How dare you condemn me without knowing the facts! SHUT UP – I’m having a rhetorical conversation with myself. True, there was no new PC game round-up post yesterday, which might be offered as evidence that somebody forgot to write one, but you have no proof, no proof whatsoever that this wholly speculative ‘forgetful RPS editor’ was me. Also true: I’ve written 99% of the previous round-ups, but this guarantees nothing, for as David Hume reminds us in A Treatise of Human Nature, our minds are ill-equipped to identify relationships between past and future experience; all we have is the appearance of events following each other.
As such, the list of PC games below is but a sputtering of alienated atoms across the endless instant of ineffability. My memory informs me that PC games were released last week, and there appear to be more being released this week, but to argue for some kind of causal ‘trend’ would be buffoonish – and you, my dear friend, are no buffoon, or you wouldn’t be even now writing a comment about why my reading of Humean skepticism is pretentious and incorrect. Onward!
Tuesday 5th May
It’s a big week for music nostalgia, apparently. In Wax Heads, you run a struggling record store, fishing out obscurities for your needle-dropping clientele in a blend of conversation and puzzling.
Dead as Disco is a glitzy dancefloor brawler in which you beat people up to a beat. Hi-Fi Rush players will probably be keen.
In The Black is about digging a struggling disco club out of debt – SIKE, it’s actually a 23rd century space dogfighting game with fiddly nuclear-powered starships.
Plentiful is an early access hex-based god sim with an emphasis on ecosystem management.
Motorslice is about climbing up a megastructure full of raging backhoe excavators, among other strangely pugnacious heavy construction equipment.
Wednesday 6th May
From the developer of The Banished Vault, Amberspire is a dice-powered city-builder set on a moon-sized mausoleum, where you try to grow your city while managing the fungal spread of hazardous terrain features.
Rainbow Legends is a roguelite deckbuilder with an interesting element of territory control – card damage is determined by how much ground you occupy.
Thursday 7th May
Created by the people behind The Artful Escape, Mixtape (pictured) is an impressive welding of retro music, coming-of-age angst, and assorted visual horseplay.
Arsonate takes the Inscryption/Buckshot Roulette deathgame format and applies it to forest fires.
Dread Neighbor is a first-person horror game set in a suspiciously affordable block of flats. It takes inspiration from “modern Chinese horror”.
One more music game for the pile: Wardrum is a grid and turn-based affair featuring twitchy cartoon cavepersons.
Friday 8th May
I can’t see a game I really like out Friday, so I’m going to parachute in one of the games we missed on Monday – U.V.S. Nirmana, the newest Zach-like engineering puzzler from Coincidence. It puts you in charge of a Buddhist spaceship, and is about transforming inputs such as “form”, “mind” and “wealth”. Definitely sounds like a Deanna Troi episode.
I’d ask you what you’re buying/playing this week, but I’ve still got philosophical skepticism on the brain and am unconvinced that any of you are beings independent of my perceptions. I will gauge your degree of reality by how much I like the videogames you share, this being the one worthwhile ‘scoring system’. For guidance, the cut-off point for being labelled a Cartesian demon is 6/10.
As for what my hypothetical, possibly illusory colleagues are doing, James has returned from São Paulo with a healthy tan and a few tales of adventure involving laptop batteries. Mark is driving something, and also seeing something related to a particular blockbuster crime series. Julian is in space. I can’t speak for the guides writers – none of them were in the Monday meeting, possibly because they are sick of being asked to empirically demonstrate that they exist.