I would like to say this missive is brought to you from a dark, ventilated room where I lay upon a bed of ice packs. However, if all goes according to masochistic plan, I will already have been cycling for a few hours when this goes live. I need to get out of the house and onto the road before the sun's too high in the sky and the tarmac becomes an oven baking me from below.

The payoff at the other end? The first BBQ of the summer and, I sincerely hope, a tall glass of chilled water.

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Stardew Valley creator Eric 'ConcernedApe' Barone has released his latest reminder that yes, he's still working on Haunted Chocolatier, the action-RPG and life sim in which you run a sweetshop in a realm of ghosts. This particular blogpost is notable for a mildly agonised aside about the game's recipe book interface, which needs to be "seamless, clear, intuitive, satisfying, aesthetic", in a word, perfect.

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Watch out, Steam Machine! One who would claim your throne comes forth from the sun-kissed streets of France. He might have your number, once he's figured out what he's comfortable being called. He's the PC Box from French tech sellers LDLC, and he was originally dubbed the Stim Machine because no parody can be too on the nose.

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Driven witless by the UK heatwave, I throw open my email inbox and search desperately for videogames about waterfalls, canopies of thick palm leaves, and the sibilant settling of ice in the bellies of the largest, most enduring glaciers. Instead, I am challenged to excavate a world of sand.

Hooded Horse and Lantto Games have announced an early access release date for Sandustry, their 2D factory-building game in which resources break down into pixels with individual physics. It's out in early access via Steam, GOG, and the Microsoft Store on August 13th. Please be careful when watching the below trailer. It may absorb whatever body fluids you have left.

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Urgh. Have you seen memory prices lately? If you somehow haven’t, make sure to look through your fingers, as they are truly terrifying. DDR5 RAM sticks are ungodly expensive, older DDR4's not much better, high VRAM graphics cards are ridiculous, and any PC hardware that includes at least one of these (which is a lot) is suffering ludicrous price hikes in turn. That includes the new Steam Machine, while handheld PCs are being stripped of affordable options, and next-gen, standalone VR headsets are unlikely to do much better.

But we’re been here before, right? We made it through the crypto-mining-induced GPU price spikes of 2018, the 2011 hard drive shortages caused by flooding in Thailand, and the pandemic-driven PC surge. Remember the Discord stock alerts? The retailer lotteries? The waiting lines for websites?

We can do this. We can weather the storm of new memory price hikes. But we don’t have to do it in silence. We don’t need to damn our enthusiasm for the PCs that play our PC games. There are ways to still upgrade and improve your rig, and its gaming prowess, even with memory prices as ridiculous as they are.

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Creative Assembly have announced the first six playable factions for historical strategy bash Total War: Medieval 3, while also sharing a little insight on the process of choosing Total War factions. Of course, the optimal way to select Twarieval 3 factions would be to mock up a grand tournament, where designers adorned with the heraldry of each realm prove their mettle in the jousts, the melee, and the pas d'armes, while rival spymasters contrive to spike their goblets with arsenic.

Sadly, I don't think Creative Assembly have the budget to build a jousting arena, and poisonings tend to be frowned upon by HR departments. But they are, at least, letting players vote on 23 other playable factions they're thinking about adding. Online voting: the tiltyard of the modern era.

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If there's one obvious criticism you can levy at Forza Horizon 6, aside from who bankrolled it, it's that Playground Games' latest racer's very much an iterative sequel. There's plenty to it you'll have seen and done before if you've played previous entries. Clutch, the debut racer ex-Forza director-headed studio Maverick Games recently revealed, certainly isn't content just to follow a single established path. Having just watched devs Maverick's first lengthy livestream of it in action, it's trying to spin even more plates inspired by different moulds of driving game than I initially thought. Though, whether it nails all of those elements remains to be seen.

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A long time ago in a games industry far, far away, a bunch of Sony Online Entertainment developers had the crazy idea of adding Jedi characters to an MMO without either robbing all the other classes of appeal, or nerfing the Force-wielders into oblivion.

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With the days ticking down until July, when Xbox are said to be fully pulling the trigger on mass upheaval that could see studios closed and will almost certainly see jobs cut, bosses at one of the studios reported to have its future hanging in the balance have given some staff permission to openly seek new work. This, it's claimed, is the reason a bunch of devs at South of Midnight studio Compulsion Games have taken to LinkedIn ahead of any layoffs being confirmed to post that they're on the market for other jobs.

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Welp, almost a year on from its launch, Wildgate's story is coming to an end. For a refresher, this is the sci-fi shooter from Moonshot Games led by Starcraft 2 lead designer Dustin Browder. This obviously all sounds a bit sad, and it will be for some out there, but this final update isn't as doomy and gloomy as it could be.

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There's nothing I revel in more than a game with a simple concept and committing to it as fully as possible. So, here's BREKEKEKEX, a stylish action/3D brawler that pits you against frogs, cultists, guys on hogs, guys with buckets on their heads, "and worse." It is mouthwateringly ridiculous; in what world does a Dragon Ball arena fighter where you fight frogs somehow pass as a good pitch? My one, at the very least.

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I want to see something beautiful. Enter stage left Something Beautiful, a "music-driven" point-and-click adventure game that has the vibe of a cursed CD-ROM you find in your parents storage unit where you look for answers in a strange, surreal, unsettling world filled with fleshy, anthropomorphic puzzles.

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There comes a time in the life of most early access releases that they most abandon that moniker in favour of a fully fledged 1.0 launch. And it appears said time is arriving for Enshrouded, the fantasy survival game that comes with a whole lot of building options, as developer Keen Games GmbH have locked in a 1.0 release date.

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Back in May, Bungie announced that their long running shooter MMO Destiny 2 would be getting its final ever big update in June. At the time there were rumours that layoffs would follow not long after the update arrived. Now, a little over two weeks since the update dropped, Bungie have confirmed that layoffs are taking place.

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The Steam Machine will get a comparable level of post-launch software support and feature updates to what the Steam Deck has enjoyed, according to a Valve hardware designer. In an RPS interview last week, just prior to the Machine’s launch and price confirmation, Lawrence Yang told me that Valve already have a wishlist of extra tricks and tools to add to their boxy lil' PC, including some which weren’t quite ready in time for release.

Asked what future Steam Machine support will look like, Yang says that it's "Pretty similar to what almost all of our hardware looks like. Whenever we ship something, we're never like, 'Okay, we're moving on.' We always continue shipping updates and improvements, especially in the first month or so."

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Forget anything that happened to twist Elden Ring's Lands Between into the shape the Tarnished finds them in during their wander from boss to boss. All of it pales in drama to the corporate battle currently going on behind-the-scenes at FromSoftware's parent company Kadokawa. Their CEO, Takeshi Natsuno, has kept his job at the firm's latest annual meeting, despite ongoing attempts to oust him by an activist investor group who claim Kadokawa haven't wrung the maximum amount of cash out of Elden Ring's success.

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Trying to persuade egotistical racing drivers not to crash into each other while keeping an eye glued to the sky in case a sudden deluge necessitates a switch to wets is pretty stressful, but at least when the cars are only virtual ones it's a fun kind of stress. A fresh set of team boss shoes to jump into is set to hit Steam in 2027, with the very straightforwardly named Motorsport Manager getting a sequel in the form of the equally straightforwardly named Motorsport Manager 2.

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Many years ago, Suzy Eddie Izzard did a stand-up routine about different makes of vacuum cleaner, including the immortal "Hodededededer" of undecided linguistic origin. Izzard also enjoys sending up cheesy horror movies. Now that I've played 7 Nights with Vroombi, which launches today on Steam, I'd love to see Izzard do a sketch about a robot vacuum cleaner stuck in a haunted house. Because that is what 7 Nights with Vroombi is about.

Each night, you emerge from your nook to ingest a certain quantity of dust particles, while contending with eerie phenomena. The furniture is in the habit of moving around of its own accord. There is moaning behind some of the doors. The dust lies in peculiarly ornate patterns. Worst of all, perhaps, are the scribbled notes and doodles left out for you by a child, Lily. These range from tips about your scanner button to worrying asides like "You can't leave, can you, Mr Vroombi?" Right now, I'd say there's a 55% chance that Lily is actually Satan.

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Former Halo Studios art director Glenn Israel has warned current Xbox staff that Microsoft's impending "reset" of their gaming business is an opportunity for studio execs to rid themselves of employees who've criticised their behaviour, citing his own, alleged experience of being driven out by "senior Halo representatives". Israel is encouraging any and all Xbox staff who've made trouble for bosses to speak to a lawyer and take certain steps to protect themselves, before the hammer comes down.

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