and role-playing reworks being introduced in the base game’s Remastered upgrade, which is coming months ahead of Songs of the Past on September 29th. And, usual hands-off disclaimers applying, looks like it could be the more appealing package for lapsed Witchers – especially as it’s free to owners of the original.
You there. Have you completed the RPS Supporters survey? You don’t even need to be a Supporter. In fact, it’s better for certain questions if you aren’t. Either way, this is your chance to play a part in making sure our subscription rewards are as rewarding as rewards can be, which some might say is a reward in itself.
Sundays are for resting, so I hear, though by the time you read this I’ll have got up at 5:30am to drive my parents-in-law to Gatwick Airport. As such, I’m probably not the best authority on resting, or, indeed, Sundays. Nonetheless, I have gathered some quality game-related articles to help you fill yours.
I suppose, in a way, I asked for this. Crouched and cowering behind a garden fence, inches away from the thrashing, cleaver-faced miscreation who’d quite comfortably win in a fight against my splintering plank of rotten wood, I can almost hear Silent Hill: Townfall whisper mocking in my ear: not too much combat now, eh?
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